21st century Canada is an opportune place to observe Antienlightenment and Counterenlightenment justice frameworks. Amongst these are Antienlightenment transgender identity politics. One of the main Antienlightenment justice struggles of transgender identity politics consists of an attack on a sports institution reserved for the human development of the majority of humans with very low testosterone, traditionally and commonly identified as women. There is a softer version of this, in which women athletes are assigned responsibility for making room for transgender women, making them feel at home, and being good sports when transgender women win in women’s sports. But the other day a trans-ally academic dove immediately into the hard version (“Cis-women should expect no more access to sports participation than people with other physical deficiencies.”), so let’s analyze how the Antienlightenment argumentation works. The discussion that follows analyzes the rhetorical strategy, expressed last week, of an affluent, Anglo cis-male Canadian Political Science professor and transgender identity advocate. His affluent, Anglo cis-female academic wife is of the same opinion, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Thus I think we can consider the trans-ally’s reasoning as the politics and rhetorical strategy of the Canadian Antienlightenment.
Transgender identity advocates argue that recognizing a majority human group (women as low-testosterone people) as requiring a reserved field of physical play, whole-body development, sports competition, collective coordination, and endorphin therapy–on top of that “logically” afforded the traditional “model” humans with high testosterone, men–constitutes a priority, fundamental, unjust discrimination against those women whose development was masculine (involving high levels of testosterone), transgender women (0.19% of the Canadian population). Thus in liberal Antienlightenment transgender politics, women’s sports in particular are a violation of the minority individual’s priority right to identity-based belonging.
(Limit: “I identify as capitalist. Yet the capitalists are denying me inclusion. I am therefore owed property.” This logical extension is excluded from Antienlightenment identity politics and justice, indicating that Antienlightenment politics are not logically inconsistent so much as committed to inegalitarianism, inclusive of the inegalitarian privilege of bad-faith argumentation.)
Men’s sports do not violate transgender justice because in the majestic equality of men’s sports, transgender men are free to join men’s sports, to the extent that their low-testosterone physical endowment allows, and to the extent that transgender men prefer to expose themselves to the masculine culture expressed in men’s locker rooms.
As we shall see, women’s sports is perceived by transgender political advocates as a violation of the quintessential Antienlightenment justice, marginal justice, which centers the interest of all marginal identities, from political-economic elites down through their meritocratic management employees and to the marginalized minorities whom elites elect to patronize and protect from the majority. In Antienlightenment thought, revived in the 20th century, expanding elite privileges into democracy is the injustice; expanding upon privilege is unethical, because the majority is essentially the moral problem. Instead, a bedrock of political-economic inequality permits elites to electively patronize other marginal identities to overcome the injustices of the majority. The Antienlightenment perspective is over-represented in academia, wherein people normally have mind-body alienation health issues.
The Olympic committee (IOC) has for decades struggled to develop a fair policy regarding the participation of women who have gone through male puberty and thus have bodies that incorporate high testosterone’s strength, speed, and endurance endowments. While overall humans are not very gender dimorphic (There is not a lot of difference between XX females and YX males in humans.), nonetheless, testosterone reliably endows humans with higher bone density, muscle mass, and oxygen carrying capacity, and the bimodal distribution of testosterone in puberty bifurcates some physical performance within the human population.
Handelsman, Hirschberg and Bermon (2018) explain the particular bimodal distribution of testosterone endowment in humans: “Elite athletic competitions have separate male and female events due to men’s physical advantages in strength, speed, and endurance, so that a protected female category with objective entry criteria is required.
Prior to puberty, there is no sex difference in circulating testosterone concentrations or athletic performance, but from puberty onward a clear sex difference in athletic performance emerges as circulating testosterone concentrations rise in men because testes produce 30 times more testosterone than before puberty with circulating testosterone exceeding 15-fold that of women at any age.
There is a wide sex difference in circulating testosterone concentrations and a reproducible dose-response relationship between circulating testosterone and muscle mass and strength as well as circulating hemoglobin in both men and women. These dichotomies largely account for the sex differences in muscle mass and strength and circulating hemoglobin levels that result in at least an 8% to 12% ergogenic advantage in men.
Based on the nonoverlapping, bimodal distribution of circulating testosterone concentration—and making an allowance for women with mild hyperandrogenism, notably women with polycystic ovary syndrome (who are overrepresented in elite athletics)—the appropriate eligibility criterion for female athletic events should be a circulating testosterone of <5.0 nmol/L.”
The specific, population-wide, discrete bifurcation of some physical performance capacity on the basis of a bimodal distribution of testosterone in human development is at odds with individual and cultural preferences for conceptualizing gender as fluid, gradated, and self-selected. Transgender advocates argue that an absolutely fluid, gradated, and self-selected concept of gender is essential and just in all cases, and that societies must therefore ignore as meaningless the scientific findings of a bimodal distribution of testosterone endowment and its effects. For Antienlightenment liberals, the only justice issue that remains at stake in women’s sports is whether transgender women feel included and affirmed.
