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 for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age.
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 the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1.
In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about.
Taking a step back, I think "search for outliers" doesn't quite get to the heart of the issue. Why are we searching for the outliers, and why are we so particular about the base distributions that we are searching for outliers of - why are there women's sports at all (if the outliers they find are not outliers on the same metric in the whole population), and why is boxing, for example, divided into weight classes?
It seems to me that a big part of the point of competitive spectator sports is to send, to the spectator, a message along the lines of "this could have been you". It is hard to argue that the ability to throw a 1kg+ discus exceptionally far is otherwise so useful that would justify all the expense of finding and showcasing the outlier. Therefore, the point of the competition stands and falls with whether the spectator buys this message.
When do spectators tend to believe in it? When should they? Arguably, there is a plethora of reasons why the median American spectator looking at a clip of Usain Bolt running could not in any meaningful sense have been him. Yet, somehow, the "could-have-been-me sense" that people are endowed with transcends these reasons and results in men commonly looking at him and getting some of that could-have-been-me sense that gives the sport meaning, and women looking at him and getting much less of it. To solve this, we maintain a separate women's category. The winner there is not as much of an outlier relative to the distribution of the whole population. Most likely, she is still every bit as dissimilar to the spectators as Usain Bolt is. Yet, the women watching, and the ones merely learning about this event happening through osmosis, get their heart warmed by the dubious sense that this could have been them, and perhaps encouraged to try harder and hold more hope for some other pursuit of their own, in a way that they never would have due to Usain Bolt. Would they or would they not get the feeling for a transwoman sprinter? How would we even measure this?
> and why is boxing, for example, divided into weight classes?
Entertainment value. Put a flyweight against a heavyweight and the audience are not going to care. No audience means no money for the show runners, and the Olympics is, when you get down to the brass tacks, all about money.
Well, in your example, carpentry isn't about winning or being the best, it's about creating a house to sell (or flip, where you could actually frame a better argument about doing the worst possible job the fastest).
Insightful indeed. It really frames the issue with trans athletes as a competition problem. We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available.
Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.
> We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available.
> Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports.
That's a naive, reductive view. Competition isn't just about benchmarking and finding the global #1, nor perfect objective ranking. If it was, we would not bother with geographically-based competitions, nor tournament brackets and championships.
Competition is an entertainment product and a major form of community. It sustains itself through competitors and spectators. Seeking objectivity is backwards.
Agreed, and I think people adopt this reductive view because it can be quite difficult to reason about objectively. In terms of a framework to channel one's thinking on this, I found this paper useful in understanding the rationale behind defining distinct categories of competitors in sports: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim-Parry/publication/3...
The key takeaway in my view is that the authors make a distinction between "category advantage", which is a systematic, structural, group-based difference that exists before competition even begins, and "competition advantage", which we see play out in competitive events and is based on a mix of factors including skill, preparation, and both innate and trained talent.
Where exactly to draw the line can be somewhat subjective (e.g. in weight classes) but it helps to explain why we have a separate female category: male physiology confers such a significant category advantage that, in open competition, it would limit the ability of female athletes to compete meaningfully and demonstrate their abilities. Having a separate category fulfils this desirable outcome of showcasing and celebrating female athletic excellence.
Often we see calls to add various classes of males, particularly ones who have chosen to identify as women, framed as "inclusion" but from the perspective of who this category is actually intended for it's the opposite. Drawing a clear eligibility boundary around the female category maximises inclusion of female athletes who would otherwise be disadvantaged and excluded.
Segregation by sex is not arbitrary, and segration by weight isn't either (even if the actual values of the implementation are).
But, anyhow, the thing you're looking for is the "open" format that already exists in other competitions like chess, where there's an open category and then any specific categories.
Ironically, in dance competitions (specially swing dancing at least), the open category is done the newbies, and higher levels have other more speciallized categories: advanced, invitational, ...
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 (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.
> There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.
But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change definitions over time, of course. If it’s your contention that the definition by consensus has already changed, say so, but there are billions of people on this earth who haven’t got the message, which seems odd for something determined by consensus of the people who use language.
Putting that aside, since sports are about physicality and accomplishing things in the real world, it makes no sense to base them on “identity” - something that cannot be detected or defined by anyone but the self identifier - rather they should be based on physical aspects of reality.
I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.
Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.
I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports
Going even further back, gender denoted, originally, a linguistical construct associated with sex but not strictly dependent on it, as seen on romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese, etc. [1] There, words have their own gender and, sometimes, the gender of the word and the sex/social gender of the subject may disagree. Ex.: "ant" in Spanish is "hormiga", but this noun is exclusively feminine with no masculine form.
> It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.
I don't know any culture which defined gender by how you dress and how long your hair is rather than what is between your legs. You would be called a girly boy or a boyish girl.
So girly and boyish is how you are perceived, girl and boy is your sex, that is how almost every culture defined it through all time.
>except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt
"I took a drug, therefore I am now a woman" is not a reasonable position to hold. The debate starts out with one based on an identity, and then in the very next formulation reduces that identity to which medicines you take.
No, but that’s not what the statement is saying. It’s arguing that we should add the minimum restrictions we can to the women’s sports category and that hormones might be a reasonable one
This started out with a claim that “trans women are women full stop”, which implies that there’s no difference in the categories, and has since retreated to “in order for trans women to compete as women, they have to take these medicines”.
This implies that males who identify as women but do not undergo HRT are not women in the context of sports (and their gender in other contexts remains ill defined, especially in the absence of perverse incentive). This is a form of misgendering, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
This is a position that one could take up, but it comes
at a steep cost. It holds the societal acceptance of
transgenderism hostage to a biological account of
sex-gender. This is problematic for several reasons.
Moreover, it is worth highlighting the problems with
suggesting that sex, as biologically based, determines
the gender with which one psychologically identifies
[...] Second, whatever criterion is offered to ground
this similarity would inevitably disqualify many women,
for not all women share the same hormone levels,
reproductive capacity, gonadal structure, genital
makeup, and so on. (Tuvel 2017)
Again I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt
Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.
> 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 <gender identity> 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 restating the perverse incentive they were talking about
> 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."
I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose."
Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching.
Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor:
“transsexual claims to belong to a sex do not appear to be metaphysically
justified: they are claims that self-identities ought to be definitive in
terms of the question of sex membership and gendered treatment. They are
therefore political in nature” (Bettcher 2014, 387).
I am not sure, since this article uses sex and gender in senses that are entirely inverse to the common ones in 2026. How do you define those terms?
In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned."
The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender."
Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?
If we’re going to take an ontological approach, is there a stable non-tautological definition of “woman” that admits your definition of the subcategory?
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 with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting)
Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.
Right, the purpose is to actually arrange for legitimate competition. Ideally, we would split by whatever facets actually make sense; consider something like fighting disciplines where the split is by weight, or auto racing where it's by the class of vehicle, power-to-weight ratio, etc.
The problem is that there is only so much attention to go around, so we cannot have too many splits; depending on the sport it might just not be financially doable. We also don't want the split to be effectively "the best" and "the second best", because nobody is going to fund millions in advertising for the second best. So, a split like men/women is not surprising as a historical compromise to ensure there's still some attention on those competing in a lighter weight class.
Generically changing it to lightweights/heavyweights might be a reasonable compromise as well, or an age line, or something like that; it will depend on the sport and the market to draw that out. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the thing that makes sense is to continue with the existing split, though....
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.
How do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way.
I sincerely doubt more than half the population of the entire planet showed more than a passing interest in them, and I'm still curious how it'd be possible to measure that.
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.
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.
If Semenya had been categorized according to his sex, he wouldn't be considered amongst the very best athletes. He is basically a middling standard 800m male runner who has been able to make a career on the back of what is essentially an administrative error.
Talent scouts specifically sought out males like Semenya who were erroneously registered as female at birth, knowing that their male physical advantage would give them an edge in women's competitions.
The specific condition he has (5-alpha reductase deficiency) is one that only affects males, conferring upon them internal testicles and a micropenis. But male development, including all the testosterone-driven advantages that distinguish male and female athletic performance, is otherwise normal.
His gold medal in the 2016 Rio Olympics women's 800m, along with silver and bronze being taken by two other males with similar conditions, is the reason why World Athletics (then the IAAF) and, later, the IOC started to move policy away from eligibility by identity documentation to empirical testing of sex advantage.
The policy change discussed in the linked article wouldn't have happened without athletes like Semenya taking advantage of the previous flawed policy, to the detriment of female athletes.
Caster Semenya is a woman, not sure why you're referring to her as him. The fact that she has a potentially unfair advantage due to her unusual genetics in women's competitions doesn't in any way make it fair to refer to her in this way.
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 in women's athletics.
And of course he would have gone through male puberty, not female puberty. This would have been obvious then, and the result of this is obvious now if you see him in interviews. Male-typical build, male-typical vocal tone. Even his now-wife assumed (correctly) that he is male when she first met him.
Semenya has to double down on this narrative that he is a woman otherwise he will have to admit that his successful sporting career as a woman will have been a lie.
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?
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 would think that would prove that they actually were a woman, but their medals were still kept from them. They were still driven from the sport, branded as cheaters, etc. Because someone who was so much better than the rest can't really be a woman, they have to be cheating somehow, they have to be a man.
In fact, I'm not aware of any genetic testing program ever catching any deliberate cheating, only people who were raised from birth as women. The very first example of this, (1), Dora/Heinrich Ratjen (2) seems to have been an intersex person who was definitely raised as a girl from birth who was a bit confused about what their body was doing. But all the way back in the 1950's when their 1936 Olympics became a big deal, we have lurid tales in the English language media of deliberate cheating that don't seem to have been supported by anything that Ratjen ever did.
When I’ve researched this it’s turned out that among elite athletes it tended to be a bit higher since some of these intersex conditions can confer benefits
Seems to me like the obvious answer is to categorize these events by weight division rather than gender, but this will never be considered because the hysteria is the point.
Is it gender, or is it sex, that matters? This is exactly the point, that it is sex that matters, and specific ruling for intersex conditions also matters.
eh, the article didn't seem to clearly define the differences and I find it boring. People should do whatever they want with their lives and their own genitals. Just don't cheat at sport or pretend that Laurel Hubbard -- who was a modestly good lifter as a man (like... good for a hobby level?) but went to the olympics as an (old for the sport) woman had any business in the olympics. And that Laurel didn't steal a spot from an actual woman who deserved to be there.
Fighting sports are divided by weight (boxing, judo, etc) but no woman would even be close to winning in the same weight category of men, so we will never see a woman in those sports at the Olympics or anywhere it matters.
And who would pick a woman to play in a team of volleyball, basketball, soccer? I think that historically the only sport in which men and women are absolutely equal is shooting. Maybe curling but it's usually the man that sweeps the ice (a little bit of extra strength.)
Explain how you'd do basketball? Marathons? Maybe it isn't obvious, but weight isn't the main difference between men and women, nor is it necessarily an advantage in different sports.
> So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?
Yeah. It would work like video game rankings. Top-ranked players are top-ranked because of skill, and if they happen to be mostly men for most games, so be it.
But I get your point. The crux of the problem is most people don't want to see skill-based matchmaking. They want to see the best man, the best woman, or the best disabled person, etc. The categories are already defined in people's minds as cultural constants. The trans people don't like this because they feel excluded by both male and female categories, so they argue in bad faith that there's no physical difference between females and trans-females or males and trans-males. Our long-term options as a society are to either 1) change culture so that people get used to skill-based matchmaking like in video games, or 2) ignore trans people and wait for this issue to disappear when future tech allows a man to transfer his consciousness into a female body and vice versa.
Since 2) is quite far out technologically, I propose 1).
That's a possible compromise, but a high maintenance one. It would set a precedent for other groups, and then we'd have to add a new category every time people complain.
I think we should just make the Olympics universal and let anyone compete for the title of absolute best in the world, no qualifiers. Detach the existing categories too, like men-only or women-only. Make all category-gated games a separate deal, like Paralympics. Each group can organize their own variant if they want.
However, the point is not to group by advantage. It is to create a separate category for women to compete in where women can win. Any grouping that failed at this purpose misses the mark
It’s interesting how the evidence based analysis switched as soon as the republicans came into power. Maybe this is less about evidence and more about opinion actually?
Not sure how this helps. Olympic events already have relative rating systems that ranks all the participant: pretty complicated and sport dependent systems that determine qualification for the games and competition amongst all the competitors at the games. The problem how to have separate competitions for different groups of participants when there isn't a universally shared agreement on who should be in which group.
If you have a relative skill rating system, then there's no need to split competitors into groups. But if you insist, then you can split them based on skill ratings (define a rating range for beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc). And for games with one-on-one matchups, sampling from a gaussian centered on each player's skill rating is good enough.
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 stronger than Sabalenka. You probably have to start looking well into the thousand somethings for something that is consisently beaten by her.
Only the top 200 players make money, the top 100 good money, and the top 50 ridiculous money.
So women would not be in something like top 2000 of tennis players or worse. Which would basically remove any incentive for women to participate in pro tennis at all.
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?
Basically proving my point. Very few women in top chess. Currently there are 0 women in top 100 chess players. Only 3 women were ever in the top 100 chess players. And chess is not even a game where men have a natural advantage like in almost all of the physical sports.
I don't deny that there are very few women in top chess, but that wasn't your point. You said it would end up being all men at all the skill rating levels, which is not true. Take chess as an example: there are a lot more women at around 1500 elo than at 2500 elo. So if you host an intermediate-level tournament just for players around 1500 elo, plenty of women will participate.
The ratio of men to women who are at 1500 Elo in chess is like worse than 90:1, so no, you host an intermediate level tournament and it will be almost all men. Well, mostly boys but that’s current chess for you.
But it’s not just that. If there are no top women in any kind of leagues in chess, that will only further discourage women from participating competitively in chess in the first place.
Note that most competitive women chess players play in women’s only tournaments even though they can easily join open men’s tournaments as well. For various reasons, one being that these women’s only tournaments are where they have the best chance of winning or being in the top k for prizes.
The male-to-female ratio at 1500 elo is not 90:1, but more like 9:1. 10% is a visible minority.
But I see where our disagreement is. You think there ought to be more women in chess. I think different people can do different things, so women don't need to match men in every statistic and vice versa. If we open it up to universal participation and it turns out to be a male-dominated game, then let it be. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
> I think different people can do different things, so women don't need to match men in every statistic and vice versa. If we open it up to universal participation and it turns out to be a male-dominated game, then let it be. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
You don't have a say though, others want to see women play chess against each others and happily pay for and organize that event. Or do you want to make female only events illegal? As long as they are legal they will continue to be held.
It seems like we are creatively bankrupt if we can’t think of any solution. I think many of us could think of a good solution in literally seconds.
And there’s a really good argument that a solution isn’t actually needed.
Does the NBA need a solution for Steph Curry being the best 3 point shooter of all time and dominating his competition? Did the NFL need a solution for Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl 30% of the seasons he played in his career? Did Ohio high school basketball need a solution for LeBron James only losing 6 games in his entire high school career?
Athletes dominating their league happens all the time without the issue of transgender and intersex players.
If there is some kind of mass influx of men playing women’s sports to win easy championships that’s when we can deal with the problem. But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale. E.g. there has never been a time when washed up NBA player that decided to try and join the WNBA. We don’t need to solve problems that do not yet exist.
But let’s say we have to solve this problem to make everyone shut up about it. Here’s one I just thought of off the top of my head:
Anyone who performs at a level of play at an abnormally high gap between themselves and their competition (a set statistical percentage better) can be forced to seek a higher league of play if it exists and they are eligible if and only if other competitors in the league request they do so with a strong consensus.
Is this a perfect solution? No, but I thought of it in literally ten seconds, it doesn’t even involve gender, and I didn’t resort to sitting on my hands and saying “aw shucks there’s no solution” or “I guess we’ll just have to ban trans people from sports.
I think not many people are arguing that we shouldn’t exclude people based on testosterone in elite events, but none of these were trans women, these were all women who lived their entire lives as women from the moment they were born
I'd argue about testosterone. High testosterone happens in some woman naturally, why exclude them? They still are woman, they should have a right to participate.
Height is also an advantage in sports, and women statistically are much shorter then man, should we ban tall woman from sports? Should we say "she exhibits a male amount of height, it isn't fair to let her participate with 'normal' woman"?
The more "fair" we make woman competition the narrower our definition of a woman gets.
If you want to make it fair, let's pick a random chemical in man exclude people from competition based on their readings. That surely would make sport career look more fun for everyone, training all your life only to find out that some committee doesn't consider you a man. And then we can celebrate equality by noticing that man-to-woman sport participation ratio got closer to 50-50
My view is that testosterone is a reasonable thing to discriminate on because:
1. It is causally connected to primary and secondary sex characteristics
2. It has a large impact on performance in many sports
3. It's easy to explain to most people and somewhat matches people's intuitions around fairness
But, yes, it is true that there are cis women with high T levels and it is somewhat unfair and arbitrary to include them when not excluding other random advantages that people have. I'm just not sure if I have a better solution
> But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale.
This is not the same as saying there's no problem.
A fraction of humans will ever compete in the Olympics. People train their whole lives for it. It's not about 'scale', it's about safety and fairness. It's not reasonable to expect them to 'shut up' about it.
I don't want to watch a man beat up a woman in a boxing ring.
>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 up with exoskeletons (or some drugs) equalizing your DNA-based advantages/disadvantages.
Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories - "only those assigned male at birth", "only those assigned female at birth", "anybody can choose to compete in that category". The 3rd category may just naturally become most competitive and interesting without any "males in female sports" issues we currently have.
> 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... )
No one cares at amateur levels but we are speaking of the Olympic. I'm all for transgender to do sport, have fun and even compete but Olympic games are about who is the best of the world.
If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.
at the highest levels are the most rigorous standards and testing. this is where it makes the most sense to allow trans athletes to. compete. trans women who have been on hormone replacement do not have an advantage over cis women. this is discrimination plain and simple and creates an atmosphere of misunderstanding, mistrust, and misinformation towards trans people (which incidentally also affects non-gender-conforming cis women).
Except people clearly fucking do for some reason, and all that's going to happen is make life worse for women both cis and trans. Trans women will get excluded, and cis women who are "too good" or not fitting societal ideals of femininity will be accused of being trans. This is already happening to children.
> If you chose to identify as another sex
When did you choose to identify as the gender you were born with?
Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted.
If you were required to compete with people of a gender you do not identify with, even when event organisers recognise you as more fitting among the other group, that's a ban. There are trans masc people. Requiring them to compete with women is unfair and disrespectful. Requiring trans fem people to do so is the same. The rules around gender identification in regulated sports require proof of medical treatment yada yada to accept that people are 'trans enough', which is itself discriminatory. Trans people are a lot less distinct and separate from everyone else than you'd be led to think.
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.
"This might feel counterintuitive" is precisely why the religious right has seized on transgender participation in athletics as a wedge issue. When they say "well, somebody who was born as a man obviously has a natural advantage over people born as women," it feels logical, right? The fact that it largely isn't supported by data rarely comes up, and when it does, it's easy to deflect with "maybe there's just not enough data yet" (which, of course, could just as easily be an argument against imposing such bans, but never mind).
It is infuriating how successful the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd has been at pushing discriminatory legislation through in the last few years based largely on feelings rather than facts.
The classification has always been based on sociological conceptions and is still based on such after this change. There have always been outliers who are sociologically women, but don't have the biological makeup most women have.
That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.
I'm claiming that there were always women with outlier biology which is not at all easy to classify and not obvious at a glance.
People caring about this issue in sports now and changing the objective admission criteria to exclude them is a political phenomenon more than anything else.
The categories were created at a time when “sex” and “gender” were universally considered synonymous, but they were created for the purpose of sex segregation — were they not?
This issue genuinely confuses me — and I don’t seem alone in that. Re-defining words does not redefine categories or change the underlying motivation for creating categories in the first place.
I'm not trying to define away biology here. Although "sex" is surprisingly hard to nail down.
Rather, I'm arguing the underlying motivation for creating these categories was and is a sociological one. Why carve out womens sports, as opposed to short peoples sports, low testosterone sports (or other categories which would be similarly disadvantaged)?
The only reason people pay attention to sex here is sociological, i.e. because of gender. This implies that the admissions criteria do not automatically have to follow these strict biological lines -- and I see little reason to enforce them this strictly now. Why exclude trans people and why make yourself a headache trying to classify e.g. intersex people?
More of an aside: a society which fully accepted trans women as women would think looking at the biological markers you're looking at is complete nonsense. Suggesting trans women should be banned would be as ludicrous as suggesting all women with a specific gene which might increase your chances of winning should be banned.
We carved out women’s sports because otherwise there would be no biological women in competitive sports, and that was considered to be a significant enough exclusion of half the human population as to warrant such direct intercession.
Whether or not a similar case can be made for other categories does not have bearing on the case for sex categorization. Such claims can and should stand on their own merits.
You've posted this several times, and I think it represents a pretty narrow understanding of humans.
Like, gender clearly and obviously exists. Why do women wear make up and skirts, while men typically dont? Is there a biological need to do those things? Is that universal across all cultures?
Of course we have social norms for men and women. That set of norms is what gender is. Denying the idea that society expects different behaviors from men and women is frankly a pretty absurd take.
There's no such thing as gender separate from sex. There's the recognition of one's immutable, inherent, sex, and tacking social expectations on top of it, but never that one could choose, or "feel". Always derived, never a choice. And when people allowed cross-dressing, it was always clear it was fake, pretending, never true. But they allowed people to have their personal delusions.
The origin of this use of "gender" itself is due to the prudishness of English upper classes in pronouncing the word "sex", so they repurposed "gender" which is just the French word "genre" meaning "kind" or "category". Much more acceptable in polite company than something that can allude to a sexual act, fornication.
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 a gender characteristic.
You might believe gender is immutable. I'm not going to argue that with you. But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
> 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 one's sex. They were never a matter of one's "internal feelings", they were an extension of one's sex.
You seem to be partly arguing from a position of ignorance.
The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis. Some people feel pressured by this to, despite all the societal dis-incentives, medically transition. They then are not only their gender in behavior and reported experience, but also physically (with the exception of some hard-to-change stuff such as fertility).
We usually handle such general, durable "personal delusions" by accepting them. If I studied some math for years, can do said math and am employed at my local university doing mathematics, I am a mathematician. I do not have delusions of being a mathematician. If I move to, say Germany, and after years speak the language, have children there, participate in the local culture, and have a citicenship I am now German. Only the most backward people would say I have delusions of being German. Although, this cultural rigidity of course exists, I do not see it as desirable. An advanced society should accept and accomodate its outliers instead of steamrolling over them and making them suffer.
[^1]: Afaik currently a neuroscientific explanation is not forthcoming
> You seem to be partly arguing from a position of ignorance.
Quite the contrary. I speak partly from personal experience.
> The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis.
A human cannot change sex no more than one can become another species, no matter ho much one can be convinced of it. And there's no such thing as gender detached from sex.
> The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable
The transness is nothing more than a general condition of self-loathing which is quite durable, I agree. And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.
And while I agree that personal delusions should be allowed as long as they're harmless, this one isn't: many young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones, and when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering". We must always remember what the truth is, even when allowing this kind of lie.
> And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.
I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie if there are people whose mental makeup is better suited to a gender expression not corresponding to their sex, who then inhabit that different role in everyday life.
I frankly don't get your assertion that this cannot happen, as there exist people for whom this is reality right now (in part because they are simply not easily identifyable as trans).
> young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones
My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention. Where is the problem here? People do cosmetic surgeries for similar, if not more vain, reasons.
> when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering"
Trying to ignore the reality that ones body is different in medical contexts would be indeed harmful. If this kind of activism exists, I do not condone it. I imagine that treating a trans person does not boil down to treating them like a cis person of their sex however, as hormone replacement causes a bunch of differences.
> I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie
A lie is defined in terms of it not being the truth, not in terms of effects on someone. Those effects are entirely irrelevant.
> My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Men getting oestrogens are getting osteoporosis in their 20's and 30's.
> Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention.
It's not even doing that in most cases, because the self-loathing that caused people to look for the "transness" escape hatch turns out to have outside causes and won't go away.
This kind of argument was not persuasive when Alito deployed it for his pedantic dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County [0, specifically p. 17], and it remains not persuasive now.
> There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition,
There might also be a similar advantage for AFAB women who have unusually higher testosterone. I don't get why they don't just do hormone brackets like they do with weight in boxing, and do away with gender based divisions entirely.
This is completely misinformed. Biological women and biological men at identical testosterone levels do not have the same grip strength or endurance attributes, because their bodies are fundamentally different particularly in bone size and muscular composition.
The average MTF and the average female have wildly different hand sizes, among many other physical differences.
Honest question, you say you compete for fun, but what about the folks you beat who are competing for the sake of competition, which is a little different than fun? I am generally open minded at least in comparison to folks I encounter but I can’t square this one in my head. I am just one person with a single opinion but would like to better understand where I am wrong on this topic.
We are not talking about elite athletics here. If someone is upset about a transwoman finishing 150th in the local 10k race they need to work that out with a therapist or something.
No one's talking about 10k races that don't matter much. But people are talking about races and events in high school or college that do affect things like scholarships or future professional athletic endeavors. That's really where most of the heartburn started, as far as I can tell. I suppose one option could be to have two lists, the nominal ranking of participants and then a trans-adjusted one that removes those participants.
Plenty of people are talking about things that don't matter. They're trying to ban amateur leagues from including trans women even if the league wants to include them.
> That's really where most of the heartburn started, as far as I can tell.
The "heartburn" really started when conservatives decided they could exploit hatred of the other by attacking non-binary folks. They got a "spokeswoman" who finished sixth in the NCAA swimming championships (no future professional career potential) to spread their hate and divisiveness.
It allowed Republican politicians to claim children were allowed to identify as animals and use litter boxes in schools. Spreading lies to breed hate.
It's just a modern application of the playbook against other races (which has also been revived).
> "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - President Lyndon B. Johnson
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.
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.
I run marathons. It’s not terribly dangerous but a few people die every year, and it’s a good idea to have the medical oversight, aid stations, etc. that an actual race provides.
If I was an unfair threat to some poor girl’s scholarship I’d be happy to find a solution like just not being on the leaderboard.
Instead I see laws, headlines, and debates on my favorite orange site about whether I should be allowed access to that infrastructure at all.
Ask chat gpt how to increase your understanding using Blooms revised taxonomy of learning using college level textbooks and primary source information with Amazon purchase search links.
And follow up every side with a steel man, good faith critical thinking summary with deep, cross cutting questions that strike at the heart of the arguments.
Additionally follow up with which demographics and political class does each position serve.
Also ask for examples of bad faith comments and questions to help identify them to not waste your time engaging.
You can also ask to explain all of that output to a 6th grade reading level if it helps
Asking wishy washy middle of the road questions instead of just asking directly is a political choice to reduce the chance of criticism and to help manipulate the convo in your psychological favor instead of seeking a wide array of information like a normal person that has access to literally to every single philosopher that ever existed writings
If the rules changed mid competition and I lost a race to someone who had been competing on a men’s varsity team and then shortly after competed on the women’s team, it would be very hard for me to just shrug and say they beat me fair and square. That reaction is not unreasonable.
It may not justify sweeping laws, but it absolutely justifies having an honest conversation about fairness.
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
Here's a helpful map of cultures with transgendered subsets that are accepted in society. Cultures on every continent have a deep historical record of transgendered folks.
> 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 could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
> It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
Surely this is something that can be addressed if it ever becomes a problem. Surely we don't need to write rules for scenarios that aren't causing issues...
If an unscrupulous regime wanted to get medals with that method they'd just give cis women testosterone during puberty. Nothing about the new trans-exclusionary standards would deter that.
No XY chromosome no SRY gene. You're left with validating that someone's entire development was done in the absence of testosterone, which would--if even possible--require incredibly invasive and extensive testing.
> As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.
It affects the rights of transgender people, so it is directly related to transgender rights. Also, I don't at all think that it's coincidence that people spreading hate about transgender people are the same ones so concerned about this particular issue?
People spreading hate and prejudice always have <reasons>.
> We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s
We all do? People born in the 1950s or earlier might remember, making them at least 65 years old. I've never heard of it from people of any age. In any case, it's hard to connect this 60 year old issue with today's decision.
No it's because in almost every sport, male sex development bestows significant performance advantages.
This is easy to see even with a casual glance. Look at the world records for any sport with measurable and comparable metrics, like times for swimming, running, etc. The difference between the most elite female and male athletes is stark.
The differences are marginal and mostly depend on the hormonal load present in each individual athlete.
