Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The Science of the Trans Athlete Debate, Made Easy(ish) About this episode The culture war around a tiny population of competitors may have led to the re-election of Donald Trump, who says nationwide bans on Day One aren't complicated. But biology is complicated. And David Epstein — greatest sports science reporter in America, author of The Sports Gene, writer of the Range Widely newsletter — did the research, so that the suspicious and/or sympathetic among us don't necessarily have to. Turns out, there are solutions upon which fact-based humans can agree, in case studies from childbirth to high-jump junk, college volleyball to Olympic boxing, nature to nurture... and nipple.
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Link on The Sports Gene: https://davidepstein.com/david-epstein-the-sports-gene/
Link on Range Widely: https://davidepstein.substack.com/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 10,441 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:56 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. Today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
3:03 Speaker 02 Why men have nipples, which we can talk about.
3:04 Pablo Torre? But it's a good title.
3:05 Speaker 02 At one point, they were toying with that for the title of the whole book. And I'm like, we cannot.
3:10 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
3:13 Speaker 03 You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.
3:28 Pablo Torre? You are the greatest sports science writer in America, arguably the world, although I don't travel the world as much as I travel America.
3:33 Speaker 02 You always say that, and I like to add to that caveat, like, out of all three of us, you know?
3:39 Pablo Torre? You're underselling yourself.
3:40 Speaker 02 I'm a science writer, an investigative reporter. And the other half of the former Sports Illustrated... I don't remember what corner of the building we were in, but we were part of the SI fact-checking department.
3:51 Pablo Torre? The disgusting brothers in the corner of the Sports Illustrated.
3:55 Speaker 02 Playing ping pong when they should have been making sure that some SEC team's record was correct.
4:02 Pablo Torre? It is funny that we keep on referring to our mini ping pong wars, because you are also actually like a really good D1 runner, like a college athlete yourself.
4:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, I was an 800-meter runner in college.
4:13 Pablo Torre? Which is a miserable distance, to be clear.
4:16 Speaker 02 Well, it's the best distance, to be clear, but someone like you would say it's the most miserable. This is as a... Someone from the gen pop. Might think that it's the most miserable distance.
4:26 Pablo Torre? As a civilian.
4:26 Speaker 02 Purely because of all the puking afterward, you know? But it's objectively the best. But yeah, I don't think anybody gets into that event because it's like their first choice. It's like you figure out that it's what you're best at.
4:36 Pablo Torre? Because you can tolerate it.
4:38 Speaker 02 You wanted to run the 100. You didn't quite have the pop for that. You know, you're, you're not like, you can't hide behind a parking meter. So, you know, you're not doing the 10K. So you end up in the 800.
4:48 Pablo Torre? Yes.
4:49 Speaker 02 And then you're grateful for it because lazy sprinters get selected out. And so you're like, this is, this is great.
4:53 Pablo Torre? Right. And then one day, when you're writing the sports gene, you end up running with Usain Bolt and you can actually do that without puking.
5:00 Speaker 02 Usain Bolt, when I went to his practices, man, there wasn't a lot of running going on. He took it easy in the practices I saw.
5:05 Pablo Torre? Oh, Usain Bolt was on the Pablo Torre program of, of preparation.
5:08 Speaker 02 One of the days I remember when he was still around at the end of the practice, his coach was going, hey, big man, what are you doing still here? Because he was there at the end of practice, where his training partner, Johan Blake, was like, you know, like bench pressing automobiles in the parking lot and stuff.
5:22 Pablo Torre? I like that you ended up inadvertently forcing Usain Bolt to practice more because you just had questions for him.
5:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, or at least to, at least to hang around the area a little longer.
5:32 Pablo Torre? But the book that you wrote, The Sports Gene, is only one reason why I demanded that you come back in studio with us. Because your background is not merely science writer. Your background is also guy who used to investigate performance enhancing drugs.
5:46 Speaker 02 Yes.
5:47 Pablo Torre? Which is something that required you to use, I think, your background in an academic study of the human body.
5:57 Speaker 02 I have a grad degree in geological sciences where I lived and attended in the Arctic, studying the carbon cycle, which has nothing to do with anything, except for I had a strong science background. It turned out to be like the most useful thing imaginable for our moment in sports, because it intersected with so many issues, whether that was human performance or doping or brain trauma or whatever else. So.
6:16 Pablo Torre? Yes. Other fact checkers did not have that credential.
6:19 Speaker 02 It was really my interest in sort of ability to read medical research that kind of. Made that, you know, you knew when we were fact checkers, it was like you use anything you have to try to be doing something that isn't your job and start like writing.
6:32 Pablo Torre? Yes.
6:33 Speaker 02 And so doping was becoming a big deal. So I was like, oh, this is, you know, I can read some of the studies and find out some things that other people don't know.
6:41 Pablo Torre? Yeah. So Alex Rodriguez was somebody that you investigated among other names.
6:45 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. Selena Roberts and I first outed him for steroid use, which I always say I think was a good trade for both teams. Like, you know, got me like hired and promoted Sports Illustrated and I think it might've like cured him of a little of his sort of perfectionism syndrome, you know, maybe.
7:01 Pablo Torre? I like to think so. I think at the very least it brought you to a table in the studio where the coaster in front of you for people not watching on YouTube is a photoshopped image we have of A-Rod as a centaur. Full circle already.
7:13 Speaker 02 Naturally. Wait, but how did this come about?
7:16 Pablo Torre? That's a longer story.
7:17 Speaker 02 Okay.
7:36 Pablo Torre? The science story that we worked on together is actually the impetus for why you're here. It's not in fact your illustrious career since then. It's the fact that I think 13 years ago now, we co-reported and co-wrote a big feature for Sports Illustrated that was titled "The Transgender Athlete."
