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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

371–380 of 960 posts

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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)".…

Speaking for myself I believe that trans people and non-binary people should be accommodated, but there’s a contextual limit. When it comes to equal protection, employment, healthcare, medical access, bathrooms and a dozen other issues it’s a no-brainer in favor of accommodating people. Ironically the sports divide is probably the single area where having some physical advantages isn’t a bonus. It’s also near and dea…

In the Olympics, it appears trans athletes are still a minority among the group of athletes who are excluded because of sex characteristics. Most of the athletes impacted by the ever-stricter testosterone limits in the Olympics are cis women. Such a league would include cisgender former Olympic athletes who had to undergo forms of HRT in order to qualify.

When discussing trans people in sports, the most salient contexts aren't elite sports championships like the Olympics. "Sports" is also done recreationally and is often considered a normal part of ones childhood upbringing. On the topic of trans people, the question "can my child play this sport with their friends"?

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

#372
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More important than national security and government integrity, I'm told. Certainly seems that way for a certain subset of voters. They'd rather lose the election than let women compete against females only.

> They'd rather lose the election than let women compete against females only. Fascinating political analysis. It's weird how a small group of people are deeply driven by identity politics above literally anything else, especially when those people typically aren't even slightly affected (and generally have never watched a single women's event in their life). I sometimes wonder if people like you scream at politician…

If you can find me some politicians, I would gladly yell at them that the DH and the pitch clock are unnatural and immoral.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrom... Among others

I am going to try to keep my response apolitical to try to avoid fanning a culture war. That Wiki is the exact reason we are in this situation because we are bringing up points for 1 in 20000 or 0.005% of the population. Any system designed around 0.005% edge cases is going to be so complex that it is functionally impossible to do in practice. That is why one side says the solution is "obvious" because we have a simp…

Sure, it covers 99.9% of cases, but top elite athletes are the genetic exceptions, they are the genetic freaks. They are the top 0.0001%. You don't get to compete at the most elite levels without your body being exceptionally gifted and almost specifically shaped for the relevant sport, which inevitably means funky genetic traits and disorders, higher testosterone levels etc.

I mean the word freak in the most loving and caring way possible, mind you.

What does fairness mean in that context?

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

#374
post #227

I wish people would care a lot less about sports.

1) You don’t care about it, therefore it isn’t worth it for people to care?

2) why do you think those who care about this don’t care about other issues?

3) this hardly makes the headlines, and wont stay there for long. It doesn’t get outsized attention

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> More important than national security and government integrity, I'm told. Certainly seems that way for a certain subset of voters. They'd rather lose the election than let women compete against females only.

[flagged]

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly, it's not possible to "delay puberty" until later in life without permanent consequences. Puberty cannot simply be resumed later. Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. The changes can't be reversed later as if hormones were not altered during critical phases if the person changes their mind.

It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades.

> Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases.

Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them.

It almost feels like you're arguing definitions.

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

#378
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

At 12 kids do not have sufficient capacity to handle any major decision, including any medical procedure.

That does not take away their right to see their best interests represented and defended.

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

#379

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.

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 mu…

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

This would apply to sex chromosomes as well

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