Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place
insidethegames.biz
insidethegames.biz
No one cares what pronouns an athlete uses, how they dress, what roles and behaviours society traditionally assigns/expects of them and how they respond to those traditions. They care entirely about biological advantages and disadvantages.
So the division is based on — again unsure of the terms here but — “sex” not on “gender”.
And no sport is trans exclusionary as far as I know: the person in question in this article would be welcomed everywhere to compete against other biological males, and any biological female would be welcome to compete against others of their sex whatever they identify as (so long as they haven’t taken testosterone). I’m not sure I understand why this has become an issue.
you might be hard-pressed to find two bodies each "exactly like" the other. The interesting questions here are not about exactly equal, but about equivalence classes of people, and in different contexts.
not to mention development that happens in the womb etc that’s non reversible. hormones won’t change your bone structure or the shape of your hips or a million other things
But that isn’t important, because even if it were false: Purely for the question of athletics, athletic performance trumps all else.
Medical doctors will still need to know about chromosomes for dealing with chromosomal disorders, and if you’ve had your gonads out you’re not going to get gonad cancer, but purely for gender-related athletics issues, the 80-20 principle applies: most of the “million” things your chromosomes do are the same for basically everyone (and thus the reason nobody is born a literal banana), then there’s the subset of chromosomal stuff which affects athletic performance, then the subset of that subset where the gender interacts with the athletic genes such that men and women with those genes perform differently, and in that subset of a subset the difference can be overwhelmed by externally supplied steroids.
Which is why steroids are banned.
Now, in the specific case in this article, transition happened well into adulthood, and the athlete says:
> Vanbellinghen, 27, whose qualifying efforts were disrupted by injury, pointed out that the retained benefit of taking steroids, even years earlier, is widely known.
> "So why is it still a question whether two decades, from puberty to the age of 35, with the hormonal system of a man also would give an advantage [in competing against women]?
Obviously this isn’t the same as the case of someone transitioning pre-puberty. But, as I say, it’s why some trans people want to transition pre-puberty.
If there is a way to level it out, that might be a solution, if it’s possible.
But this is true of lots of sports. Most recently, Simone Biles was punished by scoring judges for a gymnastic move that only she is able to perform, due to her height and musculature. "Genetic freaks" who train hard but still have an unalterable physical advantage tend to dominate any individual sport, to the detriment of their competitors - what makes Hubbard different?
Hubbard does, to some extend?
In Formula 1, Mercedes has dominated for the last 7 years or so. Is money their unfair advantage? Or is Hamilton just that good? It did make for a less attractive sport, if you already kind of know who will win.
I always found it odd that there are not, let's say height classes for high jump. It always seemed unfair to me that I had to lift my center of mass higher than others for the same performance.
There are lots of examples at the Olympic level, some of which can be found elsewhere in this thread. Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps are probably the most well-known recent cases - both dedicated athletes who also had some physical quirk which helped to ensure that they totally dominated their respective sport for the period that they were in their physical primes.
To be clear, the point is that nobody is "worried" about genetic outliers in mens' sports. If you were unlucky enough to be competing in a national Olympic swim team at the same time as peak-fitness Phelps, you were expected to suck it up and accept that you very likely had no chance of getting a gold medal. A great deal is made out of training and mentality, but at the end of the day, physicality is still a big silent factor in these competitions that the athletes simply have no control over.
Growing up under the influence of male genetics and hormones gives an individual a massive advantage in such a sport, that simply cannot be compensated for or against with just training or medical solutions. There's nothing that will take that edge away from such an individual because human intervention later in life can't entirely undo the course nature took when building that body.
The evidence is in the performance which falls squarely in line with male performance [0].
And to everyone thinking of a parallel with motorsports and whatnot, there is none. Those sports rely on technology developed by humans so anything is entirely reproducible and reversible. Nature on the other hand still does things that we don't understand, can't reproduce, or can't fully compensate for. We have no way to change the gender with all the associated factors so we focus on the critical and obvious ones like physical look and hormonal balance, which get a person 95% there. But when it comes to peak performance the 5% makes a difference and it's clearly an unfair one to every other participant.
I don't see the clear difference. In what qualitative sense does Hubbard's genetic advantage differ from the genetic advantage of any athlete at the top of their sport? There are many competitions which are dominated by one individual, regardless of the training or medical help which every other competitor can afford. Should those people be excluded from competing for reasons of fairness?
The article seems to make clear that while she is in the top 10, she's not in the top 3 and is in no way a favorite to win. So I'm not sure what that graph is supposed to be showing.
Two women in this weight class have scored a 300+ in competition while Hubbard's best is a 285 from 2019.
You wouldn't let an adult compete in a junior competition because they feel young at heart. You wouldn't let someone compete while on performance enhancing drugs just because they needed them. You would ban athletes who who are repeatedly caught using steroids because it's well known they provide an unfair advantage even years later. And that absolutely pales in comparison to having a trained male body in a women's weightlifting competition.
Also, comparing a trans woman to someone who "feels young at heart" is a false equivalence, and an offensive one. One is an identity, the other is not.
You decided let your personal sensibilities get in the way of understanding my arguments that are much stronger than anything you presented. Sports aren't about gender identity but about sex. As entitled as any individual is to decide on a body that reflects their identity, their biological sex is still very much unchanged. And so are the advantages years of being a male provide.
As you can see from actual athletes, this situation is offensive for those women who after a lifetime of training and hard work see themselves competing against effectively a biological male body with a massive advantage that dwarfs even years of performance enhancing drugs would give.
And to your last point, saying gender identity is OK, age identity is not [1], and that it's OK to identify as a different gender or even no gender at all but anything else is not acceptable is grossly hypocritical and might be as ignorant as people were 50 years ago about gender related topics. Time will tell. I honestly do not feel like my age, and do not identify with that number but rather with a much younger age for many of the reasons you can read in the article linked. This being said, even if the law allowed me to change the number either way, I would not consider this to be a valid differentiator for sports.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27603055
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/08/dutch-man-69-s...
How, exactly?
> and an offensive one.
Proof?
> One is an identity, the other is not.
And then we're back to the very first comment, "sex not gender": Sports are categorised into male and female by biology, not identity.
The definition of fairness is difficult when dealing with even single genetic features.
Female sports will continue to be dominated by biological males if we continue to let this happen.
We should remember that most cis women cannot compete at an Olympic level anyways. That's the point I'm trying to make in this thread - physical outliers are already responsible for lots of non-competitions at the top level of many sports.
Every athlete with a physical advantage precludes some other athlete from the top of the competition. If the "point" of womens' leagues is to provide a level playing field for cis women, then maybe we should be more open to introducing level playing fields more generally - because there are large parts of the population that cannot win in the system we already have, either. Otherwise, the "point" of womens' leagues is just to provide a space for women to compete, and trans women should be allowed in those spaces.
The point of male/female separation is to protect biological female from the genetic advantages of biological male, not from genetic outliers.
This is patently false. In sports such as archery (which is an Olympic sport), where strength does not provide an advantage, men and women do compete together. So it's clearly not about providing a "space" for women to compete.
And in weightlifting, the subject at hand, all competitors are on their own, they might never be in the same room as each other. So again, what is this "space for women to compete"? It's clearly about the physical advantages of the sex, and I can't believe we're even having this discussion.
Can one change their mind about whether they are a man or a woman whenever they want?
Which is the third party who should have the right to judge if you are a man or a woman?
Can a male self identify as a female when they wish and enter a women competition?
That non-trans women have no fucking chance of being champions in pretty much any sports at all anymore, obviously. You're bending over backwards to be "fair" to a tiny minority, and not giving a shit that in order to do that you're being as utterly unfair as one could possibly be to half of humanity. The much eaasier solution, if you want people born as males to hold all the records, is to just simply abolish womens' sports altogether.
Honestly, this question is so horrendously disingenious that I'm shocked you even had the gall to ask it.
This graph would suggest she does:
then there is robert förstemann, a track cyclist who might suffer from a myostatin deficincy (a hormone that restricts muscle growth).
The article suggests that she's top 10, but not top 3 in the world. She almost certainly won't win, but might get a medal (since 2 of the 3 best lifter in this category won't be competing in the Olympics for various reasons).
(but the gap is in climbing seems to be smaller)
The applicability of higher grip strength to success in climbing is obvious, I hope.
If anything, going by biology is more inclusive because it allows both trans-women and trans-men to compete fairly against others that share their biological sex, as long as they postpone treatments until their athletic career is over. If we go by this evolving combination of gender identity and hormone level checks, pre-treatment trans-women aren't allowed in any category, post-treatment trans-women have a massive advantage over biologically female bodies, pre-treatment trans-men cannot compete at all and post-treatment trans-men are still at an extreme disadvantage.
for example, in American English, the trans community has centered on a separation between sex and gender
In commonwealth English, that specific separation in the lexicon hasn't reached consensus even within the trans community, let alone in a broader colloquialism from people wanting to understand and people actively resisting any form of trans acceptance
so its actually really impossible to determine if there is an educational moment possible if someone is coming across as trans exclusionary when using sex/gender interchangeably or if they are irreconcilable, especially as people pile on to being mad at that person (see for example JK Rowling’s tweets. nobody assumed it was an educational moment while its not even clear that the UK has sex/gender separation concept)
So far it doesn't seem people even notice this is going on, that the inclusive communities are evolving terminology slightly differently! Lets check back in 5 years!
TL;DR is that Maya was (apparently) fired for the first opinion, lost a first court case over it because being gender critical is not protected under UK, and won the appeal because it was after all.
Some of the more extreme trans activists seem to want to pretend that these clusters don't exist, which puts them at odds with reality.
Other seem to demand that the clusters shouldn't matter, which I find rather optimistic since they're relevant for reproduction.
Trans rights are a noble goal, but some of the statements made by trans activists are a bit out there.
Remember the story a few years ago about the gay couple where one of them was a transgender man and gave birth to their child? I'm sure similar situations do sometimes arise with transgender women.
I feel that the trans community has largely been forced into defending "trans women are women" (TWAW), even if it has holes as a philosophical argument, because they need to fight the transphobic "trans women are men" rhetoric and downstream policy decisions. How can someone live as a woman without constant risk of being outed? They need an "F" on their passport and to use the women's toilets, etc. without having a constant risk of being "caught", because that ends badly.
I think you're correct in your second statement. This whole area seems very polarising. The edge case of women's sports is the obvious situation where a principle of 'Live and let live' doesn't work.
No, that's what they call themselves. You can see plenty of people using that label on twitter.
Polarize_d_, in that people have gone out of their way to polarize it. The last major legal advance was in 2004, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Recognition_Act_2004 with broad support, and it's only in very recent years that this backlash has sprung up.
