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Comment by sunshowers | Hacker News Reader

The important thing to recognize is that fairness is a pretty fuzzy concept and a lot of the boundary between fair and unfair is defined by particular societal norms (socially constructed, if you will).

All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. People like Michael Phelps and Alex Honnold are specific examples of course, but even after years of training most people cannot perform anywhere near the level that elite athletes do.

Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.

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Absolutely lots of factors actually influence competitive advantage and it's arbitrary which ones we decide to use to group competitors!

I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands, why not have height classes for various sports? Why not have cycling races with tiers of people at different points on the vO2 max scale?

I actually think it would be interesting to watch competitions for some sports that are based around who does "better than expected" by some model that predicts baselines. What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? Critically, you wouldn't just stop paying attention when the first cluster of people cross the finish-line -- the winner might arrive later. I would also love to see if different styles of play would emerge in, e.g. an under-6-foot basketball height class.

> What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations?

This is basically how golf works, right?

But in high level competition people don't use handicaps right? But I think handicaps are also about your individual skill level based on your past performance relative to par on different courses right? (I'm not a golfer). I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate deep skill. I'm imagining we should have a shared model that given some basic info (e.g. your biological sex, height, maybe some ratios about your skeletal proportions, age, hormones) gives a distribution on performance (e.g. marathon time, long jump distance, weight lighting combined score), and your normalized score is based on the quantile you get relative to that baseline. I think that behaves pretty different from a handicap based on personal past performance. I.e. a tiny old lady who throws a shotput pretty far gets a high normalized score, even if her performance is extremely consistent over time (and so on the day of competition she's not outperforming her prior record).

Michael Phelps has already had his records broken. Women will never break men's records across a wide range of sports. I keep seeing him brought up, but it's in no way comparable.

Pushing for allowing men into women's sports based on gender identity will result in the extinction of women's sports. If you want that, at least be honest about it.

Sorry, what?

You can compare the world records of female athletes and male athletes in almost every sport and see that really this is an empirical observation.

To use one of your examples: Michael Phelps has at this point had his records beaten by a number of other male swimmers. But no female swimmer has come close. Not even Katie Ledecky.

Well, yes, I completely agree it makes sense to have two categories.

Sure, but how big is the total pool of female swimmers? If we assume that ability to swim (within a sex, for the sake of argument) follows a normal distribution, the denominator of "people that gave swimming a real try" is going to have a direct relationship with the capabilities of the best ever to try. This is completely ignoring funding, encouragement, and access, and strictly discussing the sheer number of women that have literally tried swimming at a young enough age to discover their talent and have the opportunity to become the best swimmer they possibly could if they have it.

It is easy to control for that, just look at the best man from a very small population.

For example, the fastest male swimmers in Iceland are still much faster than the fastest female swimmers in the world, and Iceland has 10 000 times less people than the world.

There aren't 10 000 times more men trying to become elite swimmers than women.

Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have, but we've only known about chromosomes for <200 years. Before the 1900 Olympics, women weren't even allowed to compete.

On the scale of human evolution, this is a very recent situation for society to figure out how to "decide".

There are plenty of cultures around the world that conceptualize gender differently than we do, as well. Including many where there are options where individuals can choose their gender, in various circumstances or for various purposes.

So actually on the scale of human evolution, humans have been making different choices about matters like these since we've been humans.

It's really not new or recent. For as long as there's been gender norms there's been groups of people outside those norms.

You can, for example, find examples of trans individuals in Utah in the 1800s. [1] Eunuchs are a pretty well-known concept since about the start of recorded history.

Here's an example of a roman cult which practiced self-castration. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Morris_Young

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli

I didn't mean to imply that these people didn't exist, just that the scientific understanding detailing aspects of their existence (chromosomes, gonadal dysgenesis, etc) is new.

> Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have

Or gender norms have existed since gender was defined in the 70s-80s by feminist scholars. Before that was only sex, which biologists know to be not a binary but a bimodal distribution, itself.

Norms are not defined by scholars or scientists, even if they may define the terms to describe them.

That sound you hear is literally every anthropologist laughing hysterically.

> We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair

That somehow was mostly because people with certain chromosomal characteristics were heavily disadvantaged in sports, but increasingly wanted participation in them. Because those people (who we called "women") would largely be unable to be competitive and/or would face considerable increased risk of physical harm if they played in/against the same teams as everyone else, people with those chromosomal characteristics splintered off to compete in/against teams of themselves.

This was extremely successful and many women have been happily participating in sports, enjoying the ability to win games by virtue of their training and the non-sex defining aspects of their genetic make up, all without having to unnecessarily accept outsized risks of bodily harm and injury.

It's also worth mentioning that there hasn't been much effort to keep women from competing outside of their own divisions if they're willing to accept the lower odds of success and higher risks of harm to themselves that'd come from that. For the most part, they have been deciding for themselves that it isn't worth it.

It's not even as if chromosomal advantages are the only place we've done this. We have weight classes in certain sports. We have teams that only accept people within certain age ranges. We have divisions based on demonstrated ability. We even have things like the special Olympics. These really aren't a problem or a bad thing to have.

People can't choose their biology, but they can choose to play sports in a way that's more fair and safe for themselves and the others they play with and that's a perfectly acceptable practice that we should encourage. This is true even when it means that some people are excluded from specific teams or events because of things they cannot change about themselves. There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.

> There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.

This reads to me as "separate but equal" which I think is exactly what's wrong with sports divisions. Sports divisions play out the "separate is inherently unequal" at so many levels.

i don't think equality was ever the goal. The goal was just to let more people play sports, have fun, and have a realistic chance of winning within their chosen division.