7:51 Speaker 02 It's kind of amazing. It was that long ago too, because I remember somebody talking to me at that time and who was sort of an activist for gay athletes and saying like, you got like, let me come in and pitch your boss at Sports Illustrated. We should be writing about gay athletes. And I'm like, just wait. We got a big story coming out about transgender athletes. We're like going to what we see coming. It was really you that saw it coming. Since 2009, when Castor Semenya, sort of the South African 800 meter runner who has a difference of sexual development, sort of busted on the scene, winning a world championships, I started writing about athletes with differences of sexual development.
8:27 Pablo Torre? Yes.
8:28 Speaker 02 Meaning that for the large, large majority of humanity, all of the characteristics, the sex characteristics line up in one direction. So it'd be like your chromosomes, genes, psychology, genitalia, you know, self-identity, et cetera. They all go in one direction, male or female. But for some people, there's a mix, right? And those athletes can present a challenge for sports. So I started writing about that. And then you pulled me into writing about transgender athletes, which I didn't see at the time, the writing on the wall, that these issues were, one, going to be treated together. But how big a deal, until we worked on that story, transgender athletes were going to be. So I'm kind of curious, what did you see at that time? And you were like, this is the time to do it.
9:11 Pablo Torre? It just felt like it was going to be controversial at some point. And we were early. Like, there's a paragraph in the piece that I will read, because in retrospect, we did sort of presage what was to come, because we didn't have it at the time. We basically spent a lot of time with two trans male athletes. One of them is Kealan Godsey, who's a hammer thrower. Visited him in Massachusetts. The other was Kai Alums, who was the first NCAA basketball player, a trans male, assigned female at birth, as is said, and then transitioned. But neither, and this is the line in the piece, neither Godsey nor Alums embodies the true third rail of the gender equity debate in team sports.
9:55 Pablo Torre? We have not yet had someone born male who identifies as female and wants to participate on a women's team.
10:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, you saw that one coming.
10:04 Speaker 04 The idea that we have biological boys playing in girls' sports, it is the women's issue of our time.
10:10 Speaker 05 I'd say it's more. It's more than just cheating. It's dangerous and it's insane.
10:13 Speaker 03 Transgenderism is a lie. You don't get to choose your own gender. It's the way that God made you. You don't get to change.
10:20 Pablo Torre? What I didn't see coming was the fact that last year, 2024, the culture war around trans athletes would mushroom into something that was not merely an object of fascination for people, but it turned into like a blowout loss for an entire political party.
10:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:35 Pablo Torre? That was not something that I foresaw. The ad that ran, by the way, at all these sporting events, those football games during the election cycle, in which the ad declared,
10:44 Speaker 06 Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners. Kamala's for they/them. President Trump is for you.
10:51 Speaker 07 I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this.
10:52 Pablo Torre? Didn't see President Donald Trump being reelected, in part on the back of this fear mongering around the transgender athlete, in which he declared, by the way, that this would be for him this month, a day one priority.
11:07 Speaker 07 And we will keep men out of women's sports.
11:16 Speaker 07 And that will likewise be done on day one. Should I do day one, day two, or day three? How about day one, right?
11:26 Speaker 07 Under the Trump administration, it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.
11:42 Speaker 07 Doesn't sound too complicated, does it?
11:44 Pablo Torre? It doesn't sound too complicated, does it? Is, I think, the statement, and this is a lot to say, it's a statement that I might disagree with the most among all of the statements Donald Trump has ever said.
11:57 Speaker 02 That in itself doesn't sound too complicated. The problem is that biology is really complicated, right? I think that's part of the issue is, for a variety of reasons, people don't really want to wrestle with the underlying complexity, right? So you prefer something simple.
12:10 Pablo Torre? Yeah, you prefer a stump speech that you could give on December 22 of last year in Arizona at, quote, "America Fest", which is, again, this very familiar scene in which he is riling up a crowd in the way that, by the way, this week Senator Tommy Tuberville, former Auburn football coach, speaking of the SEC, Republican from Alabama, he is also reintroducing a piece of legislation to ban trans athletes from participating in women's sports particularly, with the support of 23 Republican colleagues this year, following in the footsteps of a year in which there were controversies around Olympic boxing and women's college volleyball. And before that, it was Leah Thomas and the Penn women's swim team. And all of this is just mainstream,
12:54 Pablo Torre? giant, American controversy now.
12:56 Speaker 02 Yeah. Usually, you mentioned a few cases, volleyball, boxing, but usually this was mostly in track and field. So if you look at the 2016 Olympics in the 800 meters, again, my event, all three of the female medalists had differences of sexual development, which meant, according to rules now, nobody on the medal stand would be able to compete in that event now, right? And I'm someone who actually like cares about the women's 800 meters, but it's been amazing to see all these people who didn't know that was a thing. And like the interest in track and field and swimming is just like incredible.
13:35 Pablo Torre? Yeah, they were with you posting on let's run.org.
13:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:38 Pablo Torre? The message boards, dot com, excuse me.
13:41 Speaker 02 People don't actually care about most of these sports. It's symbolic.
13:44 Pablo Torre? Well, as symbolism goes, it feels omnipresent now, which has been this problem of numeracy when it comes to how many trans athletes, how many trans people there even are. There was a fascinating poll, it was YouGov that had conducted it in 2022, which Americans estimated that 21% of the population is trans.
14:01 Speaker 02 Oh my, 21%?
14:03 Pablo Torre? 21, 1 in 5 Americans, as of 2022, Americans believed were transgender.
14:09 Speaker 02 That's amazing. That reminds me of this survey I read a little while ago that asked people to estimate the proportion of their country that was Muslim. And the, the, oh, should I put you on the spot? Do you want to? Pablo, what percentage of the United States is comprised of Muslims?