That's an interesting statement from the POV of falsifiability. Is there an experiment we could theoretically perform to find out if a person who's stating that he's "gender critical" really wants to eradicate all trans people?
In other words, anti-trans (or GC) beliefs occupy much the same position in law as anti-gay Christian beliefs. You can /believe/ them all you like & can’t be sacked for that belief, but if you express those beliefs in the workplace you’ve just created a hostile environment for other employees & your employer can simply fire you (after going through the appropriate disciplinary procedures where required by law) due to your breach of the Equality Act, under which being trans (specifically in law: gender reassignment) carries protected status in the same way that being a different skin colour or sexuality does.
On the other side of the coin, I recognise that the people I work with will surely have some deeply-held beliefs about the wrongness of some aspects of my life. That's inevitable when you have some minimum diversity of viewpoints, and of course "reasonable people may differ" on many of those topics. I don't think I have the right to insist they supress these beliefs, as long as they're not trying to harm me with them. (Assuming that just having a belief isn't harmful.)
The argument from the trans community would be that misgendering and encouraging other employees to misgender them(which will happen if the belief is propaganda-ised) will cause significant emotional harm, risk mental health, cause problems in fulfilling job etc.. I'm not sure about how true this would be, as I'm in the closet and I'm a bit indifferent about what other people think, but can imagine it being very difficult for others.
Not in terms of the Equality Act. You can be as critical as you like in private, or outside the workplace as I understand things.
But if you voice those criticisms directly to someone in the protected class in the workplace, then you’ve crossed the line.
So, eg, telling a gay person to their face that you oppose gay marriage & all gay people are going to hell might be your strongly held philosophical (or religious in this case) belief, but the act of voicing it to the individual in the protected class breaks your employers obligations under the Equality Act in the UK & they would be entitled to fire you for it. The same goes for persistently mis-gendering a trans person (quite apart from it being extremely rude of course!) as gender re-assignment forms a protected class in law.
(Obviously, this is as I understand things & not the opinion of a legal expert in these matters.)
sports has everything to do with sex and nothing
to do with gender
I wonder how this would apply in sports that don't typically have weight classes, like track & field. I imagine you'd start seeing athletes in pretty much every sport cutting weight like in boxing and wrestling, which I don't think is a healthy outcome.
Are we at a level of biological science yet to create reliable divisions/classes on anything more sophisticated? And what about non-professional sports in schools?
There's actually a campaign in wheelchair tennis to allow players who don't actually need a wheelchair to be allowed to compete. https://www.theaccessibleplanet.com/able-bodied-playing-whee...
I've wondered about this - it's an interesting idea. Then the sport is just "Wheelchair tennis" and anyone can try.
Perhaps the more fundamental question — once again leaning on apparently somewhat flimsy terminology — would be: is biological sex something worthy of celebration and note? Half of our species is born a certain way, whatever we call it. Is that grouping to be given certain opportunities to demonstrate their talents that would not be afforded them on a level playing field?
So presumably you include other factors — but then you are simply dividing by ability. You could conceivably attempt to divide by innate ability (theoretically allowing competitors to compete against one another based on nurture, not nature) but that would be impossible to do fairly or in a way that would make sense to audiences.
we're at HN - run PCA and clustering on the totality of athletes' results and biological data for the last N decades with end result being the groups based on identified parameters similar to boxing/wrestling weight groups.
>that would make sense to audiences.
we're already in situation which is harder and harder to make sense. Putting it on the firm basis of scientific analysis is the only way to move forward which would avoid all the pitfalls we're going to hit otherwise.
Also, if trans women are supposed to go to women competition, does it mean that trans men are supposed to go to men competition? Wouldn't that mean pretty much condemning them to having no chance of winning from the start in the most sports where sheer mass, power, etc. play major role?
Anyway, if we don't put it on the firm scientific basis today, i can see how tomorrow a number of male athletes form China and Russia would suddenly start to feel like they are women, may be would take some hormones to satisfy some doubts/requirements (giving the doping already going on i don't see any obstacles here), and that will be the end of female sports.
While I understand the sentiment, but I think we need to speak of skill vs physical factors. The division of weightlifters in weight classes is to deal with the latter rather than the former.
Similarly - WADA does this already by banning doping. PEDs don't make you a high-skill athlete, they enhance physical capabilities (stronger, faster recovery etc).
Laurel Hubbard is in an unfortunately unique position, where she's at a natural advantage due to higher testosterone levels earlier in life.
It might be impossible to end up with a fair division, but I don't think "no division" is a good answer.
Is it fun to watch a bunch of length skiers that all have a similar rare medical conditions that enables an endurance and oxygen uptake that is way beyond what is possible for the wast majority of the population? Dividing by genetics seems as a good option, but would that then go against the spirit of the sport?
Sex is simply just a bunch of common genetic traits, but they are not the only traits that matters in sport. There are a long list of them, especially in extreme strength or endurance sports.
Sports scientists do not agree
Tweets are a dreadful way to read something like this, which would be easier to suggest in a blog post or paper. But I suppose Twitter gives people the right to respond, so swings-and-roundabouts.
Edit: now I'm taking weight!
Ross Tucker made a point about safety, but also about fairness, about which he said (paraphrasing) that females would disappear completely from mixed sex sports, even with weight categories. His point about "fairness" categories is more like "how would that even work?"
One of the advantages of weightlifting (at least for a middle aged cisgendered male) is that it increases testosterone production.
Significantly lowered levels can have some really bad outcomes as one age, ie killing energy levels, libido, physical strength etc.
I've been mainly focusing on my squats in my garage gym (full Olympic barbell/bench/rack with spotter bars/extra Olympic EzyCurl bar) setup, but looking at my history I've let the big deadlift slip - 14 days since last session.
So I took the 20 second trip to the gym last night to start fixing that, warmed up with squats and then just deadlifts - and can definitely feel the energy today (on top of the fatigue!).
I've been struggling with energy lately due to a lot of change and stress, so hopefully a renewed focus on the deadlift will be helpful. Cheers.
You crucially missed an important variable which competitive sports of any kind fully hinge upon: skeletal muscle density… which hugely differs across biological sexes.
In other sports, there’s a rating system that effectively places people with competitors at their level (ELO in chess, tennis rankings)
Either would work in any sport, except for the fact that huge classes of people wouldn’t ever be represented at top level. Prime examples are women and people with disabilities.
In para-athletics, they try to solve that with an elaborate classification system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Para-athletics_classification)
Problem is that training can sometimes move you between categories. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T42_(classification) has “impaired muscle power or impaired range of movement” as criteria. Those can get better with training.
For women, it seems easier, but even ignoring transgenders, there’s various genetic rarities such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46,XX/46,XY that can put women at an advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foekje_Dillema) that we may or may not choose to call unfair (we don’t think it’s unfair for men over six feet to compete in basketball, though, even though that’s largely genetic)
No one wants to watch a competition to see who is the "best of people we think are ranked 100-200" since it is an arbitrary grouping. They want to see people compete to be the best woman or man in the world.
Dividing based on weight makes sense for some sports since it is an added constraint that people compete to optimize their strength against. But dividing based on strength just moves the competition from the actual competition, into the ranking process.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24886927/
https://danielkiikka.com/performance/birth-month-athletic-pe...
These are things for which there are also rather persistent differences in distribution between males and females.
I heard about it in this podcast (about 7:25) https://philosophybites.com/2019/05/kathleen-stock-on-what-i...
https://quillette.com/2019/04/11/ignoring-differences-betwee...
Intersex athletes exist too and are not as rare as you may imagine.
Here's a more notable recent example of the controversy of delineating by sex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya
Likely there were always intersex athletes who had advantages, but only the relatively recent anti doping and medical examinations would reveal them.
Just look at these female world records compared to 13-15 year old high school boys: https://boysvswomen.com/#/world-record
Hubbard is also 43 years old. There is no precedent for any human female being competitive in this sport at this age, not even the most freakishly talented female weightlifters in history, not even the Soviet drug cheats.
Kuinini Manumua, the Tongan woman who would have been given this place if not for Hubbard, is 21 years old.
Feagaiga Stowers, who placed second behind Hubbard in the Pacific Games in her native Samoa in 2018, is 20 years old.
This problem cannot be solved or even properly discussed without properly acknowledging biological reality.
This disparity is why women fought so hard for sex-based separation in the first place. I cannot understand why we would roll back those protections by considering “gender” equivalent to sex. It can only hurt women.
Why have leagues for women in basketball but not "men under 6ft tall"?
Is it to encourage girls and women to be physically active for a health life? If so, so we need competition for that? (I'd say no -- boys and men who aren't eite talent are also pushed out by the focus on competition)
Now if people like women sports due to the style of play in WNBA or Women's soccer or whatever, that's great; just make the rules and marketing and such to promote that style, and women will tend to be the participants.
I would. Then it would be more about skill than strength and height, like football.
And if 10 cm categories are too wide they can be adjusted to 5 cm.
I would actually change the rules in olympic basketball to have 1 player from each category :)
Average is at 200 cm compared to 175 cm in general adult male US population:)
Compare this to football: http://www.twolfanger.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Average-...
The argument presented was that height mattered more than skill. If that were true, the tallest players would also be the best, no? Instead, very clearly, the best players are usually _not_ the tallest, sometimes not even close.
It doesn't mean that skill doesn't matter at all.
Sorry, in what way is that clear? The best players aren't the tallest, so isn't it clear that your statement is false?
The attribute that defines success is skill, not height, which is evidenced by a look at the most successful NBA players.
You're saying "Because NBA players are taller than average, tall = success", which is just not really true.
In fact it's pretty obvious there would be a tipping point because extreme height is inversely correlated with health and mobility.
In similar fashion weight matters more than skill in boxing that's why we have weight categories. 120 kg boxer will win over 80 kg boxer 90% of the time or more assuming basic competency. But it doesn't mean that the most obese person in the world would be the best boxer.
And the correlation is even more obvious with basketball than with boxing which you can see comparing the height distribution in basketball with height distribution in adult male population [1]. Average for basketball is higher than 97th percentile for general population. That's not an accident :)
If skill is more important than height where are the 160 cm basketball players? None of them got enough skill?
In soccer 2 players widely recognized as the best in last decade are 170 and 187 cm. Different sides of the general height average.
In basketball this histogram for ALL professional players STARTS at the general average (5'9).
[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2010/compendia/...
If your argument is "Height of an NBA player is the most significant factor in determining their success", that statement is also incorrect.
