This apology is a wonderful thing in many ways, so I thought it was worth passing along.

But, at risk of putting my foot in my mouth for some thing that I should’ve thought more about, I also thought I’d go ahead and share my thoughts about the suggestion that we should have a third category, besides men and women in sport, or if you prefer, we should divide women into different types of women.

People saying that can be well-intended. It does kind of make sense. It was something that I might’ve suggested, as a sort of logical solution. But thinking about it even for a moment, I realized that it may be wrong.

The problem is the proposal to have a special category for “intersex” or non-binary and fiat that whether she wants to or not that should be the forced place for the boxer, begs the question of what is a woman for athletic purposes and for social purposes.

Nearly everyone who does well in a sport owes their performance to some genetic difference that makes it very hard for somebody to compete who doesn’t share that unusual trait.

It’s not obvious that there should be a third division. If a person is in the socially constructed category of “woman”, and goes through life that way, then there is a good case to be made that that’s the division she belongs in.

Now, admittedly, maybe that isn’t so. It would need a much closer examination than I’m giving it.

But I do know this: Once we start saying that there’s ways you’re allowed to be a freakishly fast woman, or tall woman, or efficient at processing oxygen woman, and still be allowed to compete as a woman, but there’s other ways you’re not, then we have to really examine why we have a special category for women at all.

Why don’t we have a category for short people? For old people? Why are “women” a special category for sports?

The reason we have special athletic categories for women is not merely because men have an advantage over women. If that were sufficient reason, then any group of people could have their own category to insulate them from any other group of people who have a natural, innate advantage over them. We would have short basketball. Tall gymnastics. Fat pole vault. Myopic target shooting.

No, the reason women are their own category is because we consider that a socially relevant distinction and we want to encourage the notion of sport as being meaningful within this social distinction.

We used to do that with race. In the United States, Black people and white people didn’t play baseball together. That wasn’t for any reason of physical prowess. It was because we wanted to preserve the notion of sport as a special competition within the framework of race as a key factor in identity. That wasn’t benevolent, and women’s sports supposedly is, but that’s about the social reasons for the difference, not what we do in sports to honor the difference.

So it’s somewhat arbitrary that we do this for women, but it’s probably commendable. But the rationale for it is that we regard being a woman as a recognized social category and this person, Khelif, is in that social category. I don’t see any reason to say that we have to start breaking up women into different, distinct sub-categories of women’s competition. Why does Khelif get deemed the “wrong kind” of woman?

If the reason has to do with body architecture and hormones, then we shouldn’t have “women’s“ sports, we should have sports by body architecture and hormones. But we don’t want to. Why is that? Because the purpose of the gender separation is to honor the enormous social role played by the binary gender distinction.

I don’t think it’s fair that we can have it both ways. If we’re going to divide society into two genders and make them so significant, and we’re going to require people to grow up in one of those two genders, regardless of whatever their biological situation might be in terms of being an outlier, then it is doubly cruel to then — having forced that upon someone — deny them the one realm where they have advantages and yet expect them to endure so many disadvantages due to their anomalous situation.

If we had a social construction where there was a third gender or some other way to move through the world, without being either a man or a woman, and it had been generally accepted to the point where it was integrated into the fabric of our society, then perhaps that should be reflected in athletic competition. But that is not how this person grew up.

As long as we force you into a bucket of being a man or a woman, it would disrespect the whole point of sport honoring that gender distinction to then say there is a “right” way to be a woman in a protected class — protected from men — and a “wrong” way in we say Sorry, you’re socially a woman for every purpose where it’s convenient for us and you to say so, and you’re going to have psychologically internalized that, but we won’t let you use your superpowers to compete against “real women” who aren’t “freaks”. Of course they can be freaks in the right way, but not your way.

Why not your way, you ask? Because your genetics endow you with a gift the other woman can’t defeat. Why is that not true for the tall women, the efficient mitochondria women?

There’s the rub. Make a good case for that, which respects all the other concerns mentioned, and maybe you’ve got a good argument and will change my mind.

But it’s gonna be awfully hard to do that. Because if whatever you’re talking about is not something that anyone experiences in their everyday life as part of their gender identity.

If it’s a scientific fact that they can l discern only via genetic testing, then you’ve delaminated it from what it means socially to “be a woman”. Because nobody is going through that kind of genetic testing in childhood, and then, based on the result, being raised a different way and being accepted and integrated into society as a different kind of person rather than as a woman. Even in the actual case of Khelif, what are we to say to her?

Not hypothetically. Today. “You aren’t a woman”? Surely not. How is she to live the rest of her life? “You are a woman but can’t compete as such, because you were born too good an athlete”? Surely not. How is she supposed to participate as an athlete? She shouldn’t have to humiliate her femininity to compete as a man.

And she isn’t physiologically a man and so wouldn’t do well. And if you say well tough cookies, you are a physically inadequate man, that might be fair if you had said that to her at age two and she had grown up a “he” who identifies as a man and was treated as a man and never contemplated a serious career as a boxer as a (physically inadequate) man, then maybe.

I’m sensitive to the issue that women need to have women’s interests protected. But this isn’t a case of a transgender person. This is a person who is treated as a woman, and thought of herself as a woman her whole life. She is one of those people that conservatives should be trying to protect.

And I’ll tell you, if after considering all these factors you still think that this person should’ve been raised as a man or should be regarded as some third category or as non-binary, then you need to normalize that in the whole society as a mainstreamed idea.

But that’s not what I’m seeing. I’m seeing hypocrisy. The same people who are upset about her competing in boxing also are opposed to the social acceptance of transgender people, and also would’ve been opposed to this person at age ten who appeared to be physiologically female, having transition surgery and hormones or other medical treatments so that she could manifest as an adult normal male.

You can’t have it both ways. Either you socially impose the notion of gender binary, and you accept the reality of anomalous people who are forced into one category or the other, and you accept the consequences of that for sports.

Or you warmly, enthusiastically, embrace the social notion of gender being more complex than you’ve been accustomed to thinking about it, and that has to penetrate through all aspects of society, including sport.

And if the whole point of the gender distinction and sports is because of this social recognition of the special role of gender, then it’s grossly unfair to say, essentially, that people can go their whole life and think they are a woman, but be wrong about it at the key moment of expressing who they are, a champion, in front of the whole world.

If you want to protect women, then protect this woman.