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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

#451
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only if you ignore the brain and it's processes as not "biological phenomena"

Sport is about the body more than the brain. Particularly weightlifting.

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.

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

#452
post #415
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#453
post #199

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*.…

You call them whatever you want, and the other side has a freedom to call you a transphobe. simple as that.

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

#454
I already see a bunch of uninformed and transphobic arguments, including phrases such as "harmful to women" without including trans women, assuming sex is completely decoupled from gender, sex is binary (do you really think it's possible to have true binary in a physical world, let alone in a natural process?), and classical "I know their gender better than themself and nobody can object."

I know what HN demographics are like and what they work with, and it's not LGBT. So please, get yourself educated.

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

#455

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.

This depends entirely on each individual. Mike Tyson referred to his championship belts as "garbage".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgcHBcQRlpw

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

#456
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among some populations it may be a social contagion: https://t.co/Bp5FcXDsg3 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: indi…

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/w…

Here's a study referenced in the book. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/

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."

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abigail Shrier's recent book Irreversible Damage explores this question. I highly recommend it.

As I mentioned in another comment: 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…

As I mentioned in another comment, multiple studies have been done. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095578/

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

#459
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or anyone that takes testosterone.

Sounds like it is not that simple in the end, doesn't it?

Actually its very simple.

If you are born a certain sex, you should compete in the same sex category provided you haven’t taken any substances to enhance performance. This would mean you are only using what your body naturally produces.

Theres a difference between trans-women and women.

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

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

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.

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?

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