14:26 Pablo Torre? I'm gonna, I'm gonna go 20% taking the under on, on the line I just said.
14:32 Speaker 02 Of Muslims, okay. The answer, you're around the average guess, and the answer is like 2%.
14:36 Pablo Torre? Perfect.
14:37 Speaker 02 And you see the same thing where in surveys if people are asked, like what portion of your country is immigrants? Like people are wildly off in most countries. For some reason, the last survey I saw Australians did much better than others.
14:48 Pablo Torre? But by the way, but the through line in those groups, right? Transgender people, Muslims, immigrants, is that they are a focus of political messaging and fear mongering in a way that belies the truth, which is that [bleep] 1% approximately of America is in fact transgender. And as for the number of trans-
15:07 Speaker 02 If it's been that high, I would have guessed lower, actually.
15:09 Pablo Torre? In the case of trans athletes particularly, it's a statistic that the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, former governor of Massachusetts, was asked to explain under questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a visit to Capitol Hill last month. How many athletes are there in the United States in the NCAA's?
15:29 Speaker 06 Five hundred and ten thousand.
15:35 Speaker 06 How many transgender athletes are you aware of? Uh, less than ten.
15:41 Speaker 06 Less than ten out of five hundred and ten thousand?
15:44 Pablo Torre? Yep. Which is a remarkable statistical reality.
15:50 Speaker 02 I wonder if that includes, uh, trans women and trans men.
15:54 Pablo Torre? Yes, it does. It does. But the implication, of course, is that the population that we did not get to dive into 13 years ago, the trans female athlete, has been swaying elections while also being, uh, you know, less than 0.002%?
16:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I should say, I mean, I don't think that means we shouldn't be attentive to some of these issues, but I do think it is bonkers not to have some numeracy about these issues if you're claiming to care about them.
16:27 Pablo Torre? Yes.
16:28 Speaker 02 Like, that also matters. Like, that's, that's like my main, you know, if I could teach, like, every journalist or just have them learn one thing, it'd be like, put base rates in every story. When you talk about something happening, I don't care what it is, find a statistic for how likely this thing, I don't care if it's like fraud or winning an Olympic medal or whatever, find the base rate. How common is this thing? Like, let's help people be more numerate, right?
16:52 Pablo Torre? Yes, yes.
16:53 Speaker 02 Because that doesn't mean that they don't have to care about an issue because it's small, but perspective matters. Like, how big an issue is this? How much time should be spent on it in Congress, right? Those things matter. I think no matter what you think should be done, those matter, and people don't really seem to have much of a clue about that.
17:14 Pablo Torre? The reason I wanted to do this episode with you despite this population being so small is because I continue to think that the controversy and debate around what is fair, what is the point of sports, who should be allowed to play in what division, all of that's actually still fascinating to me, even more so now.
17:34 Speaker 02 Totally. So there is case where it's small numbers, but sometimes it gets concentrated. And this is particularly at the elite level, right? Because I think it really matters what level you're talking about.
17:41 Pablo Torre? Yes.
17:41 Speaker 02 In a big way.
17:42 Pablo Torre? And it matters, by the way, it matters because we want sports and believe sports to matter.
17:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:49 Pablo Torre? I'm not, the point of having this conversation we're about to have is not to say that this is a debate that is worthless because...
17:58 Pablo Torre? It affects so few people and because these are just sports. It's because we care about them.
18:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:04 Pablo Torre? And we want sports to be taken seriously, that we take this conversation seriously. And the complications contra the president that attend a debate that will get, I think, inconvenient if you're somebody who wants this to be politically useful to either side of this.
18:24 Speaker 02 But it, again, it is politically useful, right? Unbelievably politically useful. I mean, a scientist who studies some issues related to transgender athletes, not only that, but I remember when this boxing controversy was going on in the Olympics with Aman Khalif, texted me like, I think the election just was decided.
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22:35 Pablo Torre? I want to be helpful to people who haven't done the research, who have suspicions, who maybe are in fact sympathetic on a human level, but unsympathetic on the level of science because they have a hard time wrapping their minds around, what are we really saying when it comes to how good women are at sports versus men? And you happen to have reported a chapter of your book, The Sports Gene, that grapples with what actually is empirically true when it comes to that performance gap. So where do you want to start? Where do you want to start with explaining?
23:12 Speaker 02 In the womb.
23:12 Pablo Torre? Yeah, seriously, let's do that.
23:14 Speaker 02 I guess is the place. I mean, you know, in development, everyone starts their journey, sort of as a female, more or less. That's how I put it in the book. It's in this chapter titled, Why Men Have Nipples, which we can talk about.
23:32 Pablo Torre? But it's a good title.
23:33 Speaker 02 At one point, they were toying with that for the title of the whole book. And I'm like, we cannot. It's literally just one chapter. So that's sort of like the default setting, right, initially? And then some weeks into gestation, if there are XY chromosomes present, you know, long story short, production of testosterone starts. And that has in the womb, what are called, there are sort of two main types of effects of hormones, organizational and activational. Activational means like later in life, like your testosterone surges and like you get aggressive or something, or you get faster or whatever. Organizational means it's like setting up the biology and the physiology. And obviously, what's going on in the womb is this organizational activity.
24:17 Speaker 02 And so that's where, that's where people start to diverge, right? And almost right away, there are things getting set up, like longer proportional limbs that males will have. There's some evidence of, you know, differences that that might help certain types of motor skills, like for tracking objects and things like that. But the differences are pretty limited. Like, if you look at records in track and field through like age nine, they're basically identical.
24:46 Pablo Torre? So we mentioned that you were yourself an 800 meter runner.
24:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:49 Pablo Torre? What I did not say, which is also true, is that you are also somebody who long ago broke the women's world record.
24:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, after, yeah.
24:57 Pablo Torre? In the 800, right?
24:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, after like two years of training.
