Time and again, an odd phrase keeps popping up in Rationality Rules’ latest transphobic video.

[9:18] You see, I absolutely understand why we have and still do categorize sports based upon sex, as it’s simply the case that the vast majority of males have significant athletic advantages over females, but strictly speaking it’s not due to their sex. It’s due to factors that heavily correlate with their sex, such as height, width, heart size, lung size, bone density, muscle mass, muscle fiber type, hemoglobin, and so on. Or, in other words, sports are not segregated due to chromosomes, they’re segregated due to morphology. Now as it turns out it’s hormone levels, and specifically male puberty, that is the primary cause of such differences.

[14:18] And yes, considering the many benefits of male puberty, the burden is on those who were asserting that HRT sufficiently mitigates said benefits. Now, in the rarer cases of trans women who transitioned before receiving male puberty, I’m currently convinced that the burden has been sufficiently met.

[16:48] Which is to say that the attributes granted from male puberty that play a vital role in explosive events – such as height, width, limb length, and fast twitch muscle fibers – have not been shown to be sufficiently mitigated by HRT in trans women. Or, to put this more bluntly, I think there’s a good reason as to why we’re seeing trans women – who have experienced male puberty – doing so well in weightlifting and other explosive events.

[20:03] I am not opposed to trans women who have experienced male puberty competing in the female category of SOME events because they’re trans. I am opposed because the attributes which are granted from male puberty that play a vital role in some events have not been shown to be sufficiently mitigated by HRT.

“Male puberty?” There’s no need for the qualifier; swap “puberty” in for “male puberty” in any of the examples above, and no misunderstandings pop up. I’ve only heard of “puberty” without qualifiers being used in this context, and while I’m no biologist I have done some homework in this area. Let’s pop the term into Google Ngram, and see what comes up. For comparison’s sake, I’ll also add “female puberty.”

The usage of “male puberty” prior to 1970 is misleading, though, as the matches include phrases like “Procreative power in the male. Puberty.” and books with an incorrect publication date. Sifting through the rest, there’s a single usage of it in an 1833 medical textbook, what looks like one usage in a 1953 scientific journal article, a handful of mentions in two medical texts from the 1920’s, and that’s it. Post-1970, there’s roughly a dozen examples in Google’s entire corpus. Compare the above graph to one where we add “puberty” with no qualifications:

Even at “male puberty”‘s peak, “puberty” by itself is used 350x times more often! We get similar results from Google Scholar, where “‘male puberty’ -rite” nets about 5,000 matches while “puberty -rite” has over 800,000 matches. “Male puberty” is an obscure term, even in scientific circles, so why did RR use it when “puberty” was shorter and equally effective? I have a theory, and it relates to something I’ve mentioned in a different context.

It’s very difficult to track down the sex assignment procedure used at birth, but if you read between the lines of several studies and look up the tests performed on newborns, you get the impression that sex determination begins by looking at genitals. If they fit neatly into one of two categories, an “M” or “F” is marked down on the birth certificate and no further testing is done. Only if the genitals are ambiguous do doctors carry out hormone or chromosome tests, as far as I can tell, and in some cases they pull out the scalpel before those tests even reach a conclusion. All that talk about “clusters” of sexual characteristics is meaningless, because by stating “women, definitionally, are adult human females” TERFs are really saying “women, definitionally, are people with vaginas, a urinary tract that does not pass through a phallus, and a phallus no longer than X.”

Human beings are sexed at birth, and that process is our definition of “sex.” Almost every country only allows two categories: male or female. There’s two problems with that, the first of which Rationality Rules himself acknowledges.

[8:30] GIRL COMET: I was formed with androgen insensitivity syndrome. What this means is that my body is female, but it’s atypical. For example, my chromosomes are XY, when most women have XX. I also don’t have a uterus like some – most regular girls have.

RATIONALITY RULES: The effects of this condition are so profound, in fact, that many women are not diagnosed until their teens due to the absence of menses and body hair. Now here’s a really interesting and highly relevant question: which division do people with this condition belong in, the men’s category or the women’s?

Human beings come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and develop in different ways. Puberty is no different, in fact if you take the most liberal definition of intersex then most people fall into that category because a doctor diagnosed “non-classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia” at puberty. This is one reason why “male” or “female puberty” is problematic, because both phrases imply there are only two ways you can experience puberty, in contradiction with reality.

The second problem is that there’s a lot that a doctor or midwife cannot see when they’re checking out your junk. There is no way to detect if someone is transgender when they are born. But that means the doctor/midwife may not have assigned them to the sex they identify with. If you believe transgender women are women, then to say they experienced “male puberty” is no different than saying they have “male anatomy” or calling them “biologically male,” and that’s problematic. So when Rationality Rules says this …

[20:03] I am not opposed to trans women who have experienced male puberty competing in the female category of SOME events because they’re trans. I am opposed because the attributes which are granted from male puberty that play a vital role in some events have not been shown to be sufficiently mitigated by HRT.

… he’s actually saying this …

I am not opposed to trans women who are biologically male competing in the female category of SOME events because they’re trans. I am opposed because the attributes which are granted from being biologically male that play a vital role in some events have not been shown to be sufficiently mitigated by HRT.

This might be one of my few disagreements with Essence Of Thought: Rationality Rules isn’t dog-whistling, because there’s no hidden subtext. Instead, he merely swapped one transphobic phrasing for another. But because he chose a replacement that’s obscure and sounds science-y, you really have to be on your toes to spot his slight-of-hand.

That’s bad enough, but it’s made worse by another assumption RR makes. Did you spot it earlier? No? I’ll bold the critical bit:

[9:18] You see, I absolutely understand why we have and still do categorize sports based upon sex, as it’s simply the case that the vast majority of males have significant athletic advantages over females, but strictly speaking it’s not due to their sex. It’s due to factors that heavily correlate with their sex, such as height, width, heart size, lung size, bone density, muscle mass, muscle fiber type, hemoglobin, and so on.

At the heart of RR’s argument is the assumption that all men are equal or superior to all women at sports. But if we assume that is true, and we assume that transgender women are men, then it is de-facto unfair to allow transgender women to compete with cis women. RR didn’t have to provide a single bit of evidence, because he’d already tucked away his conclusion in his premises.

That’s the third card I’ve plucked from his card game about logical fallacies! Worse, his card is wrong: you don’t need to fit your entire conclusion into a single premise. Worse worse, this is actually the third time I’ve accused him of begging the question! By merely asking whether transgender athletes have an unfair advantage over their cis peers, he’s assuming they do not posses the right to self-identify nor that gender identity exists as a core premise.

I’m still astounded at RR’s ineptitude. Are we sure he isn’t a false flag operation designed to make skeptics look bad?