E-Pluribus | August 5, 2024
America, home of the weird; Trump trolls progressives again? The Olympic boxing controversy, explained.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Vivek Ramaswamy: America the Weird
Republicans vociferously protested the media’s recent attempts to smear them as “weird.” Former presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy takes a different approach at The Free Press, declaring that all Americans are actually quite weird by historical standards—and our nation’s founders may have been the weirdest of all:
The Old World was one that aspired to a certain form of normalcy—one where people stayed in their respective lanes. An inventor was an inventor, a lord was a lord, a philosopher was a philosopher. Much of this was determined at birth.
But our Founders were different. They didn’t believe in those boundaries.
Benjamin Franklin was not only a co-author of the Declaration of Independence but also founded hospitals and universities; dabbled in medicine; created a musical instrument that went on to be used by Mozart and Beethoven; designed the lightning rod, bifocal spectacles, and the Franklin stove. Robert Livingston helped design the steamship as a side project while serving as an ambassador to France.
Roger Sherman was a self-taught attorney who never had any formal education. Thomas Jefferson was fluent in four languages, wrote nineteen thousand letters by hand, and invented prototypes of the polygraph and the swivel chair. Oh, and he designed the architecture of the Virginia State Capitol building.
They were weird. Often the ones who said the weirdest things adopted some of the weirdest viewpoints by the standards of their day. John Adams was an abolitionist during an age when slavery was the norm the world over. He was also a self-taught scholar of Hindu scripture and wrote letters to Thomas Jefferson about the Bhagavad Gita.
Kay S. Hymowitz: Travesty, or Troll?
Donald Trump’s characteristic hyperbole and provocations regularly offend his critics and sometimes even his supporters, the latter of which could threaten his electoral success. But the progressive reaction to Trump’s recent allegation that Kamala Harris “became a black person” may actually boost his chances of winning another four years in the White House, argues Kay Hymowitz at City Journal:
Given the relentless pace of political news these days, you may have already forgotten the furor over Donald Trump’s comments at the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago last week. So here’s a quick reminder. “She was Indian all the way,” he said of Kamala Harris, “and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she became a black person.”
The audience greeted Trump, who obviously knew he was kicking a hornet’s nest, with “gasps and jeers.” A little later at the White House, Biden administration press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the comments “repulsive” and “insulting.” The New York Times went with “shocking.” On the MSNBC website, two professors huffed that Trump was demonstrating his “ignorance,” since race, as every college grad knows, is “socially constructed.” The verdict, from Democrats as well as many Republicans, was that the encounter was a disaster for the Trump campaign.
That’s possible. Many sober-minded people, including some who will be voting for him, are exhausted by Trumpian hyperbole and provocations. This latest entry, though not quite the racist outrage critics said it was, nevertheless could portend worse offenses to come.
Or maybe, just maybe, Trump was engaging in an epic troll that will work to his advantage. There’s a good chance that the swing voters whom both candidates need to court were not especially “repulsed” or “shocked” by Trump’s statement. Many of them likely have biracial friends, acquaintances, or even family members who aren’t bothered by violations of check-the-box thinking. What they will dislike is a repeat performance of a Democratic Party fulminating over identity politics and policing any hint of racial insensitivity. That’s exactly the briar patch Trump has led them to jump into.
Doriane Lambelet Coleman: XY Athletes in Women’s Olympic Boxing: The Paris 2024 Controversy Explained
Image by Chabe01 via Wikipedia.
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Should athletes with disorders of sex development (DSD) compete in female categories? Politics has turned that century-old question into the latest front in the gender wars. At Quillette, Doriane Lambelet Coleman counters the heated (and often misleading) rhetoric around the women’s Olympic boxing controversy with a helpful overview of the science many reporters and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) seem to have obscured:
Imane Khelif is a 25-year-old welterweight from Algeria. Lin Yu-ting is a 28-year-old featherweight from Taiwan. Both have medalled at previous world championships in the female category, and both are participating in their second Olympic Games having already competed in Tokyo.
Why is their eligibility for the female category in question?
The International Boxing Association (IBA) issued a statement on 31 July explaining that a ‘recognized’ test had established that Khelif and Lin do not meet the eligibility standards for female competition. The IBA says this was not a testosterone test, which means it’s referring to a genetic test.
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Officials from the IBA have separately added that both fighters have XY chromosomes and high testosterone (“high T”) levels.
“High T” is one of the ways that testosterone levels outside of the female range tend to be described when one is speaking about an athlete in the female category.
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What are DSD and why does elite sport care about them?
There are many different disorders or differences of sex development (DSD).
Depending on which you’re talking about, they can affect only males, only females, or both. As shown in Figure 2, immediately below, the only DSD of concern to sport affect genetic males who are also androgen sensitive—either fully, e.g. in the case of athletes with 5 alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), or substantially, e.g. in the case of athletes with partial androgen insensitivity (PAIS).
This makes policy sense. The point of the female category is to ensure that females only compete against each other and not against those with male biological advantage, and androgens are the primary driver of sex differences in athletic performance.
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Do Khelif and Lin have DSD that should make them ineligible for the female category?
As I write, there are currently three running versions of the answer to this question.
The first is the one from the—reputedly unreliable IBA—that Khelif and Lin do have DSD that should make them ineligible. That is, the IBA or its representatives have said they’re genetic males with male advantage. The latter generally means their T is bioavailable—they’re not androgen insensitive—and they’ve otherwise masculinised in the ways that matter in the arena.
The second is the one that’s trending on social media and in some press commentary saying—without evidence—that Khelif and Lin are entirely female, XX chromosomes, ovaries, and all. Some concede the point that the athletes’ phenotypes are masculine, but they say that lots of women—a status they tend to read broadly to include transwomen—have masculine phenotypes and so this is just a matter of accepting that premise.
The third seems to be the IOC’s present position if we carefully parse its highly coded pronouncements—that Khelif and Lin may well have XY DSD with male advantage, but because they were identified at birth as female and continue to identify as such, they’re women.
The IOC has spent a lot of time over the last few days lamenting the attacks on Khelif and Lin. We should all be lamenting them—they’re truly awful. Still, this volatile situation is almost entirely of the IOC’s own making. It’s sending impossibly mixed messages that were to be expected given its complicated relationship to sex and gender in sport.
Around Twitter (X)
Via Greg Lukianoff, there is no evidence trigger warnings (TWs) work. Universities that continue to employ them are only further damaging their credibility:
Thomas Chatterton Williams says 2024 has been a…unique year for politics:
Finally, our editor Jeryl Bier with a biting observation about student loan debt:
