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Comment by nimbleal | Hacker News Reader

I may be a few years behind on terminology (?) but surely sports has everything to do with sex and nothing to do with gender?

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.

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Most people have no idea just how massive the biological advantage is. Movies and popular culture have conditioned people to think that females can hold their own against men. Individuals can, in some contexts, where the statistical distribution overlaps. For example a mediocre middle aged man can be beaten in strength or speed sports by an athletic 20-something woman. But at the tails of the distribution, where the competitions occur, the advantages of the Y chromosome and male puberty are insurmountable.

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 should women's championships even exist? Isn't that just a pity prize? Either design a game where women tend to perform better (like certain forms of gymnastics) or where they tend to be more interested due to the cultural aspects (like cheer/dance), or let women compete in other areas of endeavor.

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.

This post is generally ridiculous, but I will point out that we do have weight categories for boxing. I suppose we don't have height categories for basketball because no one wants to watch that.

> I suppose we don't have height categories for basketball because no one wants to watch that.

I would. Then it would be more about skill than strength and height, like football.

But wouldn't you, in a 160-180cm bracket, for example, end up with nearly all players being 178-180cm? And then 158-160cm for the next one. Imagine what drama would happen if a promising teenage athlete would not stop growing at 159 and got 2 extra centimetres, for example: he would completely lose his shot to be a professional. People can adjust their weight with a diet, but they can't really change their height.

3 cm isn't that much of a deal. 20 cm is.

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 :)

It’s already this way. It hasn’t been “about” height in a long time. The best players in the league aren’t the tallest by a long shot. Steph Curry is 6’4.

This is the distribution apparently: https://i.imgur.com/v0QRyDr.png

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-...

Not sure what your point is?

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.

My point is that height clearly matters more.

It doesn't mean that skill doesn't matter at all.

> My point is that height clearly matters more.

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.

This is a very simplistic understanding of statistics. Basketball success doesn't need to be correlated linearly with height for it to be the single most important factor.

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 a random person decides whether they could be an NBA player", that statement is incorrect.

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?

I have to weigh in on this.

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.

One on One is again not really a worthwhile topic given that's not how basketball is played at high levels.

> 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.

Pun intended? If so, nicely done.

IIRC in the early days basketball teams had a maximum average height, which I think might be neat to bring back.

If you want a giant on your team, you'd need to balance him out by recruiting an exceptionally talented shorter guy.

> because no one wants to watch that.

So... like the WNBA?

Why should they exist? Sounds to me like you're suggesting that female people should be forbidden from organising their own sporting competitions unless it's mudwrestling, foxy boxing and such-and-such (to quote Homer Simpson).

For the same reason that weight classes exist and cause people to pay millions and millions to watch Floyd Mayweather box when a super heavyweight could pound him into pulp.

It allows more people to compete in sport.

  sports has everything to do with sex and nothing 
  to do with gender

Dividing by sex is a substitute for dividing by the things that really matter: height, weight, strength, bone density, etc. If sports grouped competitors by a combination of those attributes, it would solve a lot of issues, including debate over transgender athletes.

I agree, but unintended consequences abound.

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?

The Paralympic movement does something like this, and it's hard, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-57404811.

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...

> There's actually a campaign in wheelchair tennis to allow players who don't actually need a wheelchair to be allowed to compete

I've wondered about this - it's an interesting idea. Then the sport is just "Wheelchair tennis" and anyone can try.

I think people not confined to a wheelchair have more options for physical training. You could say that's an unfair advantage to people actually requiring the chair.

True, and also it's possible that they would be able to get leverage from their legs in a way that not everyone could. It's a tricky topic.

While absolutely common, cutting weight is not universal in combat sports and wrestling. There are distinct athletic costs to cutting weight.

Most combat sports have weight classes so what you are suggesting is not completely unheard of.

Hmmmm. At that point are you not simply beginning to divide by ability? Basketball for short people? Weightlifting for weak people? It would seem to both go against the spirit of sport and be impossible to implement in practice (for e.g how many different ways do you cut it?)

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?

Many sports have many categories. Boxers and wrestlers are separated based on weight

Yes, but as mentioned elsewhere weight alone would do little to solve this issue. Males would still dominate.

