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More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

novonordiskfonden.dk

201–210 of 231 posts

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#201
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That weightlifter came last due to a disqualification for improper technique, not because of being unable to lift the weight. If you look at previous performances by that same weightlifter in earlier competitions, although these were mediocre compared to other males, they would be outstanding if this weightlifter was actually female. Middle-aged, relatively unfit, with a chronic injury, and still able to lift signifi…

> This is just one example amongst hundreds. There are loads of these male athletes with male physiological advantage taking medals in women's sports. Then where are they in the olympics? Why didn't trans women take over all medals in all categories? Why was there only one trans woman in fucking weightlifting and her technique apparently sucked so bad that she was disqualified? I'm not like deeply into sports, again,…

It's because there's not many of them eligible to compete at this level. Fortunately, there is a pipeline of restrictions in place so hardly any of these males filter through.

Firstly, there is the eligibility criteria to compete as women. Up until 2016, when the IOC relaxed the policy to only require these males to undergo testosterone suppression, the rule was that they had to have had the surgery to remove the testicles and reshape the penis into a hole. Only a minority of these males choose to go through with this surgery as it is, so to intersect with the group of males who want to seriously compete in sport was highly unlikely. Testosterone suppression, which not all of these males choose to do anyway, has strict limits of minimum duration and maximum concentration. So this in itself filters out most.

Secondly, no athlete can directly apply to compete in the Olympics, as all entrants have to go through their country's organizing committee. So this limits countries to those who recognize trans identities and who have a committee brazen enough to enter a male who wants to be female in the female category, ahead of actual female athletes.

Thirdly, even if those conditions are met, the athlete must choose to do this knowing that the eyes of the world will be watching and that such an entry into the Olympics will be highly and globally controversial. This filters out all but the most shameless. Note this contrasts with the female athletes who claim transgender identities and enter, uncontroversially, into the category of their sex, of which there have been several over the years.

All this is why almost all of the trans-identifying males who compete, and win, in the female category do so in competitions other than the Olympics. Mostly smaller, regional ones.

It's also why most of the male athletes who've competed at the Olympics in the female category are those with disorders of sex development. The rules are different for these athletes. Though not without controversy either. DSD policy has changed over time too, to be more restrictive. The most recent turning point was after male athletes took gold, silver and bronze in the women's 800m at Rio. They didn't claim trans identities, having been erroneously assigned female on their birth certificates, but competing as if they are female was, and is, similarly problematic.

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. Sure. Meanwhile there's no athletic record of anyone identified as a woman cracking the four minute mile. Not long after Roger Bannister, teenage boys started doing it. It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets. Elite capability does not erase or conceal sex-related gaps. We have male and femal…

It's kinda unusual, but only because they don't run the mile event very often. Most track events have a 1,500 meters, 109m short of a mile. But they're definitely running them at a sub-4 pace -- the high school record is something like 3:34 for the 1,500. Most tracks aren't set up to properly measure the mile. It's easier to measure the 1,600 meters, still 9 meters short of a mile. It's not a standard track event but…

What is kinda unusual? I don't understand your comment.

The USA high school record for the female 1500 m event 4:04.62, set on May 17, 2013, by one Mary Cain of Bronxville, NY, in an event at Eagle Rock, CA.

It would take something like another 18 seconds to get to 1609 meters at that pace.

That's just the USA. Let's look at the World Under-18 records:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_i...

3:54.52, by a Ling Zhang in China, in 1997. Not sub-4 pace. She was 16 + 188 days old.

Not sure where you got 3:34 from; maybe you are looking at a boys' table? A 17-year-old Australian named Cameron Myers hit 3:33.26 in 2023, in Poland.

We saw a new women's 1500 m record just this month. 31-year-old Kenyan Faith Kipyegon ran it 3:48.68 on July 5, in Eugene, OR.

Note that it it was still 15 seconds slower than the boy. It's about a 4:05 mile pace.

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, this is just egocentrism then - then inability to see things from the point of view of another. Everybody is actually not exactly the same as you, as surprising as that apparently will be.

no, it isn't egocentrism. Egocentrism is to think you're special when in fact you're not and thinking that empathy requires, rather than understanding, constant affirmation of your point of view. I can certainly understand the confusion of someone being faced with a diagnosis like this, that's empathy, but to pretend this means I need to affirm their insecurities even if grounded in nothing is not just not empathy, i…

> this means I need to affirm their insecurities

Seriously, it's not about you. It's about them.

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#204
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the sense that race is a type of caste system. There's really no biological reality to it.

If that is so, why does a black couple bear black children, and a white couple bear white children? I'll concede that much in the way of "race" is a social construct, but to claim there's no biology involved is categorically false.

race is a category assigned based on crudely determined heritable traits, but looking at the genetics you don't get the same categories. dark skin is a convergent evolutionary trait that comes from living near the equator, you don't need the groups to be related at all for them to arrive at a similar skin tone. the same goes for all skin tones in fact. racial categories actually don't make sense from a biological perspective, but that doesn't mean that traits correlated with race don't exist. the picture is just extremely crude to the point of being useless outside of the political element of providing a visible indicator of caste.

