I can't agree; the number of kilograms is too simplistic a parameter. I'd be more inclined to agree to some more sophisticated division that takes body composition into account. But that is still too simplistic if it is applied the same way in every sport. In some sports, mass is disadvantageous. In some sports, lean mass is advantageous, fat mass isn't. In some, raw mass is advantageous.
But that is futile, because ability necessary to the sport is what produces the results, i.e. rankings. So that amounts to just (1) everyone competing together as if there were one category, then (2) being ranked from winner to loser, and (3) we then declare that each rank is its own ability class, so everyone is a winner in their ability class!
Bob is the winner of the #1 division, Amy is the winner of the #2 division, and so on.
All the tuples of athletes who tied get to be in one class; e.g. if three people crossed the 10,000 meter finish at 29:13, they are in that ability class together, tying for that class' first place. :)
Even if you don't go to the absurd extreme you pushed it to, it still doesn't work. Like, say you rank everyone from 1st to 50th, and then break everyone into five divisions (1st-10th, 11th-20th, and so on).
Then you end up with perverse incentives. The #1 person in the 2nd division doesn't really want to work harder to move up to the 1st division, because they're likely to never get beyond 10th or 9th or so. And the 10th place holder in the 1st division might find it more prestigious to slow down a little to try to take the #1 spot of the 2nd division.
Olympic weightlifting is already split into relatively thin weight brackets. I think the issue is that, pound for pound, men tend to be stronger than women
In the 76-81kg womens bracket current record total (snatch + cnj) is 278kg. In the 73-81kg mens bracket the record total is 363kg.
Men have a huge advantage in power and speed over women of the same weight; this is uncontroversial. This is not affected by reducing blood testosterone.
Weightlifting is already separated by class. As I understand it, weight alone is not enough to create a “fair” competition. A historical use of steroids changes your body composition so that you have more strength at the same weight, even if the use was years ago. From the article the implication is that the same is true for testosterone, giving male to female transitioned people a unfair advantage (as long as transition was post puberty).
> the implication is that the same is true for testosterone
Testosterone actually is one of the aforementioned steroids. The first sentence of the article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone (at the time of this comment) is
> Testosterone is the primary sex hormone and anabolic steroid in males.
"Gender" is larger than biological sex - a distinction that normally doesn't matter. Wikipedia: Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, femininity and masculinity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex, sex-based social structures (i.e., gender roles), or gender identity.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. I know a lot of what you are saying first came from John William Money who… has a actually pretty evil history that should make everyone reevaluate the concepts [0]. I think the simple answer is we don’t know. We don’t know if you are right, we don’t know lots. But one thing we definitely do know is XY humans have more muscle mass and bone density on average than XX humans.
It’s probably not fair to put them against each other because of internal identity claims.
What is the hurry here? Why must we change women’s sports right now? Am I not told to “believe in science”? Where is the hard science on gender identity?
This is a good example of how the popular narrative of the right being anti-science is wrong. Both 'sides' are absolutely anti-science on any topic where the science would be an uncomfortable truth for them.
Republicans can't do climatology; Democrats can't do biology.
That's the problem that division into genders is supposed to address. Currently we have n = 2. Results favoring one of the two genders is addressed by having separate categories with separate results: women's records, men's records.
Everyone's relative chromosome string should be determined, like XXY and that should be the category, devoid of any loaded words like "man" or "woman". If you're XY, you don't get to got against XX athletes, regardless of the identity of anyone involved.
The problem is that doesn't entirely work for trans women. Hormone therapy during their transition will reduce their performance to the point where they mostly can't be competitive with cis men anymore, while they'll still dominate against cis women.
It will be interesting if it goes this route, e.g. title IV like regulations that end up destroying women’s sports and replacing it with human flesh weights.
As long as you're fine with excluding people who were born with the physical characteristics historically associated with the word "woman" from all sports, that will work. I don't think that can be the woke position, though.
Women's sports are generally a carve-out. Women can't compete with men in most sports. Because of that, I don't think that women should be excluded from men's sports. "Men's sports" are just sports, and shouldn't be restrictive. Women's sports are a subset of sports where men have been excluded in order to give women a chance. If a woman is good enough to compete in "men's sports" she should (if she wants.) The opposite is not true. This is not a symmetrical situation. If transwomen are allowed to compete in women's sports, they will dominate women's sports.
All physical aspects? No probably not, the movements and motions that make up almost all sports? Yes, and that’s just reality.
I am struggling to come up with any that women as a generalized block might be naturally better at. Maybe some fineness movements like some forms of dance or balance.
Another user above nailed it, this is a newly self-inflicted problem.
It's not as simple as it seems, the insider article focuses on average pace, but if you look at race winners more often than not its still a man, this difference in average is probably due to the higher number of men completing with a higher variance in ability.
I think it would be more truthful to say as distances increase the ability for women to complete with men also increases but we have not yet found a distance where women have a definite advantage.
This BBC article covering this topic does much better at explaining the state of affairs:
This is in no way meant to disparage what any of these athletes, male or female. When it comes down to grim determination and pushing the human body to its very limits men and women are the same, but it is also telling that we need to get to this point of pain management and mental fortitude to level the playing field.
These kind of issues are really interesting because sports are by nature unfair, but it's been decided to remove part of the unfairness but now some is brought back in with that.
A piece theorising "refinement culture" [1] points out that the Olympics have changed a lot since their invention and revival. Originally, they were a celebration of the human form. Now, they're about putting up the most extreme freak you can find.
I didn't find the overall argument persuasive, but i thought that was interesting.
I feel like with this issue at some point we are bound to reach a breaking point. It's just a question of how far along things will go before we get there. People are more and more open about being transgender and there is more and more support for transgender individuals having the chance to live life as their correct gender. This is a great thing!
However, it presents a huge problem for women's athletics, particularly in sports where strength differences are a large determiner of performance differences. If, as it is said in some circles, a full .5% of the human population is transgender, we are going to continue to see huge increases in openly transgender people competing in sport. In sports where long term exposure to male hormones enhance performance, it's hard to see how life-long XX bodies will be able to compete. Which seems like a bad outcome since the whole point of the existence of women's sport is to allow women to have space to compete without facing insurmountable built-in disadvantages.
It may take a couple more decades but I don't see a stable equilibrium where MTF athletes are competing with cis-women in high level sport, especially if they made their transition during adulthood.
I would be fascinated to hear about different models for how this plays out. I've read the occasional news article about it but I'm not really very familiar with the thinking on the other side of this issue, particularly when it comes to the physical advantages trans women have over cis women in sport.
I won't risk saying this in real life or anywhere where my real identity is known, but I do wonder if the end result will be similar to what's common in many parts of Asia: a third/fourth gender.
Instead of saying trans people are 100% identical to the gender they identify as, they'll be seen as something different. E.g., In Thailand there's the concept of kathoey (westerners refer to them as ladyboys). The Indian subcontinent and culturally related areas have hijra. They're not seen as the same as women, but they're not seen as men either. They're something else, and it's okay.
I've also seen a lot of westerners trying to push their ideas of gender globally and getting enraged when it doesn't fit. Some people get enraged when, for example, Thai kathoey aren't simply referred to as women, but for a lot of those people in Thailand, they don't see themselves as identical to women. So while trying to stop people from misgendering people, they overstep and misgender people who weren't being misgendered.
It is common to hear a transwoman claim (indeed, even occasionally here on HN) that anything other than recognizing them as equal to ciswomen is an act of violence and prejudice against them, and at worst, they utter some invective about “TERFs”. So, suggesting the recognition of a new gender is unlikely to satisfy at least those strident individuals.
Referring to trans people as "a transgender" is rude. If your other statements are as ill informed and inconsiderate, then it's no wonder your conversations with the trans community have been confrontational.
Anddd that’s proving his point. Assuming you’re not a troll making a satirical post, this is pretty much textbook toxic behavior. You respond with aggression when instead you could be nice. People respond with an equal and opposite reaction so when you come out swinging you lose an opportunity where you could educate them instead of spreading more hate.
Reminds me of a funny story where I was informed that transgendered[0] isn't a word. And in fact you can see a definition on Urban dictionary where someone has said it is "a word that doesn't exist". It turns out that while the word was once used widely it has recently become forbidden for grammatical reasons.
It's not surprising this debate is so broken when basic terms aren't even constant.
From first principles, transwomen feel like they should be just as much of a woman born biologically female, but they just happened to be born biologically male. This dysphoria causes a great deal of angst and I don't think the benefits of othering them as any kind of second-class woman can outweigh that.
If I have clinical depression, saying "you're completely normal and do not have depression" doesn't make the depression go away or subside in any way.
Gender dysphoria is oftentimes treated via transitioning in some fashion. Having groupthink on online spaces doesn't alleviate symptoms.
I've never heard anyone except trans activists talking about the specifics of someone's trans-ness in an open setting. Certainly not something someone who's just trying to go about their day would even care about, let alone making a point that "hey by the way you're not biologically a woman, peace".
It's such a weird argument to me. Then again, I'm a dirty "transmedicalist" as labelled by the twitter trans community, so what do I know.
>If I have clinical depression, saying "you're completely normal and do not have depression" doesn't make the depression go away or subside in any way.
This is really not a good analogy. An identity-linked issue like this would be closer to someone not being included into a certain in-group.
For example an African-American who grows up in a predominantly caucasian could be called "not black" or "not black enough" by someone trying to hurt them based on the way they speak or act differently.
You can imagine that this would be alleviated by people not putting up arbitrary rules on who "can be called black".
I did not claim it was not a mental disorder. I said it is linked with identity in a way which is dissimilar to the depression analogy.
Is it far-fetched to say that the severity of negative emotional and mental effects on a person depends on how accepting the culture is of those who do not fit into the majority?
No, but that's not what you insinuated, and I feel as though you missed my point - I was simply talking about the reaction by others to a mental condition: saying "you're a biological woman" to a trans woman does about as much good as saying "just be happy" to a depressed person. It doesn't solve anything, and it reduces the very real condition and the effects of said condition down to talking points and virtue signalling.
Having gender dysphoria isn't a thing to be ashamed of, just any other mental health condition is not something to be ashamed of. Saying "you're a biological woman sis" is like saying "we're just going to act like you don't have it because it's shameful".
It doesn't make any sense from me, nor does it make sense to most of the trans individuals I follow. It seems, yet again, to be the allies that cause the most misinformation (just like we faced with the gay marriage debates).
'Feel'. My confusion comes from the fact that these people were not born female and so can have no idea what it is to 'feel' like a woman any more than I can 'feel' like a wolf.
This then reduces womanhood to a state of mind, rather than any physical and/or chemical criteria, which I think is wrong. Why should natural born women have their identity diluted?
It also seemingly reinforces the 'two genders' claim by categorising trans people as one or the other.
Like I said at the top, I am a bit confused by it all.
This is a really interesting philosophical problem, about qualia generally, but specifically "what it's like to be a something". See the classic essay by Nagel[0].
In today's language (in the US at least), gender is a state of mind, precisely because talking about the mental aspect of gender/sex is very useful both for talking about transgender people and for studying how mental gender identity affects people's lives. As for "feeling" a certain gender, I get it. What you say makes sense, but humans aren't creatures strictly operating by logical principles. Sometimes, what our brains tell us doesn't make sense. But, if you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with, are you going to trust logic, or your own experiences? You can't just say to yourself, "guess I'm being illogical, I'm gonna stop feeling this way now". I recently happened to watch a video by a trans woman where she summed up her experiences with trying to understand why she felt this way as:
"And why am I a woman? Because I'm a woman. That's it. I mean, I can describe my experiences and my feelings to you to help you understand better, but I can't logically prove anything. And I'm super fucking sorry if you can't handle that mankind was set adrift in an absurd world. That must be super fucking hard for you. Tell me all about it."
This was after spending years of her life trying to find a more satisfying explanation and failing to be convinced by any.
As far as reinforcing the gender binary, trans women are just as able to be girly girls or tomboys as cis women are, and the same goes for trans men. On top of that, there are plenty of non-binary people, which depending on who you ask, either fall or don't fall under trans.
Gender is confusing, I agree, but the fact that there are so many people feeling this way means that we can't just simplify and say "you can't really know what it means to feel like a woman" when the lived reality of these people is much more complex and something they've been struggling with for a while.
Thanks for your response; I was expecting to be on the receiving end of downvotes/abuse.
> you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with
I have no problem with believing that some people aren't the gender they physically represent. But, in my mind, arriving to the conclusion that 'I don't identify as a male, therefore I must be female' isn't right.
> And why am I a woman? Because I'm a woman
Again, they don't actually know that they're a woman. They know they're not male, for sure, and I'm fully on board with that. But insisting that they're female... I'm not sure. Is 'trans woman' not sufficient?
Benjamin Boyce has a YT channel that deals with some of this stuff that I watch occasionally to try help understand.
> But, in my mind, arriving to the conclusion that 'I don't identify as a male, therefore I must be female' isn't right.
I think for trans women, it isn't so much a conclusion following from not identifying as male as it is simply 'I identify as female', but this runs into the same issue that you brought up in your first comment of not actually knowing what being female is. But then again, doesn't knowing they're not male imply they know what being male is despite not being male? I think it's just too philosophical of a point for most trans people to concern themselves with when they're dealing with who knows how many other issues.
I recommend either reading or watching more stories about trans people's personal experiences if you want to get a better sense as to why people feel that way, as different people probably have different reasons. I don't personally have any recommendations (the quote I mentioned earlier was a small comment from a video on a completely unrelated topic), but thanks for the recommendation for Benjamin, I'll check him out!
> But, if you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with, are you going to trust logic, or your own experiences?
Do you support applying that same logic to transracialism? E.g. white woman identifying as a black woman?
I don't know much about transracialism at all, but it makes sense to me if you look at it as a cultural identification kind of thing. Both my brother and I were born in and grew up in the states, but I identify more with American culture while he identities more with the culture our parents are from, so culture at least is a mental identity thing rather than a physical reality.
If it's purely a racial/ethnic kind of thing that's about your genetic heritage, I agree it doesn't make sense to apply the same concept. It's like the distinction between sex and gender I mentioned above, trans people identify as a specific gender regardless of their sex, and I think people can identify with a specific culture regardless of their race/ethnicity. To better complete the analogy, I could definitely imagine a white person growing up in Japan their whole life and feeling a general unease about the mismatch between their cultural identity (Japanese) and their race/ethnicity (white), and in cases where that unease is severe enough, potentially being willing to go through surgery to better reflect their identity. Dysphoria over racial/cultural mismatch (if it even exists, idk) seems much less common than gender dysphoria, but I don't see why you wouldn't apply the same logic to both.
White/black may be widely viewed as preposterous but things like Hispanic/white are often a matter of self identification and culture more than genetic reality.
These aggressive activists do more to inflame anti-trans sentiment than any other. I'm fine with live and let live. Call yourself what you want, wear what you want, marry who you want -- no problem. But today's trans-activist is not satisfied with that; they also want to bully people and organizations into absurd things like having a person who lived and developed as a man for 35 years competing in strength sport against biological women.
It's not safe to say in liberal workplaces anymore, but this dynamic of transwomen activists forcing their way into women's spaces is creating exactly the same dynamic as men dominating women in other areas of life. As a woman, I'm tired of it. The latest example from my life: At my company all the women's groups are being rebranded to "gender minorities" groups to accommodate the wishes of a few activists deploying the usual bully tactics. If you disagree at all, you are labeled a TERF and they try to get you fired. So who, exactly, is creating the hostile workplace?
I wonder about that. From what I've understood while talking to trans people and reading what they wrote (so a small sample that's probably biased), the place in the society associated with their gender (the one they transitionned into) is really important. For example, in my experience, trans women want to be recognized as women and live mostly the same as cis women.
I first encountered this because I was puzzled as to why so many trans people seemed to be renforcing gender roles instead of trying to abolish them. The answer is that gender roles matter a lot to them, and fitting in matters a lot to them too. That's why I think the "third gender" solution would be really unsatisfying for most (or at least a part).
This may be true, however you can't have it both ways.
The argument that competing in Super-Heavy weight lifting (the class that Laurel competes in) is following a general western stereotype of cis women is laughable at best. I'd argue that by standards from the last 100 years it's almost as far from it as a sport can be.
Yeah. I think for people today it's absolutely unacceptable. There's a need to fight oppression and gain acceptance.
But once nobody cares anymore and nobody is bothered by the existence of trans people, I wonder if that's when it'll settle into a separate gender. Things like the issue in this topic with imbalance in sports and other areas might eventually result in another change in social structures outside of a strictly binary system.
I don't think this is about external acceptance, but more about internal acceptance. To take an extreme example: If you're suffering heavily from gender dysphoria, decide to transition to female, change absolutely nothing to your life and just try to convince yourself that you're just a women who expresses her gender differently, most of the time the dysphoria will stay here. Of course as always: there are lots of trans people and they're all individuals with their own desires and issues so this is an oversimplification. But I've been many time surprised by their desire to fit in traditional gender roles.
An oft-repeated mantra is also that "gender is a social construct." I think up until now, American society has for the most part retained some pretty strict images of gender roles and stereotypes. Turn on a TV and it's bumbling, fat father and smart, responsible wife or buff, rugged masculine hero and sexy seductress on nearly every channel. Not much of a middle in the public eye.
Now that it's being normalized that you don't have to be in either of those groups or even try to be anything like them, kids a generation from now might grow up with a different standard. Plus, honestly, despite what people try to say, kids put things into distinct groups. With a growing presence of trans people in media, I do wonder whether kids will grow up with the idea that "this is fine, but different." The trans people simply being the male/female gender they identify as is a social thing that we're taught to accept, which could very well change because the next generation doesn't think of it that way anymore.
See also: America's formerly strict ideas of race. Not long ago, you were white, black, or asian and society decided what you were. Now we accept that there are in betweens and people outside those labels, and none of them are bad identities to have.
Sad to say third/fourth gender is mostly still unacceptable in most Asian countries. Only acceptable in small part of Asians. Third/fourth gender is more acceptable in ancient Asia though. In Thailand Kathoy mostly compete in Men Category.
I recently learned that the Navajo historically recognized more than two genders. This article says at least 6 but initially I heard 4. It's not something I've looked into much so I can't really say.
"In the Diné language, there are at least six genders: Asdzáán (woman), Hastiin (male), Náhleeh (feminine-man), Dilbaa (masculine-woman), Nádleeh Asdzaa (lesbian), ‘Nádleeh Hastii (gay man). All come from the Diné creation story, in which asdzáán and hastiin, a cisgender married couple, were not getting along and separated. When that happened, dilbaa and náhleeh emerged from hiding and were seen as a special group that could perform the duties of both women and men, stepping into the vacated partner roles. They were accepted by asdzáán and hastiin, who realized their survival depended on them."
There's the fascinating debate in Anglo-Saxon archaeology around this, too.
Some "male" graves (buried with weapons, armour, etc) have female skeletons in them. And some "female" graves (pots, jewellery, broaches) have male skeletons in them. This is not disputed by anyone, the skeletal and DNA analysis is unequivocal.
But all the writing we have from the period only mentions standard sex/gender roles (all warriors are "he", all primary care givers are "she", there's no mention of homosexuality, etc).
However, all the written evidence we have is from christian sources, and as we know, christianity (especially catholic christianity) has been pretty pro-patriarchy since the start. So while there's no evidence for it, one explanation is that the original pagan Saxon culture had different ideas about gender and sexuality, but this got edited out by the monks transcribing the old pagan sources.
Feminine beauty in Thailand allowed transgender people to have their own platform where they are able to challenge stereotypes and claim cultural recognition. Miss Tiffany's Universe is a beauty contest that is opened to all transgender women. Beginning in 1998, the pageant takes place every year in Pattaya, Thailand during May. With over 100 applicants, the pageant is considered to be one of the most popular transgender pageants in the world. Through beauty pageants, Thailand has been able to promote the country's cosmetic surgery industry, which has had a massive increase in medical tourism for sex reassignment surgery. According to the Miss Tiffany's Universe website, the live broadcast attracts record of fifteen million viewers. The winner of the pageant receives a tiara, sash, car, grand prize of 100,000 baht (US$3,000), equivalent to an annual wage for a Thai factory worker. The assistant manager director, Alisa Phanthusak, stated that the pageant wants kathoeys to be visible and to treat them as normal
There are many disadvantages/advantages that various groups face/possess. It is ideological which ones we choose to elevate.
Genes for height, genes for fast twitch muscles, testosterone, etc… aren’t the same for different groups. Some of these disadvantages are just as insurmountable.
Many sports are closed to poor people. Equestrian, sailing, etc… aren’t sports for the poor.
Richer countries often have better technology (see those Nike shoes and the swimsuits that were banned).
That's true, but there are enormous differences between those other categories compared to sexuality! For one thing, we do not know exactly which genes code for each of these traits yet. And for another thing, the genes coding, for example, fast twitch muscles are not generally part of someone's identity the way gender is. I don't think the presence of those genes nor their uneven distribution does anything to defuse the social issue that we're talking about.
To be completely clear, in some sports there appears to be a moderate risk that elite cis-women will be completely unable to compete with elite trans-women. This is going to be visible and apparent. I don't think this will be acceptable to the most people, and they will likely look to change the system.
Nit-picking your other points: there are not really any popular rich-people-only sports any more, except perhaps auto racing. I don't think broader society is all that interested in the egalitarian properties of yacht sailing. R.e. the clothing technology: yes, and those things were banned because of the advantage they conferred. That's exactly what I'm talking about here.
> Nit-picking your other points: there are not really any popular rich-people-only sports any more, except perhaps auto racing.
I can assure you, from personal experience, that rowing, cycling, tennis, and lacrosse are overwhelmingly wealthy sports. You don’t have to pass a credit check to play them, but they are absolutely a class apart (both economically and racially) versus sports like baseball and basketball.
Golf, skiing, snowboarding, windsurfing, kitesurfing, mtb-ing, street cycling, motorracing: all have thousands or even millions of participants, so can be considered popular, but require participants to spend thousands on equipment, travel, access to slopes, etc. If you can do any of these, you're considered rich.
You keep listing second and third tier sports. It doesn't really address my argument about the most popular spectator sports at all. And even if it did I don't think it would do much to defuse my main point, which is that a lot of people will not accept a situation where cis women are effectively barred from winning in any sport.
> There are many disadvantages/advantages that various groups face/possess. It is ideological which ones we choose to elevate.
Is basketball a conspiracy against short people? Weightlifting for tall people? Are combat sports full of weight-ist people who won't allow a heavyweight pound a welterweight? Is football the least ideological sport because it allows a greater variety for BMI and height?
Let us not bury the glaringly obvious fact that sex is a category with one of the strongest, if not the strongest, explanatory power for performance across almost the entirety of athletic endeavors in existence.
Height is a huge advantage in basketball. The average height of an NBA player is over 6’5”. Height is mostly genetic except for malnutrition. Different populations have different average heights.
The optimal build for a weightlifter is to have short arms and legs and to have the two parts be of equal length. That is mostly genetic. Of course different population groups have differences here as well.
Weight is an advantage in combat sports both because you can dish out more and because you can absorb more punishment. I suspect that high bone density is advantageous and is mostly genetic. Different populations have different bone densities.
No one is denying that sex has explanatory power. The point is that many other things have explanatory power as well and that choosing which categories to consider is ideological.
Why have separate sports for sex? Why have separate weight classes? Why have a minimum age requirement for gymnasts? Why not allow professionals until 1992?
Why not have separate height classes for basketball? Why not have separate weight classes for football?
> The point is that many other things have explanatory power as well and that choosing which categories to consider is ideological. Why have separate sports for sex?
No need to complicate; if we didn't have sex segregated sports, for almost all sports (save for maybe open ocean swimming), we couldn't have any women competing at all[1]. In fact there are "battle of sexes" type exhibition matches that demonstrate the rough placement eg Braasch vs. the Williams sisters.
[1] To expand this statement because I know some people will get offended; this doesn't mean men are better at sports than women. It says, at the tail end of distributions, where most of the professional sports are played, tail end of men's distribution will be better than tail end of women's, leaving no opportunity for women to compete if distributions are intermixed.
I tried finding examples of other sports where women are roughly competitive with men at the top level: archery, shooting, curling, ultra-marathon, gymnastics, climbing.
men's and women's gymnastics are practically different sports. they only share 2 events and those events have pretty different rules between men and women.
In Ultra Marathon women win races that are not super competitive. Women hold basically zero course records for important races. The difference is smaller though with longer distances. But not even Courtney Dewaulter wins the UTMB outright.
Roughly competitive doesn't cut it when the competition itself is designed to find out and honor the outliers. If top 3 men in archery has consistently higher scores than the top 3 women, pitting them against each other would mean women not getting any medals anymore.
So unless you have hard statistics to back up these claims or are an expert in one of these fields, I would go with the experts' decision to sex segregate their leagues because they might know a few things or two we won't necessarily consider.
Just from my amateur interest; for outdoors archery, the draw strength matters a lot for accuracy, in curling likewise drive and sweeping strength make a difference.
> However, it presents a huge problem for women's athletics,
Trans women have been able to compete for years in Olympic level sport, and they haven't wiped the floor with cis women. I fail to see evidence of the problem - I see a lot more evidence of it being a culture war and TERF talking point.
It also doesn't really line up with the fact that we fawn over genetic quirks that let Michael Phelps dominate his sport. If we think that certain sorts of genetic quirks are unfair in women's sport, why do we allow them in men's?
> It also doesn't really line up with the fact that we fawn over genetic quirks that let Michael Phelps dominate his sport. If we think that certain sorts of genetic quirks are unfair in women's sport, why do we allow them in men's?
I appreciate that you’ve said this so concisely and clearly. The Olympics are, overwhelmingly, a show of extraordinary human abilities. Singling out transwomen for scrutiny and prejudice amounts to special pleading.
here is a thought experiment for you: no more genders in sports. at all. everyone competes under the same rules. we bother with quirks like gender? i mean, we want equality right? everyone competes under the same rules /s
Your snideness is noted, but this is precisely the stoic mindset: athleticism is most virtuously practiced when we only compare current selves to our best possible versions of ourselves.
We can’t change anything about how others are; we can only better ourselves. Telling transwomen that they can’t perform athletic excellence on their own terms is myopic and inconsistent with our own praise for factors outside of our control. Worry less about them, and more about yourself.
nah. if you’re working on yourself that’s fine. if you’re working a lifetime to be the best at something only to be cheated out of it, we’re talking about something else.
to nail this point home: if you are training to ride a bike and you’re the best in the world at it and after that someone comes along with an electric bike and wants to “compete” with you you’re gonna have a problem. nothing wrong if everyone has an electric one and the sport involves electric bikes. something is wrong if someone brings an electric bike and claims the bike is the same as the others.
Cis women are 50% of the population while transgender women are less than 1% of the population. Excluding 50% of the population from sports is obviously more problematic than excluding less than 1%, even if both are not ideal.
But all have some at least theoretically plausible hope, say as a child, to aspire to them. Back when sports were only for men, ~50 % -- women -- were excluded even from that. Allowing trans women to compete as women will again remove that hope from ~50 %: Non-trans women.
What percentage of the population are Olympians? And what percentage of the population are trans? Being openly trans is more accepted in lots of the world now, but not everywhere. I'm not sure we have enough evidence to say whether or not trans people could have an advantage in some Olympic sports for some genders. Either side of the argument seems plausible to me and it will be incredibly difficult for everyone to agree to one stance when there are so many intangible parts to this argument.
> It also doesn't really line up with the fact that we fawn over genetic quirks that let Michael Phelps dominate his sport. If we think that certain sorts of genetic quirks are unfair in women's sport, why do we allow them in men's?
These are not the same thing. Michael Phelps dominated the sport as a whole, males and females. A genetic quirk to be the best of the world vs a genetic quirk to be a big fish in a small pond (with all respect to females powerlifters, but males just have better records) is not the same at all.
I think a better comparison is one made in the article, to steroids. Steroids are just testosterone after all. Imagine someone put steroids in the food of a powerlifter for 20 years (I'm using this metaphor because I don't want to insinuate that the powerlifter did it on purpose). Do you think it would be fair to let them compete? Stopping them from competing is unfair to them, but allowing them is unfair to all other powerlifters.
First of all, I suggest you refrain from calling trans women "not women" – this is, whether you intend it to be or not, quite disrespectful. You can talk about the biological implications of being transgender without erasing their identities like that.
Second of all, there are physical changes from hormone replacement therapy. associated with transitioning. This is absolutely not "240lb judoka feeling thin on the inside" and not absurdly cut and dry like you suggest.
