Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 960 posts

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

#731

Post by [deleted] »

bluescrn wrote: post #627
scoofy wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#732

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

egberts1 wrote: post #670
callistocodes wrote: post #334

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…

400 transfems at Olympic events is rare?

first of all, you need a source for 400. 2nd of all 400/11000 athletes is 3%. that's roughly inline with population statistics in the 15-25 demographic

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

#733

Post by crote »

dillydogg wrote: post #659
Aurornis wrote: post #459

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.

Have we forgotten about Caster Semenya already?

Women with DSD on averave have a higher testosterone level. Testosterone generally makes you better at sports. The Olympics select for the very best athletes.

In other words: the Olympics are selecting for women with DSD, so once you start doing 100% testing you'll find an incidence far above that of the general population.

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

#734

Post by no-name-here »

trhway wrote: post #509
qingcharles wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue. similar problem in boat races - different boats have different characteristics, thus PHRF rating. Not perfect, yet it works. The same thing i expect to happen with human sports too - analyze DNA, assign handicap score, and let everybody run. Of course that wouldn't work for say boxing or judo - though even here with time we can come u…

> Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories [1. assigned male at birth (AMAB), 2. assigned female at birth, 3. anybody]

Wouldn't we expect AMAB to consistently win #1 and #3 (and obviously only AFAB can compete in #2), so trans men/trans women would never be a likely top competitor in any category? And categories 1 and 3 would likely always have exactly the same winners?

(I’m not stating a value judgment to the idea, just making sure we’re on the same page. And even the above idea still runs into issues with intersex people, or objections from some about women with high testosterone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_O... )

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

#735

Post by crote »

testbjjl wrote: post #715
ItsHarper wrote: post #618

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?

You're wrong.

For example, the olympics were open to transgender women for over 20 years. Number of participants? One. And she finished dead last.

There are some high-profile cases, like Riley Gaines making an entire career out of "losing" to a trans woman - but they were actually tied fifth, and the whole drama is about her getting her trophy in the mail, because who gets to hold the trophy at the ceremony is decided by alphabetical name ordering.

Can you find examples of any trans woman ever beating a cis woman? Obviously - just like you can find examples of a blonde left-handed aquarius beating a righ-handed pisces redhead. But trans women dominating a competition? That just doesn't happen.

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

#736

Post by NuclearPM »

citruscomputing wrote: post #589
michaelt wrote: post #513

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…

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…

No.

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

#737

Post by crote »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #417
locknitpicker wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime coul…

You don't have to go back that far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_Russia

That's cis women using doping. Considering how transphobic Russia is, the chance of them using any kind of "trans loophole" is zero.

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

#738

Post by trhway »

no-name-here wrote: post #734
trhway wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue. similar problem in boat races - different boats have different characteristics, thus PHRF rating. Not perfect, yet it works. The same thing i expect to happen with human sports too - analyze DNA, assign handicap score, and let everybody run. Of course that wouldn't work for say boxing or judo - though even here with time we can come u…

> Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories [1. assigned male at birth (AMAB), 2. assigned female at birth, 3. anybody] Wouldn't we expect AMAB to consistently win #1 and #3 (and obviously only AFAB can compete in #2), so trans men/trans women would never be a likely top competitor in any category? And categories 1 and 3 would likely always have exactly the same winners? (I’m not stating a value judgment to th…

>And categories 1 and 3 would likely always have exactly the same winners?

no, the point is that you can't compete in more than one category.

>so trans men/trans women would never be a likely top competitor in any category?

we don't really know. What if trans confirms strong biological advantage? Like getting best things from both sides?

>And even the above idea still runs into issues with intersex people

why not compete in the category 3?

> or objections from some about women with high testosterone

if it is biologically natural - cat 2, otherwise, as long as it is medical and not illegal doping - cat 3.

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

#739

Post by crote »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #585
themgt wrote: 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

Exactly, it just got to be fair for everyone. Can't make a woman with 'internal testicles and higher levels of testosterone compare against other women, that would be like accepting dopping.

And Michael Phelps should be banned for having freakishly long arms - his genetic advantage is basically doping as well, obviously!

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

#740

Post by crote »

andsoitis wrote: post #314
kg wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At 12 you simply do not have sufficient capacity to make a good decision on the matter.

The obvious solution is to prescribe puberty blockers to 100% of children. After all, how can a 12-year-old decide that they are cis - they don't have the capacity for that yet. They can undergo the right puberty, whatever that may be, once their brain has matured.

That suddenly looks like a very silly argument, doesn't it?

Post reply on HN