For a long time, the runner Caster Semenya made for a terrific and compelling true-life underdog. In a world that was increasingly cognisant of the oppressive interplay of race, gender and class, here was a woman, black and gender non-conforming — a 2009 New Yorker article described her as “breathtakingly butch” — battling against a racist, sexist system that wanted to keep her down. Her trajectory from an impoverished running club in rural South Africa to the winner’s podium at the Olympics was Hollywood movie material, and the repeated indignities she suffered at the hands of officials and fellow competitors who questioned her right to be there were an outrage: Semenya was dogged by rumours that she was a man in disguise, and was routinely required to prove her sex by submitting to humiliating inspections of her genitals. It all seemed like the work of a snivelling patriarchy conspiring to take down an exceptional woman.

But the truth was more complicated: Semenya is a woman — by her own definition, and in virtually every social context that matters — but she is also not exactly female. Testing eventually revealed her to be intersex, possessing an XY chromosomal makeup and a pair of internal, undescended testes, which among other advantages meant she could produce performance-enhancing testosterone at levels that an ordinary female could not.

Athletic governing bodies struggled to come up with a policy that would allow someone like Semenya to continue competing: when she declined to remove her internal testes, they required her to take drugs to suppress her testosterone production. The solution satisfied no one, including Semenya, who found hormone therapy intolerable. In an essay adapted from her new memoir, The Race to Be Myself, she writes: “If I had internal testicles or whatever they were saying I had, they were mine. I was healthy, I loved my body, and it had made me a champion. Why must I go and mutilate it to conform to someone else’s rules?”

In one sense, it is only fair that someone who moves through the world as a woman be allowed to compete alongside women. “I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now what the medical findings are,” Semenya writes. “I was born a girl and raised as a girl.” But socialisation is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to defining womanhood in sports; science matters, too. And the concept of protected classes in sport also stems from a desire to be fair. Women, disabled people, the very old or very young: all of them compete on playing fields that only admit people who share certain characteristics, which is to say, certain limitations. The boundaries around these fields have always been human-drawn and hence imperfect, but they are also necessary; the alternative, as the International Paralympic Committee notes, is “one-sided and predictable competition, in which the least impaired athlete always wins”.

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Semenya, in her book, puts scare quotes around the words “protected class” as if to mock the idea that it could apply to women, but the argument doesn’t land — not least because her presence in women’s sports has more often than not given rise to exactly the sort of one-sided, predictable outcome the IPC works to avoid. Semenya mops the floor with her competitors, and the women who have raced against her have noted that it doesn’t feel like a fair fight. And while nobody likes to think that half the planet can be reasonably classified as impaired compared with the other half — that womanhood itself is something akin to disability — the truth is: the acceptance that women are weaker is the essential foundation of women’s sports. Men jump higher, run faster, kick and punch harder. And if women’s sport is a ghetto of sorts, it is a necessary one, not just for fairness or safety’s sake but for the sake of sport. Nobody wants a one-sided and predictable competition; we want drama and excitement. This is why we play sport, and why we watch other people doing it. We love to see them fight; we love a win against the odds.

There’s something viscerally distasteful about the inverse: somebody with too much strength clobbering someone who has too little. An able-bodied athlete dunking on a guy in a wheelchair; a grown man winning a sprint against a bunch of 8-year-olds. A ringer parachuted into an amateur competition. We watch in pursuit of the kind of fairness that makes for a good game.

This doesn’t mean that the line where an attribute becomes an unfair advantage is always easy to discern. Years ago, the Olympics governing body became embroiled in a debate over whether Oscar Pistorius’s bionic legs gave him an unfair advantage, leading to months of rigorous study that culminated in the following remarkable conclusion, published in The Journal of Applied Physiology: Pistorius, the scientists agreed, was “physiologically similar but mechanically dissimilar” to an athlete with normal human legs. (Pistorius was allowed to run.) But to the general public, fairness in sport is like obscenity as famously defined by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: we know it when we see it.

