You probably already know magician, comedian, and all-around character Brian Brushwood if you have spent more than an hour on the Internet. Among his various television shows, appearances, podcasts, and livestreams, Brian carries on a long tradition of magicians who use their craft to expose frauds and mystical BS going back to Houdini and the late James Randi.
Report after report, article after article, with a few arrests and convictions in between, the stories could be printed out and stacked high enough to make a reasonably-good gallows. And yet, the years go by and so few of those who deserve to swing just keep creating new victims. Nothing changes. At some point the question needs to be asked:
When will the martial arts have its own #MeToo moment?
If you use the phrase “MeToo” around a certain group of people (mostly the ones we’re going to talk about in this piece), their immediate hostility to any discussion on the rampant problem of sexual harassment in the martial arts world gives up the game. For people like this, almost exclusively men, the reaction triggers something inside their heads that tells them someone is trespassing against something to which they feel entitled: underhanded, creepy, or even outright criminal tactics used to get laid.
Don’t believe us?
A while back we ran a piece on the site entitled Enough is Enough: Instructors, it is NOT okay to have sex with your students. To save you clicking through, it gives clear reasons why virtually every other serious profession has ethical constraints about pursuing sexual relationships between persons in positions of authority and those who are subordinate to them, and references several cases where a failure to adhere to this norm has had consequences and individuals such as Alvis Solis, Lloyd Irvin, and Mike Fowler have victimized people. (All of these individuals are still participating in Brazilian Jiujitsu to some extent.)
The piece was warmly received by our own readers for the most part, but the reaction we got from a lot of people on social media—in particular, Facebook—was outright hostile. Here are a few examples of the replies from the two times we featured the piece on Bullshido’s Facebook page:
Here too
This dude’s fake bookshelves are enraging.
When Ronan Farrow published his investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s decades of predatory behavior, the dam of silence finally broke, and his victims came forward to tell their stories. Weinstein was like a god in Hollywood, deciding the fate of anyone whose career path crossed his. He exploited his power over people’s careers to force himself upon an endless list of women without any consequences beyond a few whispered warnings to up and coming actresses spoken behind closed doors.
That dam held until enough people started chiseling cracks into it, at great personal risk.
Let’s be real for a moment about the situation: in comparison to the entertainment industry, at best, the martial arts are considered by most people to be a quirky hobby one is expected to outgrow as they take on adult responsibilities. It’s an interest for children, mostly boys, with either too much aggression or far too little. The hobby intersects and overlaps at multiple points with other forms of escapism, including cosplay and fantasy.
The only way you can tell this is cosplay and not a traditional martial arts event is the lack of goatees and beer bellies.
Where it does not significantly intersect with those things, it is sport: wrestling, boxing, etc. These forms of martial arts are taken a bit more seriously than the ones in which people dress up in traditional Asian costumes, but nonetheless the average person considers those sports niche interests compared to ones like football, baseball, and so on.
The consequences of this are twofold:
1. The public does not take the martial arts industry very seriously, which results in a lack of coverage of any form of scandal only rarely making it into the news.
2. The type of individual interested in the martial arts is more likely to be socially deviant to some extent. While for the most part that extent is easily chalked up to harmless, quirky personality traits or some prior history of rejecting conformity, that is not always the case.
Remember this guy? First person to name him in the replies gets a sticker or something.
Unfortunately because of the first consideration, there is no solid data on whether there is a statistically larger number of predators in the martial arts than the public at large. Nobody cares enough to compile that data.
Yet, here we are, having covered this issue for twenty years now, and from this perspective the conclusion is clear:
The martial arts provide a target-rich environment for sexual predators
But why though?
If there was one simple reason we’d have already solved the problem. It should go without saying (but can’t, because people prefer easy answers to hard thinking) that everything happens for multiple reasons. Just the same, there’s rarely a single solution to a major problem; silver bullet solutions do not exist. However, if you can identify some of the main reasons why something happens, you can shoot normal bullets at them so there are fewer instances of that problem (especially when some of those problems are people).
In this case, one of the main reasons sexual predators are drawn to the martial arts is pretty obvious when you think about it. The problem is, “thinking about it” here puts a normal person into a good deal of discomfort from having to confront a few unpleasant realities. So to cut to the chase, we’ll spell those out:
The martial arts offer lower-status males a path to both prestige and authority they cannot achieve elsewhere.
Radford “Ashida Kim” Davis was a tiny Florida man who lived in a trailer park pretending to be a Japanese Ninja with a Korean surname to sell books in the 80s and 90’s to people who didn’t know better.
“Lower status” is an academic’s way of saying “loser”. Obviously this doesn’t describe everyone in the martial arts (and of course, not you, right? wink-emoji) just the cretins we’re focusing on and most of the other varieties of trash we’ve dealt with over the last few decades here. Basically it’s a descriptor of dudes who don’t really have the chops to make it in a “big boy” job, in an actual career field, or any other endeavor that involves more objective measurements of character and competence. And we’ll get to why that matters in a minute.
