British journalist Piers Morgan and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on Friday debated whether sports should be divided by sex.
Morgan, on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” revisited a November exchange between Tyson and comedian Bill Maher, in which Maher criticized the astrophysicist for not acknowledging the differences between men and women in sports. The journalist played a clip from the earlier clash, prompting Tyson to acknowledge sex differences but float a theory that sports could be divided by hormone levels rather than sex, which Morgan dismissed.
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“What I see is sports is on the frontier of how to handle this frontier of people who are trans. It’s on the frontier of how to resolve that. And I’m making this up now: imagine the future of sports does not distinguish sex, it distinguishes and sorts people by hormone ratios,” Tyson said. “I’m making this up, but imagine that, if that were the case. That would be interesting. You get a hormone test, you’re in this range and then you compete against other people with the same range.”
“That’s ridiculous. Neil, that is ridiculous,” Morgan responded.
Tyson disagreed, noting that wrestlers are divided by weight. Morgan retorted by suggesting male boxers would beat female boxers even if they are in the same weight class.
“I say this respectfully because I love you, but it just seems to me like you’ve dug yourself into a slight hole on this issue and you’re trying to get out of it,” Morgan said. “And now you’re suggesting slightly mad cat theories, whereas the science, to me, is obvious. You’ve already given the best argument I’ve heard for why we separate the sexes.”
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“Hold on. You misquoted me in this very interview. What I said was the idea of creating categories within a sport, splitting them — in the example I gave, which I just made it up — like hormone ratios — is not fundamentally weird compared to dividing wrestlers by weight,” Tyson responded. “Because the only reason why you do this is to make an interesting contest.”
Morgan said Tyson wasn’t “allowing for the superior male biology,” saying hormones are not the only category that matters in sports.
“I also feel that if you want to have a separate category, have a trans category. Or have trans women compete against men, which is their biology,” he added. “Isn’t that the scientific way to resolve this?”
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Tyson acknowledged he did not “have a solution” to the issue.
“I do. You have a trans category, or you have the trans women compete against biological men, which is what they are,” Morgan asserted, with Tyson acknowledging that is a possible solution.
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics announced in April that only biological females can compete in women’s sports at the over 240 universities it represents. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona persistently refused to answer queries on whether physical differences exist between men and women during an April hearing.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.