551–560 of 643 posts
At some point we need to stop and realise that some problems just don’t have a solution that is going to please everybody. In this case there is an option to annihilate hopes and dreams of either transgender athletes, or women. Both options suck, but the second one affects disproportionately more people.
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 a…
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.
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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 b…
> 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?
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.
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yeah but even then it doesn’t change your chromosomes
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 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
The effects of testosterone in the womb and during puberty have extremely profound effects on the body that do not ever go away throughout your entire life. Bone density and neuromuscular efficiency are vastly different between the sexes and do not regress with the introduction of hormones later on. The level of testosterone on competition day has by comparison almost no effect on anything. National women's teams in…
Can you point me to some studies around fetal testosterone?
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> My point is that height clearly matters more. 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.
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…
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?
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>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…
Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder (saying this in the most scientific way possible). It's not a cultural stigma. 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?
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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 l…
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…
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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.
It's always some obscure exception, as if that doesn't prove the rule.
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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 l…
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…
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...