This is what makes Semenya’s case so complicated. The notion of her being some sort of cheater is flawed. When she balked at suppressing her hormone levels, it wasn’t because she wanted to win; it was because it felt like lying: “I wasn’t going to take on an identity that did not fit my soul because some doctors had taken my blood and images of my organs. I was not a hermaphrodite or anything other than a woman.”

In her memoir, Semenya is largely describing events from over a decade ago. But the book has been published into a world where a related, ongoing battle is raging, over the place of trans women in sports. These issues are not identical, of course: Semenya never imagined she was anything other than biologically female, while trans women are seeking admission to a category they know full well they were not born into. But both have been plagued by allegations that they’re trying to game the system, that they’re cheaters. Often, trans women are presented as just a bunch of grasping, avaricious men who’ve found the easiest possible pathway to a gold medal. When ESPN aired a special about trans swimmer Lia Thomas, her former competitor Riley Gaines slammed both the network and the athlete as complicit in the destruction of women’s sports: “Lia Thomas is not a brave, courageous woman who earned a national title. He is an arrogant, cheat who stole a national title from a hardworking, deserving woman.”

This knee-jerk demonisation has always seemed wrong to me — morally, but also logically. The humiliation, the opprobrium, the physical and mental burden of transitioning: all seem like a wildly disproportionate price to pay for the sake of a college swimming championship. Instead, what has always struck me about Thomas’s case is that elite swimming is one of the few arenas where the women celebrated are broad shouldered, long limbed, and tall. Perhaps swimming represents, to her, a chance to feel not just like a winner, but like she belongs.

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This is the tragedy: that what is fair at the macro level is not fair, as in compassionate, to an individual person. Lia Thomas cannot fairly compete in the sporting category known as “women”, and arguably neither can Semenya, whose memoir presents this as an obscene attempt to deny her identity. No doubt it felt that way to her: to alter her body to compete with women would have amounted, in her mind, to a tacit admission that she wasn’t one.

And as long as women’s sports are seen as having the power to validate or invalidate one’s innate sense of self — for as long as we see the regulatory bodies as not just deciding who can compete as a woman, but who is one — this issue will remain intractable. The best hope is a future where the category of “woman” in sports is treated in much the same way as the IPC treats the category of “disabled”: “If an athlete is not eligible to compete in a sport, this does not question the presence of a genuine impairment,” the committee website assures readers. “It is a sport ruling.”

The truth, unfortunate but inevitable, is this: the most carefully drawn lines, the ones that need to not just include but protect, will always leave someone on the outside.

That’s the level that Laurel Hubbard (a mediocre male weightlifter from New Zealand who now identifies as a woman) was required to maintain for a minimum of 12 months in order to compete at this year’s Olympics against women. That’s also the level that South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya (who won gold in the women’s 800 metres in 2012 and 2016) refused to medicate herself down to. Consequently, Semenya is banned from defending her title in Tokyo. (Although eligible for the 5,000 metres, she did not qualify.)

For over a decade, Semenya has been both a celebrated athlete and the object of harsh, probing curiosity. In 2008, when Semenya was the world champion in the 800 metres, the journalist Ariel Levy visited Semenya’s former club in the devastatingly poor Limpopo province. Here, Levy met a small girl who informed her: “I will be the world champion. I want to participate in athletics and have a scholarship. Caster is making me proud. She won. She put our club on the map.”

But even before Semenya had made a name beyond her birthplace, it was being asked whether it was right for her to compete at all, never mind win. There were murmurs that Semenya — tall, narrow-hipped, flat-chested, deep-voiced and powerful as she was — must have an intersex condition. Bluntly, people wondered: was she female at all? Semenya’s former coach told Levy that the young runner was routinely summoned to the toilets so she could prove to her rivals that she had the right genitals for her race.

