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Comment by RobLach | Hacker News Reader

Physical sport competition shouldn’t be separated by n number of genders, but by weight class.

Olympic weightlifting is already split into relatively thin weight brackets. I think the issue is that, pound for pound, men tend to be stronger than women

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...

Men have a huge advantage in power and speed over women of the same weight; this is uncontroversial. This is not affected by reducing blood testosterone.

In a sane world this would be uncontroversial. In clown world, everything is up for grabs.

As long as you're fine with excluding people who were born with the physical characteristics historically associated with the word "woman" from all sports, that will work. I don't think that can be the woke position, though.

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.

So your argument is that men are inherently superior to women in all physical aspects? Yea, no bias there...

All physical aspects? No probably not, the movements and motions that make up almost all sports? Yes, and that’s just reality.

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.

I think women tend to be better than men at 200+ mile ultramarathons.

https://www.insider.com/women-are-faster-long-distance-runne...

It's not as simple as it seems, the insider article focuses on average pace, but if you look at race winners more often than not its still a man, this difference in average is probably due to the higher number of men completing with a higher variance in ability.

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.

Well written comment.

Reality often has a bias in favour of scientific fact. Most of us have learned to live with that.

Weightlifting is already separated by class. As I understand it, weight alone is not enough to create a “fair” competition. A historical use of steroids changes your body composition so that you have more strength at the same weight, even if the use was years ago. From the article the implication is that the same is true for testosterone, giving male to female transitioned people a unfair advantage (as long as transition was post puberty).

> the implication is that the same is true for testosterone

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.

Males and females have wholly different chemical, bone, and muscular structures.

It's an obvious answer but people are going to get upset over hearing it.

What happens when physical sport competition results tend to favor 1 of the n number of genders?

When it comes to powerlifting, I would bet on current or former members of one particular gender.

That's the problem that division into genders is supposed to address. Currently we have n = 2. Results favoring one of the two genders is addressed by having separate categories with separate results: women's records, men's records.

Rather than splitting by gender it should be split by sex, or birth sex, if you prefer.

Everyone's relative chromosome string should be determined, like XXY and that should be the category, devoid of any loaded words like "man" or "woman". If you're XY, you don't get to got against XX athletes, regardless of the identity of anyone involved.

The problem is that doesn't entirely work for trans women. Hormone therapy during their transition will reduce their performance to the point where they mostly can't be competitive with cis men anymore, while they'll still dominate against cis women.

I can't agree; the number of kilograms is too simplistic a parameter. I'd be more inclined to agree to some more sophisticated division that takes body composition into account. But that is still too simplistic if it is applied the same way in every sport. In some sports, mass is disadvantageous. In some sports, lean mass is advantageous, fat mass isn't. In some, raw mass is advantageous.

Perhaps classes on ability necessary to the sport should be the only way to go?

But that is futile, because ability necessary to the sport is what produces the results, i.e. rankings. So that amounts to just (1) everyone competing together as if there were one category, then (2) being ranked from winner to loser, and (3) we then declare that each rank is its own ability class, so everyone is a winner in their ability class!

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. :)

Even if you don't go to the absurd extreme you pushed it to, it still doesn't work. Like, say you rank everyone from 1st to 50th, and then break everyone into five divisions (1st-10th, 11th-20th, and so on).

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.

It will be interesting if it goes this route, e.g. title IV like regulations that end up destroying women’s sports and replacing it with human flesh weights.

"Gender" is larger than biological sex - a distinction that normally doesn't matter. Wikipedia: Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, femininity and masculinity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex, sex-based social structures (i.e., gender roles), or gender identity.

So what's the word to describe what they are talking about. Go ahead and assume what it is they're getting at, and answer it for us.

I don’t know if that’s true or not. I know a lot of what you are saying first came from John William Money who… has a actually pretty evil history that should make everyone reevaluate the concepts [0]. I think the simple answer is we don’t know. We don’t know if you are right, we don’t know lots. But one thing we definitely do know is XY humans have more muscle mass and bone density on average than XX humans.

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?

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061120561/

This is a good example of how the popular narrative of the right being anti-science is wrong. Both 'sides' are absolutely anti-science on any topic where the science would be an uncomfortable truth for them.

Republicans can't do climatology; Democrats can't do biology.

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