Hacker News Reader

Comment by etherus | Hacker News Reader

If you were required to compete with people of a gender you do not identify with, even when event organisers recognise you as more fitting among the other group, that's a ban. There are trans masc people. Requiring them to compete with women is unfair and disrespectful. Requiring trans fem people to do so is the same. The rules around gender identification in regulated sports require proof of medical treatment yada yada to accept that people are 'trans enough', which is itself discriminatory. Trans people are a lot less distinct and separate from everyone else than you'd be led to think.

View on HN

The classification is based on sex, expressly due to the material differences between the sexes.

It is not and has never been rooted in any sort of sociological concept of gender as an independent category from one’s sex.

The material difference between people we bar and do not bar is not large enough to constitute a difference against competing with people we assign within the same sex group [1][2][3]. This might feel counterintuitive, but please consider that trans people who have medically transitioned are not as different from cis people of the same gender than you expect. Hormones do a lot. [1] https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2026/01/22/bjsports-2025-... [2]https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/10/bjsports-2023-... [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10641525/

I think the eye test is more reliable than the BMJ when it comes to international competition at the highest level. We’ve all seen the videos.

"This might feel counterintuitive" is precisely why the religious right has seized on transgender participation in athletics as a wedge issue. When they say "well, somebody who was born as a man obviously has a natural advantage over people born as women," it feels logical, right? The fact that it largely isn't supported by data rarely comes up, and when it does, it's easy to deflect with "maybe there's just not enough data yet" (which, of course, could just as easily be an argument against imposing such bans, but never mind).

It is infuriating how successful the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd has been at pushing discriminatory legislation through in the last few years based largely on feelings rather than facts.

Let’s reverse this. Why should physical competition be classified based on sociological conceptions around gender?

The classification has always been based on sociological conceptions and is still based on such after this change. There have always been outliers who are sociologically women, but don't have the biological makeup most women have.

That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.

You’re claiming female sports categories were not biologically rooted classifications?

I'm claiming that there were always women with outlier biology which is not at all easy to classify and not obvious at a glance.

People caring about this issue in sports now and changing the objective admission criteria to exclude them is a political phenomenon more than anything else.

The categories were created at a time when “sex” and “gender” were universally considered synonymous, but they were created for the purpose of sex segregation — were they not?

This issue genuinely confuses me — and I don’t seem alone in that. Re-defining words does not redefine categories or change the underlying motivation for creating categories in the first place.

I'm not trying to define away biology here. Although "sex" is surprisingly hard to nail down.

Rather, I'm arguing the underlying motivation for creating these categories was and is a sociological one. Why carve out womens sports, as opposed to short peoples sports, low testosterone sports (or other categories which would be similarly disadvantaged)?

The only reason people pay attention to sex here is sociological, i.e. because of gender. This implies that the admissions criteria do not automatically have to follow these strict biological lines -- and I see little reason to enforce them this strictly now. Why exclude trans people and why make yourself a headache trying to classify e.g. intersex people?

More of an aside: a society which fully accepted trans women as women would think looking at the biological markers you're looking at is complete nonsense. Suggesting trans women should be banned would be as ludicrous as suggesting all women with a specific gene which might increase your chances of winning should be banned.

We carved out women’s sports because otherwise there would be no biological women in competitive sports, and that was considered to be a significant enough exclusion of half the human population as to warrant such direct intercession.

Whether or not a similar case can be made for other categories does not have bearing on the case for sex categorization. Such claims can and should stand on their own merits.

If it's based on a material difference, then classify the material difference, directly.

There could be translympics just like there is paralympics.

We probably don't want to head down the path of creating new competitions for people that meet arbitrary criteria. White-straight-man only olympics anyone?

White straight men aren't being barred from the Olympics.

I'm guessing you wouldn't say this if you attended the paraolympics, or perhaps it would enforce your already held views, I'm not sure. But there are already 64 different classes of impairment that compete as far as I can tell. Frankly I found it a bit fascinating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com