I would like to suggest that you resist the urge to police other’s use of language, especially when their use of terms is well established and reasonable. Whether you intend it or not, this is quite disrespectful.
How is calling transgender women "not women" "well established and reasonable"? Whether you intended to parrot what I said to be so snide, this is quite disrespectful.
Well established: a woman is an adult human female. Try a dictionary, biology textbook, etc. You might not like it, but you can’t reasonably say that it’s not well established. I hope you agree that a “transgender woman”, or, to use more neutral language, a trans identified man, is not female. That’s the entire issue here.
Reasonable: see the above. Also, implied by the users of the term itself. If a T.W. is a W., why do they say T.W.?
Have to agree with this. It’s like someone calling me the N word. Arguable the word is “established” and probably reasonable to the sayer. Still hella disrespectful to me though.
So, when someone says “I date women”, are you implying that it is established and reasonable to the typical person in the world or even Western society that this statement would be including trans people?
>Second of all, there are physical changes from hormone replacement therapy. associated with transitioning. This is absolutely not "240lb judoka feeling thin on the inside" and not absurdly cut and dry like you suggest.
These drugs do not "erase" the biological reality of sex differences.
I'm not arguing there is no biological difference – there absolutely is. I am arguing that there are different lines people can draw and that the example given is absurd and reductive of these considerations.
All it is really doing is expose how much of current results are down to genetics and hormone levels anyway.
This has always been a problem, but one where all but the sports most extremely affected, like e.g. weightlifting with weight classes, have pretended it is not.
In powerlifting there additionally are "tested" and "untested" federations, where it's an open secret that the untested federations are full of steroids.
The point being that one can keep pretending these differences don't exist and agonise over the effect trans people may have, or you can introduce class systems that equaliser by physical characteristics irrespective of sex and gender.
In most sports performance-enhancing therapies are banned. Entire federations and countries were banned from participating at major competitions. By allowing hormone therapies we are basically discriminating against hematocrit therapies and so on. It's a Pandora's box and it's open already so we better be handling it rather sooner than later.
Unless rules are made to enforce division based on sex and not gender, then it's just a matter of time until transgender athletes are the only winners in Women's events.
Be prepared to see a lot of dropouts/boycotts by various nations in the Olympics. Eastern nations are not going to stand by silently. Some will shrug and directly enlist straight men in Women's events.
The olympic requirements are already having completely female hormone levels for 2 years.
In fact, the limit for testosterone is significantly lower than for cis women, being a significant disadvantage for trans athletes, which is why in all the decades trans athletes have been allowed, you haven't seen any.
Cis women with higher levels of testosterone, e.g. caster semenya, are already dominating the olympics, having natural hormone levels that'd be an immediate disqualification for any trans athlete.
Muscle density isn't built to competitive Olympic levels in 2 years. Having a lifetime of male-level hormones and then 2 years of low testosterone is still an advantage, as we've seen in many events so far.
This is also a strategy that has been used for doping, where athletes in their teens get pumped full of steroids, then go clean for some years and are suddenly very competitive in the 'clean' divisions.
The weightlifting rules allows trans athletes to have testosterone levels of 10nmol/L. Some sports are 5nmol/L.
Normal range for men is 9-31nmol/L
Women range from 0.9-2.5nmol/L
Even these guys (link below) who argue that the limits are arbitrary then go on to point to study in which 11 of 234 female athletes had T levels of 8nmol/L and 32 had 2.6nmol/L. 74 of 446 male athletes had 8.4nmol/L.
With normal HRT, you're usually reaching T levels around 0.5nmol/L (mine are 0.53 at the moment).
So pretty much every genuinely trans athlete will have a disadvantage compared to cis female athletes.
In fact, even pre transition, my levels were lower than those of 11 of 234 cis female athletes, so I never got any of the "benefits" testosterone supposedly has.
None of your statistics are an argument for banning or restricting trans athletes.
we are going to continue to see huge increases in openly transgender people competing in sport
We're discussing literally the first trans woman to compete at the Olympics. Obviously going from 0 to 1 is a huge increase in percentage terms, but there's no evidence that it's going to continue to the point where women's sports are 'destabilised'.
First trans woman in the Olympics and she is essentially guaranteed to win the gold based on the numbers she put up during qualification. We are seeing high school and college athletics grappling with this issue. While it's early days, it's hard to picture a scenario where the Olympics can avoid making a decision on this over the long run.
Olympics is like the end stage. Transgender people competing in sport has been a common thing for past 3-4 years now. I personally know 3 girls who lost their sports scholarships to multiple transgender competing and taking all the top spots.
A girl who's case is heading up to U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit wrote a post on USAToday a month ago before USAToday edited her post without her permission and made changes to it:
Perhaps I am way of base here. But it seems to me like MTF athletes simply should not be allowed in sports where testosterone would be considered doping (or some other criterion to determine whether having been biologically male is a significant advantage).
My proposal would clearly suck for MTF athletes. They'd be forced to either drop from competitions, or compete in the men's league. An MTF athlete competing in a men's league is likely to experience disphoria. It will also probably attract people saying "Look they are still a man, they are even in the mens league!". Both of these would be very hard to handle for MTF athletes. Probably causing many of them to drop from professional competition.
I hope this would be addressed partially by not having a "mens league" but an "open league" and a "womens league".
But otherwise, I think this is acceptable fallout to keep athletic competition fair. Yes, this policy will harm MTF athletes, and that is simply unfair. But the alternate policy is even more unfair. It might not harm individual MTF athletes, but it harms the acceptance of trans people in wider society a lot. Moreover, it harms athletes in general a lot.
In the end, I feel the following harsh sentiment. If you are truly MTF, then transitioning is probably more important than keeping your profession. It really sucks to force people to give up their profession when they are already going through a tough time. But I don't see any other way.
The problem with using testosterone as your marker is that many cis female athletes have higher serum levels naturally than trans women in this context. In fact, to get the benefits of secondary sex characteristics for trans women they often have to have LOWER testosterone and higher estrogen levels for cis women in their weight and age. This is done to overcome the masculinization they've gone through. Basically, to get the boobs you gotta carpet bomb the testes forever or snip snip.
I think using instantaneous testosterone is probably not the right call. Probably a metric like aggregate exposure to testosterone/other androgens over the course of one's life. It would need to be one signal among many -- for example, cis-men should not compete in women's sport regardless of whether they have very low testosterone. But it seems like a signal like this may be needed at some point.
Of course it is possible that we collectively decide that it's ok that cis women have no chance of winning the Olympic weightlifting gold ever again. That seems like a bad outcome to me, but I am only a single voice. If the relevant stakeholders are ok with that it won't be a great tragedy to me that my opinion is ignored. But, for example, my wife had a very negative reaction when I posed that scenario to her. It seems to me like as the implication of current policy becomes more clear, more folks are going to want to change the policy.
Even aggregate exposure isn't going to be a good metric. You don't keep the muscle mass for long. In fact, one of the big issues that trans women deal with is osteoporosis. I've personally known some trans women who've had to actively had to use supplements to prevent fractures and the like. No amount of exercise will be enough to build up density. The reality is that trans folks are probably on the bottom rung in the majority of cases in physical performance. Those that endure this and even get sports rarely rise above the average.
That is not what the research I have seen shows. And the incident being discussed in the story we are commenting on seems to put the lie to this notion.
So as an average (non-athletic) male, my testosterone is likely lower than that of Phelps. If we were the same height and weight, would my entry into the competition disqualify him for having too much testosterone?
The idea was not to look at testosterone markers. The idea was that "testosterone is effective doping" might be a decent heuristic for FTM athletes have an advantage from their biology.
Whilst there are indeed cases of trans athletes with lower testosterone, that doesn't cover all cases. And it is the remaining cases that matter.
Don't underestimate the damage this is doing. I visit 9gag quite often. The population there is not trans positive (and generally intollerant). Memes against trans people have become a lot more prevalent there. It is galvanizing a lot of simmering sentiment against trans people.
And the scary thing is, on this specific issue of MTF athletes, their argument doesn't immediately fall apart. That is not the kind of foothold we should want for them.
> I hope this would be addressed partially by not having a "mens league" but an "open league" and a "womens league".
Actually, AFAIK some (many? the majority? almost all? who knows...) of what we think of as "mens leagues" are already "open leagues". Can't recall if it was our national football league (Finland's Valioliiga), or the UEFA or FIFA (maybe all of them?) that simply doesn't have a rule "the Valioliiga / UEFA Champions League / Euro Cup / FIFA World Cup is only for men". So in theory women could compete there, too... They just don't.
Why wouldn't people support transgendered people able to be the gender they wish and being able to do so in all possible aspects? Be they transwomen wanting to play female sports, or transmen wanting to play male sports (which you oddly leave out of your question).
People use “gender” to mean all kinds of different things. What do you mean by the word in your question? The second part is easy to explain: “Be they transwomen wanting to play female sports”. If by “transwomen” you mean biological males who have “transitioned” to women (more neutrally called “trans-identified men”), the answer is because they are not female, so it is unfair to allow them to compete with females.
Because the fittest people with an expressed SRY gene (aka "biologically male") are generally 10-15% better at sports than those without it (aka "biologically female") so if you allow SRY-expressing MtF transgender people to compete in the female category against non-SRY cisgender female people (rather than only letting them competing in the male category), and there are enough of them at top levels, no cisgender woman will ever win anything.
Also, this incentivizes male athletes that can't win medals but are close to take hormone replacement theory solely so they can compete in the much easier female category and win medals, which runs in the same arguments against doping.
On the other hand, if you don't, then MtF transgender people are not likely to win anything, since hormone replacement therapy reduces performance (but not enough to match non-SRY people).
>incentivizes male athletes that can't win medals but are close to take hormone replacement theory solely so they can compete
This might seem absurd but when you consider that they already go to extreme lengths to sneak in highly dangerous and life altering drugs just to win, I can see it happening.
I have heard this is a very serious problem with even genuinely disabled athletes pretending to be in worse condition than they actually are to get in easier games/handicaps.
Does it seem absurd when you consider that some totalitarian regimes pluck 4 year olds from their families and send them to gymnastics schools, all for the chance to get an extra gold medal?
Because it's cheating with unfair advantage?
Transmen wanting to play male sports is left out intentionally because it's the highest level of competition of human being. Male sports became male sports simply because female could not compete and it's unfair for female, any human think they can compete at that level is welcome to try, there won't be any complains.
I don't think it's odd to leave out of the question, since there would be very little opposition to such a proposal.
The argument against would be mostly twofold:
1) it might be 'weird' to have a 'girl' in the men's locker room
2) depending on the sport, there might be an issue of safety
either way, not a big deal- as some other commenter said on here, women's sports is a carveout for a specific demographic (biological females, as if that's in question), and transgenders of all kinds would be much more welcome in regular 'men's' sports, or their own 'hormone free-for-all' programs, than an already established subgroup that does not wish to be so infiltrated.
> Why wouldn't people support transgendered people able to be the gender they wish and being able to do so in all possible aspects?
Ok, that is a plausible argument. However, it's missing one major component: How could anyone argue that this is one of the aspects or life where it is actually possible to treat someone as their preferred gender? If I had to cherry pick an example of an aspect of life where it is not possible to treat a transgender person as their preferred gender, it would be Olympic sports.
That's probably precisely why they are doing this. They're obviously trying to make a political statement. They want it to be the inspiring event that puts this Olympics in the history books. But I mean... Come on people, there are obvious reasons why this athlete is not going to be remembered heroically for their political message in the same way as someone like Jesse Owens.
> or transmen wanting to play male sports (which you oddly leave out of your question).
It’s not odd, because it just hasn’t come up as an issue. In fact most pro sports leagues are not men-only. If a woman or f2m transgender could make the cut on an NFL team, there are no rules against it.
It's a luxury belief [0], something that arguably provides negative societal utility yet signals one's worldview very effectively. Only around 30% of Americans think that trans athletes should compete in the gender category for which they identify, so it's rather surprising that there has been such a push to make it happen [1].
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. If you start calling names like "social signalling" and "progressive elites", you're somewhere between pouring fuel on the flames and starting new ones. Not cool—regardless of what your views are.
> At its very core, the exclusion is seen as a form of "well you're not really a woman".
For the supporters of trans-women being women, is there a canonical / generally accepted list of criteria which would classify people "objectively" as a woman? If there is such a thing as a group of people that can be called "women", how would membership in that group be established?
If someone considers themselves a woman, they are a woman. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that for 99% of life. I can understand some objections in a very limited number of contexts and sports is one of those contexts, but otherwise just allow people to choose where they fall on the gender spectrum.
What makes 'woman' a special class in this regard? We wouldn't accept the same kind of self definition elsewhere. I couldn't decide to be a Native American without meeting some external criteria around my birth and life. Nor can I decide to be 6 foot 4 or thin even if I sincerely believed it. Someone who did self define like that would be regarded as delusional.
Is there some principled way to decide what things one can self define as and which one can't?
This is a difficult topic. A key difference between your example of height and something like gender is that gender is socially constructed, while height is a physically reality that can be objectively verified. So one part is that it has to be socially constructed.
However, race is also socially constructed, so it's tricky. People who claim to be "trans-racial" are still regarded as delusional by society despite this. This is mostly just the position of the society we are in.
But there is something more that makes gender transition more valid than racial "transition": Gender dysphoria is a real condition, that has the medically recommended solution of social and medical transition. This is a good reason for why society should adjust it's social construction of gender, and this is why it is happening right now. To date, "race dysphoria" is not medically recognized and has not been formally observed. It has no history dating back hundreds of years like being transgender does.
I largely agree, but I will add that we generally do allow people to self-identify their race. Lots of college and job applications that ask for your race will use this type of self-identifying terminology. The problem is when people are perceived to be lying about their identity as a means of getting some sort of advantage. Rachel Dolezal for example was caught lying about her parentage. Trans people generally don't lie to cover their transness (except maybe socially to avoid the attention their transness would garner).
This lying to get an advantage can potentially apply to trans people in sports too. People are always claiming that near elite male athletes who can't win in men's competitions will just say they are women to face easier opponents, but we haven't really seen any evidence of that occurring. This is primarily because the obstacles to check a box on a college application are so drastically different than the obstacles in front of someone who wants to publicly and officially change their gender. Considering that, I think the best approach is to not waste too much energy on "fixing" this problem until it is actually shown to be a problem.
Well you can tell this person isn't really a woman, because they are 43 years old and they just qualified for Olympic Weightlifting. This wouldn't be possible if they were, in fact, a 43 year-old woman.
> The first, preferred by Fowler, is that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. A more explicit phrasing might be "the exception that proves the existence of the rule".[1]
> The phrase means that an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases. In other words, a general law is better drafted for the average circumstance as this will be more common.[1]
Further it can be argued that the fact that a defect is present in the biological system does not invalidate the presence of said system generally. The complete lack of a system could be the determining factor.
It might be better to have hormone classes in sports the way boxing has weight classes. You could have Mike Tyson class all the way through Betty White class, and as a side benefit you'd be able to put women's sports teams in with appropriately matched men. As another side benefit a lot of people who were simply born with the wrong stuff to compete could rise to the top of their class by hard work. Since there's not that much value in "gene grading" people, when all the heroism comes from training and dedication, getting away from the birth lottery sports system could be helpful to the sports documentary industry, along with the human soul.
Have classes for everything, this way everyone is in their own special class and everyone is a world champion. This way everyone will be happy right? /s
Have classes for nothing, this way we can ignore those emaciated wannabes like Mayweather and Pacquiao and focus our attentions on the one true world champion of boxing, the man who has the bulk to back it. Classes are only there to give awards to inferior athletes for no reason right? /s
Which percentage of those three letters categories are in the population? Very few. And competitive athletes in them? Probably epsilon. The man and woman categories worked without issue for centuries, the whole problem is self-inflected.
“Assigned female”[0] just means that their original birth certificate has an ‘F’ in the sex field, normally assigned based on observed physical characteristics. It also generally implies that everyone assumed this was correct (with the associated gender roles etc) until the person began expressing a gender identity independently—in this case a different one, though for most people they tend to be the same. In this case 'slg is also using it to imply that the person’s natural physical characteristics also match their assigned sex.
This doesn’t really make sense. The hospital personnel who record the sex of the baby aren‘t saying anything about “gender roles”. They’re simply recording the sex of the baby. It will only be incorrect in extremely rare circumstances of external anatomy not being indicative of sex. (And the field in the birth certificate is for sex, not gender. That would make no sense.)
EDIT: It’s rather underhanded to abuse the edit button to silently correct your comment, causing replies to not quite make sense. That’s why people here signal that they’ve edited a comment in cases like this.
I didn’t say that the hospital personnel were involved in the gender role—the parents would generally take the lead on that one, but they usually use the medical advice as a basis. Yes, it’s unusual for all these aspects (assigned sex at birth, phenotype, gender identity, and so on) to not match, but it’s useful to have separate terms for the cases in which they don’t—as in the case of our hypothetical 14-year-old. (Thanks for the correction on the field name; edited.)
(EDIT to your edit: I changed the text on that comment and then spent a couple extra minutes rephrasing this comment before I posted it. Probably I should have done those in the other order, sorry about that.)
"Trans men assigned female at birth" means nothing; just what are your chromosomes.
> Are they allowed to take testosterone
Absolutely not; however, doped sports could be yet separate category. There is probably audience money in it, like in monster trucks and WWF wrestling.
That seems like it introduces more problems than it solves; genetic essentialism as a solution to debates about gender tends to be an approach that nobody agrees with. Now you still have the same concerns about people using hormones, plus:
- intersex people whose phenotype and genotype don’t match (putting them in the “wrong” category)
- chimeric people who belong in different categories depending on which part of their body you sample
- probably other edge cases I’m not thinking of.
If your goal is just to put people into categories, it’s probably a lot less controversial to split them based on if their earlobe is attached and whether they can curl their tongue.
No matter what classification is used, there will be variations. However, using a deterministic criteria reduces incentive to game the system. More importantly, it reduces (for example) the pressure on participants to change their sexual identity to improve their competition level in a sport or at the least give the impression that the change was made for competitive reasons.
My point is that if something is "different" , forcing others to label that thing as "not-different" isn't a productive battle. Others will just now need a new way to describe it, because to them, the original label is now meaningless in it's classic sense, to them.
For example we've gone from: (some male terms I apparently can't use anymore) to transwoman to ciswoman to biological woman.
And in every case the transwomen demands to be included in the "new" category, and everyone else has to come up with another term to differentiate.
The point isn't to line up with physical traits, but to prevent issues such as some XY beefcake who identified as a man for 35 years using gender politics to impose perself into the XX category.
This doesn't replace trait-based subcategorization. E.g. the category XX wrestling still has weight classes.
There's a lot more of a spectrum than you'd think.
Many of the cis female athletes currently winning in the olympics, e.g. caster semenya, have significantly higher testosterone levels than would be legal for trans female athletes.
I don't know the history of all sports, but the few tidbits I know all point to sex/gender separation as being initially based on beliefs that women were inferior to men. From physical sports to mental ones like chess, sex separation was due to women not being seen as equal to men.
I think its time to do away with separations on sex, and go with ones based on ability and size. Boxing does it with weight classes, why can't we do it with everything?
Go look up Olympic world records and compare the numbers for various events between men and women. It might not sound very nice, but women are on average physically inferior to men. At the top of any given objectively quantifiable sport, the best male athlete will beat the best female athlete, I'm guessing 99.99% of the time, although I don't know about all of the sports so some may give women an advantage I suppose.
> Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.
Women would be crushed. As far as physical sports at the highest levels of play are concerned, women are inferior to men. That's not to say that women are lesser because of it, but that's just how it goes.
Karsten Braasch (peaked out at around 40th worldwide) beat both of the Williams sisters (both rank 1 players) back-to-back. He was twice their age and known for smoking cigarettes during changeovers. Male weightlifting records are hundreds of pounds higher than women's records. There are thousands of male sprinters who have posted a better time than the _world record_ female sprinter. I don't think there's even any data to compare men vs. women in combat sports like boxing because anybody who has ever paid any attention to sports can tell you it's an awful idea.
Yeah, we could do away with the separations, as long as you can accept that women will almost always take the back-seat at high levels of play.
>I don't think there's even any data to compare men vs. women in combat sports like boxing because anybody who has ever paid any attention to sports can tell you it's an awful idea.
Actually there is in the world of MMA. MtF fighter Fallon Fox dominated lots of biologically female fighters, in one particularly nasty incident it took her less than 3 minutes to give Tamikka Brents a concussion, a broken orbital, and leave her needing a bunch of staples to patch her skin back together [0].
If you do read the article, Tamikka Brents explains she is an abnormally strong woman, she is, but not compared to Fallon Fox.
Tamikka Brents [1].
Tamikka Brents and Fallon Fox weigh in [2].
> Boxing does it with weight classes, why can't we do it with everything?
I've often heard that women (in general) have ~5% more body fat percentage than males, because of how their body work. That means that if you have two 100kg people in optimal conditions, a man and a woman, the man would have on average 5kg of muscle more than the woman. This is a HUGE difference and wouldn't make for fair fights.
I’m not aware of a professional sports league in the US that excludes women as a matter of rules or policy - they just don’t have the physical makeup to play at that level. That’s ok, neither do you or I.
Everyone should agree that it's fundamentally unfair for biological males to compete against biological females in most sports. But the problem is any strict rules against this will lead to discrimination in so many other areas, I'm basically willing to look the other way as it's such a rare occurrence anyways. How many trans athletes are there?
It's very sad that this is a political issue - it makes any reasonable solution impossible. Any restrictions that liberals might find practical and fair (like a ban on competing where muscles are involved) will inevitably be used by conservatives to justify bigotry and prejudice in a number of other areas (exclusion from public bathrooms, for example, or even restrictions based on race, nationality or sexuality).
When a trans athlete wins an Olympic gold medal, it will surely encourage more to try. As rare as they might be, they could easily come to dominate at the elite level in strength and speed events, and crowd out women who don't have the hormonal advantages.
During the men’s 1500 freestyle heats it was noted the Katie Ledecky would have had the top seed by a significant margin if she were to compete with the men. Similar things sometimes happen in ultra running. I wonder if intersex competition in endurance sports would bring out more greats from the women. As a spectator sport, I think audiences would go crazy for an event with no distinction between sexes and equal chances of winning.
It's an interesting one. Considering that the athlete competed as a junior I assume she also tried to get in to the Olympic team prior to her transition but was unsuccessful. Now she is ranked 4th in the world for her division. As I see it there's only two possible reasons for her current success despite being 43. That transitioning has not nullified all advantages or that the number of women weightlifters is lower and thus less competitive. Most likely some combination of the two.
Another interesting aspect is that New Zealand now has a much better chance to get a medal in this event. Given the importance that some countries give to winning the games, e.g China and Russia, might they push to have more MtF athletes of their own.
> Given the importance that some countries give to winning the games, e.g China and Russia, might they push to have more MtF athletes of their own.
Are you suggesting that they might force some of their athletes to transition in order to gain an advantage at the olympics? These societies are not friendly to trans people in general, so I have some doubts they would elevate people who pursued transition themselves.
I thought Anna Vanbellinghen was very well said. It's not about questioning someone's identity, or their right to live openly. But this is about acknowledging physical reality.
One thing I'd like to add is that this is, by definition, a hard problem. The fact is sex and gender exists on a continuum, even if 99% of the time it seems binary. Anyone who says that the "other side" in this situation (regardless of which side they are on) is being idiotic is ignoring a lot of inconveniently difficult truths.
> The fact is sex and gender exists on a continuum, even if 99% of the time it seems binary.
I was with you until this statement. Sex is a millions-of-years-old discrete variable; it depends on whether you could produce the bigger gamete (called egg) or the smaller one (sperm). Gender is a continuous variable with a strongly bimodal distribution.
Sex not being binary is technically correct, the best kind of correct, but it misses the wood for the trees.
Most (but not every) step on that continuum are known as diseases of sexual development [0].
These arguments often come up in discussions around trans issues, but its a trick of misdirection, although the DSD community does have a higher incident of gender identity issues (which is what you'd expect), around 5%, 1% that actively changed their gender, the lack of transition within the DSD community seems to suggest DSD and gender dysphoria are not related phenomenon.
The idea that sex is a continuum, based on known disorders, is like saying human bipedalism is a continuum due to people being born with less than 2 full legs, or more than 2 legs (extra toes), or losing them in later life. Although technically correct the observation does not really change the conversation.
I am not making specific claims about where specific individuals are classified in terms of sex, because I am not an expert. I am implying pointing out that the idea of sex as a discrete variable with two choices in humans is wrong. It is usually bimodal, in the vast majority of people (including trans people), where the chromosomes are XX or XY, and the gametes are eggs or sperm, and the external genitals are vaginal or penile, ovaries are present or not, testosterone is low/high, etc. However, there is no law of nature that these dimensions of sex agree with each other, or that there aren't intermediate states for any specific dimension. You seem so proud of the fact that "Klinefelter Syndrome are male" (failing to specify exactly why they are classified that way), but that doesn't help you deal with the fact that there is not rule that will classify everyone neatly into two categories, even if the rule in your head is "obvious" with "Klinefelter Syndrome".
And before you say "this is purely hypothetical, these sorts of conditions would never affect the practical sorts of discussions we are having here about olympic games", no, it is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foekje_Dillema.
> I am implying pointing out that the idea of sex as a discrete variable with two choices in humans is wrong.
> the gametes are eggs or sperm ... there is no law of nature that ... there aren't intermediate states for any specific dimension
Sorry for butchering your sentence but wanted to respond very specifically.
Sex, which is by far not exclusive to humans, has one primary purpose and that is sexual reproduction. And quite a lot there is governed by laws of nature. There are 2 sexes and not 1 or 3; 1 means cloning yourself and that does not introduce sufficient variance to fight against environmental change, 3 partners are combinatorially more difficult than 2 to bring together. Why gametes are dimorphic; sexual reproduction only needs exchange of genetic material, but the initial cell needs tons of other organelles to bootstrap. A process where either gamete can bring any of the organelles is exponentially more error prone and difficult to coordinate. Hence the small gamete having the bare bones mobility machinery to bring the genetic material to the heavier gamete.
There is no gamete that's between sperm or egg. Even in super rare species where an individual can change sex (some fish does this) they switch to their sex matching gamete entirely, and don't produce an inbetweener.
We can talk about continuity among secondary manifestations of sex, we can talk about fluidity of gender roles etc. and all would be fair game. But we can't call sex anything other than a discrete, binary category without destroying its scientific, cross-species, cross-millions-of-years, universal definition.
It seems like you have decided that sex is solely defined by gametes. Ignoring for now that this is not the sole criterion of "sex" used in most scientific and colloquial contexts, even on your own terms, it is not true that all humans are one of two "sexes".
At a bare minimum, you would have to make an allowance for the "third sex" (as you define it) of those who do not produce any gametes. Remember, we are talking about sex in humans, not sex in human gametes. I do not dispute that human gametes are strictly binary; the question is about classifying individuals, for which the binary classification is obviously not absolute, even on the question of gamete production.
My definition says "could produce gametes", not "can have offsprings".
Re intersex; congenital anomalies do not define a category (if the term congenital anomaly offends you, I am using the WHO definition). Just like if we would say "humans have one head" we would be excluding congenital twins, or with "five fingers" we would be excluding polydactyly.
This debate butts up against the limitations of language and it is necessary to take care to define terms. This definition will be more or less useful depending on what you are trying to communicate.
“Sex” could be interpreted to mean a statement about chromosomes, in which case there are more than two variants.
Or it could be interpreted to be a statement about reproductive potential, in which case the “two sexes” model is a better fit, because there’s no intermediate gamete between sperm and egg. Do intersex conditions break this model? Almost always not: the variations of sex development are variations on the male pattern and the female pattern. Are there exceptionally rare individuals that defy categorisation? Surely there are, but the existence of extreme, rare outliers doesn’t invalidate the model.
Which definition is most useful? In the context of women’s rights, it’s clearly the latter. Women suffer discrimination based on their reproductive biology, not based on their chromosomes. It’s also the model that the vast majority of people use as their everyday working definition of sex.
So I think anyone who wants to claim there are more than two sexes must accept the responsibility to qualify their terminology.
> “Sex” could be interpreted to mean a statement about chromosomes.
Yes, it could - by people who don't know what the word "sex" means. Sex isn't about chromosomes, it's about gametes, and sex chromosome variants aren't separate sexes. For example, people with Klinefelter Syndrome (XXY) are male. This isn't hard.