If Semenya was able to accept such intrusions philosophically at first, over time they became more and more profound, until eventually she found herself in front of the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2019, fighting against the requirement to suppress her natural testosterone levels. (The 5 nmol/L ceiling is still over twice the normal level for women.) CAS ultimately upheld the limit: the judgment it issued is lengthy, technical and heartbreaking.

Heartbreaking, because what is clear throughout Semenya’s testimony is that she has never doubted that she’s a woman. The public scrutiny of her sex, she said, had been “atrocious and humiliating” — and discriminatory too, since she argued that no comparable questions would be asked of a male athlete. The medication she took to reduce her testosterone made her ill, and any drop in her performance should be put down to that rather than seen as confirmation that she had an unfair hormonal advantage. It felt, she said, like a “punishment” for her body.

Sport is nothing without fairness. Every race, every match, every competition is a quest to find — and to reward — the exceptional within a given discipline. It’s true that without diligent training, even the most physically gifted will never make it within sight of the podium; but it’s also true that without those physical gifts, no amount of graft will turn you into an athlete. Beyond issues of basic safety, the baseline logic of every rule in sport is to exclude external influences that might obscure the quest for excellence.

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That’s why doping is banned. It’s why running shoes and swimming costumes (and, in the Paralympics, prosthetics) are exhaustingly debated: at what point does “more efficient” shade into “cheating”? It’s why there are separate male and female competitions: the inarguable advantages produced by a male puberty in terms of height, strength and speed mean that in a mixed competition, outstanding women would always be overshadowed by men. And it’s why the Semenya question is so painful.

Clearly, her treatment has been unfair, and worse than unfair. There’s a grotesque, prying quality to reading the CAS judgment as it itemises her body, the contents of her blood, the nature of her chromosomes. But those chromosomes are 46XY — that is, male. Should her female competitors accept that as fair? As hard as they push their bodies, and as much as those bodies have to give, there are things that the XX will never be able to achieve.

It’s important to note that even Semenya’s best performances have never approached the speeds that men achieve. She doesn’t even hold a world record. But she did come close to breaking the women’s 800 metre time, which was set in the doping heyday of the Eighties. In other words, Semenya is suspiciously fast for a woman, but not fast enough to be exceptional as a man. She’s stranded in a hinterland of sex that makes her talent seem either excessive or inadequate. Extraordinary as she is, there’s no way for her to win.

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Semenya is the most prominent athlete caught in this hormonal bind, but not the only one. In 2014, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand was barred from competition over her elevated testosterone (she successfully appealed the decision); last week, Namibian sprinters Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi were both disqualified from the 400m in Tokyo for the same reason. Ugandan runner Annet Negesa had surgery to “fix” her intersex condition: her performances never recovered. For any athlete in this situation, the experience is intrusive, cruel and devastating. Some will have no idea that there’s anything unusual about their body until it becomes a matter of public dispute.

Proponents of trans women’s inclusion in female sports will often point to such examples as evidence of the egregious effects of gatekeeping sex. See, they say — by trying to keep males out, you only harm women. It’s even argued that the suspicion of Semenya is a form of racism, since her masculine appearance defies white beauty standards (although it’s clearly not Semenya’s race that makes her, in Levy’s description, “breathtakingly butch”). None of which has any relevance to Laurel Hubbard, who is unambiguously male and undeniably white.

There’s a terrible injustice in Hubbard being able to compete at Tokyo while Semenya cannot. The extent of testosterone’s effect on Semenya’s body is debatable; the extent of its effect on Hubbard, who has been through a regular male puberty, is not. And reducing the circulating testosterone in a male body can make an individual slow in comparison to a man, but it doesn’t make them female: the advantages of sex remain long after transition. Hubbard will never be forced through the cruel exposures inflicted on Semenya, because Hubbard’s sex is not in doubt.