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.

>impossible to do fairly

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.

What happens if you run PCA and it groups trans women in with men?

trans women by their nature already defy the classic notions of sex and gender (i.e. that classic match of software and hardware), so why does it matter whether they would get grouped with the men (i suppose you meant the classic notion of "men"), trans men, women or with any cross boundaries cutting group as long as the competition is honest (i.e. similar blood oxygen carrying capabilities with similar muscle mass with similar bone density or whatever PCA would point to)?

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.

> but then you are simply dividing by ability

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.

Boxers and wrestlers are also separated based on sex, because even at the same weight males will dominate.

A while back I wondered how much of elite sport is determined by genetics. The answer I got back was unsurprising that genetics play a very heavy role in many sports 90%+. We have basically already dived the population based on those traits when it comes to some world championships.

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.

Olympic weightlifting is already divided into weight categories. What you're advocating is the abolition of women's sports.

Not that I made an argument for using weight alone, but it depends on the sport in any event. To avoid injuries, the physical attributes that matter to billiards differ from those that matter to rugby.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Scienceofsport/status/14070200037...

Sports scientists do not agree

That tweet addresses solely weight, but I'm not arguing for categories based solely on weight.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Scienceofsport/status/12979157895...

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.

Thanks, the entire thread makes more sense! I want to avoid sounding any more opinionated about sports medicine than I already do, since it's not a subject in which I have any expertise. That said, when I consider that a 'mens' category alone includes both Andre The Giant and Peter Dinklage, it's hard for me to understand how a richer mix of physical attributes could do any worse :)

Well, you're not picking people at either end of a normal size scale. You're picking people with gigantism and dwarfism. But let's take Andre as an example: what sports Andre would truly excel at? He made a name in wrestling, but his gigantism was as much a cause of health problems as an "edge" in sport. And if size was the deciding factor, then why wasn't the largest woman with gigantism (Tanya Angus, 7 feet 7 inches and weighed 400lbs) beating the shit out of wrestlers like The Undertaker (6 feet 10, 309lbs)? Because size isn't all.

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?"

I think life time testosterone levels would help too. Hard to define and monitor but a huge performance impacted

On a related note:

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.

Yeah it really helps. I'd recommend heavy deadlifts to any middle aged male. It's a huge energy booster.

I just wanted to say thanks for reminding me that deadlifts is the really big one.

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.

> Dividing by sex is a substitute for dividing by the things that really matter: height, weight, strength, bone density, etc.

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 many sports, there’s selection for the level one competes at. You won’t see Messi play in third division football, for example, or me being offered a job by a top team. Top athletes want the challenge/fame/money of competing with better players.

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)

When you segment based on age and sex you are dividing up people based on their starting conditions - people who were born in the same year, and with the same sex, compete to see who is the best. When you divide based on the attributes that matter for the sport, you are basically just pre-ranking everyone and bucketing them so you only compete against those who we predict will do as well as you. Which is fine for more casual levels of sport, but isn't particularly interesting to watch.

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.

A problematic aspect of segmenting based on age is that you get a very large bias towards people with specific birth months. Getting 11 more months compare to the competition is huge, and the data shows it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24886927/

https://danielkiikka.com/performance/birth-month-athletic-pe...

I like this idea. It could also make the nba and nfl more racially diverse.

Reaction times and spatial reasoning matter very significantly in sports, as well.

These are things for which there are also rather persistent differences in distribution between males and females.

I strongly suspect that you'd discover that your data forms two major clusters.

Taking hormone therapy dramatically changes your body, making using just your sex also problematic. It's a complex subject. Here's the best article I've found on it: https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gend...

yeah but it doesn’t make your body exactly like someone with different chromosomes than you that lived with that hormone set their entire life through puberty etc, and with a different bone structure and musculature

that is correct, and to be fair, not contested by the parent comment.

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.

The argument is that even hrt isn't enough to transfer someone from one class to another.

There are plenty of banned performance enhancing substances, so regardless of what anyone means by gender, I doubt that’s a useful distinction with regard to the relationship between gender and athletic performance. I think a better question is: Where is the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable medical intervention?

