You know those very annoying CAPTCHAs – nine blurry images arranged in a 3×3 square that ask you to click on all the fire hydrants, or buses, or crosswalks, etc., etc. – to prove you’re “not a robot”?
CAPTCHA is a lame acronym, iteratively cross-dressed into: “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
Well, today I’m giving you the first look at the “Other Club Turing test to Unautomatedly separate the Guys from the Gals,” or OCTUGG. TOC doesn’t employ a team of highly paid acronym inventors.
OCTUGG has only 4 choices instead of 9, and hi-res images so the yellow fire hydrant isn’t camouflaged by the school bus in the background. You might think it’s simpler and clearer than CAPTCHA.
We’ll see. Your job is is to think about which images below you’d click given the instruction: “Click on all the males.”
Upper left to lower right, they are Laurel Hubbard, Hanna Mouncey, Kataluna Enriquez, and Fallon Fox. All transwomen. Three of them claim to be female athletes. Three of them are narcissistic bullies. One is a paler, slimmer rendition of RuPaul.
Laurel Hubbard is a Kiwi weight lifter, who set womens’ world records – keeping an XX chromosome female off the medals podium. Hanna Mouncey is an Aussie rugby player (6’2″/220) who has significantly injured more than a few women. Kataluna Enriquez is a Nevada beauty pageant winner (Miss Silver State), about to compete for Miss Nevada. And Fallon Fox is an American MMA fighter who broke an XX chromosome opponent’s eye socket in a fight even Liz Warren would not have called fair.
So. It’s not as easy to identify who should be allowed to play on your collegiate women’s sports teams as the South Dakota legislature assumed.
I mean, Miss Silver State isn’t going to be recruited to the wrestling team even by some woke athletic director. If they had a female wrestling team. Only the males capable of crushing females would be of interest. Fleeting interest, once all the marginal males figure out they can be stars in strength and speed competition with females.
Let them compete, I say. With each other. Out and proud, right?
Emphasis mine in the following. Parker citation link omitted. The science is settled in the case of human sexual dimorphism. There are two sexes. The scientific definition of this is that human:
[f]emale gametes are larger than male gametes. This is not an empirical observation, but a definition: in a system with two markedly different gamete sizes, we define females to be the sex that produces the larger gametes and vice-versa for males (Parker et al. 1972), and the same definition applies to the female and male functions in hermaphrodites.
There is a longer discussion of this here: Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes
Why are there girls and why are there boys? We review theoretical work which suggests that divergence into just two sexes is an almost inevitable consequence of sexual reproduction in complex multicellular organisms, and is likely to be driven largely by gamete competition. In this context we prefer to use the term gamete competition instead of sperm competition, as sperm only exist after the sexes have already diverged (Lessells et al., 2009). To see this, we must be clear about how the two sexes are defined in a broad sense: males are those individuals that produce the smaller gametes (e.g. sperm), while females are defined as those that produce the larger gametes (e.g. Parker et al., 1972; Bell, 1982; Lessells et al., 2009; Togashi and Cox, 2011). Of course, in many species a whole suite of secondary sexual traits exists, but the fundamental definition is rooted in this difference in gametes, and the question of the origin of the two sexes is then equal to the question of why do gametes come in two different sizes.
The secondary sexual characteristics, of course, are where we get into errors like those of the South Dakota legislature. It isn’t always obvious who is male and who is female. They might as well have tried to set height and weight limits, akin to the strictures we place on youth sport by banding the competitors in age groups.
Or they could try a routine genetic test. No more intrusive than vaccine passports.