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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

641–650 of 960 posts

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

#641

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No, that is not a good analogy at all. It's so poor an analogy that it's challenging to interpret this comment generously. I think you might be arguing facetiously to make a different rhetoric point than the literal content of your post, bot I will respond to your text literally. Humans have a wide variety of biological variation in metrics we think of as linked to "biological sex" and those metrics are accessibly mu…

I have a lot of sympathy for Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya, as they were assigned female at birth and raised as girls, and they want to compete with women. But I don't know if there's a case to be made that they're biologically female. They have XY chromosomes, internal testes, a male testosterone level, and male muscle development. They have the SRY gene that the IOC is testing for, and are not one of the exceptio…

For starters, I can't find any credible source saying they have XY chromosomes or internal testes.

Further, they are women, and therefore their testosterone levels and muscle development are female.

This just gets to a ludicrous place. These are women who are simply identifiable as so. Anyone throughout history would have identified them as so. Their biological metrics are within the variation of cis women, because they are cis women.

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

#643

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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 be…

If we can admit of best male, best female, best disabled, best under the age of 18, etc, we can certainly admit of best trans-male; best trans-female.

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

#644
post #168

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Almost every single person on Earth is not built of the right genetic stuff to compete with male Olympic athletes, me and you included. Why do we need a carve out for one particular group because of their genetic bad luck?

Because apparently it's OK to hate on trans people, scapegoat any current issue on this particular demographics, and do everything possible to make their lives as miserable as possible.

What makes you think it's ok to hate on them? I don't think that's ok at all.

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

#645

This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball), this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course. Remember, sport is and has always been about statistical outliers competing. Fairness has never been…

> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)

It’s actually interesting. The claim in defense is that the decision was made prior to her win. This is often backformed in these committees though so on its own I wouldn’t believe it uncritically. However, it seems that other shooting sports were split already which does support this viewpoint. The real tragedy is that women weren’t allowed to shoot skeet at the Olympics after the split. Wild that flew.

Anyway, I still agree that it looks suspicious that the sport where women are quite competitive is one where this happens. I think it might just be not looking hard enough, though.

Equestrian sports are open in category and dressage is dominated by women, eventing leans female, and jumping leans male (just looking at Wikipedia medals - no expertise here). No split there. So the premise is not universally true and probably represents each sports federation differently.

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

#646

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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

#647
post #451

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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.

Right, the purpose is to actually arrange for legitimate competition. Ideally, we would split by whatever facets actually make sense; consider something like fighting disciplines where the split is by weight, or auto racing where it's by the class of vehicle, power-to-weight ratio, etc.

The problem is that there is only so much attention to go around, so we cannot have too many splits; depending on the sport it might just not be financially doable. We also don't want the split to be effectively "the best" and "the second best", because nobody is going to fund millions in advertising for the second best. So, a split like men/women is not surprising as a historical compromise to ensure there's still some attention on those competing in a lighter weight class.

Generically changing it to lightweights/heavyweights might be a reasonable compromise as well, or an age line, or something like that; it will depend on the sport and the market to draw that out. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the thing that makes sense is to continue with the existing split, though....

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

#648
post #629

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> 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 h…

> Genspect, which is also a biased source on the subject:

Organization that supports position supports position .

If Genspect can be discarded as being a biased source, then so can WPATH and every other org supporting gender ideology.

Given the fraught nature of the debate, Wikipedia seems like a poor source for determining the bias of players in the debate - the most passionate debaters have plenty of time to just edit Wikipedia.

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

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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