If your jimmies were rustled by that assessment, gird your thirsty loins because this is where the real discomfort comes in. For well-adjusted men, the idea of achieving status and positions of authority over others isn’t accompanied by a sense of entitlement to exploit those in a subordinate position. But not all men, by far, are well-adjusted, irrespective of laws or social norms.
Bonk: Go to Actual Jail
If you’ll allow a slight, but unfortunately very necessary aside here, it is essential to preface the next section with a reference to the Naturalistic Fallacy. In this case, just because nature and evolution—selection pressures—resulted in adaptations which allowed your ancestors to survive long enough for you to be reading this, doesn’t mean those things are applicable, much less acceptable, in the world we have created for ourselves tens of thousands of years later. Or, let’s put it this way: just because your earliest ancestors may have whipped it out and relieved themselves wherever they were conducting their daily business doesn’t mean you get to make puddles in your cubicle, even if that would technically be “natural”.
“And right here is where you urinated, Gary.”
Do you get where we’re going with this? Great? No? Okay then, just pretend you did and keep reading.
Much of human behavior is driven by genetic imperatives—to the point one could make a reasonable case that we are, on one level, little more than a delivery and sustainment system for the survival of those genes. In fact, this is the dollar-store gist of Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” (the same book in which he introduced the word “meme” to the world).
If you take into consideration how little effort the average person spends trying to understand their own behavior—their drives, why they like what they like, and especially the underpinnings of their dreams and aspirations—you arrive at the conclusion that much of it is the product of a sort of a zombie hedonism operating on the Pleasure Principle that leaves some clawing their fingernails at the flimsy barricades of modern social norms, and where those fail to constrain their behavior, laws and criminal penalties.
And easily, by far, the most significant human activity people pursue towards that end, is sex. Why? Because the genes must flow.
Obligatory dick joke to tone provide relief for the impending outrage and genuine disgust.
Everything is about sex, except sex—sex is about…
Gametes.
To draw it with thick crayons, dudes are biologically-driven, with their genes behind the wheel, to “mate” with as many partners as possible. The male gamete, sperm, is cheap and easy to replace (unlike eggs), and the more partners a male has the more his genes are likely to carry into the future.
But this is why we brought up the Naturalistic Fallacy earlier. Just because an evolved behavioral impulse exists doesn’t suggest it has any role in our modern lives. It just is, like one’s appendix or that little globby bit in the corner of your eyeball. Again, the impulse to defecate is arguably just as strong, but we teach our children to regulate their behavior long before adulthood (…in most cases) so that we’re not cleaning shit off our shoes at the supermarket.
And just like how the vast majority of adults are competent at not soiling themselves, the vast majority of men are capable of regulating their desire to copulate in a manner that avoids victimizing women. So the question then becomes, how could you identify those men who are less likely to regulate their behavior, making them more likely to be sexual predators?
What’s in the box? A test… to see if you are a human or an animal. What’s that, will it feel like your skin is burning off? No, we’re just seeing how long you can keep hand out of your pants and treat women like they’re people.
The good news is that there is strong evidence to suggest they all fall within a certain set of personality characteristics, making them (somewhat) easier to spot. In his 2021 book, When men behave badly: The hidden roots of sexual deception, harassment, and assault, Professor David Buss of the University of Texas explains these traits:
…serial harassers score high on the Dark Triad of personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. A hallmark of narcissism is a strong sense of personal entitlement, and this extends to the sexual sphere. Machiavellianism is marked by a social strategy of manipulation and exploitation. High Machs, as they are called, view other humans as mere tools to be used for instrumental aims and discarded.
High scorers on psychopathy are deficient in empathy and indifferent to others’ suffering, although they often convey a superficial veneer of charm that fools some women. All three elements of the Dark Triad coalesce to create a strategy of social exploitation, of which sexual exploitation is a key component.
So where do status and prestige come in? The same place as peacock feathers, a well-constructed nest, or a dominant position within the herd: greater access to potential mates. Combine this with a hobby where status is clearly delineated, particularly between instructor and student, and one in which the activity is explicitly hands-on in close quarters, and you have the perfect hunting ground for predators and victimizers.
This is why there is always so much outrage coming from a large segment of the martial arts community any time an effort to establish ethical boundaries between instructors and students is brought up—they’re telling on themselves. People who see their schools as a target-rich environment have no interest in being reigned in. They, narcissistically, feel entitled to it because of the dubious status they have achieved in the hobby. And anywhere a sense entitlement is met with push-back, it produces hostility, even rage.
Lloyd Irvin, of “Lloyd Irvin Rape Truth” fame, who participated in the gang rape of a 17 year old girl at Hampton University in 1989.
Addressing the need for a change in the broader culture, to recognize people with these traits, and to provide better incentives, norms, and sanctions to address their deficits of character and self-control, is far beyond the scope of what we can achieve here. However, the silver lining to the fact that the martial arts industry exists in a relatively small niche provides ordinary people in its community a significantly-enhanced voice in how that community operates. This is something we, here, have used time after time to effect positive changes in the past, at the expense of other assholes.
