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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

721–730 of 960 posts

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

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I said "Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt"

That was trying to elaborate on citruscomputing's argument where they said "Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care."

I'm rephrasing those two points. Apologies if I initially described that badly, but I'm just restating the perverse incentive they were talking about

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

#723

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…

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 run marathons. It’s not terribly dangerous but a few people die every year, and it’s a good idea to have the medical oversight, aid stations, etc. that an actual race provides.

If I was an unfair threat to some poor girl’s scholarship I’d be happy to find a solution like just not being on the leaderboard.

Instead I see laws, headlines, and debates on my favorite orange site about whether I should be allowed access to that infrastructure at all.

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

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insightful indeed. It really frames the issue with trans athletes as a competition problem. We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available. Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.

Segregation by sex is not arbitrary, and segration by weight isn't either (even if the actual values of the implementation are). But, anyhow, the thing you're looking for is the "open" format that already exists in other competitions like chess, where there's an open category and then any specific categories. Ironically, in dance competitions (specially swing dancing at least), the open category is done the newbies,…

Not sure I fully understood what you meant by 'the open category is done'?

Also, from the categories that you mentioned, do you compete in West Coast Swing?

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

#725
post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 competit…

The male-to-female ratio at 1500 elo is not 90:1, but more like 9:1. 10% is a visible minority.

But I see where our disagreement is. You think there ought to be more women in chess. I think different people can do different things, so women don't need to match men in every statistic and vice versa. If we open it up to universal participation and it turns out to be a male-dominated game, then let it be. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

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

#727
post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No one's talking about 10k races that don't matter much. But people are talking about races and events in high school or college that do affect things like scholarships or future professional athletic endeavors. That's really where most of the heartburn started, as far as I can tell. I suppose one option could be to have two lists, the nominal ranking of participants and then a trans-adjusted one that removes those p…

Plenty of people are talking about things that don't matter. They're trying to ban amateur leagues from including trans women even if the league wants to include them.

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

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Relative to the amount of people that compete, not really

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

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Insightful indeed. It really frames the issue with trans athletes as a competition problem. We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available. Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.

> We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available.

> Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports.

That's a naive, reductive view. Competition isn't just about benchmarking and finding the global #1, nor perfect objective ranking. If it was, we would not bother with geographically-based competitions, nor tournament brackets and championships.

Competition is an entertainment product and a major form of community. It sustains itself through competitors and spectators. Seeking objectivity is backwards.

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

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ask chat gpt how to increase your understanding using Blooms revised taxonomy of learning using college level textbooks and primary source information with Amazon purchase search links.

And follow up every side with a steel man, good faith critical thinking summary with deep, cross cutting questions that strike at the heart of the arguments.

Additionally follow up with which demographics and political class does each position serve.

Also ask for examples of bad faith comments and questions to help identify them to not waste your time engaging.

You can also ask to explain all of that output to a 6th grade reading level if it helps

Asking wishy washy middle of the road questions instead of just asking directly is a political choice to reduce the chance of criticism and to help manipulate the convo in your psychological favor instead of seeking a wide array of information like a normal person that has access to literally to every single philosopher that ever existed writings

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