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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

941–950 of 960 posts

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

#941
post #933

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,…

The problem arises because Trans people in the west (ironically) insist on a binary definition.

Here in Pakistan, trans people have fought for (and gained) the right to NOT be part of the binary system; so here we have 'M' for men, 'W' for women and 'X' for trans people. (Homosexuality is still illegal, btw)

Or to make it more explicit, the tagline 'trans women are women' would be considered transphobic here, because women is considered to be synonymous with cis women, but they are trans, they earnt the right for that X in their sex column.

It's not like we are a bastion of trans rights here, so the issue of bathrooms ( they are required to have their own, iirc, but I doubt compliance is prevalent) and sports (haven't heard anything about trans people in sports) hasn't arisen yet.

I feel trans people in the west will have to come to the same realisation that their trans counterparts in the east have; the binary definition is not fit for purpose.

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

#942
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you have already procured food and shelter, everything important in your life is symbolic.

Right, which is why civil rights laws tend to be about employment and housing.

Civil rights are symbolic, I'm not sure I understood the point you were making.

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

#943
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five billion people followed the Paris Olympics. It’s actually kind of important.

I doubt that 5 billion people could watch the Olympics at all. Where I am from, there is so little interest in the Olympics that I doubt even half my countries' population would be interested. I have never watched the Olympics ever, and amongst my family and friends, there is little to no mention of it. It is a minor cultural phenomena. This seems to me like there were large extrapolations made.

I assume that you are relatively young.

During the last few decades, for various reasons the interest in several kinds of sports events, including the Olympics, has become much lower than before. Other forms of entertainment that were popular in the past have been similarly affected.

However, when I was a child, a half of century ago, the Olympics was not a minor cultural phenomena, but a really major event in which the majority of the people all over the world would be interested.

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

#944
post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population. Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.

I do not suggest that detransitioning can indeed extrapolate to the whole group. I am saying that it exists, therefore at least some people regret their transition, therefore they should not be allowed to make that decision at 12, or for their parents to do so.

That’s pretty flawed argument on the face of it, very few things win a cost benefit analysis if you disregard the benefit and thus require exactly zero cost.

The real question is whether detransitioning or other negative outcomes are greater than the number of suicides prevented by allowing early transitioning, and that’s a rather more complicated hurdle to jump.

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

#945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caster Semenya: https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/67367157

This is fair, I didn't know about this, but this doesn't appear to be the case for Imane Khelif. Either way, my point still stands. These women are women, would have been recognized as such by anyone throughout history, and it's simply the case that some women are born with XY chromosomes and testes.

> this doesn't appear to be the case for Imane Khelif.

It absolutely does appear to be the case, but Imane is very vague about it in interviews.

> These women are women, would have been recognized as such by anyone throughout history

I disagree. They are males with a genital deformity (no penis). Whether that translates to "woman" is not universal across cultures.

I agree we should refer to them as women, because that's how they were raised their entire lives.

> it's simply the case that some women are born with XY chromosomes and testes.

Yes, women with CAIS. But individuals with 5-ARD are not always going to have the "woman" label applied to them. And it is not fair they they compete against women in sporting events.

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

#946

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except gender is as malleable as hair color. Sex isn't, but gender is. Gender is the social expectations for a human in the context of a specific culture.

If I live in Virginia until adulthood, then move to American Samoa, my gender expression is going to radically change. I'll start wearing skirts. If I then move to Qatar, my gender expression will change again. I might still think of myself as a man through those changes, but whats expected of me and how I view myself with those cultures will shift. "What does it mean to be a man?" Is very different, globally.

So even if I consider myself a man, that definition regularly changes for different contexts. Clothing, conversational style, physical affection (it's common for men to hold hands in parts of the Middle East, and considered uncomfortable in the states.)

Given gender expression and identity can change as you transit cultures, surely you can see that some people might belong to cultures whose definition of "what does it mean to be a man" might be "whatever the fuck you want". Punk and queer subcultures, for instance, have different gender expectations than say, the Vatican.

For some cultures, genitals have little to no bearing on one's social expectations. Fit into the role that feels right, who cares about what is in your DNA.

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

#947

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..."

> I'm rephrasing those two points.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

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

#948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a brain injury when I was 12 that knocked my testosterone levels way down. In my 20s this was discovered and I went on testosterone replacement. My hands are still the same size as my mom’s. My feet didn’t get back to the size they were before the accident. I didn’t regain the height I lost. God only knows what it did to my brain. Maybe if you’re only on them a little bit you’d be fine, but the whole concept is…

Your anecdote is a bit of a tangent. Trans kids wouldn't be on blockers as long as your hormone levels were out of balance, and they generally want to avoid the changes which you bemoan the loss of. But do you even find your life to be significantly harmed by your smallish stature? There are short people who never had brain injuries, and it's generally not such a concern that we feel the need to make them larger. Lot…

I very much wish I was still (at least) 6 feet tall, yes. Luckily puberty hit me early and I developed "down there" quickly, otherwise that would also really bother me.

The point is that my wife has said she very well might have been confused and thought herself trans (at the time) when she very much is not. She liked to do boy things. She didn't want to be a woman. That's pretty much what the lines are.

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

#949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that 5 billion people could watch the Olympics at all. Where I am from, there is so little interest in the Olympics that I doubt even half my countries' population would be interested. I have never watched the Olympics ever, and amongst my family and friends, there is little to no mention of it. It is a minor cultural phenomena. This seems to me like there were large extrapolations made.

I assume that you are relatively young. During the last few decades, for various reasons the interest in several kinds of sports events, including the Olympics, has become much lower than before. Other forms of entertainment that were popular in the past have been similarly affected. However, when I was a child, a half of century ago, the Olympics was not a minor cultural phenomena, but a really major event in which…

You are very much right, I appreciate your comment.

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

#950

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

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