Comment by csnover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csnover | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is such a tired canard. Biological sex is an imprecise and discriminatory proxy for physical performance, and we can do better. Professional boxing already includes an additional objective measure—weight class—to improve match fairness. So not only is it possible to find a better discriminator, there is already one proven approach that can be used as a starting point today.

Furthermore, using biological sex as the discriminator in sport doesn’t just create unnecessary conflict for intersex and trans players, it also excludes cis-gendered people who are talented, love sport, but just didn’t win the genetic lottery. Dividing leagues by metrics other than gender gives everybody more opportunity to participate. Again, going back to boxing, if the only metric were gender, most or all of the people outside heavyweight class wouldn’t be participating at all.

Finally, I would also argue that team sport is more interesting when greater varieties of people with different strengths and weaknesses can play together. If we designed video games the way we run most sport leagues, matches would be split up into tanks vs tanks, dps vs dps, support vs support. Congratulations, you’ve made things “more even” by separating everyone using superficial physical traits, and lost most of the interesting dynamics of pitting different strengths against different weaknesses.

That's all very well in theory, but what classes would you use to replace sex in practice?

For example, in a recent women's swimming competition, Lia Thomas, who is male, was permitted to compete on the basis of his gender identity claims.

Do you consider gender identity to be a reasonable method of categorization? Because that is the specific problematic issue here, not whether different attributes than sex could be used in general.

I know I am being petty, but -

"For example, in a recent women's swimming competition, Lia Thomas, who is MALE, was permitted to compete on the basis of HIS gender identity claims"

At least address her with the correct pronouns, that's the least you could do in such a discussion.

I hope my comment is not interpreted as arrogant, my point is that even if we are discussing biological sex that is no reason to strip people from their preferred (social!) gender.

I understand the point you are making, but I feel that using a female pronoun while discussing Thomas being male would have been the more jarring linguistic choice, given the subject.

I know what you mean. But pronouns which relate to social gender can be differentiated from sex/biological gender.

To rewrite your original comment, "Lia Thomas, who was born male, was permitted to compete on the basis of her gender identity claims" would be a fine and understandable statement, I think.

When talking about the person Lia Thomas, we are talking about a woman. She's Lia Thomas. Yes, she was assigned male at birth and her biological gender is male, but the person is female.

Again, I am maybe a bit petty, but I think this is exactly one of these important aspects when talking about transsexuality.

I'm not really disagreeing with what you're essentially saying, just trying to make a point about transsexuality.

Thomas has said himself, that he does not care about pronouns, as long as he gets to destroy women sports, so I don't understand why you're so offended on his behalf.

Having said that, of course he's not a woman. No doctor in the world would disagree with me on that. You're deluded by some kind of ideology which puts even Idiocracy to shame. Snap out of it.

> Thomas has said himself, that he does not care about pronouns, as long as he gets to destroy women sports

Source?

> don't understand why you're so offended

I'm not offended, why else would I mention multiple times that I'm being petty, but trying to make a point and start a conversation about transsexuality.

> Having said that, of course he's not a woman. No doctor in the world would disagree with me on that

Yet another person who doesn't understand the difference between sex and gender and instead decides to belittle me. Nothing I haven't experienced yet, still disappointing.

I see your point, but I think one has to take the context of the conversation into account too.

In a social situation involving a transgender person, it's considered polite to use pronouns that won't exacerbate any gender dysphoria they may feel. I would think that most of us have done this at some point, as a kindness.

However if we're discussing a controversial public figure, and the topic is sex versus gender identity, I feel it makes more sense to use pronouns that match up with material reality, for the sake of clarity.

Great comment, this really changed my mind and gave me some different perspectives about how sports could be handled.

Especially the part where diversity makes it more interesting in team sports.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com