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Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

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Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#371

Post by memling »

maybeOneDay wrote: post #317
andyxor wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core question is when sanity will return and men will no longer be allowed to compete against women. Hopefully the wave of opposition to this travesty will be strong enough to change the regulations. Boycott the Olympics.

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?

Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#372

Post by sandworm101 »

gwd wrote: post #369
sandworm101 wrote: post #360

The 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…

All Olympic competitors sacrifice health for the sport. We are long past seeing them as healthy. The starvation diets in runners that lead to hormone shutdown are probably the best known example. Just as with many professional team sports, if you want to win you must accept lifelong consequences.

Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#373

Post by chopin »

rocqua wrote: post #321
ivanbakel wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. "Gene…

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.

Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#374

Post by gambiting »

pixel_tracing wrote: post #370
gambiting wrote: post #314

So 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

I just gave some examples in another comment - calling women dumb and comparing them to cows is the type of speech you really want to defend here? Is that what you think "people shouldn't be afraid to speak their mind" about?

Like ok, cool. But I'd also like to speak my mind and call those comments vile and say they have no place in a civilized discussion.

And how am I intimidating?? HN comments are scary now?

Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#375

Post by adaml_623 »

aardvarkr wrote: post #125
moeris wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[0] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transgendered

Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#376

Post by jefftk »

trhway wrote: post #335
nimbleal wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

>impossible to do fairly 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 w…

What happens if you run PCA and it groups trans women in with men?

Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#377

Post by lenkite »

kuschku wrote: post #297
lenkite wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are significant differences in skeleton muscle function that will never go away by having female hormone levels for 2 years.

Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#379

Post by twic »

acituan wrote: post #104
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #50

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place

#380

Post by gwd »

rocqua wrote: post #332
dncornholio wrote: post #264

This problem is made artificial difficult. It's simple: born as a man? Sport like a man. Born as a women? Sport like women. Gender in sport is not about identity, it's about biology. Also it creates a huge backdoor to Olympic gold medals. There's nothing that stops turning the female category into all transgender..

Even though I largely agree with your conclusion, I strongly disagree that this problem is made artificially difficult. The fallout of a decision like this for professional athletes who are trans is huge. That fallout and the effects from that decision should not at all be taken lightly. Having an MTF proffesional athlete to compete in the male category is going to probably cause a lot of disphoria. It will also make…

> Adding "drop your profession" to that makes it that much harder. Especially to professional athletes to whom "being an athlete" is probably rather important.

All athletes have to drop their profession sooner or later.

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