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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

741–750 of 960 posts

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

#741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No, this is an observation. What, do the parents and doctors flip a coin or throw darts before "assigning" a "gender"?

It is quite common for babies to come out of the womb with blonde hair, only for it to darken to brown later in life. The baby isn't blonde, it just looks blonde right now.

Same with gender. Doctors observe a flavor of genitals, make a reasonable assumption, and legally assign the gender which seems appropriate.

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

#742
post #241
post #92

what always strikes me as weird is how often the conversation is framed around "men competing in women's sports" when trans women cant really be said to be biologically male anymore. Taking Estrogen and blocking testosterone has a huge effect on how fast/strong/athletic someone is. I feel like that should be the key point of discussion, but somehow always gets burried under other, kind of less relevant subjects (for…

Testosterone and estrogen are not magic substances that eliminate bone density, preponderance of type II muscle fibres, favourable tendon insertions and all of the other athletic advantages conferred upon males in the womb. I have experience with women who take steroids for strength sports and I am not exaggerating when I say they could be out-competed by 17 year old male high school students with proper coaching.

HRT does affect bone density. This is basic knowledge.

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

#743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrom... Among others

I am going to try to keep my response apolitical to try to avoid fanning a culture war. That Wiki is the exact reason we are in this situation because we are bringing up points for 1 in 20000 or 0.005% of the population. Any system designed around 0.005% edge cases is going to be so complex that it is functionally impossible to do in practice. That is why one side says the solution is "obvious" because we have a simp…

This isn't a novel problem.

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

#744
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Late last year Dr. Jane Thornton, the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific director and a Canadian former Olympic rower, presented the initial findings of a review of athletes who are transgender or have differences of sexual development, known as DSD, and are competing in women’s sports. That analysis, which has not been made public, stated athletes born with male sexual markers retained physical adva…

That very quoted section indicates the analysis has not been made public. IMO that's very fishy and makes me question the authenticity of the source. What is Dr. Thornton hiding, exactly? Why conceal the review, methodology and data? Even if preliminary it should be released.

I support trans-rights, and want to weigh one groups of rights against another groups.

Taking one stat which is uncontroversial. AFAB women are are significantly more likely to sustain ACL injuries than men or trans-women: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4805849/

Multiple reasons, but leg placement on the hip means direction change at pace puts more stress on joints, and the cycle appears to cause problems for reasons that AFAIK are still unknown.

It wouldn't shock me if some sports are impacted, but I also know that there are some vocal people on both sides of the opinion that would scream regardless of the outcome.

However we have examples like Ellia Green who, if we used "conventional wisdom" wouldn't have won in the mens Rugby Olympics. The one thing I've learnt is that things that sound important rarely are.

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

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. If the "correct" age is what we see today, then there's thousands of generations of humans who had puberty naturally occur "too late" yet we're all still here to talk about it. If the "correct" age instead is when it used to occur, then everyone should go o…

> It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. The change over the past couple hundred years is measured on the order of a couple years at most. This has nothing at all to do with hormonal intervention until adult ages. Once someone reaches adulthood the window for a lot of changes has closed. > Puber…

Puberty only lasts a couple of years. First menstruation usually happens between ages 9 and 18 - that's a spread longer than the duration of puberty! Look at any puberty-age high school class and you'll find one kid who has basically finished puberty, while another has barely started.

In other words: the "window" isn't as crucial as you make it seem.

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

#747
That's good, because the 3 cases of biological men competeting at women Olympics were scandalous. The runner Caster Semenya, and the two boxers, Algerian Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan. They were all just women by law. Not transgender, just mislabeled at birth.

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

#748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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So what about the kids who already get all of that and still say they are transgender? Should they perhaps be treated like they actually are transgender, or do you propose forced conversion therapy - like we tried in the past with gay people and left-handed people?

Puberty blockers aren't being handed out like candy. There's a rather intense psychological diagnostic process before it.

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

#749

Has anyone measured trans athletes performance? I see this topic come up repeatedly in different guises, protect women from the evil trans-agenda. But I haven't seen where this is actually a problem. Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif

> Khelif was born female and has competed exclusively in women's events, including those overseen by the IOC.[2][4][5] She is not transgender.[6][7][8]

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

#750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation? I asked because I'm curious, and Googling just gives opinion pieces and not data. [Edit] Currently -3 but no study referenced. Do people just not like the idea of providing evidence for their position? The women I've spoken to about this article cite men being the problem, whether its sexual harassment, or other sexist attitudes. Not one felt that trans participation in their sport of choice was in their to…

This is more about logic. For this article to be relevant a spot for the Olympics of either gender has been taken by a trans athlete. Which by conclusion means that a trans person outperformed the other gender. Taking part in the Olympics is a difficult endeavor, for which you must qualify first.

Look up Elizabeth Swaney, she got to the Olympics by not falling off her skis. And I mean that quite literally: Ignoring DNFs she was dead last in all the qualifying events, but by doing a massive amount of them she somehow managed to get enough points in total to qualify.

Or there's Eric Moussambani, who participated in the 100 meter freestyle swimming without ever having seen an Olympic-sized swimming pool before. Similarly with a Jamaica bobsleigh team: horribly equipment, very little experience, still at the Olympics.

At the top it is indeed about being the absolute best, but at the bottom it is very much about being a competition between nations, and for some countries being the best at an obscure sport can still mean being pretty bad at it.

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