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

571–580 of 960 posts

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

#571

Post by thrance »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #519
Retric wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender from what was assigned at birth, but it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case. Edge cases in biology get wild and sex assigned at birth can be a near arbitrary decision. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant ri…

It is entirely clear that it can be the case, as proven by the existence of people "detransitioning". It is also entirely clear that there have been parents (usually mothers) who wanted to have a trans child because it was cool.

So-called "detransitions" represent way less than 1% of the trans population. In particular, the proportion of people regretting their transitions is much smaller than that of mothers regretting having their kids. They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of bigoted narratives.

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

#572

Post by mc32 »

qingcharles wrote: post #438
callistocodes wrote: post #334

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…

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…

One solution is to have more categories. Then people can compete in their relevant categories.

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

#573

Post by thrance »

mvdtnz wrote: post #168
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".

Almost every single person on Earth is not built of the right genetic stuff to compete with male Olympic athletes, me and you included. Why do we need a carve out for one particular group because of their genetic bad luck?

Because apparently it's OK to hate on trans people, scapegoat any current issue on this particular demographics, and do everything possible to make their lives as miserable as possible.

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

#574

Post by blindriver »

RealityVoid wrote: post #541
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

I find the Khelif debacle incredibly damning for anti-trans militants since she apparently was born as a woman and has this weird thing where she has male characteristics. The anti-trans hysteria at that point in time was super off-putting for me since she did nothing wrong but merely existed. Before this I was like... meh, have sex separated sports and be done with it, but this made me re-evaluate my views in sex in…

[flagged]

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

#575

Post by mc32 »

lokar wrote: post #488
callistocodes wrote: post #334

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…

You can tell the IOC does not care about fairness in competition: they focus on this, instead of the rampant cheating (eg doping) which they do nothing about.

Doping is a problem which offers offenders unfair advantages -the IOC combats that and looks like they are looking at other unfair advantages as well. It's a cat-and-mouse game. As of yet there is no perfect doping detector (it can have false positives) but just because it's imperfect doesn't mean they should ignore the advantage it offers these offenders.

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

#577

Post by bluescrn »

txrx0000 wrote: post #569
dpd_dpd wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the solution is to exclude male advantage from the female competition via evidence-based analysis, as the IOC's new policy does.

Grouping based on skill would achieve what you describe and then some. It would eliminate every kind of advantage, not just sex-based advantage.

Sport does that already. The Olympics is the very top skill tier.

So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?

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

#578

Post by aucisson_masque »

callistocodes wrote: post #334

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…

No one cares at amateur levels but we are speaking of the Olympic. I'm all for transgender to do sport, have fun and even compete but Olympic games are about who is the best of the world.

If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.

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

#579

Post by badc0ffee »

lynndotpy wrote: post #260
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.

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…

I have a lot of sympathy for Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya, as they were assigned female at birth and raised as girls, and they want to compete with women. But I don't know if there's a case to be made that they're biologically female.

They have XY chromosomes, internal testes, a male testosterone level, and male muscle development. They have the SRY gene that the IOC is testing for, and are not one of the exceptions. Regardless of the fact that their DSD (5-ARD) results in no penis.

To be clear, I'm not saying they should start living life as men. But describing their situation as the natural variation of cis women is simplistic and not accurate.

Post reply on HN