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Comment by ivanbakel | Hacker News Reader

>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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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