Males are not scrutinized anywhere near as closely, so they always get away with higher levels of anabolic steroids/hGH/rhEPO/random peptides than women would. Women are subject to constant, consistent testing, while male doping testing is basically an honor system (just don't be too obvious about it).
You can tell the IOC does not care about fairness in competition: they focus on this, instead of the rampant cheating (eg doping) which they do nothing about.
I'm pretty sure there are folks involved in doing drug testing for many sports so saying are doing nothing seems hyperbolic. Are there specific things you think the bodies in charge of drug testing should be doing but aren't? Genuinely curious.
Doping is a problem which offers offenders unfair advantages -the IOC combats that and looks like they are looking at other unfair advantages as well. It's a cat-and-mouse game. As of yet there is no perfect doping detector (it can have false positives) but just because it's imperfect doesn't mean they should ignore the advantage it offers these offenders.
Trans women have competed as women in the Olympics once ever and have 0 medals. By the numbers it's a non issue under previous rules (despite the incredible amount of ink spilled over it). People are talking about trans women here but the vast majority of people affected by this change are women who are not trans who have a "disorder of sexual development".
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.
The ruling itself is much more nuanced and covers a lot of situations, including extremely rare disorders of sexual development (DSD) and their variations. The most recent controversies on this topic did not involve transgender athletes, but that's largely unknown or misunderstood by people who only know this topic by headlines and sound bites.
The headline writers are relating it back to the topic which brings the most clicks, which is transgender athletes.
The IOC didn't go on a crusade against transgender athletes specifically. They were refining the rules on sex-based divisions and included a lot of considerations and nuance.
That page is at the center of a massive debate on Wikipedia for that specific topic.
Khelif responded to a question about having the SRY gene like this:
> In a February 2026 interview with L'Équipe, Khelif was asked: "To be clear, you have a female phenotype but possess the SRY gene, an indicator of masculinity", to which she responded: "Yes, and it’s natural. I have female hormones."
So she was asked if she had the SRY gene and she responded "Yes". That's also consistent with the previous issues with governing bodies excluding her under their rules, but they are not allowed to share test results for obvious reasons.
The debate now is down to technicalities. Technically the Wikipedia quote is correct in that Khelif has not described herself as intersex or having a DSD in those words but she has now admitted to having an SRY gene, which is the important part in the context of these competition rules.
Just the Algerian government harrumphing. As GP says, Khelif herself has basically admitted to having the SRY gene in interviews, and has been notably tight-lipped about what medical tests caused her to be disqualified from women's boxing in the IBA.
Has Khelif published it? Otherwise, I don't think anyone's very personal information about their body should be on HN (or anywhere). If it doesn't violate a guideline, it should.
I find the Khelif debacle incredibly damning for anti-trans militants since she apparently was born as a woman and has this weird thing where she has male characteristics. The anti-trans hysteria at that point in time was super off-putting for me since she did nothing wrong but merely existed. Before this I was like... meh, have sex separated sports and be done with it, but this made me re-evaluate my views in sex in that it's much more fluid than I gave it credit for. And this, by "nature", without human intervention.
I don't see anyone ever going "oh, Michael Phelps has unfair advantages because of this crazy gene". Then, it's fair and square, just better genes life's not fair. No, suddenly the care now, eeeeveryone cares now about woman's sports because someone with a rare genetic disorder showed up in the spot light. Utterly bizzare for me.
You need to read up about XY 5-ARD (the condition Caster Semenya has and Khelif surely has). Being XY with active SRY means you're male. Khelif has admitted having the SRY gene (in an interview with L'Equipe). Males have very significant advantages (50% plus) in power sports such as weightlifting and, yes, boxing.
Sex isn't "more fluid". It's entirely binary, but DSDs (differences of sexual development) can make appearances deceptive - so an XY male can be wrongly recorded as female at birth, especially in countries with inexperienced medics and midwives.
Phelps's records have all been broken. By other males, of course - no female is getting close to his numbers. That's male advantage in action.
Khelif has an uterus, breasts and any other characteristics associated with women. Conservatives calling her a man is pure insanity and just shows how limited their perspectives are and how confused they are about the subject.
Used to be that they'd ask in bad faith "what is a woman?" to trans advocates, but maybe it was a genuine question? Because they don't look like they could recognize one if they ever saw one.
Anti-transgender stance in sports doesn't mean anyone is doing something wrong, it's just that it's considered unfair to female women, and this includes various other conditions such as Khelif's.
As far as your other argument it seems to suggest doing away with the whole women's sports as separate.
> Anti-transgender stance in sports doesn't mean anyone is doing something wrong, it's just that it's considered unfair to female women, and this includes various other conditions such as Khelif's.
Right, but that's not what's going on here, it's used as a platform for bigotry under the pretense of protecting women. It's not only... we need clear ground rules for this thing in order to have a level playing field, it's "Look what the trans are doing! Oh, the decadence in humanity!"
I'm not saying about doing away with woman's sports, sure, do the separation n xy chromozomes if we converge on this. I'm saying that it seems that the arguments of anit-trans activists are inconsistent and, for me, personally, a dude that doesn't really care about these things, off putting.
I don't think it was ever "look at what the trans are doing" but much rather "look what these evil bastards in sports bodies are doing". Some think these evil bastards are part of a larger plot to ruin the western civilization, go figure.
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.
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-level.
If you divided the competitors into “has freakishly long arms” and “doesn’t have freakishly long arms” groups to compete within, and Phelps met the metrics for freakishly long arms, are you saying you think he should be free to compete in either group?
If so, there was no point in dividing into groups.
That said, I am sure athletes and governing bodies could agree on a better solution than outright banning- for example all it takes is a group that pairs a freakishly long armed swimmer with not, and they compete as pairs. Or an open group- maybe someone without freakishly long arms will find a way to win.
Anyway, it’s sports, people will min/max everything you let them, and we know from history they may bend or break rules as well. At the end of the day someone has to make a rule and enforce it, over time it will evolve.
That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender from what was assigned at birth, but it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case. Edge cases in biology get wild and sex assigned at birth can be a near arbitrary decision. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)
Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
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.
Only in theory is it so easy to separate clerical errors from other issues.
So in practice clerical errors cause all kinds of long term havoc. Once declared dead it can be a monstrous effort to prove to various systems you are in fact alive.
One cannot ask a baby what social role they would like to have. Typically, in approximately 97-99% of cases, that aligns with the genitalia. So no, no coin flip. It's typically done by looking at genitalia. You'll be right almost always.
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.
> 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.
This is funny because that's the exact argument that transphobic opponents say about trans people themselves and the argument as to why gender fluidity or gender outside of sex doesn't exist. "Just because an extremely small number of people believe they are a different gender than their biological sex doesn't mean that gender is different from biological sex" is almost exactly the argument that transphobes use.
I think you fundamentally fail to understand what I just said. Proper unbiased random sampling allows you to create sub populations that tend to reflect the characteristics of a larger group, biased populations don’t share that relationship.
“Because some animals hibernate, all animals hibernate” is just as flawed as saying “Because only a small percentage of hibernate, no animals hibernate.” Instead the relationship is “Because some animals exist that hibernate, there exist animals that hibernate.”
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.
So-called "detransitions" represent way less than 1% of the trans population. In particular, the proportion of people regretting their transitions is much smaller than that of mothers regretting having their kids. They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of bigoted narratives.
Which is why puberty blockers are prescribed to transgender children, delaying puberty until later in life when a "good decision" can be made, usually closer to the mid to late teens.
Sadly, it's not possible to "delay puberty" until later in life without permanent consequences. Puberty cannot simply be resumed later. Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. The changes can't be reversed later as if hormones were not altered during critical phases if the person changes their mind.
It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades.
> Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases.
Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them.
> It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades
Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to.
The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window.
Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages.
Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age.
> but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know.
I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing
> You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim.
> I asked Claude...
There are no double-blind studies, RCTs, or otherwise on this topic because it's not a situation that lends itself to that type of study. Please don't try to ask AI to summarize the situation because its training set is guaranteed to have far more discussion about it from Reddit and news articles than the limited scientific research
Of the papers out there, many are either case reports or they're studies that look into the case where people go from puberty blocker therapy into gender-affirming care, not the cases where they change their mind and discontinue with hope of returning to their baseline state.
Above I was addressing the implication that puberty blockers are a safe way to press pause on puberty until much later without consequence. That's simply not true.
Those studies you found about bone density also note that they can reduce height, and along with it other growth changes that occur during those ages in conjunction with puberty. Someone who takes puberty blockers until 16-18 will have a different physical anatomy than someone who does not. You cannot resume growth in adulthood after discontinuing the medications.
So the studies you found are consistent with what I'm saying: You cannot delay puberty without also impacting the growth that happens during that phase. That's one of the main reasons why people take the puberty blockers! As someone gets older, the window for that growth does not stay open forever.
I'm not asking for a double blind study. I'm asking for examples of someone who took puberty blockers, regretted it and stopped, and then went on to not be able to live the life they wanted to live. I'm not aware of any such stories and I'm pretty familiarly with the population of people who regret taking hormones. When I double checked with Claude it also failed to find anything accept the issue around bone density I mentioned.
There are plenty of studies that point to strong evidence that this protocol results in better mental health outcomes because for whatever potential consequence there is for delaying natural puberty, there are plenty of known irreversible impacts of allowing it to progress.
If you have other evidence, even just observational studies it would be good to share that.
And again the recommendation is to continue until 15 or 16, not until 18
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 on puberty blockers for a few years to avoid this unnatural surge of precocious puberty.
> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.
That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.
> 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.
> Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes.
You're either not understanding, or trying to avoid an inconvenient point: Once blocked during critical periods, many of those changes simply cannot happen at a later date.
Puberty cannot be delayed until adulthood and then resumed as if nothing happened.
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.
I read it, but you keep moving the goalposts around so much and introducing irrelevant detours that I can't respond to everything you write, sorry.
I've been consistent about my point, but you've introduced so many other topics including the "maybe it's only for a year or two" point that this is just one big gish gallop
Your point about puberty happening earlier and earlier also contradicts your arguments about how it might only be for a year or two
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 bad. My wife fainted when she got her first period. Why? She didn’t want to be a woman. She was a tomboy. It turns out that the flood of sex hormones during puberty can actually make you feel like a woman/man, which should surprise no one. To block that from happening and potentially effectively treating the dysphoria is madness.
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. Lots of them even wish they were taller.
And it's a pretty frequent straw-man to compare tomboys to kids with persistent gender dysphoria. They only seem superficially similar to people who really haven't engaged with the huge breadth of research on trans people over the past century. It also ignores the fact that there are feminine presenting trans masculine people (those born female, who medically transitioned, but still present femininely), or tomboy trans feminine people (born male, medically transitioned, still present masculinely).
But surely puberty, not just maturity, is necessary to fully understand the sexual experience and whether your feelings about yourself crystalise differently in the presence of sexual drive. Not to mention, the idea of delaying puberty seems like an invitation for unrelated and/or unforeseen downstream consequences on biological health.
It is not. Precocious sexual drive is possibly amongst the worst things there is for gaining sexual maturity. Also known as 'thinking with your dick'. CSA aside, you can do a ton of damage to your life by just going along with your sexual drive.
I am a virgin at 27 years old. What am I missing about the sexual experience? Is it somehow locked out to me? Or… can I access it intellectually, and reason about it with its ups and downs?
There's a reason the consent age does not start at puberty.
Sexual identity is an important component of gender identity. Encouraging people to make conclusions about their gender identity before they understand their sexual identity seems risky to me, especially when a child is being asked to make decisions with potentially life-altering medical consequences.
To be clear, a person does not need to have had sex to understand their sexual identity. They need to know what they find attractive and how their sexual identity relates to their own body. Even if someone feels like the opposite gender, that does not necessarily mean their sexual identity will automatically align with that.
It may be true that the transgender experience is something more fundamental to the self than “mere” sex. But when the choice is between one set of trade-offs and another, such as intervention versus non-intervention, I would contend that understanding one’s sexual identity is a critical piece of information.
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?
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.
Have you considered that due to their education and research those people may know more on the subject than you do?
Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or environmental lack of acceptance or support.
Besides, despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.
After reading the above I don't believe they concluded stress of living in a non-accepting world is the primary reason.
30% think about killing themselves and 4%+ try each year is shocking. I think whatever side of the debate you are on we can agree things aren't working out for too many people who go through this process. If this was a drug or vaccine or hair shampoo it would have been pulled off the market.
Through what process? This was a study about trans and nonbinary people, not specifically about people who have “transitioned”
I would imagine the rate of depression and similar disorders in trans people is extremely high. To be so unsatisfied with one’s own body that you consider (or go through) major treatment and surgery to change something so fundamental.
> Genspect, which is also a biased source on the subject:
Organization that supports position <x> supports position <x>.
If Genspect can be discarded as being a biased source, then so can WPATH and every other org supporting gender ideology.
Given the fraught nature of the debate, Wikipedia seems like a poor source for determining the bias of players in the debate - the most passionate debaters have plenty of time to just edit Wikipedia.
Can you explain what „gender ideology” is supposed to mean?
The primary issue with Genspect is poor scientific rigour applied to their publications, as I have shown above. Pretty much „if it fits our platform, we will spread it”.
> *70%-80% of children who expressed transgender feelings, overtime, lost those feelings.
This number most likely comes from a study that classified girls as transgender based on behaviors like preference to wear their hair short of wear pants instead of dresses or skirt:
Media research points to transgender topic being spun primarily by traditional media and social media as a political wedge issue to mobilize right-leaning voters, akin to abortion rights before:
it's only a fallacy in purely logical arguments. Appeal to authority makes sense in medical, scientific, engineering, and other contexts when the arguments necessarily depend on ambiguous data and subjective conclusions.
And yet we cannot stop time, and a decision has to be made. It seems natural to involve the child in this decision.
Of course, the next best thing (if a decision can't be made now) after stopping time are puberty blockers. Which are not completely without risks, but this applies to the other two options just as well (if not more so).
You can't not make decisions, and to claim so is to frame choosing one particular option as not-a-decision.
From a biological perspective, the women being banned here are not just men and as far as I'm aware cannot realistically compete in the men's division any more than any other woman. Practically these changes bar women athletes with certain medical differences from competing in the Olympics.
I'm not an expert so idk whether that's fair or not but that's what this decision is doing.
To be fair, that could be said of many other medical conditions as well, especially chromosomal abnormalities such as Down Syndrome. Many humans, from the moment they are born and through no fault of their own, have virtually no hope of ever competing in the Olympics let alone winning, just because at such competitive extremes, any significant genetic disadvantage takes you out of the running.
Like most things in biologicy, categorization is a nightmare unless you have a very specific use case in mind. In this case I'm talking about women phenotypically and socially (including self-identity) and especially athletes assigned female at birth. These women are clearly not just "males".
I think you're falling for Sticker Swap Fallacy. The goal is to have fair match-ups in sports. Gender and sex are two possible labels to use to assist with this, but they're imperfect enough that we probably ought to not use them as the primary differentiator.
The solution is simple: class every sport like boxing.
Pick a sports-relevant metric and split into divisions. Some sports will naturally fall into gendered divisions, while others will have varying degrees of co-ed competition among competitors of similar ability.
The way out of this is not to pick a better scissor of sex or gender, it's to pick a better scissor of ability.
This "solution" can really only be proposed by someone who has not played sports. This would simply result in women being unable to compete in sports professionally, outside of a couple small niches like ultra long distance swimming and a couple sub-disciplines of gymnastics.
It really depends on the way classes are divided. Dismissing the general concept demonstrates a fear of change rather than a legitimate openness to fair play.
No it doesn't, and no it doesn't. Proposing this concept demonstrates a profound ignorance of what competition at the top level of sports actually looks like.
The concept is just bad, unless your goal is to prevent women from being able to make a living playing professional sports.
The thing is, we're already using a scissor for ability, just a poor one with the exact problem you describe - it renders trans women unable to make a living playing professional sports. Throwing one group under the bus for another cannot be avoided so long as sex or gender are part of sports divisions.
You are clearly out of your depth. Have you ever competed in high level sports? Please don't speak on things you know nothing about. It takes a lot of gall to tell someone 'please let go of the need for this' when they are pointing this out. I will do no such thing, but I likely will give up trying to educate you.
I won't respond further unless you pick an example sport, and propose how your "scissor for ability" would work, in concrete detail. If you do this, I will be happy to explain why this would result in neither women _nor trans women_ having any chance to make a living as professional athletes.
I have competed in reasonably high level sports, and my wife was US Masters duathlete of the year a few years ago (with me as her coach). I think you're wrong, though it's easy to see why.
Currently, with sex-based categories, a woman can be declared "the best in the world" and most people won't waste much time on the question "yeah, but could she beat the best men?" (granted, some will). They will accept that, e.g. she has the fastest time over 26.2 miles in the world right now, even though a few hundred or a few thousand men worldwide are faster.
If you use performance based metrics to create the categories (the way that road cycling does, for example, though still within gender divisions), that "title" would go away, and likely a woman would only be "the best in the world in division X", other than in (as you noted) some endurance, climbing and gymnastics sports where an elite subset of women could potentially be the best of "top" category.
It isn't completely obvious that this is a negative - how much of a change it would be would depend on a lot of other changes (or lack thereof) in how sport was organized. Certainly if it continued to focus on only the top division, then women would be shut out of most opportunities to be professional. But that's not inherent in the design. I do concede, however, that it is quite a likely outcome of such a category structure.
If we are talking about amateur sports where the stakes are low, the concept of slotting athletes into divisions makes sense.
In elite sports, no one wants to see "best in division X". They want to see the best hockey players, the best golfer, the best skier, etc. The money incentives are considerable.
Implicit in what you're saying is that they want to see the best sex-identified athletes in a given sport. If that wasn't true, women's sports would have no audience and we know now (finally!) that this is not the case.
I personally think that we'd live in a much better world where you compete against others who broadly speaking are in the same performance category as you.
But I do appreciate that the transition to such a world would, indeed, destroy women's professional sports, and thus I do not attempt to really advocate for that transition. If it could happen overnight (it cannot), perhaps I would, but that's not where we live.
WNBA is being sponsored by men's NBA and they would not have survived without.
The merr existence is not an evidence of success.
Kids' little leagues also exist, but can't be compared, with actual professional men's sports.
Where is women's American football? Women's baseball? Crickets...
Women's icehockey is in such a state, that there are only 2 decent countries dominating everybody, and they would get destroyed by men's amateur players.
There are only few women's sports disciplines that are actually popular on their own. Like figure skating and tennis. And the athletes would get annihilated by their male counterparts.
The world's best female ultradistance runners, rock climbers (particuarly sport and bouldering, but lead also), ultradistance swimmers, are all on a par with their male counterparts and occasionally better.
Since I personally don't have any interest in team sports of any type, I have nothing to say about your observations, though I will continue to wear my "I'm here for the women's race" t-shirt whenever I can.
I said that I would only abolish them if we could get to the endpoint overnight. Which clearly is impossible, ergo, I would not happily abolish them at all.
I'd happily wear a "I'm here for the D2a race" shirt in such a system.
Most people's paths as sports participants (not spectators) is that they enter a tiered system and remain there. Only a tiny percentage of people rise through that system to become truly national or internationally competitive.
One of the central problems here is that there are conflicts between what's good for the participants and whats good for fans/spectators. They are not always in conflict, but in several important ways, they truly are. 99.99999% of people who run marathons are not Eliud Kipchoge, and are not interested in a system that is designed around his level of performance and competition. But 90%+ of the people who would pay to watch marathons have little interest in a system that isn't built around talents like his. The same is true of almost all sports - solo or team - but it doesn't show up for 80% of them because there is no market for paid viewing of them. Or rather ... there wasn't until YT became what it is today. "The Finisher", a film about Jasmin Paris, the first woman to finish the infamous Barkley Marathons, has had 1.8M views, something it would never have achieved in "legacy" media.
Why would you name it "division 2"? If you're going to test for SRY as the way to assign participants, then you should name the divisions "SRY-pos" and "SRY-neg". At least that would be correct.
That's the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting up-thread.
Categories would be assigned based on performance criteria for the sport in question. One simplistic approach, loosely modelled on how road cycling works, would be to have categories based on race performances - you enter an "open" category, and after N finishes above a certain level, you are required to move up to "division 4". After N finishes above a certain level in div4, you are required to move up to "division 3". And so on. The idea is that you're racing against your performance peers, regardless of their gender (or age).
Let's use the present scissor and the current state of affairs, which at present excludes some women for the sake of others. Which, I'll remind you, comes with all of the problems we currently experience.
His proposal is to make divisions by whatever way it would be the justest way. If that would be the man/woman division for a given sport, than keeping it is part of his proposal. His proposal is not going to be less just than the current rules by definition, but it IS a bit vague.
Men are stronger, faster, have more dense bones, have bigger lungs, bigger hands, etc, etc, etc. Men and women are different in hundreds of ways it's not just 'lean body mass'. Men are better at sports than women. Do you even live in reality? Have you ever completed in anything in your life?
For what conceivable reason would you want to recreate the male and female division using a dozen or more proxies for sex instead of just using sex, to wind up with people being placed into the same buckets they would have been if you just went by sex in the first place? This seems ideologically motivated.
The controversy in these comments answers that question nicely. It seems likely that such a change would obviate these edge cases, though they may introduce their own; that seems worthy of consideration.
Really, the question seems better turned around: why use a known bad proxy for physical ability when another one might be better?
Those divisions already exists. Most sports have different leagues. There are international leagues, national leagues, regional leagues, all the way down to hobby leagues or beer leagues. If we assign everyone into a league independent of gender, the highest leagues (the most popular and most lucrative ones) will be exclusively men and women will only be present in the lower leagues. No one can want this outcome.
And then you get a situation with as many divisions as there are people and everyone get a gold medal, everyone is a winner. The true woke paradise.
Fortunately, most people don't like to live in this hell and are against clear attempts to destroy women's sports by the clueless and/or purposefully malicious activists.
Good lord. Absolutely nobody is going to watch boxing divisions based on lung size and bone density.
Did you actually think that lean mass would be a sensible way to separate divisions in a gender neutral fashion? That would, again, just result in women being unable to compete professionally in virtually any sport. They would be relegated to Division N, for some very large value of N. Competing alongside multitudes of biologically male amateurs, where nobody cares and nobody pays to watch. To even entertain this idea betrays a total lack of understanding of the matter at hand.
Right now you are acting like Elon Musk storming into the government and having 20 year olds cut everybody's budget. You may think you're coming in with fresh outsider perspective and an open minded way to look at things and improve them, but everyone actually involved in the domain can see a trainwreck in progress. It's not a good look.
I am quite certain it's not your intention, but you're really coming across as someone who hates women's sports, and doesn't want them to exist. On behalf of my wife and sister and a lot of the women I've known in a lifetime of playing sports - kindly keep your awful ideas to yourself. Women fought tooth and nail for the right to have their own professional sporting opportunities. Don't you dare try to take it away from them.
The numbers tell the opposite story. Hierarchical and ranked sports enjoy displacement at every subsequent point from unfair entrants.
By the numbers, looking just at #1-3 spots of results list where tens of thousands of subsequent entries have been improperly displaced and claiming no impact is mathematically absurd. Contextually it ignorant of how competitive sports work at a scholastic or professional level, particularly for women. In 2026 based on the number, volume, and depth of rebuttals - at the international sporting level among others - that ignorance could readily be seen as willing.
LeBron James playing in your kids 16 and under basketball league, even if he promises to keep his team at or lower than 4th place, will be visible on the numbers and also peoples sentiments and desire to participate. Primates understand ‘fair’ viscerally (cucumber experiments).
The intersex argument based on the ratios you are presenting also breaks the other way. Those women, as female sports mature and expand (into combat sports especially), have been excluded from female competition for number of reasons. To your point, mostly this is about safety and then fairness, the trans angle is a minority even there with less scientific or sporting grounds for inclusion in competitive divisions.
[In olden days people who couldn’t make the team would participate and help with equipment, logistics, fundraising, training, or tutoring. These days you can run virtual competitions with GPS tracking, and there are a bunch of individual sports that are already tracked by large category spreadsheets, with plenty of room for more. I hope these bans help end the wasteful discussion and focus energies on collaboration and social inclusion.]
The Olympics are looked up to by a large range of people and organization that don't actually participate in the Olympics.
This goes beyond just affecting the Olympics, but setting an example for the world to follow and gives other organizations the cover and courage to follow while being able to deflect to simply setting the same standards of the Olympics.
Almost every single person on Earth is not built of the right genetic stuff to compete with male Olympic athletes, me and you included. Why do we need a carve out for one particular group because of their genetic bad luck?
Because apparently it's OK to hate on trans people, scapegoat any current issue on this particular demographics, and do everything possible to make their lives as miserable as possible.
You were asking "Why do we need a carve out for one particular group because of their genetic bad luck?". I'm telling you the reason is purely ideological: the right needs scapegoats and trans people are one of the current ones. Doesn't go further than than.
“Hate”? I think you might be over blowing the word, I’m sorry you feel that way. I think you might have a bit of a negative view and tend to think people are against you when they’re not. To me I see this as all related, it’s all playing into each other. Just chill mate it’s not a good headspace. Maybe reassess what you are defining as hate. Is it you who’s spreading it?
Transgender athletes are not barred from women's events. Female athletes who identify as men, or otherwise do not identify as women, can still compete in this category, as they have been doing already.
What the IOC's new policy actually does is make male athletes ineligible for competition in the female category, with very few exceptions. These exceptions are for athletes who are technically male but have a disorder of sex development that confers no male advantage, e.g. CAIS.
If you try to define athletic divisions by sex, you're going to have a hard time. The world's best athletes probably all have some unusual biology. About 1.7% of people are not completely biological male or female. I would expect that proportion to be higher for Olympic athletes. Excluding 1.7% or 2% or 10% of the world's best athletes from competing would not be fair.
Anybody can compete in the unsexed category. It’s only the female sex category where someone can be barred. No one is barred from competing at the highest level.
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 example I dont think it matters that up until now no trans woman has really won anything significant, as that could always change in the future).
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.
You also forgot to mention height. I am lgbt and I was a college athlete. In my sport it's common for middle school age boys to be better than some of the best women. It's not hateful to speak the truth.
> 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.
Just because they are not male, does not mean that they are female.
There is no way a man would ever compete in women's sports.
Let's imagine a con-man wanted to compete in women's sports. He would have to decide this early in life. Most trans people realize before they are 10. He would then have to spend the rest of his life pretending to be trans to not get his medal revoked.
Trans women are women. They don't have to pretend to be women. However, some trans women have to hide their identity and present as men, for their safety. Presenting as a gender you're not is incredibly taxing. There are high rates of depression and increased risk of suicide for people who have to hide their gender.
Besides the incredible psychological toll, our imaginary con-man would face bullying, harassment, physical assault, sexual violence, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, exclusion from healthcare, and increased risks of poverty and homelessness, which in turn correspond to greater risks of fatal violence.
The rights and legal status of transgender people vary by country. Our imaginary con-man might have restricted access to education, to sports, to bathrooms, and to marriage and military positions. As well as much, much worse.
On top of all that, our imaginary con-man would still have to train to be an Olympic athlete. Most men are not as fast or strong as the world's fastest and strongest women. Sex differences in athletic performance also depend on more than just biological differences. Living as a woman means only having access to the resources available to female athletes.
No man would go through all that for a women's medal.
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?
Many studies show with in ~10% female ranges of ability , but, having more fast twitch muscle fiber and bone mass from male puberty if they went through it. Bone mass does eventually drop to female levels but over decades not years so athletes would likely be out of athletic prime before that happens. Studies showing more dramatic results that stand out in my memory that lean toward transwomen outperforming transwomen are studies done on military veterans comparing to general population metrics of muscle mass for athletic activity levels also done with a very low population count I believe they only looked at under 300 trans women. Regardless we need more research, but there are a comically small amount of trans athletes seeking professional level sports, like I think <20 for all college level for instance.
Anecdotally, I found as a deskjob, pilates and casual weight lifting trans woman, I lost dramatic amount of strength and muscle mass. 20 pounds now feels like 50 pounds did for myself pre-transition. I usually participate with women and the instructor/personal helps with modifications usually aimed at women just getting into fitness. Running joke amongst friends is how easily I am outperformed by my female friends at the gym/pilates/etc. However, that's since my body is low testosterone even for females, its checked twice a year because of it, normally It's once a year for most trans people. Other friends retained a lot of their strength, but are mechanics, so its really situational in my opinion, and its a super hard and interesting topic of research because of it
> Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
The closest controlled study we have on this topic is not in athletes but in U.S. military servicemembers and their standard fitness test: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36271916/
This isn't a good study for professional athletes training for competition because the fitness test is not analogous to professional competition. They only need to pass with a reasonable score but most are not competing for the top position like in the Olympics
The study found that
> transgender females' performance showed statistically significantly better performance than cisgender females until 2 years of GAHT in run times and 4 years in sit-up scores and remained superior in push-ups at the study's 4-year endpoint.