It wouldn’t take an overwhelming number of people to shift the culture towards one in which it is unacceptable for female martial artists to be preyed upon by the minority that preys upon them. It would simply take the silent majority to stop keeping their eyes closed, and stop being so silent.
This includes you. Unless, that is, you’re either one of the people who joined the martial arts community to work on your cowardly nature, or you’re not a man, just a lower animal.
In the first of a two part series with the crew of The Modern Rogue, a guide to badassery and one of the most popular channels on YouTube. The conversation covers a range of topics including goat-eyeball-plucking, speech jamming, how social media ruins lives, various Throwdown injuries and shenanigans, and a detour into anime featuring our own in-house badass BJ “Gezere” Bradley.
Dr. Goldsmith comes on the pod to provide us an update on the state of this lovely pandemic, and why we can’t have nice things in general. Topics discussed include:
* How the vaccine actually works, for people who’ve been hit in the head several times. * Home testing kits. * Boosters? * Why vaccinated people are like Anderson Silva (and unvaccinated people are Steven Seagal). * A prediction on when kids under 12 are actually going to get vaccinated. * An uncomfortable statistical analysis of the risk to children. * Bret Weinstein, the Darkhorse-Paste Podcast, the Intellectual Dark Web, and the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Watch the stream here below, or listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, Tinder, Minecraft, and Your Mom.
Taking things down a notch and getting back to our roots, on this episode of the pod we feature the world’s toughest Otaku, black belt in half a dozen styles (including the ones that actually count), retired US Army officer, and Bullshido forums legend, “Gezere”, to discuss his role in popularizing Anime in the United States, and whatever the hell else he wants to talk about.
Some of you will remember him from the first ever Throwdown held on the East coast back in 2002. Others, from the forums as “Lord Asia” and a few other handles.
Bottom, center-right, delivering a lethal strike to Omega’s… omega.
Listen to the episode below, or on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you find podcasts.
a Tribute to Douglas Adams and the farce that is the digital age
When viewing the timestream that houses all the timelines, you will see a plethora of golden light. Life itself, shining so bright it threatens to overwhelm anyone who sees it. Its branches speeding in every direction into futures yet untold. Most folks who visit this marvel and stare for hours, which is measured in full decades on some timelines. Few who have seen it are usually impressed as time flows past into bright tech-filled futures of flying cars and vacations on the moon Europa. There are paradise worlds where mankind lives synonymous with nature in trees as tall as skyscrapers. Even peaceful worlds where humans have found solutions for both war and death. World’s where you and your grandfather could be best friends for a millennium.
This is not about those timelines. This doesn’t involve those worlds. No, this is a shortened stump of a timeline whose time flows black and curdled. Viewing this timeline from the outside, one would think it is a root of some kind. It sort of resembles a very wonky, dirty corkscrew. It’s not pretty, it’s not intuitive, and unfortunately for everyone on this timeline, it isn’t safe either.
Re: TARDIS
Every person on this timeline is anxious. For a good reason, this is, without a doubt, the worst timeline in existence, in all of the multi-verse.
42 Skidoo
Congratulations are in order. It is a surprising feat to find yourself at the bottom of the briniest barrel of reality. Unfortunately, you’ve found yourself stranded here and are now consulting the Time Traveler’s Guide to the Worst Timeline.
For starters, let’s throw all that calm and chill stuff out the window. This timeline gave up on chill in the late 90s. Maybe you should panic. Perhaps we all should panic. I’m going to say it right here, in large red, sharp letters, “Definitely Panic.” Unfortunately for us, nothing here is ‘mostly harmless.’ In fact, everything in this place will leave you feeling sticky and itchy.
However, you arrived here: time-traveling phone booth of various types, a flying car, a handheld computer, or simply observing patterns of natural timeslip in the universe; I’m sorry you’ve arrived. Not because you’ll ruin this timeline, nothing could make this any worse. But, tragically, you get to bear witness to this frightening parody of existence.
Denizens of this timeline put their hands in tiger cages! They try to befriend bears. They even cross fences into dangerous areas near Volcanoes expecting nature to somehow be “different” and “safe!” They are even surprised when nature never changes!
It’s an old meme, but it checks out.
Some people on this timeline believe in mystical energy martial arts. Right up until a point where a practitioner of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu pops them square in the mouth. The comedy of this scene is very sobering and fun to watch. There are whole social media websites dedicated to sharing this slapstick.
The Yellow Bamboo cult believed they could stop attackers with “chi”.Many feelings and faces were hurt.
Don’t forget your towel (it’s for the tears)
The following fact will blow your mind while also sounding entirely redundant. This timeline has every bit of data at their fingertips so, some people here use their time to create fake data, to trick other people into believing their data is somehow better data. I’m not kidding. They have whole websites dedicated to alerting folks about what data is real and what data is fake. Last week, the biggest one, well known for being the best at spotting real data, was caught stealing articles about fake data.
That won’t get brought up by anti-fact-checking cranks for the next 100 years or anything goddamnit
If you think that’s crazy, buckle up buddy, this roller-coaster hasn’t even peaked the first hill.