25:00 Pablo Torre? So just give us the blunt truth about how big the gap is between men and women, because you're a great runner, but that is a jarring.
25:07 Speaker 02 The truth about that is that in those two years, I worked harder than any other female runner had worked in over the course of her entire career. Obviously.
25:15 Pablo Torre? Obviously.
25:15 Speaker 02 No, I mean, the gap in running events between men and women is usually around 11%. And that holds for the most part, rule of thumb. Kind of no matter the distance, the gap closes.
25:28 Pablo Torre? Between men and women, yeah.
25:30 Speaker 02 Between men and women. And there are some endurance events where it'll close a little bit, like long distance, like outdoor swimming, the gap is like half, you know? Women have more body fat, they're sort of more buoyant and things like that. When you go to activities that are really based on like, speed and power, or just power, or power, the gap really explodes. So if you look at something like the long jump, you know, the gap is enormous. Much higher than that 11%. You can get to like 20, 30%. Things like the throwing event. Throwing is a huge difference. Like, the difference between a typical male in throwing and typical female is much, much larger than like the difference between men and women in height. So it's a question of like how big are sort of typical differences?
26:14 Speaker 02 So they're huge. And you see this manifest in kind of interesting, like, take like the high jump next time you watch the Olympics, right? In many cases, the female high jumpers will actually be as tall as the male jumpers, or close. And that's because when you're trying to get over that bar, you know, the reason they arch backward is because your center of mass, when they make that sort of donut shape, your center of mass is in the middle of the donut. And so it can pass under the bar while you're going over the bar. So your center mass, if you have good form, center mass goes under while you go over, so you don't have to get as high. And so, once people started going over backward, there became a priority to be taller, to have your center of mass get taller. And since women don't get as much off the ground, it really is a huge advantage for them to just be really tall.
26:57 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
26:58 Speaker 02 Where sometimes, the guys are not nearly as big of height outliers in high jump as the women are. So some of the tall women in high jump are as tall as the men. And that's kind of making up some of the gap of just like not being able to jump as high, because the difference is enormous.
27:11 Pablo Torre? Right, right. I'm being very mature and not making a joke about that Olympic high jumper who's [BLEEP] got caught on the pole.
27:17 Speaker 02 That was pole vault, man.
27:18 Pablo Torre? Oh, [BLEEP].
27:19 Speaker 02 That was pole vault.
27:20 Pablo Torre? [LAUGHS]
27:21 Speaker 02 How are you gonna, how are you gonna catch your junk on the bar when you go over backwards? Think about it.
27:27 Pablo Torre? Listen.
27:28 Speaker 02 You could catch your bubble going backward.
27:30 Pablo Torre? Maybe his junk is just that big.
27:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, that guy wouldn't, you know, he would not be nearly as famous if he had been on his, yeah. If, you know what? If he got caught when he was high jumping, that would really...
27:40 Pablo Torre? That, that would have been more of a headline.
27:41 Speaker 02 I would know his name, if that were the case.
27:43 Pablo Torre? Yeah, exactly. He would, he would be doing ads. He would be selling the products.
27:46 Speaker 02 So yeah, the differences are huge.
27:48 Pablo Torre? Right, but, but just the gap, though. So broadly speaking, then, just to give the...
27:51 Speaker 02 This, I'm talking about elite, like, the differences at the elite level.
27:54 Pablo Torre? Yes.
27:54 Speaker 02 I'm not talking about the fact that, like, there are plenty of women that can beat lots of men in lots of sports.
27:59 Pablo Torre? But broadly speaking, when it comes to comparing the athletic performance of men versus women in these metrically validated ways, what you're saying is that it's not especially close.
28:09 Speaker 02 It's not close. I mean, the reason we have classifications is because there's tremendous social value to having women's sports, just like there's tremendous social value to having men's sports. And that we need a separate classification to, to preserve a lot of those benefits.
28:23 Pablo Torre? But in terms of why that gap is not close.
28:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:27 Pablo Torre? This is now taking us, I think, inside of our bodies on the Magic School Bus that you are driving.
28:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:33 Pablo Torre? But explain that. Why is it that way?
28:36 Speaker 02 Let's see, everything from, obviously, we know men are usually taller, but that's not always the case. They have longer proportional limbs, which can be really useful for things like throwing, right? You have like a longer whip.
28:49 Speaker 02 They have more muscle mass, a lot more muscle mass, a lot less fat. Tend to have more explosive muscle types in some cases. Seem in many cases to be more responsive to training. So like you'll, they can bulk up faster, just like someone will have, you know, just like someone on steroids. Because men are on steroids relatively speaking to women.
29:10 Pablo Torre? Which is to say that there are these hormones.
29:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, I mean testosterone drives most of these differences, right? And it doesn't just drive the differences that people think about with like muscle growth, but also, you know, more hemoglobin, which is the protein that carries oxygen in your bloodstream. So men will have a better oxygen carrying capacity, which is really helpful for, you know, endurance events. So.
29:30 Pablo Torre? Well, also pain sensitivity, right?
29:33 Speaker 02 There is an idea that women have higher pain tolerance than men.
29:38 Pablo Torre? Well, there's a TikTok genre in which guys get hooked up to these electrodes, I think.
29:43 Speaker 02 Oh, I haven't seen, I don't have TikTok.
29:44 Pablo Torre? And the whole bit of the TikTok video is men simulating the pain that women feel during their periods. Menstrual cramps, as I'm told they are. And everybody essentially in these videos collapses to the ground.
30:09 Speaker 02 That's what's going on on TikTok that I've been missing.
30:11 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
30:11 Speaker 02 So women do become more pain tolerant as they approach childbirth. So that is true. And I'm not denying that men can be a bunch of like sniveling punks.
