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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

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

#311

Post by baumy »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #304
baumy wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't, and no it doesn't. Proposing this concept demonstrates a profound ignorance of what competition at the top level of sports actually looks like. The concept is just bad, unless your goal is to prevent women from being able to make a living playing professional sports.

The thing is, we're already using a scissor for ability, just a poor one with the exact problem you describe - it renders trans women unable to make a living playing professional sports. Throwing one group under the bus for another cannot be avoided so long as sex or gender are part of sports divisions. Please let go of the need for this.

You are clearly out of your depth. Have you ever competed in high level sports? Please don't speak on things you know nothing about. It takes a lot of gall to tell someone 'please let go of the need for this' when they are pointing this out. I will do no such thing, but I likely will give up trying to educate you.

I won't respond further unless you pick an example sport, and propose how your "scissor for ability" would work, in concrete detail. If you do this, I will be happy to explain why this would result in neither women _nor trans women_ having any chance to make a living as professional athletes.

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

#312

Post by mandevil »

orochimaaru wrote: post #273
hananova wrote: post #240

This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball), this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course. Remember, sport is and has always been about statistical outliers competing. Fairness has never been…

>>>> This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. What are those? fwiw - I don't think they should be included in the ban. Genetic advantage people in their natural gender is how sports works. I'm 5'7" - Lebron definitely has a genetic advantage over me. Banning him from basketball isn't doing anyone favors.

Santhi Soundarajan (1) shows exactly how this ends up catching cis women who were raised as women from birth. Which is why it's a bad idea to draw strict lines.

Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes.

This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.

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

#313

Post by messe »

IlikeMadison wrote: post #47
b3ing wrote: post #17

This always should of been left to sports committees than our government, what a waste of our representatives times, but I guess they got the culture war points

>should of why

Because they're probably a native speaker.

EDIT: this is exactly the kind of mistake that native speakers make, that ESL speakers don't.

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

#314

Post by andsoitis »

kg wrote: post #286
canucker2016 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guidelines for trans female athletes for the 2024 Paris Olympics involved transitioning before the age of 12/puberty to be eligible. There's more info at https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/paris-2024-olym...

Incidentally, many countries/states are working hard to make it impossible to transition that early.

At 12 you simply do not have sufficient capacity to make a good decision on the matter.

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

#315

Post by rideontime »

themgt wrote: post #233
tdb7893 wrote: post #21

Trans women have competed as women in the Olympics once ever and have 0 medals. By the numbers it's a non issue under previous rules (despite the incredible amount of ink spilled over it). People are talking about trans women here but the vast majority of people affected by this change are women who are not trans who have a "disorder of sexual development".

The IOC policy is specifically that athletes need to test negative for the SRY gene to be eligible to compete in the female category. Imane Khelif won gold in the 2024 Summer Olympics women's boxing event, and has since admitted to having the SRY gene. So it isn't a non-issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif#2026

So it's the headline that's inaccurate. It should read "bars women with the SRY gene" rather than "transgender."

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

#316

Post by fretboard »

mvdtnz wrote: post #234
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also there has only been one (1) trans woman, Laurel Hubbard, who has competed in a women's event (weightlifting) and she not place.

She didn't place at the Olympics but it's worth noting she was the oldest competitor by far, and this after she had cleaned up gold medals in numerous international competitions despite having a relatively thin background in the sport. She was expected to podium at the Olympics and it's not really clear why she performed so poorly (the only athlete in the division to DNF). Mrs Hubbard's background, if you read it hon…

Indeed. Hubbard's trajectory in female weightlifting is entirely unprecedented: re-entering the sport after a fifteen year break, with a stronger performance than those of elite female weightlifters with decades of competitive careers behind them and who had won Olympic medals.

The only reason why this was possible is because Hubbard is male.

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

#317

Post by enragedcacti »

EA-3167 wrote: post #253
enragedcacti wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was intended in good faith, to make the point that rarity alone is not a good metric for salience. In my experience, most trans people have no problem with the statement "humans are sexually dimorphic" in a biology context. They (and I) have issue with it when its used in a debate to say "Humans are sexually dimorphic (and therefore trans and intersex people are irrelevant/shouldn't be accommodated/don't exist)". In the context of sports, it is definitely relevant that there are many edge cases and substantial overlap in the distribution of phenotypes between AFAB and AMAB people.

Coming back around to the olympics: I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree without dismissing the complexity that comes from organizing across 8 billion people.

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

#318

Post by fretboard »

hananova wrote: post #199
shrx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be outliers.

High level sports consists entirely of outliers. That’s kind of the point of the olympics. This newest rule is nothing more than a misogynist rule to turn the women’s division into the “no more than statistically average” division.

[flagged]

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

#319

Post by fretboard »

rideontime wrote: post #315
themgt wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IOC policy is specifically that athletes need to test negative for the SRY gene to be eligible to compete in the female category. Imane Khelif won gold in the 2024 Summer Olympics women's boxing event, and has since admitted to having the SRY gene. So it isn't a non-issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif#2026

So it's the headline that's inaccurate. It should read "bars women with the SRY gene" rather than "transgender."

It should read "bars male athletes".

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

#320

Post by fxwin »

kixiQu wrote: post #310
fxwin wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.) Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0] > Until men with gen…

> We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. I mean, we do have weight categories in combat sports, right? I don't see why we couldn't come up with similarly neutral categories if we think it's good to segment people out by physical advantages. The parent comment is making a good point, though: it feels like some people care a lot about physical advantages that map onto gender stuff they care a…

We could do that! I'm just trying to say that given categories based on (biological) sex, we should find some criterion based on biological sex to sort people into said categories, which the OC decision seems to do (at least better than the alternatives I have encountered). I don't have a problem at all with finding different ways of defining categories for competitions.

Re: anomalies - I think this is just unavoidable in any sort of category system, and I don't have a good solution for it except to consider frequency and severity.

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