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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

#931

Post by petre »

michaelt wrote: post #513
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…

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…

The issue is that orhers might get bitter about it once you win and think that you might have had an unfair advantage, ask for re-examination and then it might as well end up in court.

Consider the Jordan Chiles / Ana Maria Barbosu dispute from the 2024 Paris Olympics. It's still going on and it wasn't even a gender issue.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/jordan-ch...

I'm not an athlete and I don't know how to solve the issue. Maybe the Olympic Comittee knows better. In the context of cycling, I have thought about mixing up all the athletes and then ranking them in as many cathegories as necessary. But even there, in the context of BMX racing for example, I don't know if it's such a good idea to have men compete against women and other non binary persons because there are faults and accidents happening.

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

#932

Post by dnlzro »

nradov wrote: post #147
eirini1 wrote: 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…

That isn't the key point. Taking hormone therapy as an adult doesn't erase the huge athletic advantage conferred by going through male puberty.

I think both of these points are two sides of the same coin. There's an athletic advantage that most transgender women will have over most cisgender women, but there's also an athletic disadvantage that most trans women will have compared to cis men.

i.e., unless something fundamentally changes about how leagues are divided, there's going to be perceived unfairness in sports.

As long as things are unchanged, I think the real conversation boils down to who we prioritize: cis women or trans women.

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

#933

Post by dnlzro »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #854

The issue is literally one of segregation. You create, as a form of entertainment for the masses, an event for peak athletes to display their talent...by quirk of biology that means men. You create a women's category to let them have their own entertainment niche. You have in fact segregated sports, by gender, or sex, or whatever you want to call it. Now there exist individuals who challenge the boundaries of this se…

> how many segregation categories to you create before it becomes all meaningless

Considering the fact that most women's leagues barely get any mainstream attention as is, I think any further fragmentation of sports isn't going to be sustainable.

Also, ignoring the commercial and entertainment aspect of sports, it's just really hard to organize local leagues if they only serve a small portion of the population. Like, even in a large metropolitan area, how many transgender people are there? Of those, how many are interested in a particular sport? Of those, how many are interested enough to form a club?

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

#934

Post by fgonzag »

tremon wrote: post #893
fgonzag wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't.In tennis a 14 UTR whatever wins against a 13 UTR whatever. UTR is your effectiveness rating against every other player. Same in chess with ELO. The issue is woman would disappear from profesional sports. Sinners 16.27 rating means that he double bagels Sabalenkas 13.29 essentially 100% of the time. The 500th ATP player has a UTR of 13.81, half a point is quite a bit stronger, do he's still very much stron…

I don't get how you can compare Sinner's UTR against Sabalenka's when they're based to two disparate group scores? Doesn't there need to be at least a modicum of cross-pollination to make a meaningful comparison?

There is some cross pollination. Women can play vs men, just usually don't. I'm fairly certain singles UTR is universal across players, it only distinguishes between doubles and singles UTR.

UTR can also include unranked games if one of the players submits a score and the other approves it.

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

#935

Post by remarkEon »

ahhhhnoooo wrote: post #926
remarkEon wrote: post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sometimes people use something called analogies or similar examples to help explain a foreign concept. In this case, the poster was trying to explain that our traits are birth do not always reflect who we are as adults. Gender is one such trait. Hair color is another.

There’s this phenomenon in this thread where commenters are taking something that’s superficially similar and then making an extreme claim that, upon inspection, does not hold up at all or is completely irrelevant to the argument being made. That is what is happening here. “An adult’s hair color can be different than what it was at birth” is a true statement, but of course is not relevant at all to the claim that one’s gender is just as malleable as one’s hair color, which is what this so-called analogy attempts to do. Real analogies do not do this, and when people deploy the above formulae it’s easy to recognize as bad faith.

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

#936

Post by mandevil »

lolc wrote: post #921
mandevil wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will certainly do that. Previous attempts at this (the Olympics did genetic tests from the 1960's through the 1990's, other organizations have done similar tests into the present) always did wind up discovering cis women raised as women from birth, with female presenting genitalia, who failed whatever genetic tests they were doing. At least one of these women even went on to give birth to a live human baby! You wo…

I wouldn't call it cheating. But I have no trouble drawing lines that exclude some people, if that levels the field for a bigger group. In this case the female olympics would soon be known as the intersex olympics given the selection pressure. I can understand the decision to make the competiton more interesting by barring intersex people. No need to frame it as cheating though.

Since we don't actually do genetic tests at birth, this would only ocurr in the context of national qualifying, think about what the experience of someone who trains to be good enough to qualify for the Olympics, then gets this test and is told, "Sorry, you aren't really a woman. Too bad. No Olympics for you. Sorry you wasted all those years training."

How else should the person who just got that information interpret it except... Sorry, you're not really deserving, even though your score qualifies you. And what do call someone who has a score that qualifies but doesn't get to go?

And there are far more of people with this experience than the experience of being born and treated by society as a man and becoming an Olympic athlete as a woman.

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

#937

Post by aucisson_masque »

sevenseacat wrote: post #795
aucisson_masque wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That makes no sense. A decent percentage of women would have higher testosterone levels than some men, due to various hormonal conditions like PCOS.

Most testosterone values in PCOS will be ≤150 ng/dL (≤5.2 nmol/L).

Men, especially athlete, are around 30 nmol/l. At the very least 6 times over your weird case scenario.

I'm sorry but women don't have testicles so they can't naturally produce high levels of testosterone, you won't be able to twist stuffs enough and make scenario weird enough to prove that.

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

#938

Post by aucisson_masque »

thrance wrote: post #808
aucisson_masque wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Michal Phelps didn't chose to have long arms Oh, and Khelif chose to have a female phenotype so she could compete in the female category in the Olympics? Get real. There are many other women in the same situation. > You will never find a woman that has the same testosterone levels that a man identifying as a woman Uh, yes you will... The entire purpose of taking estrogen is to bring down testosterone to female-leve…

> Uh, yes you will... The entire purpose of taking estrogen is to bring down testosterone to female-level.

Ever heard of testicles ?

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

#940

Post by youarentrightjr »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #493
youarentrightjr wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry part of my reply got cut off. > What if it's 0? It's not 0, and anyone engaging honestly knows it. To make another vaccine analogy: claiming it's a small number and therefore it doesn't matter is identical to the people who said Covid vaccines weren't important because the disease didn't wipe out more than x% of the population. In fact, it's because of the vaccines that this is the case. And it's because of res…

> Cmon guy, you can't ask for a source and then dismiss the one provided without critically examining it. I did examine it. From the outset it looks like self-reported nonsense, hence the comparison to VAERS. Examining further, yes, it's self-reported nonsense, and also it's broken so I can't even really look into it in detail. The one example that is highlighted with sourcing is about a transwoman golfer who won ONE…

Can't respond to your flagged to death comment so I'll respond here:

> If the advantage is as overwhelming and deterministic as you claim

Nobody is claiming this, you're strawmanning again.

Hope you have more success in the future convincing people that there's totally nothing different between sexes and that it doesn't matter if your chromosomes cause you distinct lifelong hormonal exposures which are definitely not at all related to strength, speed, bone density, or anything else that would give someone a sporting advantage. I imagine anyone with half a functional brain won't fall for it.

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