30:22 Pablo Torre? But the differences you're describing are all differences that would be advantageous competitively, not merely in sports, but also in the, in the coliseum that is the natural world.
30:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I'm always wary of this because I know in, in evolution, we can get in these like just so stories where anything that exists, we say, well, it exists for this like specific purpose. But you're like, there's also byproducts and these like spandrels, which like things that arise because they're just like in a side of something that's important for reproduction. But yeah, a lot of these characteristics are different because men were set up better for fighting and killing historically. And that's, that's true. You can look at other primates too and see this. Like the difference in upper body muscle mass between men and women, it's high, like even among primates. Uh, you know, other monkeys.
31:18 Speaker 02 And I think it's like not that far off of like where male and female gorillas are. It's everything from like, sometimes men will have like a more prominent brow ridge to that make and a stronger jawline that makes them a lot harder to knock unconscious, basically.
31:32 Pablo Torre? Right, which is an important thing to just know about ourselves, that these are, again, without being so simplistic, these are advantages when it comes to trying to defend yourself from a predator.
31:45 Speaker 02 I would say less necessarily a predator than another human, than like killing another human. You can look at like some primates, their primary mating strategy is, is sort of competition and sexual selection, like female choice, right? They compete for, like peacock, you compete for the attention of the female. In, in other animals, it is fighting and securing access, right, to, to reproduction. And to some degree, you can get a sense of which primates are more on one side or the other, not that this is like only a one-sided thing, but by looking at like the relative size of their testicles to their body size. So like bonobos.
32:22 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
32:22 Speaker 02 Right? Close cousins of ours.
32:24 Pablo Torre? Sexual Olympians, I've heard them called.
32:26 Speaker 02 That's right. Big balls compared to their body size. And like everything they're doing is, you know, they're, they're like mating a lot and that's how they, that's how they compete. Whereas I think where we are, where humans are in the primate spectrum suggests that, you know, we've been set up quite a bit to fight each other, for men to kill each other.
32:43 Pablo Torre? Which is to say that our ethics now in modernity should not necessarily simply replicate Genghis Khan.
32:48 Speaker 02 Oh dude, I mean.
32:49 Pablo Torre? But the way that we got here.
32:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:52 Pablo Torre? Uh, in a literal sense, um, is a function of how evolution, I think you write it this way, um, accentuates the qualities that a burgeoning adult is soon to need for reproduction, which is to say puberty.
33:06 Speaker 02 Yes. If you look across species, in many cases, certainly in primates, again, the sex that has a higher potential reproductive rate, or don't even just look at animals in general, has a higher potential reproductive rate. And obviously, men have a higher potential reproductive rate than women because women can only give birth so often.
33:22 Pablo Torre? A real competitive disadvantage for them.
33:24 Speaker 02 Yeah. As the computer scientist Fred Brooks said, no matter how many women you put on the job, they can only give birth in nine months. That will be the sex that will have more of the characteristics that might, you know, help for something like fighting. So it's like, so I'm like, I can't remember if I mentioned this in the book, but in some, some animals like seahorses.
33:43 Pablo Torre? Yes.
33:43 Speaker 02 Where the men have to deal with gestation, the, the men, the, the whatever, the male seahorses, the females go out and fight, you know?
33:52 Pablo Torre? And they're bigger.
33:53 Speaker 02 And they're bigger. The idea that this means anything about what we should be doing today, right? Like, all this cool stuff that we have is like, because we're not doing a bunch of the stuff that we used to do.
34:05 Pablo Torre? But I do want to just be clear that puberty for boys and girls, really different.
34:10 Speaker 02 That's right. It accentuates, right, those characteristics that are going to be useful in, in reproduction or essential in reproduction. Very, very different.
34:17 Pablo Torre? Right.
34:17 Speaker 02 And you can see this explode in difference in sports performance.
34:20 Pablo Torre? Well, this is where it comes home to roost because again, for boys, puberty is late and long, relative to girls where it is early and short. And in that difference, the athleticism gap surges because of, again, as you put it, the natural steroid that is testosterone, the magic word.
34:38 Speaker 02 I haven't read these papers in a long time, but I'm gonna venture into the waters of kind of specific numbers. Let's say that the typical testosterone range for a woman, maybe we're talking like, you know, one, two, two or three nanomoles per liter of blood. You don't have to know, it doesn't matter what, if you know that. That's in the range. Let's say like five, maybe on the very high range. The men, like the low end of the range is probably more like nine and then going up to like 40, right? So if you're looking at like a high.
35:12 Pablo Torre? Multiples more.
35:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. So if you're looking at the high end of the female range, meaning like three, four, five nanomoles per liter of blood, and the low end of the male range maybe being like more like nine, 10. And then there's a between area where sometimes people will fall if they have certain, sort of unusual biological conditions.
35:32 Speaker 02 But it's not really a spectrum. You know, there is some separation there. And you see that in this performance explosion.
35:40 Pablo Torre? Right. Age 14 seems to be the number that, again, these growth charts are indicating.
35:45 Speaker 02 By 14, I think World Athletics, which is the governing body for track and field, I was just trying to update myself on the way here about what some of their regulations are now. Because they changed sort of recently, and I didn't realize that. They were looking at, you know, if someone was sort of having testosterone levels in the male range at age 12 or later. That's where they were like, that's where we're cutting it off. Or this what they call the Tanner stage of two. These are stages of development. Tanner stage of two for a male would be like you're starting to grow pubic hair, basically. I mean, again, at nine, when I look at track and field records, which, again, I'm a track and field fan, but I use those because they're so easily comparable. Like, what am I going to refer to in soccer or something?
36:23 Pablo Torre? And also, generally speaking, speed is a useful quality in most sports.
36:27 Speaker 02 Right. And this is totally objectively measured.
36:30 Pablo Torre? Yes, yes.