> In similar fashion weight matters more than skill in boxing that's why we have weight categories
A 220 lb boxer is more capable of knocking out a 140 lb boxer, yes. A 6'10 basketball player is not more capable of outperforming a 6'3 basketball player. Also using single-player sports as a comparison to team sports is a waste of time and energy.
Skill is the determining factor. Not height.
I'll say, it really really seems like you don't know about/watch/care about _actual_ professional basketball. In which case, maybe you shouldn't just guess your way through a conversation about professional basketball?
Based on my observations, on offense (and in a team situation), skill trumps height.
On defense, there's no way a much shorter player can reliably guard a taller player. And definitely not one on one. I've watched many one on one clips and thought 'wow size is everything.'
Sure, Steph Curry is probably the most skilled player in the league. But do you think a team with five Steph Currys can beat a team with, say, five Paul Georges? I'm not so sure.
> there's no way a much shorter player can reliably guard a taller player.
Just flatout false. Clint Capela isn't the tallest center in the NBA but is an absolutely dominant defensive player. It's not about guarding all five players on the other team, it's about winning your matchup and providing help. In both scenarios, height isn't the most important thing at all. Jrue Holiday is also an elite defender but isn't very tall at all.
Height is a red herring; sometimes height can be used as a proxy in place of skill. The thing about elite levels of play, is that the skill level is so high that you can't really get away with lacking skill.
> Sure, Steph Curry is probably the most skilled player in the league. But do you think a team with five Steph Currys can beat a team with, say, five Paul Georges? I'm not so sure.
Steph's ability to set picks and create mismatches isn't nearly as good as his ability to use picks and exploit mismatches. Steph's playstyle is enabled by a totally different archetype of player. PG is a more "complete" offensive and defensive player.
If you want a giant on your team, you'd need to balance him out by recruiting an exceptionally talented shorter guy.
So... like the WNBA?
It allows more people to compete in sport.
However, it presents a huge problem for women's athletics, particularly in sports where strength differences are a large determiner of performance differences. If, as it is said in some circles, a full .5% of the human population is transgender, we are going to continue to see huge increases in openly transgender people competing in sport. In sports where long term exposure to male hormones enhance performance, it's hard to see how life-long XX bodies will be able to compete. Which seems like a bad outcome since the whole point of the existence of women's sport is to allow women to have space to compete without facing insurmountable built-in disadvantages.
It may take a couple more decades but I don't see a stable equilibrium where MTF athletes are competing with cis-women in high level sport, especially if they made their transition during adulthood.
I would be fascinated to hear about different models for how this plays out. I've read the occasional news article about it but I'm not really very familiar with the thinking on the other side of this issue, particularly when it comes to the physical advantages trans women have over cis women in sport.
Instead of saying trans people are 100% identical to the gender they identify as, they'll be seen as something different. E.g., In Thailand there's the concept of kathoey (westerners refer to them as ladyboys). The Indian subcontinent and culturally related areas have hijra. They're not seen as the same as women, but they're not seen as men either. They're something else, and it's okay.
I've also seen a lot of westerners trying to push their ideas of gender globally and getting enraged when it doesn't fit. Some people get enraged when, for example, Thai kathoey aren't simply referred to as women, but for a lot of those people in Thailand, they don't see themselves as identical to women. So while trying to stop people from misgendering people, they overstep and misgender people who weren't being misgendered.
Gender dysphoria is oftentimes treated via transitioning in some fashion. Having groupthink on online spaces doesn't alleviate symptoms.
I've never heard anyone except trans activists talking about the specifics of someone's trans-ness in an open setting. Certainly not something someone who's just trying to go about their day would even care about, let alone making a point that "hey by the way you're not biologically a woman, peace".
It's such a weird argument to me. Then again, I'm a dirty "transmedicalist" as labelled by the twitter trans community, so what do I know.
This is really not a good analogy. An identity-linked issue like this would be closer to someone not being included into a certain in-group.
For example an African-American who grows up in a predominantly caucasian could be called "not black" or "not black enough" by someone trying to hurt them based on the way they speak or act differently.
You can imagine that this would be alleviated by people not putting up arbitrary rules on who "can be called black".
So no, I disagree that it has any semblance to the "not black enough" argument.
Is it far-fetched to say that the severity of negative emotional and mental effects on a person depends on how accepting the culture is of those who do not fit into the majority?
Having gender dysphoria isn't a thing to be ashamed of, just any other mental health condition is not something to be ashamed of. Saying "you're a biological woman sis" is like saying "we're just going to act like you don't have it because it's shameful".
It doesn't make any sense from me, nor does it make sense to most of the trans individuals I follow. It seems, yet again, to be the allies that cause the most misinformation (just like we faced with the gay marriage debates).
This then reduces womanhood to a state of mind, rather than any physical and/or chemical criteria, which I think is wrong. Why should natural born women have their identity diluted?
It also seemingly reinforces the 'two genders' claim by categorising trans people as one or the other.
Like I said at the top, I am a bit confused by it all.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%...
> you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with
I have no problem with believing that some people aren't the gender they physically represent. But, in my mind, arriving to the conclusion that 'I don't identify as a male, therefore I must be female' isn't right.
> And why am I a woman? Because I'm a woman
Again, they don't actually know that they're a woman. They know they're not male, for sure, and I'm fully on board with that. But insisting that they're female... I'm not sure. Is 'trans woman' not sufficient?
Benjamin Boyce has a YT channel that deals with some of this stuff that I watch occasionally to try help understand.
I think for trans women, it isn't so much a conclusion following from not identifying as male as it is simply 'I identify as female', but this runs into the same issue that you brought up in your first comment of not actually knowing what being female is. But then again, doesn't knowing they're not male imply they know what being male is despite not being male? I think it's just too philosophical of a point for most trans people to concern themselves with when they're dealing with who knows how many other issues.
I recommend either reading or watching more stories about trans people's personal experiences if you want to get a better sense as to why people feel that way, as different people probably have different reasons. I don't personally have any recommendations (the quote I mentioned earlier was a small comment from a video on a completely unrelated topic), but thanks for the recommendation for Benjamin, I'll check him out!
Do you support applying that same logic to transracialism? E.g. white woman identifying as a black woman?
If it's purely a racial/ethnic kind of thing that's about your genetic heritage, I agree it doesn't make sense to apply the same concept. It's like the distinction between sex and gender I mentioned above, trans people identify as a specific gender regardless of their sex, and I think people can identify with a specific culture regardless of their race/ethnicity. To better complete the analogy, I could definitely imagine a white person growing up in Japan their whole life and feeling a general unease about the mismatch between their cultural identity (Japanese) and their race/ethnicity (white), and in cases where that unease is severe enough, potentially being willing to go through surgery to better reflect their identity. Dysphoria over racial/cultural mismatch (if it even exists, idk) seems much less common than gender dysphoria, but I don't see why you wouldn't apply the same logic to both.
It's not safe to say in liberal workplaces anymore, but this dynamic of transwomen activists forcing their way into women's spaces is creating exactly the same dynamic as men dominating women in other areas of life. As a woman, I'm tired of it. The latest example from my life: At my company all the women's groups are being rebranded to "gender minorities" groups to accommodate the wishes of a few activists deploying the usual bully tactics. If you disagree at all, you are labeled a TERF and they try to get you fired. So who, exactly, is creating the hostile workplace?
I first encountered this because I was puzzled as to why so many trans people seemed to be renforcing gender roles instead of trying to abolish them. The answer is that gender roles matter a lot to them, and fitting in matters a lot to them too. That's why I think the "third gender" solution would be really unsatisfying for most (or at least a part).
The argument that competing in Super-Heavy weight lifting (the class that Laurel competes in) is following a general western stereotype of cis women is laughable at best. I'd argue that by standards from the last 100 years it's almost as far from it as a sport can be.
But once nobody cares anymore and nobody is bothered by the existence of trans people, I wonder if that's when it'll settle into a separate gender. Things like the issue in this topic with imbalance in sports and other areas might eventually result in another change in social structures outside of a strictly binary system.
Now that it's being normalized that you don't have to be in either of those groups or even try to be anything like them, kids a generation from now might grow up with a different standard. Plus, honestly, despite what people try to say, kids put things into distinct groups. With a growing presence of trans people in media, I do wonder whether kids will grow up with the idea that "this is fine, but different." The trans people simply being the male/female gender they identify as is a social thing that we're taught to accept, which could very well change because the next generation doesn't think of it that way anymore.
See also: America's formerly strict ideas of race. Not long ago, you were white, black, or asian and society decided what you were. Now we accept that there are in betweens and people outside those labels, and none of them are bad identities to have.
"In the Diné language, there are at least six genders: Asdzáán (woman), Hastiin (male), Náhleeh (feminine-man), Dilbaa (masculine-woman), Nádleeh Asdzaa (lesbian), ‘Nádleeh Hastii (gay man). All come from the Diné creation story, in which asdzáán and hastiin, a cisgender married couple, were not getting along and separated. When that happened, dilbaa and náhleeh emerged from hiding and were seen as a special group that could perform the duties of both women and men, stepping into the vacated partner roles. They were accepted by asdzáán and hastiin, who realized their survival depended on them."
https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.2/indigenous-affairs-why-are-d...
Some "male" graves (buried with weapons, armour, etc) have female skeletons in them. And some "female" graves (pots, jewellery, broaches) have male skeletons in them. This is not disputed by anyone, the skeletal and DNA analysis is unequivocal.
But all the writing we have from the period only mentions standard sex/gender roles (all warriors are "he", all primary care givers are "she", there's no mention of homosexuality, etc).
However, all the written evidence we have is from christian sources, and as we know, christianity (especially catholic christianity) has been pretty pro-patriarchy since the start. So while there's no evidence for it, one explanation is that the original pagan Saxon culture had different ideas about gender and sexuality, but this got edited out by the monks transcribing the old pagan sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathoey#Miss_Tiffany's_Univers...
Genes for height, genes for fast twitch muscles, testosterone, etc… aren’t the same for different groups. Some of these disadvantages are just as insurmountable.
Many sports are closed to poor people. Equestrian, sailing, etc… aren’t sports for the poor.
Richer countries often have better technology (see those Nike shoes and the swimsuits that were banned).
We are just in the land of competing interests.
To be completely clear, in some sports there appears to be a moderate risk that elite cis-women will be completely unable to compete with elite trans-women. This is going to be visible and apparent. I don't think this will be acceptable to the most people, and they will likely look to change the system.
Nit-picking your other points: there are not really any popular rich-people-only sports any more, except perhaps auto racing. I don't think broader society is all that interested in the egalitarian properties of yacht sailing. R.e. the clothing technology: yes, and those things were banned because of the advantage they conferred. That's exactly what I'm talking about here.