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Despite trans activist efforts to treat “intersex” and “trans” as indistinguishable issues, they are simply not the same. One of Semenya’s objections to enforced testosterone regulation was that it was an attempt “to convert the DSD [difference of sex development] Regulations into a shadow transgender rule”. The effects of male adolescence being what they are, “transgender” can be read as “transwomen” here: trans men present no challenge whatsoever to the integrity of men’s sport. In other words, Semenya believed that a rule targeting intersex women was actually being shaped by consideration of male athletes who wished to enter female competition.

If that’s true, it’s typical. Repeatedly, intersex people’s lives are hijacked to prove that “sex is a spectrum”, so that undoubtedly male people can pretend the class of “female” is too hazy to exclude anyone from. But sex is not a spectrum. Every difference of sex development is an atypical presentation of either the male or female body — there is no “in-between”. Every person with a DSD deserves considerably better than to be recruited as a human shield for the infiltration of femaleness. People with DSDs have long campaigned against compulsory treatments; trans activists argue that without surgery and hormones, trans people will die.

In sport, sex should be simple: the case for separate male and female competition is so stark that only a blindness to women’s interests could lead anyone to neglect it. But in sport, sex is inevitably complicated: the very pertinence of sex to performance means that women with intersex conditions are liable to come under question, and every case will have its own subtleties. What shouldn’t be difficult is this: whatever “being a woman” means, there’s more to it than a deficiency of testosterone, and treating a woman like Semenya decently cannot require dissolving the notion of “women” altogether.

Richard Dawkins does not have the same rule, I think it’s fair to say. “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds,” he tweeted recently. “It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice.”

Lots of people got very cross about that, and I was naively surprised; surprised enough to break my own rule. I thought he was saying something fairly obvious, which is that if you bred humans for some trait then it would probably make that trait more common, and that he was explicit in saying he wasn’t talking about whether it was morally acceptable. But other people thought — they told me so — that he was literally in favour of eugenics. (Dawkins later clarified that no, he was not: “I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy [but just] as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. Heaven forbid that we do it.”)

The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

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Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

As a high-decoupler, Harris thought that it was OK to talk about what-ifs; if there are genetic components to racial differences, then we still need to treat everyone with equal dignity, etc: “I’m not saying there are, but if there are…” He thought he’d performed the ritual.

But for Klein, the editor of Vox, the ritual was not strong enough. Murray’s ideas are reminiscent of a grim history, in which pseudoscientific ideas about a hierarchy of humans were used to justify slavery or Jim Crow laws. For Klein (a low-decoupler, in Nerst’s taxonomy), you can’t simply take an idea out of its context like that. The context comes with it.

These two paradigms are very hard to square. Harris thought he was having a coolly rational debate in the philosophy-seminar style, so was baffled to find he was being accused of racism; Klein thought Harris was trying to sneak racist ideas in under an academic smokescreen, and couldn’t believe Harris claiming otherwise. Their models of the world were so different they just couldn’t understand each other. So obviously it descended into a massive online row with accusations of bad faith and racism.

That’s what I think was going on with the Dawkins tweet. Dawkins thought he’d performed the magic ritual – “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice” =  “By X, I don’t mean Y.” He is a nerdy, high-decoupling person, a scientist, used to taking concepts apart.

But many people reading it are not high-decouplers; they hear “eugenics” and “work” and immediately all of the history, from Francis Galton to Josef Mengele, is brought into the discussion: you can’t separate the one from the other. 

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I think a lot of arguments in society come down to this high-decoupler/low-decoupler difference. And while I hope I’ve done a good job of putting the case for low-decoupling, I am very obviously a high-decoupler, so often I find myself thinking “but they performed the magic ritual! They said they didn’t mean Y!” and being really confused that everyone is very angry that they believe Y.

Dawkins, to my knowledge, never explained why he suddenly brought up eugenics out of a clear blue sky, but the word is in the news at the moment because Dominic Cummings hired the weirdo he wanted to hire, a man called Andrew Sabisky. Inevitably enough, the media has gone through his old social media posts and found various things he’s said, and he has since quit.