I believe this is one reason why some trans people are very keen for their hormonal therapy to begin before puberty.

yeah but even then it doesn’t change your chromosomes

Ultimately irrelevant, given the chromosomes produce stuff we can synthesise or inhibit. Not yet perfectly of course, but anabolic steroids have been synthesised since the 1930s, and are effective enough to be banned in sport.

not really. there’s a lot more to you than just things you synthesize or inhibit.

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

It’s still an open question as to why trans people are trans, but it definitely looks like something is already different as early as the womb.

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 you can't even legally consent to have sex before puberty, why are you supposed to be able to consent to change it at the same age?

But it doesn't change your skeletal structure, or the size of your lungs. Both of which dramatically affect your performance.

I think the core question is, does Hubbard have an advantage so she will win 95% of the time? If so, it’s not really a competition, especially if that result derives from her innate male physiology giving her an unfair advantage. We don’t allow doping either.

If there is a way to level it out, that might be a solution, if it’s possible.

>I think the core question is, does Hubbard have an advantage so she will win 95% of the time? If so, it’s not really a competition, especially if that result derives from her innate ... physiology giving her an unfair advantage.

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?

Yeah, so is it unfair? Simone Biles has a genetic advantage, something she probably didn’t have any control over or influence in.

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.

Are there any examples of this worry about "genetic freaks" in non-women categories? It seems much less relevant to me in a category where everyone can enter than one that is restricted to a subset to give that subset 'fair' competition.

Aleksandr Karelin instantly comes to mind.

Not directly related to your question but we have weight classes in certain sports. This levels out at least some of genetic advantages.

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.

>Are there any examples of this worry about "genetic freaks" in non-women categories?

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.

While it's hard to draw a precise line, there's a clear difference between having some genetic features that give you an advantage, and having most genetic features that give you an advantage.

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.

[0] https://i.redd.it/vv4ws1848t671.jpg

> While it's hard to draw a precise line, there's a clear difference between having some genetic features that give you an advantage, and having most genetic features that give you an advantage.

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 evidence is in the performance which falls squarely in line with male performance

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.

I think the point is they took the spot from somebody who deserves to represent their country in Olympic competition and they aren’t even likely to win.

It's supposed to say that she's exhibiting typical male level performance, which happens to be substantially above typical female performance at that level. This means she's taking full advantage of a body which developed and trained as male for 35 years to get ahead of women who have to rely "only" on training.

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.

Equally, you wouldn't ban a child from a junior competition just because they were able to achieve an adult's performance out of "fairness" to the other children. Hubbard may have a physical advantage over cis women - but lots of athletes have physical advantages over each other. What is different about the kind of advantage you might obtain by being trans?

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.

Your last point is one that people don’t agree on though, which makes the topic challenging.

If you read the very first line of the first comment I made above [0] you'll see why the "but some are better than others" is a very unrealistic and uncharitable take on the topic. The whole reason we have separated men and women trials in almost every sport is that the difference between men and women goes far beyond "lots of athletes have an advantage over each other". Having a male body for 35 years is much more than your average advantage.

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...

> Also, comparing a trans woman to someone who "feels young at heart" is a false equivalence,

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.

I feel something being overlooked is the fact that it's relatively easy to dope without detection when your natural state is "doping" when weightlifting is one of the dirtiest sports out there.

Just to take one example of a genetic feature in the wild, there is a gene receptor which if you have the right mutation will cause an 25-50% increase in oxygen carrying capacity of red blood cells. Some people call it a naturally occurring blood doping.

The definition of fairness is difficult when dealing with even single genetic features.

Except... gymnastics won't end up being dominated by a bunch of people like Simone Biles.

Female sports will continue to be dominated by biological males if we continue to let this happen.

So? What would be the downside of trans women dominating womens' sports, if that were even the eventuality?

The downside is that the whole point of having women's sports was to give women a chance to win, which they would usually be unable to. What you are suggesting will again put biological women in the position where they cannot win. So you have defeated the whole purpose.

>What you are suggesting will again put biological women in the position where they cannot win.

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.

Because what you are suggesting will not only affect the top level, every single other level below will face the exact same situation. Genetically normal with determination female are still winning and trying at championship, scholarship, etc.. Let crush that because they are genetically inferior from a mediocre biological male right?