I can assure you, from personal experience, that rowing, cycling, tennis, and lacrosse are overwhelmingly wealthy sports. You don’t have to pass a credit check to play them, but they are absolutely a class apart (both economically and racially) versus sports like baseball and basketball.
Is basketball a conspiracy against short people? Weightlifting for tall people? Are combat sports full of weight-ist people who won't allow a heavyweight pound a welterweight? Is football the least ideological sport because it allows a greater variety for BMI and height?
Let us not bury the glaringly obvious fact that sex is a category with one of the strongest, if not the strongest, explanatory power for performance across almost the entirety of athletic endeavors in existence.
Height is a huge advantage in basketball. The average height of an NBA player is over 6’5”. Height is mostly genetic except for malnutrition. Different populations have different average heights.
The optimal build for a weightlifter is to have short arms and legs and to have the two parts be of equal length. That is mostly genetic. Of course different population groups have differences here as well.
Weight is an advantage in combat sports both because you can dish out more and because you can absorb more punishment. I suspect that high bone density is advantageous and is mostly genetic. Different populations have different bone densities.
No one is denying that sex has explanatory power. The point is that many other things have explanatory power as well and that choosing which categories to consider is ideological.
Why have separate sports for sex? Why have separate weight classes? Why have a minimum age requirement for gymnasts? Why not allow professionals until 1992?
Why not have separate height classes for basketball? Why not have separate weight classes for football?
No need to complicate; if we didn't have sex segregated sports, for almost all sports (save for maybe open ocean swimming), we couldn't have any women competing at all[1]. In fact there are "battle of sexes" type exhibition matches that demonstrate the rough placement eg Braasch vs. the Williams sisters.
[1] To expand this statement because I know some people will get offended; this doesn't mean men are better at sports than women. It says, at the tail end of distributions, where most of the professional sports are played, tail end of men's distribution will be better than tail end of women's, leaving no opportunity for women to compete if distributions are intermixed.
So unless you have hard statistics to back up these claims or are an expert in one of these fields, I would go with the experts' decision to sex segregate their leagues because they might know a few things or two we won't necessarily consider.
Just from my amateur interest; for outdoors archery, the draw strength matters a lot for accuracy, in curling likewise drive and sweeping strength make a difference.
Skiing is expensive for most people, but having grown up in a mountainous area, most kids could and did go skiing for very cheap.
Trans women have been able to compete for years in Olympic level sport, and they haven't wiped the floor with cis women. I fail to see evidence of the problem - I see a lot more evidence of it being a culture war and TERF talking point.
It also doesn't really line up with the fact that we fawn over genetic quirks that let Michael Phelps dominate his sport. If we think that certain sorts of genetic quirks are unfair in women's sport, why do we allow them in men's?
I appreciate that you’ve said this so concisely and clearly. The Olympics are, overwhelmingly, a show of extraordinary human abilities. Singling out transwomen for scrutiny and prejudice amounts to special pleading.
We can’t change anything about how others are; we can only better ourselves. Telling transwomen that they can’t perform athletic excellence on their own terms is myopic and inconsistent with our own praise for factors outside of our control. Worry less about them, and more about yourself.
to nail this point home: if you are training to ride a bike and you’re the best in the world at it and after that someone comes along with an electric bike and wants to “compete” with you you’re gonna have a problem. nothing wrong if everyone has an electric one and the sport involves electric bikes. something is wrong if someone brings an electric bike and claims the bike is the same as the others.
We are not arguing the virtues of athleticism I don't understand why you wrote that.
Yours is a non-argument.
These are not the same thing. Michael Phelps dominated the sport as a whole, males and females. A genetic quirk to be the best of the world vs a genetic quirk to be a big fish in a small pond (with all respect to females powerlifters, but males just have better records) is not the same at all.
I think a better comparison is one made in the article, to steroids. Steroids are just testosterone after all. Imagine someone put steroids in the food of a powerlifter for 20 years (I'm using this metaphor because I don't want to insinuate that the powerlifter did it on purpose). Do you think it would be fair to let them compete? Stopping them from competing is unfair to them, but allowing them is unfair to all other powerlifters.
If I’m a 240lb judoka, it would be unfair for me to compete in the 160lb weight class just because I feel thin on the inside.
Second of all, there are physical changes from hormone replacement therapy. associated with transitioning. This is absolutely not "240lb judoka feeling thin on the inside" and not absurdly cut and dry like you suggest.
These drugs do not "erase" the biological reality of sex differences.
This has always been a problem, but one where all but the sports most extremely affected, like e.g. weightlifting with weight classes, have pretended it is not.
In powerlifting there additionally are "tested" and "untested" federations, where it's an open secret that the untested federations are full of steroids.
The point being that one can keep pretending these differences don't exist and agonise over the effect trans people may have, or you can introduce class systems that equaliser by physical characteristics irrespective of sex and gender.
Be prepared to see a lot of dropouts/boycotts by various nations in the Olympics. Eastern nations are not going to stand by silently. Some will shrug and directly enlist straight men in Women's events.
In fact, the limit for testosterone is significantly lower than for cis women, being a significant disadvantage for trans athletes, which is why in all the decades trans athletes have been allowed, you haven't seen any.
Cis women with higher levels of testosterone, e.g. caster semenya, are already dominating the olympics, having natural hormone levels that'd be an immediate disqualification for any trans athlete.
This is also a strategy that has been used for doping, where athletes in their teens get pumped full of steroids, then go clean for some years and are suddenly very competitive in the 'clean' divisions.
The weightlifting rules allows trans athletes to have testosterone levels of 10nmol/L. Some sports are 5nmol/L.
Normal range for men is 9-31nmol/L
Women range from 0.9-2.5nmol/L
Even these guys (link below) who argue that the limits are arbitrary then go on to point to study in which 11 of 234 female athletes had T levels of 8nmol/L and 32 had 2.6nmol/L. 74 of 446 male athletes had 8.4nmol/L.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/mar/20/testosterone-l...
So pretty much every genuinely trans athlete will have a disadvantage compared to cis female athletes.
In fact, even pre transition, my levels were lower than those of 11 of 234 cis female athletes, so I never got any of the "benefits" testosterone supposedly has.
None of your statistics are an argument for banning or restricting trans athletes.
We're discussing literally the first trans woman to compete at the Olympics. Obviously going from 0 to 1 is a huge increase in percentage terms, but there's no evidence that it's going to continue to the point where women's sports are 'destabilised'.
A girl who's case is heading up to U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit wrote a post on USAToday a month ago before USAToday edited her post without her permission and made changes to it:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/05/22/transgende...
She did an interview last week:
My proposal would clearly suck for MTF athletes. They'd be forced to either drop from competitions, or compete in the men's league. An MTF athlete competing in a men's league is likely to experience disphoria. It will also probably attract people saying "Look they are still a man, they are even in the mens league!". Both of these would be very hard to handle for MTF athletes. Probably causing many of them to drop from professional competition.
I hope this would be addressed partially by not having a "mens league" but an "open league" and a "womens league".
But otherwise, I think this is acceptable fallout to keep athletic competition fair. Yes, this policy will harm MTF athletes, and that is simply unfair. But the alternate policy is even more unfair. It might not harm individual MTF athletes, but it harms the acceptance of trans people in wider society a lot. Moreover, it harms athletes in general a lot.
In the end, I feel the following harsh sentiment. If you are truly MTF, then transitioning is probably more important than keeping your profession. It really sucks to force people to give up their profession when they are already going through a tough time. But I don't see any other way.
Of course it is possible that we collectively decide that it's ok that cis women have no chance of winning the Olympic weightlifting gold ever again. That seems like a bad outcome to me, but I am only a single voice. If the relevant stakeholders are ok with that it won't be a great tragedy to me that my opinion is ignored. But, for example, my wife had a very negative reaction when I posed that scenario to her. It seems to me like as the implication of current policy becomes more clear, more folks are going to want to change the policy.
That is not what the research I have seen shows. And the incident being discussed in the story we are commenting on seems to put the lie to this notion.
Whilst there are indeed cases of trans athletes with lower testosterone, that doesn't cover all cases. And it is the remaining cases that matter. Don't underestimate the damage this is doing. I visit 9gag quite often. The population there is not trans positive (and generally intollerant). Memes against trans people have become a lot more prevalent there. It is galvanizing a lot of simmering sentiment against trans people.
And the scary thing is, on this specific issue of MTF athletes, their argument doesn't immediately fall apart. That is not the kind of foothold we should want for them.
Actually, AFAIK some (many? the majority? almost all? who knows...) of what we think of as "mens leagues" are already "open leagues". Can't recall if it was our national football league (Finland's Valioliiga), or the UEFA or FIFA (maybe all of them?) that simply doesn't have a rule "the Valioliiga / UEFA Champions League / Euro Cup / FIFA World Cup is only for men". So in theory women could compete there, too... They just don't.
Anyone who's done some semi serious lifting and then gone on a long break to return will know that progress is much faster the Nth time around.
This explains why those who have taken steroids will have a life long advantage:
Eg https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190125084106.h...
I also understand that the male puberty imprints into the muscle development for life.
As such, two opinionated observations:
1) Once you've done steroids you should be banned from high level competitions for life, not just 4 years or what.
2) Allowing someone who has experienced and lifted weights through and after male puberty to compete against those who have not is grossly unfair to cisgendered female lifters. See point 1.
1. Country-wide doping systems that currently exist in weightlifting. Punishing an individual lifter does little to disincentivize doping at a larger scope. A country's sports organization can just take on the next Olympic hopeful (or buy another country's). Alternatively whole countries' participation can be banned, punishing clean athletes.
2. WADA testing is largely inconsistent across the world. You can take a look at the doping reports [here](https://www.iwf.net/anti-doping/statistics/) and compare e.g. Iranian athletes to others.
3. "Steroids" is a big bucket. Weightlifting even now has devolved into a race to design the best undetectable compound.
The IWF is already in trouble with the IOC for so many positive tests - I'm really curious to see how things develop and whether weightlifting ends up splitting into tested/untested federations like powerlifting.
I'll read up on your resources - and yes, different rules across regions would be a big one.
Personally I just take Creatine and WPI, but I'm only training for functional fitness as a desk bound software engineer. Still, it's a very interesting topic; I do know someone who competes at a national level, and the routines and regimes are punishing.
> Personally I just take Creatine and WPI All you need! Similarly I'm an engineer, I compete in a tested powerlifting fed, laying off the "extra supplements" for now.
If you want to talk respectfully about the implications of transgender athletes in sport, that's one thing. But what you are doing is not that. You're trying to dismiss the plight of trans people at large.