To bolster their narrow, marginalist moral politics, transgender advocates sacrifice logical rigor along with scientific validity. Treating testosterone endowment incorrectly as if it were a meaningless quasi randomly-distributed continuum variable (like gender identity, height, or community support for sports in a proprietarian society–Bad luck for you, ladies!), transgender advocates argue that transgender women must be permitted to eschew men’s sports and instead compete with women in any sports that are designated women’s sports (preferentially), where their testosterone-based physical endowment must be celebrated and honoured, or societies should end women’s sports and return to the “ungendered” Antienlightenment institution of sports that are (de facto) for men only, as the species’ carriers of the testosterone endowment.
For transgender advocates, the funding and institution of women’s sports defy the liberal political assumption of randomly-distributed life chances and meritocratic outcomes. As stark socio-economic inequality is legitimate in the proprietarian view of liberals and modern conservatives alike, the only remaining injustice in the liberal worldview is the marginal identity exclusions imposed by a population majority (“the mob” Burke called it).
The transgender advocates of the liberal Antienlightenment consider women’s sports to be, if not an illegitimate mass-society diversion of resources, an idiosyncratic (non-purposive) venue in which transgender women should expect to receive the benefits of women’s emotional support duty, as transgender women deploy their distinctive physical endowment-identity nexus to excel in athletic competition with women.
Traditionally, in conservative Antienlightenment cultures, the bimodal distribution of testosterone endowment has been fetishized and over-extended as a principle encompassing the essence of the individual’s protected human identity (male) or super-exploitable, subhuman identity (female). Thus, one is either male, and naturally worthy of sports and other forms of social support for one’s whole, thinking-body development, or one is female and reserved for exploitation and expropriation. Being a woman in the conservative Antienlightenment tradition is assumed as a curse and shame. Women are treated as a fundamental debtor population in patriarchies, and so woman’s duty is to perform labor for little recognition, credit or cooperation, to others’ aggrandizement. We can recognize this conservative Antienlightenment assumption within the liberal Antienlightenment disposition to assign women and not men the primary duty to make gender transition rewarding.
In either Antienlightenment, liberal or conservative, the human development and welfare of the majority ipso facto unjustly diverts from the True justice of centering the interests of the margins, comprising the elite (including neoliberal capitalism’s meritocrats) and any minority identities that elites in their wisdom may elect to patronize. Thus, transgender advocates join with religious patriarchs in denying that institutions that foster human development across the population, inclusive of the majority–in this case women, contribute to the social good. In the Antienlightenment view, the institution of sports for men and for women is at best irrelevant to –if not harmful to– the social good because they foster human development broadly, which is not an Antienlightenment value. In the Antienlightenment justice telos of a steep and immobile hierarchy (today based on proprietarianism), the dutiful sacrifice of the dishonorable majority for the aggrandizement of the elite few is the social good.
An Enlightenment approach to sports, by contrast, recommends recognizing the empirical impact on athletic performance of bimodal testosterone distribution at puberty, and allocating athletes between two gendered branches of socially-supported sports institutions on the basis of that bimodal testosterone endowment–rather than on the basis of the individual’s gender identity–in order to advance the social good, which Enlightenment justice holds to be the universal (not uniform) promotion of human development, within the necessary context of Earthly integrity. Separate, funded and supported women’s and men’s sports and athletic competition can contribute to maximizing human participation in activities that promote the healthy development of human thinking bodies. This is an important social good.
There is not just difference in kind of justice, but asymmetry between Enlightenment and Antienlightenment’s capacity for justice. While there is no capacity in Antienlightenment justice for protecting the development of the majority of people and life, since the majority is assumed as depraved, debtors, and subhuman sources of injustice to be subjugated, suppressed, expropriated and exploited (Godechot 1971, McMahon 2001, and Moyn 2023), there is by contrast room in Enlightenment justice for additively protecting marginal identities within the justice of protecting developmental life. In extending democratic justice, the necessary limit is not the liberation of the margins but specifically the maximization of elites. Imperial power gives us a slippery justice shift box, always impatiently retreating from progressive liberation back into the sloppy justice groove of elite patronage.
First, to protect individuals’ gender identity, the two gendered sports tracks can be labeled differently–high v. low testosterone sports, for example, instead of men and women’s. The nominal identity of the institution, in this case the dual sports tracks, is inessential to Enlightenment justice, and so identity exclusion is not required by Enlightenment justice. (By contrast, the marginalization of the development of a majority population, women, is logically required by Antienlightenment justice.)