This timeline elected a greedy reality TV star, and many people expected it to turn out well. Some of them still believe, even after he attempted a coup, that somehow this was all a good thing!
(They’re nuking these videos over copyright as fast as they’re coming out, so let us know if this one dies too in the comments -ed)via the Jan 6th Meme archive on the forums
The biggest world-power on earth politicized wearing a mask and getting a vaccine… during a plague! Group A felt that wearing a mask was a healthy and responsible choice. It benefited them and benefited other people around them. Group B hated group A accusing them of shitty political views. Group B screamed about wanting the freedom to make terrible health decisions that affect and infect everyone around them. They claimed vaccines were more dangerous than a plague that killed 4 million worldwide. Oh, and one of those conspiracy theories declared that a billionaire was putting microchips in vaccines! If someone wanted to microchip this population, they’d put them in their Miller High-Life bottles.
There are dozens if not hundreds of these.
If you can, please re-assemble your time machine and leave this violent car-wreck of an existence. If you can’t well, I’m sorry you’re stranded here for whatever reason, but I am right here with you. I am also cursing under my breath and dying inside every single time I meet a flat-earther. I meet a new one almost weekly these days.
I’d rather listen to Pitbull’s entire catalog on repeat
Should you feel like taking the easy way out and destroying all of space and time in a paradox, well, I’ve tried. They simply don’t work here. This timeline is immune to paradoxes. It is like a cockroach wiggling through a nuclear holocaust. Living amongst the rubble. Devouring whatever moldy sustenance its diseased head can sniff out. When people here encounter a mind-bending, world-destroying paradox, they blame the other tribe that is contrary to their political views. They ignore signs of the apocalypse and continue stomping around it, through existence. The cockroach wasn’t a metaphor or an analogy.
Welcome, and all the fish are dying
Anyways, welcome to the worst timeline in every dark and twisted corner of the multi-verse. I am sorry you’ve found your way here, and I’d like to reassure you in the fact that you should definitely panic.
This would make a nice t-shirt to sell to people who joke about dolphin-safe tuna
I don’t know how to tell you this without resorting to an ad hominem1, but the fact that you’re aware of a few phrases in Latin isn’t impressing anyone, much less winning you an argument.
Bullshido has always existed at an unlikely intersection of geekdom and recreational violence.
The latter of those two niches may be jarring to those with more delicate sensibilities, but even those who have spent their lives completely insulated from the state of nature and the brutality of the world, have to acknowledge that as “barbaric” as they find full-contact fight sports and the non-cosplay martial arts, they’re a much more civilized and appropriate form of expression for that seemingly-innate human impulse. Ensuring people have a healthy and consensual outlet for such things tends to work out better for everyone.
Behaviorism, whee!
No, we’re not having a Nature vs. Nurture argument, that room is down the hall to your left.
The reason for calling explicit attention to the unique niche we’ve carved—or rather, barbarically hacked—out for ourselves, is that at least among our own community of abnormally well-read knuckle-draggers a set of norms organically developed that helped guide conversations and arguments towards productive conclusions. And it would be a reasonably safe bet that we arrived at those conclusions at a rate much greater than virtually any other community or group on social media, especially today.
What is the secret sauce? Well if you said “violence” you might be off the mark but not completely off the target. For the first decade-and-change of our existence, the central topic of discussion was rooting out BS in the Martial Arts. Those of you who have recently followed us on Facebook can observe this bit of Internet history through the occasional whining noise in the comments about why we don’t stick to that subject, generally because those mental children got left behind when we broadened the scope of our BS-calling (and probably should have gotten left behind in grade school for a few extra years).
No, the secret sauce isn’t violence—as much as that would make for a hell of a tagline—it is violence-adjacent though, because rejecting the null hypothesis of many of the arguments involved someone getting their ass kicked. And informed by our unique sociological lens, it is with the purest spirit of loving kindness that we approach the subject of telling some of you to shut the fuck up with your Argumentum Ad Nauseum bullshit.
The Fallacy Guy
It’s “The Guy” everyone.
1. Simply insulting someone isn’t a fucking ad hominem argument, dipshit. (Yeah, we’ll put the footnotes in the middle of the piece because what the hell are you going to do about it? Cancel your subscription? This is Thunderdome, motherfucker—there are no rules here. Eat or be eaten, or something. I dunno, I only watched Fury Road.)
Perhaps the most misused logical fallacy by every Fallacy Guy is to latch onto the fact that they’re being insulted for being… well, the person that they actually are, irrespective of the merits or lack thereof of argument they’re making. Yes, if you tell someone “global warming isn’t real because it snowed this year”, you may indeed be called a whole spectrum of colorful insults by everyone, even people who might agree with you, because it’s the dumbest goddamn argument possible on the subject and you’re making them look bad. This is still not an ad hominem.
