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Comment by cko | Hacker News Reader

The BBC article doesn't seem to claim that there is no genetic advantage. I learned from it that there is some gray area in biological gender.

It may very well be that after this Olympics, the IOC will have to draw some arbitrary line (e.g., if you are a female with testosterone-sensitive Y chromosome, then you can't compete with females).

It is possible that the top athletes in many sports have a yet to be discovered rare genetic condition that allows their body to recover faster, gives them faster twitch muscles and supreme mental focus. That's certainly a genetic advantage.

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>> The BBC article doesn't seem to claim that there is no genetic advantage. I learned from it that there is some gray area in biological gender.

I understand the BBC article to also make it clear that there is no test for "genetic advantage". If there were such a test then we could separate athletes to "advantage categories" so that all the athletes with the same kind of advantage compete with each other. Rather what we have is broad categories of weight and gender where different athletes have different strengths and weaknesses, where the majority of them have some kind of genetic advantage over the average non-athlete of their gender and weight, and where there are very often athletes who are clearly head and shoulders above the competition in every which way; and probably without doping.

Has anyone done an experiment like this?

Take the typical female (XX) and typical male (XY) one rep max on say a squat, bench press and deadlift (could/should also compare cardio, etc) vs someone with this condition. Who are these individuals closer to when untrained? That's who they should compete against.

Getting untrained people to do a one rep squat / bench / deadlift seems unsafe. It's probably easier to just do genetic testing or get biological markers and draw the line that way.

> Getting untrained people to do a one rep squat / bench / deadlift seems unsafe.

It isn't, they can't lift that much because they are untrained so it's difficult for them to hurt themselves. Many other exercises would also work, 50 yard dash? Rucking with a backpack for a few miles? Anything where a gender difference exists today that is large enough to be statistically significant.

They do this sort of thing all the time: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34873221/

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