The point of male/female separation is to protect biological female from the genetic advantages of biological male, not from genetic outliers.

> the "point" of womens' leagues is just to provide a space for women to compete, and trans women should be allowed in those spaces.

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.

Does one have to undergo surgery and hormonal therapy to be a trans woman?

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?

> So? What would be the downside of trans women dominating womens' sports, if that were even the eventuality?

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.

The big difference is that these are genetic differences that already have a separate category, to compete against others with those same genetic differences.

> does Hubbard have an advantage so she will win 95% of the time?

This graph would suggest she does:

https://i.redd.it/vv4ws1848t671.jpg

If you read the article you'll see that Hubbard is top 10, but not top 3 in her weight class, and in no way a favorite to win. Even her scores pre-transition wouldn't guarantee her gold at the Olympics.

To be clear, are you saying the graph is inaccurate?

I'm assuming it is accurate, it is still misleading. It makes it look like she should be breaking records and crushing the competition, when in truth she is doing neither.

She is crushing the competition by winning 95% of the time and got placed 4th at the age of 43, stealing the place & glory of another top-tier athlete at their peak performance. How is that not an extraordinary feat had she been a biological female? So no, there's nothing misleading about that chart, you just read it wrong.

How many women over 40 regularly beat Hubbard?

Yes, comparing a 43 years old who is in no way at the peak of their physical performance to a bunch of 20s shows the degree of unfairness. And no, Hubbard doesn't need to win gold for this to become unfair.

Can you at least spare some sympathy for the young woman who's unable to compete at the Olympics because Hubbard has taken her place?

there are athletes who might suffer from abnormal genetic mutations that might give them an advantage. the most popular example might be usain bolt who is, technically, too tall - but in combination with his abnormal muscularity ...

then there is robert förstemann, a track cyclist who might suffer from a myostatin deficincy (a hormone that restricts muscle growth).

does Hubbard have an advantage so she will win 95% of the time?

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).

Also Hubbard is old and probably not the best make weightlifter previously. So the best woman in the world will likely be beaten by someone who would under different circumstances have already retired and was never that great in the first place.

Why would having the same muscle but heavier bones as your competitors be an advantage in almost any sport?

Increased bone density means less prone to injury and more momentum in pivots and swings/punches.

If it would be as simple as "having the same muscle but heavier bones" - then there would be advantages in climbing for example. But the worlds top climbers are male, too.

(but the gap is in climbing seems to be smaller)

Grip strength is another easily-measured physical metric where there is practically no overlap between the bell curve for male and female humans.

The applicability of higher grip strength to success in climbing is obvious, I hope.

Not only that - but look at the shape of the hip bone between men and women - the latter have wider hips to cater for child-birth. This means men have a massive advantage when running/swimming/cycling/lifting. The same applies to the arms (men have straighter arms) which obviously changes the mechanics when lifting. No amount of hormone therapy will change this.

And there's a bunch of trans people anecdotally debating it claiming things like height reduction and others. The truth trans people on (long-term) hormones have not been studied on physiological characteristics to be sure they're affected or not.

If terminology is your hang up then how about BSA, birth sex assignment. Then it is only about biology and not about identity.

only if you ignore the brain and it's processes as not "biological phenomena"

Sport is about the body more than the brain. Particularly weightlifting.

Agreed... And I am not arguing that trans women (who take hormones after the male puberty) don't have an advantage over non-trans women. Just that trans women are about identity and not biology. Oh BTW, at the highest levels of competition like olympics, I suspect there's a brain/mind involvement to a very strong level. But that doesn't change your argument anyways.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to include the effects of medical interventions for the purposes of determining which group, athletically speaking, trans-women should belong to. My understanding is that trans-women are women, not because they received medical treatments that affirm their gender, but because they identify as women. Thus, gender identity, except to the extent that it correlates with biological sex, has very little direct effect on athletic performance. Yes, some choose to receive treatments that reduce their athletic performance, but that's true of many other athletes - sometimes you have to choose between your own health and competition and making the best choices for health often means forgoing a chance to be a top athlete.

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.

basically what happens in online spaces is that regional separate evolution of trans terms clash

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!

