361–370 of 960 posts
I wish people would care a lot less about sports.
I actually wish non-sports people would care less about sports, too. Because the decisions should be left to those of us playing the sports. Not bystanders trying to impose their own agendas on to activities they don't even participate in.
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Lia Thomas. Why are all these innocent questioners asking for more evidence not familiar with the existence of the evidence they are asking for? Considering they feel so strongly about it, they should already have seen all this.
Pre-transition Lia Thomas wasn’t mid-tier, but I suspect you already knew that
Regardless, Lia went from not being in the front of the pack, to being in the front of the pack:
“By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to fifth on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle.”
65th to 1st in one category, and 554th to 5th in another.
It is fair to say there was a significant increase in rank post-transition.
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At 12 you simply do not have sufficient capacity to make a good decision on the matter.
Which is why puberty blockers are prescribed to transgender children, delaying puberty until later in life when a "good decision" can be made, usually closer to the mid to late teens.
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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.
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At 12 you simply do not have sufficient capacity to make a good decision on the matter.
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Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or environmental lack of acceptance or support.
Besides, despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.
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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.
Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
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It's largely because chess has historically been a boys-club type activity. Women were actively discouraged, if not barred, from playing on grounds of misogyny. So, even today, there's very little women taking it seriously. Of course, we all know there's no difference in the level of intellect or strategy between men and women.
> Of course, we all know there's no difference in the level of intellect or strategy between men and women. Do we? I thought it was commonly accepted that the average and median are the same but that men have more outliers on both sides.
Many IQ tests have been designed to minimize the difference between males and females, primarily by reducing g-loading. Males pull ahead after puberty, prior to this they have an IQ disadvantage. So you have to take these factors into account when trying to make a fair and proper assessment.
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Why not Human Olympics?
Already exists, it's what people refer to as "male olympics". As far as I know, females aren't banned from competing. It is just that they don't stand a chance in most disciplines. The whole point of female olympics is to keep males out.
My two cents as a transfem athlete: The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned. There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man fo…
We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany
As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.
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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.
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