What I have an issue with is this type of behavior where they turn things upside down without any care for others. In this case, they're stealing glory from and seriously hampering the careers of lifelong female athletes.
Imagine lifting since you were a teenage girl, and someone else in their mid 30's, who would not have qualified for the men's competition, comes along to take your Olympic medal after going through a sex change procedure. It's deeply disrespectful to women. It requires a certain zealotry to bully your way into female spaces like this.
That said, I don't really agree with this clarification either: no trans woman is setting out to have gender reassignment to bully their way into competing against women who were lifting since they were teenagers. I think you are attributing this to malice that is simply not there, and it is only an artifact of unfortunate circumstance. Trans women certainly don't want to be in this situation either: I'm sure they would much rather be born biologically female and compete that way!
If we're talking about someone who transitions in their teens and has no other options for sport in their adolescence, I would agree that's a much more difficult and ambiguous situation.
This is the problem. There's no difference to people. Arguing any nuanced part of the conversation is often met with exaggerated reactions of "you're anti-trans" or "you're dismissing transexualism as a whole", which is not the case.
So yes, the pro-trans movement on many online spaces is very ideological - they even claim it themselves (transmedicalism vs. gender identity, etc). Very little of it these days is based on science or medical prognosis.
I do understand as well your reticence around the ideological space that a lot of online spaces take place in. To that I’d just say that this stuff is fairly new, and you have a lot of young people finding and differentiating their identities as they’re going through quite a process.
My opinion is frankly it’s a wonderful thing, to have it so people can prioritize their emotional well being enough to not have their natural individual differentiations beat out of them as so many cultures have done. In doing so, discovering how much of a thing gender dysphoria is for some, and allowing them to lead much much better lives.
Hubbard has been free to do olympic weightlifting her entire life. Against similarly bodied individuals (men).
I too am excluded from competing in women's weightlifting contests. That is absolutely for the best (though everyone we're talking about here can likely lift more than I can).
What other animals have a similar level of consciousness? You can‘t form the idea that you are “in the wrong body” unless that idea has been provided to you by your culture. You need linguistic and social support to even have the concept.
EDIT: Oh, you may be interested in the phenomenon of what you might call “trans” non-human animals: individuals who behave like those of the opposite sex. Apparently in some species their physical characteristics can even change, such as female lions that grow manes. But nobody is confused enough to say “trans lady lions are lady lions“; that confusion is reserved for humans. In mammals, the sex can not change. But it‘s an interesting phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage
If you have a peer-reviewed study, that would be much more worthwhile to look at.
The layman's explanation of the phenomenon is that parents observe a rapidly onset expression of gender dysphoria in their teenage daughters which "seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe."
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/16/academics-ar...
Abigail Shrier is a writer and not a scientist, and it can be clearly seen even from the title of the book that she has an agenda. The thesis of the book has been "rejected by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage
If you have a peer-reviewed study, that would be much more worthwhile to look at.
Interviewing parents seems like a problematic basis for an entirely new condition to me.
In my puberty I had a strong feeling of rather being a girl and this caused significant mental anguish and some self harm. If had known as much about transgender people back then as I do know I would have likely transitioned then.
Today I'm pretty okay with being a man. I still sometimes have problems with it but not in the same order of magnitude.
From these personal experiences I think it is plausible that more people transition because more people are aware of the possibility and knowing other trans people in their age. I have no idea how big that group is however.
This is an interesting case that went through the UK courts. Very analogous to OP’s situation had it happened today.
Are you.... sure about this? Like how sure are you? What do you think you know?
The human body changes surprisingly fast. Astronauts that stay in outer space for too long can't even walk when they return to earth. That "too long" is like... a year basically.
A "lifetime" of muscle mass will last for how long once someone starts taking androgen blockers then estrogen?
The reality is while we think of 'sex' as being some kind of chromosomal thing, that isn't what really separates the 'genders'. After all, apart from genitals, there is little external difference in babies. So it isn't exactly the XY/XX... of course one might say "but that happens during puberty", which is what exactly? The significant rise of sex-hormones. As the saying goes "if you can't make your own, store bought is fine" (regarding neuro-transmitters, sex hormones, etc).
So, are you SURE that an individual that "lived in the prime of their life as a man" is just as strong as they once were once they have spent years on hormone therapy? If you're sure, why are you sure? "I don't think it's fair" ... but why? Is is fair to trans athletes?
> Vanbellinghen, 27, whose qualifying efforts were disrupted by injury, pointed out that the retained benefit of taking steroids, even years earlier, is widely known.
It's easier to regain lost muscle mass than it is to gain it in the first place.
Yes. Male puberty confers lifelong physical advantages on the body in terms of muscle mass, heart size, lung capacity and bone density. That's why men dominate women physically in every sport, which is why women have their own special sporting categories so that they stand a chance. Hormone therapy reduces these advantage but it doesn't eliminate them.
> Is it fair to trans athletes?
Probably not, but then is it fair to wheelchair-bound athletes that they're physically incapable of competing with Olympians and so need their own separate event? Maybe the cruel reality of life is that we can't always accommodate everybody?
I recall one race which had an overall price and a women's price. The same person won both and that caused slight kerfuffle.
> The human body changes surprisingly fast. Astronauts that stay in outer space for too long can't even walk when they return to earth. That "too long" is like... a year basically.
> A "lifetime" of muscle mass will last for how long once someone starts taking androgen blockers then estrogen?
You raise a very fair question, but we have sufficient data to really support either position at the moment?
Do we have a way of knowing when an individual (or group of individuals) would have lost the ‘benefits’ to make competition truly fair?
Can you expand on this? I've not heard of fetuses being affected by androgens before.
The reduced testosterone requirement is still way above what the average female athlete will have and it is a very limited view of what makes a biological female different from a biological male. I can't imagine what kind of problems this will give in combat sports, just imagine the longer reach and explosiveness men have.
I'm all for people being able to identify as whatever they want, but not at the cost of fair sports.
Here are some great discussions on the topic if you're interested:
Weightlifting House - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcijSwv5YBM
Zack Telander - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjulLSX29H0
One thing I'd like to add is that this is, by definition, a hard problem. The fact is sex and gender exists on a continuum, even if 99% of the time it seems binary. Anyone who says that the "other side" in this situation (regardless of which side they are on) is being idiotic is ignoring a lot of inconveniently difficult truths.
I was with you until this statement. Sex is a millions-of-years-old discrete variable; it depends on whether you could produce the bigger gamete (called egg) or the smaller one (sperm). Gender is a continuous variable with a strongly bimodal distribution.
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/File/051_...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/visualizing-s...
Most (but not every) step on that continuum are known as diseases of sexual development [0].
These arguments often come up in discussions around trans issues, but its a trick of misdirection, although the DSD community does have a higher incident of gender identity issues (which is what you'd expect), around 5%, 1% that actively changed their gender, the lack of transition within the DSD community seems to suggest DSD and gender dysphoria are not related phenomenon.
The idea that sex is a continuum, based on known disorders, is like saying human bipedalism is a continuum due to people being born with less than 2 full legs, or more than 2 legs (extra toes), or losing them in later life. Although technically correct the observation does not really change the conversation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29606626/
[edited for clarity] added: the lack of transition within the DSD community
Also: people with Klinefelter Syndrome are male.
And before you say "this is purely hypothetical, these sorts of conditions would never affect the practical sorts of discussions we are having here about olympic games", no, it is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foekje_Dillema.
> the gametes are eggs or sperm ... there is no law of nature that ... there aren't intermediate states for any specific dimension
Sorry for butchering your sentence but wanted to respond very specifically.
Sex, which is by far not exclusive to humans, has one primary purpose and that is sexual reproduction. And quite a lot there is governed by laws of nature. There are 2 sexes and not 1 or 3; 1 means cloning yourself and that does not introduce sufficient variance to fight against environmental change, 3 partners are combinatorially more difficult than 2 to bring together. Why gametes are dimorphic; sexual reproduction only needs exchange of genetic material, but the initial cell needs tons of other organelles to bootstrap. A process where either gamete can bring any of the organelles is exponentially more error prone and difficult to coordinate. Hence the small gamete having the bare bones mobility machinery to bring the genetic material to the heavier gamete.
There is no gamete that's between sperm or egg. Even in super rare species where an individual can change sex (some fish does this) they switch to their sex matching gamete entirely, and don't produce an inbetweener.
We can talk about continuity among secondary manifestations of sex, we can talk about fluidity of gender roles etc. and all would be fair game. But we can't call sex anything other than a discrete, binary category without destroying its scientific, cross-species, cross-millions-of-years, universal definition.
At a bare minimum, you would have to make an allowance for the "third sex" (as you define it) of those who do not produce any gametes. Remember, we are talking about sex in humans, not sex in human gametes. I do not dispute that human gametes are strictly binary; the question is about classifying individuals, for which the binary classification is obviously not absolute, even on the question of gamete production.
Re intersex; congenital anomalies do not define a category (if the term congenital anomaly offends you, I am using the WHO definition). Just like if we would say "humans have one head" we would be excluding congenital twins, or with "five fingers" we would be excluding polydactyly.
“Sex” could be interpreted to mean a statement about chromosomes, in which case there are more than two variants.
Or it could be interpreted to be a statement about reproductive potential, in which case the “two sexes” model is a better fit, because there’s no intermediate gamete between sperm and egg. Do intersex conditions break this model? Almost always not: the variations of sex development are variations on the male pattern and the female pattern. Are there exceptionally rare individuals that defy categorisation? Surely there are, but the existence of extreme, rare outliers doesn’t invalidate the model.
Which definition is most useful? In the context of women’s rights, it’s clearly the latter. Women suffer discrimination based on their reproductive biology, not based on their chromosomes. It’s also the model that the vast majority of people use as their everyday working definition of sex.
So I think anyone who wants to claim there are more than two sexes must accept the responsibility to qualify their terminology.
Yes, it could - by people who don't know what the word "sex" means. Sex isn't about chromosomes, it's about gametes, and sex chromosome variants aren't separate sexes. For example, people with Klinefelter Syndrome (XXY) are male. This isn't hard.
https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-a...
> What’s important to note is that the presence of a Y chromosome, or two, or three, etc., all result in the development of testes and therefore these individuals are biologically male. Likewise, individuals with additional or fewer X chromosomes, in the absence of a Y, all develop ovaries and are therefore biologically female.
Looking at things like testes and ovaries is only one part of things, and not some universal definition scientists accept. The author even admits in the comment some people may have both. We also know that some people make have one of these but appear oppositely on the inside/outside.
> This isn't hard.
From my experience, it is deeply complex.
