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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

521–530 of 960 posts

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

#521

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…

> The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. 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 coul…

> As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.

It affects the rights of transgender people, so it is directly related to transgender rights. Also, I don't at all think that it's coincidence that people spreading hate about transgender people are the same ones so concerned about this particular issue?

People spreading hate and prejudice always have .

> We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s

We all do? People born in the 1950s or earlier might remember, making them at least 65 years old. I've never heard of it from people of any age. In any case, it's hard to connect this 60 year old issue with today's decision.

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

#522
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t seem to be the case, given the first paragraph of the article: > The International Olympic Committee has barred transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category of the Olympics and said that all participants in those events must undergo genetic testing. Genetic testing doesn’t leave a lot of room for accidentally or intentionally targeting women for being “insufficiently feminine.”

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…

> Leave aside the fact that very few of us here have actually tested our 23rd chromosome.

When people do submit to such testing, how commonly are the results other than they expected?

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

#523
post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue. Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises. How do you ever come up wit…

Seems to me like the obvious answer is to categorize these events by weight division rather than gender, but this will never be considered because the hysteria is the point.

Fighting sports are divided by weight (boxing, judo, etc) but no woman would even be close to winning in the same weight category of men, so we will never see a woman in those sports at the Olympics or anywhere it matters.

And who would pick a woman to play in a team of volleyball, basketball, soccer? I think that historically the only sport in which men and women are absolutely equal is shooting. Maybe curling but it's usually the man that sweeps the ice (a little bit of extra strength.)

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

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

#525
post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory. That the issue of discrimination comes up is to be expected. The idea of competitive sports exists in a framework of discrimination means that you will always have unhappy people. The good news is that sports, for the most part, is mostly symbolic, and rarely affects ones livelihood.

Assuming you have already procured food and shelter, everything important in your life is symbolic.

Right, which is why civil rights laws tend to be about employment and housing.

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

#526
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2024/09/uneven-playin... “Women tend to have thinner skulls than men, along with smaller neck muscles, which can predispose female athletes to getting a concussion,” says Sarah Menacho, MD, a neurosurgeon and neurocritical care specialist at University of Utah Health. “Data shows that women are also more likely than men to report concussion-related symptoms, and these symptoms c…

Huh, didn't know that.

Don't let that prevent you from posting more dismissive posts about topics you don't know in the future.

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

#527
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" wou…

Let's use the present scissor and the current state of affairs, which at present excludes some women for the sake of others. Which, I'll remind you, comes with all of the problems we currently experience.

And solves a lot more of the problems, including the ones we are discussing.

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

#528

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…

> Humans have a wide variety of biological variation in metrics we think of as linked to "biological sex"

What is the total prevalence of all conditions medically recognized as intersex?

> and those metrics are accessibly mutable.

What is that even supposed to mean?

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

#529

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.

Dude, men are better than women at virtually every single sport. What are you talking about.

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

#530
post #68

The easiest way to explain this nonsense is that in 100+ years of Olympics, there are ZERO elite athletes who were transgender none it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote because there have been no previous cases of that either However there are women who have given birth who will fail that SRY test Because biology is messy, not black and wh…

> it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote

I'm staying out of the other issue as best I can, but as a non-American the resistance to this is just baffling, especially given the fact your recent elections have not exactly been widely trusted internally. Not that I'm saying there was much merit to the distrust, but it still makes sense to take steps to demonstrate it. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

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