So of the 3 simple activities they tested their performance remained higher in one test (run times) until 2 years, another test (sit-ups) until 4 years, and remained higher at the end of the limited 4-year study period in the last test (push-ups).
This study was widely circulated as "proof" that hormone therapy erases sex-based gains after only 2 years, but that's not even an accurate read of the study. It's also not measuring athletes who are training or trying to compete.
Depending on the sport, hormone therapy cannot be expected to compensate for sex some important sex differences like physical structure. Male anatomy is simply different in ways that provide different types of leverage or angles (like Q Angle, which runners will talk about, or reach, which is important to boxers)
This is a very taboo topic to discuss and honestly I'm a little nervous to even comment about it here pseudonymously. The popular culture discussion of the topic is very different than the sports science discussion of the topic, where sex differences have long been accepted to be innate and irreversible, regardless of hormone therapy.
The usual term is "cisgender", or "cis" for short.
"Cis" and "Trans" both come from Latin; the former means "the same side of" and the latter means "the other side of". If you are happy to be on the same side of the gender binary as what you were assigned when you were born then you are "cisgender"; if you are unhappy with that state of affairs (regardless of how much work you have put into changing it) then you are "transgender".
Adding to this: If you do not want to reference the current gender, you can also use "Assigned Female at Birth" (AFAB), or "Assigned Male at Birth" (AMAB).
This is useful when clarifying terms, when you do not know the persons identity, or when discussing groups based on the factory default settings.
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 top ten complaints.
Considering I was asking whether there was evidence on trans-performance, sure it matters a little.
That's fine if they don't want to compete with men, but the statements were because "it's unfair". I was curious if there had been any studies on this.
> Considering I was asking whether there was evidence on trans-performance, sure it matters a little.
Well, (and I hesitate to say this because of HN guidelines, but) it was in the article, which I assumed you read. It was this assumption that made me think you wanted evidence that it is women who are complaining about competing against men.
FTFA
> 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 advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
The linked article is to the nytimes. I dunno which article is the yahoo one. This story was on the nytimes, it's the one under discussion.
> Does it have a link to any of the findings?
The findings I posted where from the linked article, to the nytimes. The findings were exactly as I posted them; in brief, athletes born with male markers retain their physical advantages.
> You can debate what policies are the most fair without calling trans women "men."
You're correct - man/woman are gender identities, male/female are biological facts. The more accurate version of that statement (which, btw, is not mine, I am just repeating what the complaints are) is:
That's a misleading way to talk about "outperforming". When the US brings over 200 people to the olympics, then if cis and trans athletes have exactly the same performance and without other bias you'd expect to see 1-2 trans US olympians every year just by chance. And you'd expect them to have the same medal rates as anyone else from the US. When someone asks if there's evidence of trans athletes outperforming cis athletes, that's not what they're asking for.
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.
Exactly my point, your country is only sending you to the Olympics if you are their absolute best.
The competitive part does not start at the Olympics. The Olympics are already the price.
Citation? Data? Let's take Paris 2024 track and field 800 m as an example, I won't do all the googling for you. In men's heats, the slowest clocked time was a hair under 1:55. In women's finals (consequently the fastest time of the competition), the winner clocked in at a bit under 1m57, whereas the men's final was won with 1:41 and change. You may look up other competitions by yourself. The reason for the lack of "citation", or "data" as you call it, is because men typically are not allowed to enter women's competitions, for that - rooted-in-reality reason I just demonstrated.
Well, trans women given current regulations that allowed competition with cis women, would have had to be on hormone replacement therapy for 3-5 years depending on the sport. So the data and context does matter, because the intuitive conclusion you came to isn't touching a dataset to find the rooted-in-reality conclusion. The question is 'is a male with a female hormone balance for over X period time with in a fair difference in biological function to females.'. Which is a complex question, since so many things are at play. How much does fast twitch muscle fiber is retained? How much does that even matter for the sport in question?(ballet vs sprinting) Did they go through male puberty? Where are they working out to retain their muscle mass through their 3-5 year transition period and not losing any of their originally gained muscle? What would it look like if they intentionally lost the muscle mass and then retrained it back?
I find those to be fascinating questions, the later we have little research on, currently, and it could enlighten so much more of exercise science especially for cis athletes as well.
A YEAR of hormone therapy. Meeting a required measured threshold of testosterone.
And that's not even the controversial stuff. A man and a trans-woman are different. hell, one has (generalizing here) boobs: come on... don't be dense/obtuse! Have you tried running fast suddenly having boobs when you did not before?!?! ...one is way easier.
The problem is that someone who's transitioned is no longer a man. After undergoing surgery and hormone treatment for a long period of time, a trans athlete falls somewhere between men and women in terms of capability. They'd have no more success competing against men than naturally born women would, yet they still have advantages when competing against naturally born women.
Unfortunately, while the most equitable solution might be to create a separate category unique to trans individuals, there aren't enough trans athletes to make it feasible (yet?). It's rather sad that transitioning means a person can no longer compete in sports, but I'm not sure there's a better alternative.
You still have your larger bone structure. Larger musculature structure and different muscle insertions. different ligament structure. different skin structure. different grip strength. Broader shoulders, narrower pelvis, different angled limbs. all of that isn't going away even if it atrophies. And you aren't going to let it atrophy because you are an athlete in training managing your dietary macros. Maybe recovery isn't as efficient lacking so much excess testosterone but you still have some.
Starting out with this: are you proposing a height limit on female athletes? If having a larger bone structure is an unfair advantage, surely tall women should be banned from competing?
It comes down to where we draw the line. We limit healthy women from competing in paraplegic games for example, because of inherent advantages.
In certain sports, height might not be formally regulated, but weight classes are regulated. And in those sports it is arguably an advantage to be shorter, as you can be bulkier overall and dedicate more of the limited weight to pure muscle mass vs your skeleton. Although there are also considerations for things such as reach in some circumstances.
Overall though, the difference between a slightly taller athlete of a given sex is nowhere near the athletic prowess differences between a given athlete of the same height and of different sex. A 5' Lebron James would still dominate a 7' Caitlin Clark. Maybe there would be height classes just like there are weight classes and sex classes, if height were such an influencing factor.
It's your decision to take drugs that destroy your bodies ability to compete. It's the same as people who decide to eat way too much and similarly destroy their bodies ability to compete. They don't need to make new 'fat person's divisions for people who eat too much. If you want to compete in sports at a high level taking female hormones is detrimental to that.
Is there actually an advantage? that's toted. but no one can ever point to real data about it... and all the data suggests the exact opposite... that for most cases: cis-women out-compete trans-women.
They list their findings but no data. They effectively are just issuing an opinion. The opinion may be more considered than the rest of ours, but it’s not data.
> 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 advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
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.
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.
I mean yes but why keep the analysis private? I can think of very few reasons to do that, and one of them is because they know their methodology or data is flawed or inaccurate and they don't want people figuring that out. Obviously this is speculation but I would think they would want data like that to be public, since we want more data on things like this, not less.
I would be interested to see that analysis, and it's unfortunate that it is not publicly available in some fashion. I'm mainly curious about the number of DSD-expressing vs transgender athletes they reviewed. Trans athletes in the Olympics or even competing at an Olympic level are vanishingly rare.
A source is not required, taking part in the Olympics alone, means outperforming your countries other athletes. If that doesn’t happen there wouldn’t be a reason for the article.
Certainly some of the high profile cases have been fairly absurd. A mid-tier male athletic transitions, and then blows the female record out of the water and gets gold. What I don't know is whether there are wider stats rather than some really big notable cases. It wouldn't surprise me, I just don't have the facts at the moment.
I was a college athlete. Trust me, this topic has been discussed ad infinitum. People were not even allowed to speak out. In addition, the NCAA meet is very competitive and Thomas pushed someone out of the meet and out of finals. Girls work their entire life for this meet just for it to end this way. It's shockingly sad on so many levels. It's not common, but it's not right that people were not even allowed to speak up. Former swimmers there have done interviews.
Regardless, Lia went from not being in the front of the pack, to being in the front of the pack:
“By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to fifth on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle.”
65th to 1st in one category, and 554th to 5th in another.
It is fair to say there was a significant increase in rank post-transition.
Yeah, generally you get better in your sport in the 4-5 years you're in college. She was already putting up crazy numbers as a freshman on the men's team.
From Wikipedia:
> Thomas began swimming on the men's team at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. During her freshman year, Thomas recorded a time of eight minutes and 57.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle that ranked as the sixth-fastest national men's time, and also recorded 500-yard freestyle and 1,650-yard freestyle times that ranked within the national top 100.[4] On the men's swim team in 2018–2019, Thomas finished second in the men's 500, 1,000, and 1,650-yard freestyle at the Ivy League championships as a sophomore in 2019.[4][3][13] During the 2018–2019 season, Thomas recorded the top UPenn men's team times in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free, but was the sixth best among UPenn men's team members in the 200 free.[14]
To focus in on her just-out-of-highschool low ranking, and imply that it's weird that she improved by the time she graduated, is deliberately disingenuous (not on your part, but on the writer's.) She had already won 3 silver medals as a sophomore on the men's team, and was the best on her team in all but one event.
Nitpick: the references 4 of the wiki page point to a CNN article which in turn references times and rankings that don't exist any longer. A little more investigation shows that all of Thoms' titles were revoked and a court case allowing Thomas to the Olympics was also lost. The wiki is badly out of date.
Holy bad faith. OP didn't say Thomas's improved ranking is simply due to "people naturally improving overtime", but because she already was already rising, even between other men. Could you at least argue that point?
Also, if that's a "far left ideology rabbit hole" (it isn't even ideological), I have to ponder what the hell you think is a "right ideology", nevermind "far right ideology".
This power lifter set regional junior records as a young man then quit the sport and didn't compete for 16 years. After transitioning she went on to win gold medals in numerous international competitions as a woman.
> Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
No, both because there are very few trans athletes in competition, and because trans athletes (except trans women who have not started or are less than a year into hormone therapy) have net athletic disadvantages, when considering all factors relevant to performance in almost any real sport, compared to cisgender people of the same gender identity.
I mean, if you had a sport that isolated grip strength alone, trans women would have an advantage over cis women, but aside from rather contrived cases like that, they don't.
There's a reason the poster woman for the political movement around this in the US is a cisgender woman whose story of "unfair competition" is tying with a trans woman for fifth place behind four other cisgender women (and having to hold a sixth place trophy in photos, since there were not duplicates on hand for the same rank) in an intercollegiate swimming competition.
Consider that wins in any professional competition sport carries with it sponsorships, advertising stints, apparal lines or similar. For many women athletes this is a considerable part of their lively hood - include prize money etc. in terms of notoriety that gets displaced by the current regulation.
No idea on the hard data. but... We classify competitions for a reason. The competition is more interesting when the competitors are categorized into similar ability.
You can't bring your formula1 to a touring car race just because you feel like it is a touring car.
Personally I think at the top level there should be an unlimited class. within the rules of the sport anyone can enter, then at various lower prestige levels participation is limited according to some parameter.
One interesting example of this is the UTR system for tennis. It is agnostic in gender as wells as age, and tournaments can be held purely based on the UTR range
bad comparison - here is one better, not a perfect one...
You can't enter a car into a boating competition. The question here is: if you take basic precautions to make it the same class of boat - a modified car turned into a boat should be a valid entry - provided the engine speed roughly matches.
People worry about cars on water here, not knowing that doesn't exist by definition: any car in water has been modified from a car to be a boat. you may recognize that it was once a car - but that's vestigial shell stuff. the inter-workings are a propeller - not a wheel.
I see your argument and has some merit but isn't persuasive enough. I would posit that its a bit too loose and that it breaks down on biological people have many more complicated systems that aren't simply re-categorized similar to your car and boat comparison.
For better or worse nor is our medical science sophisticated enough to swap out the systems to be true comparables (and I don't mean to offend anyone).
> For better or worse nor is our medical science sophisticated enough to swap out the systems to be true comparables
The problem is that it isn't a hard binary. All the relevant metrics are going to fall on a spectrum, and there is a significant overlap between the male and female spectra.
The real question is: do you consider it fair if a top 1% male spectrum transitions to a top 1% female spectrum, or it only fair if that top 1% male spectrum ends up at the 50% percentile on the female spectrum?
> 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]
I wonder if anyone has measured the speed in which reality is codified into law or regulation. Women have been fighting against males in female sports for many, many years. Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
To educate others reading this, it's far from "obvious" how to classify gender in sports. Checking if they have the right "parts" physically doesn't do it. Checking for hormone levels doesn't do it. Even checking for Y chromosomes doesn't do it.
In my opinion the way forward is to stop trying to find arbitrary ways to define gender, and just start making competition classes based on whatever factors are relevant to the event. E.g. a women with high testosterone? They can compete with men or women with the same testosterone bracket. This would also let men with low-T compete fairly rather then be excluded from the games.
It's also relevant at what point other genetic changes are "unfair." There are absolutely genetic traits that give people HUGE advantages in various competitions. Just like the gender-related properties, these are natural and yet result in unfair competitions.
The problem with your proposed 'fuzzy divisions' is that they're not compatible with the zeitgeist of 'seeing the best compete', and 'drug-free' sports, as there's no reason to disallow performance-enhancing-drugs if we're already splitting into divisions.
Actually, you bring up an excelling additional argument for the sort of bracketing I proposed. It also works for drugs!
There is significant grey area wrt to "doping" too in the sense that a performance enhancing drug may express as a larger than normal amount of a naturally occurring substance. So did the person dope, or is that their natural genetics? In my scheme, WHO CARES!
Beyond that, I suppose there is the usual argument against more serious and non-natural forms of doping that it is physically detrimental to the competitors and by allowing it you are encouraging or pressuring people to essentially harm themselves.
Still, competition classes could be helpful in some of the doping grey areas.
Thank you. But the Y test still seems sufficient. Every criterion will have false positives and negatives. With the Y test the false negative (you present as a woman but have a Y chromosome) is rare and the vast majority of cases are handled well. If you have this condition you must compete against men (given the Y chromosome test rule) or not compete. If you’re dying to be in the Olympics as a woman but have the Y chromosome, you’re just out of luck. Not everyone can be a concert pianist either. No rule makes things wonderful for 100% of humans. The Y test gets very close.
But that's a contradiction, no? We're saving women from other women and barring trans people also (ones we consider men) because of a perceived risk that I don't see evidence for (i.e. people choosing to compete as women on a malicious basis or with an 'innate advantage' that makes it dangerous - we've had a long time of running these sports without this sort of regulation, and it seems to be a political choice more than a reaction to evidence that women are being outcompeted by trans people). This is also assuming that having a y chromosome makes it fair for people with a y chromosome to compete against one another, but if you compare people's physiology these people who present as women often have low/no testosterone. Separating on the line of testosterone picks up a lot of female athletes (especially at the olympic level) that are not trans, and overall I just see this hurting women without evidence that it's actually a response to harm. In any case, trans people and gender non conforming women become the victims of this in the public sphere.
It just seems very misguided.
High level sports consists entirely of outliers. That’s kind of the point of the olympics. This newest rule is nothing more than a misogynist rule to turn the women’s division into the “no more than statistically average” division.
Almost every gold medal winner in the past games would not have been affected by this new rule, so that's a biiit hyperbolic. Those athletes are still far outside the normal performance of women (or men, for that matter).
If you pay attention, your source has an asterisk of “typically” and “usually”, aswell as a distinction between phenotype and karyotype traits. While it is true that the majority of people with a Y chromosome are male, there are many people with Y chromosomes you’d call female because of their phenotype (which is what society primarily cares about), among other cicumstances.
I specifically said sex. Gender is mostly undefined. If you say that gender is the societal presentation as male or female, but you can’t define male from female then what are you defining? Its the “trans women are women” contradiction.
For Swyer syndrome, A 2017 study estimated that the incidence of Swyer syndrome is approximately 1 in 100,000 females. Fewer than 100 cases have been reported as of 2018.
For both the genetic disorders, they would have to be beneficial or at least not an disadvantage, for elite sport activity in order to be an issue for misclassification. For a sex-determination system, they could simply add an exception for Swyer syndrome and postpone the decision until such individual presented themselves at an Olympic competition.
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 simple rule that covers 99.9% of cases and the other 0.1% is unfortunately effectively barred from high level competition. Note, high level competition already bars 99.9% of people. Even though the opposing side is correct in pointing out these edge cases, it does nothing to advance an actual solution.
There are statistically around 15 women AFAB with XY chromosomes in the NCAA by those numbers (assuming no correlation between Swyer syndrome and athletic performance).
There are currently around 10 openly transgender women in the NCAA.
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 and caring way possible, mind you.
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.
Except I proposed a solution, which you ignored (I'm assuming here that I'm your "opposing side".)
Also, there are a significant number of these sorts of arguments in high-level sports, probably precisely because these "0.1%" cases are exactly the ones that result in exceptional ability relative to norms. It's also curious that there is such obsession about naturally occurring genetic outliers with respect to females or gender but absolute silence about naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender. And surprise surprise the top athletes often have such outlier genetics!
If you're drawing a distinction between natural genetic difference related to only gender and no other factors then sadly it's exactly a culture war, not a war based in science or fairness.
Because in a specific minority of the population it disagrees with the gender assigned at birth for obvious reasons. There are plenty of resources you could read on intersex instead of lol at something you don’t understand
> Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
A few reasons:
1. Sex is not as straightforward as most people think, and what to do with intersex people is not clear.
2. Trans athletes are underrepresented at pretty much all levels of sport, and aren't actually winning that much, making it not actually an urgent problem.
3. The philosophical underpinnings that advantages due to differences in body development should be disqualifying is a little broken, since we do not consider Michael Phelps being double jointed as being an unfair developmental advantage.
The Olympics used to do this. From as early as the 1960's they were doing genetic testing on female athletes. They stripped Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska of all her medals and records in 1967, in spite of the fact that she gave birth to a child a year later, which would seem to indicate that she was a woman. The Olympics only abandoned this testing regime after the 1996 Olympic Games when 8 women who were cis and assigned female from birth to that moment were wrongly tested as male (7 AIS cases, 1 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency ). The uproar from that caused the Olympics to realize that this was a lot more complicated then they thought and abandon the idea of a strict genetic test.
Because those 8 women at that one Games were a lot more than all transfem Olympic athletes in history combined, the danger of ruling people out is much greater than the danger of allowing someone in who doesn't deserve it.
Anecdotally there has been a common knowledge that some of the record-setting Soviet women in disciplines line disk throwing, etc, had genetic abnormalities and had to suddenly finish their careers when the aforementioned testing came.
> The shift to PCR-based techniques replaced one diagnostic genetic test with another but did not alleviate the problems. Positive results still stigmatized women with such conditions as androgen insensitivity, XY mosaicism, and 5-α-reductase deficiency. Both sex chromatin and SRY tests identify individuals with genetic anomalies that yield no competitive advantage. Therefore, finally in 1999, the IOC conditionally rescinded its 30-yr requirement for on-site gender screening of all women entered in female-only events at the Olympic Games, starting with Sydney in 2000. Rather, intervention and evaluation of individual athletes by appropriate medical personnel could be employed if there was any question about gender identity. This change has not been made permanent.
> It is worth noting these tests are sensitive. If a male lab technician conducts the test he can inadvertently contaminate it with a single skin cell and produce a false positive SRY result.
> No guidance is given on how to conduct the test to reduce the risk of false results.
> Nor does World Athletics recognise the impacts a positive test result would have on a person, which can be more profound than exclusion from sport alone.
> There was no mention from World Athletics that appropriate genetic counselling should be provided, which is considered necessary prior to genetic testing and challenging to access in many lower- and middle-income countries.
> I, along with many other experts, persuaded the International Olympic Committee to drop the use of SRY for sex testing for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
> It is therefore very surprising that, 25 years later, there is a misguided effort to bring this test back.
> Even if a molecular method could be devised that had a very small error rate, it would still just constitute a test for a nucleic acid sequence, not for sex or gender. Although one can test for the main candidate gene for male sex determination, SRY, it still holds that most XY women test positive and some XX males test negative for SRY. It is possible that there will never be a laboratory test that will adequately assess the sex of all individuals.
...
> (IAAF proposals held) that the purpose of gender verification is to prevent normal men from masquerading as women in women's comopetition was reinforced. Perhaps a genuine concern decades ago, this fear now seems to be a less pressing concern. One reason may be that routine drug testing now requires the voiding of urine be carefully watched by an official to make certain that urine from a given athlete actually comes from his or her urethra. Thus, athletes are already carefully watched in "doping stations". The likelihood of a male successfully masquerading as a female under such circumstances seems remote in current comparison.
Men who weigh 100kg are also banned from participating in the 63kg weightlifting category. So what? There are physical traits that offer advantages in sports. We bucketize so that we see more interesting competitions (aka a 120kg weightlifter would completely dominate all of the smaller folks, every single time, so what's the point of competing ).
I don’t see where we disagree. It is exactly why we have different buckets for men and women. Otherwise why would ever a woman try to compete in weightlifting?
I always thought the more elegant approach to all of this was to add a mixed sex league. Keep the traditions, add a novel new one, and let people consent to who they want to compete against and watch
Correct and it’s the same in many sports. Theres generally not “men’s golf” and “women’s golf” there’s just “golf” and “women’s golf.”
Women are not excluded from golf tournaments, but the requirements to compete (primarily how far one hits the ball) are vastly different. Thats why both play the same golf course, just from different tee boxes.
I think they're trying to say that if there was a mixed league it would always end up being 100% men at the highest level. Like, mixed league basketball would almost certainly be just men at the highest level because of how the sport works.
I sometimes play mixed vball rec leagues, the definition of a mixed league in our rec league here, says we "have to have at least 2 women playing at any time"
So maybe I think what they mean by "mixed league" is not a "Maybe Mixed League" but like "Definitely Mixed League" as in mixed participants being a strict requirement somehow?
In the sports I competed in, the men's class was really an open class. (EDIT: Looking at past results, we didn't even have a "men's division". There was just a separate women's division) Anyone could compete in it. The women's classes were the only restricted classes.
There are several sports where female physiology (skeletal structure, etc) has inherent advantages over male physiology where this may not be true, though.
The only reason is topic is even on the table is the sheer amount of political grifters riding the trans “panic” for many years, trying to rile up a mob. This is a non issue, and online trans investigators and people like jk Rowling so far managed to only hurt multiple (assigned at birth) women in sports, whos looks don’t conform with traditional femininity.
You sure about that? I rarely see any debate on the left about trans rights, but I see various right wing politicians and media constantly beat the drums about trans people - bathrooms, sports, claiming them all to be pedophiles, “transinvestigating” various celebrities or figures. Current US executive branch made a few directed hits against trans people, for example creating a bunch of problems with passports.
Trans people are certainly one of the most popular scapegoats for the right.
It's the most popular event for speedrunning and has raised millions of dollars each year for over a decade. Sounds like they're doing just fine as is and, perhaps, fostering an inclusive environment which explicitly protects people demonized by society at large has only helped, not hurt.
They don't seem to have a page directly talking about goals, but look at their front page. Specifically the section at the bottom talking about community stuff, which also has prominent links in the top bar.
Already exists, it's what people refer to as "male olympics". As far as I know, females aren't banned from competing. It is just that they don't stand a chance in most disciplines. The whole point of female olympics is to keep males out.
Maybe they should accept that they simply aren't competitive if they can't compete against their own sex. There's no shame in it, most people aren't competitive, certainly so at this level.
Confidently incorrect. As an example - a banned Thomas salto had been developed and performed by a male gymnast first, and afterwards women starting trying to do it too. This is an anecdote example, but it shows that gymnastics is not some women dominated sport. As another example - four out of four named jumps in the figure skating are all named by male athletes who performed them first.
Why not ignore gender labels and go by chromosomal configuration? There could be XY and XX [1] olympics. And then there should be X, XYY, XXX, XXXY, XXYY, and all the other possibilities [2].
There is more complexity than the binary in the expression of sex in humans.
All biological categories are fuzzy around the edges. Those fuzzy edges do not invalidate the category. The existence of small #'s of people with actual physical intersex conditions (not "I feel like <x>") in no way conflicts with humans being sexually dimorphic.
That is what they do.
Male, female, man, woman, boy, girl are sex categories, not gender categories, that is they predate the very idea of gender as distinct from sex.
Sports categories never had anything to do with gender.
The other difference of sexual development are different sexes
I agree with you in general, but I think it would be fair to let XY individuals with CAIS compete on the female side - their bodies do not respond to testosterone.
Really, there should be separate categories for people with more than the regular amount of arm hair. Also separate categories for short people, tall people, lazy people, people who wear glasses, people with blue trousers, and of course, for sketch artists and quantitative traders.
Because then trans men will dominate the "women"'s category. What's frustrating about this entire subject is that many of these things were tried. After finding that too many cis athletes were being disqualified they switched to the current rules that in most cases split things based on testerone levels. You can choose to do it some other way, but all of them come with some problems that people won't like
Not only trans athletes, but any biologically born women the IOC thinks are insufficiently feminine.
It’s an unfair advantage apparently. You know, like being born tall for basketball players. Curious how no other biological advantages are being policed.
That doesn’t seem to be the case, given the first paragraph of the article:
> The International Olympic Committee has barred transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category of the Olympics and said that all participants in those events must undergo genetic testing.
Genetic testing doesn’t leave a lot of room for accidentally or intentionally targeting women for being “insufficiently feminine.”
This might be true if the Olympics were exclusively classifying the 23rd chromosomes, and nothing but.
Leave aside the fact that very few of us here have actually tested our 23rd chromosome. Historically, the Olympics have not been (and are not) strictly chromosomal. The 2023 testosterone suppression decision requirements has exclusively impacted cis women, for one example.
Humans are biologically dimorphic in the same way winters are usually cold and summers are usually hot.
More often than you'd think! You can easily go your entire life without knowing. It is not uncommon for the first hint to be that a couple is having trouble conceiving.
> You can easily go your entire life without knowing.
Sure, since we already established that the tests are usually not done at all.
An overwhelming majority of people (at least among those who have a basic understanding of the underlying science) could, however, guess correctly about themselves.
The combined prevalence of all intersex conditions is simply not that high.
I would say that humans are sexually dimorphic in the same way that humans are bipeds. if you attempted to make a serious argument that limb agenesis implies that we’re a variable-limbed species it would be obfuscating rather than illuminating.
No, that is not a good analogy at all. It's so poor an analogy that it's challenging to interpret this comment generously. I think you might be arguing facetiously to make a different rhetoric point than the literal content of your post, bot I will respond to your text literally.
Humans have a wide variety of biological variation in metrics we think of as linked to "biological sex" and those metrics are accessibly mutable. Even within the Olympics, the natural variation of these metrics within cis women is a famous topic of debate (Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, etc.)
Bipedalism is something which varies very rarely and is especially not accessibly mutable.
> What is the total prevalence of all conditions medically recognized as intersex?
Not all biological variation is classified as intersex.
> What is that even supposed to mean?
You can change a lot of your 'secondary sex characteristics' intentionally. This is much easier than removing a limb, and even easier than adding a limb.
So? It would apply to sex chromosomes and only sex chromosomes, which is just one observed sex characteristic.
We are talking about sexual dimorphism and secondary sex characteristics.
Humans were understood to be sexually dimorphic before we discovered sex chromosomes in 1905, and we usually label our babies with a biological sex without the aid of consumer genetic testing.
I have a lot of sympathy for Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya, as they were assigned female at birth and raised as girls, and they want to compete with women. But I don't know if there's a case to be made that they're biologically female.
They have XY chromosomes, internal testes, a male testosterone level, and male muscle development. They have the SRY gene that the IOC is testing for, and are not one of the exceptions. Regardless of the fact that their DSD (5-ARD) results in no penis.
To be clear, I'm not saying they should start living life as men. But describing their situation as the natural variation of cis women is simplistic and not accurate.
For starters, I can't find any credible source saying they have XY chromosomes or internal testes.
Further, they are women, and therefore their testosterone levels and muscle development are female.
This just gets to a ludicrous place. These are women who are simply identifiable as so. Anyone throughout history would have identified them as so. Their biological metrics are within the variation of cis women, because they are cis women.
If it were possible for us to exist (and thus consider the question) in the absence of the other atoms, and if those other atoms overwhelmingly (somehow) had a number of nucleons between 1 and 2, then the analogy might plausibly make sense.