Someone calling you a “mouth-breathing moron” is just a statement of their view on how much oxygen you are wasting. It is only when that statement is presented as a justification for refuting any arguments you may make, ie. “Tony, you literally lick windows in your spare time, of course the Earth isn’t flat.” The Earth being a globe and your pastime of window-licking are separate, and hopefully unrelated things. That’s why it’s called “AD HOMINEM” in the first place: you’re attacking the qualities of the person instead of the qualities of the argument.
Then again, if you actually did even a week’s worth of Duolingo Latin lessons you would know better.
This piece is not going to get into how every single logical fallacy is misused by midwits who think they are a silver bullet against internet arguments. Better people than us have explained such things in great detail. If you’ll notice, we don’t maintain a list of all the logical fallacies here, we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. The articles we do have on the subject cover specific applications or misapplications of them as they are impacting the efforts at curbing bullshit and shoring up people’s cognitive defenses against it.
Our purpose here is to make it abundantly clear that nobody is impressed that you are aware of logical fallacies, and whipping one out in an argument like you’re B. Rabbit in a rap battle having just discovered that Clarence has loving and supportive parents, makes you the Clarence in that situation.
Argumentum ad Eminem
TL;DR;FU
Perhaps there was a brief time when it was useful, even helpful, to be a Shitpost Cicero, never missing an opportunity to use Latin to point out the flaws in an argument. If so, that time was about 3 weeks in the summer of 2007 after the first Smartphone launched and people who had never heard of logical fallacies started streaming onto forums and early social media sites, dooming us all to this information dystopia in which we now reside.
But going on a decade and a half later, even someone who only uses their smartphone for porn has heard of the more common fallacies. So you’re not impressing anyone in that Facebook group or Twitter thread; you’re just performing a socially-awkward, inappropriate act for your own gratification. And if you’re putting in all that work, why not just use your phone for porn?
Feel free to stay up late, “hugging your horn”, just leave the rest of the Internet to people who want to exchange ideas and have actual social skills.
I already know and accept that. There is no way to touch upon this issue without really pissing off a lot of people. I agonized over writing this, and very nearly skipped it. Then I realized that the reason I did not want to write this piece was because I was afraid of the topic. That felt like a terrible reason to not write an article. So, like an idiot, I’m writing it anyway. I’m writing it from a place as close to pure objectivity as I can, and I am still going to fuck it up and piss off a lot of people. I’m sorry if you are one of them. I accept your rage as well-earned and will not pretend that the issue is not as sensitive as the glutes and hammies after a Wendler leg day. Let the healing (hating) begin.
So who is Laurel Hubbard? Laurel Hubbard is a transwoman weightlifter who has just qualified for New Zealand’s Olympic team. If that sentence confuses you, I’ll explain. Laurel Hubbard was born biologically male, and transitioned to female in 2012 via a lengthy and unpleasant process of hormone therapy and complex surgical procedures. If you are still confused, then you are not smart enough to be reading this piece. Go eat some crayons.
The circumstances of her gender identity and the nature of her chosen sport have caused no dearth of uproar in the internet for reasons both compelling and horrific, depending upon which dark holes of iniquity you frequent. I intend to try and explore as many of these as I can in the vain hope of elevating the discussion surrounding this issue beyond what I have seen up to this point. Yes, I am a moron.
Issue One: Official Status
Laurel Hubbard is a woman. Full stop. I refuse to live in a world where a person cannot choose the circumstances of their own life with as much freedom as physically possible. She has every right to be the best version of herself she can achieve, and she does not need me to tell you that. If your argument against her participation in women’s sports begins and ends at “she’s not really a woman,” shut the fuck up and go play with the rest of the bronze-age idiots. Objectively, philosophically, morally, intrinsically, and for all purposes both practical and impractical, Laurel Hubbard is a woman. If you can’t get to that conclusion then just stop reading and go tweet something half-baked about how liberal Jewish space lasers are turning the frogs gay or whatever.
Issue Two: The Rules
Believe it or not, the IOC has rules regarding the status of transgender athletes. Rules are good, right? The friendly folks at Wikipedia provide the following:
In 2003, a committee convened by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Medical Commission drew up new guidelines for participation of athletes who had undergone gender reassignment. The report listed three conditions for participation. First, athletes must have undergone sex reassignment surgery, including changes in the external genitalia and gonadectomy. Second, athletes must show legal recognition of their gender. Third, athletes must have undergone hormone therapy for an appropriate time before participation, with two years being the suggested time.
It was not until 2004 that the IOC allowed transgender athletes to participate in the Olympic Games.
In 2015, the IOC modified these guidelines in recognition that legal recognition of gender could be difficult in countries where gender transition is not legal, and that requiring surgery in otherwise healthy individuals “may be inconsistent with developing legislation and notions of human rights”. The new guidelines require only that trans woman athletes declare their gender and not change that assertion for four years, as well as demonstrate a testosterone level of less than 10 nanomoles per liter for at least one year prior to competition and throughout the period of eligibility. Athletes who transitioned from female to male were allowed to compete without restriction. These guidelines were in effect for the 2016 Rio Olympics, although no openly transgender athletes competed.