Current UK situation seems to be that being "Gender Critical" is a protected belief, based on the ruling case of a case where a tax expert lost her job for tweeting about how men cannot just change into women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Forstater_v_Centre_for_Gl...

Yeah see this is a great example as I have no clue what anybody’s position is there upon a quick skim, and I’ve never even heard the term Gender Critical

Being "gender critical" is the view that trans women are not women. Not to be confused with the "anti-gender" movement, which opposes anything other than traditional male/female roles, or with "postgenderism", which argues the complete opposite, namely that traditional gender is irrelevant.

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.

That just seems weird to me. Most people want to have kids later in life. Of course trans women are different wrt that life goal.

Your argument is somewhat tangential - are you arguing women are defined by their ability to give birth? Seems fairly obvious that doesn't hold up even when we aren't talking about trans people

It doesn’t hold up if you talk about cis women either. I know plenty who cannot have children. Menopause also then would make women not-women, right?

There is a bimodal distribution of biological traits related to reproduction. Traditionally, women are defined as members of one of those clusters, the one whose members are generally able to give birth during some period of their lives. This doesn't mean that all members of the cluster can or have or will give birth, but nonetheless the clusters are fairly well-defined for nearly 100% of the population, with trans people being an exception.

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.

If by "shouldn't matter" you mean something like "it's ridiculous to define what a woman is as having a capability that literally all women lose around middle age" then I'd have to count myself amongst those people. Your argument is an extremely weak one for defining what it means to be a woman.

Not all trans people undergo or desire surgical intervention. Also, a transgender woman who desires biological children and surgical intervention could freeze her sperm before surgery.

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.

"Gender critical" is the anti-trans movement. The reason you can't tell their true position is the usual one: they daren't say "we want to eradicate trans people" in public, so they take the "just asking questions" route.

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.

So has Gender critical been defined as a group in such a way that no-one will admit to being in it? Is it similar to TERF?

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.

> Gender critical been defined as a group in such a way that no-one will admit to being in it?

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.

> The reason you can't tell their true position is the usual one: they daren't say "we want to eradicate trans people" in public, so they take the "just asking questions" route.

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?

Note that the court held two things: 1) Strongly held philosphical beliefs have much the same protection as religious beliefs in law and 2) That doesn’t mean you get to express those beliefs to other people in workplace.

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.

I'm not sure that's relevant; the case was a Tweet, was it not?

I think it was significantly more than just a single Tweet. You’d have to go back to the original judgement (some of which is quoted in the judement I linked to) to see.

Fair enough!

Is being philosophically critical of something automatically hostile? There are plenty of things that would argue against on a moral basis, that are important parts of the lives of some of the people I've worked with. I'd never harass them directly or indirectly for one of these things, but it would be hard to keep them a complete secret either.

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.)

> 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.

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.

Incidentally, threatening suicide to get what you want is a form of emotional abuse.

Good thing nobody does that, isn’t it?

I have been on the receiving end of it.

I suppose I made a big generalization there. Yes, people do sometimes use the threat of suicide to gain social leverage. That in no way is equivalent to saying that people who suffer from chronic pain, chronic depression, who are gay, trans, or work in high stress jobs have much higher than average suicide rates. If you hear statistics around suicide broken down by those demographics and see yourself as a victim of terrorism then that says more about you as a person than about anyone else. If someone directly tells you that what you are doing to them makes them feel suicidal then call 911 and walk away from that person. Beyond that, it's not your responsibility. If you keep feeling terrorized by a situation like that, I suggest talking to your mental health professional who can help you develop better coping skills.

> Is being philosophically critical of something automatically hostile?

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.)

Sex is not binary either.

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.

I found the idea of a "cluster concept" of biological sex, as opposed to a essentialist binary, to be a useful addition for thinking about this issue. We can all point to the binary and say where do you draw the line, because of all kinds of exceptional cases. But if you say, here is a cluster of characteristics that are common to amongst the groups, you don't need to have them all, but most people have a majority of one or the other, then there becomes a more objective way to think about it.. And maybe the cluster that is important to weight lifting is different from something else.. Not saying that I aggrege with Kathleen Stock's conclusions. Just find this useful.

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...

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