Who is this author? His blog appears to be a crusade against trans people.
> What’s important to note is that the presence of a Y chromosome, or two, or three, etc., all result in the development of testes and therefore these individuals are biologically male. Likewise, individuals with additional or fewer X chromosomes, in the absence of a Y, all develop ovaries and are therefore biologically female.
Looking at things like testes and ovaries is only one part of things, and not some universal definition scientists accept. The author even admits in the comment some people may have both. We also know that some people make have one of these but appear oppositely on the inside/outside.
> This isn't hard.
From my experience, it is deeply complex.
> Effectively regulating sports divisions based on sex using science is impossible. There are no singular or combinations of objective criteria that can define each sex. Prior attempts to govern sports eligibility based on sex using existing testing methods have failed to provide a workable solution based on chromosome composition, physical exam, etc. In other words: we have no way to consistently differentiate male from female and we have never possessed the ability to do so. Gender and sex are not the same thing. Sex is typically assigned at birth based the appearance on appearance of external genitalia and or chromosomal makeup, whereas gender is socially constructed and may vary from culture to culture and/or change over time. However, sex is difficult to dichotomize into two binary divisions because there are a number of different chromosome compositions consistent with either male or female phenotypes. The phrase “biological sex” is meaningless and is ill-advised.
Thing is though, the size of people's gametes has no bearing on their weightlifting ability. Rather, secondary sexual characteristics do. Those characteristics are very strongly associated with gamete size, but not perfectly. So classifying sex purely on the size of people's gametes will lead to a few odd outcomes.
In my opinion people often speak incoherently on this topic because they are trying to be politically correct.
Vanbellinghen is asserting that Hubbard should not compete as a woman. Hubbard identifies as a woman. In what way is Vanbellinghen not questioning Hubbard's identity? It is as if "I am not questioning your identity" is a magic spell that must be chanted prior to doing exactly that so you don't get in trouble. If Hubbard is a woman, then it is completely appropriate for Hubbard to compete as a woman, and if not, then not.
It is also incorrect to describe sex as a continuum. On a continuum we can increase or decrease a value. The number line, for example, is a continuum. We can find the integer immediately larger or smaller than a given integer. It would be incoherent to pick a woman and ask who is incrementally more feminine than her or incrementally less. We can't sort people by how male they are. I think "bimodal distribution" is a more apt description than continuous or continuum.
> In what way is Vanbellinghen not questioning Hubbard's identity?
Not all women are allowed to participate in powerlifting competitions. For example, people not qualified couldn't. People that are known steroids abusers couldn't. That doesn't make them less women.
Sure, but Vanbellinghen is not claiming Hubbard should be disqualified on those grounds. The issue is that Hubbard is a biological male and has an innate advantage when it comes to lifting things.
> Vanbellinghen, 27, whose qualifying efforts were disrupted by injury, pointed out that the retained benefit of taking steroids, even years earlier, is widely known.
> "So why is it still a question whether two decades, from puberty to the age of 35, with the hormonal system of a man also would give an advantage [in competing against women]?
The issue would be the same with a long term steroid user consider how it was worded.
> In my opinion people often speak incoherently on this topic because they are trying to be politically correct.
Yes, they are trying to be politically correct, since you are basically forced to talk about it only in a politically correct way. Her statement reads to me like she is not allowed to tell directly what she thinks about it, so needs to describe it in a roundabout way. And that worries me more than the women's weightlifting itself.
> Vanbellinghen is asserting that Hubbard should not compete as a woman. Hubbard identifies as a woman.
Not quite. Vanbellinghen is asserting that Hubbard should not compete in the women's league. That is different from asserting she should not compete as a woman. She then continues to argue this is not because her identity is not female, but because of biological reasons.
This is coherent because the point of a Women's league (in weight-lifting at least) isn't to segregate women from men, but to give women a place to compete without being crippled by biologically determined dis-advantages.
Things get complicated because the reason for a Women's league existing, and the actual written rules around it do not quite line up. It might even be the case that for Hubbard to compete as women means she could not enter the men's league. That would then probably be a moral mistake in the rules.
> Vanbellinghen is asserting that Hubbard should not compete as a woman. Hubbard identifies as a woman. In what way is Vanbellinghen not questioning Hubbard's identity?
Women who take performance enhancing drugs are also disqualified from competing. No one is challenging their identity as a woman, just the fairness of their competing against women without that advantage. It is not a moral prohibition against consuming certain substances, but a practical prohibition because it makes competing on a level playing field impossible.
The same is true of trans atheletes. They have an advantage other women do not. Women's sports were invented precisely for that reason: natal males have an advantage that means most natal females are not competetive against them in most sports.
Vanbellinghen is not saying Hubbard used steroids. Physical differences or biological advantages between competitors aren't ever considered reasons to exclude a competitor. People who are gifted with strong and healthy bodies can become world class competitors with enough training and dedication. A swimmer isn't disqualified for being unusually tall, a sprinter unusually lean, a gymnast petite, etc.
Imagine a woman born with only one arm complaining that Vanbellinghen had an insurmountable natural advantage in weight lifting. The one armed woman would be correct. There is a Special Olympics where disabled people can compete and it would be incredibly unfair for fully-abled competitors to enter the Special Olympics. Analogously there is an Olympic division where Hubbard could fairly compete (the men's) and another division where Hubbard has an unfair advantage (the women's).
If Hubbard is a woman then Hubbard has a distinct natural advantage. To wit, Hubbard was born and developed physiologically as a man. Hubbard didn't attain this advantage unfairly by using steroids. We don't disqualify any other competitor because of the physiological advantages of their natural bodies. Why should Hubbard be disqualified? The only coherent argument is that Hubbard is not actually a woman and should compete in the men's division. This is a denial of Hubbard's identity.
It feels like you are deliberately trying to conflate issues that don't need to be conflated.
Not even taking transgenderism into account, I think it is a very difficult problem of how to handle people have been born with intersex characteristics in sports. On the one hand, the argument can be made "how is this different than other natural variation that makes someone good at sports", but on the other hand, since testosterone has such a powerful effect, it means that women sports can only be won by those with a genetic abnormality that causes high testosterone (a couple of years ago all three of the top finishers at an international track and field competition were intersex - I'm blanking on the competition but Caster Semenya was one of them).
No one needs to deny their identity as woman to also question whether, in one example, internal testes gives someone an unfair advantage in women's sports.
Isn't the physical reality that the top women in any sport are also going to be extreme outliers in terms of their physical make up. There's huge variance in biology between women but we don't adjust for this in sport, we just decide that's a fair starting point.
Yup - finally this has reached the point where gender politics crashes into reality.
I’m not against any gender doing what they wish.
But really, the point is when you (by nature) have testosterone coursing through your bloodstream… even if you transitioned, by the very nature of things you have an advantage of strength, agility, speed and desire over your female peers.
As much as we would love to believe it, men are wildly physically different from women. And that’s how nature intended it for whatever reasons nature intended.
You can see it in the sports stats very clearly for every sport where women and men compete.
Men and woman are not the same and can never be. Each has strengths and weaknesses which make them fit very well together.
I understand the need to transition. But sports is one of those examples that we can’t put our head in the sand and believe we live in a world of make-believe.
>by the very nature of things you have an advantage of strength, agility, speed and desire over your female peers.
By the very nature of things LeBron James has an advantage of strength, agility, and speed over me. (no clue why you included desire in your comment)
Basically every elite athlete is born with a genetic predisposition to be better at their sport than the average person. It takes a lot of determination and training to reach that full potential, but let's not pretend that people are born on equal footing.
This is true but if we work with this line of logic, we should just remove the gender split in sports and make it purely a game for the best of the best.
What this means is that most females will be removed from sport since they can't compete with the average male athlete. Society has spoken already and decided they want to see female athletes which is why many male only sports have started their own female only sides.
This is a truly unfortunate edge case where trans people have an unfair advantage on one gender side and an unfair disadvantage on the other side. Perhaps the only fair way to do things would be to have trans only teams but the numbers probably don't work out. Or to have trans people pick sports where physical strength is not at play like motor racing, shooting, chess, etc.
> which is why many male only sports have started their own female only sides
Most of the popular sport leagues don't have any rules disallowing female competitors. I'm sure the NHL, NBA, NFL, MLS, MLB, Premier League etc. would love to have a female player that was good enough because it would be a marketing dream.
> Or to have trans people pick sports where physical strength is not at play like motor racing, shooting, chess, etc.
Even at those non-physical sports, men still have a big advantage, it shows in all of the sports you listed and e-sport.
Gender split in sports is there to protect women.
The men sport is actually a game for "the best of the best", I don't think there would be any complain if there's a woman (cis or trans) want to challenge that space.
One has to completely ignore reality to try to pretend that is a fair competition. One other thing to note from that graph is the worst performance from a man was significantly better than the best performance from cis-woman. Testosterone makes you stronger, who knew?
Co-ed sports for kids that train together demonstrate this well. I was a competitive swimmer from the age of 5 to 18. Girls and boys received the same instruction from the same coaches, did the same number of laps in practice, etc. Before puberty, there was no difference in times between girls and boys. At about 10-11 years old, the girls started getting faster than the boys. But at 13-14 years old the boys became faster than the girls. Both of these correlate to when both groups reach puberty.
There's no way to look at that graph and not conclude that all of the arguments about how estrogen makes the transgender body equivalent. A mediocre man stays a mediocre man. I would really like to know the source posting.
And she's just the one who was brave enough to speak out.
Considering that voicing your support for Hubbard comes with basically no personal or professional cost, while voicing your opposition can cost you dealy, I'm going to assume that since most people have remained silent then the majority agrees with Anna Vanbellinghen.
Don't imagine they would be thrilled when the current situation is that no matter how hard you try, you will never come close to winning as a biological female https://i.redd.it/vv4ws1848t671.jpg
If this is an issue for all MTF weightlifters, would it be reasonable to disqualify someone only if they had previously competed at the same level as a male?
i don’t think you need to have competed before to have a huge advantage induced by hormones that were normally biologically there. The real question is: where do we draw the line? if a female athlete injects herself with hormones that give her an unfair advantage should this be considered cheating and be grounds for disqualification?
No- but you do see a similar restriction with pro athletes not being able to play as an amateur, partially due to the experience of competing at a higher level.
pretty sure if you take any random 250lb male that plays football or something they could be the number one female lifter in the world if they identify as a female for an hour. so not sure if that disqualification would matter
I don't think that's really relevant. In no world are people without medical treatment going to be considered, and no one is going to go through that just to win a medal.
This is a very controversial topic. Many have spoken about it at length. I personally believe it's not fair for women in athletics. There are several excellent suggestions/solutions discussed on this thread. I feel like there needs to be another category which would include people who're naturally male/female/others and/or identify as something/someone else. And keep the existing male and female categories as they are.
And of course it goes without saying that I've written this with all due respect to such individuals and I bear no malice towards anyone.
It doesn't go without saying. Which is why you said it. The pro-trans movement starts from the assumption that any disagreement with their ideology is "harm". They've bullied everyone into accepting what is transparently a ridiculous situation; often by alleging bad faith. I'm very happy to see someone from professional women's weightlifting refer to this as a "bad joke".
"Ideology"? Is it unfathomable to you that people would reasonably be able to feel that they have a different biological gender to how they feel in their mind? And that people cavalierly dismissing their acceptance in society is somehow not harmful?
If you want to talk respectfully about the implications of transgender athletes in sport, that's one thing. But what you are doing is not that. You're trying to dismiss the plight of trans people at large.
I have no issue with how they choose to self identify. I accept trans-identifying individuals and I will use whichever pronouns they ask of me.
What I have an issue with is this type of behavior where they turn things upside down without any care for others. In this case, they're stealing glory from and seriously hampering the careers of lifelong female athletes.
Imagine lifting since you were a teenage girl, and someone else in their mid 30's, who would not have qualified for the men's competition, comes along to take your Olympic medal after going through a sex change procedure. It's deeply disrespectful to women. It requires a certain zealotry to bully your way into female spaces like this.
I apologize for misunderstanding your initial point: couching the pro-trans movement as an "ideology" had read to me as a dismissal of the pro-trans movement at large and if that is not your intent then I retract my initial comment.
That said, I don't really agree with this clarification either: no trans woman is setting out to have gender reassignment to bully their way into competing against women who were lifting since they were teenagers. I think you are attributing this to malice that is simply not there, and it is only an artifact of unfortunate circumstance. Trans women certainly don't want to be in this situation either: I'm sure they would much rather be born biologically female and compete that way!
I respectfully disagree. Hubbard has no business in this competition. It's selfish for her to do this. She is "johnny come lately" to women's weightlifting and has several decades of male puberty under her belt. These photos are actually tragic to look at.
If we're talking about someone who transitions in their teens and has no other options for sport in their adolescence, I would agree that's a much more difficult and ambiguous situation.
> pro-trans movement as an "ideology" had read to me as a dismissal of the pro-trans movement at large
This is the problem. There's no difference to people. Arguing any nuanced part of the conversation is often met with exaggerated reactions of "you're anti-trans" or "you're dismissing transexualism as a whole", which is not the case.
So yes, the pro-trans movement on many online spaces is very ideological - they even claim it themselves (transmedicalism vs. gender identity, etc). Very little of it these days is based on science or medical prognosis.
OTOH very little of how our society bases its treatment of trans people based on science or medical prognosis. The best evidence there is is that dysphoria is real and gender affirming therapies including medical transition is an effective treatment. Yet access to that treatment varies extremely widely, being treated inherently as a second or third class citizen both by culture and in a lot of cases by law.
I do understand as well your reticence around the ideological space that a lot of online spaces take place in. To that I’d just say that this stuff is fairly new, and you have a lot of young people finding and differentiating their identities as they’re going through quite a process.
My opinion is frankly it’s a wonderful thing, to have it so people can prioritize their emotional well being enough to not have their natural individual differentiations beat out of them as so many cultures have done. In doing so, discovering how much of a thing gender dysphoria is for some, and allowing them to lead much much better lives.
Yes, and detransitioners happen and should be (and are as far as I've experienced) supported. But their argument a bit like if I said that all elective surgery should be illegal because I regret mine. For every story like this you can find a thousand who are waiting years to get any amount of treatment. The UK is well known for having some of the most stringent policies and heavy usage of gatekeeping before anyone gets treatment - FAR more than in the US.
The trans person's intent doesn't matter. What matters is that they are inserting themselves into female competition at an immense advantage. The fact of the matter is that if you allow biological men into female competition, females will never win anything. That is literally why there are sex separated sports. Females cannot compete with males at the highest level of sport, this is just a fact. I don't think we should be destroying the sports dreams of half the population to appease the trans people. It sucks for them, but quite frankly I don't care, because there is no better solution than to exclude them.
As many as are necessary for the coherence of society. They are welcome to enter into the open (mens) division of a sport. They are not welcome to enter the women's division, because they are not women. We already had this debate a few decades ago and decided women need their own sports divisions. I'm sorry that these people want very badly to play in the women's league, but they are not women, and so they should not be allowed in that league, for all the reasons that engendered the women's league in the first place.
This ^ is exactly the type of zealotry I'm referring to.
Hubbard has been free to do olympic weightlifting her entire life. Against similarly bodied individuals (men).
I too am excluded from competing in women's weightlifting contests. That is absolutely for the best (though everyone we're talking about here can likely lift more than I can).
I've been curious if anyone has studied why there are more and more transgender people lately. I don't believe it is only due to awareness and perception - it seems to be occuring more and more frequently. Do other animals with similar levels of consciousness experience gender dysmorphia?
What other animals have a similar level of consciousness?
You can‘t form the idea that you are “in the wrong body” unless that idea has been provided to you by your culture. You need linguistic and social support to even have the concept.
EDIT: Oh, you may be interested in the phenomenon of what you might call “trans” non-human animals: individuals who behave like those of the opposite sex. Apparently in some species their physical characteristics can even change, such as female lions that grow manes. But nobody is confused enough to say “trans lady lions are lady lions“; that confusion is reserved for humans. In mammals, the sex can not change. But it‘s an interesting phenomenon.
Abigail Shrier is a writer and not a scientist, and it can be clearly seen even from the title of the book that she has an agenda. The thesis of the book has been "rejected by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health."
The layman's explanation of the phenomenon is that parents observe a rapidly onset expression of gender dysphoria in their teenage daughters which "seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe."
Are you similarly confident that the dramatic rise in left-handedness in western cultures over the past ~200 years is due to factors other than awareness and perception?
Abigail Shrier is a writer and not a scientist, and it can be clearly seen even from the title of the book that she has an agenda. The thesis of the book has been "rejected by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health."
In my puberty I had a strong feeling of rather being a girl and this caused significant mental anguish and some self harm. If had known as much about transgender people back then as I do know I would have likely transitioned then.
Today I'm pretty okay with being a man. I still sometimes have problems with it but not in the same order of magnitude.
From these personal experiences I think it is plausible that more people transition because more people are aware of the possibility and knowing other trans people in their age. I have no idea how big that group is however.
Though it may be an unanswerable question (and maybe too personal, please don't feel obligated to share), do you think you would have been better off transitioning?
If you'd asked me 10 years ago I probably would have said something disrespectful. I didn't know enough about trans-rights or lgbt rights. But over the years I've realised that they probably face a lot of injustice and indeed are marginalised in some societies. I've been working for a company that cares deeply about diversity and inclusion, which has helped me learn a lot. But, I still don't think it's fair for women that an individual who lived the prime of their life as a man, benefitting from all the testosterone and muscle mass and then identifying as a woman to beat other women. I think there should be a line. Of course there should be no discrimination against anyone for their race/gender/beliefs etc. But there is a reason why weight categories and gender exist in boxing and martial arts. It's just absurd that we've to even discuss this.
> But, I still don't think it's fair for women that an individual who lived the prime of their life as a man, benefitting from all the testosterone and muscle mass
Are you.... sure about this? Like how sure are you? What do you think you know?
The human body changes surprisingly fast. Astronauts that stay in outer space for too long can't even walk when they return to earth. That "too long" is like... a year basically.
A "lifetime" of muscle mass will last for how long once someone starts taking androgen blockers then estrogen?
The reality is while we think of 'sex' as being some kind of chromosomal thing, that isn't what really separates the 'genders'. After all, apart from genitals, there is little external difference in babies. So it isn't exactly the XY/XX... of course one might say "but that happens during puberty", which is what exactly? The significant rise of sex-hormones. As the saying goes "if you can't make your own, store bought is fine" (regarding neuro-transmitters, sex hormones, etc).
So, are you SURE that an individual that "lived in the prime of their life as a man" is just as strong as they once were once they have spent years on hormone therapy? If you're sure, why are you sure? "I don't think it's fair" ... but why? Is is fair to trans athletes?
Not just as strong, but there does remain an advantage. TFA goes into this:
> Vanbellinghen, 27, whose qualifying efforts were disrupted by injury, pointed out that the retained benefit of taking steroids, even years earlier, is widely known.
It's easier to regain lost muscle mass than it is to gain it in the first place.
> So, are you SURE that an individual that "lived in the prime of their life as a man" is just as strong as they once were once they have spent years on hormone therapy?
Yes. Male puberty confers lifelong physical advantages on the body in terms of muscle mass, heart size, lung capacity and bone density. That's why men dominate women physically in every sport, which is why women have their own special sporting categories so that they stand a chance. Hormone therapy reduces these advantage but it doesn't eliminate them.
> Is it fair to trans athletes?
Probably not, but then is it fair to wheelchair-bound athletes that they're physically incapable of competing with Olympians and so need their own separate event? Maybe the cruel reality of life is that we can't always accommodate everybody?
I don't believe men dominate women in ultra-endurance racing. IIRC though the sample size is quite small it may be that extremely long distance racing actually favors women.
Agreed. Though in this case it seems to me OP is just providing an interesting tidbit. They didn't try to morph that fact into hand-waving of the vast difference in all other sports.
> Are you.... sure about this? Like how sure are you? What do you think you know?
> The human body changes surprisingly fast. Astronauts that stay in outer space for too long can't even walk when they return to earth. That "too long" is like... a year basically.
> A "lifetime" of muscle mass will last for how long once someone starts taking androgen blockers then estrogen?
You raise a very fair question, but we have sufficient data to really support either position at the moment?
Do we have a way of knowing when an individual (or group of individuals) would have lost the ‘benefits’ to make competition truly fair?
You don't know what you're talking about. Male hormones in the womb and in puberty confer permanent, drastic changes to muscular power. After training, testosterone levels have very minor effects. An average high school boy athlete could take estrogen for 20 years and still be vastly stronger after that than most female athletes.
I may be a few years behind on terminology (?) but surely sports has everything to do with sex and nothing to do with gender?
No one cares what pronouns an athlete uses, how they dress, what roles and behaviours society traditionally assigns/expects of them and how they respond to those traditions. They care entirely about biological advantages and disadvantages.
So the division is based on — again unsure of the terms here but — “sex” not on “gender”.
And no sport is trans exclusionary as far as I know: the person in question in this article would be welcomed everywhere to compete against other biological males, and any biological female would be welcome to compete against others of their sex whatever they identify as (so long as they haven’t taken testosterone). I’m not sure I understand why this has become an issue.
yeah but it doesn’t make your body exactly like someone with different chromosomes than you that lived with that hormone set their entire life through puberty etc, and with a different bone structure and musculature
that is correct, and to be fair, not contested by the parent comment.
you might be hard-pressed to find two bodies each "exactly like" the other. The interesting questions here are not about exactly equal, but about equivalence classes of people, and in different contexts.
There are plenty of banned performance enhancing substances, so regardless of what anyone means by gender, I doubt that’s a useful distinction with regard to the relationship between gender and athletic performance. I think a better question is: Where is the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable medical intervention?
No, activists are keen to see these children, most of whom would turn out to be homosexual if not pushed through affirmative therapy, sterilized. The "treatments" for transition render the trans person incapable of orgasm, obliterate their sex drive, and remove their genitals. About half will commit suicide, and detransitioners are shunned and mocked. Resources and communities online like r/egg_irl that offer "support" for trans questioning people downplay the negatives of transition
That's the only explanation that makes sense to me. More persecution of homosexuals. Read the "When Sons Become Daughters" series on Quillette.
And don't get me started on the propaganda that's out there that nobody will talk about in polite company. Go search for "sissy training" on PornHub.
Ask yourself: who is making hypnosis videos encouraging boys to sterilize themselves and have sex with men, and why?
I searched. I can't figure out what these videos are about from the titles/thumbnails, and I'll be damned if I'm actually going to watch these things. Can you summarize?
Ultimately irrelevant, given the chromosomes produce stuff we can synthesise or inhibit. Not yet perfectly of course, but anabolic steroids have been synthesised since the 1930s, and are effective enough to be banned in sport.
not really. there’s a lot more to you than just things you synthesize or inhibit.
not to mention development that happens in the womb etc that’s non reversible. hormones won’t change your bone structure or the shape of your hips or a million other things
It’s still an open question as to why trans people are trans, but it definitely looks like something is already different as early as the womb.
But that isn’t important, because even if it were false: Purely for the question of athletics, athletic performance trumps all else.
Medical doctors will still need to know about chromosomes for dealing with chromosomal disorders, and if you’ve had your gonads out you’re not going to get gonad cancer, but purely for gender-related athletics issues, the 80-20 principle applies: most of the “million” things your chromosomes do are the same for basically everyone (and thus the reason nobody is born a literal banana), then there’s the subset of chromosomal stuff which affects athletic performance, then the subset of that subset where the gender interacts with the athletic genes such that men and women with those genes perform differently, and in that subset of a subset the difference can be overwhelmed by externally supplied steroids.
Which is why steroids are banned.
Now, in the specific case in this article, transition happened well into adulthood, and the athlete says:
> Vanbellinghen, 27, whose qualifying efforts were disrupted by injury, pointed out that the retained benefit of taking steroids, even years earlier, is widely known.
> "So why is it still a question whether two decades, from puberty to the age of 35, with the hormonal system of a man also would give an advantage [in competing against women]?
Obviously this isn’t the same as the case of someone transitioning pre-puberty. But, as I say, it’s why some trans people want to transition pre-puberty.
I think the core question is, does Hubbard have an advantage so she will win 95% of the time? If so, it’s not really a competition, especially if that result derives from her innate male physiology giving her an unfair advantage. We don’t allow doping either.
If there is a way to level it out, that might be a solution, if it’s possible.
It's possible to be against the idea of trans women competing in female competitive sports without intentionally misgendering all trans athletes/humans.
> It's possible to be against the idea of trans women competing in female competitive sports without intentionally misgendering all trans athletes/humans.
Genuine question, one about which I haven't seen much in the way of conversation—although my experience is relatively limited.
Why is the subjective experience of gender privileged over the objective biology of sex?
I can anticipate a couple possible responses for which I'm not sure I have very clear thoughts, either—maybe someone can contribute more light than heat here?
1. Biology isn't actually all that objective: one's subjective experience is at least partially determined by biology, too.
2. We can turn the question on its head: why should objective biology be privileged over subjective experience?
1. is pretty close for ex: most brain functions can be called subjective, and therefore not that relevant.
2. is relatively a trend in how civilization has been moving. The cavemen bashed a skull that seemed unfamiliar or they didn't like, we don't we try to setup a legal system and judge a sense of justice.
I don't think every subjective experience should be allowed to be used over other person's choices. I guess we would need something like "your right to swing your hand stops a feet/inch from my nose" kinda principle.
> 1. is pretty close for ex: most brain functions can be called subjective, and therefore not that relevant.
Sorry for the delay. HN is not a great forum for long discussions (on purpose, I guess). I've been noodling on this for awhile, and so maybe just blathering into the ether.
I'm not sure that subjective and irrelevant necessarily go together.
I guess the argument I'm thinking of is more this: my pronoun preference is biological, so if my chromosomes disagree with my pronoun preference why should my chromosomes govern communication protocols instead of the rest of my biology?
If these things are truly irrelevant, then the notion of gender identity is itself irrelevant and so, too, are pronouns, aren't they? (I mean, maybe not, but I don't see how one could say chromosomes don't matter but preferences do.)
One of the real challenges gender identity raises is that it acknowledges that the body actually means something. It also implies that language means something. Mind and body go together, and when they disagree some kind of resolution is needed. Language shapes reality, so when language contradicts that resolution the reality of my existence, my very identity, is threatened or negated.
If we stipulate that, I think we have to admit pronoun use really isn't neutral. It's not merely a matter of common decency and respect (although it certainly is part of that), but about what we think it means to be human and how we attempt to shape and react to reality.
My own thoughts here aren't super well formed, hence my line of questioning and (perhaps poorly worded and thought out) reasoning...but I do think it bears some critical examination.
I think we're on the same page..I was collating subjective and irrelevant together for the sake of the parent comment. and it is quite common in the "objectivist philosophy/meta-physical" view .
> Language shapes reality,
Sorry I have disagree on this one. I don't think language shapes reality. It definitely shapes our perception, filters, and biases but shapes reality only in a very Probabilistic graphical model sense. And even then it shapes(as in cavemen---> civilization) reality as much as say, air shapes reality, mathematical formulae and theories shape reality . My usual stance on the gender identity debate comes along with the "freedom to swing your arm but not hit my nose" sense.
In this case of weightlifting for ex: I recently saw a twitter mention comparing the same athlete before starting HRT therapy and now.(along with a co-competitor in the male category she used to compete with) It pointed out how much the gap between both the lifters progress has been because of the Hormones.
Anyway, I don't have a clear stance on trans-people competing in their gender category .. I think the gender based categorization in sports has to move further, but I'm ambiguous even about how the sports laws work on even doping. So since I don't have skin-in-the-game I only try to add clarity to the discussion without taking either stance strongly.
> Sorry I have disagree on this one. I don't think language shapes reality. It definitely shapes our perception, filters, and biases but shapes reality only in a very Probabilistic graphical model sense. And even then it shapes(as in cavemen---> civilization) reality as much as say, air shapes reality, mathematical formulae and theories shape reality .
Sorry if it's not clear: I'm not trying to say what's true, despite having opinions on the subject; I'm interested in best arguments.
What I think the implications are in assuming that gender is as much state-of-mind as state-of-body (if not more) is two-fold:
1. The body really does matter. It's inconsistent to say that the body has to align with the mind if the body doesn't matter. Surgical and hormonal intervention make no sense if the mind and the body aren't somehow connected in a very deep way.
2. The desire for pronoun usage is more, too, than mere courtesy, but the desire for consensus on reality. If I'm a woman trapped in a man's body or have no particular gender, when I ask someone to use pronouns of my preference I am actually asking them to make a statement about what is real and true. This implies in no small way that language shapes and makes reality in some nontrivial way.
2. Is definitely the counter argument I would use - if people have preferred pronouns then what is the ethical argument for ignoring those and using words that would cause them harm? If nothing else it seems to me to come down to basic decency and respect for others.
It's less about one term being "privileged" (I must confess that word seems slightly unclear to me in this context) over another and more about the ease of treating people the way they would like, with no real downsides that I can see.
Anecdotally, refusing to use a trans person's pronouns seems typically to be a dogwhistle for not respecting the existence/legitimacy of transgender people.
> Is definitely the counter argument I would use - if people have preferred pronouns then what is the ethical argument for ignoring those and using words that would cause them harm
So I think a natural conservative argument there would be that the primary reason why we have sex-based (not gender-based!) pronouns in the first place is so that we can talk about biological categories that are important for the continuation of our species: while some men cannot father offspring, certainly no transman can. So why should we call them men, if it is in fact the reproductive function because of which we use these terms in the first place?
Messing about with mechanisms that are crucial to our survival should at least not be done lightly.
Even as somebody who is non-conservative on most issues, the lack of acknowledgment by trans activists that that's what they're doing rubs me slightly the wrong way.
That logic would also state that we should no longer call a man a man if he becomes infertile through choice (or otherwise), no?
> Messing about with mechanisms that are crucial to our survival should at least not be done lightly.
I disagree with this. Unsurprisingly so, given that I am non-conservative. I believe in personal choice over reproduction and I believe that this choice simply is more important than any tiny effect on societies survival - something that in fact means very little to me other than the 'coincidental' lack of suffering in people I care about/humanity in general. I'm not sure there's any objective value in the human race surviving, in fact if I could push a button that meant all humans would be incredibly fulfilled and lead happy lives and then naturally (peacefully, painlessly, etc) die out in 3 generations time I would certainly strongly consider doing so... I'm rambling now, though.
> the lack of acknowledgment by trans activists that that's what they're doing
I think that's because it's largely incidental - indeed, it doesn't stop them from becoming adoptive parents. It doesn't stop them from freezing sperm/eggs and creating children through more modern means. It may not even lead to infertility in many cases - I'll admit I don't know any detailed knowledge on that.
But most importantly their right to lead their life in whichever way they want, and to choose not to have children, is not especially relevant to anyone else. Nobody should be forced (or be guilted into) to have(ing) children.
> That logic would also state that we should no longer call a man a man if he becomes infertile through choice (or otherwise), no?
I don't think that's necessarily the case. The argument is less about individual cases and more about keeping the overall categories intact as traditionally perceived, which isn't really endangered in that case.
By the same argument, calling transmen men if they are passing perfectly would probably be fine. And that's likely what's been happening forever anyway, and is the point of "passing": those individuals don't threaten the general categories. It's a kind of "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.
[...]
> > the lack of acknowledgment by trans activists that that's what they're doing
> I think that's because it's largely incidental
Is it? What you write about personal choice is all(?) true and does not contradict the argument.
My impression is that while transphobia is definitely a thing, a lot of the backlash against trans activism isn't about trans people's individual rights and choices but about trans activists wanting to impose certain beliefs that they have on others. For example, for the purpose of this discussion, the belief that the categories of "man" and "woman" must be defined differently than many (most?) people intuitively define them based on some of the most deeply rooted perception and pattern recognition of the brain.
So it may feel incidental to trans activists, but the people who react likely don't feel the same because it's the aspect (or one of the aspects) of trans activism that affects them the most personally.
> It's less about one term being "privileged" (I must confess that word seems slightly unclear to me in this context) over another and more about the ease of treating people the way they would like, with no real downsides that I can see.
Sorry for any confusion.
By privileged, I simply mean that one's gender identity instead of biological sex should govern pronoun usage.
> 2. Is definitely the counter argument I would use - if people have preferred pronouns then what is the ethical argument for ignoring those and using words that would cause them harm? If nothing else it seems to me to come down to basic decency and respect for others.
I mean I guess that is part of the reason that pronoun usage is a controversial topic, right? Why are people uncomfortable with using others' desired pronouns? It may be deeply rooted beliefs or other identitarian characteristics (religious or political convictions for example) that could cause someone psychological harm if they use preferred pronouns instead of biological sex.
In areas where legal agency is at issue—in children, for example—use of pronouns could potentially elide complex challenges and lead to irreversible physical changes that don't correspond with later preference (i.e., sex reassignment surgery or puberty blockers may have permanent effects even if the child decides later that it was a bad idea).
Now I don't know that these are particularly good arguments, but they are two ideas that I've seen online or that arise from applying a subjective-experience argument to other identity characteristics.
Adding a third option, proposing sex being the superior categorisation completely ignores the existence of intersex people.
Take Hanne Gaby Odiele (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanne_Gaby_Odiele). They (their preferred pronoun) have an XY chromosome but due to an androgen insensitivity looks traditionally female - to the point of being a fairly successful model for woman's fashion. They'd certainly be very out of place in a mens bathroom if forced there due to their chromosome.
> Adding a third option, proposing sex being the superior categorisation completely ignores the existence of intersex people.
This is another assertion that I also don't quite understand. (I want to emphasize I'm not trolling here—I'm genuinely interested. Topics like this are obviously highly charged and challenging to discuss in a fruitful way.)
Vocabulary exists for discussing intersex characteristics, so the existence of intersex people is known and acknowledged. Is there something special about pronouns?
How would you address an intersex person? Their physical characteristics might have been decided by a doctor shortly after birth without any input from themselves. Their chromosomes might be ambiguous or just don’t match their physical characteristics. Like Hanne Gaby Odiele having an XY chromosome, looking (to me) physically female and preferring the they/them pronoun.
> How would you address an intersex person? Their physical characteristics might have been decided by a doctor shortly after birth without any input from themselves. Their chromosomes might be ambiguous or just don’t match their physical characteristics. Like Hanne Gaby Odiele having an XY chromosome, looking (to me) physically female and preferring the they/them pronoun.
My default is to use appearance in the absence of other factors; I understand there are cases in which this is challenging at best.
Even so, I'm still not quite sure how this addresses my question about how using biological pronouns instead of preferred pronouns somehow "ignores the existence of the intersex" as you earlier asserted. (Indeed, it seems as though the question of pronouns actually rather highlights the existence of the person, if in an uncomfortable and potentially discriminatory way.)
> I'm still not quite sure how this addresses my question about how using biological pronouns instead of preferred pronouns somehow "ignores the existence of the intersex" as you earlier asserted.
My point, perhaps poorly delivered, was that not every person has a “biological pronoun”. How do you even define it?
Addressing these folks by their “biological sex” (of you mean chromosomes) would be hugely insulting, besides the fact it’s not like we got our chromosomes written on our forehead.
Lastly, there are people with ambiguous physical characteristics. Often gender assignment surgeries are performed shortly after birth. Those folks usually get addressed by the gender a doctor chose for them when they were infants - and sometimes this turns out to be the wrong choice and doesn’t actually match their identity. They also don’t have a “biological sex” that neatly fits into the male/female schema.
> My point, perhaps poorly delivered, was that not every person has a “biological pronoun”. How do you even define it?
My understanding is that historically the presence of the Y chromosome was considered determinative. One was male (therefore "he") if the karotype was 46,XY or 47,XXY or 48,XXXY, etc. Indeed, in discussions of the more common abnormal karotypes (e.g., Klinefelter), most of the literature I've seen uses the word "male."
> Addressing these folks by their “biological sex” (of you mean chromosomes) would be hugely insulting, besides the fact it’s not like we got our chromosomes written on our forehead.
With respect to chromosomes and forehead, that's not exactly true. There's sufficient divergence between male and female skulls that some gender expression surgeries target them.[1] I do understand what you mean, and I'm not trying to be snarky. Sexual differentiation is more than just genitalia, and we're well adapted to noticing those differences.
It seems like you're making two points:
1. Those with abnormal karotypes can have an experience similar to the normally karotyped: their self-perception and their anatomy might not line up, and they may prefer to be called by a pronoun that doesn't correspond with karotype or anatomy.
2. The experience of those with abnormal karotypes can and should be generalized to those with normal karotypes.
(I'm a bit fuzzy on (2) but I think I'm representing you correctly on (1). By all means correct me if I'm wrong.)
I could pretty easily see someone relatively conservative on the issue of pronouns (for, e.g., medical or religious reasons) agreeing that those with abnormal karotypes should be allowed pronoun preference but disagreeing with the second because chromosomal abnormalities are the exception that proves the rule.
I'm not sure how it helps resolve the initial question because it requires generalizing from a small set to a substantially larger one. It also offers a more clear reason why one's subjective experience doesn't quite line up with one's body (i.e., a clear abnormality on the chromosomes).
We‘ve taken this conversation pretty far over the past 12-days (thanks for sticking with it!). I think it‘s fair to circle back to your original question that I responded to:
> Why is the subjective experience of gender privileged over the objective biology of sex?
My point was that biology is not all that objective and if we were to use pronouns in accordance with your thesis, we‘d eliminate the identity of many intersex people.
Whether gender-identity can be out of sync with your body in the absence of conditions described as intersex (which, for the record, I do believe in) and whether it should be respected is somewhat orthogonal to that. I believe the examples I’ve given of conditions where biology is either ambiguous or actively out of sync are sufficient to illustrate that using “ objective biology” would eliminate the identity of many intersex people. It’s my opinion, that that alone is reason enough to privilege gender over sex.
Thanks for the consistent and thoughtful replies. It's been helpful for me as I think about these hot-button topics. I'll certainly leave here but will probably reference the thread for my own sake for some time to come; thanks again.
>I think the core question is, does Hubbard have an advantage so she will win 95% of the time? If so, it’s not really a competition, especially if that result derives from her innate ... physiology giving her an unfair advantage.
But this is true of lots of sports. Most recently, Simone Biles was punished by scoring judges for a gymnastic move that only she is able to perform, due to her height and musculature. "Genetic freaks" who train hard but still have an unalterable physical advantage tend to dominate any individual sport, to the detriment of their competitors - what makes Hubbard different?
Yeah, so is it unfair? Simone Biles has a genetic advantage, something she probably didn’t have any control over or influence in.
Hubbard does, to some extend?
In Formula 1, Mercedes has dominated for the last 7 years or so. Is money their unfair advantage? Or is Hamilton just that good? It did make for a less attractive sport, if you already kind of know who will win.
Are there any examples of this worry about "genetic freaks" in non-women categories? It seems much less relevant to me in a category where everyone can enter than one that is restricted to a subset to give that subset 'fair' competition.
Not directly related to your question but we have weight classes in certain sports. This levels out at least some of genetic advantages.
I always found it odd that there are not, let's say height classes for high jump. It always seemed unfair to me that I had to lift my center of mass higher than others for the same performance.
>Are there any examples of this worry about "genetic freaks" in non-women categories?
There are lots of examples at the Olympic level, some of which can be found elsewhere in this thread. Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps are probably the most well-known recent cases - both dedicated athletes who also had some physical quirk which helped to ensure that they totally dominated their respective sport for the period that they were in their physical primes.
To be clear, the point is that nobody is "worried" about genetic outliers in mens' sports. If you were unlucky enough to be competing in a national Olympic swim team at the same time as peak-fitness Phelps, you were expected to suck it up and accept that you very likely had no chance of getting a gold medal. A great deal is made out of training and mentality, but at the end of the day, physicality is still a big silent factor in these competitions that the athletes simply have no control over.
While it's hard to draw a precise line, there's a clear difference between having some genetic features that give you an advantage, and having most genetic features that give you an advantage.
Growing up under the influence of male genetics and hormones gives an individual a massive advantage in such a sport, that simply cannot be compensated for or against with just training or medical solutions. There's nothing that will take that edge away from such an individual because human intervention later in life can't entirely undo the course nature took when building that body.
The evidence is in the performance which falls squarely in line with male performance [0].
And to everyone thinking of a parallel with motorsports and whatnot, there is none. Those sports rely on technology developed by humans so anything is entirely reproducible and reversible. Nature on the other hand still does things that we don't understand, can't reproduce, or can't fully compensate for. We have no way to change the gender with all the associated factors so we focus on the critical and obvious ones like physical look and hormonal balance, which get a person 95% there. But when it comes to peak performance the 5% makes a difference and it's clearly an unfair one to every other participant.
> While it's hard to draw a precise line, there's a clear difference between having some genetic features that give you an advantage, and having most genetic features that give you an advantage.
I don't see the clear difference. In what qualitative sense does Hubbard's genetic advantage differ from the genetic advantage of any athlete at the top of their sport? There are many competitions which are dominated by one individual, regardless of the training or medical help which every other competitor can afford. Should those people be excluded from competing for reasons of fairness?
The evidence is in the performance which falls squarely in line with male performance
The article seems to make clear that while she is in the top 10, she's not in the top 3 and is in no way a favorite to win. So I'm not sure what that graph is supposed to be showing.
Two women in this weight class have scored a 300+ in competition while Hubbard's best is a 285 from 2019.
I think the point is they took the spot from somebody who deserves to represent their country in Olympic competition and they aren’t even likely to win.
It's supposed to say that she's exhibiting typical male level performance, which happens to be substantially above typical female performance at that level. This means she's taking full advantage of a body which developed and trained as male for 35 years to get ahead of women who have to rely "only" on training.
You wouldn't let an adult compete in a junior competition because they feel young at heart. You wouldn't let someone compete while on performance enhancing drugs just because they needed them. You would ban athletes who who are repeatedly caught using steroids because it's well known they provide an unfair advantage even years later. And that absolutely pales in comparison to having a trained male body in a women's weightlifting competition.
Equally, you wouldn't ban a child from a junior competition just because they were able to achieve an adult's performance out of "fairness" to the other children. Hubbard may have a physical advantage over cis women - but lots of athletes have physical advantages over each other. What is different about the kind of advantage you might obtain by being trans?
Also, comparing a trans woman to someone who "feels young at heart" is a false equivalence, and an offensive one. One is an identity, the other is not.
If you read the very first line of the first comment I made above [0] you'll see why the "but some are better than others" is a very unrealistic and uncharitable take on the topic. The whole reason we have separated men and women trials in almost every sport is that the difference between men and women goes far beyond "lots of athletes have an advantage over each other". Having a male body for 35 years is much more than your average advantage.
You decided let your personal sensibilities get in the way of understanding my arguments that are much stronger than anything you presented. Sports aren't about gender identity but about sex. As entitled as any individual is to decide on a body that reflects their identity, their biological sex is still very much unchanged. And so are the advantages years of being a male provide.
As you can see from actual athletes, this situation is offensive for those women who after a lifetime of training and hard work see themselves competing against effectively a biological male body with a massive advantage that dwarfs even years of performance enhancing drugs would give.
And to your last point, saying gender identity is OK, age identity is not [1], and that it's OK to identify as a different gender or even no gender at all but anything else is not acceptable is grossly hypocritical and might be as ignorant as people were 50 years ago about gender related topics. Time will tell. I honestly do not feel like my age, and do not identify with that number but rather with a much younger age for many of the reasons you can read in the article linked. This being said, even if the law allowed me to change the number either way, I would not consider this to be a valid differentiator for sports.
I feel something being overlooked is the fact that it's relatively easy to dope without detection when your natural state is "doping" when weightlifting is one of the dirtiest sports out there.
Just to take one example of a genetic feature in the wild, there is a gene receptor which if you have the right mutation will cause an 25-50% increase in oxygen carrying capacity of red blood cells. Some people call it a naturally occurring blood doping.
The definition of fairness is difficult when dealing with even single genetic features.
The downside is that the whole point of having women's sports was to give women a chance to win, which they would usually be unable to. What you are suggesting will again put biological women in the position where they cannot win. So you have defeated the whole purpose.
>What you are suggesting will again put biological women in the position where they cannot win.
We should remember that most cis women cannot compete at an Olympic level anyways. That's the point I'm trying to make in this thread - physical outliers are already responsible for lots of non-competitions at the top level of many sports.
Every athlete with a physical advantage precludes some other athlete from the top of the competition. If the "point" of womens' leagues is to provide a level playing field for cis women, then maybe we should be more open to introducing level playing fields more generally - because there are large parts of the population that cannot win in the system we already have, either. Otherwise, the "point" of womens' leagues is just to provide a space for women to compete, and trans women should be allowed in those spaces.
Because what you are suggesting will not only affect the top level, every single other level below will face the exact same situation. Genetically normal with determination female are still winning and trying at championship, scholarship, etc.. Let crush that because they are genetically inferior from a mediocre biological male right?
The point of male/female separation is to protect biological female from the genetic advantages of biological male, not from genetic outliers.
> the "point" of womens' leagues is just to provide a space for women to compete, and trans women should be allowed in those spaces.
This is patently false. In sports such as archery (which is an Olympic sport), where strength does not provide an advantage, men and women do compete together. So it's clearly not about providing a "space" for women to compete.
And in weightlifting, the subject at hand, all competitors are on their own, they might never be in the same room as each other. So again, what is this "space for women to compete"? It's clearly about the physical advantages of the sex, and I can't believe we're even having this discussion.
> So? What would be the downside of trans women dominating womens' sports, if that were even the eventuality?
That non-trans women have no fucking chance of being champions in pretty much any sports at all anymore, obviously. You're bending over backwards to be "fair" to a tiny minority, and not giving a shit that in order to do that you're being as utterly unfair as one could possibly be to half of humanity. The much eaasier solution, if you want people born as males to hold all the records, is to just simply abolish womens' sports altogether.
Honestly, this question is so horrendously disingenious that I'm shocked you even had the gall to ask it.
The big difference is that these are genetic differences that already have a separate category, to compete against others with those same genetic differences.
If you read the article you'll see that Hubbard is top 10, but not top 3 in her weight class, and in no way a favorite to win. Even her scores pre-transition wouldn't guarantee her gold at the Olympics.
I'm assuming it is accurate, it is still misleading. It makes it look like she should be breaking records and crushing the competition, when in truth she is doing neither.
She is crushing the competition by winning 95% of the time and got placed 4th at the age of 43, stealing the place & glory of another top-tier athlete at their peak performance.
How is that not an extraordinary feat had she been a biological female? So no, there's nothing misleading about that chart, you just read it wrong.
Yes, comparing a 43 years old who is in no way at the peak of their physical performance to a bunch of 20s shows the degree of unfairness.
And no, Hubbard doesn't need to win gold for this to become unfair.
there are athletes who might suffer from abnormal genetic mutations that might give them an advantage. the most popular example might be usain bolt who is, technically, too tall - but in combination with his abnormal muscularity ...
then there is robert förstemann, a track cyclist who might suffer from a myostatin deficincy (a hormone that restricts muscle growth).
does Hubbard have an advantage so she will win 95% of the time?
The article suggests that she's top 10, but not top 3 in the world. She almost certainly won't win, but might get a medal (since 2 of the 3 best lifter in this category won't be competing in the Olympics for various reasons).
Also Hubbard is old and probably not the best make weightlifter previously. So the best woman in the world will likely be beaten by someone who would under different circumstances have already retired and was never that great in the first place.
If it would be as simple as "having the same muscle but heavier bones" - then there would be advantages in climbing for example. But the worlds top climbers are male, too.
Not only that - but look at the shape of the hip bone between men and women - the latter have wider hips to cater for child-birth. This means men have a massive advantage when running/swimming/cycling/lifting. The same applies to the arms (men have straighter arms) which obviously changes the mechanics when lifting. No amount of hormone therapy will change this.
And there's a bunch of trans people anecdotally debating it claiming things like height reduction and others. The truth trans people on (long-term) hormones have not been studied on physiological characteristics to be sure they're affected or not.
Agreed... And I am not arguing that trans women (who take hormones after the male puberty) don't have an advantage over non-trans women. Just that trans women are about identity and not biology.
Oh BTW, at the highest levels of competition like olympics, I suspect there's a brain/mind involvement to a very strong level. But that doesn't change your argument anyways.
I'm not sure if it makes sense to include the effects of medical interventions for the purposes of determining which group, athletically speaking, trans-women should belong to. My understanding is that trans-women are women, not because they received medical treatments that affirm their gender, but because they identify as women. Thus, gender identity, except to the extent that it correlates with biological sex, has very little direct effect on athletic performance. Yes, some choose to receive treatments that reduce their athletic performance, but that's true of many other athletes - sometimes you have to choose between your own health and competition and making the best choices for health often means forgoing a chance to be a top athlete.
If anything, going by biology is more inclusive because it allows both trans-women and trans-men to compete fairly against others that share their biological sex, as long as they postpone treatments until their athletic career is over. If we go by this evolving combination of gender identity and hormone level checks, pre-treatment trans-women aren't allowed in any category, post-treatment trans-women have a massive advantage over biologically female bodies, pre-treatment trans-men cannot compete at all and post-treatment trans-men are still at an extreme disadvantage.
basically what happens in online spaces is that regional separate evolution of trans terms clash
for example, in American English, the trans community has centered on a separation between sex and gender
In commonwealth English, that specific separation in the lexicon hasn't reached consensus even within the trans community, let alone in a broader colloquialism from people wanting to understand and people actively resisting any form of trans acceptance
so its actually really impossible to determine if there is an educational moment possible if someone is coming across as trans exclusionary when using sex/gender interchangeably or if they are irreconcilable, especially as people pile on to being mad at that person (see for example JK Rowling’s tweets. nobody assumed it was an educational moment while its not even clear that the UK has sex/gender separation concept)
So far it doesn't seem people even notice this is going on, that the inclusive communities are evolving terminology slightly differently! Lets check back in 5 years!
Current UK situation seems to be that being "Gender Critical" is a protected belief, based on the ruling case of a case where a tax expert lost her job for tweeting about how men cannot just change into women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Forstater_v_Centre_for_Gl...
Yeah see this is a great example as I have no clue what anybody’s position is there upon a quick skim, and I’ve never even heard the term Gender Critical
Being "gender critical" is the view that trans women are not women. Not to be confused with the "anti-gender" movement, which opposes anything other than traditional male/female roles, or with "postgenderism", which argues the complete opposite, namely that traditional gender is irrelevant.
TL;DR is that Maya was (apparently) fired for the first opinion, lost a first court case over it because being gender critical is not protected under UK, and won the appeal because it was after all.
Your argument is somewhat tangential - are you arguing women are defined by their ability to give birth? Seems fairly obvious that doesn't hold up even when we aren't talking about trans people
There is a bimodal distribution of biological traits related to reproduction. Traditionally, women are defined as members of one of those clusters, the one whose members are generally able to give birth during some period of their lives. This doesn't mean that all members of the cluster can or have or will give birth, but nonetheless the clusters are fairly well-defined for nearly 100% of the population, with trans people being an exception.
Some of the more extreme trans activists seem to want to pretend that these clusters don't exist, which puts them at odds with reality.
Other seem to demand that the clusters shouldn't matter, which I find rather optimistic since they're relevant for reproduction.
Trans rights are a noble goal, but some of the statements made by trans activists are a bit out there.
If by "shouldn't matter" you mean something like "it's ridiculous to define what a woman is as having a capability that literally all women lose around middle age" then I'd have to count myself amongst those people. Your argument is an extremely weak one for defining what it means to be a woman.
Not all trans people undergo or desire surgical intervention. Also, a transgender woman who desires biological children and surgical intervention could freeze her sperm before surgery.
Remember the story a few years ago about the gay couple where one of them was a transgender man and gave birth to their child? I'm sure similar situations do sometimes arise with transgender women.
"Gender critical" is the anti-trans movement. The reason you can't tell their true position is the usual one: they daren't say "we want to eradicate trans people" in public, so they take the "just asking questions" route.
I feel that the trans community has largely been forced into defending "trans women are women" (TWAW), even if it has holes as a philosophical argument, because they need to fight the transphobic "trans women are men" rhetoric and downstream policy decisions. How can someone live as a woman without constant risk of being outed? They need an "F" on their passport and to use the women's toilets, etc. without having a constant risk of being "caught", because that ends badly.
So has Gender critical been defined as a group in such a way that no-one will admit to being in it? Is it similar to TERF?
I think you're correct in your second statement. This whole area seems very polarising. The edge case of women's sports is the obvious situation where a principle of 'Live and let live' doesn't work.
> Gender critical been defined as a group in such a way that no-one will admit to being in it?
No, that's what they call themselves. You can see plenty of people using that label on twitter.
Polarize_d_, in that people have gone out of their way to polarize it. The last major legal advance was in 2004, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Recognition_Act_2004 with broad support, and it's only in very recent years that this backlash has sprung up.
> The reason you can't tell their true position is the usual one: they daren't say "we want to eradicate trans people" in public, so they take the "just asking questions" route.
That's an interesting statement from the POV of falsifiability. Is there an experiment we could theoretically perform to find out if a person who's stating that he's "gender critical" really wants to eradicate all trans people?
Note that the court held two things: 1) Strongly held philosphical beliefs have much the same protection as religious beliefs in law and 2) That doesn’t mean you get to express those beliefs to other people in workplace.
In other words, anti-trans (or GC) beliefs occupy much the same position in law as anti-gay Christian beliefs. You can /believe/ them all you like & can’t be sacked for that belief, but if you express those beliefs in the workplace you’ve just created a hostile environment for other employees & your employer can simply fire you (after going through the appropriate disciplinary procedures where required by law) due to your breach of the Equality Act, under which being trans (specifically in law: gender reassignment) carries protected status in the same way that being a different skin colour or sexuality does.
I think it was significantly more than just a single Tweet. You’d have to go back to the original judgement (some of which is quoted in the judement I linked to) to see.
Is being philosophically critical of something automatically hostile? There are plenty of things that would argue against on a moral basis, that are important parts of the lives of some of the people I've worked with. I'd never harass them directly or indirectly for one of these things, but it would be hard to keep them a complete secret either.
On the other side of the coin, I recognise that the people I work with will surely have some deeply-held beliefs about the wrongness of some aspects of my life. That's inevitable when you have some minimum diversity of viewpoints, and of course "reasonable people may differ" on many of those topics. I don't think I have the right to insist they supress these beliefs, as long as they're not trying to harm me with them. (Assuming that just having a belief isn't harmful.)
> I don't think I have the right to insist they supress these beliefs, as long as they're not trying to harm me with them.
The argument from the trans community would be that misgendering and encouraging other employees to misgender them(which will happen if the belief is propaganda-ised) will cause significant emotional harm, risk mental health, cause problems in fulfilling job etc.. I'm not sure about how true this would be, as I'm in the closet and I'm a bit indifferent about what other people think, but can imagine it being very difficult for others.
I suppose I made a big generalization there. Yes, people do sometimes use the threat of suicide to gain social leverage. That in no way is equivalent to saying that people who suffer from chronic pain, chronic depression, who are gay, trans, or work in high stress jobs have much higher than average suicide rates. If you hear statistics around suicide broken down by those demographics and see yourself as a victim of terrorism then that says more about you as a person than about anyone else. If someone directly tells you that what you are doing to them makes them feel suicidal then call 911 and walk away from that person. Beyond that, it's not your responsibility. If you keep feeling terrorized by a situation like that, I suggest talking to your mental health professional who can help you develop better coping skills.
> Is being philosophically critical of something automatically hostile?
Not in terms of the Equality Act. You can be as critical as you like in private, or outside the workplace as I understand things.
But if you voice those criticisms directly to someone in the protected class in the workplace, then you’ve crossed the line.
So, eg, telling a gay person to their face that you oppose gay marriage & all gay people are going to hell might be your strongly held philosophical (or religious in this case) belief, but the act of voicing it to the individual in the protected class breaks your employers obligations under the Equality Act in the UK & they would be entitled to fire you for it. The same goes for persistently mis-gendering a trans person (quite apart from it being extremely rude of course!) as gender re-assignment forms a protected class in law.
(Obviously, this is as I understand things & not the opinion of a legal expert in these matters.)
sports has everything to do with sex and nothing
to do with gender
Dividing by sex is a substitute for dividing by the things that really matter: height, weight, strength, bone density, etc. If sports grouped competitors by a combination of those attributes, it would solve a lot of issues, including debate over transgender athletes.
I wonder how this would apply in sports that don't typically have weight classes, like track & field. I imagine you'd start seeing athletes in pretty much every sport cutting weight like in boxing and wrestling, which I don't think is a healthy outcome.
Are we at a level of biological science yet to create reliable divisions/classes on anything more sophisticated? And what about non-professional sports in schools?
I think people not confined to a wheelchair have more options for physical training. You could say that's an unfair advantage to people actually requiring the chair.
Hmmmm. At that point are you not simply beginning to divide by ability? Basketball for short people? Weightlifting for weak people? It would seem to both go against the spirit of sport and be impossible to implement in practice (for e.g how many different ways do you cut it?)
Perhaps the more fundamental question — once again leaning on apparently somewhat flimsy terminology — would be: is biological sex something worthy of celebration and note? Half of our species is born a certain way, whatever we call it. Is that grouping to be given certain opportunities to demonstrate their talents that would not be afforded them on a level playing field?
Yes, but as mentioned elsewhere weight alone would do little to solve this issue. Males would still dominate.
So presumably you include other factors — but then you are simply dividing by ability. You could conceivably attempt to divide by innate ability (theoretically allowing competitors to compete against one another based on nurture, not nature) but that would be impossible to do fairly or in a way that would make sense to audiences.
we're at HN - run PCA and clustering on the totality of athletes' results and biological data for the last N decades with end result being the groups based on identified parameters similar to boxing/wrestling weight groups.
>that would make sense to audiences.
we're already in situation which is harder and harder to make sense. Putting it on the firm basis of scientific analysis is the only way to move forward which would avoid all the pitfalls we're going to hit otherwise.
trans women by their nature already defy the classic notions of sex and gender (i.e. that classic match of software and hardware), so why does it matter whether they would get grouped with the men (i suppose you meant the classic notion of "men"), trans men, women or with any cross boundaries cutting group as long as the competition is honest (i.e. similar blood oxygen carrying capabilities with similar muscle mass with similar bone density or whatever PCA would point to)?
Also, if trans women are supposed to go to women competition, does it mean that trans men are supposed to go to men competition? Wouldn't that mean pretty much condemning them to having no chance of winning from the start in the most sports where sheer mass, power, etc. play major role?
Anyway, if we don't put it on the firm scientific basis today, i can see how tomorrow a number of male athletes form China and Russia would suddenly start to feel like they are women, may be would take some hormones to satisfy some doubts/requirements (giving the doping already going on i don't see any obstacles here), and that will be the end of female sports.
While I understand the sentiment, but I think we need to speak of skill vs physical factors. The division of weightlifters in weight classes is to deal with the latter rather than the former.
Similarly - WADA does this already by banning doping. PEDs don't make you a high-skill athlete, they enhance physical capabilities (stronger, faster recovery etc).
Laurel Hubbard is in an unfortunately unique position, where she's at a natural advantage due to higher testosterone levels earlier in life.
It might be impossible to end up with a fair division, but I don't think "no division" is a good answer.
A while back I wondered how much of elite sport is determined by genetics. The answer I got back was unsurprising that genetics play a very heavy role in many sports 90%+. We have basically already dived the population based on those traits when it comes to some world championships.
Is it fun to watch a bunch of length skiers that all have a similar rare medical conditions that enables an endurance and oxygen uptake that is way beyond what is possible for the wast majority of the population? Dividing by genetics seems as a good option, but would that then go against the spirit of the sport?
Sex is simply just a bunch of common genetic traits, but they are not the only traits that matters in sport. There are a long list of them, especially in extreme strength or endurance sports.
Not that I made an argument for using weight alone, but it depends on the sport in any event. To avoid injuries, the physical attributes that matter to billiards differ from those that matter to rugby.
Tweets are a dreadful way to read something like this, which would be easier to suggest in a blog post or paper. But I suppose Twitter gives people the right to respond, so swings-and-roundabouts.
Thanks, the entire thread makes more sense! I want to avoid sounding any more opinionated about sports medicine than I already do, since it's not a subject in which I have any expertise. That said, when I consider that a 'mens' category alone includes both Andre The Giant and Peter Dinklage, it's hard for me to understand how a richer mix of physical attributes could do any worse :)
Well, you're not picking people at either end of a normal size scale. You're picking people with gigantism and dwarfism. But let's take Andre as an example: what sports Andre would truly excel at? He made a name in wrestling, but his gigantism was as much a cause of health problems as an "edge" in sport. And if size was the deciding factor, then why wasn't the largest woman with gigantism (Tanya Angus, 7 feet 7 inches and weighed 400lbs) beating the shit out of wrestlers like The Undertaker (6 feet 10, 309lbs)? Because size isn't all.
Edit: now I'm taking weight!
Ross Tucker made a point about safety, but also about fairness, about which he said (paraphrasing) that females would disappear completely from mixed sex sports, even with weight categories. His point about "fairness" categories is more like "how would that even work?"
I just wanted to say thanks for reminding me that deadlifts is the really big one.
I've been mainly focusing on my squats in my garage gym (full Olympic barbell/bench/rack with spotter bars/extra Olympic EzyCurl bar) setup, but looking at my history I've let the big deadlift slip - 14 days since last session.
So I took the 20 second trip to the gym last night to start fixing that, warmed up with squats and then just deadlifts - and can definitely feel the energy today (on top of the fatigue!).
I've been struggling with energy lately due to a lot of change and stress, so hopefully a renewed focus on the deadlift will be helpful. Cheers.
> Dividing by sex is a substitute for dividing by the things that really matter: height, weight, strength, bone density, etc.
You crucially missed an important variable which competitive sports of any kind fully hinge upon: skeletal muscle density… which hugely differs across biological sexes.
In many sports, there’s selection for the level one competes at. You won’t see Messi play in third division football, for example, or me being offered a job by a top team. Top athletes want the challenge/fame/money of competing with better players.
In other sports, there’s a rating system that effectively places people with competitors at their level (ELO in chess, tennis rankings)
Either would work in any sport, except for the fact that huge classes of people wouldn’t ever be represented at top level. Prime examples are women and people with disabilities.
Problem is that training can sometimes move you between categories. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T42_(classification) has “impaired muscle power or impaired range of movement” as criteria. Those can get better with training.
For women, it seems easier, but even ignoring transgenders, there’s various genetic rarities such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46,XX/46,XY that can put women at an advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foekje_Dillema) that we may or may not choose to call unfair (we don’t think it’s unfair for men over six feet to compete in basketball, though, even though that’s largely genetic)
When you segment based on age and sex you are dividing up people based on their starting conditions - people who were born in the same year, and with the same sex, compete to see who is the best. When you divide based on the attributes that matter for the sport, you are basically just pre-ranking everyone and bucketing them so you only compete against those who we predict will do as well as you. Which is fine for more casual levels of sport, but isn't particularly interesting to watch.
No one wants to watch a competition to see who is the "best of people we think are ranked 100-200" since it is an arbitrary grouping. They want to see people compete to be the best woman or man in the world.
Dividing based on weight makes sense for some sports since it is an added constraint that people compete to optimize their strength against. But dividing based on strength just moves the competition from the actual competition, into the ranking process.
A problematic aspect of segmenting based on age is that you get a very large bias towards people with specific birth months. Getting 11 more months compare to the competition is huge, and the data shows it.
I found the idea of a "cluster concept" of biological sex, as opposed to a essentialist binary, to be a useful addition for thinking about this issue. We can all point to the binary and say where do you draw the line, because of all kinds of exceptional cases. But if you say, here is a cluster of characteristics that are common to amongst the groups, you don't need to have them all, but most people have a majority of one or the other, then there becomes a more objective way to think about it.. And maybe the cluster that is important to weight lifting is different from something else..
Not saying that I aggrege with Kathleen Stock's conclusions. Just find this useful.
Most people have no idea just how massive the biological advantage is. Movies and popular culture have conditioned people to think that females can hold their own against men. Individuals can, in some contexts, where the statistical distribution overlaps. For example a mediocre middle aged man can be beaten in strength or speed sports by an athletic 20-something woman. But at the tails of the distribution, where the competitions occur, the advantages of the Y chromosome and male puberty are insurmountable.
Hubbard is also 43 years old. There is no precedent for any human female being competitive in this sport at this age, not even the most freakishly talented female weightlifters in history, not even the Soviet drug cheats.
Kuinini Manumua, the Tongan woman who would have been given this place if not for Hubbard, is 21 years old.
Feagaiga Stowers, who placed second behind Hubbard in the Pacific Games in her native Samoa in 2018, is 20 years old.
This problem cannot be solved or even properly discussed without properly acknowledging biological reality.
This disparity is why women fought so hard for sex-based separation in the first place. I cannot understand why we would roll back those protections by considering “gender” equivalent to sex. It can only hurt women.
What about intersex females or women with androgen sensitivity? They are XX but might still get "the advantage of growing up with testosterone". Or women who have testosterone insensitivity and an XY chromosome pair (ie, are in all factors but their sex chromosomes female)?
There will always be edge cases, and they should be addressed on an individual basis. Changing the rules that affect 99% of the athletes to benefit the 1% edge cases doesn't make sense.
Why not find a set of rules that works for 100% of people instead of leaving out the 1% for no other reason than "we have to continue with the rules we established as tradition".
Because there are no such rules. It's a competition. Only a few people can win, and any rules are biased.
If you rolled back the clock and tried again, Michael Phelps would never be a champion weightlifter, and the best weightlifter would never be a champion swimmer.
Currently for olympic distance running at 400 meters or further, a female must present with a certain maximum level of testosterone. This rule was specifically made to exclude an intersex female-presenting runner who excelled. Due to medical complications, she cannot take medication to surpress her testosterone levels on a long term basis.
And a boxer who for medical reasons can not reduce their weight to a lower weight category just competes in the higher weight category. It shouldn't matter why you exceed a certain threshold, so long as the thresholds are consistent and relevant you should compete in your category.
This what-about mentality that fragments the population into increasingly small groups while expecting everyone else to adhere needs a course correction.
I don't want to fragment, I want these people to be recognized as what they identify; women. Even if they don't have the right chromosomes, there is atleast a dozen reasons someone might still have grown up as female or identifies female.
I fully believe trans women are women, but I'm genuinely curious as to what the feminist response to stuff like these competitions should be when it's clear that trans women have a distinct and irrerperable advantage over biological women.
What potential problems would there be from having a biological women competition, and a trans women competition? Genuinely curious as to your answer and I am asking this in good faith
And what is the response that people who undergo female hormone treatments will have a distinct disadvantage over men who've not done that? Should they have to continue in a field they have this disadvantage in?
> I want these people to be recognized as what they identify; women. Even if they don't have the right chromosomes, there is atleast a dozen reasons someone might still have grown up as female or identifies female.
Replace gender with race. Do you feel the same way about race?
Well, I didn't know that race is determined by your chromosomes. TIL I guess. And I don't see how someone would identify as black if they aren't, it's a melatin level in the skin.
The issues about race have less to do with the issues about transgender people, and more with their struggles faced by fault of modern society, in addition to the struggles one would face as transgender and/or female, which can intersect quite badly.
I'm honestly astounded that HN apparently doesn't have any idea about intersectional discourse in the slightest, should be pretty obvious stuff.
So your position is that a person is female simply by virtue of claiming that they "identify as" female. Is a person black simply by virtue of claiming that they "identify as" black?
I am aware Chromosomes carry the genome, but leading the question is not quite fair as well. Since sex and gender were topics, it was well evident that I was talking about Chromosomal differences between humans, NOT gene-level differences.
It looks like you skipped out on Biology 101, otherwise the difference would be clear in context and upon my elaboration.
> I was talking about Chromosomal differences between humans, NOT gene-level differences.
Since the former includes the latter, your excuse makes zero sense. It sounds like a convoluted attempt to obfuscate the fact that you thought "chromosomes" was synonymous with "allosomes".
> It looks like you skipped out on Biology 101
How so? This is a weird projection. You're the one who clearly didn't know what chromosomes are.
Finally, you still haven't answered the question: Is a person black simply by virtue of claiming that they "identify as" black?
You do realize there are descendants of black people with fair skin that look almost European otherwise but identify with their ancestors kept down under segregation?
Why should women's championships even exist? Isn't that just a pity prize? Either design a game where women tend to perform better (like certain forms of gymnastics) or where they tend to be more interested due to the cultural aspects (like cheer/dance), or let women compete in other areas of endeavor.
Why have leagues for women in basketball but not "men under 6ft tall"?
Is it to encourage girls and women to be physically active for a health life? If so, so we need competition for that? (I'd say no -- boys and men who aren't eite talent are also pushed out by the focus on competition)
Now if people like women sports due to the style of play in WNBA or Women's soccer or whatever, that's great; just make the rules and marketing and such to promote that style, and women will tend to be the participants.
This post is generally ridiculous, but I will point out that we do have weight categories for boxing. I suppose we don't have height categories for basketball because no one wants to watch that.
But wouldn't you, in a 160-180cm bracket, for example, end up with nearly all players being 178-180cm? And then 158-160cm for the next one. Imagine what drama would happen if a promising teenage athlete would not stop growing at 159 and got 2 extra centimetres, for example: he would completely lose his shot to be a professional. People can adjust their weight with a diet, but they can't really change their height.
It’s already this way. It hasn’t been “about” height in a long time. The best players in the league aren’t the tallest by a long shot. Steph Curry is 6’4.
The argument presented was that height mattered more than skill. If that were true, the tallest players would also be the best, no? Instead, very clearly, the best players are usually _not_ the tallest, sometimes not even close.
This is a very simplistic understanding of statistics. Basketball success doesn't need to be correlated linearly with height for it to be the single most important factor.
In fact it's pretty obvious there would be a tipping point because extreme height is inversely correlated with health and mobility.
In similar fashion weight matters more than skill in boxing that's why we have weight categories. 120 kg boxer will win over 80 kg boxer 90% of the time or more assuming basic competency. But it doesn't mean that the most obese person in the world would be the best boxer.
And the correlation is even more obvious with basketball than with boxing which you can see comparing the height distribution in basketball with height distribution in adult male population [1]. Average for basketball is higher than 97th percentile for general population. That's not an accident :)
If skill is more important than height where are the 160 cm basketball players? None of them got enough skill?
In soccer 2 players widely recognized as the best in last decade are 170 and 187 cm. Different sides of the general height average.
In basketball this histogram for ALL professional players STARTS at the general average (5'9).
If your argument is "Height of a random person decides whether they could be an NBA player", that statement is incorrect.
If your argument is "Height of an NBA player is the most significant factor in determining their success", that statement is also incorrect.
> In similar fashion weight matters more than skill in boxing that's why we have weight categories
A 220 lb boxer is more capable of knocking out a 140 lb boxer, yes. A 6'10 basketball player is not more capable of outperforming a 6'3 basketball player. Also using single-player sports as a comparison to team sports is a waste of time and energy.
Skill is the determining factor. Not height.
I'll say, it really really seems like you don't know about/watch/care about _actual_ professional basketball. In which case, maybe you shouldn't just guess your way through a conversation about professional basketball?
Based on my observations, on offense (and in a team situation), skill trumps height.
On defense, there's no way a much shorter player can reliably guard a taller player. And definitely not one on one. I've watched many one on one clips and thought 'wow size is everything.'
Sure, Steph Curry is probably the most skilled player in the league. But do you think a team with five Steph Currys can beat a team with, say, five Paul Georges? I'm not so sure.
One on One is again not really a worthwhile topic given that's not how basketball is played at high levels.
> there's no way a much shorter player can reliably guard a taller player.
Just flatout false. Clint Capela isn't the tallest center in the NBA but is an absolutely dominant defensive player. It's not about guarding all five players on the other team, it's about winning your matchup and providing help. In both scenarios, height isn't the most important thing at all. Jrue Holiday is also an elite defender but isn't very tall at all.
Height is a red herring; sometimes height can be used as a proxy in place of skill. The thing about elite levels of play, is that the skill level is so high that you can't really get away with lacking skill.
> Sure, Steph Curry is probably the most skilled player in the league. But do you think a team with five Steph Currys can beat a team with, say, five Paul Georges? I'm not so sure.
Steph's ability to set picks and create mismatches isn't nearly as good as his ability to use picks and exploit mismatches. Steph's playstyle is enabled by a totally different archetype of player. PG is a more "complete" offensive and defensive player.
Why should they exist? Sounds to me like you're suggesting that female people should be forbidden from organising their own sporting competitions unless it's mudwrestling, foxy boxing and such-and-such (to quote Homer Simpson).
For the same reason that weight classes exist and cause people to pay millions and millions to watch Floyd Mayweather box when a super heavyweight could pound him into pulp.
Spectator Sports: the act of deriving hope, happiness, failure, elation, frustration, and other emotions from the actions of others. See also: performing arts.
Competitive Sport: the act of determining your performance and subsequent identity/categorization by arbitrary comparison with other arbitrary individuals.
Here's an idea. Let's just let weightlifters lift weights. They can compare themselves to their previous efforts and broadcast their successes by beating their own PRs. If people want to find some sort of vicarious happiness from observing this process, set up (monetize) their efforts with something like Twitch.
This is a great idea in theory, but human nature is a pretty strong driver to be the best, fastest, strongest, and winningest when competing against others. Competition is hard-wired into us, and I'm skeptical that systems that strip that out will be viable or entertaining in the long term.
The idea that an athletic competition--conferring a first, second and third place, holds any substantial meaning at all is completely absurd. All other controversy simply flows from this fact.
Unfortunately, as a society, we've allowed people to tie their livelihoods to it: people spend their lives training for competitions and the prestige of winning them can directly contribute to their livelihoods through income from deals with sponsors, etc.
As long as there's agreement that it's unfortunate, we can discuss ways to dismantle the system in a way that doesn't destroy the livelihoods of many people. But I'm afraid most people don't agree that it's unfortunate.
Everyone knows that 99% of life is not under your control. But it can still be entertaining to design games around the (supposed) 1% that is under your control.
I encourage anyone interested in this subject to read this[0] article, it is a comprehensive analysis of the subject. If not the whole thing, at least the final sections "Recommendations and Conclusions" and "Executive Summary". It really underlines how complex this is.
What if women compete with/against men based on weight, or perhaps muscle mass class or something like that, could a gender-neutral competition be possible?
I always thought this category of problem would become acute when people with a disability became sufficiently augmented (with an advanced prosthesis for example) that they could compete with and eventually beat non-disabled athletes. At that juncture it would be necessary to create a new kind of Olympics for augmented people, because nobody wants to box with someone who has a terminator arm.
One possibility that could potentially work for certain sports, like weightlifting, where the competition is solely in terms of individual records, would be to do away with the existing division by weight and male/female and instead introduce a handicap model based on measured characteristics. For example, all players might be required to have blood testosterone levels recorded at regular intervals starting from a young age, and these measurements, along with characteristics like weight and height, could serve as inputs to the handicap model. The handicap model would be updated each year; potentially the model used in a given Olympic event for a given year could even be updated based on the results recorded in that same year.
Of course there are a lot of practical issues, and even if they were overcome, it is unclear that the results would be satisfying.
For example, several sports have weight classes which are of course "abused" (as in, the athlete will do as much effort to fit onto a lower class - going through severe diets and dehydration)
Now if instead of weight you would measure "fat free mass" and maybe height, this would leave much less margin for maneuvers.
(Or, ok, you could re-weight the athlete just before the competition and disqualify them if there's a bigger difference from the weighting date - that would work as well)
If you base it on trying to measure biological characteristics that we know (or think we know) affect performance, you are right--it would be impractical for all but leagues that the top athletes compete in.
If you made it based on past performance, though, it should be doable in even small amateur leagues.
That's how it works in chess. When you play tournament chess you get a rating based on your performances and the ratings of the established players you played.
Large tournaments use the "Swiss system". In round 1, you sort the players by rating, split the list in two, and the top rated player in the first list plays the top rated list in the second, and so on.
In subsequent rounds, you sort the players by results so far, split the list into separate lists for each score group, and then within each score group the top half by rating plays the bottom half.
Large tournaments typically have prizes for the top scores, but also "class" prizes. A class prize is for the top scores in certain rating ranges, say under 1800 or under 1200. A big tournament like the US Open might have a whole slew of class prizes, such as top score in under 1200, [1200, 1400), [1400, 1600), [1600, 1800), [1800, 2000).
There are women's chess tournaments but that is because much fewer women take up chess, and often women are uncomfortable if they are the only woman in a competition, especially at the scholastic level.
That environment can affect their performance due to "stereotype threat". When you are doing something in public that goes against a negative stereotype about your group you can feel a lot of pressure to avoid confirming the stereotype, and that extra pressure can actually make it harder for you to do your best. That in turn further discourages women from taking up tournament chess.
Interesting idea, but I doubt it would solve the issue at hand. The sport must still determine how to factor in variables like sex and prior advantages of testosterone. You can bet that these determinations would be heatedly argued and pressure from all sides (including corporate sponsors and activists) would most likely pollute the sport.
Well, once we figure out exactly what attributes make an athlete good at a given sport, we might as well skip the sport entirely. Just give the medal to the guy with the greatest genetic potential to be good at that sport.
You could do that, but few are interested in the answer to that question. People want to know who is fastest, strongest, ect, not most improved since birth.
The challenges people overcome makes for a good story, but is not the core competition.
if sex is a social construct and men and women are exactly the same then let’s just get rid of distinction between male and female sports and combine them.
women will never come in the top 100 again for the vast majority of sports, but it’ll force people to reconcile the contradictions they claim. or maybe they’ll just say sports are sexist
I also understand that the male puberty imprints into the muscle development for life.
As such, two opinionated observations:
1) Once you've done steroids you should be banned from high level competitions for life, not just 4 years or what.
2) Allowing someone who has experienced and lifted weights through and after male puberty to compete against those who have not is grossly unfair to cisgendered female lifters. See point 1.
Fully agree with your second point. Your first point touches on why it's such an interesting and difficult problem to solve.
1. Country-wide doping systems that currently exist in weightlifting. Punishing an individual lifter does little to disincentivize doping at a larger scope. A country's sports organization can just take on the next Olympic hopeful (or buy another country's). Alternatively whole countries' participation can be banned, punishing clean athletes.
2. WADA testing is largely inconsistent across the world. You can take a look at the doping reports [here](https://www.iwf.net/anti-doping/statistics/) and compare e.g. Iranian athletes to others.
3. "Steroids" is a big bucket. Weightlifting even now has devolved into a race to design the best undetectable compound.
The IWF is already in trouble with the IOC for so many positive tests - I'm really curious to see how things develop and whether weightlifting ends up splitting into tested/untested federations like powerlifting.
Thanks, appreciated that information about doping. It sure is a tricky subject in weightlifting; someone actually relatively clean (ie doing their best to only take approved or at least non banned supplements) their entire life would likely be considered at a disadvantage?
I'll read up on your resources - and yes, different rules across regions would be a big one.
Personally I just take Creatine and WPI, but I'm only training for functional fitness as a desk bound software engineer. Still, it's a very interesting topic; I do know someone who competes at a national level, and the routines and regimes are punishing.
It is indeed! PEDs provide such an advantage in Power sports, that anyone not on them is at a huge disadvantage.
> Personally I just take Creatine and WPI
All you need! Similarly I'm an engineer, I compete in a tested powerlifting fed, laying off the "extra supplements" for now.
the most elegant and fair solution to problems like this is to eliminate all gender distinctions in sports and collapse all leagues, competitions and record categories into a unified human category. let the best human win, regardless of their birth gender, sex preference, or sex organs at moment. yes, there will be certain sports or events that will tend to favor male. but there will be some that favor female. let the chips fall where they may. it will still be limited to humans, regardless. its not like human athletes will have to worry how they will compete in the Olympics in swimming against dolphins or sharks. Humans wont have to compete in sprinting against cheetahs or gazelles. wrestling against gorillas, etc.
I'd guess anything where hip area strength is critical. male bodies are at an advantage in terms of overall muscular and bone structure.
the larger point is its wiser to treat it as a competition between individuals. because. anytime we exclude someone based on non-individual traits then it means we are discriminating against them. and "discrimination is bad", no matter what.
Really? The most basic definition of "discrimination" is "to note or distinguish as different." Are you saying we should never be allowed to observe that, in reality, sometimes two things really are different from each other?
I don't have a big problem with people who "identify as" someone else. I have a big one with people who insist that *I* must call them in a particular way. It clashes with the idea that freedom of one person stops where freedom of another person starts. What about my right to call another person as I see them? This is invasive. I'm not telling them how to live - they are. This is *gaslighting* and promoting *taboos*.
Margaret Thatcher once said: "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
> I have a big one with people who insist that I must call them in a particular way. It clashes with the idea that freedom of one person stops where freedom of another person starts
So this would also apply to say, racial slurs and personal insults. Calling someone a name or the n-word instead of their name, that's a freedom? What about antisemitic slurs or insulting disabled people? How about just referring to women as sex objects, that's also within that rule. As well as doing the same for children or the deceased.
You don't expect people to be insulted by such things? Are you serious?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
> Freedom of speech[2] is a fundamental human right that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
The list of things at the forefront of you mind would fall under the above. You might get your teeth kicked in but by the actual freedom of speech definition rather than your own truths interpretation there would be no legal response.
It's true however that we don't actually subscribe to that definition any more, so you never know. Maybe you'll have your wish.
Huh? It's called criminal verbal threats and they're quite illegal.
Case laws have upheld them numerous times. This isn't "interpreted truths", racial slurs have been interpreted as intent and such things have been prosecuted.
Is that something I said? Did I call anyone a nigger, eskimo, blanca, rusek...? Or are you just misrepresenting my argument with a superficially similar one that's easy to refute? (straw man)
It's a completely different thing. I want my right to use neutral, non-offensive terms to describe people as I see them and not have people jump at me for that. It is possible to insult people by using neutral terms, but I think I've done my part and the ball is now on the other side of the court. Managing someone else's emotions is not my responsibility beyond not using words that are intentionally hurtful and untrue.
I could meet someone in a dark alley and that person might take offense that I don't give him my wallet. He might be even more offended if I call him a thief and a mugger. It may be a good idea at the time to give him that wallet, but I'm doing that because of intimidation. I don't want people to intimidate me when I don't deserve it. Just because someone feels offended doesn't necessarily mean they're right.
The purpose of a conversation should be to reach a mutual understanding. We start on two sides and hopefully meet somewhere in the middle... if both parties act in good faith. It's not always possible to achieve with everyone, and it's not always your fault. Sometimes the other person is messed up, for example takes offense very easily or insists that I accept their demands. Sometimes the other person is just unreasonable. As long as they are, I'll just stay clear off them.
I think nowadays Western society is too tolerant of intolerance. I feel we celebrate the right of people to be offended. This enables very thin-skinned and manipulative people. I could live with the thin-skinned, but they're extremely hard to separate from the manipulative.
I don't see anything offensive in calling someone "a man" or "a woman". If I do that, and you respond by labeling me as a "transphobe", fine, but as far as I'm concerned you are responding with a pejorative (unflattering) term to a neutral one.
643 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 398 ms ] threadBob is the winner of the #1 division, Amy is the winner of the #2 division, and so on.
All the tuples of athletes who tied get to be in one class; e.g. if three people crossed the 10,000 meter finish at 29:13, they are in that ability class together, tying for that class' first place. :)
:)
Then you end up with perverse incentives. The #1 person in the 2nd division doesn't really want to work harder to move up to the 1st division, because they're likely to never get beyond 10th or 9th or so. And the 10th place holder in the 1st division might find it more prestigious to slow down a little to try to take the #1 spot of the 2nd division.
In the 76-81kg womens bracket current record total (snatch + cnj) is 278kg. In the 73-81kg mens bracket the record total is 363kg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_weightlifting#Weight_c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_Olymp...
Testosterone actually is one of the aforementioned steroids. The first sentence of the article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone (at the time of this comment) is
> Testosterone is the primary sex hormone and anabolic steroid in males.
It’s probably not fair to put them against each other because of internal identity claims.
What is the hurry here? Why must we change women’s sports right now? Am I not told to “believe in science”? Where is the hard science on gender identity?
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061120561/
Republicans can't do climatology; Democrats can't do biology.
When it comes to powerlifting, I would bet on current or former members of one particular gender.
Women's sports are generally a carve-out. Women can't compete with men in most sports. Because of that, I don't think that women should be excluded from men's sports. "Men's sports" are just sports, and shouldn't be restrictive. Women's sports are a subset of sports where men have been excluded in order to give women a chance. If a woman is good enough to compete in "men's sports" she should (if she wants.) The opposite is not true. This is not a symmetrical situation. If transwomen are allowed to compete in women's sports, they will dominate women's sports.
I am struggling to come up with any that women as a generalized block might be naturally better at. Maybe some fineness movements like some forms of dance or balance.
Another user above nailed it, this is a newly self-inflicted problem.
https://www.insider.com/women-are-faster-long-distance-runne...
I think it would be more truthful to say as distances increase the ability for women to complete with men also increases but we have not yet found a distance where women have a definite advantage.
This BBC article covering this topic does much better at explaining the state of affairs:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-49284389
This is in no way meant to disparage what any of these athletes, male or female. When it comes down to grim determination and pushing the human body to its very limits men and women are the same, but it is also telling that we need to get to this point of pain management and mental fortitude to level the playing field.
https://www.planetizen.com/node/87885/going-gold-when-town-p...
I didn't find the overall argument persuasive, but i thought that was interesting.
[1] https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture
However, it presents a huge problem for women's athletics, particularly in sports where strength differences are a large determiner of performance differences. If, as it is said in some circles, a full .5% of the human population is transgender, we are going to continue to see huge increases in openly transgender people competing in sport. In sports where long term exposure to male hormones enhance performance, it's hard to see how life-long XX bodies will be able to compete. Which seems like a bad outcome since the whole point of the existence of women's sport is to allow women to have space to compete without facing insurmountable built-in disadvantages.
It may take a couple more decades but I don't see a stable equilibrium where MTF athletes are competing with cis-women in high level sport, especially if they made their transition during adulthood.
I would be fascinated to hear about different models for how this plays out. I've read the occasional news article about it but I'm not really very familiar with the thinking on the other side of this issue, particularly when it comes to the physical advantages trans women have over cis women in sport.
Instead of saying trans people are 100% identical to the gender they identify as, they'll be seen as something different. E.g., In Thailand there's the concept of kathoey (westerners refer to them as ladyboys). The Indian subcontinent and culturally related areas have hijra. They're not seen as the same as women, but they're not seen as men either. They're something else, and it's okay.
I've also seen a lot of westerners trying to push their ideas of gender globally and getting enraged when it doesn't fit. Some people get enraged when, for example, Thai kathoey aren't simply referred to as women, but for a lot of those people in Thailand, they don't see themselves as identical to women. So while trying to stop people from misgendering people, they overstep and misgender people who weren't being misgendered.
It's not surprising this debate is so broken when basic terms aren't even constant.
[0] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transgendered
Gender dysphoria is oftentimes treated via transitioning in some fashion. Having groupthink on online spaces doesn't alleviate symptoms.
I've never heard anyone except trans activists talking about the specifics of someone's trans-ness in an open setting. Certainly not something someone who's just trying to go about their day would even care about, let alone making a point that "hey by the way you're not biologically a woman, peace".
It's such a weird argument to me. Then again, I'm a dirty "transmedicalist" as labelled by the twitter trans community, so what do I know.
This is really not a good analogy. An identity-linked issue like this would be closer to someone not being included into a certain in-group.
For example an African-American who grows up in a predominantly caucasian could be called "not black" or "not black enough" by someone trying to hurt them based on the way they speak or act differently.
You can imagine that this would be alleviated by people not putting up arbitrary rules on who "can be called black".
So no, I disagree that it has any semblance to the "not black enough" argument.
Is it far-fetched to say that the severity of negative emotional and mental effects on a person depends on how accepting the culture is of those who do not fit into the majority?
Having gender dysphoria isn't a thing to be ashamed of, just any other mental health condition is not something to be ashamed of. Saying "you're a biological woman sis" is like saying "we're just going to act like you don't have it because it's shameful".
It doesn't make any sense from me, nor does it make sense to most of the trans individuals I follow. It seems, yet again, to be the allies that cause the most misinformation (just like we faced with the gay marriage debates).
This then reduces womanhood to a state of mind, rather than any physical and/or chemical criteria, which I think is wrong. Why should natural born women have their identity diluted?
It also seemingly reinforces the 'two genders' claim by categorising trans people as one or the other.
Like I said at the top, I am a bit confused by it all.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%...
> you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with
I have no problem with believing that some people aren't the gender they physically represent. But, in my mind, arriving to the conclusion that 'I don't identify as a male, therefore I must be female' isn't right.
> And why am I a woman? Because I'm a woman
Again, they don't actually know that they're a woman. They know they're not male, for sure, and I'm fully on board with that. But insisting that they're female... I'm not sure. Is 'trans woman' not sufficient?
Benjamin Boyce has a YT channel that deals with some of this stuff that I watch occasionally to try help understand.
I think for trans women, it isn't so much a conclusion following from not identifying as male as it is simply 'I identify as female', but this runs into the same issue that you brought up in your first comment of not actually knowing what being female is. But then again, doesn't knowing they're not male imply they know what being male is despite not being male? I think it's just too philosophical of a point for most trans people to concern themselves with when they're dealing with who knows how many other issues.
I recommend either reading or watching more stories about trans people's personal experiences if you want to get a better sense as to why people feel that way, as different people probably have different reasons. I don't personally have any recommendations (the quote I mentioned earlier was a small comment from a video on a completely unrelated topic), but thanks for the recommendation for Benjamin, I'll check him out!
Do you support applying that same logic to transracialism? E.g. white woman identifying as a black woman?
If it's purely a racial/ethnic kind of thing that's about your genetic heritage, I agree it doesn't make sense to apply the same concept. It's like the distinction between sex and gender I mentioned above, trans people identify as a specific gender regardless of their sex, and I think people can identify with a specific culture regardless of their race/ethnicity. To better complete the analogy, I could definitely imagine a white person growing up in Japan their whole life and feeling a general unease about the mismatch between their cultural identity (Japanese) and their race/ethnicity (white), and in cases where that unease is severe enough, potentially being willing to go through surgery to better reflect their identity. Dysphoria over racial/cultural mismatch (if it even exists, idk) seems much less common than gender dysphoria, but I don't see why you wouldn't apply the same logic to both.
It's not safe to say in liberal workplaces anymore, but this dynamic of transwomen activists forcing their way into women's spaces is creating exactly the same dynamic as men dominating women in other areas of life. As a woman, I'm tired of it. The latest example from my life: At my company all the women's groups are being rebranded to "gender minorities" groups to accommodate the wishes of a few activists deploying the usual bully tactics. If you disagree at all, you are labeled a TERF and they try to get you fired. So who, exactly, is creating the hostile workplace?
I first encountered this because I was puzzled as to why so many trans people seemed to be renforcing gender roles instead of trying to abolish them. The answer is that gender roles matter a lot to them, and fitting in matters a lot to them too. That's why I think the "third gender" solution would be really unsatisfying for most (or at least a part).
The argument that competing in Super-Heavy weight lifting (the class that Laurel competes in) is following a general western stereotype of cis women is laughable at best. I'd argue that by standards from the last 100 years it's almost as far from it as a sport can be.
But once nobody cares anymore and nobody is bothered by the existence of trans people, I wonder if that's when it'll settle into a separate gender. Things like the issue in this topic with imbalance in sports and other areas might eventually result in another change in social structures outside of a strictly binary system.
Now that it's being normalized that you don't have to be in either of those groups or even try to be anything like them, kids a generation from now might grow up with a different standard. Plus, honestly, despite what people try to say, kids put things into distinct groups. With a growing presence of trans people in media, I do wonder whether kids will grow up with the idea that "this is fine, but different." The trans people simply being the male/female gender they identify as is a social thing that we're taught to accept, which could very well change because the next generation doesn't think of it that way anymore.
See also: America's formerly strict ideas of race. Not long ago, you were white, black, or asian and society decided what you were. Now we accept that there are in betweens and people outside those labels, and none of them are bad identities to have.
"In the Diné language, there are at least six genders: Asdzáán (woman), Hastiin (male), Náhleeh (feminine-man), Dilbaa (masculine-woman), Nádleeh Asdzaa (lesbian), ‘Nádleeh Hastii (gay man). All come from the Diné creation story, in which asdzáán and hastiin, a cisgender married couple, were not getting along and separated. When that happened, dilbaa and náhleeh emerged from hiding and were seen as a special group that could perform the duties of both women and men, stepping into the vacated partner roles. They were accepted by asdzáán and hastiin, who realized their survival depended on them."
https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.2/indigenous-affairs-why-are-d...
Some "male" graves (buried with weapons, armour, etc) have female skeletons in them. And some "female" graves (pots, jewellery, broaches) have male skeletons in them. This is not disputed by anyone, the skeletal and DNA analysis is unequivocal.
But all the writing we have from the period only mentions standard sex/gender roles (all warriors are "he", all primary care givers are "she", there's no mention of homosexuality, etc).
However, all the written evidence we have is from christian sources, and as we know, christianity (especially catholic christianity) has been pretty pro-patriarchy since the start. So while there's no evidence for it, one explanation is that the original pagan Saxon culture had different ideas about gender and sexuality, but this got edited out by the monks transcribing the old pagan sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathoey#Miss_Tiffany's_Univers...
Genes for height, genes for fast twitch muscles, testosterone, etc… aren’t the same for different groups. Some of these disadvantages are just as insurmountable.
Many sports are closed to poor people. Equestrian, sailing, etc… aren’t sports for the poor.
Richer countries often have better technology (see those Nike shoes and the swimsuits that were banned).
We are just in the land of competing interests.
To be completely clear, in some sports there appears to be a moderate risk that elite cis-women will be completely unable to compete with elite trans-women. This is going to be visible and apparent. I don't think this will be acceptable to the most people, and they will likely look to change the system.
Nit-picking your other points: there are not really any popular rich-people-only sports any more, except perhaps auto racing. I don't think broader society is all that interested in the egalitarian properties of yacht sailing. R.e. the clothing technology: yes, and those things were banned because of the advantage they conferred. That's exactly what I'm talking about here.
I can assure you, from personal experience, that rowing, cycling, tennis, and lacrosse are overwhelmingly wealthy sports. You don’t have to pass a credit check to play them, but they are absolutely a class apart (both economically and racially) versus sports like baseball and basketball.
Is basketball a conspiracy against short people? Weightlifting for tall people? Are combat sports full of weight-ist people who won't allow a heavyweight pound a welterweight? Is football the least ideological sport because it allows a greater variety for BMI and height?
Let us not bury the glaringly obvious fact that sex is a category with one of the strongest, if not the strongest, explanatory power for performance across almost the entirety of athletic endeavors in existence.
Height is a huge advantage in basketball. The average height of an NBA player is over 6’5”. Height is mostly genetic except for malnutrition. Different populations have different average heights.
The optimal build for a weightlifter is to have short arms and legs and to have the two parts be of equal length. That is mostly genetic. Of course different population groups have differences here as well.
Weight is an advantage in combat sports both because you can dish out more and because you can absorb more punishment. I suspect that high bone density is advantageous and is mostly genetic. Different populations have different bone densities.
No one is denying that sex has explanatory power. The point is that many other things have explanatory power as well and that choosing which categories to consider is ideological.
Why have separate sports for sex? Why have separate weight classes? Why have a minimum age requirement for gymnasts? Why not allow professionals until 1992?
Why not have separate height classes for basketball? Why not have separate weight classes for football?
No need to complicate; if we didn't have sex segregated sports, for almost all sports (save for maybe open ocean swimming), we couldn't have any women competing at all[1]. In fact there are "battle of sexes" type exhibition matches that demonstrate the rough placement eg Braasch vs. the Williams sisters.
[1] To expand this statement because I know some people will get offended; this doesn't mean men are better at sports than women. It says, at the tail end of distributions, where most of the professional sports are played, tail end of men's distribution will be better than tail end of women's, leaving no opportunity for women to compete if distributions are intermixed.
So unless you have hard statistics to back up these claims or are an expert in one of these fields, I would go with the experts' decision to sex segregate their leagues because they might know a few things or two we won't necessarily consider.
Just from my amateur interest; for outdoors archery, the draw strength matters a lot for accuracy, in curling likewise drive and sweeping strength make a difference.
Skiing is expensive for most people, but having grown up in a mountainous area, most kids could and did go skiing for very cheap.
Trans women have been able to compete for years in Olympic level sport, and they haven't wiped the floor with cis women. I fail to see evidence of the problem - I see a lot more evidence of it being a culture war and TERF talking point.
It also doesn't really line up with the fact that we fawn over genetic quirks that let Michael Phelps dominate his sport. If we think that certain sorts of genetic quirks are unfair in women's sport, why do we allow them in men's?
I appreciate that you’ve said this so concisely and clearly. The Olympics are, overwhelmingly, a show of extraordinary human abilities. Singling out transwomen for scrutiny and prejudice amounts to special pleading.
We can’t change anything about how others are; we can only better ourselves. Telling transwomen that they can’t perform athletic excellence on their own terms is myopic and inconsistent with our own praise for factors outside of our control. Worry less about them, and more about yourself.
to nail this point home: if you are training to ride a bike and you’re the best in the world at it and after that someone comes along with an electric bike and wants to “compete” with you you’re gonna have a problem. nothing wrong if everyone has an electric one and the sport involves electric bikes. something is wrong if someone brings an electric bike and claims the bike is the same as the others.
We are not arguing the virtues of athleticism I don't understand why you wrote that.
Yours is a non-argument.
These are not the same thing. Michael Phelps dominated the sport as a whole, males and females. A genetic quirk to be the best of the world vs a genetic quirk to be a big fish in a small pond (with all respect to females powerlifters, but males just have better records) is not the same at all.
I think a better comparison is one made in the article, to steroids. Steroids are just testosterone after all. Imagine someone put steroids in the food of a powerlifter for 20 years (I'm using this metaphor because I don't want to insinuate that the powerlifter did it on purpose). Do you think it would be fair to let them compete? Stopping them from competing is unfair to them, but allowing them is unfair to all other powerlifters.
If I’m a 240lb judoka, it would be unfair for me to compete in the 160lb weight class just because I feel thin on the inside.
Second of all, there are physical changes from hormone replacement therapy. associated with transitioning. This is absolutely not "240lb judoka feeling thin on the inside" and not absurdly cut and dry like you suggest.
Reasonable: see the above. Also, implied by the users of the term itself. If a T.W. is a W., why do they say T.W.?
If a human female is a human, why do we say human female? Because it adds additional, usually relevant, context.
These drugs do not "erase" the biological reality of sex differences.
This has always been a problem, but one where all but the sports most extremely affected, like e.g. weightlifting with weight classes, have pretended it is not.
In powerlifting there additionally are "tested" and "untested" federations, where it's an open secret that the untested federations are full of steroids.
The point being that one can keep pretending these differences don't exist and agonise over the effect trans people may have, or you can introduce class systems that equaliser by physical characteristics irrespective of sex and gender.
Be prepared to see a lot of dropouts/boycotts by various nations in the Olympics. Eastern nations are not going to stand by silently. Some will shrug and directly enlist straight men in Women's events.
In fact, the limit for testosterone is significantly lower than for cis women, being a significant disadvantage for trans athletes, which is why in all the decades trans athletes have been allowed, you haven't seen any.
Cis women with higher levels of testosterone, e.g. caster semenya, are already dominating the olympics, having natural hormone levels that'd be an immediate disqualification for any trans athlete.
This is also a strategy that has been used for doping, where athletes in their teens get pumped full of steroids, then go clean for some years and are suddenly very competitive in the 'clean' divisions.
The weightlifting rules allows trans athletes to have testosterone levels of 10nmol/L. Some sports are 5nmol/L.
Normal range for men is 9-31nmol/L
Women range from 0.9-2.5nmol/L
Even these guys (link below) who argue that the limits are arbitrary then go on to point to study in which 11 of 234 female athletes had T levels of 8nmol/L and 32 had 2.6nmol/L. 74 of 446 male athletes had 8.4nmol/L.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/mar/20/testosterone-l...
So pretty much every genuinely trans athlete will have a disadvantage compared to cis female athletes.
In fact, even pre transition, my levels were lower than those of 11 of 234 cis female athletes, so I never got any of the "benefits" testosterone supposedly has.
None of your statistics are an argument for banning or restricting trans athletes.
We're discussing literally the first trans woman to compete at the Olympics. Obviously going from 0 to 1 is a huge increase in percentage terms, but there's no evidence that it's going to continue to the point where women's sports are 'destabilised'.
A girl who's case is heading up to U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit wrote a post on USAToday a month ago before USAToday edited her post without her permission and made changes to it:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/05/22/transgende...
She did an interview last week:
https://youtu.be/5HYL9pJGs8w
My proposal would clearly suck for MTF athletes. They'd be forced to either drop from competitions, or compete in the men's league. An MTF athlete competing in a men's league is likely to experience disphoria. It will also probably attract people saying "Look they are still a man, they are even in the mens league!". Both of these would be very hard to handle for MTF athletes. Probably causing many of them to drop from professional competition.
I hope this would be addressed partially by not having a "mens league" but an "open league" and a "womens league".
But otherwise, I think this is acceptable fallout to keep athletic competition fair. Yes, this policy will harm MTF athletes, and that is simply unfair. But the alternate policy is even more unfair. It might not harm individual MTF athletes, but it harms the acceptance of trans people in wider society a lot. Moreover, it harms athletes in general a lot.
In the end, I feel the following harsh sentiment. If you are truly MTF, then transitioning is probably more important than keeping your profession. It really sucks to force people to give up their profession when they are already going through a tough time. But I don't see any other way.
Of course it is possible that we collectively decide that it's ok that cis women have no chance of winning the Olympic weightlifting gold ever again. That seems like a bad outcome to me, but I am only a single voice. If the relevant stakeholders are ok with that it won't be a great tragedy to me that my opinion is ignored. But, for example, my wife had a very negative reaction when I posed that scenario to her. It seems to me like as the implication of current policy becomes more clear, more folks are going to want to change the policy.
That is not what the research I have seen shows. And the incident being discussed in the story we are commenting on seems to put the lie to this notion.
Whilst there are indeed cases of trans athletes with lower testosterone, that doesn't cover all cases. And it is the remaining cases that matter. Don't underestimate the damage this is doing. I visit 9gag quite often. The population there is not trans positive (and generally intollerant). Memes against trans people have become a lot more prevalent there. It is galvanizing a lot of simmering sentiment against trans people.
And the scary thing is, on this specific issue of MTF athletes, their argument doesn't immediately fall apart. That is not the kind of foothold we should want for them.
Actually, AFAIK some (many? the majority? almost all? who knows...) of what we think of as "mens leagues" are already "open leagues". Can't recall if it was our national football league (Finland's Valioliiga), or the UEFA or FIFA (maybe all of them?) that simply doesn't have a rule "the Valioliiga / UEFA Champions League / Euro Cup / FIFA World Cup is only for men". So in theory women could compete there, too... They just don't.
Also, this incentivizes male athletes that can't win medals but are close to take hormone replacement theory solely so they can compete in the much easier female category and win medals, which runs in the same arguments against doping.
On the other hand, if you don't, then MtF transgender people are not likely to win anything, since hormone replacement therapy reduces performance (but not enough to match non-SRY people).
This might seem absurd but when you consider that they already go to extreme lengths to sneak in highly dangerous and life altering drugs just to win, I can see it happening.
I don't think it's odd to leave out of the question, since there would be very little opposition to such a proposal.
The argument against would be mostly twofold: 1) it might be 'weird' to have a 'girl' in the men's locker room 2) depending on the sport, there might be an issue of safety
either way, not a big deal- as some other commenter said on here, women's sports is a carveout for a specific demographic (biological females, as if that's in question), and transgenders of all kinds would be much more welcome in regular 'men's' sports, or their own 'hormone free-for-all' programs, than an already established subgroup that does not wish to be so infiltrated.
Ok, that is a plausible argument. However, it's missing one major component: How could anyone argue that this is one of the aspects or life where it is actually possible to treat someone as their preferred gender? If I had to cherry pick an example of an aspect of life where it is not possible to treat a transgender person as their preferred gender, it would be Olympic sports.
That's probably precisely why they are doing this. They're obviously trying to make a political statement. They want it to be the inspiring event that puts this Olympics in the history books. But I mean... Come on people, there are obvious reasons why this athlete is not going to be remembered heroically for their political message in the same way as someone like Jesse Owens.
It’s not odd, because it just hasn’t come up as an issue. In fact most pro sports leagues are not men-only. If a woman or f2m transgender could make the cut on an NFL team, there are no rules against it.
[0] - https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of...
[1] - https://globalsport.asu.edu/sites/default/files/resources/gs...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I could write more on the arguments both sides present, but that's the crux of it.
For the supporters of trans-women being women, is there a canonical / generally accepted list of criteria which would classify people "objectively" as a woman? If there is such a thing as a group of people that can be called "women", how would membership in that group be established?
I.e., what really is a woman?
Is there some principled way to decide what things one can self define as and which one can't?
For the record, people have self-identified as being Black:
* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jessica-krug-rachel-do...
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/rachel-dolez...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
However, race is also socially constructed, so it's tricky. People who claim to be "trans-racial" are still regarded as delusional by society despite this. This is mostly just the position of the society we are in.
But there is something more that makes gender transition more valid than racial "transition": Gender dysphoria is a real condition, that has the medically recommended solution of social and medical transition. This is a good reason for why society should adjust it's social construction of gender, and this is why it is happening right now. To date, "race dysphoria" is not medically recognized and has not been formally observed. It has no history dating back hundreds of years like being transgender does.
This lying to get an advantage can potentially apply to trans people in sports too. People are always claiming that near elite male athletes who can't win in men's competitions will just say they are women to face easier opponents, but we haven't really seen any evidence of that occurring. This is primarily because the obstacles to check a box on a college application are so drastically different than the obstacles in front of someone who wants to publicly and officially change their gender. Considering that, I think the best approach is to not waste too much energy on "fixing" this problem until it is actually shown to be a problem.
It's not fucking hard is it?
It’s amazing our collective intelligence has dropped this far. We solved this problem quite a long time ago…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCllerian_agenesis
> The first, preferred by Fowler, is that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. A more explicit phrasing might be "the exception that proves the existence of the rule".[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
Or perhaps:
> The phrase means that an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases. In other words, a general law is better drafted for the average circumstance as this will be more common.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law
Further it can be argued that the fact that a defect is present in the biological system does not invalidate the presence of said system generally. The complete lack of a system could be the determining factor.
"XX division", "XY world record". "XXY 400 m finals", "XYY long jump trials", ...
Gender identity doesn't factor into it at all; the words "man", "woman" should not be used.
Problem solved; you don't get to wedge yourself into competition with XX persons if you're XY.
;)
What about trans men who where assigned female at birth? Are they allowed to take testosterone and still compete against XX women?
It would be amusing though, because it would be a category where all the women would be beating all the men at weightlifting.
I don’t know what this “assigned female” phrase means, can you explain? And no, I’m pretty sure shooting up testosterone is a no-no in the Olympics.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment
EDIT: It’s rather underhanded to abuse the edit button to silently correct your comment, causing replies to not quite make sense. That’s why people here signal that they’ve edited a comment in cases like this.
(EDIT to your edit: I changed the text on that comment and then spent a couple extra minutes rephrasing this comment before I posted it. Probably I should have done those in the other order, sorry about that.)
> Are they allowed to take testosterone
Absolutely not; however, doped sports could be yet separate category. There is probably audience money in it, like in monster trucks and WWF wrestling.
- intersex people whose phenotype and genotype don’t match (putting them in the “wrong” category)
- chimeric people who belong in different categories depending on which part of their body you sample
- probably other edge cases I’m not thinking of.
If your goal is just to put people into categories, it’s probably a lot less controversial to split them based on if their earlobe is attached and whether they can curl their tongue.
For example we've gone from: (some male terms I apparently can't use anymore) to transwoman to ciswoman to biological woman.
And in every case the transwomen demands to be included in the "new" category, and everyone else has to come up with another term to differentiate.
This doesn't replace trait-based subcategorization. E.g. the category XX wrestling still has weight classes.
* X – Female
* XX – Female
* XXY – Male
* XY – Male
* XYY – Male
* XXXY – Male
https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-a...
XX with SRY region on one of the X: Male
XY with androgen insensitivity: female
There's a lot more of a spectrum than you'd think.
Many of the cis female athletes currently winning in the olympics, e.g. caster semenya, have significantly higher testosterone levels than would be legal for trans female athletes.
I think its time to do away with separations on sex, and go with ones based on ability and size. Boxing does it with weight classes, why can't we do it with everything?
> Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.
Karsten Braasch (peaked out at around 40th worldwide) beat both of the Williams sisters (both rank 1 players) back-to-back. He was twice their age and known for smoking cigarettes during changeovers. Male weightlifting records are hundreds of pounds higher than women's records. There are thousands of male sprinters who have posted a better time than the _world record_ female sprinter. I don't think there's even any data to compare men vs. women in combat sports like boxing because anybody who has ever paid any attention to sports can tell you it's an awful idea.
Yeah, we could do away with the separations, as long as you can accept that women will almost always take the back-seat at high levels of play.
Actually there is in the world of MMA. MtF fighter Fallon Fox dominated lots of biologically female fighters, in one particularly nasty incident it took her less than 3 minutes to give Tamikka Brents a concussion, a broken orbital, and leave her needing a bunch of staples to patch her skin back together [0].
If you do read the article, Tamikka Brents explains she is an abnormally strong woman, she is, but not compared to Fallon Fox. Tamikka Brents [1]. Tamikka Brents and Fallon Fox weigh in [2].
[0] https://www.attacktheback.com/transgender-mma-fighter-fallon... [1] https://www.sherdog.com/fighter/Tamikka-Brents-70699 [2] http://whoatv.com/fallon-fox-vs-tamikka-brents-fight-video/
I've often heard that women (in general) have ~5% more body fat percentage than males, because of how their body work. That means that if you have two 100kg people in optimal conditions, a man and a woman, the man would have on average 5kg of muscle more than the woman. This is a HUGE difference and wouldn't make for fair fights.
It's very sad that this is a political issue - it makes any reasonable solution impossible. Any restrictions that liberals might find practical and fair (like a ban on competing where muscles are involved) will inevitably be used by conservatives to justify bigotry and prejudice in a number of other areas (exclusion from public bathrooms, for example, or even restrictions based on race, nationality or sexuality).
Another interesting aspect is that New Zealand now has a much better chance to get a medal in this event. Given the importance that some countries give to winning the games, e.g China and Russia, might they push to have more MtF athletes of their own.
Are you suggesting that they might force some of their athletes to transition in order to gain an advantage at the olympics? These societies are not friendly to trans people in general, so I have some doubts they would elevate people who pursued transition themselves.
One thing I'd like to add is that this is, by definition, a hard problem. The fact is sex and gender exists on a continuum, even if 99% of the time it seems binary. Anyone who says that the "other side" in this situation (regardless of which side they are on) is being idiotic is ignoring a lot of inconveniently difficult truths.
I was with you until this statement. Sex is a millions-of-years-old discrete variable; it depends on whether you could produce the bigger gamete (called egg) or the smaller one (sperm). Gender is a continuous variable with a strongly bimodal distribution.
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/File/051_...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/visualizing-s...
Most (but not every) step on that continuum are known as diseases of sexual development [0].
These arguments often come up in discussions around trans issues, but its a trick of misdirection, although the DSD community does have a higher incident of gender identity issues (which is what you'd expect), around 5%, 1% that actively changed their gender, the lack of transition within the DSD community seems to suggest DSD and gender dysphoria are not related phenomenon.
The idea that sex is a continuum, based on known disorders, is like saying human bipedalism is a continuum due to people being born with less than 2 full legs, or more than 2 legs (extra toes), or losing them in later life. Although technically correct the observation does not really change the conversation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29606626/
[edited for clarity] added: the lack of transition within the DSD community
Also: people with Klinefelter Syndrome are male.
And before you say "this is purely hypothetical, these sorts of conditions would never affect the practical sorts of discussions we are having here about olympic games", no, it is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foekje_Dillema.
> the gametes are eggs or sperm ... there is no law of nature that ... there aren't intermediate states for any specific dimension
Sorry for butchering your sentence but wanted to respond very specifically.
Sex, which is by far not exclusive to humans, has one primary purpose and that is sexual reproduction. And quite a lot there is governed by laws of nature. There are 2 sexes and not 1 or 3; 1 means cloning yourself and that does not introduce sufficient variance to fight against environmental change, 3 partners are combinatorially more difficult than 2 to bring together. Why gametes are dimorphic; sexual reproduction only needs exchange of genetic material, but the initial cell needs tons of other organelles to bootstrap. A process where either gamete can bring any of the organelles is exponentially more error prone and difficult to coordinate. Hence the small gamete having the bare bones mobility machinery to bring the genetic material to the heavier gamete.
There is no gamete that's between sperm or egg. Even in super rare species where an individual can change sex (some fish does this) they switch to their sex matching gamete entirely, and don't produce an inbetweener.
We can talk about continuity among secondary manifestations of sex, we can talk about fluidity of gender roles etc. and all would be fair game. But we can't call sex anything other than a discrete, binary category without destroying its scientific, cross-species, cross-millions-of-years, universal definition.
At a bare minimum, you would have to make an allowance for the "third sex" (as you define it) of those who do not produce any gametes. Remember, we are talking about sex in humans, not sex in human gametes. I do not dispute that human gametes are strictly binary; the question is about classifying individuals, for which the binary classification is obviously not absolute, even on the question of gamete production.
Re intersex; congenital anomalies do not define a category (if the term congenital anomaly offends you, I am using the WHO definition). Just like if we would say "humans have one head" we would be excluding congenital twins, or with "five fingers" we would be excluding polydactyly.
“Sex” could be interpreted to mean a statement about chromosomes, in which case there are more than two variants.
Or it could be interpreted to be a statement about reproductive potential, in which case the “two sexes” model is a better fit, because there’s no intermediate gamete between sperm and egg. Do intersex conditions break this model? Almost always not: the variations of sex development are variations on the male pattern and the female pattern. Are there exceptionally rare individuals that defy categorisation? Surely there are, but the existence of extreme, rare outliers doesn’t invalidate the model.
Which definition is most useful? In the context of women’s rights, it’s clearly the latter. Women suffer discrimination based on their reproductive biology, not based on their chromosomes. It’s also the model that the vast majority of people use as their everyday working definition of sex.
So I think anyone who wants to claim there are more than two sexes must accept the responsibility to qualify their terminology.
Yes, it could - by people who don't know what the word "sex" means. Sex isn't about chromosomes, it's about gametes, and sex chromosome variants aren't separate sexes. For example, people with Klinefelter Syndrome (XXY) are male. This isn't hard.
https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-a...
> What’s important to note is that the presence of a Y chromosome, or two, or three, etc., all result in the development of testes and therefore these individuals are biologically male. Likewise, individuals with additional or fewer X chromosomes, in the absence of a Y, all develop ovaries and are therefore biologically female.
Looking at things like testes and ovaries is only one part of things, and not some universal definition scientists accept. The author even admits in the comment some people may have both. We also know that some people make have one of these but appear oppositely on the inside/outside.
> This isn't hard.
From my experience, it is deeply complex.
> Effectively regulating sports divisions based on sex using science is impossible. There are no singular or combinations of objective criteria that can define each sex. Prior attempts to govern sports eligibility based on sex using existing testing methods have failed to provide a workable solution based on chromosome composition, physical exam, etc. In other words: we have no way to consistently differentiate male from female and we have never possessed the ability to do so. Gender and sex are not the same thing. Sex is typically assigned at birth based the appearance on appearance of external genitalia and or chromosomal makeup, whereas gender is socially constructed and may vary from culture to culture and/or change over time. However, sex is difficult to dichotomize into two binary divisions because there are a number of different chromosome compositions consistent with either male or female phenotypes. The phrase “biological sex” is meaningless and is ill-advised.
From https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gend...
It is also incorrect to describe sex as a continuum. On a continuum we can increase or decrease a value. The number line, for example, is a continuum. We can find the integer immediately larger or smaller than a given integer. It would be incoherent to pick a woman and ask who is incrementally more feminine than her or incrementally less. We can't sort people by how male they are. I think "bimodal distribution" is a more apt description than continuous or continuum.
Not all women are allowed to participate in powerlifting competitions. For example, people not qualified couldn't. People that are known steroids abusers couldn't. That doesn't make them less women.
> "So why is it still a question whether two decades, from puberty to the age of 35, with the hormonal system of a man also would give an advantage [in competing against women]?
The issue would be the same with a long term steroid user consider how it was worded.
Yes, they are trying to be politically correct, since you are basically forced to talk about it only in a politically correct way. Her statement reads to me like she is not allowed to tell directly what she thinks about it, so needs to describe it in a roundabout way. And that worries me more than the women's weightlifting itself.
Not quite. Vanbellinghen is asserting that Hubbard should not compete in the women's league. That is different from asserting she should not compete as a woman. She then continues to argue this is not because her identity is not female, but because of biological reasons.
This is coherent because the point of a Women's league (in weight-lifting at least) isn't to segregate women from men, but to give women a place to compete without being crippled by biologically determined dis-advantages.
Things get complicated because the reason for a Women's league existing, and the actual written rules around it do not quite line up. It might even be the case that for Hubbard to compete as women means she could not enter the men's league. That would then probably be a moral mistake in the rules.
Women who take performance enhancing drugs are also disqualified from competing. No one is challenging their identity as a woman, just the fairness of their competing against women without that advantage. It is not a moral prohibition against consuming certain substances, but a practical prohibition because it makes competing on a level playing field impossible.
The same is true of trans atheletes. They have an advantage other women do not. Women's sports were invented precisely for that reason: natal males have an advantage that means most natal females are not competetive against them in most sports.
Imagine a woman born with only one arm complaining that Vanbellinghen had an insurmountable natural advantage in weight lifting. The one armed woman would be correct. There is a Special Olympics where disabled people can compete and it would be incredibly unfair for fully-abled competitors to enter the Special Olympics. Analogously there is an Olympic division where Hubbard could fairly compete (the men's) and another division where Hubbard has an unfair advantage (the women's).
If Hubbard is a woman then Hubbard has a distinct natural advantage. To wit, Hubbard was born and developed physiologically as a man. Hubbard didn't attain this advantage unfairly by using steroids. We don't disqualify any other competitor because of the physiological advantages of their natural bodies. Why should Hubbard be disqualified? The only coherent argument is that Hubbard is not actually a woman and should compete in the men's division. This is a denial of Hubbard's identity.
Not even taking transgenderism into account, I think it is a very difficult problem of how to handle people have been born with intersex characteristics in sports. On the one hand, the argument can be made "how is this different than other natural variation that makes someone good at sports", but on the other hand, since testosterone has such a powerful effect, it means that women sports can only be won by those with a genetic abnormality that causes high testosterone (a couple of years ago all three of the top finishers at an international track and field competition were intersex - I'm blanking on the competition but Caster Semenya was one of them).
No one needs to deny their identity as woman to also question whether, in one example, internal testes gives someone an unfair advantage in women's sports.
I’m not against any gender doing what they wish.
But really, the point is when you (by nature) have testosterone coursing through your bloodstream… even if you transitioned, by the very nature of things you have an advantage of strength, agility, speed and desire over your female peers.
As much as we would love to believe it, men are wildly physically different from women. And that’s how nature intended it for whatever reasons nature intended.
You can see it in the sports stats very clearly for every sport where women and men compete.
Men and woman are not the same and can never be. Each has strengths and weaknesses which make them fit very well together.
I understand the need to transition. But sports is one of those examples that we can’t put our head in the sand and believe we live in a world of make-believe.
By the very nature of things LeBron James has an advantage of strength, agility, and speed over me. (no clue why you included desire in your comment)
Basically every elite athlete is born with a genetic predisposition to be better at their sport than the average person. It takes a lot of determination and training to reach that full potential, but let's not pretend that people are born on equal footing.
Also it’s been very well proven that testosterone leads to more desire/ambition call it what you will.
Women who take testosterone generally report feeling more ambitious and have more sexual desire as a by product.
What this means is that most females will be removed from sport since they can't compete with the average male athlete. Society has spoken already and decided they want to see female athletes which is why many male only sports have started their own female only sides.
This is a truly unfortunate edge case where trans people have an unfair advantage on one gender side and an unfair disadvantage on the other side. Perhaps the only fair way to do things would be to have trans only teams but the numbers probably don't work out. Or to have trans people pick sports where physical strength is not at play like motor racing, shooting, chess, etc.
Most of the popular sport leagues don't have any rules disallowing female competitors. I'm sure the NHL, NBA, NFL, MLS, MLB, Premier League etc. would love to have a female player that was good enough because it would be a marketing dream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manon_Rh%C3%A9aume
Even at those non-physical sports, men still have a big advantage, it shows in all of the sports you listed and e-sport. Gender split in sports is there to protect women. The men sport is actually a game for "the best of the best", I don't think there would be any complain if there's a woman (cis or trans) want to challenge that space.
One has to completely ignore reality to try to pretend that is a fair competition. One other thing to note from that graph is the worst performance from a man was significantly better than the best performance from cis-woman. Testosterone makes you stronger, who knew?
Considering that voicing your support for Hubbard comes with basically no personal or professional cost, while voicing your opposition can cost you dealy, I'm going to assume that since most people have remained silent then the majority agrees with Anna Vanbellinghen.
This isn't that different.
If you want to talk respectfully about the implications of transgender athletes in sport, that's one thing. But what you are doing is not that. You're trying to dismiss the plight of trans people at large.
What I have an issue with is this type of behavior where they turn things upside down without any care for others. In this case, they're stealing glory from and seriously hampering the careers of lifelong female athletes.
Imagine lifting since you were a teenage girl, and someone else in their mid 30's, who would not have qualified for the men's competition, comes along to take your Olympic medal after going through a sex change procedure. It's deeply disrespectful to women. It requires a certain zealotry to bully your way into female spaces like this.
That said, I don't really agree with this clarification either: no trans woman is setting out to have gender reassignment to bully their way into competing against women who were lifting since they were teenagers. I think you are attributing this to malice that is simply not there, and it is only an artifact of unfortunate circumstance. Trans women certainly don't want to be in this situation either: I'm sure they would much rather be born biologically female and compete that way!
If we're talking about someone who transitions in their teens and has no other options for sport in their adolescence, I would agree that's a much more difficult and ambiguous situation.
This is the problem. There's no difference to people. Arguing any nuanced part of the conversation is often met with exaggerated reactions of "you're anti-trans" or "you're dismissing transexualism as a whole", which is not the case.
So yes, the pro-trans movement on many online spaces is very ideological - they even claim it themselves (transmedicalism vs. gender identity, etc). Very little of it these days is based on science or medical prognosis.
I do understand as well your reticence around the ideological space that a lot of online spaces take place in. To that I’d just say that this stuff is fairly new, and you have a lot of young people finding and differentiating their identities as they’re going through quite a process.
My opinion is frankly it’s a wonderful thing, to have it so people can prioritize their emotional well being enough to not have their natural individual differentiations beat out of them as so many cultures have done. In doing so, discovering how much of a thing gender dysphoria is for some, and allowing them to lead much much better lives.
Hubbard has been free to do olympic weightlifting her entire life. Against similarly bodied individuals (men).
I too am excluded from competing in women's weightlifting contests. That is absolutely for the best (though everyone we're talking about here can likely lift more than I can).
What other animals have a similar level of consciousness? You can‘t form the idea that you are “in the wrong body” unless that idea has been provided to you by your culture. You need linguistic and social support to even have the concept.
EDIT: Oh, you may be interested in the phenomenon of what you might call “trans” non-human animals: individuals who behave like those of the opposite sex. Apparently in some species their physical characteristics can even change, such as female lions that grow manes. But nobody is confused enough to say “trans lady lions are lady lions“; that confusion is reserved for humans. In mammals, the sex can not change. But it‘s an interesting phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage
If you have a peer-reviewed study, that would be much more worthwhile to look at.
The layman's explanation of the phenomenon is that parents observe a rapidly onset expression of gender dysphoria in their teenage daughters which "seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe."
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/16/academics-ar...
Abigail Shrier is a writer and not a scientist, and it can be clearly seen even from the title of the book that she has an agenda. The thesis of the book has been "rejected by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage
If you have a peer-reviewed study, that would be much more worthwhile to look at.
Interviewing parents seems like a problematic basis for an entirely new condition to me.
In my puberty I had a strong feeling of rather being a girl and this caused significant mental anguish and some self harm. If had known as much about transgender people back then as I do know I would have likely transitioned then.
Today I'm pretty okay with being a man. I still sometimes have problems with it but not in the same order of magnitude.
From these personal experiences I think it is plausible that more people transition because more people are aware of the possibility and knowing other trans people in their age. I have no idea how big that group is however.
This is an interesting case that went through the UK courts. Very analogous to OP’s situation had it happened today.
Are you.... sure about this? Like how sure are you? What do you think you know?
The human body changes surprisingly fast. Astronauts that stay in outer space for too long can't even walk when they return to earth. That "too long" is like... a year basically.
A "lifetime" of muscle mass will last for how long once someone starts taking androgen blockers then estrogen?
The reality is while we think of 'sex' as being some kind of chromosomal thing, that isn't what really separates the 'genders'. After all, apart from genitals, there is little external difference in babies. So it isn't exactly the XY/XX... of course one might say "but that happens during puberty", which is what exactly? The significant rise of sex-hormones. As the saying goes "if you can't make your own, store bought is fine" (regarding neuro-transmitters, sex hormones, etc).
So, are you SURE that an individual that "lived in the prime of their life as a man" is just as strong as they once were once they have spent years on hormone therapy? If you're sure, why are you sure? "I don't think it's fair" ... but why? Is is fair to trans athletes?
> Vanbellinghen, 27, whose qualifying efforts were disrupted by injury, pointed out that the retained benefit of taking steroids, even years earlier, is widely known.
It's easier to regain lost muscle mass than it is to gain it in the first place.
Yes. Male puberty confers lifelong physical advantages on the body in terms of muscle mass, heart size, lung capacity and bone density. That's why men dominate women physically in every sport, which is why women have their own special sporting categories so that they stand a chance. Hormone therapy reduces these advantage but it doesn't eliminate them.
> Is it fair to trans athletes?
Probably not, but then is it fair to wheelchair-bound athletes that they're physically incapable of competing with Olympians and so need their own separate event? Maybe the cruel reality of life is that we can't always accommodate everybody?
I recall one race which had an overall price and a women's price. The same person won both and that caused slight kerfuffle.
> The human body changes surprisingly fast. Astronauts that stay in outer space for too long can't even walk when they return to earth. That "too long" is like... a year basically.
> A "lifetime" of muscle mass will last for how long once someone starts taking androgen blockers then estrogen?
You raise a very fair question, but we have sufficient data to really support either position at the moment?
Do we have a way of knowing when an individual (or group of individuals) would have lost the ‘benefits’ to make competition truly fair?
Can you expand on this? I've not heard of fetuses being affected by androgens before.
No one cares what pronouns an athlete uses, how they dress, what roles and behaviours society traditionally assigns/expects of them and how they respond to those traditions. They care entirely about biological advantages and disadvantages.
So the division is based on — again unsure of the terms here but — “sex” not on “gender”.
And no sport is trans exclusionary as far as I know: the person in question in this article would be welcomed everywhere to compete against other biological males, and any biological female would be welcome to compete against others of their sex whatever they identify as (so long as they haven’t taken testosterone). I’m not sure I understand why this has become an issue.
you might be hard-pressed to find two bodies each "exactly like" the other. The interesting questions here are not about exactly equal, but about equivalence classes of people, and in different contexts.
That's the only explanation that makes sense to me. More persecution of homosexuals. Read the "When Sons Become Daughters" series on Quillette.
And don't get me started on the propaganda that's out there that nobody will talk about in polite company. Go search for "sissy training" on PornHub.
Ask yourself: who is making hypnosis videos encouraging boys to sterilize themselves and have sex with men, and why?
I searched. I can't figure out what these videos are about from the titles/thumbnails, and I'll be damned if I'm actually going to watch these things. Can you summarize?
not to mention development that happens in the womb etc that’s non reversible. hormones won’t change your bone structure or the shape of your hips or a million other things
But that isn’t important, because even if it were false: Purely for the question of athletics, athletic performance trumps all else.
Medical doctors will still need to know about chromosomes for dealing with chromosomal disorders, and if you’ve had your gonads out you’re not going to get gonad cancer, but purely for gender-related athletics issues, the 80-20 principle applies: most of the “million” things your chromosomes do are the same for basically everyone (and thus the reason nobody is born a literal banana), then there’s the subset of chromosomal stuff which affects athletic performance, then the subset of that subset where the gender interacts with the athletic genes such that men and women with those genes perform differently, and in that subset of a subset the difference can be overwhelmed by externally supplied steroids.
Which is why steroids are banned.
Now, in the specific case in this article, transition happened well into adulthood, and the athlete says:
> Vanbellinghen, 27, whose qualifying efforts were disrupted by injury, pointed out that the retained benefit of taking steroids, even years earlier, is widely known.
> "So why is it still a question whether two decades, from puberty to the age of 35, with the hormonal system of a man also would give an advantage [in competing against women]?
Obviously this isn’t the same as the case of someone transitioning pre-puberty. But, as I say, it’s why some trans people want to transition pre-puberty.
If there is a way to level it out, that might be a solution, if it’s possible.
Hopefully the wave of opposition to this travesty will be strong enough to change the regulations.
Boycott the Olympics.
Genuine question, one about which I haven't seen much in the way of conversation—although my experience is relatively limited.
Why is the subjective experience of gender privileged over the objective biology of sex?
I can anticipate a couple possible responses for which I'm not sure I have very clear thoughts, either—maybe someone can contribute more light than heat here?
1. Biology isn't actually all that objective: one's subjective experience is at least partially determined by biology, too.
2. We can turn the question on its head: why should objective biology be privileged over subjective experience?
Sorry for the delay. HN is not a great forum for long discussions (on purpose, I guess). I've been noodling on this for awhile, and so maybe just blathering into the ether.
I'm not sure that subjective and irrelevant necessarily go together.
I guess the argument I'm thinking of is more this: my pronoun preference is biological, so if my chromosomes disagree with my pronoun preference why should my chromosomes govern communication protocols instead of the rest of my biology?
If these things are truly irrelevant, then the notion of gender identity is itself irrelevant and so, too, are pronouns, aren't they? (I mean, maybe not, but I don't see how one could say chromosomes don't matter but preferences do.)
One of the real challenges gender identity raises is that it acknowledges that the body actually means something. It also implies that language means something. Mind and body go together, and when they disagree some kind of resolution is needed. Language shapes reality, so when language contradicts that resolution the reality of my existence, my very identity, is threatened or negated.
If we stipulate that, I think we have to admit pronoun use really isn't neutral. It's not merely a matter of common decency and respect (although it certainly is part of that), but about what we think it means to be human and how we attempt to shape and react to reality.
My own thoughts here aren't super well formed, hence my line of questioning and (perhaps poorly worded and thought out) reasoning...but I do think it bears some critical examination.
> Language shapes reality, Sorry I have disagree on this one. I don't think language shapes reality. It definitely shapes our perception, filters, and biases but shapes reality only in a very Probabilistic graphical model sense. And even then it shapes(as in cavemen---> civilization) reality as much as say, air shapes reality, mathematical formulae and theories shape reality . My usual stance on the gender identity debate comes along with the "freedom to swing your arm but not hit my nose" sense. In this case of weightlifting for ex: I recently saw a twitter mention comparing the same athlete before starting HRT therapy and now.(along with a co-competitor in the male category she used to compete with) It pointed out how much the gap between both the lifters progress has been because of the Hormones.
Anyway, I don't have a clear stance on trans-people competing in their gender category .. I think the gender based categorization in sports has to move further, but I'm ambiguous even about how the sports laws work on even doping. So since I don't have skin-in-the-game I only try to add clarity to the discussion without taking either stance strongly.
> Sorry I have disagree on this one. I don't think language shapes reality. It definitely shapes our perception, filters, and biases but shapes reality only in a very Probabilistic graphical model sense. And even then it shapes(as in cavemen---> civilization) reality as much as say, air shapes reality, mathematical formulae and theories shape reality .
Sorry if it's not clear: I'm not trying to say what's true, despite having opinions on the subject; I'm interested in best arguments.
What I think the implications are in assuming that gender is as much state-of-mind as state-of-body (if not more) is two-fold:
1. The body really does matter. It's inconsistent to say that the body has to align with the mind if the body doesn't matter. Surgical and hormonal intervention make no sense if the mind and the body aren't somehow connected in a very deep way.
2. The desire for pronoun usage is more, too, than mere courtesy, but the desire for consensus on reality. If I'm a woman trapped in a man's body or have no particular gender, when I ask someone to use pronouns of my preference I am actually asking them to make a statement about what is real and true. This implies in no small way that language shapes and makes reality in some nontrivial way.
It's less about one term being "privileged" (I must confess that word seems slightly unclear to me in this context) over another and more about the ease of treating people the way they would like, with no real downsides that I can see.
Anecdotally, refusing to use a trans person's pronouns seems typically to be a dogwhistle for not respecting the existence/legitimacy of transgender people.
So I think a natural conservative argument there would be that the primary reason why we have sex-based (not gender-based!) pronouns in the first place is so that we can talk about biological categories that are important for the continuation of our species: while some men cannot father offspring, certainly no transman can. So why should we call them men, if it is in fact the reproductive function because of which we use these terms in the first place?
Messing about with mechanisms that are crucial to our survival should at least not be done lightly.
Even as somebody who is non-conservative on most issues, the lack of acknowledgment by trans activists that that's what they're doing rubs me slightly the wrong way.
> Messing about with mechanisms that are crucial to our survival should at least not be done lightly.
I disagree with this. Unsurprisingly so, given that I am non-conservative. I believe in personal choice over reproduction and I believe that this choice simply is more important than any tiny effect on societies survival - something that in fact means very little to me other than the 'coincidental' lack of suffering in people I care about/humanity in general. I'm not sure there's any objective value in the human race surviving, in fact if I could push a button that meant all humans would be incredibly fulfilled and lead happy lives and then naturally (peacefully, painlessly, etc) die out in 3 generations time I would certainly strongly consider doing so... I'm rambling now, though.
> the lack of acknowledgment by trans activists that that's what they're doing
I think that's because it's largely incidental - indeed, it doesn't stop them from becoming adoptive parents. It doesn't stop them from freezing sperm/eggs and creating children through more modern means. It may not even lead to infertility in many cases - I'll admit I don't know any detailed knowledge on that.
But most importantly their right to lead their life in whichever way they want, and to choose not to have children, is not especially relevant to anyone else. Nobody should be forced (or be guilted into) to have(ing) children.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. The argument is less about individual cases and more about keeping the overall categories intact as traditionally perceived, which isn't really endangered in that case.
By the same argument, calling transmen men if they are passing perfectly would probably be fine. And that's likely what's been happening forever anyway, and is the point of "passing": those individuals don't threaten the general categories. It's a kind of "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.
[...]
> > the lack of acknowledgment by trans activists that that's what they're doing
> I think that's because it's largely incidental
Is it? What you write about personal choice is all(?) true and does not contradict the argument.
My impression is that while transphobia is definitely a thing, a lot of the backlash against trans activism isn't about trans people's individual rights and choices but about trans activists wanting to impose certain beliefs that they have on others. For example, for the purpose of this discussion, the belief that the categories of "man" and "woman" must be defined differently than many (most?) people intuitively define them based on some of the most deeply rooted perception and pattern recognition of the brain.
So it may feel incidental to trans activists, but the people who react likely don't feel the same because it's the aspect (or one of the aspects) of trans activism that affects them the most personally.
Sorry for any confusion.
By privileged, I simply mean that one's gender identity instead of biological sex should govern pronoun usage.
> 2. Is definitely the counter argument I would use - if people have preferred pronouns then what is the ethical argument for ignoring those and using words that would cause them harm? If nothing else it seems to me to come down to basic decency and respect for others.
I mean I guess that is part of the reason that pronoun usage is a controversial topic, right? Why are people uncomfortable with using others' desired pronouns? It may be deeply rooted beliefs or other identitarian characteristics (religious or political convictions for example) that could cause someone psychological harm if they use preferred pronouns instead of biological sex.
In areas where legal agency is at issue—in children, for example—use of pronouns could potentially elide complex challenges and lead to irreversible physical changes that don't correspond with later preference (i.e., sex reassignment surgery or puberty blockers may have permanent effects even if the child decides later that it was a bad idea).
Now I don't know that these are particularly good arguments, but they are two ideas that I've seen online or that arise from applying a subjective-experience argument to other identity characteristics.
Take Hanne Gaby Odiele (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanne_Gaby_Odiele). They (their preferred pronoun) have an XY chromosome but due to an androgen insensitivity looks traditionally female - to the point of being a fairly successful model for woman's fashion. They'd certainly be very out of place in a mens bathroom if forced there due to their chromosome.
This is another assertion that I also don't quite understand. (I want to emphasize I'm not trolling here—I'm genuinely interested. Topics like this are obviously highly charged and challenging to discuss in a fruitful way.)
Vocabulary exists for discussing intersex characteristics, so the existence of intersex people is known and acknowledged. Is there something special about pronouns?
"You."
HTH!
My default is to use appearance in the absence of other factors; I understand there are cases in which this is challenging at best.
Even so, I'm still not quite sure how this addresses my question about how using biological pronouns instead of preferred pronouns somehow "ignores the existence of the intersex" as you earlier asserted. (Indeed, it seems as though the question of pronouns actually rather highlights the existence of the person, if in an uncomfortable and potentially discriminatory way.)
My point, perhaps poorly delivered, was that not every person has a “biological pronoun”. How do you even define it?
There are people with XY chromosomes and female genitalia (and usually female identity): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
There are also people with male characteristics and two X chromosomes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
Addressing these folks by their “biological sex” (of you mean chromosomes) would be hugely insulting, besides the fact it’s not like we got our chromosomes written on our forehead.
Lastly, there are people with ambiguous physical characteristics. Often gender assignment surgeries are performed shortly after birth. Those folks usually get addressed by the gender a doctor chose for them when they were infants - and sometimes this turns out to be the wrong choice and doesn’t actually match their identity. They also don’t have a “biological sex” that neatly fits into the male/female schema.
My understanding is that historically the presence of the Y chromosome was considered determinative. One was male (therefore "he") if the karotype was 46,XY or 47,XXY or 48,XXXY, etc. Indeed, in discussions of the more common abnormal karotypes (e.g., Klinefelter), most of the literature I've seen uses the word "male."
> Addressing these folks by their “biological sex” (of you mean chromosomes) would be hugely insulting, besides the fact it’s not like we got our chromosomes written on our forehead.
With respect to chromosomes and forehead, that's not exactly true. There's sufficient divergence between male and female skulls that some gender expression surgeries target them.[1] I do understand what you mean, and I'm not trying to be snarky. Sexual differentiation is more than just genitalia, and we're well adapted to noticing those differences.
It seems like you're making two points:
1. Those with abnormal karotypes can have an experience similar to the normally karotyped: their self-perception and their anatomy might not line up, and they may prefer to be called by a pronoun that doesn't correspond with karotype or anatomy.
2. The experience of those with abnormal karotypes can and should be generalized to those with normal karotypes.
(I'm a bit fuzzy on (2) but I think I'm representing you correctly on (1). By all means correct me if I'm wrong.)
I could pretty easily see someone relatively conservative on the issue of pronouns (for, e.g., medical or religious reasons) agreeing that those with abnormal karotypes should be allowed pronoun preference but disagreeing with the second because chromosomal abnormalities are the exception that proves the rule.
I'm not sure how it helps resolve the initial question because it requires generalizing from a small set to a substantially larger one. It also offers a more clear reason why one's subjective experience doesn't quite line up with one's body (i.e., a clear abnormality on the chromosomes).
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7994012/
> Why is the subjective experience of gender privileged over the objective biology of sex?
My point was that biology is not all that objective and if we were to use pronouns in accordance with your thesis, we‘d eliminate the identity of many intersex people.
Whether gender-identity can be out of sync with your body in the absence of conditions described as intersex (which, for the record, I do believe in) and whether it should be respected is somewhat orthogonal to that. I believe the examples I’ve given of conditions where biology is either ambiguous or actively out of sync are sufficient to illustrate that using “ objective biology” would eliminate the identity of many intersex people. It’s my opinion, that that alone is reason enough to privilege gender over sex.
But this is true of lots of sports. Most recently, Simone Biles was punished by scoring judges for a gymnastic move that only she is able to perform, due to her height and musculature. "Genetic freaks" who train hard but still have an unalterable physical advantage tend to dominate any individual sport, to the detriment of their competitors - what makes Hubbard different?
Hubbard does, to some extend?
In Formula 1, Mercedes has dominated for the last 7 years or so. Is money their unfair advantage? Or is Hamilton just that good? It did make for a less attractive sport, if you already kind of know who will win.
I always found it odd that there are not, let's say height classes for high jump. It always seemed unfair to me that I had to lift my center of mass higher than others for the same performance.
There are lots of examples at the Olympic level, some of which can be found elsewhere in this thread. Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps are probably the most well-known recent cases - both dedicated athletes who also had some physical quirk which helped to ensure that they totally dominated their respective sport for the period that they were in their physical primes.
To be clear, the point is that nobody is "worried" about genetic outliers in mens' sports. If you were unlucky enough to be competing in a national Olympic swim team at the same time as peak-fitness Phelps, you were expected to suck it up and accept that you very likely had no chance of getting a gold medal. A great deal is made out of training and mentality, but at the end of the day, physicality is still a big silent factor in these competitions that the athletes simply have no control over.
Growing up under the influence of male genetics and hormones gives an individual a massive advantage in such a sport, that simply cannot be compensated for or against with just training or medical solutions. There's nothing that will take that edge away from such an individual because human intervention later in life can't entirely undo the course nature took when building that body.
The evidence is in the performance which falls squarely in line with male performance [0].
And to everyone thinking of a parallel with motorsports and whatnot, there is none. Those sports rely on technology developed by humans so anything is entirely reproducible and reversible. Nature on the other hand still does things that we don't understand, can't reproduce, or can't fully compensate for. We have no way to change the gender with all the associated factors so we focus on the critical and obvious ones like physical look and hormonal balance, which get a person 95% there. But when it comes to peak performance the 5% makes a difference and it's clearly an unfair one to every other participant.
[0] https://i.redd.it/vv4ws1848t671.jpg
I don't see the clear difference. In what qualitative sense does Hubbard's genetic advantage differ from the genetic advantage of any athlete at the top of their sport? There are many competitions which are dominated by one individual, regardless of the training or medical help which every other competitor can afford. Should those people be excluded from competing for reasons of fairness?
The article seems to make clear that while she is in the top 10, she's not in the top 3 and is in no way a favorite to win. So I'm not sure what that graph is supposed to be showing.
Two women in this weight class have scored a 300+ in competition while Hubbard's best is a 285 from 2019.
You wouldn't let an adult compete in a junior competition because they feel young at heart. You wouldn't let someone compete while on performance enhancing drugs just because they needed them. You would ban athletes who who are repeatedly caught using steroids because it's well known they provide an unfair advantage even years later. And that absolutely pales in comparison to having a trained male body in a women's weightlifting competition.
Also, comparing a trans woman to someone who "feels young at heart" is a false equivalence, and an offensive one. One is an identity, the other is not.
You decided let your personal sensibilities get in the way of understanding my arguments that are much stronger than anything you presented. Sports aren't about gender identity but about sex. As entitled as any individual is to decide on a body that reflects their identity, their biological sex is still very much unchanged. And so are the advantages years of being a male provide.
As you can see from actual athletes, this situation is offensive for those women who after a lifetime of training and hard work see themselves competing against effectively a biological male body with a massive advantage that dwarfs even years of performance enhancing drugs would give.
And to your last point, saying gender identity is OK, age identity is not [1], and that it's OK to identify as a different gender or even no gender at all but anything else is not acceptable is grossly hypocritical and might be as ignorant as people were 50 years ago about gender related topics. Time will tell. I honestly do not feel like my age, and do not identify with that number but rather with a much younger age for many of the reasons you can read in the article linked. This being said, even if the law allowed me to change the number either way, I would not consider this to be a valid differentiator for sports.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27603055
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/08/dutch-man-69-s...
How, exactly?
> and an offensive one.
Proof?
> One is an identity, the other is not.
And then we're back to the very first comment, "sex not gender": Sports are categorised into male and female by biology, not identity.
The definition of fairness is difficult when dealing with even single genetic features.
Female sports will continue to be dominated by biological males if we continue to let this happen.
We should remember that most cis women cannot compete at an Olympic level anyways. That's the point I'm trying to make in this thread - physical outliers are already responsible for lots of non-competitions at the top level of many sports.
Every athlete with a physical advantage precludes some other athlete from the top of the competition. If the "point" of womens' leagues is to provide a level playing field for cis women, then maybe we should be more open to introducing level playing fields more generally - because there are large parts of the population that cannot win in the system we already have, either. Otherwise, the "point" of womens' leagues is just to provide a space for women to compete, and trans women should be allowed in those spaces.
The point of male/female separation is to protect biological female from the genetic advantages of biological male, not from genetic outliers.
This is patently false. In sports such as archery (which is an Olympic sport), where strength does not provide an advantage, men and women do compete together. So it's clearly not about providing a "space" for women to compete.
And in weightlifting, the subject at hand, all competitors are on their own, they might never be in the same room as each other. So again, what is this "space for women to compete"? It's clearly about the physical advantages of the sex, and I can't believe we're even having this discussion.
Can one change their mind about whether they are a man or a woman whenever they want?
Which is the third party who should have the right to judge if you are a man or a woman?
Can a male self identify as a female when they wish and enter a women competition?
That non-trans women have no fucking chance of being champions in pretty much any sports at all anymore, obviously. You're bending over backwards to be "fair" to a tiny minority, and not giving a shit that in order to do that you're being as utterly unfair as one could possibly be to half of humanity. The much eaasier solution, if you want people born as males to hold all the records, is to just simply abolish womens' sports altogether.
Honestly, this question is so horrendously disingenious that I'm shocked you even had the gall to ask it.
This graph would suggest she does:
https://i.redd.it/vv4ws1848t671.jpg
then there is robert förstemann, a track cyclist who might suffer from a myostatin deficincy (a hormone that restricts muscle growth).
The article suggests that she's top 10, but not top 3 in the world. She almost certainly won't win, but might get a medal (since 2 of the 3 best lifter in this category won't be competing in the Olympics for various reasons).
(but the gap is in climbing seems to be smaller)
The applicability of higher grip strength to success in climbing is obvious, I hope.
If anything, going by biology is more inclusive because it allows both trans-women and trans-men to compete fairly against others that share their biological sex, as long as they postpone treatments until their athletic career is over. If we go by this evolving combination of gender identity and hormone level checks, pre-treatment trans-women aren't allowed in any category, post-treatment trans-women have a massive advantage over biologically female bodies, pre-treatment trans-men cannot compete at all and post-treatment trans-men are still at an extreme disadvantage.
for example, in American English, the trans community has centered on a separation between sex and gender
In commonwealth English, that specific separation in the lexicon hasn't reached consensus even within the trans community, let alone in a broader colloquialism from people wanting to understand and people actively resisting any form of trans acceptance
so its actually really impossible to determine if there is an educational moment possible if someone is coming across as trans exclusionary when using sex/gender interchangeably or if they are irreconcilable, especially as people pile on to being mad at that person (see for example JK Rowling’s tweets. nobody assumed it was an educational moment while its not even clear that the UK has sex/gender separation concept)
So far it doesn't seem people even notice this is going on, that the inclusive communities are evolving terminology slightly differently! Lets check back in 5 years!
TL;DR is that Maya was (apparently) fired for the first opinion, lost a first court case over it because being gender critical is not protected under UK, and won the appeal because it was after all.
Some of the more extreme trans activists seem to want to pretend that these clusters don't exist, which puts them at odds with reality.
Other seem to demand that the clusters shouldn't matter, which I find rather optimistic since they're relevant for reproduction.
Trans rights are a noble goal, but some of the statements made by trans activists are a bit out there.
Remember the story a few years ago about the gay couple where one of them was a transgender man and gave birth to their child? I'm sure similar situations do sometimes arise with transgender women.
I feel that the trans community has largely been forced into defending "trans women are women" (TWAW), even if it has holes as a philosophical argument, because they need to fight the transphobic "trans women are men" rhetoric and downstream policy decisions. How can someone live as a woman without constant risk of being outed? They need an "F" on their passport and to use the women's toilets, etc. without having a constant risk of being "caught", because that ends badly.
I think you're correct in your second statement. This whole area seems very polarising. The edge case of women's sports is the obvious situation where a principle of 'Live and let live' doesn't work.
No, that's what they call themselves. You can see plenty of people using that label on twitter.
Polarize_d_, in that people have gone out of their way to polarize it. The last major legal advance was in 2004, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Recognition_Act_2004 with broad support, and it's only in very recent years that this backlash has sprung up.
That's an interesting statement from the POV of falsifiability. Is there an experiment we could theoretically perform to find out if a person who's stating that he's "gender critical" really wants to eradicate all trans people?
In other words, anti-trans (or GC) beliefs occupy much the same position in law as anti-gay Christian beliefs. You can /believe/ them all you like & can’t be sacked for that belief, but if you express those beliefs in the workplace you’ve just created a hostile environment for other employees & your employer can simply fire you (after going through the appropriate disciplinary procedures where required by law) due to your breach of the Equality Act, under which being trans (specifically in law: gender reassignment) carries protected status in the same way that being a different skin colour or sexuality does.
On the other side of the coin, I recognise that the people I work with will surely have some deeply-held beliefs about the wrongness of some aspects of my life. That's inevitable when you have some minimum diversity of viewpoints, and of course "reasonable people may differ" on many of those topics. I don't think I have the right to insist they supress these beliefs, as long as they're not trying to harm me with them. (Assuming that just having a belief isn't harmful.)
The argument from the trans community would be that misgendering and encouraging other employees to misgender them(which will happen if the belief is propaganda-ised) will cause significant emotional harm, risk mental health, cause problems in fulfilling job etc.. I'm not sure about how true this would be, as I'm in the closet and I'm a bit indifferent about what other people think, but can imagine it being very difficult for others.
Not in terms of the Equality Act. You can be as critical as you like in private, or outside the workplace as I understand things.
But if you voice those criticisms directly to someone in the protected class in the workplace, then you’ve crossed the line.
So, eg, telling a gay person to their face that you oppose gay marriage & all gay people are going to hell might be your strongly held philosophical (or religious in this case) belief, but the act of voicing it to the individual in the protected class breaks your employers obligations under the Equality Act in the UK & they would be entitled to fire you for it. The same goes for persistently mis-gendering a trans person (quite apart from it being extremely rude of course!) as gender re-assignment forms a protected class in law.
(Obviously, this is as I understand things & not the opinion of a legal expert in these matters.)
I wonder how this would apply in sports that don't typically have weight classes, like track & field. I imagine you'd start seeing athletes in pretty much every sport cutting weight like in boxing and wrestling, which I don't think is a healthy outcome.
Are we at a level of biological science yet to create reliable divisions/classes on anything more sophisticated? And what about non-professional sports in schools?
There's actually a campaign in wheelchair tennis to allow players who don't actually need a wheelchair to be allowed to compete. https://www.theaccessibleplanet.com/able-bodied-playing-whee...
I've wondered about this - it's an interesting idea. Then the sport is just "Wheelchair tennis" and anyone can try.
Perhaps the more fundamental question — once again leaning on apparently somewhat flimsy terminology — would be: is biological sex something worthy of celebration and note? Half of our species is born a certain way, whatever we call it. Is that grouping to be given certain opportunities to demonstrate their talents that would not be afforded them on a level playing field?
So presumably you include other factors — but then you are simply dividing by ability. You could conceivably attempt to divide by innate ability (theoretically allowing competitors to compete against one another based on nurture, not nature) but that would be impossible to do fairly or in a way that would make sense to audiences.
we're at HN - run PCA and clustering on the totality of athletes' results and biological data for the last N decades with end result being the groups based on identified parameters similar to boxing/wrestling weight groups.
>that would make sense to audiences.
we're already in situation which is harder and harder to make sense. Putting it on the firm basis of scientific analysis is the only way to move forward which would avoid all the pitfalls we're going to hit otherwise.
Also, if trans women are supposed to go to women competition, does it mean that trans men are supposed to go to men competition? Wouldn't that mean pretty much condemning them to having no chance of winning from the start in the most sports where sheer mass, power, etc. play major role?
Anyway, if we don't put it on the firm scientific basis today, i can see how tomorrow a number of male athletes form China and Russia would suddenly start to feel like they are women, may be would take some hormones to satisfy some doubts/requirements (giving the doping already going on i don't see any obstacles here), and that will be the end of female sports.
While I understand the sentiment, but I think we need to speak of skill vs physical factors. The division of weightlifters in weight classes is to deal with the latter rather than the former.
Similarly - WADA does this already by banning doping. PEDs don't make you a high-skill athlete, they enhance physical capabilities (stronger, faster recovery etc).
Laurel Hubbard is in an unfortunately unique position, where she's at a natural advantage due to higher testosterone levels earlier in life.
It might be impossible to end up with a fair division, but I don't think "no division" is a good answer.
Is it fun to watch a bunch of length skiers that all have a similar rare medical conditions that enables an endurance and oxygen uptake that is way beyond what is possible for the wast majority of the population? Dividing by genetics seems as a good option, but would that then go against the spirit of the sport?
Sex is simply just a bunch of common genetic traits, but they are not the only traits that matters in sport. There are a long list of them, especially in extreme strength or endurance sports.
Sports scientists do not agree
Tweets are a dreadful way to read something like this, which would be easier to suggest in a blog post or paper. But I suppose Twitter gives people the right to respond, so swings-and-roundabouts.
Edit: now I'm taking weight!
Ross Tucker made a point about safety, but also about fairness, about which he said (paraphrasing) that females would disappear completely from mixed sex sports, even with weight categories. His point about "fairness" categories is more like "how would that even work?"
One of the advantages of weightlifting (at least for a middle aged cisgendered male) is that it increases testosterone production.
Significantly lowered levels can have some really bad outcomes as one age, ie killing energy levels, libido, physical strength etc.
I've been mainly focusing on my squats in my garage gym (full Olympic barbell/bench/rack with spotter bars/extra Olympic EzyCurl bar) setup, but looking at my history I've let the big deadlift slip - 14 days since last session.
So I took the 20 second trip to the gym last night to start fixing that, warmed up with squats and then just deadlifts - and can definitely feel the energy today (on top of the fatigue!).
I've been struggling with energy lately due to a lot of change and stress, so hopefully a renewed focus on the deadlift will be helpful. Cheers.
You crucially missed an important variable which competitive sports of any kind fully hinge upon: skeletal muscle density… which hugely differs across biological sexes.
In other sports, there’s a rating system that effectively places people with competitors at their level (ELO in chess, tennis rankings)
Either would work in any sport, except for the fact that huge classes of people wouldn’t ever be represented at top level. Prime examples are women and people with disabilities.
In para-athletics, they try to solve that with an elaborate classification system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Para-athletics_classification)
Problem is that training can sometimes move you between categories. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T42_(classification) has “impaired muscle power or impaired range of movement” as criteria. Those can get better with training.
For women, it seems easier, but even ignoring transgenders, there’s various genetic rarities such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46,XX/46,XY that can put women at an advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foekje_Dillema) that we may or may not choose to call unfair (we don’t think it’s unfair for men over six feet to compete in basketball, though, even though that’s largely genetic)
No one wants to watch a competition to see who is the "best of people we think are ranked 100-200" since it is an arbitrary grouping. They want to see people compete to be the best woman or man in the world.
Dividing based on weight makes sense for some sports since it is an added constraint that people compete to optimize their strength against. But dividing based on strength just moves the competition from the actual competition, into the ranking process.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24886927/
https://danielkiikka.com/performance/birth-month-athletic-pe...
These are things for which there are also rather persistent differences in distribution between males and females.
I heard about it in this podcast (about 7:25) https://philosophybites.com/2019/05/kathleen-stock-on-what-i...
https://quillette.com/2019/04/11/ignoring-differences-betwee...
Intersex athletes exist too and are not as rare as you may imagine.
Here's a more notable recent example of the controversy of delineating by sex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya
Likely there were always intersex athletes who had advantages, but only the relatively recent anti doping and medical examinations would reveal them.
Just look at these female world records compared to 13-15 year old high school boys: https://boysvswomen.com/#/world-record
Hubbard is also 43 years old. There is no precedent for any human female being competitive in this sport at this age, not even the most freakishly talented female weightlifters in history, not even the Soviet drug cheats.
Kuinini Manumua, the Tongan woman who would have been given this place if not for Hubbard, is 21 years old.
Feagaiga Stowers, who placed second behind Hubbard in the Pacific Games in her native Samoa in 2018, is 20 years old.
This problem cannot be solved or even properly discussed without properly acknowledging biological reality.
This disparity is why women fought so hard for sex-based separation in the first place. I cannot understand why we would roll back those protections by considering “gender” equivalent to sex. It can only hurt women.
If you rolled back the clock and tried again, Michael Phelps would never be a champion weightlifter, and the best weightlifter would never be a champion swimmer.
Currently for olympic distance running at 400 meters or further, a female must present with a certain maximum level of testosterone. This rule was specifically made to exclude an intersex female-presenting runner who excelled. Due to medical complications, she cannot take medication to surpress her testosterone levels on a long term basis.
So yes, such rules exist.
What potential problems would there be from having a biological women competition, and a trans women competition? Genuinely curious as to your answer and I am asking this in good faith
Replace gender with race. Do you feel the same way about race?
The issues about race have less to do with the issues about transgender people, and more with their struggles faced by fault of modern society, in addition to the struggles one would face as transgender and/or female, which can intersect quite badly.
I'm honestly astounded that HN apparently doesn't have any idea about intersectional discourse in the slightest, should be pretty obvious stuff.
Is that sarcasm? Do you know what chromosomes are?
> And I don't see how someone would identify as black if they aren't
By simply claiming they do. Is that not the criterion you're using for gender?
"I don't see how someone would identify as female if they aren't."
And you still fail to see the difference between gender and sex and how that is different from culture and skin color. Congratulations.
>Is that sarcasm? Do you know what chromosomes are?
I didn't skip Biology 101.
> I didn't skip Biology 101.
Looks like you did. Chromosomes carry the genome.
It looks like you skipped out on Biology 101, otherwise the difference would be clear in context and upon my elaboration.
Good day.
Since the former includes the latter, your excuse makes zero sense. It sounds like a convoluted attempt to obfuscate the fact that you thought "chromosomes" was synonymous with "allosomes".
> It looks like you skipped out on Biology 101
How so? This is a weird projection. You're the one who clearly didn't know what chromosomes are.
Finally, you still haven't answered the question: Is a person black simply by virtue of claiming that they "identify as" black?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Butterfield
XX only division.
Unlimited division for everyone else.
Why have leagues for women in basketball but not "men under 6ft tall"?
Is it to encourage girls and women to be physically active for a health life? If so, so we need competition for that? (I'd say no -- boys and men who aren't eite talent are also pushed out by the focus on competition)
Now if people like women sports due to the style of play in WNBA or Women's soccer or whatever, that's great; just make the rules and marketing and such to promote that style, and women will tend to be the participants.
I would. Then it would be more about skill than strength and height, like football.
And if 10 cm categories are too wide they can be adjusted to 5 cm.
I would actually change the rules in olympic basketball to have 1 player from each category :)
Average is at 200 cm compared to 175 cm in general adult male US population:)
Compare this to football: http://www.twolfanger.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Average-...
The argument presented was that height mattered more than skill. If that were true, the tallest players would also be the best, no? Instead, very clearly, the best players are usually _not_ the tallest, sometimes not even close.
It doesn't mean that skill doesn't matter at all.
Sorry, in what way is that clear? The best players aren't the tallest, so isn't it clear that your statement is false?
The attribute that defines success is skill, not height, which is evidenced by a look at the most successful NBA players.
You're saying "Because NBA players are taller than average, tall = success", which is just not really true.
In fact it's pretty obvious there would be a tipping point because extreme height is inversely correlated with health and mobility.
In similar fashion weight matters more than skill in boxing that's why we have weight categories. 120 kg boxer will win over 80 kg boxer 90% of the time or more assuming basic competency. But it doesn't mean that the most obese person in the world would be the best boxer.
And the correlation is even more obvious with basketball than with boxing which you can see comparing the height distribution in basketball with height distribution in adult male population [1]. Average for basketball is higher than 97th percentile for general population. That's not an accident :)
If skill is more important than height where are the 160 cm basketball players? None of them got enough skill?
In soccer 2 players widely recognized as the best in last decade are 170 and 187 cm. Different sides of the general height average.
In basketball this histogram for ALL professional players STARTS at the general average (5'9).
[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2010/compendia/...
If your argument is "Height of an NBA player is the most significant factor in determining their success", that statement is also incorrect.
> In similar fashion weight matters more than skill in boxing that's why we have weight categories
A 220 lb boxer is more capable of knocking out a 140 lb boxer, yes. A 6'10 basketball player is not more capable of outperforming a 6'3 basketball player. Also using single-player sports as a comparison to team sports is a waste of time and energy.
Skill is the determining factor. Not height.
I'll say, it really really seems like you don't know about/watch/care about _actual_ professional basketball. In which case, maybe you shouldn't just guess your way through a conversation about professional basketball?
Based on my observations, on offense (and in a team situation), skill trumps height.
On defense, there's no way a much shorter player can reliably guard a taller player. And definitely not one on one. I've watched many one on one clips and thought 'wow size is everything.'
Sure, Steph Curry is probably the most skilled player in the league. But do you think a team with five Steph Currys can beat a team with, say, five Paul Georges? I'm not so sure.
> there's no way a much shorter player can reliably guard a taller player.
Just flatout false. Clint Capela isn't the tallest center in the NBA but is an absolutely dominant defensive player. It's not about guarding all five players on the other team, it's about winning your matchup and providing help. In both scenarios, height isn't the most important thing at all. Jrue Holiday is also an elite defender but isn't very tall at all.
Height is a red herring; sometimes height can be used as a proxy in place of skill. The thing about elite levels of play, is that the skill level is so high that you can't really get away with lacking skill.
> Sure, Steph Curry is probably the most skilled player in the league. But do you think a team with five Steph Currys can beat a team with, say, five Paul Georges? I'm not so sure.
Steph's ability to set picks and create mismatches isn't nearly as good as his ability to use picks and exploit mismatches. Steph's playstyle is enabled by a totally different archetype of player. PG is a more "complete" offensive and defensive player.
If you want a giant on your team, you'd need to balance him out by recruiting an exceptionally talented shorter guy.
So... like the WNBA?
It allows more people to compete in sport.
Competitive Sport: the act of determining your performance and subsequent identity/categorization by arbitrary comparison with other arbitrary individuals.
Here's an idea. Let's just let weightlifters lift weights. They can compare themselves to their previous efforts and broadcast their successes by beating their own PRs. If people want to find some sort of vicarious happiness from observing this process, set up (monetize) their efforts with something like Twitch.
For every thousand hacking at the leaves...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgcHBcQRlpw
[0]: https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gend...
i feel like it strongly depends on the competition in question. i doubt it with weightlifting.
but women clearly have an advantage in gymnastics
Really? The internet went mad when Simone Biles did the Yurchenko double pike.
Men have been doing it for at least 20 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius
Of course there are a lot of practical issues, and even if they were overcome, it is unclear that the results would be satisfying.
For example, several sports have weight classes which are of course "abused" (as in, the athlete will do as much effort to fit onto a lower class - going through severe diets and dehydration)
Now if instead of weight you would measure "fat free mass" and maybe height, this would leave much less margin for maneuvers.
(Or, ok, you could re-weight the athlete just before the competition and disqualify them if there's a bigger difference from the weighting date - that would work as well)
If you made it based on past performance, though, it should be doable in even small amateur leagues.
That's how it works in chess. When you play tournament chess you get a rating based on your performances and the ratings of the established players you played.
Large tournaments use the "Swiss system". In round 1, you sort the players by rating, split the list in two, and the top rated player in the first list plays the top rated list in the second, and so on.
In subsequent rounds, you sort the players by results so far, split the list into separate lists for each score group, and then within each score group the top half by rating plays the bottom half.
Large tournaments typically have prizes for the top scores, but also "class" prizes. A class prize is for the top scores in certain rating ranges, say under 1800 or under 1200. A big tournament like the US Open might have a whole slew of class prizes, such as top score in under 1200, [1200, 1400), [1400, 1600), [1600, 1800), [1800, 2000).
There are women's chess tournaments but that is because much fewer women take up chess, and often women are uncomfortable if they are the only woman in a competition, especially at the scholastic level.
That environment can affect their performance due to "stereotype threat". When you are doing something in public that goes against a negative stereotype about your group you can feel a lot of pressure to avoid confirming the stereotype, and that extra pressure can actually make it harder for you to do your best. That in turn further discourages women from taking up tournament chess.
The challenges people overcome makes for a good story, but is not the core competition.
women will never come in the top 100 again for the vast majority of sports, but it’ll force people to reconcile the contradictions they claim. or maybe they’ll just say sports are sexist
Anyone who's done some semi serious lifting and then gone on a long break to return will know that progress is much faster the Nth time around.
This explains why those who have taken steroids will have a life long advantage:
Eg https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190125084106.h...
I also understand that the male puberty imprints into the muscle development for life.
As such, two opinionated observations:
1) Once you've done steroids you should be banned from high level competitions for life, not just 4 years or what.
2) Allowing someone who has experienced and lifted weights through and after male puberty to compete against those who have not is grossly unfair to cisgendered female lifters. See point 1.
1. Country-wide doping systems that currently exist in weightlifting. Punishing an individual lifter does little to disincentivize doping at a larger scope. A country's sports organization can just take on the next Olympic hopeful (or buy another country's). Alternatively whole countries' participation can be banned, punishing clean athletes.
2. WADA testing is largely inconsistent across the world. You can take a look at the doping reports [here](https://www.iwf.net/anti-doping/statistics/) and compare e.g. Iranian athletes to others.
3. "Steroids" is a big bucket. Weightlifting even now has devolved into a race to design the best undetectable compound.
The IWF is already in trouble with the IOC for so many positive tests - I'm really curious to see how things develop and whether weightlifting ends up splitting into tested/untested federations like powerlifting.
I'll read up on your resources - and yes, different rules across regions would be a big one.
Personally I just take Creatine and WPI, but I'm only training for functional fitness as a desk bound software engineer. Still, it's a very interesting topic; I do know someone who competes at a national level, and the routines and regimes are punishing.
> Personally I just take Creatine and WPI All you need! Similarly I'm an engineer, I compete in a tested powerlifting fed, laying off the "extra supplements" for now.
Which sports are these? In which physical sports do women have an advantage over men? Can you name one?
I'd guess anything where hip area strength is critical. male bodies are at an advantage in terms of overall muscular and bone structure.
the larger point is its wiser to treat it as a competition between individuals. because. anytime we exclude someone based on non-individual traits then it means we are discriminating against them. and "discrimination is bad", no matter what.
Really? The most basic definition of "discrimination" is "to note or distinguish as different." Are you saying we should never be allowed to observe that, in reality, sometimes two things really are different from each other?
Margaret Thatcher once said: "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/bear-boy/
So this would also apply to say, racial slurs and personal insults. Calling someone a name or the n-word instead of their name, that's a freedom? What about antisemitic slurs or insulting disabled people? How about just referring to women as sex objects, that's also within that rule. As well as doing the same for children or the deceased.
You don't expect people to be insulted by such things? Are you serious?
I don't think you actually mean what you say.
That's actually a crime, you know that, right, it's not freedom of speech. Using racial slurs is a crime in most environments as well.
There is no right to say arbitrary things in front of arbitrary people. That's actually not a thing.
It's not "your freedom" that's being violated, there never was one there to begin with here.
The list of things at the forefront of you mind would fall under the above. You might get your teeth kicked in but by the actual freedom of speech definition rather than your own truths interpretation there would be no legal response.
It's true however that we don't actually subscribe to that definition any more, so you never know. Maybe you'll have your wish.
Case laws have upheld them numerous times. This isn't "interpreted truths", racial slurs have been interpreted as intent and such things have been prosecuted.
Seems lots of people get intentionally offended nowadays... Only the intention is their own.
It's a completely different thing. I want my right to use neutral, non-offensive terms to describe people as I see them and not have people jump at me for that. It is possible to insult people by using neutral terms, but I think I've done my part and the ball is now on the other side of the court. Managing someone else's emotions is not my responsibility beyond not using words that are intentionally hurtful and untrue.
I could meet someone in a dark alley and that person might take offense that I don't give him my wallet. He might be even more offended if I call him a thief and a mugger. It may be a good idea at the time to give him that wallet, but I'm doing that because of intimidation. I don't want people to intimidate me when I don't deserve it. Just because someone feels offended doesn't necessarily mean they're right.
The purpose of a conversation should be to reach a mutual understanding. We start on two sides and hopefully meet somewhere in the middle... if both parties act in good faith. It's not always possible to achieve with everyone, and it's not always your fault. Sometimes the other person is messed up, for example takes offense very easily or insists that I accept their demands. Sometimes the other person is just unreasonable. As long as they are, I'll just stay clear off them.
I think nowadays Western society is too tolerant of intolerance. I feel we celebrate the right of people to be offended. This enables very thin-skinned and manipulative people. I could live with the thin-skinned, but they're extremely hard to separate from the manipulative.