That’s a very fun way to think about it, but it’s far more effective in a semantic debate than a serious one. I also don’t for a minute believe that the goal here is some broader reform of how the world talks about statistical distributions.
It was intended in good faith, to make the point that rarity alone is not a good metric for salience. In my experience, most trans people have no problem with the statement "humans are sexually dimorphic" in a biology context. They (and I) have issue with it when its used in a debate to say "Humans are sexually dimorphic (and therefore trans and intersex people are irrelevant/shouldn't be accommodated/don't exist)". In the context of sports, it is definitely relevant that there are many edge cases and substantial overlap in the distribution of phenotypes between AFAB and AMAB people.
Coming back around to the olympics: I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree without dismissing the complexity that comes from organizing across 8 billion people.
> They (and I) have issue with it when its used in a debate to say "Humans are sexually dimorphic (and therefore trans and intersex people are irrelevant/shouldn't be accommodated/don't exist)".
But that is not being said here, just as in every other time the discussion of sex segregation in sports comes up; and just as in every other time, people simply pretend in bad faith that such things are being asserted.
> I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes.
Sure. Which is why they do, and nobody has a problem with it.
Go take a survey of the people opposed to transgender women competing in women's Olympic sports, and see what they think of having a separate category for transgender athletes. Or even separate categories for transgender men and transgender women. I'd wager the large majority have no problem with that. (They might at most be concerned about disproportionate airtime being given to sport events that relatively few people qualify for and relatively few people are especially interested in.)
To add to this, I want to stress on the point of rarity. Variations within sex metrics are not the uncommon fringe case people make it out to be, they're actually common and expected.
Within biology, we'd see a number of metrics (like height) which would usually appear bimodal (like two bell curves added together). We might identify at least two latent variables here: A real-number 'age' (which can be observed) and a binary 'sex' (not directly observed). But it's worth stressing that these implied underlying curves overlap, and any given metric is not strictly correlated with the others. (Commonly, one might be on the lower end of some distributions and the higher ends of others. Someone can be 5'3" tall, have red hair, and a high body-fat percentage while also having testicles, XY chromosomes, and dying at the age of 62.) (We should also note that the 23rd chromosome just another observed variable, starting after ~1900.)
Some causes of variation that we know about are fraternal birth order, or endocrine-disrupting chemicals like PFAS, conditions like PCOS, etc.
Case in point are all the cis women who are impacted by the ever-stricter testosterone guidelines in the Olympics. Further is the effect of fraternal birth order, or the endocrine-disrupting chemicals like PFAS, or the intentional introduction of hormones and hormone blockers. (If certain industries are to be believed, soy milk has a similar effect.) These are all variations and things which impact what we understand as "biological sex".
Folk gender theorists tend to consider sexuality, identity, biology, and expression as orthogonal axes. But these are clearly also correlated among people. (Stretching the definition of "correlated" to include qualitative metrics like 'expression' using the usual methods.)
An information-theoretic framework would inform well an "optimal" way to talk about this, using a one-bit string for most people and increasingly more bits when more information is needed. This is roughly how people already talk.
Speaking for myself I believe that trans people and non-binary people should be accommodated, but there’s a contextual limit. When it comes to equal protection, employment, healthcare, medical access, bathrooms and a dozen other issues it’s a no-brainer in favor of accommodating people.
Ironically the sports divide is probably the single area where having some physical advantages isn’t a bonus. It’s also near and dear to the hearts of billions, and such a terrible hill to die on. Ideally the solution would be a league like the Paralympic competitions, but high level athletes are rare, trans people are relatively rare, and two overlapping are incredibly rare. To make such a league would be a farce that couldn’t hope to succeed.
In the Olympics, it appears trans athletes are still a minority among the group of athletes who are excluded because of sex characteristics. Most of the athletes impacted by the ever-stricter testosterone limits in the Olympics are cis women. Such a league would include cisgender former Olympic athletes who had to undergo forms of HRT in order to qualify.
When discussing trans people in sports, the most salient contexts aren't elite sports championships like the Olympics. "Sports" is also done recreationally and is often considered a normal part of ones childhood upbringing. On the topic of trans people, the question "can my child play this sport with their friends"?
Is anyone worth listening to seriously suggesting that informal childhood sports are somehow equivalent to programs that can define academic or professional careers?
Edit I’d add that T screening in sports exists primarily to find dopers, not people trying to pass.
I don't see how your question follows from the rest of the discussion, or in what specific ways you are suggesting people argue to be equivalent. Both K-12 sports and Olympic sports are understood to be sports.
To restate myself, sports during childhood are much more important than elite world championships. Almost everyone I know did a sport with peers during our formative years, myself included. Meanwhile, nobody I know was ever close to qualifying to be an Olympic athlete, and I feel certain the same is true for most of the people in this thread.
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.
It's very confusing topic. I rendered this visual map to show how SRY gene is the 'trigger' for development, not just having the Y chromosome. It helps see the signaling steps where things like AIS or XX syndrome happen: https://vectree.io/c/y-chromosome-genomic-signaling
The question comes down if the presence of the SRY gene impact athletic ability. From my reading, it seems very much like an ongoing research topic.
I recall a study looking at genetics in general and how much of professional sport abilities that can be attributed to it, and the number were fairly high for most sports, especially those involving strength and endurance. Genetic disorders like AIS could however also be a hindrance.
I do recall that in some endurance sports, certain genetic disorders involving oxygen delivery were much more common in top elites than in the average population, meaning that people without that disorder is at severe disadvantage compared to general population. It is an ongoing discussion if people with those kind of disorders should be allowed to compete in for example long distance skiing, as the disorder becomes natural doping and would be cheating if a person without the disorder was competing with that kind of blood in their system.
Genetic testing, outside of the culture war about what defines a man or a woman, really comes down to what is fair competition. Personally I can't really say. Does knowing that maybe half of the top skiers has a rare blood disorder make it less fun for people?
Before you hold genetic testing down to this standard of perfection (catching a single event of something so notable it merited its own article in JCEM), it would do well to compare it to the alternatives from which you are moving, and whether those alternatives met this standard of perfection.
Otherwise it might turn out you are proposing a standard that no system that bifurcates men and women can achieve, and on the basis of that, rejecting genetic testing.
Caster Semenya is XY with a DSD (5-ARD), and absolutely should not compete with females. The same goes for Imane Khelif who was the same DSD.
People with this condition have internal testes, a male level of testosterone, and a male level of muscle development. That a doctor assigned them female at birth and put a F on the birth certificate does not change this.
The upshot of this is that women with a genetic advantage are banned, but men with a genetic advantage aren't; is this not straightforwardly sex discrimination?
No. Nobody is banned from the "men's" category, including unambiguously cisgender women of completely unambiguous sexual characteristics. They just wouldn't stand a chance, practically speaking (for example, in the 100 metre sprint, the all-time women's world record time would not meet the qualification standard). There was already "sex discrimination" in the fact of the women's category existing in the first place; this was done as a pragmatic matter so that the world has the opportunity to celebrate peak female physical achievements.
The debate is really around how the handling of intersex and transgender athletes intersects with the original purpose of creating a separate category for women.
>Nobody is banned from the "men's" category, including unambiguously cisgender women of completely unambiguous sexual characteristics.
This is exactly my point. Men with unusual characteristics are celebrated, but women with unusual characteristics are excluded into a non-competitive category.
You can justify it if you'd like, but in a practical sense, no man will ever get to the Olympics only to be turned away because they don't genetically qualify for competition. This is an indignity reserved only for women.
Respectfully, I don't think you're engaging with what I'm actually saying here.
No adults are training their way to the kid-lympics and then getting cut open and surprised by the count of the rings.
Also, the idea of "fairness" is overstated, a naturalist just-so fallacy. Is it "fair" that some male athletes are taller or shorter than others, or have other genetic advantages, for example?
That's dumb as fuck. Olympics have always been for genetic freaks, whatever line we draw between "male" and "female" categories is completely arbitrary. Using reproductive organs was bad enough, are we now supposed to look at microscopic chains of amino acids to sort people? IMO, this decision just serves to further illustrate the insanity that is gender segregation.
This always should of been left to sports committees than our government, what a waste of our representatives times, but I guess they got the culture war points
> it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote
I'm staying out of the other issue as best I can, but as a non-American the resistance to this is just baffling, especially given the fact your recent elections have not exactly been widely trusted internally. Not that I'm saying there was much merit to the distrust, but it still makes sense to take steps to demonstrate it. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud in the US.
There is a political talking point that “aliens are voting” in our elections but it has been proven false again and again. The purpose of this is to put up barriers for legitimate citizens to vote, not to truly fix an imaginary problem.
The issue isn’t the proof of citizenship. The issue is that poll taxes are unconstitutional and there is no state that I’m aware of that makes the acquisition of identification documents free of cost.
I’m honestly quite surprised that politicians don’t resolve this idiotic situation because it’s so damn simple, but I think it’s not solved because various state governments rely on small fees for revenue. And of course because there are many political situations in which making it difficult for specific opponent voters to vote is a campaign strategy.
Make fees for drivers licenses, birth certificates, and passports illegal, and ideally institute a system that makes these forms of identification automatic/stupidly easy to acquire and the whole issue is resolved. Now you can require voters to present them and you aren’t disenfranchising anyone.
Thanks for clarifying. Not being of USA I didn't even consider the angle about having to pay for government ID - it's a very alien concept for us in eastern europe at least.
Election fraud on the other hand.. this we are very familiar with. Reaction to the coverage of last three US presidential elections was mostly "oh, how cute, such naive first attempts". So from our PoV there most certainly were widespread attempts to rig them, mostly from Dem side, and so very unprofessional, that their existence cannot be denied in good faith.
> from our PoV there most certainly were widespread attempts to rig them, mostly from Dem side
Oof, I feel bad for whatever news network you are getting your American coverage from. You might want to look into who owns that news network. This is a very common political message specifically originating from the Republican Party’s media network (e.g., Murdoch-owned media, Turning Point USA, etc).
To "get coverage from a news network" is ignorance bordering on pure madness.
They are almost exclusively propaganda and manipulation and as such the only useful signal that can be extracted is something like "how those people chose to frame certain events they feel they can't ignore in hopes of them going unnoticed". Note I'm talking about our local ones, in my opinion yours do not differ materially in this aspect.
So no. I'm not parroting after a talking head on some network or other (the thought itself is mildly insulting). For an interesting incident (and election-related stuff was interesting enough) what one does is gather as much coverage as possible and then try to reconstruct what event could have lead to this set of framings.
What I wrote is somewhat of a consensus between us old hands of many years experience resisting election fraud, with hands-on knowledge of how it's done, how to fight it, how attempts at covering it up look like and how people that prefer to believe it never happens behave.
the law they are trying to pass requires you to prove you are a citizen each and every time you vote
not when you register to vote, every single time for the rest of your existance
it has no basis in logic
it's already illegal to vote if you are not a citizen
no-one trying to gain citizenship would risk being deported for voting in an election
every time conservative groups comb the voter rolls to try to find people who are not allowed to vote, not only do they find only like a couple people out of MILLIONS, they discover they never actually voted, it was a mistaken registration
out of billions of votes the past decade there were like seven people prosecuted
that's what's going on
what they are really trying to do is make it REALLY hard to vote, to make incredible fiction, so people stop voting
because if people stop voting, the people already in power keep that power
btw don't confuse this with showing an ID when you vote
that's already the law almost everywhere
what they want is you must have a passport (most people do not have one) or a birth certificate (most people have no idea where or how to get it) EVERY time you vote, not just register but EVERY time, like it changes somehow
There's also cis-male people who will "pass" that SRY test if they take it for some reason...
This is a dumb ass way to try and define the woman's category... which is about the expected result of bigots trying to work backwards from the result they want headlines about.
SRY testing was done at the 1996 games and for a while before that. 8 cisgender women tested positive at that games. Far more than the number of transgender athletes who have ever participated. This resulted in genetic testing being changed from all women to on-suspicion.
The bottom line is these tests will catch dozens of people who are phenotypically women, who can even give birth. Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?
From what I've read, these women all had CAIS or similar, and testosterone had no effect on their bodies. Thankfully the new IOC guidelines have an exception for that and would let them compete with women.
But I want to point out that XY+CAIS individuals cannot conceive or carry a child. They have no ovaries and no uterus.
> Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?
They are, if they are female or have CAIS. Caster Semenya, for example, does not meet that standard. Caster was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, but is not biologically female, rather a male with a DSD (5-ARD) who has testes and fully male levels of testosterone and musculature.
I actually wish non-sports people would care less about sports, too.
Because the decisions should be left to those of us playing the sports. Not bystanders trying to impose their own agendas on to activities they don't even participate in.
Strongly agreed. I think there was ever a good reason for this to be a topic outside those with a direct interest in various sports governing bodies. Those should be making these decisions. It's deeply stupid that this has become a major point of contention up to the federal level of government.
>Because the decisions should be left to those of us playing the sports.
You can make the decisions, but you can't make the audience (a much larger body of people, who overwhelmingly do not participate in the sport, at least not competitively) agree with (or care about) your decisions or reasoning.
This is, in general, a good idea. Nostalgia etc. and some kind of misguided paternalism causes us to “fund” sports when really all of this stuff should have to just pay for what it is. The market economy is a good way to allocate things so that you don’t end up with a $40k/yr income person paying taxes so that rich people get tennis courts in Russian Hill. We should probably just have market functions for most things.
The government doesn’t have to leave the sphere. It just has to manage the market. For instance, a specific amount of space in a park could be allocated to dynamically priced programming. This could be auctioned on an annual basis with teardown costs pre-allocated. Then you don’t have the argument over whether tennis or pickleball. It could be cricket or sepak takraw for all we know.
Proponents of various sports could group together to share the space. This is obviously far superior to the communist style committee allocation.
And obviously the government should not fund sports. Creating the environment where sports funding can occur by ensuring a framework for contracts and so on, yes. But actually deciding that baseball or football or basketball need to be played is patently ridiculous.
Yes, putting out cones. Bending over, laying down a cone, taking five steps, laying another. Hard work. Meanwhile Malcolm Gladwell changes his mind about it. Put out some cones, Malcolm!
I always sort of speculated that sports existed to channel what would otherwise be human tendencies toward violence; an outlet enablining more stable civilization. Even though I largely ignore sports, I appreciate it over possible alternatives.
Imagine this energy put into labor reform, minumum wage, universal Healthcare, Imagine this fervor when your representatives are actively harboring sex assailants.
But alas. It's easier to spread hate than enact positive change.
Exactly. It's impossible to have both inclusion and fair play. We have to pick one, and as a parent of daughters who compete at fairly high levels it's more important to preserve the integrity of women's sports.
Sure, I guess that's an option for youth sports in the prepubescent age groups. As a practical matter most youth sports leagues and schools aren't going to hassle with sex screening tests for little kids.
But once puberty hits everything changes. My teenage daughter played travel club volleyball on a pretty good team, and during practice they would occasionally run drills with the boys team. Even at that age the difference in hitting power and vertical was enormous, and those differences only grow larger with age. Men and women are literally playing different games. Beyond just fairness, forcing girls to compete against biological males becomes a safety risk due to concussions from taking a ball to the head.
males competing against males are also at risk by taking a ball to the head :).
I think male female trans etc . can compete if analysed by sports branch basis. Male x female in contact sports like karate boxing taekwondo is not fair. However i think the difference is negligible in shooting, archerty, curling etc.
“Women tend to have thinner skulls than men, along with smaller neck muscles, which can predispose female athletes to getting a concussion,” says Sarah Menacho, MD, a neurosurgeon and neurocritical care specialist at University of Utah Health. “Data shows that women are also more likely than men to report concussion-related symptoms, and these symptoms can persist for a longer time period prior to recovery than in male athletes.”
In my experience competing in different things, that's typical: Local organizations are free to set their own local rules, but once you cross over into events that make you eligible for higher level competition they have to strictly abide by the national level rules. I couldn't use my results from grassroots competitions to qualify for national level events, generally.
> They'd rather lose the election than let women compete against females only.
Fascinating political analysis. It's weird how a small group of people are deeply driven by identity politics above literally anything else, especially when those people typically aren't even slightly affected (and generally have never watched a single women's event in their life).
I sometimes wonder if people like you scream at politicians because of the introduction of the pitch clock in baseball, too? Do you waste this much energy on the rulebooks other sports come up with? Or just like, when you think it's icky sex stuff?
You know, that thing where the school next door is twice the size and has ten times the budget but it's totally fair! They win the championship every year because they totally have genetically superior athletes every single year! They are definitely better and there are zero possible systemic issues that could affect such a situation!
If high school sports aren't fair, then the world will end! How will we go on if little billy loses to someone he shouldn't! What if he loses to a girl!
In fact, we should make the ref blowing a call a capital offense! It's only fair!
Christ, it's so stupid. If these people cared about "fairness" for women's sports, they would be legislating more funding and support for them, not attacking random high school age people for the horrific crime of not conforming and wanting to play a low stakes game.
The point of high school sports is to get kids active and teach them cooperation and provide exposure to new things.
Ensuring that nobody with the "wrong" life can play against Beth is not even in the right universe of goals.
Alright alright alright I got it. We can get perfect fairness! Every single child born in america will be taken from their parents and put in a government run home that raises them all identically, given identical food and education and entertainment and enrichment and every single one will be given identical sports training. They will be required to complete identical exercise regimens and will have constant surveillance to ensure they aren't doing anything unapproved at any time. There, now finally our high school sports are safe! Phew, crisis averted.
This is a matter of principle, fair play, and safety. Whether it's a tiny number or "scores and scores" is irrelevant.
If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site. I can't vouch for it being completely accurate but you can use it as a starting point for further research to educate yourself about the issue.
FYI - shewon is entirely self reported and does no verification. It includes events such as local town fair bean bag throwing competitions.
It also classifies a trans person winning anything as ~3 losses since "a non-trans person may have shifted the entire bracket" moving 2nd -> 1st, 3rd -> 2nd etc... The entire site is hypebole and should not be used as a serious reference lol.
> This is a matter of principle, fair play, and safety. Whether it's a tiny number or "scores and scores" is irrelevant.
What if it's 0?
> If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site.
A deeply unbiased source, I'm sure.
Anyway I'd love to but all their archive links are the same. Looks like someone wrote a for loop incorrectly. But to be blunt, this is the exact same sort of nonsense as VAERS and deserves exactly the same dismissal: Compiled data assembled from the public with no verification, by people with no credentials, with a clear axe to grind.
Edit: Also, a SHIT LOAD of these are for second/third/whatever place, not even for wins. If reality backed the assertions made, transwomen should be DESTROYING women in sports.
There actually does have to be a lot of them, frankly, because otherwise it is just a nothingburger. Just a burger with a whole lot of nothing.
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 resistance to men in women's sports that the problem is not larger.
> 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 event. One. Looking through her win/loss record, she seems broadly pretty good, but hardly what one would expect if the narrative being pushed here is true.
> You're complaining that it's using publicly available data? Would you rather private anecdotes?
It's literally private anecdotes! Anyone can submit to that thing, the form is one click away from the homepage.
> Not sure why this is relevant - is being cheated out of second place less of a misdeed than being cheated out of first?
Of course not, but again, the narrative is that men are posing as women and competing in an unfair way based on genetic advantage. That's not a "win here and there" situation the way it's framed, that's a "women have no way to fairly compete." So why are so many transwomen still being beated by ciswomen competitors?
> It's not 0, and anyone engaging honestly knows it.
Then let's see a source! I asked for one two comments ago. Even the one on that shithoused website I can actually check the sources FOR is at best, speculative. What exactly in the male genome predisposes one in the context of GOLF for earth shattering victory?
> To make another vaccine analogy: claiming it's a small number and therefore it doesn't matter
I didn't claim it's a small number, I've claimed it's made up.
> 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.
> And it's because of resistance to men in women's sports that the problem is not larger.
There are no men in women's sports, there are women in women's sports, and until you show me the source you're, respectfully, talking nonsense.
> the narrative is that men are posing as women and competing in an unfair way based on genetic advantage. That's not a "win here and there" situation the way it's framed, that's a "women have no way to fairly compete." So why are so many transwomen still being beated by ciswomen competitors?
Respectfully, you aren't ready to engage in legitimate discussion on this topic. Good faith would be steelmanning the other side, not continually referring to "the narrative" and then "defeating" it.
> There are no men in women's sports, there are women in women's sports, and until you show me the source you're, respectfully, talking nonsense.
Your consistent euphemization around this topic is another clue that you're really not engaging honestly. You should consider what you're looking to get out of this discussion.
A simple Google search will find you dozens of examples of XY individuals competing in spaces meant for XX individuals, at all levels of competition:
I'm not here to spoon feed you this 101 level info. Again, my advice would be to consider why you're engaging here - is it with an open and curious mind, keen on learning; or a zealous propagandist spirit?
Many people like to focus on the purely physical attributes, but there's a clear distinction even in realms like chess.
The highest ranked female chess player is right around #55 globally, wherein the top 50 all are dominated by men.
Some of this may have to do with men having more interest/higher propensity of starting young which is where most grandmasters begin their journey, but still an interesting thing to consider nonetheless.
It's largely because chess has historically been a boys-club type activity. Women were actively discouraged, if not barred, from playing on grounds of misogyny. So, even today, there's very little women taking it seriously.
Of course, we all know there's no difference in the level of intellect or strategy between men and women.
That’s the greater variability theory. The male median is also higher so when you combine the two the long tail to the right will be dominated by males, so will the long tail on the left but to a lesser extent.
Many IQ tests have been designed to minimize the difference between males and females, primarily by reducing g-loading. Males pull ahead after puberty, prior to this they have an IQ disadvantage. So you have to take these factors into account when trying to make a fair and proper assessment.
Androgen insensitivity syndrome means that her cells do not react to testosterone. What male advantage is there if her cells don't react to testosterone?
Soundarajan's androgen insensitivity was reported as being partial (i.e. PAIS, and not CAIS), which implies some degree of testosterone-driven masculinization.
I know of one person who was born physically a woman, but has XY chromosomes. It is only due to modern medicine that we know that there is anything "unusual" with her gender. Otherwise, she is physically a woman with no observable clues to her condition.
(IE, in the past, she would have been infertile, and probably died young due to her situation.)
I'm not comfortable with saying that people like her need to compete with men.
Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, I imagine? That's probably the one category of XY people who have undergone no hormonal masculinization throughout their lives, and the one case where I'd agree with them competing with women. Wikipedia says it's estimated to be "1 in 20,400 to 1 in 99,000".
The rulings do not mean they now segregate by sex alone. Someone who was AFAB and does not have an SRY gene would was taking HRT would not qualify for the female division due to the HRT.
A trans man who was not taking HRT could compete, though.
The key distinction is that gender identity is not what's being tested.
They're not all taking banned substances. Case in point, Hergie Bacyadan and Elis Lundholm competed in the last Summer and Winter Olympics respectively.
Both Hergie Bacyadan and Elis Lundholm has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, and competes in the women's divisions. Their status as trans men has nothing to do with their eligibility to participate.
This would be like if two trans women, who has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, would compete in men's divisions.
I thought exactly the same thing until I had a politically agnostic fencing judge sit down and explain over the course of an hour and a half all of the steps national and international regulating organizations for that sport had taken to avoid issues with unfair competition. Whether similar field-leveling safeguards could be baked into the rules for other sports is left as an exercise, but this particular instance suggests there's more nuance here than your comment suggests.
You're assuming that people arguing for bans on trans athletes are making good faith arguments about competition in sports. You shouldn't.
Here in the US a significant part of antipathy towards trans people is the deeply held belief that being trans in public is a kind of sex abuse to the public. If you listen to what much of the debate has turned into here, it has little to do with competition, and far more with the obsession over what genitals people have in locker rooms and bathrooms.
At the end of the day the number of trans athletes is so vanishingly small it's not worth caring about the impacts on competition, when the debate itself is another framing of the conservative desire to make being trans illegal.
The article addresses that. Given all the testing already, this is a trivial addition:
“Under the new policy eligibility will be determined by a one-time gene test, according to the I.O.C. The test, which is already being used in track and field, requires screening via saliva, a cheek swab or a blood sample.“
You think Olympic athletes have any expectation of privacy around drug testing already?
They have to register their every move and piss while being visible on demand.
Doesn’t really work though - and given athletes are on the edge of performance there’s probably more people that fall in between than you might expect
From the Wikipedia article:
While the presence or absence of SRY has generally determined whether or not testis development occurs, it has been suggested that there are other factors that affect the functionality of SRY.[25] Therefore, there are individuals who have the SRY gene, but still develop as females, either because the gene itself is defective or mutated, or because one of the contributing factors is defective.[26] This can happen in individuals exhibiting a XY, XXY, or XX SRY-positive[27] karyotype[better source needed]
Additionally, other sex determining systems that rely on SRY beyond XY are the processes that come after SRY is present or absent in the development of an embryo. In a normal system, if SRY is present for XY, SRY will activate the medulla to develop gonads into testes. Testosterone will then be produced and initiate the development of other male sexual characteristics. Comparably, if SRY is not present for XX, there will be a lack of the SRY based on no Y chromosome. The lack of SRY will allow the cortex of embryonic gonads to develop into ovaries, which will then produce estrogen, and lead to the development of other female sexual characteristics.[28]
The Yahoo article linked says that exceptions will be made for people with conditions like that:
“Athletes diagnosed with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) ‘or other rare differences/disorders in sex development (DSDs), who do not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone’ may still be allowed to participate in the women’s category.”
Transition changes biology. We don't yet have the technology to fully reverse the effects of male puberty, so there can be reasonable debate about trans women who transitioned after puberty, but early transitioners have no meaningful advantage. Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.
This is also true for many cisgender intersex women with XY chromosomes. Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth. Drawing the line at having a Y chromosome makes no sense.
Quite a biased source, no? This doesn't provide evidence that these differences are biological. Boys are much more likely to exercise than girls due to social norms: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10478357/.
> Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.
I'm sorry, but this is not true. "Puberty blockers" do not complete suppress the effects of male genetics. They only attempt to block certain hormonal effects.
It is not possible to completely block the effects of having male genes by simple hormone modulation.
> Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth
We do not determine eligibility for sports classes based on ability to give birth for good reason. It's not a proxy for the genetic athletic differences being addressed by these classes.
Individuals with androgen insensitivity typically cannot give birth. This an extremely rare possibility, not a typical feature of the condition.
well, testosterone is a pretty hard fact. having said that, i firmly believe there should be no competitions based on gender at all. olympics should be 100% unisex.
In this case they're also banning female athletes with DSDs, which will affect quite a lot more athletes, including all three of the medalists for the women's 800m in Rio[0]
> In this case they're also banning female athletes with DSDs, which will affect quite a lot more athletes, including all three of the medalists for the women's 800m in Rio[0]
This makes it seem that women without DSD need not bother competing.
> Would you ban basketball players above a certain height?
Well, women's basketball did ban males from competing for, well, ever, and no one bat an eye.
Like I said in another thread on this story, it's not men who are complaining that women are unfairly competing, it's women who are complaining that men are unfairly competing.
So which sport are you competing in, on an Olympic level? And who either man or woman did take a place from you, so that you weren’t able to take part or won’t be able to take part in the Olympics?
The fair answer is to remove sex, gender, and everything related to that from classification. Dont look at it. Dont consider it. Everyone competes together.
It means that floor gymnastics is fair for *anyone* to compete in. None of this "wrong crotch shape" bullshit. Or intersex. Or trans. If you are good enough, you get in. If not, you dont.
And the whole trans argument would go away.
Means testing and gender means testing is a scourge. Time to be rid of it.
And apparently trans women do not want that same chance at winning lol.
I find it appalling that only cis women get to have that chance, while literally banning trans women (and some unconventional cis women too) because of the way they were born and brought up.
Like that is the definition of discrimination one way or another.
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 competition.". Well, the thought of "get good" comes to mind. Supposedly, more competition is better for everyone.
> 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?
Then most vocal folks would scream to no end how its unfair first 25 positions in given sport are held by men. You know, women want to see other women getting medals and I don't blame them, I want to see that too.
Good luck with that at any sport where strength and/or endurance matter most, just look at any given sport and check top male vs top female records. Running, climbing, hockey, football, rowing and so on and on.
Thats not really a fair sport in eyes of most folks. Unless thats your goal.
Sports already exclude most people as they're not performant enough. So I don't see a problem with excluding biological males from female sports.
But, we should compare actual body parts that are relevant, for example I'm male but I'd not belong in male sports as my body is more feminine..
Still, it's not who you think you are that should decide, it's the body type so the competition can be more interesting as that is the point of sports anyway..
