FEATURED
Called a ‘dictator’ for his position
Philosophy, not “empirical studies,” can prove why men should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports, according to a New York University scholar.
Professor Daniel Kodsi laid out his case in a new paper in the Journal of Controversial Ideas and expanded on his arguments in comments to The College Fix. The paper and comments came prior to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling affirming that states can prohibit gender-confused men from competing in women’s sports.
Kodsi and his co-author, John Maier, wrote this paper based on a version of an amicus brief they helped write in the Supreme Court case.
The paper argues “that it is justified to exclude male people, and only male people, from certain spaces—sports teams, leagues, events and competitions—set aside for female athletes.”
“More generally, it argues that it is justified to organize sports around the biological distinction between male people and female people,” they wrote.
Kodsi told The Fix via email that his paper’s argument was not based on scientific studies, but solely on philosophical reasoning.
“A key point we attempt to drive home is that no ‘empirical studies’ are needed to establish that men who identify as women may justifiably be excluded from women’s sports, just as no empirical studies are needed to establish that adult athletes from Switzerland may justifiably be excluded from junior sports,” he said.
His argument is focused on promoting women’s rights within their sports, not motivated by unjust discrimination against men.
He wrote in the paper:
The arguments of this article lend support to the latter of the two general approaches to interpreting laws designed to protect female spaces. For it has been argued here that the sex-based organization of sport is supported by considerations of naturalness; thus, it likewise supports an interpretation of rules and laws which confer those protections as motivated by the justified aim of excluding males from female sports, rather than anything else.
Laws that “‘protect the interests of a sex” are not “surreptitiously motivated by the unjustified aim of excluding a subset of males who identify as female in particular.”
He told The Fix that he had not received professional backlash for the publication of his paper, but had received hundreds of comments after The Daily Nous wrote about his amicus brief.
“A philosophy blog post about it got more than 300 comments, such as: ‘I could not imagine spending my time or mental energy writing a brief that aligns myself with a wanna-be fascist dictator,’” Kodsi said. The commentator criticized the brief for being “in support of a position that’s primary real-world effect (if it has any effect) would be to hurt an already horrifically-marginalized minority group.”
The philosophy fellow called the viewpoint of his paper “a super-majority position.”
Lambda Legal, the legal organization representing a gender-confused athlete in the Supreme Court case, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Fix in the past month.
MORE: NAACP demands athletic boycott of red state universities