Moreover, Enlightenment justice can protect the identity of transgender people within its expansionary social good logic. In this latter vein, Enlightenment justice would prescribe not transgender exceptions to the human-development purpose of women’s sports or liquidating women’s sports as merely coddling the majority of humanity with testosterone-deficient physiques (Antienlightenment reversions of privilege to the few), but instead reforming and de-masculinizing the culture (as distinguished from the performance level) of men’s sports, so that these high-testosterone sports are transformed into a model gender-identity inclusion institution. Though it might be more of a project because it’s a real intervention on institutionalized inequity, there is no logical reason why sports involving high-testosterone bodies cannot be reformed into inclusive cultures.
To sideline this glaringly obvious path to transgender affirmation is to reveal one’s inegalitarian Antienlightenment bias, calling into question the solidity of one’s commitment to transgender equity, as Antienlightenment patronage, an elite prerogative, tends to be driven (however it is marketed as the purest form of altruism) by elite self-interest, such as removing developmental supports from the majority in order to more aggressively exploit them. This inherent unreliability is why elite patronage is no justice substitute for democratization, and privilege-concentrating Antienlightenment justice is ultimately inferior to privilege-expanding Enlightenment justice.
In the Enlightenment view, justice for transgender identity is not the responsibility of women so much as of men–which would be a far more targeted, effective civilizing reform in patriarchies, and all known societies are patriarchies. Sure, cis-women can perform their traditional duty and defer to trans women; but what if cis-men were more supportive of trans women, cis-women, and other men? Now that’s radical. Indeed, in the dominant, inegalitarian contemporary Antienlightenment culture, precious little effort has been dedicated toward detoxifying boys’ and men’s sports locker rooms and otherwise transforming men’s sports culture into a more welcoming and inclusive culture for people with testosterone endowment but feminized identity. It is certainly remarkable that in Canadian liberal transgender advocacy, detoxifying masculine culture is deprioritized relative to enforcing women’s traditional duty to contribute self-sacrificial care work. This bias, assuming the “Boys Will Be Boys”/women’s duty gender dichotomy reveals contemporary liberalism’s dependence upon the conservative Antienlightenment (cf Moyn 2023).
Antienlightenment justice of course deprioritizes the possibility of transforming exclusionary masculine culture in favor of defending the absolute right of the individual to express identity at the expense of a traditionally-discredited majority group’s (women’s) human development.
Enlightenment justice by contrast centers the social good of widespread whole-human development–including reducing the patriarchal demand on feminized people to sacrifice their own development; recognition of biological science and the practice of logical rigor; the pursuit of substantive social progress–prioritizing the reduction of rampant toxic masculinity as a means of improving the transgender experience inter alia; and stably upon these foundational social goods, consideration for the feelings of minorities.
Acknowledgement: The basis for my Enlightenment argument is that first, my mom’s generation was denied social support for their human development via sports, and that was traumatic for them and as well led to unhealthy lifestyles post-partum. Second, way back in the late 1980s, in a small Midwestern town, occasionally boys who played highschool basketball would play basketball with us girls who played basketball, and those boys who played with us, who really cooperated with us while playing basketball with us (setting up plays with us and passing and soforth), contributed to our mental health. As well, my father regularly played basketball and catch with me, which I came to see is in stark contrast to all the women my age and older whose fathers did not parent them, and who are traumatized by that neglect. If men are inclusive, and given I could practice and learn sports by playing primarily with other low-testosterone people (women), even as a cis-woman I am fine playing the sports I know with men.
This personal experience presents me with the hypothesis that female-identified athletes with bodies built with male levels of testosterone (trans women) would also be fine playing sports with male-identified people who similarly have high levels of testosterone–if male sports culture were welcoming and inclusive.
Of course, it would not be of social benefit or a liberal justice cause, let alone an argument for creating exceptions to the social good of whole-body female development, if the impetus for a male transitioning to a female gender were to dominate women. However bold and innovative, that would just be another version of patriarchy. So, assuming that transgender participation in sports is all about justice and belonging, we must assume that transgender women do not strive to dominate or outcompete women but to embrace female identity. As someone with a long history of female identity, my experience tells me that if masculine culture, including in men’s sports, were more reliably inclusive, that would be a key contributor to transgender women’s well being and sense of belonging. Identity, as we know, is complex and variable, and quite normally out of individual control, including in liberal culture–as anyone who has been assigned an aged female identity knows too well. It is unjust to deploy a fetishized identity to demand widespread human stunting and suffering.
References
Godechot, Jacques. 1971. The Counter-Revolution Doctrine and Action, 1789-1804. Princeton University.
McMahon, Darrin M. 2001. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford University.
Moyn, Samuel. 2023. Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Yale University.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 