Neil deGrasse Tyson Compares Sex-Based Sports To Racial Segregation In Resurfaced Clip
The astrophysicist also revived his proposal to sort athletes by hormone levels instead of sex.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a brilliant astrophysicist. He can explain black holes, dark matter and the birth of the universe. Just don't ask him about women's sports.
During an interview on Bill Maher's Club Random podcast — which was reposted by the channel on Thursday — Tyson doubled down on his now-infamous proposal to scrap sex-based sports categories and replace them with hormone-based categories.
Every month, Maher's team reposts a "Club Random Classic" on YouTube. That's why clips from the November 2023 conversation are making the rounds on social media this week.
Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't believe in sex-based sports categories.
(John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images)
Maher opened the door by referencing Tyson's prior social media dust-up with former tennis star Martina Navratilova.
"You had a thing with Martina Navratilova," Maher said. "Because you think, like, guys with dicks should get in the women’s swimming pool, basically."
Tyson insisted he was misunderstood and launched into his actual solution.
"What I said was that, in this emerging space where you have people expressing themselves on a gender spectrum and you want to now compete in sports… that's still a frontier to be solved," Tyson said. "And I don't have the answer, but I can suggest one… Maybe we don't compete by gender anymore. We compete on hormone ratios."
Hormone ratios. That's the grand idea.
Never mind that men and women are naturally separated by horomone ratios. That's the entire point. And even if a male suppresses his testosterone later in life, that doesn't make up for size, strength, bone density, lung capacity, muscle mass and fast-twitch fiber advantages developed in male puberty.
On Piers Morgan Uncensored, Tyson floated the same idea.
"I'm making this up now. Imagine the future of sports does not distinguish sex, it sorts people by hormone ratios," he said. "You get a hormone test, you're in this range, and then you compete against other people in the same range."
He said this method would function like weight classes in combat sports.
But Morgan was quick to correctly point out: "If Floyd Mayweather fought a female woman boxer who was in the same weight division, he would annihilate her."
Bill Maher Pushes Back On Neil de Grasse Tyson's Idea For Hormone-Based Sports
Maher, to his credit, wasn't buying any of this.
"We can protect and respect without pretending that every baby is a jump ball," Maher said.
"The vast majority of people, I’m sorry, are still male or female. And certainly every cell in our body is dictating one or the other, the sexes. I make sperm and other people make eggs."
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That's when Tyson pivoted to one of the most breathtaking false equivalencies we've ever heard in this debate.
"Let's segregate society between dark-skinned people and light-skinned people because nature made it that way and that’s how it is," he said.
Ah, yes. You nailed it, Neil. Telling a dude he can't play on the women's volleyball team is morally equivalent to Jim Crow.
"Oh, for f*ck's sake," Maher replied.
Our thoughts exactly.
Tyson continues to force his way into this debate, framing it as a frontier science problem that just needs complex and clever sorting mechanisms. It's not. We already solved this "frontier" decades ago when we acknowledged that male and female bodies are different in ways that matter athletically.
If Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to explore the mysteries of the cosmos, we're all ears. But this science is settled.