Laurel Hubbard has met all of these criteria, and is therefore eligible for participation. This renders most of the discussion about her legal status entirely moot. But that is not the real thorny issue here, is it?
Issue Three: Athletic Advantages of Sexual Dimorphism in Humans
Sexual dimorphism is the phenomenon in some species where the male and female versions express morphological differences beyond the purely reproductive. Female ball pythons tend to be larger than males, for instance. Male peacocks have elaborate plumage and coloration that females do not. The list goes on ad nauseam. Sexual dimorphism is common in many species and serves valid evolutionary purposes. Among humans sexual dimorphism is primarily exhibited through secondary sexual characteristics and body composition. There is no scientific debate over this, I might add. Male and female homo sapiens are not biologically identical. This is where the Laurel Hubbard situation really gets dicey.
We have no idea what this stock photo is supposed to be suggesting but we felt bad for it and wasted a license out of pity.
It starts with testosterone. This is the hormone that produces many of the athletic advantages men typically have over women. It makes the muscles grow. It keeps the fat levels down. It makes hair grow in weird places. As with general sexual dimorphism, there is no scientific controversy regarding the athletic performance of the average male versus the average female across the human species. Generally speaking, the average human male will be larger, stronger, faster, and more durable than the average female. I don’t like saying that. It sounds pretty dismissive of all the exceptional female athletes out there, many of which make the average male look like 189 pounds of tapioca sliding down a wall. That being said, there is no intellectually honest debate around this part of the discussion.
The IOC rules state that a trans woman (or as I like to call them: women) must be on hormone therapy for two years prior to competing and have testosterone levels below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least one year. But what does that actually mean, physiologically speaking? More than one thing, unfortunately. Hold on. It’s about to get weird.
Issue 3A: Growing up Male
Male vs. Female (XY, XX) testosterone levels during puberty. Ho, T. C., Colich, N. L., Sisk, L. M., Oskirko, K., Jo, B., & Gotlib, I. H. (2020). Sex differences in the effects of gonadal hormones on white matter microstructure development in adolescence. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 42, 100773.
There is a pervasive argument that says transitioning after puberty leaves the transwoman in question with many advantages that never really go away. During puberty, a normal healthy male human will have testosterone levels high enough to make Alistair Overeem jealous. I fondly remember being sixteen years old and lifting weights for 90 minutes, then going to a 90-minute judo class. After which I would walk home and eat (not a joke) about 2500 calories of whatever I could find in the fridge. I’d go to sleep, wake up the next day, and do it again. In my early 20’s I would teach phys ed all day, go train at an MMA gym for three hours, then go work as a bouncer until 2 AM five days a week.
I am 43, now, the same age as Laurel Hubbard. If I attempted this sort of stupidity today I would die in a week. Graveyard dead. Gone. That’s what high testosterone will do for a body.
Now, research has demonstrated that the excess muscle mass from normal male levels of testosterone does in fact go away after a period of hormone (estrogen) therapy. The testosterone is necessary to keep the gains, as they say. Without high testosterone, one cannot maintain the muscle mass derived from it. We have a lot of data to prove this, too. If you want the simple version, just look at any professional bodybuilder when they are not on a steroid cycle. Those guys positively shrink, because the hypermuscularity is only sustainable while the hormones are elevated. This is why the IOC makes a transwoman be on estrogen for 2 years before competing. It’s enough time for the muscles born of cis-male test levels to drop off. How much does that matter? Just wait. We’ll talk about that more in the next section.
One other pervasive argument in play here is built around the following thesis: Living through this formative period as a biological male may produce permanent levels of bone density and bone mass that no biological female could achieve without supplemental hormones. The science is a little scarce on that issue, but there may be some truth to the argument that these advantages can be permanent if the person in question maintains an athletic lifestyle after transitioning. But not how you think.
See, here’s the surprising bit: Testosterone makes bones bigger, but estrogen makes them dense. It’s why post-menopausal women tend to get osteoporosis. It’s a complicated biological recipe where it takes a little bit of everything to produce that perfect cocktail of superhuman cyborg bones. In the linked studies, post-transition women showed increased bone density as more estrogen was added:
With the initiation of estrogen, many studies report a positive change in BMD in trans women. After 1 year of GAHT, a study of 231 trans women from Ghent and Amsterdam reported BMD increases at the lumbar spine (+ 3.67%, 95% CI 3.20–4.13%, p < 0.001), total hip (+ 0.97%, 95% CI 0.62–1.31%, p < 0.0001), and femoral neck (+ 3.67%, 95% CI 3.20–4.13, p < 0.001) . A recent meta-analysis reviewed 13 studies with 392 total trans women and showed significant gains overall in lumbar spine BMD at both 12 months (+ 0.04 g/cm2; 95% CI + 0.03 to + 0.060 g/cm2) and 24 months (+ 0.06 g/cm2; 95% CI + 0.04 to + 0.08 g/cm2), which is within a range often considered clinically significant.