I think that alt gender athletes can compete as there own group, or we do away with gender (ha), and everybody can compete in everything "fairly", and by fairly I mean nobody gets to have any feelings about this!
since when does an ancient universal reality get to be re-decided behind closed doors by anonimous interest groups?
and then become taboo to question, hmmmmm?
This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball), this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course.
Remember, sport is and has always been about statistical outliers competing. Fairness has never been, and will never be, a genuine consideration.
It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0]
> Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball)
We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences.
I would argue that it's the formerly presumed binary nature of sex/gender that made it a logical split for all sports. While marital arts and weightlifting tend to seperate by weight as well, that is because those particular events are particularly biased toward muscle mass and height/reach by proxy. Most sports are less clearly advantaged by size (soccer, for example). You just can't practically divide entire team sports by gradations of height, because there aren't enough players in a school for more than a few squads.
If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair.
The sports in which I’ve competed — cross country cycling and cross country running — also have handicaps for age. I always liked that type of system because it also gives both the open results and results by category, and there are lots of categories. W20 can thrash an M30, and plenty of M20s too, even if the overall winner is likely to be an M20.
It was simplistic for sure but gender identity was only a proxy for the handicap that impacted performance: the genetic disadvantage of not having been through a natural male puberty. If we can no longer rely on gender identity as the proxy then it makes sense to either drop the handicap system altogether, or refine it to look at the performance enhancing impact of genetics rather than what your pronouns are.
> We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex.
I mean, we do have weight categories in combat sports, right? I don't see why we couldn't come up with similarly neutral categories if we think it's good to segment people out by physical advantages. The parent comment is making a good point, though: it feels like some people care a lot about physical advantages that map onto gender stuff they care about, and not a lot about weird genetic anomalies that provide physical advantages that aren't gendered.
We could do that! I'm just trying to say that given categories based on (biological) sex, we should find some criterion based on biological sex to sort people into said categories, which the OC decision seems to do (at least better than the alternatives I have encountered). I don't have a problem at all with finding different ways of defining categories for competitions.
Re: anomalies - I think this is just unavoidable in any sort of category system, and I don't have a good solution for it except to consider frequency and severity.
Well I think it bans women that thought/think that they are cis but actually aren't, which is a bit of a different story. A fairly tragic one. Intersex/trans/anything else people just don't really have a clean fit into a lot of places, which is unfortunate.
> this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course.
Well, not really. 56%[1] of young women think that trans women should not be allowed in women's sports.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
IMO the "better" division should be open. If we are going to do two classes, and we find that one class has some sort of physical advantage inherently, then that class should be the "open" one.
> Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
A lot of people (the majority?) don't understand the extent of PEDs usage in sports. When everyone cheats nobody does. I've heard the argument before for going an "anything goes" division from friends for some sports, but then people are just going to start dying regularly from side effects like in body building.
Interesting how it’s “unfortunate” if it doesn’t affect men. The blatant hypocrisy is disgusting. There have been women banned from women’s sports who then later literally gave birth, if giving birth doesn’t qualify one as female, then what are we doing as a society?
Your linked article is also a massive category error. The people whose opinion should be polled should be actual competing athletes, that’s how the rules should be set in a sport. The biggest anti-trans athlete is some 5th place loser that couldn’t handle sharing 5th place with another woman and had to instead cry about it, only way to get in the news at 5th place, I suppose.
> Interesting how it’s “unfortunate” if it doesn’t affect men.
It's unfortunate because trans people are just as much people as cis people and deserve complete equality, but the reality of equality is that it can be very hard to do right.
Civil rights are hard because there are a lot of "rights" that can be applied to oppress others. Freedom of speech can absolutely be used to crush others, so how do you enact reasonable limits to prevent that without simultaneously causing the oppression that you aimed to prevent?
There are statutes in the US that put requirements on public school sports in relation to sex (sex is the quantifier used in Title IX). This to some effect limits men's sports in schools because of requirements for equality (typically represented as having an equal number of men's/women's sports). We consider this acceptable because otherwise there is the possibility that woman's sports are underrepresented because men's sports are more popular. In this case it's important to remember that there is limited funding.
The thing is, the class you are "bringing up" here is ~50% of the population. You're slightly limiting the other 50%, but it's barely of consequence. You are simply ensuring that to some extent funding isn't biased.
For trans women athletes, you are taking about a <1% subset of the population. This is not to say that minority populations don't matter (the United States is a great place because of minority populations). But if the majority of the women population say "no" to the <1%, then frankly at some point that's how the cookie crumbles. They still have the option of men's sports, they aren't restricted from competing there. They certainly are a huge gray area with the respect to physicality, even more so at younger ages when trans people are less likely to have transitioned (and more likely to be competing in a sport).
> The people whose opinion should be polled should be actual competing athletes
Really? In this case are you limiting it to just Olympic athletes? Can we include Diamond League athletes? Collegiate? Local 5k runners?
What even defines an athlete? Do I have to enter a race every so many months to maintain "athlete" status? Is a local race fine or do I need to be in Boston? This is silly gatekeeping.
> The biggest anti-trans athlete is some 5th place loser
Does this matter? It's also just "the biggest anti-trans athlete" that you know about. I'm sure there are some other women out there that are more hateful.
There are nuanced arguments to have about the trans women in sports situation, but the right is entirely against having them on completely bigoted basis, and then there is a very small subset of people who poison the well by turning good faith discussions about the topic into just hating the people having the discussions. At no point have I said anything disparaging about trans people or athletes. I'm just bringing up the reality of the situation being complicated, and as you called out: very unfortunate. It's unfortunate for trans men too, but nobody seems to complain about that one. :)
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
It’s actually interesting. The claim in defense is that the decision was made prior to her win. This is often backformed in these committees though so on its own I wouldn’t believe it uncritically. However, it seems that other shooting sports were split already which does support this viewpoint. The real tragedy is that women weren’t allowed to shoot skeet at the Olympics after the split. Wild that flew.
Anyway, I still agree that it looks suspicious that the sport where women are quite competitive is one where this happens. I think it might just be not looking hard enough, though.
Equestrian sports are open in category and dressage is dominated by women, eventing leans female, and jumping leans male (just looking at Wikipedia medals - no expertise here). No split there. So the premise is not universally true and probably represents each sports federation differently.
>>>> This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies.
What are those? fwiw - I don't think they should be included in the ban. Genetic advantage people in their natural gender is how sports works. I'm 5'7" - Lebron definitely has a genetic advantage over me. Banning him from basketball isn't doing anyone favors.
Santhi Soundarajan (1) shows exactly how this ends up catching cis women who were raised as women from birth. Which is why it's a bad idea to draw strict lines.
Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes.
This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one!
Hypothetically you could have three divisions: open, men, and women. In many contexts it's more practical to have two, where one is open. In those cases, if the sex that didn't win more was also the open division, then people would complain because both divisions would be dominated by players of one sex.
That if caught is doing very heavy lifting. You can only get caught if you dope to an amount that’s impossible to see naturally, and that’s a very high amount.
Good thing that’s nothing like HRT then, is it? Height is (well, mostly) immutable. Sex is not, though many people will fight tooth and nail to pretend otherwise.
No not all women get pregnant, but they generally have the plumbing to do so. My wife and I have tried for years without luck, yet no doctor has ever asked if we tried getting me pregnant instead. Smh
What would happen if we didn't allow a female category for power lifting? Just have human power lifting. Does the NFL have a ban on women in NFL? I don't know but the teams look as I expect they would even without a ban.
Don't we already sub-categorize within a gender? E.g. boxing. I don't actually know how common that is or why some sports get this treatment and not others.
Boxing is often the example
given because its someone getting hurt, but when you actually break it down it also falls apart for boxing.
If we measured everyones strength, bone density, etc... in order to stop people from risking injury that would be one thing But basing it on your Chromosomes is lazy and inaccurate.
The point is that "fairness" being tied to whether your Cis or Trans is a hilarious hill to die on when we have advanced medical technology to actually test what we deem "fair".
To be clear, I used that example because it was the only one I could think of, not for some rhetorical reason (which serves your point anyway, really).
I agree if we could just distill "here's your objective good-at-tennis score" for everybody and draw lines using those numbers, that makes sense. It feels unrealistic? I.e. we already don't do that - it doesn't necessarily feel like 100% an anti-trans thing (orthogonal obviously to the large amount of anti-trans sentiment that generally exists). Maybe Elo for everything?
I follow sport climbing, which has always seemed like a great example of this.
Climbing ability isn’t just a matter of strength or any other single dimension. E.g., the women’s routes are set on the assumption they’re more flexible than the men, not just less strong. Climbers come in many different shapes and sizes. Some climbers look like string beans, others look like they grew up lifting cows.
And BTW, there are women (Janja Garnbret, and Akiyo Noguchi before her) who dominate the women’s competition for years, to the degree that everyone else is almost playing for second place. It’s routinely speculated that Janja could regularly reach the men’s semi-finals.
Rock climbing is one sport known for small differences in performance between men and women. This is unlike about any other sport out there where a difference is huge (the worst male aspiring semi-pro is often better than a top woman).
It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
Also, so many of these anti-trans efforts end up hurting cis women too, the ones who happen to look too masculine or have too high of testosterone.
Gender is not as straightforward as bigots and transphobes would like to think. I wonder how many cis women will be affected by this ruling because their chromosomes and hormones aren't within so called "normal levels"
> It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
In most sports, the "mens" division is actually an open division that accepts all participants regardless of sex. Women just don't compete in it because they have no shot at getting a decent placement. The fact that males and females can't fairly compete with each other is the raison d'être of the women's league. This, and not culture war propaganda reasons is why only the most deranged bigots have an issue with trans men competing in "mens" sports.
Fun fact: "open divisions" only last as long as men are winning them. Women often outshoot men, and after Shan Zhang's win they were siloed into their own division.
> Fun fact: "open divisions" only last as long as men are winning them. Women often outshoot men, and after Shan Zhang's win they were siloed into their own division.
That decision was made before her win.
> the International Shooting Union, at a meeting in April of 1992, and therefore ahead of the Games, elected to bar women from shooting against men in future events.
The fact that it's only one way (banning men from competition in women's sports) is evidence against your point, not for it. If it was strictly anti-trans, then it would be an applied to both. The fact that no one cares that if a woman wants to participate in a men's event is pretty telling.
Trans men don't compete because women are essentially non competitive against men in top level athletics. Which is why trans women are controversial in women's sports. Every year there are hundreds of males highschoolers who outcompete females Olympic gold medalists. By allowing men to compete in women's sports you prioritize the notions of identity of what's usually a single individual over an entire class. It's plainly sexist.
As for intersex individuals, put them in their own competitive class.
Trans women are such a minority in women's sports it's really a non-issue that's been blown out of proportion. There was one trans woman who competed in the 2020 Olympics and she didn't even place. Riley Gaines has made a big deal in MAGA world about tying for 5th with a trans woman in a swimming competition. That means 4 cis women placed ahead of her, and if Lia Thomas hadn't competed, she still would've been in 5th. Hormone replacement therapy for trans women often results in muscle and strength loss, so the idea that trans women have some uniquely superhuman strength because they used to be men is just untrue.
> Trans women are such a minority in women's sports it's really a non-issue that's been blown out of proportion.
Indeed, but this is only a good argument for barring trans women from competing against females. You see, if trans athletes are so rare, only a very small number of people would be adversely affected by such a restriction, they can live with it.
On the other hand, the ban would calm down a large number of female athletes who are seriously disturbed by the mere possibility of competing against men, especially in contact sports, but not only.
Women are women, not only physically but also emotionally and mentally. Setting out on a crusade to change the thinking of millions of women is seriously dumb when a simple restriction, affecting 3 people total, can avoid it.
Now, think about making such a dumb idea a cornerstone of some party's political messaging... that can happen only if said party wants the other side to win.
HRT still leaves you with longer limbs and larger lungs which give a serious competitive edge. The numbers of trans individuals in sports doesn't matter, it's wrong on principle. Why segregate by sex at all? Let's get rid of it, you won't see any women, or any trans women, for that matter, anywhere on any serious athletic playing field. It'll all just be men.
What's the point of allowing trans women in women's sports anyway, especially at a top level? To affirm their identity? That throws an entire class of people, women, under the bus. Top performing males have an indisputable competitive advantage against top performing females in athletics.
I'm not sure that is the case in all sports. For example in golf, the top women golfers on LPGA tour in distance are only about as long as the shortest men on PGA tour off the tee, about 290 yards average. However, the women are generally vastly more accurate than the men in pretty much every distance tee to green. Their swing is just a different style of swing afforded by female anatomy. It is more hip driven, "textbook," in fact they have higher hip speed than men who rely more on hand speed.
Now imagine a pro golfer who was born female with those anatomical advantages for golf flexibility, and is now taking testosterone for power, ostensibly to identify as male. Not only do they have the anatomy advantage, they now have the power. They would probably dominate pro golf overall, both sides of the game I expect, whichever one they choose to compete in.
Trans women who have been on hormone therapy for at least a year have no overall advantage over cis women in most real, existing competitive sports. They have disadvantages in some of the most widely-sports-relevant capacities—compared to cis women—and small advantages in a couple of isolated abilities (grip strength).
They also have advantages in traits that across the population correlate positively with some broadly-sports-relevant capacities (e.g., lean body mass, both absolutely and as a share of total body mass, lung volume), but the actual sports-relevant capacities these correlate with on a population level (strength, endurance, etc.) they don't have an advantage on. There are studies that have detailed some of the low-level reasons for this with regard to oxygen use and other factors.
I was wondering about trans men and there is actually quite a bit amount of regulations for it, as taking testosterone is generally considered to be doping. Trans men are only allowed to compete if they are under heavy supervision by a medical professional and they follow a very strict set of rules dictating how, when and what kind of treatment they do. Too high amount of testosterone or too uneven levels of testosterone will disqualify a trans man from competing.
Men are stronger and faster and not just a little bit. If you allow men in women's sports, (basketball, soccer, boxing etc) then women will not be competitive in those sports.
Male puberty changes body composition in non-reversible ways. Muscle distribution, composition, quantity and bone density, all favor men that have gone through puberty.
Because trans men have no advantage in men's sport, whereas trans females do. It's not even about trans people at all, it's about preserving fairness in women's sports.
Before trans issues were widespread in culture, intersex athletes were also scrutinized. Hell, I remember when people were questioning whether having a testicle removed gave Lance Armstrong an advantage...
Obviously there is both a culture war against (and for) trans people, and also non-hate-based arguments against trans women competing with biological women. Both things can be true.
At best this is willful ignorance. By many measures, there is an active persistent march towards a Denial of Identity genocide against transgender folks in the US and other countries.
She didn't place at the Olympics but it's worth noting she was the oldest competitor by far, and this after she had cleaned up gold medals in numerous international competitions despite having a relatively thin background in the sport. She was expected to podium at the Olympics and it's not really clear why she performed so poorly (the only athlete in the division to DNF).
Mrs Hubbard's background, if you read it honestly, is great evidence for why this decision was the correct one.
Indeed. Hubbard's trajectory in female weightlifting is entirely unprecedented: re-entering the sport after a fifteen year break, with a stronger performance than those of elite female weightlifters with decades of competitive careers behind them and who had won Olympic medals.
The only reason why this was possible is because Hubbard is male.
> of youth sports have created clear incentives for them to prioritize competitive fairness over principles like inclusion, well-being, and fun.
In an event that is primarily focused on competitive fairness, what does inclusion have to do with it?
If playing sport is about fun, well-being, etc, then don't play in competitive events. You can't very well want to play in competitive events while complaining about competitive fairness.
It feels one sided because the author is an outsider - as the author readily admits - "It has been brought to my attention, however, that my blasé attitude toward sports makes me an outlier".
Turning to some actual numbers - this 2024 survey tells us that only ~15% of respondents said that their children participate in club sports or independent training (note that the categories are not exclusive). The same survey also says that ~10% of respondants think that their child can compete in professional sports, or be a national level team member. Finally, a similar 10% say that the "only the best players should receive time in games" is a fair policy at your child's age and level.
I think the point of the article is to maybe highlight how large the gulf might be between an typical outsider (and looking at the numbers above... and reminding ourselves that only ~50% of American youth are involved in organized sports at all), someone who is somewhat "in the game", and those who are really playing it (that 10% from above).
Any chance this anti-trans lobby (the right, lobbies, whatever they are) gets to erase trans people out of public life, whether at high Olympics level or at dumb for-fun high school level, they will take it. They will always try to make it so that the would-be suffering of a non existent cis woman who got beaten by a trans woman is so so much more important than the clear discrimination that trans women (and trans men, and unconventional cis women) deal with these rulings.
If it were happening at an unprecedented level, I would totally understand the attention and such, but this is just painful to see.
The same can be applied to gender affirming care for trans youth, bathrooms, etc. It is always about the "may be hurt woman" than the actively being hurt real trans people.
The problem for this argument is that there is no actual data that trans kids and specifically trans girls are any better at sport than other girls.
Literally no trans athletes winning anything. I think hacker news skews scientific so we can do the math, if say 1% of the athletes are trans we would expect them to win 1% of the medals in a fair contest. As it is, they don't even come anywhere close. There has not been a single olympic medal won by a trans athlete, so clearly they do not have some kind of magical advantage, in fact (and common sense would make this pretty obvious) they seem to have quite a statistical disadvantage.
> The problem for this argument is that there is no actual data that trans kids and specifically trans girls are any better at sport than other girls.
There is considerable evidence that they aren't. But that's not really relevant, because you have to remember segregation in sport has never been about competitive fairness, it has always been about allowing those who are socially superior to avoid the embarrassment of having to compete in an environment where they might be defeated by their social inferiors.
It is why women were long banned from competitions, and then shortly after exclusion seemed to harsh for evolving attitudes, they were segregated from men. And it is why trans people are being excluded from competition now. It's why racial segregation in sport was a thing. When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual, not the real reason, so counterevidence is irrelevant.
>...it has always been about allowing those who are socially superior to avoid the embarrassment of having to compete in an environment where they might be defeated by their social inferiors.
Is your argument actually that women don't generally compete with men in sports because the sports don't want to embarrass the male athletes if they lose? If so, I suspect this is a bad faith argument, but if not, you can simply do a little searching to find that there is often quite a bit of difference between the performance of top tier male athletes and top tier female athletes. For example, no woman has ever run a 4 minute mile in competition and more than 2,000 men have and even about 30 high school boys have. I am sure you can find other examples.
The moralizing parts of the conclusion of this article rejects it's own evidence. There are multiple studies cited by the article where the population average of the trans women group statistically significantly exceeds that of the cis women group. The article concludes:
"The exclusion of trans individuals also insults the skill and athleticism of both cis and trans athletes. While sex differences do develop following puberty, many of the sex differences are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy. Finally, if it is found that trans individuals have advantages in certain athletic events or sports; in those cases, there will still be a question of whether this should be considered unfair, or accepted as another instance of naturally occurring variability seen in athletes already participating in these events."
Does it really insult the skill and athleticism of cis and trans athletes to exclude trans women from women's sports? I don't think it does, but the article could not help but claim that it does. Often in debates such as this one, there are multiple levels of sophistry that annoy me. Such as the sequence 1. there is no evidence that trans women have an advantage over cis women in sports (false. there is evidence) 2. if you believe that there is any evidence, you must be a bigot (well, obviously untrue, there is evidence).
Women's sports leagues often emerge due to the easy bifurcation of the population into two groups- the easiest fault line to judge this as is 1 group with the athletic benefits of natural testosterone, and 1 group without the athletic benefits of natural testosterone. People are free to make whatever sports leagues they want, and with freedom of association they can make whatever rules they want. I will just find it completely unsurprising that the women's divisions will be relatively "closed" and the men's (or more acurately the "open") divisions will include any person that has produced testosterone naturally or become a trans man (or most things in between). It's the easiest bifurcation that reduces questions of fairness. Weight classes in wrestling fall into a similar manner of thinking for me; even if it could be argued that the guy that barely couldn't make it into a lower weight class should be fighting within that class, you have to draw the line somewhere.
But we really don’t have to “draw the line” anywhere, it’s not an issue. It’s a nothing burger. Any benefits such as they might be fall well within the standard deviation of females and so the argument that’s it’s unsafe or unfair doesn’t fly, nobody talks about excluding large or tall girls from girls sports. Besides, as they say in the article once the girls have gone through gender affirming therapy and their hormones have reached normal levels nearly all of the benefits have disappeared.
If you want to see men dressed as women, watch "This is the Army" (1943), an American wartime musical comedy film that features actor Ronald Regan, and a lot of musical numbers performed by men in drag.
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.
When I was growing up, I remember some drama because East German and Soviet male athletes were trying to compete as women. If male to female trans athletes were allowed to compete, I imagine it would just be a matter of time before a female athlete would HAVE to be trans in order to stand a competitive chance.
This has little to do with trans people. It has more to do with the appearance of fairness — not in sports, but in the whole social order. Free market, free enterprise, etc. That's critical: if the average Joe doesn't believe he could one day have the power and riches of Musk, the whole social fabric would be dangerously torn apart (dangerous for Musk and his cronies).
It's not just a transgender ban. Everyone who doesn't have XY chromosomes can't participate.
The more we protect women rights in sports, the narrower our definition of a woman gets
By 2030 would Olympic Committee ask woman that gain muscles too faster then the average woman not to participate? To make it "fair for real woman"?
While men are allowed the strongest competition and their unique builds are celebrated, woman are constantly limited by our genetics, hormone levels and chromosomes.
"Can't stray too far from an average it aren't fair for woman" is itself not fair for woman
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 for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age.
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 the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1.
In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about.
It seems to me that a big part of the point of competitive spectator sports is to send, to the spectator, a message along the lines of "this could have been you". It is hard to argue that the ability to throw a 1kg+ discus exceptionally far is otherwise so useful that would justify all the expense of finding and showcasing the outlier. Therefore, the point of the competition stands and falls with whether the spectator buys this message.
When do spectators tend to believe in it? When should they? Arguably, there is a plethora of reasons why the median American spectator looking at a clip of Usain Bolt running could not in any meaningful sense have been him. Yet, somehow, the "could-have-been-me sense" that people are endowed with transcends these reasons and results in men commonly looking at him and getting some of that could-have-been-me sense that gives the sport meaning, and women looking at him and getting much less of it. To solve this, we maintain a separate women's category. The winner there is not as much of an outlier relative to the distribution of the whole population. Most likely, she is still every bit as dissimilar to the spectators as Usain Bolt is. Yet, the women watching, and the ones merely learning about this event happening through osmosis, get their heart warmed by the dubious sense that this could have been them, and perhaps encouraged to try harder and hold more hope for some other pursuit of their own, in a way that they never would have due to Usain Bolt. Would they or would they not get the feeling for a transwoman sprinter? How would we even measure this?
A combination of boxer safety and having more competitive matches.
Entertainment value. Put a flyweight against a heavyweight and the audience are not going to care. No audience means no money for the show runners, and the Olympics is, when you get down to the brass tacks, all about money.
They're rare in everyday life, but this process selects for them.
And then they get attacked and misrepresented by people who claim they are protecting women.
Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.
> Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports.
That's a naive, reductive view. Competition isn't just about benchmarking and finding the global #1, nor perfect objective ranking. If it was, we would not bother with geographically-based competitions, nor tournament brackets and championships.
Competition is an entertainment product and a major form of community. It sustains itself through competitors and spectators. Seeking objectivity is backwards.
The key takeaway in my view is that the authors make a distinction between "category advantage", which is a systematic, structural, group-based difference that exists before competition even begins, and "competition advantage", which we see play out in competitive events and is based on a mix of factors including skill, preparation, and both innate and trained talent.
Where exactly to draw the line can be somewhat subjective (e.g. in weight classes) but it helps to explain why we have a separate female category: male physiology confers such a significant category advantage that, in open competition, it would limit the ability of female athletes to compete meaningfully and demonstrate their abilities. Having a separate category fulfils this desirable outcome of showcasing and celebrating female athletic excellence.
Often we see calls to add various classes of males, particularly ones who have chosen to identify as women, framed as "inclusion" but from the perspective of who this category is actually intended for it's the opposite. Drawing a clear eligibility boundary around the female category maximises inclusion of female athletes who would otherwise be disadvantaged and excluded.
But, anyhow, the thing you're looking for is the "open" format that already exists in other competitions like chess, where there's an open category and then any specific categories.
Ironically, in dance competitions (specially swing dancing at least), the open category is done the newbies, and higher levels have other more speciallized categories: advanced, invitational, ...
Also, from the categories that you mentioned, do you compete in West Coast Swing?
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 (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.
There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.
Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt
I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?
But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change definitions over time, of course. If it’s your contention that the definition by consensus has already changed, say so, but there are billions of people on this earth who haven’t got the message, which seems odd for something determined by consensus of the people who use language.
Putting that aside, since sports are about physicality and accomplishing things in the real world, it makes no sense to base them on “identity” - something that cannot be detected or defined by anyone but the self identifier - rather they should be based on physical aspects of reality.
Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.
I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports
[1] https://etymologyworld.com/item/gender
I don't know any culture which defined gender by how you dress and how long your hair is rather than what is between your legs. You would be called a girly boy or a boyish girl.
So girly and boyish is how you are perceived, girl and boy is your sex, that is how almost every culture defined it through all time.
>except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt
"I took a drug, therefore I am now a woman" is not a reasonable position to hold. The debate starts out with one based on an identity, and then in the very next formulation reduces that identity to which medicines you take.
So which is it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165
Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.
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?
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 restating the perverse incentive they were talking about
I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose."
Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching.
Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor:
Do you agree or disagree with the above quote?In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned."
The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender."
Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?
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 with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting)
Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.
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.
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.
The problem is that there is only so much attention to go around, so we cannot have too many splits; depending on the sport it might just not be financially doable. We also don't want the split to be effectively "the best" and "the second best", because nobody is going to fund millions in advertising for the second best. So, a split like men/women is not surprising as a historical compromise to ensure there's still some attention on those competing in a lighter weight class.
Generically changing it to lightweights/heavyweights might be a reasonable compromise as well, or an age line, or something like that; it will depend on the sport and the market to draw that out. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the thing that makes sense is to continue with the existing split, though....
I’m much stronger than her. I’ve got 2x the lung capacity she does.
If you’re going to divide competition by one trait, sex is the clear winner.
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.
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 genetics.
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.
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.
Talent scouts specifically sought out males like Semenya who were erroneously registered as female at birth, knowing that their male physical advantage would give them an edge in women's competitions.
The specific condition he has (5-alpha reductase deficiency) is one that only affects males, conferring upon them internal testicles and a micropenis. But male development, including all the testosterone-driven advantages that distinguish male and female athletic performance, is otherwise normal.
His gold medal in the 2016 Rio Olympics women's 800m, along with silver and bronze being taken by two other males with similar conditions, is the reason why World Athletics (then the IAAF) and, later, the IOC started to move policy away from eligibility by identity documentation to empirical testing of sex advantage.
The policy change discussed in the linked article wouldn't have happened without athletes like Semenya taking advantage of the previous flawed policy, to the detriment of female athletes.
And of course he would have gone through male puberty, not female puberty. This would have been obvious then, and the result of this is obvious now if you see him in interviews. Male-typical build, male-typical vocal tone. Even his now-wife assumed (correctly) that he is male when she first met him.
Semenya has to double down on this narrative that he is a woman otherwise he will have to admit that his successful sporting career as a woman will have been a lie.
In fact, I'm not aware of any genetic testing program ever catching any deliberate cheating, only people who were raised from birth as women. The very first example of this, (1), Dora/Heinrich Ratjen (2) seems to have been an intersex person who was definitely raised as a girl from birth who was a bit confused about what their body was doing. But all the way back in the 1950's when their 1936 Olympics became a big deal, we have lurid tales in the English language media of deliberate cheating that don't seem to have been supported by anything that Ratjen ever did.
1: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ratjen
https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards
Weight classes are a great thing in some sports. They do not solve for the discrepancies between women and men, though.
Clean and Jerk: Taranenko 266kg in 1988; current Lasha 267kg. Women's is Li Wenwen 187kg. An 80kg delta.
Gender matters.
And who would pick a woman to play in a team of volleyball, basketball, soccer? I think that historically the only sport in which men and women are absolutely equal is shooting. Maybe curling but it's usually the man that sweeps the ice (a little bit of extra strength.)
And that's at the peak of fitness; lower level competitions with juniors or not optimallyfit people exaggerate the strength difference.
So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?
Yeah. It would work like video game rankings. Top-ranked players are top-ranked because of skill, and if they happen to be mostly men for most games, so be it.