36:31 Speaker 02 They're like identical at age nine. Then some separation starts to open up after that. And then by like 14, it's like the best, the best boys could be professionals, you know, basically. And obviously, you know, the best girls can't compete with professional males.
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40:16 Pablo Torre? Even just like the physiology of men versus women, right? Just to, again, catch people up on this, like hips.
40:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:25 Pablo Torre? Narrow hips being something that is very useful for men, but less so for women over time, has informed the type of sports scandal that makes sense in retrospect, once you realize that the widening of hips becomes competitively disadvantageous.
40:41 Speaker 02 So gymnastics has some of the strangest scandals, right? Where they've had scandals of having athletes, like the Chinese team sometimes, athletes who are too young to be allowed to compete, and they'll fake their age to get them into the Olympics. And that's because being small and not having gone through puberty.
41:00 Pablo Torre? Right, a prepubescent girl.
41:02 Speaker 02 Right, because obviously puberty is very advantageous for male athletes. For female athletes, it can be all over the place. So there's this like not super polite saying in running, where sometimes you'll have like these incredible phenom young girls, and the saying is only the pixies survive. It's like, they may be a phenom, let's see what happens when they go through puberty, because they could still be phenom, or puberty may actually hurt them. Like, a boy never has a problem with puberty hurting them as an athlete. It may help a little, it may help a little, well, it's gonna help a lot, but it may be enormous, or it may be just okay.
41:36 Pablo Torre? Right, and for men, for boys, the scandal-
41:38 Speaker 02 It's not gonna make them worse.
41:39 Pablo Torre? Well, the scandal for boys is always, they are actually older than they want to reveal. This is the opposite.
41:45 Speaker 02 Right, so in gymnastics, it's so important to be small, and to not have these wide hips and things like that, because being small, you think about it, and elite female gymnasts shrunk from, I think it was about 5'3" to about 4'9" or 4'10", over a period of 30 years, when gymnastics was getting more competitive and everything, because that means you have a higher power-to-weight ratio when you're small, and a lower moment of inertia, which basically means you have less weight far away from your center of mass, so you can spin and twist and turn and easier, and all those things. And so you wanna be tiny, right? And that's one of the reasons why it's like beneficial to- Have delayed puberty for female gymnasts. So you might, you know, might be advantageous to get someone who's, who's really, really young.
42:27 Speaker 02 Otherwise, you know, you sort of can still select for people for whom puberty just didn't change them as much. So you'll often see some of these characteristics, like elite female athletes will just tend to have, um, you know, narrower hips than the general female population because it's an advantage.
42:44 Pablo Torre? But if we're thinking about all of this as a product of some sort of selection, as the product of, again, adaptations through evolution, to ask another blunt question, why are women athletic at all?
42:59 Speaker 02 Well, most stuff, I mean, you think about our genetic similarities, we're like almost identical, almost everything overlaps, like almost everything is the same. And so it's not like, I think as one of the, the biologists I talked to says, this isn't like ordering a car where you're just like, we tailor it to this specific job. It's like, most of the stuff is the same. And then there are certain things that are really important to survival and reproduction. There might be some changing, right? Because there's survival benefit. And so almost everything we have is similar, like lots of adaptations we have for athleticism are similar, like humans have, it's one thing we're actually good at, even compared to other animals.
43:37 Pablo Torre? Podcasting.
43:38 Speaker 02 Podcasting? We actually, you know, there's this gene called Fox P2 that's implicated in our ability to use language the way we do and, and other chimps not. So, so podcasting.
43:47 Pablo Torre? This is why you're on the show. Yeah, exactly. Validating my theories.
43:50 Speaker 02 So women have, we have all, so the thing we're actually good at is like ultra endurance running and particularly in the heat. So unlike the other primates, we don't have body hair, right? The reason we probably have, you know, we're the only primates that have head hair that continually grows throughout our life. Like you don't see chimps having to get haircuts, right? So presumably.
44:09 Pablo Torre? I didn't know that.
44:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, so presumably this is for sexual selection, like for style.
44:13 Pablo Torre? Why haven't I ever seen a chimp with a mullet?
44:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
44:16 Pablo Torre? Great point.
44:17 Speaker 02 You're like, gosh, how do they keep their hair that length? No, it's like, it just, so for, for humans, this is probably for attractiveness and for style, because we lose it in the rest of our body where. We really need to dispense heat like when we were because humans were ultra endurance predators, you know, sort of
44:34 Pablo Torre? Chasing animals down the plane.
44:35 Speaker 02 Running other animals into exhaustion, not able to sprint with them, but running them into exhaustion in the heat. So we can sweat and we stand really upright. We have good like butt muscles that help for running and all this stuff. We have a, we have sort of like a tendon that basically cushions our, cushions our brain for bouncing, for distance running. And women have all those things too, right? All those things are important to persistence hunting. Women have them, but then there are some differences where something that's like really important for women, like it's really important for women to have breasts, like female breasts that, you know, and to be able to lactate for reproduction. That's really important. And it's not, it's not so, it's not, it doesn't really harm men to have nipples, right? So we don't, we don't need them.
45:16 Pablo Torre? As Robert De Niro once asked, I believe in a, in a great act of cinematic journalism.
45:23 Speaker 06 I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?
45:26 Speaker 02 The efficient evolutionary system is just like, everyone will have these and, you know, sometimes they'll develop into female breasts and sometimes not like they're not, they're not selected against in men, so they stay. And like most of the things that we use in sports, they're overlapping for, for men and women, just a difference of degree.
45:46 Pablo Torre? The, the question of, okay, it seems obvious to me now, given your explanation that men and women should not be in the same athletic division. There should be women's sports and there should be men's sports. That seems incontrovertible to me from that big picture perspective, um, because of that genetic advantage.
46:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, or even open sports. I mean, if the male category is just like an open category and anybody wants to compete.
46:09 Pablo Torre? That top division, all are welcome. I am also fine with that. But the trouble being that the human body actually doesn't break down as cleanly, as neatly.
46:21 Pablo Torre? How would you describe how porous those categories are? Male, on the one hand, and female, on the other?
46:30 Speaker 02 So there are different, like, levels of sex determination. There's chromosomes, genes, psychology, genital, you know, reproductive organs, self-identification. And in the very large majority of cases, all those things go in one direction or the other. Male typical, female typical.
46:48 Pablo Torre? Easy.
46:50 Speaker 02 In some cases, they don't. And these cases end up being much more prominent in sports than in the wider world. And so, in some of those cases, so let's say, again, there are instances where someone can have XX chromosomes, which normally would be female, but this one gene, sex-determining region, Y gene, has broken off and stuck onto an X chromosome, and so they develop male. There are other cases, these are the ones that have been more prominent in sports, where someone can have XY chromosomes, but for some reason, they don't, they stay on that default female path when they're in the womb, instead of going down the male path. And there's a whole bunch of shades there. Like, that person could end up actually being able to use some testosterone,
47:34 Speaker 02 their body being able to use some testosterone, but for some reason, it didn't in gestation at the right time. Or they might be totally insensitive to testosterone, right? So this is a case where you could have someone with, like, when people say, "Oh, just test everyone's chromosome."
47:48 Pablo Torre? Yeah, exactly.
47:49 Speaker 02 Well, there are people with XY chromosomes who are, their body completely cannot respond to testosterone, not even as much as a normal female. And so, once all of the signals aren't pointing in one direction, then you get these cases that don't map easily onto the categories that are used for sports, and you have to decide where those people, where those people should go.
48:13 Pablo Torre? But in either event, what you said earlier, which is fascinating, is that they are more commonly found in elite sports.
48:22 Speaker 02 That's right.
48:23 Pablo Torre? But the whole complexity of this topic of DSDs, as broadly described, differences of sexual development, was actually embodied at the Olympics in Paris with this boxer from Algeria, Iman Khalif, who Donald Trump, in October of last year, described in an interview with The Undertaker.
48:43 Speaker 02 Really?
48:43 Pablo Torre? The wrestler, the Undertaker, also a podcaster, whose daughter, just for the visual here, was on his lap while conducting this interview with Donald Trump during election season. Donald Trump described said boxer like this.
48:57 Speaker 07 Now, there were two people in the Olympics, because I didn't even know they have female boxing. There were two people that transitioned into women. Both of them won the gold medal. Shockingly, are you shocked to hear that?
49:10 Speaker 02 Did he say, "I didn't know we had female boxing"?
49:12 Pablo Torre? Yes. So he said two things of note. One is that he didn't know, speaking of how much people care about these sports in reality, that female boxing was apparently a thing.
49:21 Speaker 02 He didn't know that we had female boxing?
49:23 Pablo Torre? That's what he said. That's what the president said. That's number one. Number two, he basically calls these two boxers that were, again, controversial during the Olympics, trans athletes. This being, again, Iman Khalif, the 145-pounder from Algeria, and Lin Yu Ting, 125-pounder from Taiwan, who both won gold, by the way. A bit more context is that they're not career undefeated fighters. They both lost to women a number of times before. Khalif has nine losses on a record. Lin has 14 losses on a record. Only knocked someone out once before. They are obviously really good at women's boxing, a sport which exists. But they are also not transgender athletes. And now we get to the commingling of all of these terms.
50:08 Speaker 02 I think when you're commingling those terms, that is...
50:14 Speaker 02 It could happen because some of this is really confusing. Like, I can tell. Like, I've been trying to keep track of what chromosome things and hormone things I've dropped even in this conversation.
50:22 Pablo Torre? Yep.
50:22 Speaker 02 Because, you know...
50:23 Pablo Torre? It's a lot.
50:24 Speaker 02 It's a lot. But I think usually when you're commingling those things, it's because you're trying to denigrate those people and to lump them into a category for the purposes of a certain kind of signaling.
50:39 Pablo Torre? It's politically useful to say, "These are trans athletes too", even if they say, and they've lived their entire lives, based on all the records available, according to the IOC and others, as women. Born female, registered female, female passport, box as a female, lived life as a female.
50:55 Speaker 02 I have no idea what their biological situation was or anything like that.
51:00 Pablo Torre? Yeah, medical records, we do not have them.
51:01 Speaker 02 Okay.
51:02 Pablo Torre? To your curiosity. In fact, what we have is a controversy in which Iman Khalif is... Threatening legal action against international outlets that are saying that they failed some sort of biological test, which again, does not speak to the transgender aspect of this, but to this question of DSDs, which is again, not the same thing.
51:20 Speaker 02 No, not the same thing, and something that like, has taken time for governing bodies to figure out how to regulate and all these things. And in this case, I think compounded in this case, you had, you know, the International Boxing Association, the IOC, which are like two of the most like ridiculous, like corrupt, you know, incompetent-
51:37 Pablo Torre? Also fair.
51:38 Speaker 02 -organizations. You can imagine trying to deal with something like this. You're just like, what a perfect storm of nonsense, you know?
51:44 Pablo Torre? Yes.
51:45 Speaker 02 That's different. Like, these differences of sexual development, in a lot of cases, the first that any of these people will learn of the fact that there's something unusual about them is when some sporting body tests them and tells them, right? This is very different than someone who's transitioning. It's very different.
52:21 Pablo Torre? Well, I think we should consider that something else Donald Trump said in October at a Fox News Town Hall, provided again, a very attractive solution because of this controversy that had emerged in women's college volleyball at San Jose State. And it sounded like this.