For the record: some of it is genuinely unsettling, for instance that “there are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly — even mostly — genetic in origin”. This is, I think, not true — I don’t know how you square it with the simple fact that poor black boys in the UK get better educational outcomes than poor white boys, for instance. And none of this should be seen as a defence of Sabisky’s hiring. (Watch me perform the decoupling ritual: will it work?)

But I thought a few of them were interesting from this high/low decoupling point of view. For instance, he described female genital mutilation (FGM) as a “moral panic”, because the actual numbers were low, so the risk to girls in the UK was pretty tiny. The full quote was “It is still unclear to what extent FGM represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic.”

It seems fairly obvious to me that Sabisky is saying that FGM is rare in the UK – a view, incidentally, shared by at least one consultant obstetrician in the BMJ, who said “there is no evidence that large numbers of girls living in UK are having FGM”. He’s not belittling the impact itself.

Similarly, I’ve said before that claims about a wave of teen suicides are “absolute bollocks” and that the “epidemic of loneliness” is not real; that doesn’t mean I don’t think that suicide and loneliness are terrible things. You can decouple the frequency of the event from the seriousness of the event when it does happen. But for low-decoupling people, you can’t; by downplaying one, you are downplaying the whole package.

Similarly, Sabisky said that “women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s”. But the context was that of Caster Semenya, a female runner who has an unusually high level of blood testosterone, and whether she should be allowed to compete in women’s sport. Sabisky is suggesting, as I understand it, that there is a need to draw boundaries around women’s sport in a way that you don’t around men’s, but you do around the Paralympics; if anyone could compete in women’s sports or the Paralympics, then lots of mediocre able-bodied men would win them and there would be no women’s sports or Paralympics left. The concept of “boundaries around the sport” has been separated from the idea of the sports themselves. But to a low-decoupler, it sounds, I think, as though he is saying they are inferior. 

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Even his “eugenics” argument, in an interview with Laura McInerny in SchoolsWeek in 2016, strikes me as quite a separating-the-feelings-from-the-facts, decoupling-style situation. In fact he even says so, explicitly: “You have to separate yourself from what you feel and from what are the facts of the matter.” He asks whether parents should be able to screen IVF embryos, whether for disability or schizophrenia, or for intelligence. The former is not a million miles away from our current situation, where pregnancies at high risk of chromosomal disorders can be terminated if the mother wishes; the latter will probably be happening in China in a few years. The fact is that it’s possible; that doesn’t say whether it’s right. 

Sabisky himself, according to that interview, seems to be against it: “He is personally uneasy about the ethics of many of the things he talks about and as a Christian — he married in church last year — he has moral views on the topics that may not be what people expect.” It seems to me that he is explicitly decoupling what he thinks is true, or what he thinks is effective, from what he thinks is right.

I don’t think, as some people do, that these remarks have been “taken out of context”, as such. I think that even with the context, lots of people would still assume that when he says “FGM isn’t a major risk” he means “we don’t need to care about FGM”. Similarly, Dawkins’s tweet wasn’t taken out of context: the context was all there, but the magic ritual didn’t work. It’s a translation problem: some people think they’re having a cold, rational discussion; other people are alive to the implications; there will be frequent occasions when the two groups will hear the same words and yet understand totally different things by them.

Again, to perform the decoupling-ritual one more time, none of this is to defend the hiring of Sabisky — who, full disclosure, I met in 2017 and interviewed for my book. It wouldn’t surprise me, to decouple again, if he was a useful person to have around government: he is a “superforecaster”, which means that of the 20,000 people making predictions about the future for the Good Judgment Project, he was one of the 150 who scored best for accuracy. (Read a bit more about that here, if you like.) I suspect having people who are really good at predicting the future is useful, but that is decoupling his abilities from his views, and maybe that’s not a good thing to do.

But I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. Sometimes the ritual fails, and the spirits break through the warding circle.