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda unusual, but only because they don't run the mile event very often. Most track events have a 1,500 meters, 109m short of a mile. But they're definitely running them at a sub-4 pace -- the high school record is something like 3:34 for the 1,500. Most tracks aren't set up to properly measure the mile. It's easier to measure the 1,600 meters, still 9 meters short of a mile. It's not a standard track event but…

What is kinda unusual? I don't understand your comment. The USA high school record for the female 1500 m event 4:04.62, set on May 17, 2013, by one Mary Cain of Bronxville, NY, in an event at Eagle Rock, CA. It would take something like another 18 seconds to get to 1609 meters at that pace. That's just the USA. Let's look at the World Under-18 records: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_i... 3…

Yeah, sorry about that. I should have quoted the specific bit I was replying to:

"It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets."

Most boys won't run the actual mile in a track meet, just because they don't run that event. I hadn't meant to address women at all.

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#206
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely lots of factors actually influence competitive advantage and it's arbitrary which ones we decide to use to group competitors! I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands…

> What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? This is basically how golf works, right?

But in high level competition people don't use handicaps right? But I think handicaps are also about your individual skill level based on your past performance relative to par on different courses right? (I'm not a golfer). I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate deep skill. I'm imagining we should have a shared model that given some basic info (e.g. your biological sex, height, maybe some ratios about your skeletal proportions, age, hormones) gives a distribution on performance (e.g. marathon time, long jump distance, weight lighting combined score), and your normalized score is based on the quantile you get relative to that baseline. I think that behaves pretty different from a handicap based on personal past performance. I.e. a tiny old lady who throws a shotput pretty far gets a high normalized score, even if her performance is extremely consistent over time (and so on the day of competition she's not outperforming her prior record).

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#207
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But “difficult to substantiate” isn’t what I mean? I mean something more like whether something is there independent of what people think of it. (“Reality is that which, when one stops believing in it, doesn’t go away.”) Distinctions between categories are often somewhat fuzzy, but in some cases there are processes independent of peoples’ opinions that behave largely like there are distinct buckets. Such as “has a le…

That a function is continuous instead of discrete doesn't make it any less real. The fact is, humans like to categorize things because it makes things easier for them to process and communicate. Categorization is frequently imperfect; accepting that is a hallmark of being an mature adult.

Sure, but discrete categories people come up with are less real the less they align-with/derive-from the actual how-things-are .

I’m willing to talk about the radius of a helium atom even though there is no sharp cut-off in distance beyond which the amplitude for an electron being found there becomes zero.

But not every k-means clustering on a dataset reflects a real separation into types. Just because people draw lines in their model of the world, and just because these lines are sometimes useful, doesn’t mean those lines cleave reality at the joints.

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#208
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the sense that race is a type of caste system. There's really no biological reality to it.

If that is so, why does a black couple bear black children, and a white couple bear white children? I'll concede that much in the way of "race" is a social construct, but to claim there's no biology involved is categorically false.

From which shade of color do you consider someone black or white?

If color defines a race, surely white korean people are the same race as Irish and German people and most malaysians are blacks right?

What about people born from parents with way different skin tones or any other characteristic you can think of?

And why aren't blond haired people not considered a different race than white people with brown hair? Why are ginger haired people.often discriminated? There are a lot of other characteristics than skin color we inherit from our parents, some are considered diseases, or syndromes, other not. The only difference with skin color is that we don't necessarily prejudice based on them, mostly because theses differences are less visible. Races is mostly a societal construct to discriminate people.

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#209
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to. This reads to me as "separate but equal" which I think is exactly what's wrong with sports divisions. Sports divisions play out the "separate is inherently unequal" at so many levels.

i don't think equality was ever the goal. The goal was just to let more people play sports, have fun, and have a realistic chance of winning within their chosen division. If a professional baseball player wanted to play in a little league tournament they'd do very very well, but it'd be unfair to a bunch of 7-12 year olds, so we don't allow that and the sport is "separate", but when a 9 year old kid wins the Little L…

> There are times when "separate is inherently unequal" is actually the most fair.

I guess ask the WNBA if they feel that way about it...

Re: More women than expected are genetically men (2016)

#210
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Should" meaning "would if it were mature and healthy" > "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers." No. There are no intermediates. Nobody produces "spergs" or "speggs". Someone may produce no gametes because they're not yet mature or because of a developmental disorder, but that just means that they will later on in life, or won't produce the gametes their body is…

> healthy You're just using more normative words, implying that you can tell what someone "really" is aside from literally any definition you can articulate, since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases. > Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging. Unless you are a biologist w…

>You're just using more normative words

Yes, classification is normative. This stupid debate would immediately end if people could internalize what that means.

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