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Comment by benmmurphy | Hacker News Reader

i think the more interesting questions are what is a women when adjudicating a rule involving who is a woman. it may even make sense to have multiple definitions of who a woman is depending on the rule. for example i don't think it makes sense for people who were previously men to compete in women sports when one of the main reasons for segregating women's sport is to protect them from competition from men who are biologically better at these sports. but that doesn't mean the same person should be excluded from being considered a woman when deciding some other rule.

people also seem to deliberately be conflating sex and gender. clearly a lot of 'rules' seem to be based on sex but then people will claim gender identity is fluid and then try to use gender identification to backdoor a rule that is based on sex.

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I think sport is a a exemple on why gender is a bad measure.

Why are we doing separate competitions for men and women? Because men have physical differences that give them a significant advantage on many sports. For simplicity purpose I will assume this is only because they generate more testosterone though I'm sure it's more complicated.

So people generating more testosterone have a significant advantage on sports. Why should then we care wether they are men or women, whatever that means? A good illustration of this are women who have hyperandrogenism, who are, ironically, sometimes excluded from competing in women competitions because of the unfair advance their high testosterone give them compared to other women, even though they are biological women. I'm sure some men have low level of testosterone compared to the "standard" level of most men, which would give them an unfair disadvantage in men competitions.

So my question is, why, rather than doing men/women competitions, don't we do high/low testosterone competition, regardless of the gender?

And that is why I advocate that we remove all divisions from sports. Allow all doping and body modifications. And either allow all or ban all equipment, including clothing. Let us achieve best possible results.

The advantages of male puberty and the Y chromosome extend far beyond testosterone.

It's also irrelevant how much testosterone a person produces today. You can reduce the testosterone levels of a Michael Phelps type to female levels (though it would ruin his health), yet he would retain insurmountable advantages over every woman who has ever been born on this planet.

> It's also irrelevant how much testosterone a person produces today

It's really, really not. And if we didn't know that before (we did), trans athletes on HRT provide pretty clear evidence of that, in both directions.

My point is that you can’t reverse all the advantages of the years of previous testosterone (i.e. male puberty) just by cutting today‘s testosterone levels. You can make that person perform worse than other males, sure, but it’s not enough to reach a level playing field with females. There may be exceptions for specific sports - I’m talking about the general case, which is what we base policies on.

In general you also can’t give a female athlete sufficient testosterone to counteract the absence of male puberty and make them competitive with men. You can make them better than non-doping women, sure, but it’s not enough to reach the level of post puberty males, and the more you give the worse the impact on their health. The GDR already ran that experiment.

Sure, the testosterone level was just a simplification as I said. Whatever measurable thing that give an advantage would work. For example the muscular mass, I don't know. Whatever the past, there is always something different now that gives the advantage for the current race.

We do segregate many sports on other dimensions, e.g. by weight in boxing.

The problem with trying to do something like that across the sexes is that the performance gap between elite men and elite women (i.e. those at the top of their statistical distributions) is so large in so many sports (even when controlling for height or weight).

For example, a large number of amateur men who are well under 6 feet tall can dunk a basketball (and Spud Webb was 5 foot 7!), but it's remarkable to find even a professional female player of the same height who could do this. Similarly being tackled by an 85kg male rugby player is a whole other universe of pain compared to being tackled by an 85kg female. Anybody who knows sports can find similar examples. It’s not about testosterone or some other individual item - it’s the whole complex biological organism acting in concert. When you are working with so many dimensions and those are also interacting in real time, it is very hard to divide things into "fair" categories.

Because of these issues, women fought very hard for (and won) the right to have their own competitions, free of male competitors.

For more examples, see https://boysvswomen.com/#/. If Olympic events were mixed sex, most events would have no female competitors at all. Teenage boys routinely beat female world records.

After countless female leads in fighting roles pushed in agenda based Hollywood brainwashing, and the era of immense sociopolitical pressure to push the 'women can do anything' line, perhaps the answer is just don't segregate.

Instead of the subjectivity, remove all the segregation and let reality sort it out.

Would certainly clear up a lot of cognitive dissonance.

This should give a sense of the outcome: https://boysvswomen.com/#/

Yes, teenage boys (even 13 and 14 year olds) frequently beat female world records. In almost all athletic sports, a "combined" Olympics would have no female participants at all.

This is why women fought for sex segregation in the first place.

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