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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

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

#591

Post by dangus »

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…

It seems like we are creatively bankrupt if we can’t think of any solution. I think many of us could think of a good solution in literally seconds.

And there’s a really good argument that a solution isn’t actually needed.

Does the NBA need a solution for Steph Curry being the best 3 point shooter of all time and dominating his competition? Did the NFL need a solution for Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl 30% of the seasons he played in his career? Did Ohio high school basketball need a solution for LeBron James only losing 6 games in his entire high school career?

Athletes dominating their league happens all the time without the issue of transgender and intersex players.

If there is some kind of mass influx of men playing women’s sports to win easy championships that’s when we can deal with the problem. But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale. E.g. there has never been a time when washed up NBA player that decided to try and join the WNBA. We don’t need to solve problems that do not yet exist.

But let’s say we have to solve this problem to make everyone shut up about it. Here’s one I just thought of off the top of my head:

Anyone who performs at a level of play at an abnormally high gap between themselves and their competition (a set statistical percentage better) can be forced to seek a higher league of play if it exists and they are eligible if and only if other competitors in the league request they do so with a strong consensus.

Is this a perfect solution? No, but I thought of it in literally ten seconds, it doesn’t even involve gender, and I didn’t resort to sitting on my hands and saying “aw shucks there’s no solution” or “I guess we’ll just have to ban trans people from sports.

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

#592

Post by thunderfork »

zahlman wrote: post #506
thunderfork wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upshot of this is that women with a genetic advantage are banned, but men with a genetic advantage aren't; is this not straightforwardly sex discrimination?

No. Nobody is banned from the "men's" category, including unambiguously cisgender women of completely unambiguous sexual characteristics. They just wouldn't stand a chance, practically speaking (for example, in the 100 metre sprint, the all-time women's world record time would not meet the qualification standard). There was already "sex discrimination" in the fact of the women's category existing in the first place;…

>Nobody is banned from the "men's" category, including unambiguously cisgender women of completely unambiguous sexual characteristics.

This is exactly my point. Men with unusual characteristics are celebrated, but women with unusual characteristics are excluded into a non-competitive category.

You can justify it if you'd like, but in a practical sense, no man will ever get to the Olympics only to be turned away because they don't genetically qualify for competition. This is an indignity reserved only for women.

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

#593

Post by dangus »

qu4z-2 wrote: post #530
ck2 wrote: 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 s…

The issue isn’t the proof of citizenship. The issue is that poll taxes are unconstitutional and there is no state that I’m aware of that makes the acquisition of identification documents free of cost.

I’m honestly quite surprised that politicians don’t resolve this idiotic situation because it’s so damn simple, but I think it’s not solved because various state governments rely on small fees for revenue. And of course because there are many political situations in which making it difficult for specific opponent voters to vote is a campaign strategy.

Make fees for drivers licenses, birth certificates, and passports illegal, and ideally institute a system that makes these forms of identification automatic/stupidly easy to acquire and the whole issue is resolved. Now you can require voters to present them and you aren’t disenfranchising anyone.

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

#594

Post by zahlman »

lynndotpy wrote: post #566
zahlman wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> What is the total prevalence of all conditions medically recognized as intersex? Not all biological variation is classified as intersex. > What is that even supposed to mean? You can change a lot of your 'secondary sex characteristics' intentionally. This is much easier than removing a limb, and even easier than adding a limb.

> Not all biological variation is classified as intersex.

Okay, but other biological variation is clearly not relevant to the discussion.

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

#595

Post by wstrange »

hmokiguess wrote: post #550
array_key_first wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're trying to say that if there was a mixed league it would always end up being 100% men at the highest level. Like, mixed league basketball would almost certainly be just men at the highest level because of how the sport works.

I sometimes play mixed vball rec leagues, the definition of a mixed league in our rec league here, says we "have to have at least 2 women playing at any time" So maybe I think what they mean by "mixed league" is not a "Maybe Mixed League" but like "Definitely Mixed League" as in mixed participants being a strict requirement somehow?

A bunch of people here are conflating low stakes amateur sports with elite sports.

Mixed league works fine for your company softball team. Not so much for professional sports.

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

#596

Post by thrance »

badc0ffee wrote: post #225
jasonlotito wrote: post #18

It's gonna get buried, but petesergeant had a good comment sharing this article. They are also banning females from female sports as well with this ruling. https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...

Caster Semenya is XY with a DSD (5-ARD), and absolutely should not compete with females. The same goes for Imane Khelif who was the same DSD. People with this condition have internal testes, a male level of testosterone, and a male level of muscle development. That a doctor assigned them female at birth and put a F on the birth certificate does not change this.

That's dumb as fuck. Olympics have always been for genetic freaks, whatever line we draw between "male" and "female" categories is completely arbitrary. Using reproductive organs was bad enough, are we now supposed to look at microscopic chains of amino acids to sort people? IMO, this decision just serves to further illustrate the insanity that is gender segregation.

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

#597

Post by appreciatorBus »

citruscomputing wrote: post #589
michaelt wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competitive sport is unusual in that the whole thing is, in a sense, a search for outliers. Finding very rightmost person on the histogram of running speed or swimming ability or weightlifting strength. The very, very rare. The 7ft 6in guys. Then we put them on a podium, hand them a medal, and wrap them in a flag. In most other fields, outliers average out. The new subdivision of houses gets framed at the speed of th…

We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women." Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (some…

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

#598

Post by charlesarthur »

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…

You need to read up about XY 5-ARD (the condition Caster Semenya has and Khelif surely has). Being XY with active SRY means you're male. Khelif has admitted having the SRY gene (in an interview with L'Equipe). Males have very significant advantages (50% plus) in power sports such as weightlifting and, yes, boxing.

Sex isn't "more fluid". It's entirely binary, but DSDs (differences of sexual development) can make appearances deceptive - so an XY male can be wrongly recorded as female at birth, especially in countries with inexperienced medics and midwives.

Phelps's records have all been broken. By other males, of course - no female is getting close to his numbers. That's male advantage in action.

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

#599

Post by allreduce »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #502
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 enou…

Let’s reverse this. Why should physical competition be classified based on sociological conceptions around gender?

The classification has always been based on sociological conceptions and is still based on such after this change. There have always been outliers who are sociologically women, but don't have the biological makeup most women have.

That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.

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

#600

Post by undersuit »

space_fountain wrote: post #576
koolba wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Games

But trans women aren't in anyway enhanced in their ability to compete?

And from the linked Wiki: "According to D'Souza, athletes should also be categorised based on their chromosomal sex."
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