But I get your point. The crux of the problem is most people don't want to see skill-based matchmaking. They want to see the best man, the best woman, or the best disabled person, etc. The categories are already defined in people's minds as cultural constants. The trans people don't like this because they feel excluded by both male and female categories, so they argue in bad faith that there's no physical difference between females and trans-females or males and trans-males. Our long-term options as a society are to either 1) change culture so that people get used to skill-based matchmaking like in video games, or 2) ignore trans people and wait for this issue to disappear when future tech allows a man to transfer his consciousness into a female body and vice versa.
Since 2) is quite far out technologically, I propose 1).
I think we should just make the Olympics universal and let anyone compete for the title of absolute best in the world, no qualifiers. Detach the existing categories too, like men-only or women-only. Make all category-gated games a separate deal, like Paralympics. Each group can organize their own variant if they want.
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 stronger than Sabalenka. You probably have to start looking well into the thousand somethings for something that is consisently beaten by her.
Only the top 200 players make money, the top 100 good money, and the top 50 ridiculous money.
But it’s not just that. If there are no top women in any kind of leagues in chess, that will only further discourage women from participating competitively in chess in the first place.
Note that most competitive women chess players play in women’s only tournaments even though they can easily join open men’s tournaments as well. For various reasons, one being that these women’s only tournaments are where they have the best chance of winning or being in the top k for prizes.
But I see where our disagreement is. You think there ought to be more women in chess. I think different people can do different things, so women don't need to match men in every statistic and vice versa. If we open it up to universal participation and it turns out to be a male-dominated game, then let it be. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
You don't have a say though, others want to see women play chess against each others and happily pay for and organize that event. Or do you want to make female only events illegal? As long as they are legal they will continue to be held.
And there’s a really good argument that a solution isn’t actually needed.
Does the NBA need a solution for Steph Curry being the best 3 point shooter of all time and dominating his competition? Did the NFL need a solution for Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl 30% of the seasons he played in his career? Did Ohio high school basketball need a solution for LeBron James only losing 6 games in his entire high school career?
Athletes dominating their league happens all the time without the issue of transgender and intersex players.
If there is some kind of mass influx of men playing women’s sports to win easy championships that’s when we can deal with the problem. But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale. E.g. there has never been a time when washed up NBA player that decided to try and join the WNBA. We don’t need to solve problems that do not yet exist.
But let’s say we have to solve this problem to make everyone shut up about it. Here’s one I just thought of off the top of my head:
Anyone who performs at a level of play at an abnormally high gap between themselves and their competition (a set statistical percentage better) can be forced to seek a higher league of play if it exists and they are eligible if and only if other competitors in the league request they do so with a strong consensus.
Is this a perfect solution? No, but I thought of it in literally ten seconds, it doesn’t even involve gender, and I didn’t resort to sitting on my hands and saying “aw shucks there’s no solution” or “I guess we’ll just have to ban trans people from sports.
See all three medalists.
Height is also an advantage in sports, and women statistically are much shorter then man, should we ban tall woman from sports? Should we say "she exhibits a male amount of height, it isn't fair to let her participate with 'normal' woman"?
The more "fair" we make woman competition the narrower our definition of a woman gets.
If you want to make it fair, let's pick a random chemical in man exclude people from competition based on their readings. That surely would make sport career look more fun for everyone, training all your life only to find out that some committee doesn't consider you a man. And then we can celebrate equality by noticing that man-to-woman sport participation ratio got closer to 50-50
1. It is causally connected to primary and secondary sex characteristics
2. It has a large impact on performance in many sports
3. It's easy to explain to most people and somewhat matches people's intuitions around fairness
But, yes, it is true that there are cis women with high T levels and it is somewhat unfair and arbitrary to include them when not excluding other random advantages that people have. I'm just not sure if I have a better solution
This is not the same as saying there's no problem.
A fraction of humans will ever compete in the Olympics. People train their whole lives for it. It's not about 'scale', it's about safety and fairness. It's not reasonable to expect them to 'shut up' about it.
I don't want to watch a man beat up a woman in a boxing ring.
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 up with exoskeletons (or some drugs) equalizing your DNA-based advantages/disadvantages.
Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories - "only those assigned male at birth", "only those assigned female at birth", "anybody can choose to compete in that category". The 3rd category may just naturally become most competitive and interesting without any "males in female sports" issues we currently have.
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... )
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.
If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.
Except people clearly fucking do for some reason, and all that's going to happen is make life worse for women both cis and trans. Trans women will get excluded, and cis women who are "too good" or not fitting societal ideals of femininity will be accused of being trans. This is already happening to children.
> If you chose to identify as another sex
When did you choose to identify as the gender you were born with?
Literally nobody does this
Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted.
It is not and has never been rooted in any sort of sociological concept of gender as an independent category from one’s sex.
It is infuriating how successful the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd has been at pushing discriminatory legislation through in the last few years based largely on feelings rather than facts.
That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.
People caring about this issue in sports now and changing the objective admission criteria to exclude them is a political phenomenon more than anything else.
This issue genuinely confuses me — and I don’t seem alone in that. Re-defining words does not redefine categories or change the underlying motivation for creating categories in the first place.
Rather, I'm arguing the underlying motivation for creating these categories was and is a sociological one. Why carve out womens sports, as opposed to short peoples sports, low testosterone sports (or other categories which would be similarly disadvantaged)?
The only reason people pay attention to sex here is sociological, i.e. because of gender. This implies that the admissions criteria do not automatically have to follow these strict biological lines -- and I see little reason to enforce them this strictly now. Why exclude trans people and why make yourself a headache trying to classify e.g. intersex people?
More of an aside: a society which fully accepted trans women as women would think looking at the biological markers you're looking at is complete nonsense. Suggesting trans women should be banned would be as ludicrous as suggesting all women with a specific gene which might increase your chances of winning should be banned.
Whether or not a similar case can be made for other categories does not have bearing on the case for sex categorization. Such claims can and should stand on their own merits.
Like, gender clearly and obviously exists. Why do women wear make up and skirts, while men typically dont? Is there a biological need to do those things? Is that universal across all cultures?
Of course we have social norms for men and women. That set of norms is what gender is. Denying the idea that society expects different behaviors from men and women is frankly a pretty absurd take.
The origin of this use of "gender" itself is due to the prudishness of English upper classes in pronouncing the word "sex", so they repurposed "gender" which is just the French word "genre" meaning "kind" or "category". Much more acceptable in polite company than something that can allude to a sexual act, fornication.
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 a gender characteristic.
You might believe gender is immutable. I'm not going to argue that with you. But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
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 one's sex. They were never a matter of one's "internal feelings", they were an extension of one's sex.
We didn't just make it all up as a society?
Cause I'm pretty sure it's a social construct.
If it is a social construct, then people can elect not to accept that construct....
Gender having been derived from real sex historically and even predominantly today does not stop some people from redefining it otherwise.
People can try to redefine whatever they please as long as the rest of society can point out the silliness of it.
A dress or lipstick might mean there is also a vagina to one person, but not another person.
This is a testable prediction. One where the correct answer depends on what people are actually doing.
If you think a dress means vaginas and people stop doing that, you simply become wrong.
The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis. Some people feel pressured by this to, despite all the societal dis-incentives, medically transition. They then are not only their gender in behavior and reported experience, but also physically (with the exception of some hard-to-change stuff such as fertility).
We usually handle such general, durable "personal delusions" by accepting them. If I studied some math for years, can do said math and am employed at my local university doing mathematics, I am a mathematician. I do not have delusions of being a mathematician. If I move to, say Germany, and after years speak the language, have children there, participate in the local culture, and have a citicenship I am now German. Only the most backward people would say I have delusions of being German. Although, this cultural rigidity of course exists, I do not see it as desirable. An advanced society should accept and accomodate its outliers instead of steamrolling over them and making them suffer.
[^1]: Afaik currently a neuroscientific explanation is not forthcoming
Quite the contrary. I speak partly from personal experience.
> The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis.
A human cannot change sex no more than one can become another species, no matter ho much one can be convinced of it. And there's no such thing as gender detached from sex.
> The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable
The transness is nothing more than a general condition of self-loathing which is quite durable, I agree. And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.
And while I agree that personal delusions should be allowed as long as they're harmless, this one isn't: many young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones, and when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering". We must always remember what the truth is, even when allowing this kind of lie.
I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie if there are people whose mental makeup is better suited to a gender expression not corresponding to their sex, who then inhabit that different role in everyday life. I frankly don't get your assertion that this cannot happen, as there exist people for whom this is reality right now (in part because they are simply not easily identifyable as trans).
> young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones
My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention. Where is the problem here? People do cosmetic surgeries for similar, if not more vain, reasons.
> when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering"
Trying to ignore the reality that ones body is different in medical contexts would be indeed harmful. If this kind of activism exists, I do not condone it. I imagine that treating a trans person does not boil down to treating them like a cis person of their sex however, as hormone replacement causes a bunch of differences.
A lie is defined in terms of it not being the truth, not in terms of effects on someone. Those effects are entirely irrelevant.
> My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Men getting oestrogens are getting osteoporosis in their 20's and 30's.
> Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention.
It's not even doing that in most cases, because the self-loathing that caused people to look for the "transness" escape hatch turns out to have outside causes and won't go away.
I don't disagree.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
There might also be a similar advantage for AFAB women who have unusually higher testosterone. I don't get why they don't just do hormone brackets like they do with weight in boxing, and do away with gender based divisions entirely.
The average MTF and the average female have wildly different hand sizes, among many other physical differences.
> particularly in bone size and muscular composition.
So group them by that where it's relevant. That doesn't change the fundamental argument I was making.
We are not talking about elite athletics here. If someone is upset about a transwoman finishing 150th in the local 10k race they need to work that out with a therapist or something.
The "heartburn" really started when conservatives decided they could exploit hatred of the other by attacking non-binary folks. They got a "spokeswoman" who finished sixth in the NCAA swimming championships (no future professional career potential) to spread their hate and divisiveness.
It allowed Republican politicians to claim children were allowed to identify as animals and use litter boxes in schools. Spreading lies to breed hate.
It's just a modern application of the playbook against other races (which has also been revived).
> "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - President Lyndon B. Johnson
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.
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.
If I was an unfair threat to some poor girl’s scholarship I’d be happy to find a solution like just not being on the leaderboard.
Instead I see laws, headlines, and debates on my favorite orange site about whether I should be allowed access to that infrastructure at all.
And follow up every side with a steel man, good faith critical thinking summary with deep, cross cutting questions that strike at the heart of the arguments.
Additionally follow up with which demographics and political class does each position serve.
Also ask for examples of bad faith comments and questions to help identify them to not waste your time engaging.
You can also ask to explain all of that output to a 6th grade reading level if it helps
Asking wishy washy middle of the road questions instead of just asking directly is a political choice to reduce the chance of criticism and to help manipulate the convo in your psychological favor instead of seeking a wide array of information like a normal person that has access to literally to every single philosopher that ever existed writings
It may not justify sweeping laws, but it absolutely justifies having an honest conversation about fairness.
No its not 3% for the world, for USA maybe but most countries barely have any trans people at all.
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/content/two-spirits_map-...
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 could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany
As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.
Surely this is something that can be addressed if it ever becomes a problem. Surely we don't need to write rules for scenarios that aren't causing issues...
No XY chromosome no SRY gene. You're left with validating that someone's entire development was done in the absence of testosterone, which would--if even possible--require incredibly invasive and extensive testing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_China
I don't believe either of them have really stopped.
It affects the rights of transgender people, so it is directly related to transgender rights. Also, I don't at all think that it's coincidence that people spreading hate about transgender people are the same ones so concerned about this particular issue?
People spreading hate and prejudice always have <reasons>.
> We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s
We all do? People born in the 1950s or earlier might remember, making them at least 65 years old. I've never heard of it from people of any age. In any case, it's hard to connect this 60 year old issue with today's decision.
This is easy to see even with a casual glance. Look at the world records for any sport with measurable and comparable metrics, like times for swimming, running, etc. The difference between the most elite female and male athletes is stark.
Males are not scrutinized anywhere near as closely, so they always get away with higher levels of anabolic steroids/hGH/rhEPO/random peptides than women would. Women are subject to constant, consistent testing, while male doping testing is basically an honor system (just don't be too obvious about it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif#2026
The headline writers are relating it back to the topic which brings the most clicks, which is transgender athletes.
The IOC didn't go on a crusade against transgender athletes specifically. They were refining the rules on sex-based divisions and included a lot of considerations and nuance.
Khelif responded to a question about having the SRY gene like this:
> In a February 2026 interview with L'Équipe, Khelif was asked: "To be clear, you have a female phenotype but possess the SRY gene, an indicator of masculinity", to which she responded: "Yes, and it’s natural. I have female hormones."
So she was asked if she had the SRY gene and she responded "Yes". That's also consistent with the previous issues with governing bodies excluding her under their rules, but they are not allowed to share test results for obvious reasons.
The debate now is down to technicalities. Technically the Wikipedia quote is correct in that Khelif has not described herself as intersex or having a DSD in those words but she has now admitted to having an SRY gene, which is the important part in the context of these competition rules.
I don't see anyone ever going "oh, Michael Phelps has unfair advantages because of this crazy gene". Then, it's fair and square, just better genes life's not fair. No, suddenly the care now, eeeeveryone cares now about woman's sports because someone with a rare genetic disorder showed up in the spot light. Utterly bizzare for me.
Sex isn't "more fluid". It's entirely binary, but DSDs (differences of sexual development) can make appearances deceptive - so an XY male can be wrongly recorded as female at birth, especially in countries with inexperienced medics and midwives.
Phelps's records have all been broken. By other males, of course - no female is getting close to his numbers. That's male advantage in action.
Used to be that they'd ask in bad faith "what is a woman?" to trans advocates, but maybe it was a genuine question? Because they don't look like they could recognize one if they ever saw one.
i always find it very very interesting that trans men are always left out of these conversations...
As far as your other argument it seems to suggest doing away with the whole women's sports as separate.
Right, but that's not what's going on here, it's used as a platform for bigotry under the pretense of protecting women. It's not only... we need clear ground rules for this thing in order to have a level playing field, it's "Look what the trans are doing! Oh, the decadence in humanity!"
I'm not saying about doing away with woman's sports, sure, do the separation n xy chromozomes if we converge on this. I'm saying that it seems that the arguments of anit-trans activists are inconsistent and, for me, personally, a dude that doesn't really care about these things, off putting.
You will never find a woman that has the same testosterone levels that a man identifying as a woman.. it's genetically impossible and that's unfair.
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-level.
If so, there was no point in dividing into groups.
That said, I am sure athletes and governing bodies could agree on a better solution than outright banning- for example all it takes is a group that pairs a freakishly long armed swimmer with not, and they compete as pairs. Or an open group- maybe someone without freakishly long arms will find a way to win.
Anyway, it’s sports, people will min/max everything you let them, and we know from history they may bend or break rules as well. At the end of the day someone has to make a rule and enforce it, over time it will evolve.
There's more info at https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/paris-2024-olym...
Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
The passive voice language here is really bizarre. Who is doing the assigning?
>Separating conjoined twins for example.
This is not, in any way, comparable to a 12 year old taking medications that permanently sterilize them.
Typically the parents and doctors.
"You have a beautiful baby girl!" Is assigning a gender
Same with gender. Doctors observe a flavor of genitals, make a reasonable assumption, and legally assign the gender which seems appropriate.
Which could then become rather complicated if there are laws saying the sex assigned at birth has significant lifelong legal consequences.
So in practice clerical errors cause all kinds of long term havoc. Once declared dead it can be a monstrous effort to prove to various systems you are in fact alive.
It is also entirely clear that there have been parents (usually mothers) who wanted to have a trans child because it was cool.
Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.
> Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.
This is funny because that's the exact argument that transphobic opponents say about trans people themselves and the argument as to why gender fluidity or gender outside of sex doesn't exist. "Just because an extremely small number of people believe they are a different gender than their biological sex doesn't mean that gender is different from biological sex" is almost exactly the argument that transphobes use.
“Because some animals hibernate, all animals hibernate” is just as flawed as saying “Because only a small percentage of hibernate, no animals hibernate.” Instead the relationship is “Because some animals exist that hibernate, there exist animals that hibernate.”
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.
> Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases.
Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done for cisgender children who take them.
It almost feels like you're arguing definitions.
Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to.
The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window.
Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are different than the body's eventual genetic set point, just to delay them until typical puberty ages.
Delaying puberty until it aligns with the body's expected pubertal ages is completely different. You cannot extrapolate and claim this as evidence that we can safely delay puberty until adulthood, well beyond pubertal age.
> but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing
> I asked Claude...
There are no double-blind studies, RCTs, or otherwise on this topic because it's not a situation that lends itself to that type of study. Please don't try to ask AI to summarize the situation because its training set is guaranteed to have far more discussion about it from Reddit and news articles than the limited scientific research
Of the papers out there, many are either case reports or they're studies that look into the case where people go from puberty blocker therapy into gender-affirming care, not the cases where they change their mind and discontinue with hope of returning to their baseline state.
Above I was addressing the implication that puberty blockers are a safe way to press pause on puberty until much later without consequence. That's simply not true.
Those studies you found about bone density also note that they can reduce height, and along with it other growth changes that occur during those ages in conjunction with puberty. Someone who takes puberty blockers until 16-18 will have a different physical anatomy than someone who does not. You cannot resume growth in adulthood after discontinuing the medications.
So the studies you found are consistent with what I'm saying: You cannot delay puberty without also impacting the growth that happens during that phase. That's one of the main reasons why people take the puberty blockers! As someone gets older, the window for that growth does not stay open forever.
There are plenty of studies that point to strong evidence that this protocol results in better mental health outcomes because for whatever potential consequence there is for delaying natural puberty, there are plenty of known irreversible impacts of allowing it to progress.
If you have other evidence, even just observational studies it would be good to share that.
And again the recommendation is to continue until 15 or 16, not until 18
> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.
Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.
That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.
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.
> Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes.
You're either not understanding, or trying to avoid an inconvenient point: Once blocked during critical periods, many of those changes simply cannot happen at a later date.
Puberty cannot be delayed until adulthood and then resumed as if nothing happened.
In other words: the "window" isn't as crucial as you make it seem.
I've been consistent about my point, but you've introduced so many other topics including the "maybe it's only for a year or two" point that this is just one big gish gallop
Your point about puberty happening earlier and earlier also contradicts your arguments about how it might only be for a year or two
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 bad. My wife fainted when she got her first period. Why? She didn’t want to be a woman. She was a tomboy. It turns out that the flood of sex hormones during puberty can actually make you feel like a woman/man, which should surprise no one. To block that from happening and potentially effectively treating the dysphoria is madness.
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. Lots of them even wish they were taller.
And it's a pretty frequent straw-man to compare tomboys to kids with persistent gender dysphoria. They only seem superficially similar to people who really haven't engaged with the huge breadth of research on trans people over the past century. It also ignores the fact that there are feminine presenting trans masculine people (those born female, who medically transitioned, but still present femininely), or tomboy trans feminine people (born male, medically transitioned, still present masculinely).
I am a virgin at 27 years old. What am I missing about the sexual experience? Is it somehow locked out to me? Or… can I access it intellectually, and reason about it with its ups and downs?
There's a reason the consent age does not start at puberty.
Sexual identity is an important component of gender identity. Encouraging people to make conclusions about their gender identity before they understand their sexual identity seems risky to me, especially when a child is being asked to make decisions with potentially life-altering medical consequences.
To be clear, a person does not need to have had sex to understand their sexual identity. They need to know what they find attractive and how their sexual identity relates to their own body. Even if someone feels like the opposite gender, that does not necessarily mean their sexual identity will automatically align with that.
It may be true that the transgender experience is something more fundamental to the self than “mere” sex. But when the choice is between one set of trade-offs and another, such as intervention versus non-intervention, I would contend that understanding one’s sexual identity is a critical piece of information.
Sex.
I’m aware that’s kind of a meme in certain highly religious and/or conservative communities but it’d be shocking if it were a mainstream position.
That suddenly looks like a very silly argument, doesn't it?
At 12 kids do not have sufficient capacity to handle any major decision, including any medical procedure.
That does not take away their right to see their best interests represented and defended.
Puberty blockers aren't being handed out like candy. There's a rather intense psychological diagnostic process before it.
Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or environmental lack of acceptance or support.
Besides, despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032...
30% think about killing themselves and 4%+ try each year is shocking. I think whatever side of the debate you are on we can agree things aren't working out for too many people who go through this process. If this was a drug or vaccine or hair shampoo it would have been pulled off the market.
Through what process? This was a study about trans and nonbinary people, not specifically about people who have “transitioned”
I would imagine the rate of depression and similar disorders in trans people is extremely high. To be so unsatisfied with one’s own body that you consider (or go through) major treatment and surgery to change something so fundamental.
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a well documented phenomenon.
https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(16)30765-0/abst...
https://statsforgender.org/since-the-turn-of-the-millennium-...
Lisa Littmans research behind „rapid onset gender dysphoria” is a survey amongst parents recruited on three anti-trans internet sites and communities:
https://psychcentral.com/lib/there-is-no-evidence-that-rapid...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_c...That by itself means its heavily biased research on a weak sample.
„Stats for Gender” site is ran by Genspect, which is also a biased source on the subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genspect
Organization that supports position <x> supports position <x>.
If Genspect can be discarded as being a biased source, then so can WPATH and every other org supporting gender ideology.
Given the fraught nature of the debate, Wikipedia seems like a poor source for determining the bias of players in the debate - the most passionate debaters have plenty of time to just edit Wikipedia.
The primary issue with Genspect is poor scientific rigour applied to their publications, as I have shown above. Pretty much „if it fits our platform, we will spread it”.
2022 research into Hospital's archives found the decision to cease operation in 1979 was political, not evidence based:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36191317/
> *70%-80% of children who expressed transgender feelings, overtime, lost those feelings.
This number most likely comes from a study that classified girls as transgender based on behaviors like preference to wear their hair short of wear pants instead of dresses or skirt:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/
Those children did not self-identify as transgender and further more, research could not contact 41% of them for the follow up:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-end-of-the-desistance_b_8...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/politics/transgender-c...
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/Anti-trans-attitudes...
https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/right-dominating-faceb...
I have also pointed out that regret rates for transition are within 2%.
Of course, the next best thing (if a decision can't be made now) after stopping time are puberty blockers. Which are not completely without risks, but this applies to the other two options just as well (if not more so).
You can't not make decisions, and to claim so is to frame choosing one particular option as not-a-decision.
I'm not an expert so idk whether that's fair or not but that's what this decision is doing.
Really, what it is is being dominated by Testosterone. Also why we ban steroid use, and many other things along the same lines.
I would suggest that most Olympians - both female and male (whatever your definition) likely have a higher than normal amount of that hormone.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C7LcpRtrHiKJRoAEp/sticker-sh...
Pick a sports-relevant metric and split into divisions. Some sports will naturally fall into gendered divisions, while others will have varying degrees of co-ed competition among competitors of similar ability.
The way out of this is not to pick a better scissor of sex or gender, it's to pick a better scissor of ability.
I do not consider that to be a good thing.
The concept is just bad, unless your goal is to prevent women from being able to make a living playing professional sports.
Please let go of the need for this.
I won't respond further unless you pick an example sport, and propose how your "scissor for ability" would work, in concrete detail. If you do this, I will be happy to explain why this would result in neither women _nor trans women_ having any chance to make a living as professional athletes.
Currently, with sex-based categories, a woman can be declared "the best in the world" and most people won't waste much time on the question "yeah, but could she beat the best men?" (granted, some will). They will accept that, e.g. she has the fastest time over 26.2 miles in the world right now, even though a few hundred or a few thousand men worldwide are faster.
If you use performance based metrics to create the categories (the way that road cycling does, for example, though still within gender divisions), that "title" would go away, and likely a woman would only be "the best in the world in division X", other than in (as you noted) some endurance, climbing and gymnastics sports where an elite subset of women could potentially be the best of "top" category.
It isn't completely obvious that this is a negative - how much of a change it would be would depend on a lot of other changes (or lack thereof) in how sport was organized. Certainly if it continued to focus on only the top division, then women would be shut out of most opportunities to be professional. But that's not inherent in the design. I do concede, however, that it is quite a likely outcome of such a category structure.
In elite sports, no one wants to see "best in division X". They want to see the best hockey players, the best golfer, the best skier, etc. The money incentives are considerable.
This would destroy women's professional sports.
I personally think that we'd live in a much better world where you compete against others who broadly speaking are in the same performance category as you.
But I do appreciate that the transition to such a world would, indeed, destroy women's professional sports, and thus I do not attempt to really advocate for that transition. If it could happen overnight (it cannot), perhaps I would, but that's not where we live.
The merr existence is not an evidence of success.
Kids' little leagues also exist, but can't be compared, with actual professional men's sports.
Where is women's American football? Women's baseball? Crickets...
Women's icehockey is in such a state, that there are only 2 decent countries dominating everybody, and they would get destroyed by men's amateur players.
There are only few women's sports disciplines that are actually popular on their own. Like figure skating and tennis. And the athletes would get annihilated by their male counterparts.
Since I personally don't have any interest in team sports of any type, I have nothing to say about your observations, though I will continue to wear my "I'm here for the women's race" t-shirt whenever I can.
Yet you would hapilly abolish them and think the world a better place? Im genuinely confused.
Would you wear a "division 2" or "slow bracket" shirt with similar gusto?
I'd happily wear a "I'm here for the D2a race" shirt in such a system.
Most people's paths as sports participants (not spectators) is that they enter a tiered system and remain there. Only a tiny percentage of people rise through that system to become truly national or internationally competitive.
One of the central problems here is that there are conflicts between what's good for the participants and whats good for fans/spectators. They are not always in conflict, but in several important ways, they truly are. 99.99999% of people who run marathons are not Eliud Kipchoge, and are not interested in a system that is designed around his level of performance and competition. But 90%+ of the people who would pay to watch marathons have little interest in a system that isn't built around talents like his. The same is true of almost all sports - solo or team - but it doesn't show up for 80% of them because there is no market for paid viewing of them. Or rather ... there wasn't until YT became what it is today. "The Finisher", a film about Jasmin Paris, the first woman to finish the infamous Barkley Marathons, has had 1.8M views, something it would never have achieved in "legacy" media.
Categories would be assigned based on performance criteria for the sport in question. One simplistic approach, loosely modelled on how road cycling works, would be to have categories based on race performances - you enter an "open" category, and after N finishes above a certain level, you are required to move up to "division 4". After N finishes above a certain level in div4, you are required to move up to "division 3". And so on. The idea is that you're racing against your performance peers, regardless of their gender (or age).
Really, the question seems better turned around: why use a known bad proxy for physical ability when another one might be better?
Fortunately, most people don't like to live in this hell and are against clear attempts to destroy women's sports by the clueless and/or purposefully malicious activists.
Did you actually think that lean mass would be a sensible way to separate divisions in a gender neutral fashion? That would, again, just result in women being unable to compete professionally in virtually any sport. They would be relegated to Division N, for some very large value of N. Competing alongside multitudes of biologically male amateurs, where nobody cares and nobody pays to watch. To even entertain this idea betrays a total lack of understanding of the matter at hand.
Right now you are acting like Elon Musk storming into the government and having 20 year olds cut everybody's budget. You may think you're coming in with fresh outsider perspective and an open minded way to look at things and improve them, but everyone actually involved in the domain can see a trainwreck in progress. It's not a good look.
I am quite certain it's not your intention, but you're really coming across as someone who hates women's sports, and doesn't want them to exist. On behalf of my wife and sister and a lot of the women I've known in a lifetime of playing sports - kindly keep your awful ideas to yourself. Women fought tooth and nail for the right to have their own professional sporting opportunities. Don't you dare try to take it away from them.
Considering his party plans for women as such, none of them cares about women, actually
The numbers tell the opposite story. Hierarchical and ranked sports enjoy displacement at every subsequent point from unfair entrants.
By the numbers, looking just at #1-3 spots of results list where tens of thousands of subsequent entries have been improperly displaced and claiming no impact is mathematically absurd. Contextually it ignorant of how competitive sports work at a scholastic or professional level, particularly for women. In 2026 based on the number, volume, and depth of rebuttals - at the international sporting level among others - that ignorance could readily be seen as willing.
LeBron James playing in your kids 16 and under basketball league, even if he promises to keep his team at or lower than 4th place, will be visible on the numbers and also peoples sentiments and desire to participate. Primates understand ‘fair’ viscerally (cucumber experiments).
