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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

671–680 of 960 posts

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

#671
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Typically the parents and doctors.

"You have a beautiful baby girl!" Is assigning a gender

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

#672
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…

Anti-transgender stance in sports doesn't mean anyone is doing something wrong, it's just that it's considered unfair to female women, and this includes various other conditions such as Khelif's.

As far as your other argument it seems to suggest doing away with the whole women's sports as separate.

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

#673

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…

> 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." I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around…

Do you think sex and gender are the same thing?

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

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A female or male is not 'assigned' anything. Just because you are confused about biological reality doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Just because you are confused about the distinction between gender and sex doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Birth certificates record sex, not gender, no?

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

#675
post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around…

Do you think sex and gender are the same thing?

I am not sure, since this article uses sex and gender in senses that are entirely inverse to the common ones in 2026. How do you define those terms?

In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned."

The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender."

Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?

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

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It will certainly do that. Previous attempts at this (the Olympics did genetic tests from the 1960's through the 1990's, other organizations have done similar tests into the present) always did wind up discovering cis women raised as women from birth, with female presenting genitalia, who failed whatever genetic tests they were doing. At least one of these women even went on to give birth to a live human baby! You would think that would prove that they actually were a woman, but their medals were still kept from them. They were still driven from the sport, branded as cheaters, etc. Because someone who was so much better than the rest can't really be a woman, they have to be cheating somehow, they have to be a man.

In fact, I'm not aware of any genetic testing program ever catching any deliberate cheating, only people who were raised from birth as women. The very first example of this, (1), Dora/Heinrich Ratjen (2) seems to have been an intersex person who was definitely raised as a girl from birth who was a bit confused about what their body was doing. But all the way back in the 1950's when their 1936 Olympics became a big deal, we have lurid tales in the English language media of deliberate cheating that don't seem to have been supported by anything that Ratjen ever did.

1: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ratjen

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

#677
This has little to do with trans people. It has more to do with the appearance of fairness — not in sports, but in the whole social order. Free market, free enterprise, etc. That's critical: if the average Joe doesn't believe he could one day have the power and riches of Musk, the whole social fabric would be dangerously torn apart (dangerous for Musk and his cronies).

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

#678
post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Can you explain what „gender ideology” is supposed to mean?

The primary issue with Genspect is poor scientific rigour applied to their publications, as I have shown above. Pretty much „if it fits our platform, we will spread it”.

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

#679
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Media research points to transgender topic being spun primarily by traditional media and social media as a political wedge issue to mobilize right-leaning voters, akin to abortion rights before:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/politics/transgender-c...

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/Anti-trans-attitudes...

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/right-dominating-faceb...

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

#680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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