Eagle-eyed readers will notice that the cross section of a cisgender male’s bone is still larger than the transwoman’s in this study. This might lead one to think that the increased bone density from exogenous estrogen is less an issue considering the difference in size. Well, that is where lifestyle comes into the game. There is a severe lack of data regarding transgender athletes that has many scientists hedging their bets on this topic, and wisely so. This is a very young field of research and there is a lot we do not know yet. Every scientist lives in fear of the ubiquitous specter of “confounding variables.”
“Compared with cisgender men, transgender women have lower bone mass and cortical size even prior to initiation of hormone therapy, suggesting sex steroid-independent effects in these individuals. These individuals are more likely to have vitamin D deficiency and less likely to be involved in sport than cisgender men,” says Dr. Davidge-Pitts.
Here is the rub: Ms. Hubbard has been a weightlifter her whole adult life. There is no question that prior to her transition, Ms. Hubbard possessed better-than-average bone density and size even for a male. Post-transition, she may (MAY!) have maintained that larger cross section as well as increased bone density. There is simply not enough research on it to say one way or the other. Which is maddening to those of us who want to make fair and equitable arrangements for athletes of all stripes.
In short, because she began her life as a biological male, and furthermore, a physically strong biological male, the introduction of estrogen as part of her transition might have increased her bone density. But it also might not have, because she likely already maxed that particular stat out long before this became an issue. Furthermore, for reasons we will get into shortly, there is a very real possibility that this has granted her no advantage at all within the current paradigm of competitive weightlifting. In short, we cannot be sure that any of this is making a difference because there is so little data on the topic specific to elite athletes. But, in the interests of objectivity, it must be accepted that there is a real chance Hubbard possesses a skeleton both larger and denser than her opponents can produce naturally.
So, we accept that there is at least some scientific evidence suggesting there might be an advantage vis a vis bone structure. It’s not exactly a smoking gun for those objecting to Ms. Hubbard’s participation, but objectivity demands we talk about it.
Maybe. Crap. Keep reading if I haven’t lost you already.
Issue 3B: How Much Testosterone is Too Much?
Let’s return to those IOC rules about testosterone, all of which Ms. Hubbard is in compliance with. One of the more interesting rules is that her testosterone levels must be less than 10 nanomoles per liter. If you must know, a nanomole of testosterone is 602,200,000,000,000 molecules (give or take a zero, I got lost.). Is that many molecules per liter of blood a lot of testosterone? Not for a guy. That’s very low for a male human. But unfortunately for Ms. Hubabrd’s competitors, it’s kind of high for a woman. Like,ten times the average, to be exact.
This raises an interesting question: why does the IOC allow such a high threshold? Even amongst elite cisgender female athletes, testosterone levels never even approached 10nM/L.
“Within the same press release, the IAAF cited research that states “most females (including elite female athletes) have low levels of testosterone circulating naturally in their bodies (0.12 to 1.79 nmol/L in blood), while after puberty the normal male range is much higher (7.7 to 29.4 nmol/L).”
It’s not just weightlifting, either. The paucity of data on the topic of trans athletes leads to some tough conclusions. Groundbreaking research by Joanna Harper may shed some light on the subject, and the data from her studies seems to indicate that 10Nm/L is just too high a limit for “fair” play. The prevailing theory is that the level was set here to accommodate female athletes with legitimate conditions that elevate their testosterone. Track athlete Caster Semenya is a woman with naturally high testosterone. She has not cheated nor has she ever been biologically male. She simply has a genetic condition that makes her a fantastic athlete. Nature can be very unfair like that sometimes. It is theorized that Semenya’s success in track events has been a large part of how these rules were constructed.
Caster Semenya
Even as a full-on supporter of trans-people of all stripes, this represents a bit of a problem. All the available scientific data indicates that Ms. Hubbard’s opponents will be competing against someone with between five and ten times as much free testosterone as they (naturally) possess. I do not have time or space here to talk about how that impacts every olympic event. What can be said unequivocally is that in a pure strength sport, having ten times the testosterone of your opponents constitutes an enormous advantage. If the conclusions from Harper and the IAAF prove compelling, then the allowable testosterone levels for transwomen competitors may need to be adjusted downward. Outliers like Caster Semenya will not appreciate this change, nor should they.
Issue 4: None of This Probably Matters.
The available science seems to tell us that Ms. Hubbard just might have an advantage over her opponents. Now, before you hoist that pitchfork and light the torches, let’s talk about the ugly reality behind weightlifting and the Olympics for a second. Hubbard’s testosterone levels are probably not the real issue here, with plenty of data to back that assertion. How, you ask?
STEROIDS.
I said it and I’m not taking it back. You want ugly truth? If you are an Olympic weightlifter angry because Hubbard’s testosterone levels are a threat to your medal contention, then I say you are a hypocrite. No one can expect to ever stand on the podium in weightlifting without pharmaceutical help.
If you are a champion at the international level in any strength or physique sport, you are almost certainly taking some kind of performance-enhancing drug. Period. The great bodybuilder Jay Cutler was once asked about steroid use in an interview. He said, “If you aren’t using, you aren’t winning.” The interviewer then asked. “So you use?” He replied with a cheeky smile, “I’m winning.” And don’t pretend it’s only bodybuilders, pal. Olympic weightlifting is one of the worst offenders, and it is not even much of a secret anymore.