The intersex argument based on the ratios you are presenting also breaks the other way. Those women, as female sports mature and expand (into combat sports especially), have been excluded from female competition for number of reasons. To your point, mostly this is about safety and then fairness, the trans angle is a minority even there with less scientific or sporting grounds for inclusion in competitive divisions.
[In olden days people who couldn’t make the team would participate and help with equipment, logistics, fundraising, training, or tutoring. These days you can run virtual competitions with GPS tracking, and there are a bunch of individual sports that are already tracked by large category spreadsheets, with plenty of room for more. I hope these bans help end the wasteful discussion and focus energies on collaboration and social inclusion.]
This goes beyond just affecting the Olympics, but setting an example for the world to follow and gives other organizations the cover and courage to follow while being able to deflect to simply setting the same standards of the Olympics.
Get some help.
Transgender athletes are not barred from women's events. Female athletes who identify as men, or otherwise do not identify as women, can still compete in this category, as they have been doing already.
What the IOC's new policy actually does is make male athletes ineligible for competition in the female category, with very few exceptions. These exceptions are for athletes who are technically male but have a disorder of sex development that confers no male advantage, e.g. CAIS.
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 segregation. What do?
The realpolitik answer would be to segregate these individuals into yet another niche.
Of course the question arises, how many segregation categories to you create before it becomes all meaningless?
Just because they are not male, does not mean that they are female.
Let's imagine a con-man wanted to compete in women's sports. He would have to decide this early in life. Most trans people realize before they are 10. He would then have to spend the rest of his life pretending to be trans to not get his medal revoked.
Trans women are women. They don't have to pretend to be women. However, some trans women have to hide their identity and present as men, for their safety. Presenting as a gender you're not is incredibly taxing. There are high rates of depression and increased risk of suicide for people who have to hide their gender.
Besides the incredible psychological toll, our imaginary con-man would face bullying, harassment, physical assault, sexual violence, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, exclusion from healthcare, and increased risks of poverty and homelessness, which in turn correspond to greater risks of fatal violence.
The rights and legal status of transgender people vary by country. Our imaginary con-man might have restricted access to education, to sports, to bathrooms, and to marriage and military positions. As well as much, much worse.
On top of all that, our imaginary con-man would still have to train to be an Olympic athlete. Most men are not as fast or strong as the world's fastest and strongest women. Sex differences in athletic performance also depend on more than just biological differences. Living as a woman means only having access to the resources available to female athletes.
No man would go through all that for a women's medal.
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?
Anecdotally, I found as a deskjob, pilates and casual weight lifting trans woman, I lost dramatic amount of strength and muscle mass. 20 pounds now feels like 50 pounds did for myself pre-transition. I usually participate with women and the instructor/personal helps with modifications usually aimed at women just getting into fitness. Running joke amongst friends is how easily I am outperformed by my female friends at the gym/pilates/etc. However, that's since my body is low testosterone even for females, its checked twice a year because of it, normally It's once a year for most trans people. Other friends retained a lot of their strength, but are mechanics, so its really situational in my opinion, and its a super hard and interesting topic of research because of it
The closest controlled study we have on this topic is not in athletes but in U.S. military servicemembers and their standard fitness test: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36271916/
This isn't a good study for professional athletes training for competition because the fitness test is not analogous to professional competition. They only need to pass with a reasonable score but most are not competing for the top position like in the Olympics
The study found that
> transgender females' performance showed statistically significantly better performance than cisgender females until 2 years of GAHT in run times and 4 years in sit-up scores and remained superior in push-ups at the study's 4-year endpoint.
So of the 3 simple activities they tested their performance remained higher in one test (run times) until 2 years, another test (sit-ups) until 4 years, and remained higher at the end of the limited 4-year study period in the last test (push-ups).
This study was widely circulated as "proof" that hormone therapy erases sex-based gains after only 2 years, but that's not even an accurate read of the study. It's also not measuring athletes who are training or trying to compete.
Depending on the sport, hormone therapy cannot be expected to compensate for sex some important sex differences like physical structure. Male anatomy is simply different in ways that provide different types of leverage or angles (like Q Angle, which runners will talk about, or reach, which is important to boxers)
This is a very taboo topic to discuss and honestly I'm a little nervous to even comment about it here pseudonymously. The popular culture discussion of the topic is very different than the sports science discussion of the topic, where sex differences have long been accepted to be innate and irreversible, regardless of hormone therapy.
The usual term is "cisgender", or "cis" for short.
"Cis" and "Trans" both come from Latin; the former means "the same side of" and the latter means "the other side of". If you are happy to be on the same side of the gender binary as what you were assigned when you were born then you are "cisgender"; if you are unhappy with that state of affairs (regardless of how much work you have put into changing it) then you are "transgender".
This is useful when clarifying terms, when you do not know the persons identity, or when discussing groups based on the factory default settings.
Regularly. It's the competing women who are complaining, though. They feel it is unfair to compete with men.
[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 top ten complaints.
Women complaining are voicing an opinion. Is this a good enough citation for the claim that women don't want to compete with men?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gndSDgsMnKI
That's fine if they don't want to compete with men, but the statements were because "it's unfair". I was curious if there had been any studies on this.
Well, (and I hesitate to say this because of HN guidelines, but) it was in the article, which I assumed you read. It was this assumption that made me think you wanted evidence that it is women who are complaining about competing against men.
FTFA
> 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 advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
Does it have a link to any of the findings?
> Does it have a link to any of the findings?
The findings I posted where from the linked article, to the nytimes. The findings were exactly as I posted them; in brief, athletes born with male markers retain their physical advantages.
It’s not evidence until published because it can’t be disputed.
You're correct - man/woman are gender identities, male/female are biological facts. The more accurate version of that statement (which, btw, is not mine, I am just repeating what the complaints are) is:
"Females don't want to compete with males."
Happy?
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.
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.
I find those to be fascinating questions, the later we have little research on, currently, and it could enlighten so much more of exercise science especially for cis athletes as well.
A YEAR of hormone therapy. Meeting a required measured threshold of testosterone.
And that's not even the controversial stuff. A man and a trans-woman are different. hell, one has (generalizing here) boobs: come on... don't be dense/obtuse! Have you tried running fast suddenly having boobs when you did not before?!?! ...one is way easier.
Unfortunately, while the most equitable solution might be to create a separate category unique to trans individuals, there aren't enough trans athletes to make it feasible (yet?). It's rather sad that transitioning means a person can no longer compete in sports, but I'm not sure there's a better alternative.
Starting out with this: are you proposing a height limit on female athletes? If having a larger bone structure is an unfair advantage, surely tall women should be banned from competing?
In certain sports, height might not be formally regulated, but weight classes are regulated. And in those sports it is arguably an advantage to be shorter, as you can be bulkier overall and dedicate more of the limited weight to pure muscle mass vs your skeleton. Although there are also considerations for things such as reach in some circumstances.
Overall though, the difference between a slightly taller athlete of a given sex is nowhere near the athletic prowess differences between a given athlete of the same height and of different sex. A 5' Lebron James would still dominate a 7' Caitlin Clark. Maybe there would be height classes just like there are weight classes and sex classes, if height were such an influencing factor.
It's in the article. You may not agree with their findings, but it's there.
They list their findings but no data. They effectively are just issuing an opinion. The opinion may be more considered than the rest of ours, but it’s not data.
> 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 advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
Let's be a little science-focused, okay?
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.
So much for science.
Do you have an example of this happening?
Why are all these innocent questioners asking for more evidence not familiar with the existence of the evidence they are asking for?
Considering they feel so strongly about it, they should already have seen all this.
Regardless, Lia went from not being in the front of the pack, to being in the front of the pack:
“By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to fifth on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle.”
65th to 1st in one category, and 554th to 5th in another.
It is fair to say there was a significant increase in rank post-transition.
From Wikipedia:
> Thomas began swimming on the men's team at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. During her freshman year, Thomas recorded a time of eight minutes and 57.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle that ranked as the sixth-fastest national men's time, and also recorded 500-yard freestyle and 1,650-yard freestyle times that ranked within the national top 100.[4] On the men's swim team in 2018–2019, Thomas finished second in the men's 500, 1,000, and 1,650-yard freestyle at the Ivy League championships as a sophomore in 2019.[4][3][13] During the 2018–2019 season, Thomas recorded the top UPenn men's team times in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free, but was the sixth best among UPenn men's team members in the 200 free.[14]
To focus in on her just-out-of-highschool low ranking, and imply that it's weird that she improved by the time she graduated, is deliberately disingenuous (not on your part, but on the writer's.) She had already won 3 silver medals as a sophomore on the men's team, and was the best on her team in all but one event.
https://www.sportingnews.com/us/college/news/lia-thomas-stri...
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/lia-thomas-loses-le...
Also, if that's a "far left ideology rabbit hole" (it isn't even ideological), I have to ponder what the hell you think is a "right ideology", nevermind "far right ideology".
This power lifter set regional junior records as a young man then quit the sport and didn't compete for 16 years. After transitioning she went on to win gold medals in numerous international competitions as a woman.
Transition is a process. Potentially a long one without a clear point of completion. Which makes things more complicated.
No, both because there are very few trans athletes in competition, and because trans athletes (except trans women who have not started or are less than a year into hormone therapy) have net athletic disadvantages, when considering all factors relevant to performance in almost any real sport, compared to cisgender people of the same gender identity.
I mean, if you had a sport that isolated grip strength alone, trans women would have an advantage over cis women, but aside from rather contrived cases like that, they don't.
There's a reason the poster woman for the political movement around this in the US is a cisgender woman whose story of "unfair competition" is tying with a trans woman for fifth place behind four other cisgender women (and having to hold a sixth place trophy in photos, since there were not duplicates on hand for the same rank) in an intercollegiate swimming competition.
https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/un-study-...
Consider that wins in any professional competition sport carries with it sponsorships, advertising stints, apparal lines or similar. For many women athletes this is a considerable part of their lively hood - include prize money etc. in terms of notoriety that gets displaced by the current regulation.
You can't bring your formula1 to a touring car race just because you feel like it is a touring car.
Personally I think at the top level there should be an unlimited class. within the rules of the sport anyone can enter, then at various lower prestige levels participation is limited according to some parameter.
You can't enter a car into a boating competition. The question here is: if you take basic precautions to make it the same class of boat - a modified car turned into a boat should be a valid entry - provided the engine speed roughly matches.
People worry about cars on water here, not knowing that doesn't exist by definition: any car in water has been modified from a car to be a boat. you may recognize that it was once a car - but that's vestigial shell stuff. the inter-workings are a propeller - not a wheel.
For better or worse nor is our medical science sophisticated enough to swap out the systems to be true comparables (and I don't mean to offend anyone).
The problem is that it isn't a hard binary. All the relevant metrics are going to fall on a spectrum, and there is a significant overlap between the male and female spectra.
The real question is: do you consider it fair if a top 1% male spectrum transitions to a top 1% female spectrum, or it only fair if that top 1% male spectrum ends up at the 50% percentile on the female spectrum?
Great thanks!
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/sports/article/2026/02/05/boxer-im...
Separate from that there are still measurable differences between sexes that you can’t just magically change with a pill or surgery.
Ever seen pre-puberty kids play against each other? The girls and boys perform about the same.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/bd2689e4-7094-4e0b...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ejsc.12268
Looking at the athletic measurements, boys are better/stronger/faster than girls by a noticeable 5-10%.
After the hormones finally kick in, this jumps to 40-100%.
In my opinion the way forward is to stop trying to find arbitrary ways to define gender, and just start making competition classes based on whatever factors are relevant to the event. E.g. a women with high testosterone? They can compete with men or women with the same testosterone bracket. This would also let men with low-T compete fairly rather then be excluded from the games.
It's also relevant at what point other genetic changes are "unfair." There are absolutely genetic traits that give people HUGE advantages in various competitions. Just like the gender-related properties, these are natural and yet result in unfair competitions.
There is significant grey area wrt to "doping" too in the sense that a performance enhancing drug may express as a larger than normal amount of a naturally occurring substance. So did the person dope, or is that their natural genetics? In my scheme, WHO CARES!
Beyond that, I suppose there is the usual argument against more serious and non-natural forms of doping that it is physically detrimental to the competitors and by allowing it you are encouraging or pressuring people to essentially harm themselves.
Still, competition classes could be helpful in some of the doping grey areas.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6586948/
Also warning that article has images that may be inappropriate in a public setting. I didn't realize when I linked it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
For both the genetic disorders, they would have to be beneficial or at least not an disadvantage, for elite sport activity in order to be an issue for misclassification. For a sex-determination system, they could simply add an exception for Swyer syndrome and postpone the decision until such individual presented themselves at an Olympic competition.
Lol why does this not do it?
Among others
There are currently around 10 openly transgender women in the NCAA.
Small numbers either way.
I mean the word freak in the most loving and caring way possible, mind you.
What does fairness mean in that context?
Also, there are a significant number of these sorts of arguments in high-level sports, probably precisely because these "0.1%" cases are exactly the ones that result in exceptional ability relative to norms. It's also curious that there is such obsession about naturally occurring genetic outliers with respect to females or gender but absolute silence about naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender. And surprise surprise the top athletes often have such outlier genetics!
If you're drawing a distinction between natural genetic difference related to only gender and no other factors then sadly it's exactly a culture war, not a war based in science or fairness.
This is just not true. Many sports are categorized by weight for the most obvious example.
A few reasons:
1. Sex is not as straightforward as most people think, and what to do with intersex people is not clear.
2. Trans athletes are underrepresented at pretty much all levels of sport, and aren't actually winning that much, making it not actually an urgent problem.
3. The philosophical underpinnings that advantages due to differences in body development should be disqualifying is a little broken, since we do not consider Michael Phelps being double jointed as being an unfair developmental advantage.
Being male is something you are born with.
Being male and competing against females is something you choose to do.
Because those 8 women at that one Games were a lot more than all transfem Olympic athletes in history combined, the danger of ruling people out is much greater than the danger of allowing someone in who doesn't deserve it.
Anyway, some more links to spread the getting-downvoted love:
"Gender verification of female Olympic athletes" (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2002): https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/fulltext/2002/10000/gende...
> The shift to PCR-based techniques replaced one diagnostic genetic test with another but did not alleviate the problems. Positive results still stigmatized women with such conditions as androgen insensitivity, XY mosaicism, and 5-α-reductase deficiency. Both sex chromatin and SRY tests identify individuals with genetic anomalies that yield no competitive advantage. Therefore, finally in 1999, the IOC conditionally rescinded its 30-yr requirement for on-site gender screening of all women entered in female-only events at the Olympic Games, starting with Sydney in 2000. Rather, intervention and evaluation of individual athletes by appropriate medical personnel could be employed if there was any question about gender identity. This change has not been made permanent.
"World Athletics' mandatory genetic test for women athletes is misguided. I should know – I discovered the relevant gene in 1990" (Andrew Sinclair, 2025): https://www.mcri.edu.au/news/insights-and-opinions/world-ath...
> It is worth noting these tests are sensitive. If a male lab technician conducts the test he can inadvertently contaminate it with a single skin cell and produce a false positive SRY result.
> No guidance is given on how to conduct the test to reduce the risk of false results.
> Nor does World Athletics recognise the impacts a positive test result would have on a person, which can be more profound than exclusion from sport alone.
> There was no mention from World Athletics that appropriate genetic counselling should be provided, which is considered necessary prior to genetic testing and challenging to access in many lower- and middle-income countries.
> I, along with many other experts, persuaded the International Olympic Committee to drop the use of SRY for sex testing for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
> It is therefore very surprising that, 25 years later, there is a misguided effort to bring this test back.
"Medical Examination for Health of All Athletes Replacing the Need for Gender Verification in International Sports" (JAMA, 1992): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/39507...
> Even if a molecular method could be devised that had a very small error rate, it would still just constitute a test for a nucleic acid sequence, not for sex or gender. Although one can test for the main candidate gene for male sex determination, SRY, it still holds that most XY women test positive and some XX males test negative for SRY. It is possible that there will never be a laboratory test that will adequately assess the sex of all individuals.
...
> (IAAF proposals held) that the purpose of gender verification is to prevent normal men from masquerading as women in women's comopetition was reinforced. Perhaps a genuine concern decades ago, this fear now seems to be a less pressing concern. One reason may be that routine drug testing now requires the voiding of urine be carefully watched by an official to make certain that urine from a given athlete actually comes from his or her urethra. Thus, athletes are already carefully watched in "doping stations". The likelihood of a male successfully masquerading as a female under such circumstances seems remote in current comparison.
Women are not excluded from golf tournaments, but the requirements to compete (primarily how far one hits the ball) are vastly different. Thats why both play the same golf course, just from different tee boxes.
If it's called "mixed league" the intention is clear
So maybe I think what they mean by "mixed league" is not a "Maybe Mixed League" but like "Definitely Mixed League" as in mixed participants being a strict requirement somehow?
Mixed league works fine for your company softball team. Not so much for professional sports.
There are several sports where female physiology (skeletal structure, etc) has inherent advantages over male physiology where this may not be true, though.
No one is arguing that trans women should be able to compete as women without being on HRT.
That's what I said. I'm not sure what you read.
It's the most popular event for speedrunning and has raised millions of dollars each year for over a decade. Sounds like they're doing just fine as is and, perhaps, fostering an inclusive environment which explicitly protects people demonized by society at large has only helped, not hurt.
Meanwhile the gap is well known to be massive in typical events, e.g.:
* Compare https://worldpowerlifting.com/records/womens-world-records/ vs https://worldpowerlifting.com/records/mens-world-records/ (or for that matter, browse through https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_100_metres_world_recor... plateaued at numbers seen in men's competition over a century ago; a "sub-elite" female competitor sprints barely ahead of "intermediate recreational" men per https://marathonhandbook.com/average-100-meter-time/ . Griffith-Joyner's record-setting time would not have even qualified her to run with men since at least 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres_at_the_Olympics
* I often hear it suggested that women show an advantage in longer races, but even at standard marathon length this is not borne out in results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Boston_Marathon
* National and international level competitive women's sports teams regularly get trounced by teenaged boys in exhibition e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDH_r7-GN4o widely reported on last year and https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b... from 2017
* The entire history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis) requires quite a bit of creative interpretation to put women's tennis anywhere near the level of men's
That's just off the top of my head of anecdotes and examples I can recall being casually thrown around in these sorts of discussions.
There is more complexity than the binary in the expression of sex in humans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_huma...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
Sports categories never had anything to do with gender.
The other difference of sexual development are different sexes
It’s an unfair advantage apparently. You know, like being born tall for basketball players. Curious how no other biological advantages are being policed.
> The International Olympic Committee has barred transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category of the Olympics and said that all participants in those events must undergo genetic testing.
Genetic testing doesn’t leave a lot of room for accidentally or intentionally targeting women for being “insufficiently feminine.”
Leave aside the fact that very few of us here have actually tested our 23rd chromosome. Historically, the Olympics have not been (and are not) strictly chromosomal. The 2023 testosterone suppression decision requirements has exclusively impacted cis women, for one example.
Humans are biologically dimorphic in the same way winters are usually cold and summers are usually hot.
When people do submit to such testing, how commonly are the results other than they expected?
Perhaps not, given the selection effect.
> You can easily go your entire life without knowing.
Sure, since we already established that the tests are usually not done at all.
An overwhelming majority of people (at least among those who have a basic understanding of the underlying science) could, however, guess correctly about themselves.
The combined prevalence of all intersex conditions is simply not that high.
Humans have a wide variety of biological variation in metrics we think of as linked to "biological sex" and those metrics are accessibly mutable. Even within the Olympics, the natural variation of these metrics within cis women is a famous topic of debate (Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, etc.)
Bipedalism is something which varies very rarely and is especially not accessibly mutable.
What is the total prevalence of all conditions medically recognized as intersex?
> and those metrics are accessibly mutable.
What is that even supposed to mean?
Not all biological variation is classified as intersex.
> What is that even supposed to mean?
You can change a lot of your 'secondary sex characteristics' intentionally. This is much easier than removing a limb, and even easier than adding a limb.
Okay, but other biological variation is clearly not relevant to the discussion.
This would apply to sex chromosomes as well
We are talking about sexual dimorphism and secondary sex characteristics.
Humans were understood to be sexually dimorphic before we discovered sex chromosomes in 1905, and we usually label our babies with a biological sex without the aid of consumer genetic testing.
They have XY chromosomes, internal testes, a male testosterone level, and male muscle development. They have the SRY gene that the IOC is testing for, and are not one of the exceptions. Regardless of the fact that their DSD (5-ARD) results in no penis.
To be clear, I'm not saying they should start living life as men. But describing their situation as the natural variation of cis women is simplistic and not accurate.
Further, they are women, and therefore their testosterone levels and muscle development are female.
This just gets to a ludicrous place. These are women who are simply identifiable as so. Anyone throughout history would have identified them as so. Their biological metrics are within the variation of cis women, because they are cis women.
I’d rather not have discussions in bad faith.
Coming back around to the olympics: I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree without dismissing the complexity that comes from organizing across 8 billion people.
But that is not being said here, just as in every other time the discussion of sex segregation in sports comes up; and just as in every other time, people simply pretend in bad faith that such things are being asserted.
> I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes.
Sure. Which is why they do, and nobody has a problem with it.
Go take a survey of the people opposed to transgender women competing in women's Olympic sports, and see what they think of having a separate category for transgender athletes. Or even separate categories for transgender men and transgender women. I'd wager the large majority have no problem with that. (They might at most be concerned about disproportionate airtime being given to sport events that relatively few people qualify for and relatively few people are especially interested in.)
Within biology, we'd see a number of metrics (like height) which would usually appear bimodal (like two bell curves added together). We might identify at least two latent variables here: A real-number 'age' (which can be observed) and a binary 'sex' (not directly observed). But it's worth stressing that these implied underlying curves overlap, and any given metric is not strictly correlated with the others. (Commonly, one might be on the lower end of some distributions and the higher ends of others. Someone can be 5'3" tall, have red hair, and a high body-fat percentage while also having testicles, XY chromosomes, and dying at the age of 62.) (We should also note that the 23rd chromosome just another observed variable, starting after ~1900.)
Some causes of variation that we know about are fraternal birth order, or endocrine-disrupting chemicals like PFAS, conditions like PCOS, etc.
Case in point are all the cis women who are impacted by the ever-stricter testosterone guidelines in the Olympics. Further is the effect of fraternal birth order, or the endocrine-disrupting chemicals like PFAS, or the intentional introduction of hormones and hormone blockers. (If certain industries are to be believed, soy milk has a similar effect.) These are all variations and things which impact what we understand as "biological sex".
Folk gender theorists tend to consider sexuality, identity, biology, and expression as orthogonal axes. But these are clearly also correlated among people. (Stretching the definition of "correlated" to include qualitative metrics like 'expression' using the usual methods.)
An information-theoretic framework would inform well an "optimal" way to talk about this, using a one-bit string for most people and increasingly more bits when more information is needed. This is roughly how people already talk.
Ironically the sports divide is probably the single area where having some physical advantages isn’t a bonus. It’s also near and dear to the hearts of billions, and such a terrible hill to die on. Ideally the solution would be a league like the Paralympic competitions, but high level athletes are rare, trans people are relatively rare, and two overlapping are incredibly rare. To make such a league would be a farce that couldn’t hope to succeed.
When discussing trans people in sports, the most salient contexts aren't elite sports championships like the Olympics. "Sports" is also done recreationally and is often considered a normal part of ones childhood upbringing. On the topic of trans people, the question "can my child play this sport with their friends"?
Edit I’d add that T screening in sports exists primarily to find dopers, not people trying to pass.
To restate myself, sports during childhood are much more important than elite world championships. Almost everyone I know did a sport with peers during our formative years, myself included. Meanwhile, nobody I know was ever close to qualifying to be an Olympic athlete, and I feel certain the same is true for most of the people in this thread.
Generally speaking when people talk about "kids sports" they specifically mean pre-collegiate, not in the least because colloquialism aside, college students are adults.
If it's just karyotype, are men with XX male syndrome (SRY gene without an Y chromosome) then allowed to participate in women's sports?
I recall a study looking at genetics in general and how much of professional sport abilities that can be attributed to it, and the number were fairly high for most sports, especially those involving strength and endurance. Genetic disorders like AIS could however also be a hindrance.
I do recall that in some endurance sports, certain genetic disorders involving oxygen delivery were much more common in top elites than in the average population, meaning that people without that disorder is at severe disadvantage compared to general population. It is an ongoing discussion if people with those kind of disorders should be allowed to compete in for example long distance skiing, as the disorder becomes natural doping and would be cheating if a person without the disorder was competing with that kind of blood in their system.
Genetic testing, outside of the culture war about what defines a man or a woman, really comes down to what is fair competition. Personally I can't really say. Does knowing that maybe half of the top skiers has a rare blood disorder make it less fun for people?
I'm just going to leave the headline of this article for you to consider while you answer:
"Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2190741/
Otherwise it might turn out you are proposing a standard that no system that bifurcates men and women can achieve, and on the basis of that, rejecting genetic testing.
https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...
They are also banning females from female sports as well with this ruling.
https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...
People with this condition have internal testes, a male level of testosterone, and a male level of muscle development. That a doctor assigned them female at birth and put a F on the birth certificate does not change this.
The debate is really around how the handling of intersex and transgender athletes intersects with the original purpose of creating a separate category for women.
This is exactly my point. Men with unusual characteristics are celebrated, but women with unusual characteristics are excluded into a non-competitive category.
You can justify it if you'd like, but in a practical sense, no man will ever get to the Olympics only to be turned away because they don't genetically qualify for competition. This is an indignity reserved only for women.
No adults are training their way to the kid-lympics and then getting cut open and surprised by the count of the rings.
Also, the idea of "fairness" is overstated, a naturalist just-so fallacy. Is it "fair" that some male athletes are taller or shorter than others, or have other genetic advantages, for example?
why
EDIT: this is exactly the kind of mistake that native speakers make, that ESL speakers don't.
is that in 100+ years of Olympics, there are ZERO elite athletes who were transgender
none
it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote
because there have been no previous cases of that either
However there are women who have given birth who will fail that SRY test
Because biology is messy, not black and white, never "on" or "off", there is always overlap
They tried this before in 1996 and quickly ended it by 2000 because the result was a disaster
I'm staying out of the other issue as best I can, but as a non-American the resistance to this is just baffling, especially given the fact your recent elections have not exactly been widely trusted internally. Not that I'm saying there was much merit to the distrust, but it still makes sense to take steps to demonstrate it. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
There is a political talking point that “aliens are voting” in our elections but it has been proven false again and again. The purpose of this is to put up barriers for legitimate citizens to vote, not to truly fix an imaginary problem.
I’m honestly quite surprised that politicians don’t resolve this idiotic situation because it’s so damn simple, but I think it’s not solved because various state governments rely on small fees for revenue. And of course because there are many political situations in which making it difficult for specific opponent voters to vote is a campaign strategy.
Make fees for drivers licenses, birth certificates, and passports illegal, and ideally institute a system that makes these forms of identification automatic/stupidly easy to acquire and the whole issue is resolved. Now you can require voters to present them and you aren’t disenfranchising anyone.
Election fraud on the other hand.. this we are very familiar with. Reaction to the coverage of last three US presidential elections was mostly "oh, how cute, such naive first attempts". So from our PoV there most certainly were widespread attempts to rig them, mostly from Dem side, and so very unprofessional, that their existence cannot be denied in good faith.
Oof, I feel bad for whatever news network you are getting your American coverage from. You might want to look into who owns that news network. This is a very common political message specifically originating from the Republican Party’s media network (e.g., Murdoch-owned media, Turning Point USA, etc).
They are almost exclusively propaganda and manipulation and as such the only useful signal that can be extracted is something like "how those people chose to frame certain events they feel they can't ignore in hopes of them going unnoticed". Note I'm talking about our local ones, in my opinion yours do not differ materially in this aspect.
So no. I'm not parroting after a talking head on some network or other (the thought itself is mildly insulting). For an interesting incident (and election-related stuff was interesting enough) what one does is gather as much coverage as possible and then try to reconstruct what event could have lead to this set of framings.
What I wrote is somewhat of a consensus between us old hands of many years experience resisting election fraud, with hands-on knowledge of how it's done, how to fight it, how attempts at covering it up look like and how people that prefer to believe it never happens behave.
not when you register to vote, every single time for the rest of your existance
it has no basis in logic
it's already illegal to vote if you are not a citizen
no-one trying to gain citizenship would risk being deported for voting in an election
every time conservative groups comb the voter rolls to try to find people who are not allowed to vote, not only do they find only like a couple people out of MILLIONS, they discover they never actually voted, it was a mistaken registration
out of billions of votes the past decade there were like seven people prosecuted
that's what's going on
what they are really trying to do is make it REALLY hard to vote, to make incredible fiction, so people stop voting
because if people stop voting, the people already in power keep that power
btw don't confuse this with showing an ID when you vote
that's already the law almost everywhere
what they want is you must have a passport (most people do not have one) or a birth certificate (most people have no idea where or how to get it) EVERY time you vote, not just register but EVERY time, like it changes somehow
see the nonsense now?
