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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

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

#871

Post by sillyfluke »

dpatterbee wrote: post #538
mirekrusin wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There could be translympics just like there is paralympics.

We probably don't want to head down the path of creating new competitions for people that meet arbitrary criteria. White-straight-man only olympics anyone?

I'm guessing you wouldn't say this if you attended the paraolympics, or perhaps it would enforce your already held views, I'm not sure. But there are already 64 different classes of impairment that compete as far as I can tell. Frankly I found it a bit fascinating.

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

#872

Post by ruszki »

crote wrote: post #733
dillydogg wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have male chromosomes, but you have woman genitals, then that’s a proof that you are testosterone insensitive. In other words, testosterone doesn’t make you better at sports at all. The topic is way more complex than this.

There are proofs that male chromosomes are beneficial for example in boxing for women, but it’s not because of testosterone as far as we know. In almost every other sport, it’s not beneficial at all, and even negative because of the mentioned testosterone insensitivity.

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

#873

Post by ImJamal »

nekusar wrote: post #840
ImJamal wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women would win almost no sports competition. Maybe that is fine in your view, but many women want to have a chance at winning.

Well, its either "remove all gender from classification", or "we're doing crotch and blood checks to verify if youre a woman". And since you have to "prove youre a woman", thats like having to prove a disability. Is that the message we want to send to all women? I dont want to send that. Evidently, the IOC is choosing the onerous route of crotch and blood checks. And about the "Women would win almost no sports compet…

> Well, its either "remove all gender from classification", or "we're doing crotch and blood checks to verify if youre a woman".

Correct.

> And since you have to "prove youre a woman", thats like having to prove a disability. Is that the message we want to send to all women? I dont want to send that.

Comparing womenhood to a disability is certainly a position to take. I wouldn't want to send that message to women, but you do you.

In terms of your main point, I want to send a message to women they have a chance of winning. If you have only one competition in the Olympics I'm not sure if a woman would win a single competition in the Winter Olympics except maybe curling?

> And about the "Women would win almost no sports competition.". Well, the thought of "get good" comes to mind. Supposedly, more competition is better for everyone.

Do you want only men competing? Because that is what you are going to get. Maybe you don't care about diversity, but many people do.

Many young girls want to look up to a woman skier or snowboarder and think I could do that. Maybe you just don't care about that?

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

#874

Post by pianom4n »

sapphicsnail wrote: post #745
fortran77 wrote: post #642

This is not completely true. (Not saying I agree or disagree with it.) Trans athletes can compete under the sex indicated by their chomosomes.

Trans men can compete as women?

If they are not on PEDs, yes.

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

#875

Post by sapphicsnail »

pianom4n wrote: post #874
sapphicsnail wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trans men can compete as women?

If they are not on PEDs, yes.

FTM HRT includes testorone. This debate hinges on what hormone therapy does to your body.

No one is arguing that trans women should be able to compete as women without being on HRT.

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

#876

Post by dpd_dpd »

j_w wrote: post #867
dpd_dpd wrote: post #800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at accounts from Semenya's early life there is evidence against his account of growing up as a girl. For example, there have been school photos published showing him wearing a boy's uniform near to a group of girls who were all wearing girl's uniforms. His former school headmaster, when interviewed years later, said he thought that Semenya was a boy and was very surprised to hear that he was now competing…

Even if you believe that it is the case that she lived her early life as a male, at the point that a person has made it clear that they have some preferred pronoun/is trans would it not just be disrespectful to intentionally refer to them counter to that?

If I had chosen to refer to Semenya using pronouns that imply he is female, that would have conflicted with the points I was making.

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

#877

Post by s1artibartfast »

ragall wrote: post #848
ahhhhnoooo wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "tacking social expectations on top" is the part that is gender! There's no biological foundation for wearing a sari, hijab, miniskirt, etc. Those are social expectations for women, or part of the role women fill in society. It's a wholly different concept than biological sex. My penis does not make it impossible to wear eyeliner. But society has a social expectation that I do not. It's not a sex characteristic,…

> It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic. They're one and the same. > But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect. I don't deny the existence of social expectations (you severely misread what I wrote), but those expectations were deriving from the recognition of the objective truth of…

What does "being the same" mean to you. A thought or expectation is not a chromosome.

Gender having been derived from real sex historically and even predominantly today does not stop some people from redefining it otherwise.

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

#878

Post by EA-3167 »

crote wrote: post #760
EA-3167 wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then good news, this article and the discussion are only talking about the Olympics, not childhood sports.

The problem is that decisions at the olympic level tend to trickle down to lower competitions. There are plenty of sports where the gap between "college kid having fun" and "Olympics" isn't very wide.

Fortunately there's a big gap between "College kids" and "Kids", and by the time you're in college it's not just about having fun anymore. Sports in college, whether we like it or not, are a large source of upward mobility for a lot of people, sometimes whole families and communities. College sports can determine access to college through the system of scholarships, and of course they can lead directly to pro careers.

Generally speaking when people talk about "kids sports" they specifically mean pre-collegiate, not in the least because colloquialism aside, college students are adults.

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

#879

Post by s1artibartfast »

remarkEon wrote: post #860
crote wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What? Hair color and gender are not the same thing. This is a bizarre argument.

Because it isn't an argument. It is an assertion

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

#880

Post by hervature »

logravia wrote: post #373
hervature wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, it covers 99.9% of cases, but top elite athletes are the genetic exceptions, they are the genetic freaks. They are the top 0.0001%. You don't get to compete at the most elite levels without your body being exceptionally gifted and almost specifically shaped for the relevant sport, which inevitably means funky genetic traits and disorders, higher testosterone levels etc. I mean the word freak in the most loving…

I am not sure what point you are trying to make. When it comes to the Olympics, it was decided a long time ago that having both men and women's events was beneficial for societal progress to have both sexes represented. This was at a time when sex=gender. Now, we recognize the difference between sex and gender but one side thinks the split of events was always based on gender whereas it was almost surely based on sex. This ruling confirms that view point.
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