What's Missing From the Trans Athlete Debate
EPISODE 188: Puberty, with David Epstein.
You may have already noticed, in the above teaser for the YouTube version of this episode, the Algerian boxer (and gold medallist) Imane Khelif, who became yet another face of the trans athlete debate during the 2024 Paris Olympics.
It was last fall, in an interview with, of course, The Undertaker — who, of course, has a podcast — that President Donald Trump himself inveighed against Imane Khelif and trans athletes. And how she’d “transitioned” to being a man.
There was just one problem: Imane Khelif, of course, isn’t trans.
Which does not mean that there isn’t a controversy worth dissecting here.
But it does mean that we need to place this whole thing into a larger (and more interesting) context. The kind that seldom makes it onto Twitter. Or television. Because it also brings us to — among other things — San Jose State volleyball, and human evolution, and differences of sexual development, and bonobo balls.
Which is why I invited
— otherwise known as the best sports science writer in America, and the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Sports Gene and Range — to come visit me, once again, in studio.The conversation Dave and I have here isn’t designed to be comprehensive. It’s actually the third episode in a series that PTFO has devoted to what I continue to consider the biggest and most controversial sports story in America.
But this is the conversation, however politically inconvenient, that’s been missing from an ongoing debate that helped swing no less than a presidential election.
DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:
Hormonally,
Pablo