This is a dumb ass way to try and define the woman's category... which is about the expected result of bigots trying to work backwards from the result they want headlines about.
This is news to me - which males are you talking about here?
> This is a dumb ass way to try and define the woman's category...
It's really not, though. They found a marker they can test for, and have clearly defined exceptions.
This poor bloke who found out he was infertile during a premarital medical exam, for instance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7760426/
> It's really not, though. They found a marker they can test for, and have clearly defined exceptions.
Have you heard of the politician's fallacy, "something needs to be done, this is something, so this needs to be done"...
Your argument here is that... needing a test, and having a test, doesn't mean it's the right test.
You're also assuming that we even need a test... evidence (no transfemale olympians ever coming not dead last) suggests we don't.
Interesting. Perhaps a better test is needed.
> You're also assuming that we even need a test... evidence (no transfemale olympians ever coming not dead last) suggests we don't.
This isn't just about trans women, but also about DSD cases like Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya.
The bottom line is these tests will catch dozens of people who are phenotypically women, who can even give birth. Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?
But I want to point out that XY+CAIS individuals cannot conceive or carry a child. They have no ovaries and no uterus.
> Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?
They are, if they are female or have CAIS. Caster Semenya, for example, does not meet that standard. Caster was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, but is not biologically female, rather a male with a DSD (5-ARD) who has testes and fully male levels of testosterone and musculature.
one type most definitely would "fail" SRY test
yet they can give birth using donated egg, IVF, etc.
nature makes many variations, it's not exact, it's not binary
there is common and less common and that's why it's messy
A different approach would have been to accommodate the less common
But they purposely decided not to do that because that's the opposite of their goals
it doesn't really do anything after puberty
it's about gene expression and it can be discarded genetically
so yes there are "men" walking around who would show negative on a SRY test and qualify
again, they tried this exact thing in 1996
and it went over so badly they ended it by 2000
this is 100% politics and conservative people with power trying to manipulate things
biology is not binary, it's messy and not exact
there are "common" things and less common
Another approach would have been to accommodate the less common
But you'll notice they didn't even try to do that
Because the decisions should be left to those of us playing the sports. Not bystanders trying to impose their own agendas on to activities they don't even participate in.
You can make the decisions, but you can't make the audience (a much larger body of people, who overwhelmingly do not participate in the sport, at least not competitively) agree with (or care about) your decisions or reasoning.
The government doesn’t have to leave the sphere. It just has to manage the market. For instance, a specific amount of space in a park could be allocated to dynamically priced programming. This could be auctioned on an annual basis with teardown costs pre-allocated. Then you don’t have the argument over whether tennis or pickleball. It could be cricket or sepak takraw for all we know.
Proponents of various sports could group together to share the space. This is obviously far superior to the communist style committee allocation.
And obviously the government should not fund sports. Creating the environment where sports funding can occur by ensuring a framework for contracts and so on, yes. But actually deciding that baseball or football or basketball need to be played is patently ridiculous.
2) why do you think those who care about this don’t care about other issues?
3) this hardly makes the headlines, and wont stay there for long. It doesn’t get outsized attention
But alas. It's easier to spread hate than enact positive change.
But once puberty hits everything changes. My teenage daughter played travel club volleyball on a pretty good team, and during practice they would occasionally run drills with the boys team. Even at that age the difference in hitting power and vertical was enormous, and those differences only grow larger with age. Men and women are literally playing different games. Beyond just fairness, forcing girls to compete against biological males becomes a safety risk due to concussions from taking a ball to the head.
I think male female trans etc . can compete if analysed by sports branch basis. Male x female in contact sports like karate boxing taekwondo is not fair. However i think the difference is negligible in shooting, archerty, curling etc.
“Women tend to have thinner skulls than men, along with smaller neck muscles, which can predispose female athletes to getting a concussion,” says Sarah Menacho, MD, a neurosurgeon and neurocritical care specialist at University of Utah Health. “Data shows that women are also more likely than men to report concussion-related symptoms, and these symptoms can persist for a longer time period prior to recovery than in male athletes.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-sports-concus...
https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...
Certainly seems that way for a certain subset of voters. They'd rather lose the election than let women compete against females only.
Fascinating political analysis. It's weird how a small group of people are deeply driven by identity politics above literally anything else, especially when those people typically aren't even slightly affected (and generally have never watched a single women's event in their life).
I sometimes wonder if people like you scream at politicians because of the introduction of the pitch clock in baseball, too? Do you waste this much energy on the rulebooks other sports come up with? Or just like, when you think it's icky sex stuff?
In high school sports!
You know, that thing where the school next door is twice the size and has ten times the budget but it's totally fair! They win the championship every year because they totally have genetically superior athletes every single year! They are definitely better and there are zero possible systemic issues that could affect such a situation!
If high school sports aren't fair, then the world will end! How will we go on if little billy loses to someone he shouldn't! What if he loses to a girl!
In fact, we should make the ref blowing a call a capital offense! It's only fair!
Christ, it's so stupid. If these people cared about "fairness" for women's sports, they would be legislating more funding and support for them, not attacking random high school age people for the horrific crime of not conforming and wanting to play a low stakes game.
The point of high school sports is to get kids active and teach them cooperation and provide exposure to new things.
Ensuring that nobody with the "wrong" life can play against Beth is not even in the right universe of goals.
Alright alright alright I got it. We can get perfect fairness! Every single child born in america will be taken from their parents and put in a government run home that raises them all identically, given identical food and education and entertainment and enrichment and every single one will be given identical sports training. They will be required to complete identical exercise regimens and will have constant surveillance to ensure they aren't doing anything unapproved at any time. There, now finally our high school sports are safe! Phew, crisis averted.
If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site. I can't vouch for it being completely accurate but you can use it as a starting point for further research to educate yourself about the issue.
https://www.shewon.org/
It also classifies a trans person winning anything as ~3 losses since "a non-trans person may have shifted the entire bracket" moving 2nd -> 1st, 3rd -> 2nd etc... The entire site is hypebole and should not be used as a serious reference lol.
What if it's 0?
> If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site.
A deeply unbiased source, I'm sure.
Anyway I'd love to but all their archive links are the same. Looks like someone wrote a for loop incorrectly. But to be blunt, this is the exact same sort of nonsense as VAERS and deserves exactly the same dismissal: Compiled data assembled from the public with no verification, by people with no credentials, with a clear axe to grind.
Edit: Also, a SHIT LOAD of these are for second/third/whatever place, not even for wins. If reality backed the assertions made, transwomen should be DESTROYING women in sports.
There actually does have to be a lot of them, frankly, because otherwise it is just a nothingburger. Just a burger with a whole lot of nothing.
> 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 resistance to men in women's sports that the problem is not larger.
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 event. One. Looking through her win/loss record, she seems broadly pretty good, but hardly what one would expect if the narrative being pushed here is true.
> You're complaining that it's using publicly available data? Would you rather private anecdotes?
It's literally private anecdotes! Anyone can submit to that thing, the form is one click away from the homepage.
> Not sure why this is relevant - is being cheated out of second place less of a misdeed than being cheated out of first?
Of course not, but again, the narrative is that men are posing as women and competing in an unfair way based on genetic advantage. That's not a "win here and there" situation the way it's framed, that's a "women have no way to fairly compete." So why are so many transwomen still being beated by ciswomen competitors?
> It's not 0, and anyone engaging honestly knows it.
Then let's see a source! I asked for one two comments ago. Even the one on that shithoused website I can actually check the sources FOR is at best, speculative. What exactly in the male genome predisposes one in the context of GOLF for earth shattering victory?
> To make another vaccine analogy: claiming it's a small number and therefore it doesn't matter
I didn't claim it's a small number, I've claimed it's made up.
> 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.
> And it's because of resistance to men in women's sports that the problem is not larger.
There are no men in women's sports, there are women in women's sports, and until you show me the source you're, respectfully, talking nonsense.
Respectfully, you aren't ready to engage in legitimate discussion on this topic. Good faith would be steelmanning the other side, not continually referring to "the narrative" and then "defeating" it.
> There are no men in women's sports, there are women in women's sports, and until you show me the source you're, respectfully, talking nonsense.
Your consistent euphemization around this topic is another clue that you're really not engaging honestly. You should consider what you're looking to get out of this discussion.
A simple Google search will find you dozens of examples of XY individuals competing in spaces meant for XX individuals, at all levels of competition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_Thomas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Hubbard
I'm not here to spoon feed you this 101 level info. Again, my advice would be to consider why you're engaging here - is it with an open and curious mind, keen on learning; or a zealous propagandist spirit?
You're complaining that it's using publicly available data? Would you rather private anecdotes?
> Also, a SHIT LOAD of these are for second/third/whatever place, not even for wins.
Not sure why this is relevant - is being cheated out of second place less of a misdeed than being cheated out of first?
The highest ranked female chess player is right around #55 globally, wherein the top 50 all are dominated by men.
Some of this may have to do with men having more interest/higher propensity of starting young which is where most grandmasters begin their journey, but still an interesting thing to consider nonetheless.
Of course, we all know there's no difference in the level of intellect or strategy between men and women.
Do we?
I thought it was commonly accepted that the average and median are the same but that men have more outliers on both sides.
Many IQ tests have been designed to minimize the difference between males and females, primarily by reducing g-loading. Males pull ahead after puberty, prior to this they have an IQ disadvantage. So you have to take these factors into account when trying to make a fair and proper assessment.
/s
(IE, in the past, she would have been infertile, and probably died young due to her situation.)
I'm not comfortable with saying that people like her need to compete with men.
A trans man who was not taking HRT could compete, though.
The key distinction is that gender identity is not what's being tested.
Wouldn't they be barred based on using banned substances?
This would be like if two trans women, who has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, would compete in men's divisions.
Here in the US a significant part of antipathy towards trans people is the deeply held belief that being trans in public is a kind of sex abuse to the public. If you listen to what much of the debate has turned into here, it has little to do with competition, and far more with the obsession over what genitals people have in locker rooms and bathrooms.
At the end of the day the number of trans athletes is so vanishingly small it's not worth caring about the impacts on competition, when the debate itself is another framing of the conservative desire to make being trans illegal.
“Under the new policy eligibility will be determined by a one-time gene test, according to the I.O.C. The test, which is already being used in track and field, requires screening via saliva, a cheek swab or a blood sample.“
This is less invasive than all of the other doping tests that athletes already go through, which require blood draws.
From the Wikipedia article:
While the presence or absence of SRY has generally determined whether or not testis development occurs, it has been suggested that there are other factors that affect the functionality of SRY.[25] Therefore, there are individuals who have the SRY gene, but still develop as females, either because the gene itself is defective or mutated, or because one of the contributing factors is defective.[26] This can happen in individuals exhibiting a XY, XXY, or XX SRY-positive[27] karyotype[better source needed] Additionally, other sex determining systems that rely on SRY beyond XY are the processes that come after SRY is present or absent in the development of an embryo. In a normal system, if SRY is present for XY, SRY will activate the medulla to develop gonads into testes. Testosterone will then be produced and initiate the development of other male sexual characteristics. Comparably, if SRY is not present for XX, there will be a lack of the SRY based on no Y chromosome. The lack of SRY will allow the cortex of embryonic gonads to develop into ovaries, which will then produce estrogen, and lead to the development of other female sexual characteristics.[28]
Presence of SRY in an athlete registered as female means further tests must be undertaken, with permission of the athlete, to determine eligibility.
Absence of SRY means the screening is passed and the athlete is eligible to compete.
Please read the linked articles first before jumping to Wikipedia to try to counter them. The decision is more nuanced than you assume
“Athletes diagnosed with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) ‘or other rare differences/disorders in sex development (DSDs), who do not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone’ may still be allowed to participate in the women’s category.”
This is also true for many cisgender intersex women with XY chromosomes. Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth. Drawing the line at having a Y chromosome makes no sense.
People with androgen insensitivity syndrom (AIS) have XY chromosomes but no uterus. So, no, they cannot give birth.
See https://womenssportspolicy.org/pre-puberty-male-female-child....
I'm sorry, but this is not true. "Puberty blockers" do not complete suppress the effects of male genetics. They only attempt to block certain hormonal effects.
It is not possible to completely block the effects of having male genes by simple hormone modulation.
> Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth
We do not determine eligibility for sports classes based on ability to give birth for good reason. It's not a proxy for the genetic athletic differences being addressed by these classes.
Individuals with androgen insensitivity typically cannot give birth. This an extremely rare possibility, not a typical feature of the condition.
Shameful
0: https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...
This makes it seem that women without DSD need not bother competing.
Well, women's basketball did ban males from competing for, well, ever, and no one bat an eye.
Like I said in another thread on this story, it's not men who are complaining that women are unfairly competing, it's women who are complaining that men are unfairly competing.
For some people sports is their life and livelihood for that matter, this should be acknowledged.
I agree when it comes to spectators, at least in some sports.
But people do make a living, especially in poor countries, by being successful in sports.
It means that floor gymnastics is fair for *anyone* to compete in. None of this "wrong crotch shape" bullshit. Or intersex. Or trans. If you are good enough, you get in. If not, you dont.
And the whole trans argument would go away.
Means testing and gender means testing is a scourge. Time to be rid of it.
I find it appalling that only cis women get to have that chance, while literally banning trans women (and some unconventional cis women too) because of the way they were born and brought up.
Like that is the definition of discrimination one way or another.
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 competition.". Well, the thought of "get good" comes to mind. Supposedly, more competition is better for everyone.
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?
Good luck with that at any sport where strength and/or endurance matter most, just look at any given sport and check top male vs top female records. Running, climbing, hockey, football, rowing and so on and on.
Thats not really a fair sport in eyes of most folks. Unless thats your goal.
But, we should compare actual body parts that are relevant, for example I'm male but I'd not belong in male sports as my body is more feminine..
Still, it's not who you think you are that should decide, it's the body type so the competition can be more interesting as that is the point of sports anyway..
i was a very below average cross country runner in high school, if not flat out poor. my times were still fast by female standards.
Remember, sport is and has always been about statistical outliers competing. Fairness has never been, and will never be, a genuine consideration.
It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0]
> Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball)
We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0
If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair.
I wish there was a good solution.
It was simplistic for sure but gender identity was only a proxy for the handicap that impacted performance: the genetic disadvantage of not having been through a natural male puberty. If we can no longer rely on gender identity as the proxy then it makes sense to either drop the handicap system altogether, or refine it to look at the performance enhancing impact of genetics rather than what your pronouns are.
s/W(..)/F$1/; # Women -> Female
I mean, we do have weight categories in combat sports, right? I don't see why we couldn't come up with similarly neutral categories if we think it's good to segment people out by physical advantages. The parent comment is making a good point, though: it feels like some people care a lot about physical advantages that map onto gender stuff they care about, and not a lot about weird genetic anomalies that provide physical advantages that aren't gendered.
Re: anomalies - I think this is just unavoidable in any sort of category system, and I don't have a good solution for it except to consider frequency and severity.
> this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course.
Well, not really. 56%[1] of young women think that trans women should not be allowed in women's sports.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
IMO the "better" division should be open. If we are going to do two classes, and we find that one class has some sort of physical advantage inherently, then that class should be the "open" one.
> Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
A lot of people (the majority?) don't understand the extent of PEDs usage in sports. When everyone cheats nobody does. I've heard the argument before for going an "anything goes" division from friends for some sports, but then people are just going to start dying regularly from side effects like in body building.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...
Your linked article is also a massive category error. The people whose opinion should be polled should be actual competing athletes, that’s how the rules should be set in a sport. The biggest anti-trans athlete is some 5th place loser that couldn’t handle sharing 5th place with another woman and had to instead cry about it, only way to get in the news at 5th place, I suppose.
It's unfortunate because trans people are just as much people as cis people and deserve complete equality, but the reality of equality is that it can be very hard to do right.
Civil rights are hard because there are a lot of "rights" that can be applied to oppress others. Freedom of speech can absolutely be used to crush others, so how do you enact reasonable limits to prevent that without simultaneously causing the oppression that you aimed to prevent?
There are statutes in the US that put requirements on public school sports in relation to sex (sex is the quantifier used in Title IX). This to some effect limits men's sports in schools because of requirements for equality (typically represented as having an equal number of men's/women's sports). We consider this acceptable because otherwise there is the possibility that woman's sports are underrepresented because men's sports are more popular. In this case it's important to remember that there is limited funding.
The thing is, the class you are "bringing up" here is ~50% of the population. You're slightly limiting the other 50%, but it's barely of consequence. You are simply ensuring that to some extent funding isn't biased.
For trans women athletes, you are taking about a <1% subset of the population. This is not to say that minority populations don't matter (the United States is a great place because of minority populations). But if the majority of the women population say "no" to the <1%, then frankly at some point that's how the cookie crumbles. They still have the option of men's sports, they aren't restricted from competing there. They certainly are a huge gray area with the respect to physicality, even more so at younger ages when trans people are less likely to have transitioned (and more likely to be competing in a sport).
> The people whose opinion should be polled should be actual competing athletes
Really? In this case are you limiting it to just Olympic athletes? Can we include Diamond League athletes? Collegiate? Local 5k runners?
What even defines an athlete? Do I have to enter a race every so many months to maintain "athlete" status? Is a local race fine or do I need to be in Boston? This is silly gatekeeping.
> The biggest anti-trans athlete is some 5th place loser
Does this matter? It's also just "the biggest anti-trans athlete" that you know about. I'm sure there are some other women out there that are more hateful.
There are nuanced arguments to have about the trans women in sports situation, but the right is entirely against having them on completely bigoted basis, and then there is a very small subset of people who poison the well by turning good faith discussions about the topic into just hating the people having the discussions. At no point have I said anything disparaging about trans people or athletes. I'm just bringing up the reality of the situation being complicated, and as you called out: very unfortunate. It's unfortunate for trans men too, but nobody seems to complain about that one. :)
It’s actually interesting. The claim in defense is that the decision was made prior to her win. This is often backformed in these committees though so on its own I wouldn’t believe it uncritically. However, it seems that other shooting sports were split already which does support this viewpoint. The real tragedy is that women weren’t allowed to shoot skeet at the Olympics after the split. Wild that flew.
Anyway, I still agree that it looks suspicious that the sport where women are quite competitive is one where this happens. I think it might just be not looking hard enough, though.
Equestrian sports are open in category and dressage is dominated by women, eventing leans female, and jumping leans male (just looking at Wikipedia medals - no expertise here). No split there. So the premise is not universally true and probably represents each sports federation differently.
Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes.
This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.
https://radiolab.org/series/radiolab-presents-gonads/
Hypothetically you could have three divisions: open, men, and women. In many contexts it's more practical to have two, where one is open. In those cases, if the sex that didn't win more was also the open division, then people would complain because both divisions would be dominated by players of one sex.
No not all women get pregnant, but they generally have the plumbing to do so. My wife and I have tried for years without luck, yet no doctor has ever asked if we tried getting me pregnant instead. Smh
For that matter why not restrict rich athletes who have access to training and equipment that poor athletes do not?
The point at where the line is drawn is entirely arbitrary. Gattaca vibes.
If we measured everyones strength, bone density, etc... in order to stop people from risking injury that would be one thing But basing it on your Chromosomes is lazy and inaccurate.
The point is that "fairness" being tied to whether your Cis or Trans is a hilarious hill to die on when we have advanced medical technology to actually test what we deem "fair".
I agree if we could just distill "here's your objective good-at-tennis score" for everybody and draw lines using those numbers, that makes sense. It feels unrealistic? I.e. we already don't do that - it doesn't necessarily feel like 100% an anti-trans thing (orthogonal obviously to the large amount of anti-trans sentiment that generally exists). Maybe Elo for everything?
My point is just that fairness in the Olympics is fake and always has been.
Someones Chromosomes are such a poor way to measure their physical abilities especially when the bar is so high for top athletes in the field.
Climbing ability isn’t just a matter of strength or any other single dimension. E.g., the women’s routes are set on the assumption they’re more flexible than the men, not just less strong. Climbers come in many different shapes and sizes. Some climbers look like string beans, others look like they grew up lifting cows.
And BTW, there are women (Janja Garnbret, and Akiyo Noguchi before her) who dominate the women’s competition for years, to the degree that everyone else is almost playing for second place. It’s routinely speculated that Janja could regularly reach the men’s semi-finals.
Also, so many of these anti-trans efforts end up hurting cis women too, the ones who happen to look too masculine or have too high of testosterone.
Gender is not as straightforward as bigots and transphobes would like to think. I wonder how many cis women will be affected by this ruling because their chromosomes and hormones aren't within so called "normal levels"
In most sports, the "mens" division is actually an open division that accepts all participants regardless of sex. Women just don't compete in it because they have no shot at getting a decent placement. The fact that males and females can't fairly compete with each other is the raison d'être of the women's league. This, and not culture war propaganda reasons is why only the most deranged bigots have an issue with trans men competing in "mens" sports.
That decision was made before her win.
> the International Shooting Union, at a meeting in April of 1992, and therefore ahead of the Games, elected to bar women from shooting against men in future events.
<https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/2753773/2021/08/05/in-tokyo...>
As for intersex individuals, put them in their own competitive class.
Indeed, but this is only a good argument for barring trans women from competing against females. You see, if trans athletes are so rare, only a very small number of people would be adversely affected by such a restriction, they can live with it.
On the other hand, the ban would calm down a large number of female athletes who are seriously disturbed by the mere possibility of competing against men, especially in contact sports, but not only.
Women are women, not only physically but also emotionally and mentally. Setting out on a crusade to change the thinking of millions of women is seriously dumb when a simple restriction, affecting 3 people total, can avoid it.
Now, think about making such a dumb idea a cornerstone of some party's political messaging... that can happen only if said party wants the other side to win.
What's the point of allowing trans women in women's sports anyway, especially at a top level? To affirm their identity? That throws an entire class of people, women, under the bus. Top performing males have an indisputable competitive advantage against top performing females in athletics.
I assume trans men are administered testosterone as part of their medical care, and that's already universally banned from competitive sports.
On the contrary, it would apply to trans men if it were about "culture war against trans people".
Now imagine a pro golfer who was born female with those anatomical advantages for golf flexibility, and is now taking testosterone for power, ostensibly to identify as male. Not only do they have the anatomy advantage, they now have the power. They would probably dominate pro golf overall, both sides of the game I expect, whichever one they choose to compete in.
They also have advantages in traits that across the population correlate positively with some broadly-sports-relevant capacities (e.g., lean body mass, both absolutely and as a share of total body mass, lung volume), but the actual sports-relevant capacities these correlate with on a population level (strength, endurance, etc.) they don't have an advantage on. There are studies that have detailed some of the low-level reasons for this with regard to oxygen use and other factors.
Are they stronger than cis women?
I believe the logic is based on the fact that male athletes are stronger than female athletes.
Before trans issues were widespread in culture, intersex athletes were also scrutinized. Hell, I remember when people were questioning whether having a testicle removed gave Lance Armstrong an advantage...
I don't say this often: Oh, come on.
Obviously there is both a culture war against (and for) trans people, and also non-hate-based arguments against trans women competing with biological women. Both things can be true.
At best this is willful ignorance. By many measures, there is an active persistent march towards a Denial of Identity genocide against transgender folks in the US and other countries.
https://lemkininstitute.com/so/e2PpT6aRi
Mrs Hubbard's background, if you read it honestly, is great evidence for why this decision was the correct one.
The only reason why this was possible is because Hubbard is male.
> of youth sports have created clear incentives for them to prioritize competitive fairness over principles like inclusion, well-being, and fun.
In an event that is primarily focused on competitive fairness, what does inclusion have to do with it?
If playing sport is about fun, well-being, etc, then don't play in competitive events. You can't very well want to play in competitive events while complaining about competitive fairness.
Turning to some actual numbers - this 2024 survey tells us that only ~15% of respondents said that their children participate in club sports or independent training (note that the categories are not exclusive). The same survey also says that ~10% of respondants think that their child can compete in professional sports, or be a national level team member. Finally, a similar 10% say that the "only the best players should receive time in games" is a fair policy at your child's age and level.
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Na...
I think the point of the article is to maybe highlight how large the gulf might be between an typical outsider (and looking at the numbers above... and reminding ourselves that only ~50% of American youth are involved in organized sports at all), someone who is somewhat "in the game", and those who are really playing it (that 10% from above).
If it were happening at an unprecedented level, I would totally understand the attention and such, but this is just painful to see.
The same can be applied to gender affirming care for trans youth, bathrooms, etc. It is always about the "may be hurt woman" than the actively being hurt real trans people.
Gosh I hate feeling like a second class citizen.
Literally no trans athletes winning anything. I think hacker news skews scientific so we can do the math, if say 1% of the athletes are trans we would expect them to win 1% of the medals in a fair contest. As it is, they don't even come anywhere close. There has not been a single olympic medal won by a trans athlete, so clearly they do not have some kind of magical advantage, in fact (and common sense would make this pretty obvious) they seem to have quite a statistical disadvantage.
There is considerable evidence that they aren't. But that's not really relevant, because you have to remember segregation in sport has never been about competitive fairness, it has always been about allowing those who are socially superior to avoid the embarrassment of having to compete in an environment where they might be defeated by their social inferiors.
It is why women were long banned from competitions, and then shortly after exclusion seemed to harsh for evolving attitudes, they were segregated from men. And it is why trans people are being excluded from competition now. It's why racial segregation in sport was a thing. When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual, not the real reason, so counterevidence is irrelevant.
Is your argument actually that women don't generally compete with men in sports because the sports don't want to embarrass the male athletes if they lose? If so, I suspect this is a bad faith argument, but if not, you can simply do a little searching to find that there is often quite a bit of difference between the performance of top tier male athletes and top tier female athletes. For example, no woman has ever run a 4 minute mile in competition and more than 2,000 men have and even about 30 high school boys have. I am sure you can find other examples.
Why did Lia Thomas go from being nowhere near winning in the male division to getting fifth in the women's?
When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual
If sports were not sex-segregated, most events would never be won by a woman. How is that a pretext?
The moralizing parts of the conclusion of this article rejects it's own evidence. There are multiple studies cited by the article where the population average of the trans women group statistically significantly exceeds that of the cis women group. The article concludes:
"The exclusion of trans individuals also insults the skill and athleticism of both cis and trans athletes. While sex differences do develop following puberty, many of the sex differences are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy. Finally, if it is found that trans individuals have advantages in certain athletic events or sports; in those cases, there will still be a question of whether this should be considered unfair, or accepted as another instance of naturally occurring variability seen in athletes already participating in these events."
Does it really insult the skill and athleticism of cis and trans athletes to exclude trans women from women's sports? I don't think it does, but the article could not help but claim that it does. Often in debates such as this one, there are multiple levels of sophistry that annoy me. Such as the sequence 1. there is no evidence that trans women have an advantage over cis women in sports (false. there is evidence) 2. if you believe that there is any evidence, you must be a bigot (well, obviously untrue, there is evidence).
Women's sports leagues often emerge due to the easy bifurcation of the population into two groups- the easiest fault line to judge this as is 1 group with the athletic benefits of natural testosterone, and 1 group without the athletic benefits of natural testosterone. People are free to make whatever sports leagues they want, and with freedom of association they can make whatever rules they want. I will just find it completely unsurprising that the women's divisions will be relatively "closed" and the men's (or more acurately the "open") divisions will include any person that has produced testosterone naturally or become a trans man (or most things in between). It's the easiest bifurcation that reduces questions of fairness. Weight classes in wrestling fall into a similar manner of thinking for me; even if it could be argued that the guy that barely couldn't make it into a lower weight class should be fighting within that class, you have to draw the line somewhere.
https://shows.acast.com/realscienceofsport/episodes/whytrans...
If you want to see men dressed as women, watch "This is the Army" (1943), an American wartime musical comedy film that features actor Ronald Regan, and a lot of musical numbers performed by men in drag.
The more we protect women rights in sports, the narrower our definition of a woman gets
By 2030 would Olympic Committee ask woman that gain muscles too faster then the average woman not to participate? To make it "fair for real woman"?
While men are allowed the strongest competition and their unique builds are celebrated, woman are constantly limited by our genetics, hormone levels and chromosomes.
"Can't stray too far from an average it aren't fair for woman" is itself not fair for woman