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?
Men would still win 99% of the time.
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
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.wiktion…
What is the shortest word that doesn't exist?
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#423Couldn't even get past the equivocating this poor woman felt she had to do before saying what we all know: this is bullshit.
Clarity required: bullshit she should compete as a female, or bullshit she shouldn't?
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly my point. If substance the is banned, why even ask the question?
> It's simple: born as a man? Sport like a man. Born as a women? Sport like women. Well, except for people born as women who take testosterone, then.
Or anyone that takes testosterone.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#425I 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…
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.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Ah okay fair enough, I would consider those people assholes as well. Although I am against any sort of forced identification on internet forums simply because I would prefer people speak their minds completely openly, regardless of what I think of what they are saying. I don't care for pretense, which is what actually happens IRL, in my experience.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 agree, but unintended consequences abound. 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…
While absolutely common, cutting weight is not universal in combat sports and wrestling. There are distinct athletic costs to cutting weight.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wo…
Many sports have many categories. Boxers and wrestlers are separated based on weight
Boxers and wrestlers are also separated based on sex, because even at the same weight males will dominate.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#429I think sports categories should be chromosome strings. "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.
Have you considered the effects of androgen insensitivity syndrome? Chromosomes don't always neatly map to physical traits.
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.
Re: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
'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 cate…
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.