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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

711–720 of 960 posts

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

#711

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165 Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean... " again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.

Nope, I’m consistently saying the same thing. When have I said something else?

> It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic

This was never said by anyone until you came along with that comment, which is a totally different idea (effectively a non sequitur). Can you quote who echoed the same argument?

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

#713

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> There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related. But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change…

I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant. Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to de…

Going even further back, gender denoted, originally, a linguistical construct associated with sex but not strictly dependent on it, as seen on romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese, etc. [1] There, words have their own gender and, sometimes, the gender of the word and the sex/social gender of the subject may disagree. Ex.: "ant" in Spanish is "hormiga", but this noun is exclusively feminine with no masculine form.

[1] https://etymologyworld.com/item/gender

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

#714
post #622

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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.

The lead story was about the Olympics

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

#715

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.

I'm not an athlete, but here's my understanding. Being on feminine hormones pretty much removes any advantage if you've been on them for a while. There are typically rules about that for (at least) high level competitions. You can't just walk in and state your gender for that kind of thing.

Correct me if I’m wrong but there are a fair number of examples of these athletes winning?

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

#716

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.

Honest question, you say you're generally open minded in comparison with people you encounter but have you considered you're generally not?

Yes, so I ask questions to increase my understanding? Is that a bad thing?

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

#717

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No it would not. Look at chess ratings.

Basically proving my point. Very few women in top chess. Currently there are 0 women in top 100 chess players. Only 3 women were ever in the top 100 chess players. And chess is not even a game where men have a natural advantage like in almost all of the physical sports.

I don't deny that there are very few women in top chess, but that wasn't your point. You said it would end up being all men at all the skill rating levels, which is not true. Take chess as an example: there are a lot more women at around 1500 elo than at 2500 elo. So if you host an intermediate-level tournament just for players around 1500 elo, plenty of women will participate.

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

#718
post #690

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They violated the rules. They didnt have to compete.

What does that have to do with the GP?

Contestant being invalidated would already innately make the reason for invalidation one for public consideration.

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

#719

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I know of one person who was born physically a woman, but has XY chromosomes. It is only due to modern medicine that we know that there is anything "unusual" with her gender. Otherwise, she is physically a woman with no observable clues to her condition. (IE, in the past, she would have been infertile, and probably died young due to her situation.) I'm not comfortable with saying that people like her need to compete…

Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, I imagine? That's probably the one category of XY people who have undergone no hormonal masculinization throughout their lives, and the one case where I'd agree with them competing with women. Wikipedia says it's estimated to be "1 in 20,400 to 1 in 99,000".

Probably, it's a friend of a friend situation, so I don't know the name of the condition.

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

#720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically proving my point. Very few women in top chess. Currently there are 0 women in top 100 chess players. Only 3 women were ever in the top 100 chess players. And chess is not even a game where men have a natural advantage like in almost all of the physical sports.

I don't deny that there are very few women in top chess, but that wasn't your point. You said it would end up being all men at all the skill rating levels, which is not true. Take chess as an example: there are a lot more women at around 1500 elo than at 2500 elo. So if you host an intermediate-level tournament just for players around 1500 elo, plenty of women will participate.

The ratio of men to women who are at 1500 Elo in chess is like worse than 90:1, so no, you host an intermediate level tournament and it will be almost all men. Well, mostly boys but that’s current chess for you.

But it’s not just that. If there are no top women in any kind of leagues in chess, that will only further discourage women from participating competitively in chess in the first place.

Note that most competitive women chess players play in women’s only tournaments even though they can easily join open men’s tournaments as well. For various reasons, one being that these women’s only tournaments are where they have the best chance of winning or being in the top k for prizes.

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