> Effectively regulating sports divisions based on sex using science is impossible. There are no singular or combinations of objective criteria that can define each sex. Prior attempts to govern sports eligibility based on sex using existing testing methods have failed to provide a workable solution based on chromosome composition, physical exam, etc. In other words: we have no way to consistently differentiate male from female and we have never possessed the ability to do so. Gender and sex are not the same thing. Sex is typically assigned at birth based the appearance on appearance of external genitalia and or chromosomal makeup, whereas gender is socially constructed and may vary from culture to culture and/or change over time. However, sex is difficult to dichotomize into two binary divisions because there are a number of different chromosome compositions consistent with either male or female phenotypes. The phrase “biological sex” is meaningless and is ill-advised.
From https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gend...
It is also incorrect to describe sex as a continuum. On a continuum we can increase or decrease a value. The number line, for example, is a continuum. We can find the integer immediately larger or smaller than a given integer. It would be incoherent to pick a woman and ask who is incrementally more feminine than her or incrementally less. We can't sort people by how male they are. I think "bimodal distribution" is a more apt description than continuous or continuum.
Not all women are allowed to participate in powerlifting competitions. For example, people not qualified couldn't. People that are known steroids abusers couldn't. That doesn't make them less women.
> "So why is it still a question whether two decades, from puberty to the age of 35, with the hormonal system of a man also would give an advantage [in competing against women]?
The issue would be the same with a long term steroid user consider how it was worded.
Yes, they are trying to be politically correct, since you are basically forced to talk about it only in a politically correct way. Her statement reads to me like she is not allowed to tell directly what she thinks about it, so needs to describe it in a roundabout way. And that worries me more than the women's weightlifting itself.
Not quite. Vanbellinghen is asserting that Hubbard should not compete in the women's league. That is different from asserting she should not compete as a woman. She then continues to argue this is not because her identity is not female, but because of biological reasons.
This is coherent because the point of a Women's league (in weight-lifting at least) isn't to segregate women from men, but to give women a place to compete without being crippled by biologically determined dis-advantages.
Things get complicated because the reason for a Women's league existing, and the actual written rules around it do not quite line up. It might even be the case that for Hubbard to compete as women means she could not enter the men's league. That would then probably be a moral mistake in the rules.
Women who take performance enhancing drugs are also disqualified from competing. No one is challenging their identity as a woman, just the fairness of their competing against women without that advantage. It is not a moral prohibition against consuming certain substances, but a practical prohibition because it makes competing on a level playing field impossible.
The same is true of trans atheletes. They have an advantage other women do not. Women's sports were invented precisely for that reason: natal males have an advantage that means most natal females are not competetive against them in most sports.
Imagine a woman born with only one arm complaining that Vanbellinghen had an insurmountable natural advantage in weight lifting. The one armed woman would be correct. There is a Special Olympics where disabled people can compete and it would be incredibly unfair for fully-abled competitors to enter the Special Olympics. Analogously there is an Olympic division where Hubbard could fairly compete (the men's) and another division where Hubbard has an unfair advantage (the women's).
If Hubbard is a woman then Hubbard has a distinct natural advantage. To wit, Hubbard was born and developed physiologically as a man. Hubbard didn't attain this advantage unfairly by using steroids. We don't disqualify any other competitor because of the physiological advantages of their natural bodies. Why should Hubbard be disqualified? The only coherent argument is that Hubbard is not actually a woman and should compete in the men's division. This is a denial of Hubbard's identity.
Not even taking transgenderism into account, I think it is a very difficult problem of how to handle people have been born with intersex characteristics in sports. On the one hand, the argument can be made "how is this different than other natural variation that makes someone good at sports", but on the other hand, since testosterone has such a powerful effect, it means that women sports can only be won by those with a genetic abnormality that causes high testosterone (a couple of years ago all three of the top finishers at an international track and field competition were intersex - I'm blanking on the competition but Caster Semenya was one of them).
No one needs to deny their identity as woman to also question whether, in one example, internal testes gives someone an unfair advantage in women's sports.
Gender in sport is not about identity, it's about biology.
Also it creates a huge backdoor to Olympic gold medals. There's nothing that stops turning the female category into all transgender..
Well, except for people born as women who take testosterone, then.
If you are born a certain sex, you should compete in the same sex category provided you haven’t taken any substances to enhance performance. This would mean you are only using what your body naturally produces.
Theres a difference between trans-women and women.
Being trans isn't a choice, but taking testosterone or whatever definitely is. It does not matter if you're male, female, trans, chinese, african or american.. Nobody should be allowed take banned PED's in professional sports.
It is very important to keep this integrity in sports. You could argue that you can let a FtM take testosterone because else he wont be able to compete with the others, but what if he started winning. Will people say he won because he's so good or would it be because he's allowed to take testosterone?
No ifs, no buts.
I disagree. You just cannot be caught taking steroids/testosterone. Plenty of athletes do it and get away with it. Its part of the game, a meta game if you will.
The fallout of a decision like this for professional athletes who are trans is huge. That fallout and the effects from that decision should not at all be taken lightly.
Having an MTF proffesional athlete to compete in the male category is going to probably cause a lot of disphoria. It will also make it much harder from them to be accepted as female. Many people will question "If she is a woman, why is she competing in the male category". Hence it would probably cause many MTF professional athletes to simply decide to drop their profession.
Transitioning is already hard. Adding "drop your profession" to that makes it that much harder. Especially to professional athletes to whom "being an athlete" is probably rather important. Just dismissing these concerns as "easy" is wrong. The impact this will have is huge and deserves significant consideration.
I believe that, on balance, even when considering the above, there are still cases where MTF athletes should be barred from "women's leagues". At least in sports where their biology gives MTF athletes a significant advantage. But that is a close and difficult call to me. Not at all an easy one.
The impact of making women’s competitions an impossibility for non MTF persons seems far greater in comparison.
All athletes have to drop their profession sooner or later.
Another interesting aspect is that New Zealand now has a much better chance to get a medal in this event. Given the importance that some countries give to winning the games, e.g China and Russia, might they push to have more MtF athletes of their own.
Are you suggesting that they might force some of their athletes to transition in order to gain an advantage at the olympics? These societies are not friendly to trans people in general, so I have some doubts they would elevate people who pursued transition themselves.
(Pistorius was born with feet. They were deformed feet and were surgically removed when he was very young. He used surgery to improve on his "natural" body. The prosthetic blades were then a second stage down the rabbit hole of technological augmentation.)
With anabolic steroids however, if there is a "maximum amount that your body will absorb", it's far beyond what causes long-term health problems. This leads to a Prisoner's Dilemma type situation, where if most competitors are taking dose X, and one person takes dose X+1, that one person get an advantage; but if all competitors take does X+1, nobody has an advantage, but they all suffer health consequences.
I don't inherently see a problem with any particular sport openly advertising that competitors may use up to dose X of any particular drug or steroid, where X has been reasonably shown to be a safe amount. The problem is, is it possible to test that only X has been taken, rather than X+1? If it's only possible to test that 0 (or a negligible amount) has been taken, then the only enforceable limit is 0; and an unenforced limit is effectively no limit at all.
"XX division", "XY world record". "XXY 400 m finals", "XYY long jump trials", ...
Gender identity doesn't factor into it at all; the words "man", "woman" should not be used.
Problem solved; you don't get to wedge yourself into competition with XX persons if you're XY.
;)
What about trans men who where assigned female at birth? Are they allowed to take testosterone and still compete against XX women?
It would be amusing though, because it would be a category where all the women would be beating all the men at weightlifting.
I don’t know what this “assigned female” phrase means, can you explain? And no, I’m pretty sure shooting up testosterone is a no-no in the Olympics.
EDIT: It’s rather underhanded to abuse the edit button to silently correct your comment, causing replies to not quite make sense. That’s why people here signal that they’ve edited a comment in cases like this.
(EDIT to your edit: I changed the text on that comment and then spent a couple extra minutes rephrasing this comment before I posted it. Probably I should have done those in the other order, sorry about that.)
> Are they allowed to take testosterone
Absolutely not; however, doped sports could be yet separate category. There is probably audience money in it, like in monster trucks and WWF wrestling.
- intersex people whose phenotype and genotype don’t match (putting them in the “wrong” category)
- chimeric people who belong in different categories depending on which part of their body you sample
- probably other edge cases I’m not thinking of.
If your goal is just to put people into categories, it’s probably a lot less controversial to split them based on if their earlobe is attached and whether they can curl their tongue.
For example we've gone from: (some male terms I apparently can't use anymore) to transwoman to ciswoman to biological woman.
And in every case the transwomen demands to be included in the "new" category, and everyone else has to come up with another term to differentiate.
This doesn't replace trait-based subcategorization. E.g. the category XX wrestling still has weight classes.
* X – Female
* XX – Female
* XXY – Male
* XY – Male
* XYY – Male
* XXXY – Male
https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-a...
XX with SRY region on one of the X: Male
XY with androgen insensitivity: female
There's a lot more of a spectrum than you'd think.
Many of the cis female athletes currently winning in the olympics, e.g. caster semenya, have significantly higher testosterone levels than would be legal for trans female athletes.
Of course there are a lot of practical issues, and even if they were overcome, it is unclear that the results would be satisfying.
For example, several sports have weight classes which are of course "abused" (as in, the athlete will do as much effort to fit onto a lower class - going through severe diets and dehydration)
Now if instead of weight you would measure "fat free mass" and maybe height, this would leave much less margin for maneuvers.
(Or, ok, you could re-weight the athlete just before the competition and disqualify them if there's a bigger difference from the weighting date - that would work as well)
If you made it based on past performance, though, it should be doable in even small amateur leagues.
That's how it works in chess. When you play tournament chess you get a rating based on your performances and the ratings of the established players you played.
Large tournaments use the "Swiss system". In round 1, you sort the players by rating, split the list in two, and the top rated player in the first list plays the top rated list in the second, and so on.
In subsequent rounds, you sort the players by results so far, split the list into separate lists for each score group, and then within each score group the top half by rating plays the bottom half.
Large tournaments typically have prizes for the top scores, but also "class" prizes. A class prize is for the top scores in certain rating ranges, say under 1800 or under 1200. A big tournament like the US Open might have a whole slew of class prizes, such as top score in under 1200, [1200, 1400), [1400, 1600), [1600, 1800), [1800, 2000).
There are women's chess tournaments but that is because much fewer women take up chess, and often women are uncomfortable if they are the only woman in a competition, especially at the scholastic level.
That environment can affect their performance due to "stereotype threat". When you are doing something in public that goes against a negative stereotype about your group you can feel a lot of pressure to avoid confirming the stereotype, and that extra pressure can actually make it harder for you to do your best. That in turn further discourages women from taking up tournament chess.
