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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

651–660 of 960 posts

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

#651

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Men are stronger, faster, have more dense bones, have bigger lungs, bigger hands, etc, etc, etc. Men and women are different in hundreds of ways it's not just 'lean body mass'. Men are better at sports than women. Do you even live in reality? Have you ever completed in anything in your life?

Then create those divisions. Please be rational.

Good lord. Absolutely nobody is going to watch boxing divisions based on lung size and bone density.

Did you actually think that lean mass would be a sensible way to separate divisions in a gender neutral fashion? That would, again, just result in women being unable to compete professionally in virtually any sport. They would be relegated to Division N, for some very large value of N. Competing alongside multitudes of biologically male amateurs, where nobody cares and nobody pays to watch. To even entertain this idea betrays a total lack of understanding of the matter at hand.

Right now you are acting like Elon Musk storming into the government and having 20 year olds cut everybody's budget. You may think you're coming in with fresh outsider perspective and an open minded way to look at things and improve them, but everyone actually involved in the domain can see a trainwreck in progress. It's not a good look.

I am quite certain it's not your intention, but you're really coming across as someone who hates women's sports, and doesn't want them to exist. On behalf of my wife and sister and a lot of the women I've known in a lifetime of playing sports - kindly keep your awful ideas to yourself. Women fought tooth and nail for the right to have their own professional sporting opportunities. Don't you dare try to take it away from them.

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

#652

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…

No one cares at amateur levels but we are speaking of the Olympic. I'm all for transgender to do sport, have fun and even compete but Olympic games are about who is the best of the world. If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.

> If you chose to identify as another sex

Literally nobody does this

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

#654
post #490
post #477

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Five billion people followed the Paris Olympics. It’s actually kind of important.

How do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way.

You're most likely part of the 2bn that showed no, or a passing interest, in the Olympics.

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

#655
post #286

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The guidelines for trans female athletes for the 2024 Paris Olympics involved transitioning before the age of 12/puberty to be eligible. There's more info at https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/paris-2024-olym...

Incidentally, many countries/states are working hard to make it impossible to transition that early.

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

#656

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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 t…

Caster Semenya: https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/67367157

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

#657

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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.…

We carved out women’s sports because otherwise there would be no biological women in competitive sports, and that was considered to be a significant enough exclusion of half the human population as to warrant such direct intercession.

Whether or not a similar case can be made for other categories does not have bearing on the case for sex categorization. Such claims can and should stand on their own merits.

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

#658
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way.

You're most likely part of the 2bn that showed no, or a passing interest, in the Olympics.

I sincerely doubt more than half the population of the entire planet showed more than a passing interest in them, and I'm still curious how it'd be possible to measure that.

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

#659

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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…

> and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises. This is a gross (literally) misunderstanding of the entire topic The ruling covers a lot of the nuanced cases, including rare DSDs that may never even apply to Olympic athletes The tests DO NOT check for genitals, and that is irrelevant to the decisions! It's a cheek swab that checks ge…

What I would suggest as a pathologist who deals with diagnosing these: the incidence of differences of sexual development is somewhere between 1 in 1000 - 4500 births. So this policy will not unlikely diagnose someone with a DSD who didn't know.

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

#660
post #492
post #462

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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.

As an example: men super heavyweight snatch record: Lasha, 225 kg. With Krastev 217 way back in 1987. Women: 149kg, Li Yan. So a 76kg delta.

Clean and Jerk: Taranenko 266kg in 1988; current Lasha 267kg. Women's is Li Wenwen 187kg. An 80kg delta.

Gender matters.

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