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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

#631

Post by tensor »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #610
tensor wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except I proposed a solution, which you ignored (I'm assuming here that I'm your "opposing side".) Also, there are a significant number of these sorts of arguments in high-level sports, probably precisely because these "0.1%" cases are exactly the ones that result in exceptional ability relative to norms. It's also curious that there is such obsession about naturally occurring genetic outliers with respect to females…

> naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender This is just not true. Many sports are categorized by weight for the most obvious example.

Yes. Which is what I proposed for all differences. Note that classifying by weight is not banning athletes like is happening in the olympics.

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

#632

Post by txrx0000 »

bluescrn wrote: post #577
txrx0000 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Yeah. It would work like video game rankings. Top-ranked players are top-ranked because of skill, and if they happen to be mostly men for most games, so be it.

But I get your point. The crux of the problem is most people don't want to see skill-based matchmaking. They want to see the best man, the best woman, or the best disabled person, etc. The categories are already defined in people's minds as cultural constants. The trans people don't like this because they feel excluded by both male and female categories, so they argue in bad faith that there's no physical difference between females and trans-females or males and trans-males. Our long-term options as a society are to either 1) change culture so that people get used to skill-based matchmaking like in video games, or 2) ignore trans people and wait for this issue to disappear when future tech allows a man to transfer his consciousness into a female body and vice versa.

Since 2) is quite far out technologically, I propose 1).

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

#633

Post by txrx0000 »

kelipso wrote: post #586
txrx0000 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a relative skill rating system, then there's no need to split competitors into groups. But if you insist, then you can split them based on skill ratings (define a rating range for beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc). And for games with one-on-one matchups, sampling from a gaussian centered on each player's skill rating is good enough.

It will end up being all men at all the skill rating levels.

No it would not. Look at chess ratings.

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

#634

Post by remarkEon »

Retric wrote: post #366
andsoitis wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 12 you simply do not have sufficient capacity to make a good decision on the matter.

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…

>from what was assigned at birth

The passive voice language here is really bizarre. Who is doing the assigning?

>Separating conjoined twins for example.

This is not, in any way, comparable to a 12 year old taking medications that permanently sterilize them.

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

#635

Post by ragall »

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…

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

#636

Post by appreciatorBus »

tensor wrote: post #631
appreciatorBus wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender This is just not true. Many sports are categorized by weight for the most obvious example.

Yes. Which is what I proposed for all differences. Note that classifying by weight is not banning athletes like is happening in the olympics.

Heavy weight boxers are banned from competing against feather weight boxers.

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

#637

Post by renewiltord »

LanceH wrote: post #361
Aurornis wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually wish non-sports people would care less about sports, too. Because the decisions should be left to those of us playing the sports. Not bystanders trying to impose their own agendas on to activities they don't even participate in.

And money from non-sports people should be left with the non-sports people.

This is, in general, a good idea. Nostalgia etc. and some kind of misguided paternalism causes us to “fund” sports when really all of this stuff should have to just pay for what it is. The market economy is a good way to allocate things so that you don’t end up with a $40k/yr income person paying taxes so that rich people get tennis courts in Russian Hill. We should probably just have market functions for most things.

The government doesn’t have to leave the sphere. It just has to manage the market. For instance, a specific amount of space in a park could be allocated to dynamically priced programming. This could be auctioned on an annual basis with teardown costs pre-allocated. Then you don’t have the argument over whether tennis or pickleball. It could be cricket or sepak takraw for all we know.

Proponents of various sports could group together to share the space. This is obviously far superior to the communist style committee allocation.

And obviously the government should not fund sports. Creating the environment where sports funding can occur by ensuring a framework for contracts and so on, yes. But actually deciding that baseball or football or basketball need to be played is patently ridiculous.

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

#638

Post by zuminator »

dpatterbee wrote: post #538
mirekrusin wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There could be translympics just like there is paralympics.

We probably don't want to head down the path of creating new competitions for people that meet arbitrary criteria. White-straight-man only olympics anyone?

White straight men aren't being barred from the Olympics.

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

#640

Post by ragall »

allreduce wrote: post #599
frumplestlatz wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

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