If a professional baseball player wanted to play in a little league tournament they'd do very very well, but it'd be unfair to a bunch of 7-12 year olds, so we don't allow that and the sport is "separate", but when a 9 year old kid wins the Little League World Series, while that's very exciting for the players, we still don't treat that win as being equal to winning the actual World Series.

Winning the actual World Series is a much bigger deal. Nobody treats them as being equal, but being inherently unequal doesn't mean that it's wrong. The Little League World Series can just be its own thing, because what actually matters is that the kids are having fun playing the sport they love and don't have to worry that some 30 year old with a batting average of .340 is going to ruin their good time.

There are times when "separate is inherently unequal" is actually the most fair.

> There are times when "separate is inherently unequal" is actually the most fair.

I guess ask the WNBA if they feel that way about it...

> All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us.

Sure. Meanwhile there's no athletic record of anyone identified as a woman cracking the four minute mile.

Not long after Roger Bannister, teenage boys started doing it. It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets.

Elite capability does not erase or conceal sex-related gaps. We have male and female divisions at all levels of sport for a reason.

It's kinda unusual, but only because they don't run the mile event very often. Most track events have a 1,500 meters, 109m short of a mile. But they're definitely running them at a sub-4 pace -- the high school record is something like 3:34 for the 1,500.

Most tracks aren't set up to properly measure the mile. It's easier to measure the 1,600 meters, still 9 meters short of a mile. It's not a standard track event but it does give a good estimate of the mile time.

What is kinda unusual? I don't understand your comment.

The USA high school record for the female 1500 m event 4:04.62, set on May 17, 2013, by one Mary Cain of Bronxville, NY, in an event at Eagle Rock, CA.

It would take something like another 18 seconds to get to 1609 meters at that pace.

That's just the USA. Let's look at the World Under-18 records:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_i...

3:54.52, by a Ling Zhang in China, in 1997. Not sub-4 pace. She was 16 + 188 days old.

Not sure where you got 3:34 from; maybe you are looking at a boys' table? A 17-year-old Australian named Cameron Myers hit 3:33.26 in 2023, in Poland.

We saw a new women's 1500 m record just this month. 31-year-old Kenyan Faith Kipyegon ran it 3:48.68 on July 5, in Eugene, OR.

Note that it it was still 15 seconds slower than the boy. It's about a 4:05 mile pace.

Yeah, sorry about that. I should have quoted the specific bit I was replying to:

"It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets."

Most boys won't run the actual mile in a track meet, just because they don't run that event. I hadn't meant to address women at all.

>Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.

What's the implication here, that because the distinction is totally arbitrary, that we should do away with it? What does that mean for women's sports?

> What does that mean for women's sports?

I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?

>I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?

Would you be equally deferential to the organizer/rule-making body if it was some other controversial issue, like whether women could compete at all? As a sibling comment mentioned, women couldn't even compete in the olympics before 1900, so if it came up as a culture war topic would your reaction also be "I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision"?

I don't see the need to create and articulate a universalizeable moral framework to decide how I should react to a specific case in front of me.

I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.

>I don't see the need to create and articulate a universalizeable moral framework to decide how I should react to a specific case in front of me.

You kinda do, otherwise your position just sounds like "why are you talking about trans athletes? You should just Trust the Experts, except when I disagree with them, then it's an Important Moral Issue that the public needs to weigh in on".

>I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.

This is a very perilous position to hold, because it basically means if there's enough TERF athletes to outnumber trans women athletes (which doesn't seem too implausible, based on purely demographic factors) then it's okay to exclude them.

To your last point, most women don't want men in their sports, but have been pressured to go along with it.

It is okay to exclude men from women's sports because women have the right to sex-specific spaces.

[flagged]

You're right, discussion's open to the clergy only. Any laymen who continue to discuss this infohazard will be banned.

    the clergy, such at least as can be fully confided in, may admissibly and
    meritoriously make themselves acquainted with the arguments of opponents, in
    order to answer them, and may, therefore, read heretical books; the laity,
    not unless by special permission, hard to be obtained. This discipline
    recognises a knowledge of the enemy's case as beneficial to the teachers,
    but finds means, consistent with this, of denying it to the rest of the
    world: thus giving to the élite more mental culture, though not more mental
    freedom, than it allows to the mass [0].

[0] John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty." 1859. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm

I deliberately did not include any normative information on my post. Also, I didn't say the distinction was totally arbitrary (because it's not — social constructs rarely are totally arbitrary). I said the boundaries are fuzzy.

I think a regime where intersex cis women, as well as trans women who have been on testosterone suppression for a long period, would probably be most fair. I don't think categorical bans are fair in any respect, not is forcing intersex cis and trans women to compete with men (because they're likely to be much worse due to not having as much testosterone), nor is creating a third category (because it would have too few people to be truly competitive). But I'm not an expert and most likely neither are you, so I try to keep my opinions here relatively loosely held.

The para-Olympics thrive with dramatically smaller numbers than trans women can manage. A 3rd category would do just fine.

The muscular changes that happen during puberty are permanent. No amount of testosterone suppression will change that. In how many sports do any trans-women end up on the podium vs their numbers in that sport?

The boundaries are really not that fuzzy at all.

For myself, it means that I should have some patience and humility. Of course, I don't participate in women's sports anyway, so that should be pretty easy for me.

Exactly. I also support human augmentation, body modification, blood doping, and exogenous testosterone usage at the Olympics. These are the affirmations a mere male athlete can use to transition into an alpha male elite athlete. You can maybe include minoxidil, for those who actually need it.

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