Jay Cutler
In the 2012 London games, all three of the 94kg weightlifting medalists tested positive for something illegal, andsix out of the top seven finishers also tested positive in that division. Half of all the weightlifters competing tested positive. HALF! Between 2008 and 2012, 61 lifters tested positive for illegal substances. Bulgaria’s entire team was BANNED for 2016. Do you want to know what’s really crazy about that? Their best finisher was 5th place. Even soaked in stanozolol, Bulgaria could not make the podium. These are just the ones who got caught, by the way. There were many more who got away with it, I promise.
In that context, what does the current allowable testosterone level even mean? What difference does female bone structure make when EVERYONE is running gear? Olympic weightlifting is so steeped in performance-enhancing drugs that penalizing Hubbard for having extra testosterone seems petty and strange. Virtually all the athletes in medal contention are likely enjoying some kind of pharmaceutical assistance, so why does it matter? Is she even in medal contention? Hubbard last competed at the world championships in 2019, where she finished 6th overall. Even with her elevated testosterone and all those advantages, she could not make the podium. Her best lifts are way off the women’s world records as well. What does that tell us, really?
Where Does This Leave Us?
Nowhere.
If we view Ms. Hubbard’s Olympic situation outside of any context at all, it appears likely that she is enjoying a competitive advantage over her opponents. Biologically speaking, the allowable testosterone levels for transwomen athletes is almost certainly too high. All the available science supports that conclusion. Then again, all the available science on the issue could not fill a Dixie cup. When in doubt, do more research. In any case, if we ignore the other performance-enhancing elephant in the room, it is the RULE that is the problem here. Fix the rule and the problem goes away.
CeCe Telfer
It can work. US track and field athlete CeCe Telfer has not qualified for the Team USA Olympic trials (women’s 400m hurdles) because the governing body for US track and field (USATF) limits testosterone levels for transwomen athletes to 5 nM per liter (Half what IOC allows). Incidentally, Telfer’s best time is 57.53 seconds, or a full 5+ seconds slower than the women’s world record held by Dalilah Muhammed. It should be noted that Olympic track and field is almost as fair as weightlifting for all the same reasons. Ms. Muhammad has been adjacent to several doping scandals herself, though she has never tested positive. Just her coaches and teammates and most of the people she is faster than…
But I digress. Within the context of the competitive women’s weightlifting scene, Ms Hubbard’s participation becomes a non-issue. Objectively, she is not likely to be any more juiced up than her competitors, and all the available data support this assertion. Is that a cop-out? I don’t think so. Success in competitive weightlifting has long been deeply steeped in performance-enhancing drugs, and pretending that Hubbard’s elevated testosterone is any more or less an advantage than a professionally adminstered regimen of stanozolol or trenbolone is both stupid and hypocritical.
pretending that Hubbard’s elevated testosterone is any more or less an advantage than a professionally adminstered regimen of stanozolol or trenbolone is both stupid and hypocritical.
That’s my M. Night Shyamalan twist for this article, folks. Did I fool ya? Hubbard’s situation as a competitor is literally the least-important issue pertaining to competitive weightlifting right now. The international weightlifting scene has a lot of housekeeping to take care of before I’m ever going to get excited about the relative advantages of a transwoman athlete versus her ciswoman opponents. The argument looks good on paper, but in the real world it all falls apart with only a cursory glance at the numbers. Clean up your sport, first. Then we can talk about “fairness.”
And fairness is what this is all about. Can Hubbard compete on a fair and level playing field with her ciswoman peers at the international level? Do those other athletes have the right to exclude her because of her transwoman status? What is “fair” in this context? The answer is nebulous at best, because there is no practical way to satisfy everyone. No matter what decisions get made, someone is going to feel wronged. Especially if we move the conversation to non-strength sports and include young athletes pre-transition.
In the sport of Olympic weightlifting, at least, the answers are easier. I’m a cynic by nature so the irony of it all amuses me. Can one really screech about “fair play” in a sport where cheating is the only viable path to victory in the first place? I hope you try. I really need the laugh. I sometimes wonder if other weightlifting champions whinge about Hubbard while waiting for their state-sanctioned AAS injections. Picturing this puts a smile on my face, and that makes me question my own character in ways that don’t feel good. Ah well. I’m kind of a jerk.
What should never be part of the conversation is Hubbard’s status as a woman or her dedication to her sport. If you can’t have this debate without sinking to either of those depths, you’re not ready to talk about this with the adults.
The possibility of a man-made origin for the Coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic has all the usual conspiracy theorist suspects and even a handful of credible intellectuals furiously arguing back and forth these days.
Immunologist Dr. Jason Goldsmith comes on the pod to explain all the origin scenarios, and more importantly, what can actually be done about the problem if Covid really was the result of either negligence or maleficence on the part of a Chinese laboratory or the government overseeing it.
Listen here below or on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
