The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned.
There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age.
Competitive sport is unusual in that the whole thing is, in a sense, a search for outliers.
Finding very rightmost person on the histogram of running speed or swimming ability or weightlifting strength. The very, very rare. The 7ft 6in guys. Then we put them on a podium, hand them a medal, and wrap them in a flag.
In most other fields, outliers average out. The new subdivision of houses gets framed at the speed of the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1.
In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about.
This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue.
Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises.
How do you ever come up with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting)
Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.
No one cares at amateur levels but we are speaking of the Olympic. I'm all for transgender to do sport, have fun and even compete but Olympic games are about who is the best of the world.
If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.
Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted.
Disproportionate to how rare perhaps, but not disproportionate to how loud.
Furthermore I’d argue rarity is not really an argument here. A new doping could also initially be rare; it would still provide an unfair advantage.
Anecdotal evidence also is meaningless. I might lose a sprinting race to a trained woman, but that doesn’t mean male sprinters aren’t inherently better than female sprinters. They obviously and clearly are.
In any case, I’d personally have no issue with this in friendly matches. Also I think olympically speaking this would be a perfect case for the paralympics, who have experience with (arbitrarily) adjusting competitions for varying levels of bodily differences.
> The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
Honest question, you say you compete for fun, but what about the folks you beat who are competing for the sake of competition, which is a little different than fun? I am generally open minded at least in comparison to folks I encounter but I can’t square this one in my head. I am just one person with a single opinion but would like to better understand where I am wrong on this topic.
> There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition,
There might also be a similar advantage for AFAB women who have unusually higher testosterone. I don't get why they don't just do hormone brackets like they do with weight in boxing, and do away with gender based divisions entirely.
You can tell the IOC does not care about fairness in competition: they focus on this, instead of the rampant cheating (eg doping) which they do nothing about.
Trans women have competed as women in the Olympics once ever and have 0 medals. By the numbers it's a non issue under previous rules (despite the incredible amount of ink spilled over it). People are talking about trans women here but the vast majority of people affected by this change are women who are not trans who have a "disorder of sexual development".
Transgender athletes are not barred from women's events. Female athletes who identify as men, or otherwise do not identify as women, can still compete in this category, as they have been doing already.
What the IOC's new policy actually does is make male athletes ineligible for competition in the female category, with very few exceptions. These exceptions are for athletes who are technically male but have a disorder of sex development that confers no male advantage, e.g. CAIS.
what always strikes me as weird is how often the conversation is framed around "men competing in women's sports" when trans women cant really be said to be biologically male anymore. Taking Estrogen and blocking testosterone has a huge effect on how fast/strong/athletic someone is. I feel like that should be the key point of discussion, but somehow always gets burried under other, kind of less relevant subjects (for example I dont think it matters that up until now no trans woman has really won anything significant, as that could always change in the future).
I see this topic come up repeatedly in different guises, protect women from the evil trans-agenda. But I haven't seen where this is actually a problem.
Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
I always thought the more elegant approach to all of this was to add a mixed sex league. Keep the traditions, add a novel new one, and let people consent to who they want to compete against and watch
I wonder if anyone has measured the speed in which reality is codified into law or regulation. Women have been fighting against males in female sports for many, many years. Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
My deeply naive take is all of this stuff should be done similar to weight classes. I'm not sure what key measurable testosterone or other doping effects but measure that and separate athletes into classes based on that. Want to do steroids? Fine but you just get to compete against other dopers. As a low-T male I can go get my butt kicked by women at athletic events if I want.
843 comments
The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned.
There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age.
Finding very rightmost person on the histogram of running speed or swimming ability or weightlifting strength. The very, very rare. The 7ft 6in guys. Then we put them on a podium, hand them a medal, and wrap them in a flag.
In most other fields, outliers average out. The new subdivision of houses gets framed at the speed of the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1.
In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about.
Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises.
How do you ever come up with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting)
Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.
If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.
> but would be sad to be banned.
Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted.
Furthermore I’d argue rarity is not really an argument here. A new doping could also initially be rare; it would still provide an unfair advantage.
Anecdotal evidence also is meaningless. I might lose a sprinting race to a trained woman, but that doesn’t mean male sprinters aren’t inherently better than female sprinters. They obviously and clearly are.
In any case, I’d personally have no issue with this in friendly matches. Also I think olympically speaking this would be a perfect case for the paralympics, who have experience with (arbitrarily) adjusting competitions for varying levels of bodily differences.
> The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany
As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.
> There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition,
There might also be a similar advantage for AFAB women who have unusually higher testosterone. I don't get why they don't just do hormone brackets like they do with weight in boxing, and do away with gender based divisions entirely.
Transgender athletes are not barred from women's events. Female athletes who identify as men, or otherwise do not identify as women, can still compete in this category, as they have been doing already.
What the IOC's new policy actually does is make male athletes ineligible for competition in the female category, with very few exceptions. These exceptions are for athletes who are technically male but have a disorder of sex development that confers no male advantage, e.g. CAIS.
You create, as a form of entertainment for the masses, an event for peak athletes to display their talent...by quirk of biology that means men.
You create a women's category to let them have their own entertainment niche.
You have in fact segregated sports, by gender, or sex, or whatever you want to call it.
Now there exist individuals who challenge the boundaries of this segregation. What do?
The realpolitik answer would be to segregate these individuals into yet another niche.
Of course the question arises, how many segregation categories to you create before it becomes all meaningless?
I see this topic come up repeatedly in different guises, protect women from the evil trans-agenda. But I haven't seen where this is actually a problem.
Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
is that in 100+ years of Olympics, there are ZERO elite athletes who were transgender
none
it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote
because there have been no previous cases of that either
However there are women who have given birth who will fail that SRY test
Because biology is messy, not black and white, never "on" or "off", there is always overlap
They tried this before in 1996 and quickly ended it by 2000 because the result was a disaster