52:38 Speaker 07 You look, just yesterday, they had a volleyball match. Did you see that? Yeah. Where a person that transitioned, okay? We have to be very careful because this can terminate your political career if you say it's slightly off, all right? But transitioned from man to female, was on a volleyball, and I saw the slam. It was a slam. I never saw a ball hit so hard, hit the girl on the head. But other people, even in volleyball, they've been permanently, I mean, they've been really hurt badly, women playing, men. But you don't have to do the volleyball. We stop it. We stop it. We absolutely stop it. You can't have it. It's a man playing in the game. I mean, physically, from a muscular state, even if it was a little bit less, maybe they do all sorts of tests and drugs
53:22 Speaker 07 and everything else. Look at, look at what's happened in swimming. Look at the records that are being broken. So how do you stop it?
53:29 Speaker 04 Go to the sports leagues? Do you go to the Olympic?
53:31 Speaker 07 You just ban it. The president bans it. You just don't let it happen.
53:39 Speaker 07 Not a big deal.
53:42 Pablo Torre? So what he was referring to there is this October 10 game, in which the player for San Jose State, who is said to be transgender spiked the ball. Her opponent, according to a video review, got hit in the arm, not in the head. And her opponent actually successfully dug the ball out and the play continued. So it didn't quite happen in the way that seemed so apocalyptic, according to the president.
54:04 Speaker 02 There was no danger there. And it's like, that to me would be like arguing we shouldn't have like mixed doubles in tennis because a male serve may hit a female player or something like that. Like, yeah, it could happen. But I don't think it's something that people are getting too exercised about or should be.
54:19 Pablo Torre? Well, it's also the case that, according to Katie Barnes's reporting at ESPN.com, there are male practice players all of the time for these female college volleyball teams. They're used to interacting, playing against, competing, training against men. And in fact, in the case of this one specific senior at San Jose State, she had never been, by the way, an All-American, had never contended for a national championship, had played in the exact way that was uncontroversial for three years.
54:48 Speaker 02 At college sports and like high levels of sports, you're going to be hard pressed to convince me that most people really care about the athlete's health.
54:56 Pablo Torre? It's interesting because I think that is true of the people who originated this argument in the culture war. But now, when you hear, whether it's a mom at a town hall who's getting information from these sources.
55:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:07 Pablo Torre? I don't necessarily dispute the authenticity of her concern.
55:11 Speaker 02 No, no.
55:11 Pablo Torre? Even if, in fact, the context and the evidence directly contradicts the magnitude of fear she should actually have.
55:18 Speaker 02 No, that's right. And, and look, and I want, I think women's and girls' sports have tremendous social value. And I want them to have a space where they feel safe.
55:26 Pablo Torre? Yeah, and just to be clear about this, yeah, nature versus nurture. Your book is, it's the case for why nature should not be underestimated here.
55:34 Speaker 02 Right, that's a good way to put it. I wish I would have come up with that. When I was writing the book, I felt like eventually I sort of got an idea of the spectrum. And the spectrum was, at least of people who were not just like yammering on the internet, but who were actually trying to study this stuff, either biology, sociology, whatever, was.
55:53 Speaker 02 One's, one extreme side was genes don't matter at all.
55:56 Pablo Torre? Mm-hmm.
55:57 Speaker 02 And the other extreme side was both genes and environment matter. And to me, only one of those sides was really extreme. And that was the one saying that genes don't matter at all.
56:05 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
56:05 Speaker 02 So there were these sort of extreme, extreme takes, but that's like, there's extreme takes on so many sides.
56:12 Pablo Torre? But the point being that I am left now reevaluating the legislation that is happening as we speak in Washington DC, reintroduced by Tommy Tuberville, again, former college football coach at Auburn, in a very on-the-nose enactment of the morality play we've been describing. And the title of this bill, of course, is the, quote, "Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act." Uh, and it would, yeah. Define gender as, quote, "recognized based solely on a person's reproductive biology and genetics at birth." End quote. Uh, which would affect all schools receiving federal funding, whether they be elementary schools or D1 colleges. And now this has a pretty damn good chance of passing in the Republican-controlled Senate.
56:54 Pablo Torre? And so that criteria, Dave, is what we're left here to assess.
56:58 Speaker 02 I still don't see how that gets you anywhere with athletes with differences of sexual development. Right? Because there, you're still in a place of saying, well, because again, there's this, this issue where some aspect of their biology doesn't all line up in the male typical or female typical direction between the genes and the chromosomes and other aspects of biology and psychology. And so it doesn't really get you out of that, of having to sort of make some, somewhat arbitrary policy of where do you draw the line for those athletes? That would obviously regulate transgender athletes.
57:33 Pablo Torre? Yes. But it seems like the variable that we have, uh, alighted upon here as the key one that does feel like the brightest line available is the thing that emerges from puberty.
57:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:48 Pablo Torre? Which is...
57:50 Speaker 02 Testosterone. Yeah, yeah. I, I think that's the most sensible way to, to go about it. Again, understanding that it's imperfect and that some people are going to feel unfairly treated.
58:01 Pablo Torre? Right. But we are arguing though, at the end here, that gender is actually not the bright line. What we're really talking about is hormone that should decide whether an athlete is in that top division, the open division, AKA men's sports, or that secondary division, AKA women's sports.
58:20 Speaker 02 Yeah. And again, not that testosterone is the only influence on sports and not that it is a perfect dividing line, but I think when you're trying to draw, you know, for understandable reasons, a binary on what is sometimes messy biology, I think it's the best practical tool you got because it's, because it's not a spectrum and it is responsible for a lot of those differences.
58:41 Pablo Torre? Right. Which is also an acknowledgement of something that I think I knew, um, have known for my entire life, which is that we are all still haunted by puberty.
58:51 Speaker 02 Speak for yourself, man.
59:01 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
59:07 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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