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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

#621

Post by zeven7 »

harveychess wrote: post #325
asterix_pano wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Aren't you mixing gender and sex?

If you try to define athletic divisions by sex, you're going to have a hard time. The world's best athletes probably all have some unusual biology. About 1.7% of people are not completely biological male or female. I would expect that proportion to be higher for Olympic athletes. Excluding 1.7% or 2% or 10% of the world's best athletes from competing would not be fair.

Anybody can compete in the unsexed category. It’s only the female sex category where someone can be barred. No one is barred from competing at the highest level.

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

#622

Post by zardo »

testbjjl wrote: post #613
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…

Honest question, you say you compete for fun, but what about the folks you beat who are competing for the sake of competition, which is a little different than fun? I am generally open minded at least in comparison to folks I encounter but I can’t square this one in my head. I am just one person with a single opinion but would like to better understand where I am wrong on this topic.

> then I lost to a woman twice my age.

We are not talking about elite athletics here. If someone is upset about a transwoman finishing 150th in the local 10k race they need to work that out with a therapist or something.

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

#623

Post by bit-anarchist »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #597
citruscomputing wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

But that's not what they said.

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

#624

Post by allreduce »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #616
allreduce wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm claiming that there were always women with outlier biology which is not at all easy to classify and not obvious at a glance. People caring about this issue in sports now and changing the objective admission criteria to exclude them is a political phenomenon more than anything else.

The categories were created at a time when “sex” and “gender” were universally considered synonymous, but they were created for the purpose of sex segregation — were they not? This issue genuinely confuses me — and I don’t seem alone in that. Re-defining words does not redefine categories or change the underlying motivation for creating categories in the first place.

I'm not trying to define away biology here. Although "sex" is surprisingly hard to nail down.

Rather, I'm arguing the underlying motivation for creating these categories was and is a sociological one. Why carve out womens sports, as opposed to short peoples sports, low testosterone sports (or other categories which would be similarly disadvantaged)?

The only reason people pay attention to sex here is sociological, i.e. because of gender. This implies that the admissions criteria do not automatically have to follow these strict biological lines -- and I see little reason to enforce them this strictly now. Why exclude trans people and why make yourself a headache trying to classify e.g. intersex people?

More of an aside: a society which fully accepted trans women as women would think looking at the biological markers you're looking at is complete nonsense. Suggesting trans women should be banned would be as ludicrous as suggesting all women with a specific gene which might increase your chances of winning should be banned.

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

#626

Post by zahlman »

whatever1 wrote: post #605
zahlman wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Meanwhile, men in the 63kg powerlifting class have a higher record total than even superheavyweight women: https://worldpowerlifting.com/records/womens-world-records/ https://worldpowerlifting.com/records/mens-world-records/

I don’t see where we disagree. It is exactly why we have different buckets for men and women. Otherwise why would ever a woman try to compete in weightlifting?

It came across that you proposed to solve the problem with just weight classes, which is clearly not sufficient. Sorry if I misunderstood.

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

#627

Post by bluescrn »

scoofy wrote: post #451
qingcharles wrote: post #438

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…

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.

> The issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory.

Just about anything competitive is discriminatory. People are disadvantaged by genetics, disability/health issues, age, wealth inequality, and more.

But as a society we love competitive activities, so the best we can do is come up with rules to try and impose a reasonable amount of fairness.

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

#628

Post by remarkEon »

bit-anarchist wrote: post #623
appreciatorBus wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

But that's not what they said.

Yes it is. Note the parenthetical.

>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)

This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.

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

#629

Post by Ralfp »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #619
Ralfp wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.' Rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a well documented phenomenon. https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(16)30765-0/abst... https://statsforgender.org/since-the-turn-of-the-millennium-...

It is not.

Lisa Littmans research behind „rapid onset gender dysphoria” is a survey amongst parents recruited on three anti-trans internet sites and communities:

https://psychcentral.com/lib/there-is-no-evidence-that-rapid...

    The study was based on 256 responses to an online survey of parents recruited from these three websites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...

That by itself means its heavily biased research on a weak sample.

„Stats for Gender” site is ran by Genspect, which is also a biased source on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genspect

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

#630

Post by remarkEon »

zardo wrote: post #622
testbjjl wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, you say you compete for fun, but what about the folks you beat who are competing for the sake of competition, which is a little different than fun? I am generally open minded at least in comparison to folks I encounter but I can’t square this one in my head. I am just one person with a single opinion but would like to better understand where I am wrong on this topic.

> then I lost to a woman twice my age. We are not talking about elite athletics here. If someone is upset about a transwoman finishing 150th in the local 10k race they need to work that out with a therapist or something.

No one's talking about 10k races that don't matter much. But people are talking about races and events in high school or college that do affect things like scholarships or future professional athletic endeavors. That's really where most of the heartburn started, as far as I can tell. I suppose one option could be to have two lists, the nominal ranking of participants and then a trans-adjusted one that removes those participants.
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