Why I've left Twitter/X

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve deactivated my Twitter/X account. I doubt this will be permanent but I absolutely need a break and I anticipate if I do return it will mostly be to signpost to longer form writing that I am doing. I don’t have the patience left to deal with the stress that site causes me. I’m probably not alone given the increasingly febrile atmosphere.

I thought I owed it to my subscribers here to explain what caused this, especially since my own posts will be unavailable until I reactivate the account.

The controversy over the Olympics has been a topic of discussion for many people and I have written a bit about it. I had intended to write more - and might - but what I have written so far was an explanation of the law in the UK and a brief comment that it appears that some athletes with certain DSDs might be in a complicated position.

I joined a thread where the philosopher of sport Jon Pike had mentioned that he agreed with me that this presents a complication for the typical justifications for sex-separated sporting divisions. In my response I noted that this will likely be controversial but that I do think this is a complicated picture. That sparked a very hostile response - which is fine - and an awful lot of misunderstanding or purposeful misreading of what I was saying. So, here’s what I meant and what I absolutely didn’t mean.

As a general rule, those proposing a position or a claim are tasked with explaining and justifying it. If there is a claim that in certain sporting divisions, the female category is necessary, it must be established why it is necessary. If the claim is that it doesn’t need to be necessary, it should just be the default, then that must be justified and explained. If the claim is that the default should be equal treatment unless we have good reason to permit unequal treatment, then that needs to be justified.

In my intervention I said that if we think about this issue from first principles, one of the common justifications for the female category is that it is necessary when male advantage makes if unfair or unsafe for males and females to compete against each other. There can be other reasons to justify the female category but male advantage and its effect on fairness and safety is a very common one.

So, looking at male advantage, there is a complication in cases where someone has XY chromosomes but Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). These people will be chromosomally male but phenotypically female in virtually all respects. They will be completely insensitive to testosterone and so have no male advantage. Male advantage is not understood within the scientific and philosophical literature as something that accrues by virtue of an XY chromosome; it accrues by virtue of male levels of testosterone affecting fetal, childhood and pubertal growth. Suppressing testosterone in an otherwise typical adult male will not mitigate male advantage but those with CAIS don’t have it because they are in virtually all respects - and in all respects relevant for sporting performance - identical to an XX female.

I said that if we take sporting decisions to be made at least partially on the basis of fairness and safety, then those with XY chromosomes who have CAIS are in a difficult situation; they cannot compete safely or fairly in the male category where sex differentiation is grounded in male advantage. If it would be unfair or unsafe for an XX female to compete in the male category (because they lack male advantage), then it will likely also be unfair or unsafe for someone with CAIS to compete in the male category because they also lack male advantage. That may not be sufficient to establish what rules we ought to have but it does complicate things.

In response to this, some argued that this is completely backward: that women are entitled to the female category because they are female and those with XY chromosomes are male. End of story. No complications here. But all this does is beg the question by presuming the thing that one is trying to prove. If I am discussing the reasons that justify the existence of the female category in sport with a philosopher of sport and we are interrogating common justifications and how they interact with complex edge cases, we’re not arguing in favour of destroying the category, we’re exploring edge cases. Crucially, if we are discussing what the best justifications for a policy of differentiating on the basis of sex, saying “because women are female” adds nothing. Saying “we shouldn’t need to justify this” adds nothing, especially in the current context where the existence of the female category is by no means secured.

One justification offered in response to me was that women have a right to associate with women and they should be allowed to exclude all males. That runs into an immediate problem within UK discrimination law because merely being a part of a group and wanting to exclude others is not sufficient. If the group is defined by reference to a protected characteristic such as sex or race or religion, then merely wanting to exclude members of the opposite groups is not enough. You need to establish why that want is justified in this context because it is not generally acceptable.

In that context, in response to some telling me that if members of a group want to exclude others then they should be allowed to, I asked whether the same reasoning would apply on racial grounds. I need to be clear here that I am not saying that sex differentiated sporting categories are comparable to racially differentiated sporting categories. I’m making the exact opposite point: racially different categories are not justified, no matter how much white people want to exclude non-whites. But sex differentiated sporting categories are generally permissible. That means that the reason for justifying the category isn’t just that some people in the group want the category. It’s probably something to do with fairness and safety or the promotion of participation or an attempt to combat historic disadvantage.

Similarly, some argued that unfairness and safety issues might arise in age differentiated sport. I agreed and stressed that this actually does raise interesting complications because there may be cases where someone who is under 14 has developed an unfair advantage due to a puberty growth spurt which may also entail a safety concern. In some cases it might be defensible to ask the under 14 to compete in the under 16 category. In other cases that might not be fair or safe.

All of this is to say that I began posting and thinking about these issues by trying to think through the justification we might have for differentiated sporting categories and raised an example where things are not quite as simple as they would be in other cases. I did not argue in favour of abolishing the female category and I did not compare sex differentiates sporting categories to racial segregation.

This is a more personal post than I would normally make. I like to keep things focused on the law as much as I can, but the abuse that I receive on social media goes way beyond acceptable criticism. I’m regularly asked why I bother to comment on a controversial area of law. Why would I expose myself to the insults and smears when I could just write about a different topic or write about this topic only for an academic audience? For a long time I said in response that I think there is something valuable in combating misinformation and writing for a public audience. I still believe that and I know that many people on social media do too.

But I’m exhausted. I try to maintain professionalism online. I like being able to interact as part of a back and forth. But I’m just no longer willing to expose myself to the anger and the aggression that comes with it. Social media is not a place that has an abundance of intellectual charity and I can feel myself becoming more angry and aggressive as I’m met with this constantly. I’ve seen more than one person consumed by hatred over clear injustice to the point where they are incapable of anything approaching civility in the face of disagreement. I don’t want to become like that.

All of this is a verbose, self-indulgent way to say that I’m taking a break from social media. I likely will reactivate my account after a little while, but I’m making a conscious resolution to use it predominantly to signpost to my writing for anyone who is interested in that.

Michael