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Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

To educate others reading this, it's far from "obvious" how to classify gender in sports. Checking if they have the right "parts" physically doesn't do it. Checking for hormone levels doesn't do it. Even checking for Y chromosomes doesn't do it.

In my opinion the way forward is to stop trying to find arbitrary ways to define gender, and just start making competition classes based on whatever factors are relevant to the event. E.g. a women with high testosterone? They can compete with men or women with the same testosterone bracket. This would also let men with low-T compete fairly rather then be excluded from the games.

It's also relevant at what point other genetic changes are "unfair." There are absolutely genetic traits that give people HUGE advantages in various competitions. Just like the gender-related properties, these are natural and yet result in unfair competitions.

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The problem with your proposed 'fuzzy divisions' is that they're not compatible with the zeitgeist of 'seeing the best compete', and 'drug-free' sports, as there's no reason to disallow performance-enhancing-drugs if we're already splitting into divisions.

Actually, you bring up an excelling additional argument for the sort of bracketing I proposed. It also works for drugs!

There is significant grey area wrt to "doping" too in the sense that a performance enhancing drug may express as a larger than normal amount of a naturally occurring substance. So did the person dope, or is that their natural genetics? In my scheme, WHO CARES!

Beyond that, I suppose there is the usual argument against more serious and non-natural forms of doping that it is physically detrimental to the competitors and by allowing it you are encouraging or pressuring people to essentially harm themselves.

Still, competition classes could be helpful in some of the doping grey areas.

Why is checking for a Y chromosome not sufficient? This does not seem to me like an arbitrary definition. What am I missing?

It's in fact possible to develop a female body with XY chromosomes:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6586948/

Also warning that article has images that may be inappropriate in a public setting. I didn't realize when I linked it.

Thank you. But the Y test still seems sufficient. Every criterion will have false positives and negatives. With the Y test the false negative (you present as a woman but have a Y chromosome) is rare and the vast majority of cases are handled well. If you have this condition you must compete against men (given the Y chromosome test rule) or not compete. If you’re dying to be in the Olympics as a woman but have the Y chromosome, you’re just out of luck. Not everyone can be a concert pianist either. No rule makes things wonderful for 100% of humans. The Y test gets very close.

But that's a contradiction, no? We're saving women from other women and barring trans people also (ones we consider men) because of a perceived risk that I don't see evidence for (i.e. people choosing to compete as women on a malicious basis or with an 'innate advantage' that makes it dangerous - we've had a long time of running these sports without this sort of regulation, and it seems to be a political choice more than a reaction to evidence that women are being outcompeted by trans people). This is also assuming that having a y chromosome makes it fair for people with a y chromosome to compete against one another, but if you compare people's physiology these people who present as women often have low/no testosterone. Separating on the line of testosterone picks up a lot of female athletes (especially at the olympic level) that are not trans, and overall I just see this hurting women without evidence that it's actually a response to harm. In any case, trans people and gender non conforming women become the victims of this in the public sphere. It just seems very misguided.

There will always be outliers.

High level sports consists entirely of outliers. That’s kind of the point of the olympics. This newest rule is nothing more than a misogynist rule to turn the women’s division into the “no more than statistically average” division.

Almost every gold medal winner in the past games would not have been affected by this new rule, so that's a biiit hyperbolic. Those athletes are still far outside the normal performance of women (or men, for that matter).

>checking for Y chromosomes doesn't do it

Lol why does this not do it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrom...

Among others

I am going to try to keep my response apolitical to try to avoid fanning a culture war. That Wiki is the exact reason we are in this situation because we are bringing up points for 1 in 20000 or 0.005% of the population. Any system designed around 0.005% edge cases is going to be so complex that it is functionally impossible to do in practice. That is why one side says the solution is "obvious" because we have a simple rule that covers 99.9% of cases and the other 0.1% is unfortunately effectively barred from high level competition. Note, high level competition already bars 99.9% of people. Even though the opposing side is correct in pointing out these edge cases, it does nothing to advance an actual solution.

There are statistically around 15 women AFAB with XY chromosomes in the NCAA by those numbers (assuming no correlation between Swyer syndrome and athletic performance).

There are currently around 10 openly transgender women in the NCAA.

Small numbers either way.

Except I proposed a solution, which you ignored (I'm assuming here that I'm your "opposing side".)

Also, there are a significant number of these sorts of arguments in high-level sports, probably precisely because these "0.1%" cases are exactly the ones that result in exceptional ability relative to norms. It's also curious that there is such obsession about naturally occurring genetic outliers with respect to females or gender but absolute silence about naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender. And surprise surprise the top athletes often have such outlier genetics!

If you're drawing a distinction between natural genetic difference related to only gender and no other factors then sadly it's exactly a culture war, not a war based in science or fairness.

> naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender

This is just not true. Many sports are categorized by weight for the most obvious example.

Yes. Which is what I proposed for all differences. Note that classifying by weight is not banning athletes like is happening in the olympics.

Heavy weight boxers are banned from competing against feather weight boxers.

Sure, it covers 99.9% of cases, but top elite athletes are the genetic exceptions, they are the genetic freaks. They are the top 0.0001%. You don't get to compete at the most elite levels without your body being exceptionally gifted and almost specifically shaped for the relevant sport, which inevitably means funky genetic traits and disorders, higher testosterone levels etc.

I mean the word freak in the most loving and caring way possible, mind you.

What does fairness mean in that context?

I am not sure what point you are trying to make. When it comes to the Olympics, it was decided a long time ago that having both men and women's events was beneficial for societal progress to have both sexes represented. This was at a time when sex=gender. Now, we recognize the difference between sex and gender but one side thinks the split of events was always based on gender whereas it was almost surely based on sex. This ruling confirms that view point.

This isn't a novel problem.

Because in a specific minority of the population it disagrees with the gender assigned at birth for obvious reasons. There are plenty of resources you could read on intersex instead of lol at something you don’t understand

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