Is It Ever OK to Reclassify Someone Out of Their Birth-Observed Sex Without Personal Consent? How Do We Manage Competing Methods of Classifying Sex?
Events at the 2024 Paris Olympics sadly highlight the inability of a categorical system (weight), additional to sex, to allay concerns regarding participation by athletes purported to have innate variations of sex characteristics (intersex variations/differences of sex development).
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Thanks to the American Journal of Bioethics for publishing my new open access commentary on sport.
Events at the 2024 Paris Olympics sadly highlight the inability of a categorical system (weight), additional to sex, to allay concerns regarding participation by athletes purported to have innate variations of sex characteristics (intersex variations/differences of sex development). Instead, abusive campaigns demonised athletes with long, prior histories of competition – and sought to impose methods of sex determination and classification that are not directly tested or applied at birth, and which do not universally apply. I ask if it is ever acceptable to reclassify someone out of their sex determined and classified at birth without their consent. I propose that women athletes should always be able to compete, without preconditions, in their birth-observed, birth-assigned sex.
The commentary is free to read here: