It'll be interesting to see if the IAAF goes along with this and reinstates Dora Ratjen's 1939 high jump record.
Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
361–370 of 643 posts
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#362In case anyone was wondering exactly why a condition that affects a tiny fraction of the population has such a disproportionate effect on global policy, it's because many in power subscribe to a religion that worships dualism, a modern form of Gnosticism.
A (very) conspiracy theory-minded overview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUkiBz9rYEs
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Scienceofsport/status/12979157895... 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?"
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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 expres…
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.)
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#365So you know how few years back companies were peddling this idea that forcing your real name in comments will make the discussion more civil and proper? Yeah, I can click on every single one of those people in this comment section, see their real name and their FB profile, and it still doesn't stop them from being vile on the internet.
What are some examples of vile comments, according to you?
As a few examples:
"Anyways, any woman dumb enough to participate in the farce that will be competing against HIM deserves to lose."
"Women are getting screwed because of trans ideology. Mr. Hubbard is clearly a cheating male."
"In the old days, abittoirs use to have a well trained cow that would calm the nervous cows on their way to be slaughtered. I often think of these women as those calming cows trying to placate the rest of us women."
Like, there are some good comments and people trying to have a discussion in good faith. But clearly there are others who don't and I don't see how the real name policy has improved the quality of the internet discussion at all.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#366I 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 term…
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.
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.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
"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 "t…
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.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I couldn't decide to be a Native American without meeting some external criteria around my birth and life. 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
But that's the point. Rachel Dolezal is a grifter and a laughingstock, not a black person.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#369The proof will be in the medals. The worst thing she could do for her cause is to actually win. If people see a sport where such transgender athletes are on the podium regularly and it is obvious they are doing better as a group, change will be demanded. Weightlifting looks to be that first test case but we were almost there before. Running faced a debate over allowing people with modified bodies to compete, but the…
I think the question with drugs is slightly different. Nobody cares how much vitamin C you take, because although making sure you're not vitamin C deficient has an advantage, at some point taking more doesn't help you at all; and if you take the maximum amount that your body will absorb, there are no health detriments. Same thing with creatine: taking creatine isn't "natural" in the sense that you'll end up with 2-3x as much in your system as you would "naturally"; but after a point, your body just stops using more; and if you take that amount, you won't have any health issues.
With anabolic steroids however, if there is a "maximum amount that your body will absorb", it's far beyond what causes long-term health problems. This leads to a Prisoner's Dilemma type situation, where if most competitors are taking dose X, and one person takes dose X+1, that one person get an advantage; but if all competitors take does X+1, nobody has an advantage, but they all suffer health consequences.
I don't inherently see a problem with any particular sport openly advertising that competitors may use up to dose X of any particular drug or steroid, where X has been reasonably shown to be a safe amount. The problem is, is it possible to test that only X has been taken, rather than X+1? If it's only possible to test that 0 (or a negligible amount) has been taken, then the only enforceable limit is 0; and an unenforced limit is effectively no limit at all.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#370So you know how few years back companies were peddling this idea that forcing your real name in comments will make the discussion more civil and proper? Yeah, I can click on every single one of those people in this comment section, see their real name and their FB profile, and it still doesn't stop them from being vile on the internet.
People shouldn’t be afraid to speak their mind, nor be intimidated by people like you