Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 960 posts

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#251

Post by nradov »

n4r9 wrote: post #216
nradov wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's impossible to have both inclusion and fair play. We have to pick one, and as a parent of daughters who compete at fairly high levels it's more important to preserve the integrity of women's sports.

Is there not an option to have inclusion at grassroots level and fair play as the level of competition gets higher?

Sure, I guess that's an option for youth sports in the prepubescent age groups. As a practical matter most youth sports leagues and schools aren't going to hassle with sex screening tests for little kids.

But once puberty hits everything changes. My teenage daughter played travel club volleyball on a pretty good team, and during practice they would occasionally run drills with the boys team. Even at that age the difference in hitting power and vertical was enormous, and those differences only grow larger with age. Men and women are literally playing different games. Beyond just fairness, forcing girls to compete against biological males becomes a safety risk due to concussions from taking a ball to the head.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#252

Post by belorn »

LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #35

It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men? Also, so many of these anti-trans efforts end up hurting cis women too, the ones who happen to look too masculine or have too high of testosterone. Gender is not as straightforward as bigots and transphobes would like to think. I wonder how many cis women will be affected by this ruling…

I was wondering about trans men and there is actually quite a bit amount of regulations for it, as taking testosterone is generally considered to be doping. Trans men are only allowed to compete if they are under heavy supervision by a medical professional and they follow a very strict set of rules dictating how, when and what kind of treatment they do. Too high amount of testosterone or too uneven levels of testosterone will disqualify a trans man from competing.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#253

Post by EA-3167 »

enragedcacti wrote: post #244
EA-3167 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that humans are sexually dimorphic in the same way that humans are bipeds. if you attempted to make a serious argument that limb agenesis implies that we’re a variable-limbed species it would be obfuscating rather than illuminating.

99.8% of all matter by count is either hydrogen or helium, are atoms dimorphic?

That’s a very fun way to think about it, but it’s far more effective in a semantic debate than a serious one. I also don’t for a minute believe that the goal here is some broader reform of how the world talks about statistical distributions.

I’d rather not have discussions in bad faith.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#254

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #231
trickyager wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're falling for Sticker Swap Fallacy. The goal is to have fair match-ups in sports. Gender and sex are two possible labels to use to assist with this, but they're imperfect enough that we probably ought to not use them as the primary differentiator. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C7LcpRtrHiKJRoAEp/sticker-sh...

The solution is simple: class every sport like boxing. Pick a sports-relevant metric and split into divisions. Some sports will naturally fall into gendered divisions, while others will have varying degrees of co-ed competition among competitors of similar ability. The way out of this is not to pick a better scissor of sex or gender, it's to pick a better scissor of ability.

Doesn’t Boxing use weight classes?

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#255

Post by svzn »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #249
cmiles8 wrote: post #159

[flagged]

What would do about someone like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan

That athlete was excluded from the women's competition on the basis of having male physiological advantage. Exactly what the Olympics are now doing.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#256

Post by Philadelphia »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #236
Aurornis wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article already covered it: It's minimally invasive (cheek swab) testing typically for the SRY gene - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determining_region_Y_prote... This is less invasive than all of the other doping tests that athletes already go through, which require blood draws.

Doesn’t really work though - and given athletes are on the edge of performance there’s probably more people that fall in between than you might expect From the Wikipedia article: While the presence or absence of SRY has generally determined whether or not testis development occurs, it has been suggested that there are other factors that affect the functionality of SRY.[25] Therefore, there are individuals who have th…

The Yahoo article linked says that exceptions will be made for people with conditions like that:

“Athletes diagnosed with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) ‘or other rare differences/disorders in sex development (DSDs), who do not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone’ may still be allowed to participate in the women’s category.”

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#257

Post by stdclass »

hananova wrote: post #206
orangecat wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is considerable evidence that they aren't. Why did Lia Thomas go from being nowhere near winning in the male division to getting fifth in the women's? When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual If sports were not sex-segregated, most events would never be won by a woman. How is that a pretext?

Fifth is still nowhere near winning. So she went from nowhere near winning to nowhere near winning.

[flagged]

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#258

Post by frumplestlatz »

tdb7893 wrote: post #211
lewdev wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it fair to say that they can just compete in the men's division?

From a biological perspective, the women being banned here are not just men and as far as I'm aware cannot realistically compete in the men's division any more than any other woman. Practically these changes bar women athletes with certain medical differences from competing in the Olympics. I'm not an expert so idk whether that's fair or not but that's what this decision is doing.

[flagged]

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#259

Post by [deleted] »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #236
Aurornis wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article already covered it: It's minimally invasive (cheek swab) testing typically for the SRY gene - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determining_region_Y_prote... This is less invasive than all of the other doping tests that athletes already go through, which require blood draws.

Doesn’t really work though - and given athletes are on the edge of performance there’s probably more people that fall in between than you might expect From the Wikipedia article: While the presence or absence of SRY has generally determined whether or not testis development occurs, it has been suggested that there are other factors that affect the functionality of SRY.[25] Therefore, there are individuals who have th…

[deleted]

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#260

Post by lynndotpy »

EA-3167 wrote: post #198
lynndotpy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be true if the Olympics were exclusively classifying the 23rd chromosomes, and nothing but. Leave aside the fact that very few of us here have actually tested our 23rd chromosome. Historically, the Olympics have not been (and are not) strictly chromosomal. The 2023 testosterone suppression decision requirements has exclusively impacted cis women, for one example. Humans are biologically dimorphic in the sa…

I would say that humans are sexually dimorphic in the same way that humans are bipeds. if you attempted to make a serious argument that limb agenesis implies that we’re a variable-limbed species it would be obfuscating rather than illuminating.

No, that is not a good analogy at all. It's so poor an analogy that it's challenging to interpret this comment generously. I think you might be arguing facetiously to make a different rhetoric point than the literal content of your post, bot I will respond to your text literally.

Humans have a wide variety of biological variation in metrics we think of as linked to "biological sex" and those metrics are accessibly mutable. Even within the Olympics, the natural variation of these metrics within cis women is a famous topic of debate (Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, etc.)

Bipedalism is something which varies very rarely and is especially not accessibly mutable.

Post reply on HN