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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

491–500 of 960 posts

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

#491

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> It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. The change over the past couple hundred years is measured on the order of a couple years at most. This has nothing at all to do with hormonal intervention until adult ages. Once someone reaches adulthood the window for a lot of changes has closed. > Puber…

I feel like you ignored my entire last paragraph. I don't know how to respond to this without just pasting it again.

I read it, but you keep moving the goalposts around so much and introducing irrelevant detours that I can't respond to everything you write, sorry.

I've been consistent about my point, but you've introduced so many other topics including the "maybe it's only for a year or two" point that this is just one big gish gallop

Your point about puberty happening earlier and earlier also contradicts your arguments about how it might only be for a year or two

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

#492
post #462

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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.

You might want to look at strength standards for women and men at the same weight.

https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards

Weight classes are a great thing in some sports. They do not solve for the discrepancies between women and men, though.

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

#493

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> This is a matter of principle, fair play, and safety. Whether it's a tiny number or "scores and scores" is irrelevant. What if it's 0? > If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site. A deeply unbiased source, I'm sure. Anyway I'd love to but all their archive links are the same. Looks like someone wrote a for loop incorrectly. But to be blunt, this is the exact same sort of nonsense as VAERS a…

Sorry part of my reply got cut off. > What if it's 0? It's not 0, and anyone engaging honestly knows it. To make another vaccine analogy: claiming it's a small number and therefore it doesn't matter is identical to the people who said Covid vaccines weren't important because the disease didn't wipe out more than x% of the population. In fact, it's because of the vaccines that this is the case. And it's because of res…

> Cmon guy, you can't ask for a source and then dismiss the one provided without critically examining it.

I did examine it. From the outset it looks like self-reported nonsense, hence the comparison to VAERS. Examining further, yes, it's self-reported nonsense, and also it's broken so I can't even really look into it in detail. The one example that is highlighted with sourcing is about a transwoman golfer who won ONE event. One. Looking through her win/loss record, she seems broadly pretty good, but hardly what one would expect if the narrative being pushed here is true.

> You're complaining that it's using publicly available data? Would you rather private anecdotes?

It's literally private anecdotes! Anyone can submit to that thing, the form is one click away from the homepage.

> Not sure why this is relevant - is being cheated out of second place less of a misdeed than being cheated out of first?

Of course not, but again, the narrative is that men are posing as women and competing in an unfair way based on genetic advantage. That's not a "win here and there" situation the way it's framed, that's a "women have no way to fairly compete." So why are so many transwomen still being beated by ciswomen competitors?

> It's not 0, and anyone engaging honestly knows it.

Then let's see a source! I asked for one two comments ago. Even the one on that shithoused website I can actually check the sources FOR is at best, speculative. What exactly in the male genome predisposes one in the context of GOLF for earth shattering victory?

> To make another vaccine analogy: claiming it's a small number and therefore it doesn't matter

I didn't claim it's a small number, I've claimed it's made up.

> is identical to the people who said Covid vaccines weren't important because the disease didn't wipe out more than x% of the population.

> And it's because of resistance to men in women's sports that the problem is not larger.

There are no men in women's sports, there are women in women's sports, and until you show me the source you're, respectfully, talking nonsense.

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

#494
post #436
post #365

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Have you considered that due to their education and research those people may know more on the subject than you do? 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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Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#495

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The classification is based on sex, expressly due to the material differences between the sexes. It is not and has never been rooted in any sort of sociological concept of gender as an independent category from one’s sex.

The material difference between people we bar and do not bar is not large enough to constitute a difference against competing with people we assign within the same sex group [1][2][3]. This might feel counterintuitive, but please consider that trans people who have medically transitioned are not as different from cis people of the same gender than you expect. Hormones do a lot. [1] https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/…

"This might feel counterintuitive" is precisely why the religious right has seized on transgender participation in athletics as a wedge issue. When they say "well, somebody who was born as a man obviously has a natural advantage over people born as women," it feels logical, right? The fact that it largely isn't supported by data rarely comes up, and when it does, it's easy to deflect with "maybe there's just not enough data yet" (which, of course, could just as easily be an argument against imposing such bans, but never mind).

It is infuriating how successful the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd has been at pushing discriminatory legislation through in the last few years based largely on feelings rather than facts.

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

#497

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…

That's a weird take. How bad do you imagine it going?

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

#499
post #330

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> 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…

But but but it's about fairness In high school sports! You know, that thing where the school next door is twice the size and has ten times the budget but it's totally fair! They win the championship every year because they totally have genetically superior athletes every single year! They are definitely better and there are zero possible systemic issues that could affect such a situation! If high school sports aren't…

Hint: They don't care about fairness in high school sports.

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

#500

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> Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes? No, both because there are very few trans athletes in competition, and because trans athletes (except trans women who have not started or are less than a year into hormone therapy) have net athletic disadvantages , when considering all factors relevant to performance in almost any real sport, compared to cisgender peopl…

You’re conveniently ignoring the Olympic boxing champion from 2024 who beat the absolute shit out of the female competitors.

Are you talking about Imane Khelif? The woman who was born a woman, competed her whole life as a woman and is still last time I checked, a woman?
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