The challenges people overcome makes for a good story, but is not the core competition.
The only advantage that remains is muscle memory, but people who train on steroids, quit, wait a few years, and then train normally have the same advantage.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.
Additionally, women are naturally less muscilar than men.We're talking 50% less fiber surface, 30% less muscles in total, and even a difference in the type of fibers: significantly fewer type 2 fibers, which are the ones that give your muscles explosiveness. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00235103
And their Dad is not a billionaire, it's in the 10's of millions, 150 employees according to wiki and he's a cereal manufacturer and also a Mayor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Hubbard
Laurel Hubbard might be an awful person, but you haven't made the case for that.
I can't even see evidence Laurel campaigned for this, they just seem to be following the rules. In fact it seems they haven't campaigned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JYerP_Ysts
Also, this incentivizes male athletes that can't win medals but are close to take hormone replacement theory solely so they can compete in the much easier female category and win medals, which runs in the same arguments against doping.
On the other hand, if you don't, then MtF transgender people are not likely to win anything, since hormone replacement therapy reduces performance (but not enough to match non-SRY people).
This might seem absurd but when you consider that they already go to extreme lengths to sneak in highly dangerous and life altering drugs just to win, I can see it happening.
I don't think it's odd to leave out of the question, since there would be very little opposition to such a proposal.
The argument against would be mostly twofold: 1) it might be 'weird' to have a 'girl' in the men's locker room 2) depending on the sport, there might be an issue of safety
either way, not a big deal- as some other commenter said on here, women's sports is a carveout for a specific demographic (biological females, as if that's in question), and transgenders of all kinds would be much more welcome in regular 'men's' sports, or their own 'hormone free-for-all' programs, than an already established subgroup that does not wish to be so infiltrated.
Ok, that is a plausible argument. However, it's missing one major component: How could anyone argue that this is one of the aspects or life where it is actually possible to treat someone as their preferred gender? If I had to cherry pick an example of an aspect of life where it is not possible to treat a transgender person as their preferred gender, it would be Olympic sports.
That's probably precisely why they are doing this. They're obviously trying to make a political statement. They want it to be the inspiring event that puts this Olympics in the history books. But I mean... Come on people, there are obvious reasons why this athlete is not going to be remembered heroically for their political message in the same way as someone like Jesse Owens.
It’s not odd, because it just hasn’t come up as an issue. In fact most pro sports leagues are not men-only. If a woman or f2m transgender could make the cut on an NFL team, there are no rules against it.
I could write more on the arguments both sides present, but that's the crux of it.
For the supporters of trans-women being women, is there a canonical / generally accepted list of criteria which would classify people "objectively" as a woman? If there is such a thing as a group of people that can be called "women", how would membership in that group be established?
I.e., what really is a woman?
Is there some principled way to decide what things one can self define as and which one can't?
For the record, people have self-identified as being Black:
* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jessica-krug-rachel-do...
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/rachel-dolez...
However, race is also socially constructed, so it's tricky. People who claim to be "trans-racial" are still regarded as delusional by society despite this. This is mostly just the position of the society we are in.
But there is something more that makes gender transition more valid than racial "transition": Gender dysphoria is a real condition, that has the medically recommended solution of social and medical transition. This is a good reason for why society should adjust it's social construction of gender, and this is why it is happening right now. To date, "race dysphoria" is not medically recognized and has not been formally observed. It has no history dating back hundreds of years like being transgender does.
This lying to get an advantage can potentially apply to trans people in sports too. People are always claiming that near elite male athletes who can't win in men's competitions will just say they are women to face easier opponents, but we haven't really seen any evidence of that occurring. This is primarily because the obstacles to check a box on a college application are so drastically different than the obstacles in front of someone who wants to publicly and officially change their gender. Considering that, I think the best approach is to not waste too much energy on "fixing" this problem until it is actually shown to be a problem.
It’s amazing our collective intelligence has dropped this far. We solved this problem quite a long time ago…
> The first, preferred by Fowler, is that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. A more explicit phrasing might be "the exception that proves the existence of the rule".[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
Or perhaps:
> The phrase means that an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases. In other words, a general law is better drafted for the average circumstance as this will be more common.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law
Further it can be argued that the fact that a defect is present in the biological system does not invalidate the presence of said system generally. The complete lack of a system could be the determining factor.
https://www.planetizen.com/node/87885/going-gold-when-town-p...
I didn't find the overall argument persuasive, but i thought that was interesting.
Gender is a nuanced thing, and there's no way to definitively divide people into the male and female categories.
The episode explores the story of Dutee Chand, a professional sprinter who for a time was not allowed to compete as a women due to her hyperandrogenism, a condition that leads to unusually high levels of testosterone.
Competitive Sport: the act of determining your performance and subsequent identity/categorization by arbitrary comparison with other arbitrary individuals.
Here's an idea. Let's just let weightlifters lift weights. They can compare themselves to their previous efforts and broadcast their successes by beating their own PRs. If people want to find some sort of vicarious happiness from observing this process, set up (monetize) their efforts with something like Twitch.
For every thousand hacking at the leaves...
Trans people have been allowed compete in sports for the last 18 years, however this is the first trans athlete to make it to the olympics, this seems to suggest that trans people competing in sports has not pushed IFAB people out of sports to any significant degree, especially not at the highest levels of competition.
Seems to me to be the simplest, fairest solution, given that hormone treatments might give a person an unfair advantage that we're trying to keep out of male and female sports, but that are inherently impossible to avoid in transgender sports.
For example, say that an intersexed-athlete (not simply male nor female) plays two sports: one where males are seen as advantaged and another where females are seen as advantaged. Then, the intersexed-athlete would probably compete in the male-category in the male-advantaged sport while simultaneously being in the female-category in the female-advantaged sport.
women will never come in the top 100 again for the vast majority of sports, but it’ll force people to reconcile the contradictions they claim. or maybe they’ll just say sports are sexist
I’m not against any gender doing what they wish.
But really, the point is when you (by nature) have testosterone coursing through your bloodstream… even if you transitioned, by the very nature of things you have an advantage of strength, agility, speed and desire over your female peers.
As much as we would love to believe it, men are wildly physically different from women. And that’s how nature intended it for whatever reasons nature intended.
You can see it in the sports stats very clearly for every sport where women and men compete.
Men and woman are not the same and can never be. Each has strengths and weaknesses which make them fit very well together.
I understand the need to transition. But sports is one of those examples that we can’t put our head in the sand and believe we live in a world of make-believe.
By the very nature of things LeBron James has an advantage of strength, agility, and speed over me. (no clue why you included desire in your comment)
Basically every elite athlete is born with a genetic predisposition to be better at their sport than the average person. It takes a lot of determination and training to reach that full potential, but let's not pretend that people are born on equal footing.
Also it’s been very well proven that testosterone leads to more desire/ambition call it what you will.
Women who take testosterone generally report feeling more ambitious and have more sexual desire as a by product.
What this means is that most females will be removed from sport since they can't compete with the average male athlete. Society has spoken already and decided they want to see female athletes which is why many male only sports have started their own female only sides.
This is a truly unfortunate edge case where trans people have an unfair advantage on one gender side and an unfair disadvantage on the other side. Perhaps the only fair way to do things would be to have trans only teams but the numbers probably don't work out. Or to have trans people pick sports where physical strength is not at play like motor racing, shooting, chess, etc.
Most of the popular sport leagues don't have any rules disallowing female competitors. I'm sure the NHL, NBA, NFL, MLS, MLB, Premier League etc. would love to have a female player that was good enough because it would be a marketing dream.
Even at those non-physical sports, men still have a big advantage, it shows in all of the sports you listed and e-sport. Gender split in sports is there to protect women. The men sport is actually a game for "the best of the best", I don't think there would be any complain if there's a woman (cis or trans) want to challenge that space.
One has to completely ignore reality to try to pretend that is a fair competition. One other thing to note from that graph is the worst performance from a man was significantly better than the best performance from cis-woman. Testosterone makes you stronger, who knew?
Which sports are these? In which physical sports do women have an advantage over men? Can you name one?
I'd guess anything where hip area strength is critical. male bodies are at an advantage in terms of overall muscular and bone structure.
the larger point is its wiser to treat it as a competition between individuals. because. anytime we exclude someone based on non-individual traits then it means we are discriminating against them. and "discrimination is bad", no matter what.
Really? The most basic definition of "discrimination" is "to note or distinguish as different." Are you saying we should never be allowed to observe that, in reality, sometimes two things really are different from each other?
(Note : my terminology may be wrong but I think the meaning is clear)
You might say, well then women will have no chance of ever being involved in those sports at that elite level, and you'd be right. But 99% of men have no chance of being involved in them either. We're talking about elite sports here. We don't care about the second-best percentile of men, why do we care about women?
What I'd really like to see is some kind of team sport or game where there is a strong advantage in having a "mixed" team. Surely someone can think of a game that won't be entirely dominated by men? If that existed then we could choose the team sports with women in them over the 100% male individual sports. But ultimately the choice will come down to which one is the most interesting, impressive and exciting.
So far, there's no such game existed yet, even with non-physical sport like esport.
Can you point me to some studies around fetal testosterone?
How many areas of life and society are we willing to exclude a minority from before we are satisfied that the playing field is leveled? How many minorities are we willing to target?
This is a complicated, messy issue and society at large isn't going to be perfect at it in these early days. Knee-jerk reactions, like those we're seeing from conservative politicians, are hurting people who don't have the power to fight back.
[0]: https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gend...
i feel like it strongly depends on the competition in question. i doubt it with weightlifting.
but women clearly have an advantage in gymnastics
Considering that voicing your support for Hubbard comes with basically no personal or professional cost, while voicing your opposition can cost you dealy, I'm going to assume that since most people have remained silent then the majority agrees with Anna Vanbellinghen.
And this isn't just happening in Sports, even women beauty pageants are now being won by transgender.
"What a great message for young girls... No matter what you do, men will always be better than you at it- including being a woman!"
Absolutely absurd.
This isn't that different.
The backlash against trans people is getting worse. It's why I'm stealth. I don't have to deal with the prejudice, with everyone seeing these headlines and talking points and fitting them into narratives and applying them to me. It's cowardly for me to hide, but I just can't deal. I hate being trans because of stuff like this.
I don't mind the whole bathroom thing. Poop where you want, everybody poops. And conservatives will always find a reason to be against anything that goes against their norms. You might find that the backlash is getting worse, but actually it isn't. More people than ever are accepting of all things LGBT, conservatives have just become more vocal exactly because they are becoming a minority.
but even if we disagree on the specifics of this issue, I'm glad to know there's people like you. thank you!
Margaret Thatcher once said: "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
So this would also apply to say, racial slurs and personal insults. Calling someone a name or the n-word instead of their name, that's a freedom? What about antisemitic slurs or insulting disabled people? How about just referring to women as sex objects, that's also within that rule. As well as doing the same for children or the deceased.
You don't expect people to be insulted by such things? Are you serious?
I don't think you actually mean what you say.
That's actually a crime, you know that, right, it's not freedom of speech. Using racial slurs is a crime in most environments as well.
There is no right to say arbitrary things in front of arbitrary people. That's actually not a thing.
It's not "your freedom" that's being violated, there never was one there to begin with here.
The list of things at the forefront of you mind would fall under the above. You might get your teeth kicked in but by the actual freedom of speech definition rather than your own truths interpretation there would be no legal response.
It's true however that we don't actually subscribe to that definition any more, so you never know. Maybe you'll have your wish.
Case laws have upheld them numerous times. This isn't "interpreted truths", racial slurs have been interpreted as intent and such things have been prosecuted.
Seems lots of people get intentionally offended nowadays... Only the intention is their own.
A (very) conspiracy theory-minded overview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUkiBz9rYEs
Can't help but note the power of twisting the language. It's bullshit that he should compete as a woman but of course now I'm the asshole.
That is to say, of course people should be welcome to participate regardless of gender, but the championships and prizes should be based on objective measurements (like boxing weight classes, or heights, or whatever), and whatever the public is so enamored of as to generate funding for tournament prizes.
IMO for athletics instead of focusing so much on competitions among a field of elite competitors with tiny differences, and overburdening and destroying their bodies, we should focus on challenges and achievements, and support many many people working to improve their personal records. And "sports ad entertainment" should be a more well rounded entertainment and aesthetic performance, not pointless contests of who gets a slightly lower or higher number on a metric.
I think its time to do away with separations on sex, and go with ones based on ability and size. Boxing does it with weight classes, why can't we do it with everything?
> Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.
Karsten Braasch (peaked out at around 40th worldwide) beat both of the Williams sisters (both rank 1 players) back-to-back. He was twice their age and known for smoking cigarettes during changeovers. Male weightlifting records are hundreds of pounds higher than women's records. There are thousands of male sprinters who have posted a better time than the _world record_ female sprinter. I don't think there's even any data to compare men vs. women in combat sports like boxing because anybody who has ever paid any attention to sports can tell you it's an awful idea.
Yeah, we could do away with the separations, as long as you can accept that women will almost always take the back-seat at high levels of play.
Actually there is in the world of MMA. MtF fighter Fallon Fox dominated lots of biologically female fighters, in one particularly nasty incident it took her less than 3 minutes to give Tamikka Brents a concussion, a broken orbital, and leave her needing a bunch of staples to patch her skin back together [0].
If you do read the article, Tamikka Brents explains she is an abnormally strong woman, she is, but not compared to Fallon Fox. Tamikka Brents [1]. Tamikka Brents and Fallon Fox weigh in [2].
[0] https://www.attacktheback.com/transgender-mma-fighter-fallon... [1] https://www.sherdog.com/fighter/Tamikka-Brents-70699 [2] http://whoatv.com/fallon-fox-vs-tamikka-brents-fight-video/
I've often heard that women (in general) have ~5% more body fat percentage than males, because of how their body work. That means that if you have two 100kg people in optimal conditions, a man and a woman, the man would have on average 5kg of muscle more than the woman. This is a HUGE difference and wouldn't make for fair fights.
It's very sad that this is a political issue - it makes any reasonable solution impossible. Any restrictions that liberals might find practical and fair (like a ban on competing where muscles are involved) will inevitably be used by conservatives to justify bigotry and prejudice in a number of other areas (exclusion from public bathrooms, for example, or even restrictions based on race, nationality or sexuality).
Given that, categories in competitions should be based on different bands of hormone levels etc, taking gender/sex out the discussion completely and also helping with this ridiculous projected view that there's no doping going on.
I know what HN demographics are like and what they work with, and it's not LGBT. So please, get yourself educated.
Bob is the winner of the #1 division, Amy is the winner of the #2 division, and so on.
All the tuples of athletes who tied get to be in one class; e.g. if three people crossed the 10,000 meter finish at 29:13, they are in that ability class together, tying for that class' first place. :)
:)
Then you end up with perverse incentives. The #1 person in the 2nd division doesn't really want to work harder to move up to the 1st division, because they're likely to never get beyond 10th or 9th or so. And the 10th place holder in the 1st division might find it more prestigious to slow down a little to try to take the #1 spot of the 2nd division.
In the 76-81kg womens bracket current record total (snatch + cnj) is 278kg. In the 73-81kg mens bracket the record total is 363kg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_weightlifting#Weight_c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_Olymp...
Testosterone actually is one of the aforementioned steroids. The first sentence of the article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone (at the time of this comment) is
> Testosterone is the primary sex hormone and anabolic steroid in males.
It’s probably not fair to put them against each other because of internal identity claims.
What is the hurry here? Why must we change women’s sports right now? Am I not told to “believe in science”? Where is the hard science on gender identity?
Republicans can't do climatology; Democrats can't do biology.
When it comes to powerlifting, I would bet on current or former members of one particular gender.
Women's sports are generally a carve-out. Women can't compete with men in most sports. Because of that, I don't think that women should be excluded from men's sports. "Men's sports" are just sports, and shouldn't be restrictive. Women's sports are a subset of sports where men have been excluded in order to give women a chance. If a woman is good enough to compete in "men's sports" she should (if she wants.) The opposite is not true. This is not a symmetrical situation. If transwomen are allowed to compete in women's sports, they will dominate women's sports.
I am struggling to come up with any that women as a generalized block might be naturally better at. Maybe some fineness movements like some forms of dance or balance.
Another user above nailed it, this is a newly self-inflicted problem.
https://www.insider.com/women-are-faster-long-distance-runne...
I think it would be more truthful to say as distances increase the ability for women to complete with men also increases but we have not yet found a distance where women have a definite advantage.
This BBC article covering this topic does much better at explaining the state of affairs:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-49284389
This is in no way meant to disparage what any of these athletes, male or female. When it comes down to grim determination and pushing the human body to its very limits men and women are the same, but it is also telling that we need to get to this point of pain management and mental fortitude to level the playing field.
In short: stop differntiating between men, women, transgender, transsexual, men identifying as women, women identifying as men - just bunch them up together and call it a day.
Yeah, I can click on every single one of those people in this comment section, see their real name and their FB profile, and it still doesn't stop them from being vile on the internet.
"Anyways, any woman dumb enough to participate in the farce that will be competing against HIM deserves to lose."
"Women are getting screwed because of trans ideology. Mr. Hubbard is clearly a cheating male."
"In the old days, abittoirs use to have a well trained cow that would calm the nervous cows on their way to be slaughtered. I often think of these women as those calming cows trying to placate the rest of us women."
Like, there are some good comments and people trying to have a discussion in good faith. But clearly there are others who don't and I don't see how the real name policy has improved the quality of the internet discussion at all.
And yes, I would also like people to speak openly about their thoughs - despite my earlier comment, I would defend their right to say those things openly, just as much I would defend my right to call those things vile or stupid.
Like ok, cool. But I'd also like to speak my mind and call those comments vile and say they have no place in a civilized discussion.
And how am I intimidating?? HN comments are scary now?
It's an outlier that's being pushed in as a substitute to set the framing for the entire discussion as if broad policy should be generalized from an extreme outlier.
This is the same tactic that was used to argue against gay marriage, finding some unusual extreme event and then trying to substitute it as commonplace.
Isolate these things. It honestly shouldn't bleed into mainstream discussion. This is a slight of hand substitution.
Transgendered status doesn't affect 99% of human interaction. I easily might have worked with or been neighbors to a trans person for years and never known it. You could have worked with many yourself.
You've probably worked or lived next to somebody for years and then found out they were LGBTQ and were like "well that's actually pretty irrelevant" just like how our grandparents would freak out if they were, say, Catholic or married to a foreigner. It's not a big deal.
I refuse to outsize the tiny isolated cases where it matters, it's a propaganda technique.
No thanks
> Of course, this debate is taking place in a broader context of discrimination against transgender people, and that is why the question is never free of ideology. However, the extreme nature of this particular situation really demonstrates the need to set up a stricter legal framework for transgender inclusion in sports, and especially elite sports.
You say:
> It's an outlier that's being pushed in as a substitute to set the framing for the entire discussion as if broad policy should be generalized from an extreme outlier.
That's not at all what the article is saying. The article is specifically talking about this particular situation.
This inflation is done all the time to push a political agenda. The "welfare queen" to ban humanitarianism, Willie Horton to create the modern carceral state. This is super common.
Most of the time it fails, like with Garcia Zarate or Juan Leonardo Quintero to try to demonize all Hispanic immigrants.
The first to cover this was far right rags like dailywire and newspunch in 2017 or so.
Is this new to you?
My original interpretation before your edit was that the article specifically talks about the need for a "stricter legal framework for transgender inclusion in sports", and I was confused when you said that it's a propaganda piece being used "to frame generalized trans discrimination".
But now I better understand what you meant by "political football", so thanks for clarifying.
> Were you born yesterday or are you just trying to argue with people?
Aide re, this wasn't necessary.
This is one of the exact topics where it happens because trans people have become the newest punching bag of online neonazis and fascists. They're obsessed with transphobia. That's where I first heard this "debate" about weightlifters years ago.
Crap like this from 2018: https://therightscoop.com/gavin-hubbard-is-destroying-compet... deadnaming and misgendering.
And from 2017: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/whatever-he-wins-is-worthl...
This exact person and this exact issue has been used to push sensationalist transphobic screeds for years
Playing dumb is thoroughly bad faith trolling and I have absolutely no patience for their bs.
I completely agree with this sentiment.
My biological brother is trans and I support him as best I can. It's particularly tricky for him given the cultural conservatism of our community (which I'm guessing you can relate to if my assumption about your username is correct).
I know what you mean about trolls. And can see why you thought I may have been trolling you.
My initial point was sincere - albeit a bit naive it seems. Evidently I am not as politically astute as you.
Edit: thanks for the links. Will check them out.
Like with Willie Horton, it moved the debate on criminal justice reform to be replaced by a specific case where it didn't work. It's a Lee Atwater technique, he did the Welfare Queen and Willie Horton political projects. It's marketing positioning applied to politics.
Here, it's an attempt to move the discussion on human rights for transgendered people to instead be about a New Zealand weightlifter.
Just refuse the discussion. The bait and switch reframing is the technique. It doesn't matter what's said, it matters that the discussion focuses on it instead of broad human rights.