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.
Taking a step back, I think "search for outliers" doesn't quite get to the heart of the issue. Why are we searching for the outliers, and why are we so particular about the base distributions that we are searching for outliers of - why are there women's sports at all (if the outliers they find are not outliers on the same metric in the whole population), and why is boxing, for example, divided into weight classes?
It seems to me that a big part of the point of competitive spectator sports is to send, to the spectator, a message along the lines of "this could have been you". It is hard to argue that the ability to throw a 1kg+ discus exceptionally far is otherwise so useful that would justify all the expense of finding and showcasing the outlier. Therefore, the point of the competition stands and falls with whether the spectator buys this message.
When do spectators tend to believe in it? When should they? Arguably, there is a plethora of reasons why the median American spectator looking at a clip of Usain Bolt running could not in any meaningful sense have been him. Yet, somehow, the "could-have-been-me sense" that people are endowed with transcends these reasons and results in men commonly looking at him and getting some of that could-have-been-me sense that gives the sport meaning, and women looking at him and getting much less of it. To solve this, we maintain a separate women's category. The winner there is not as much of an outlier relative to the distribution of the whole population. Most likely, she is still every bit as dissimilar to the spectators as Usain Bolt is. Yet, the women watching, and the ones merely learning about this event happening through osmosis, get their heart warmed by the dubious sense that this could have been them, and perhaps encouraged to try harder and hold more hope for some other pursuit of their own, in a way that they never would have due to Usain Bolt. Would they or would they not get the feeling for a transwoman sprinter? How would we even measure this?
> and why is boxing, for example, divided into weight classes?
Entertainment value. Put a flyweight against a heavyweight and the audience are not going to care. No audience means no money for the show runners, and the Olympics is, when you get down to the brass tacks, all about money.
The issue is that orhers might get bitter about it once you win and think that you might have had an unfair advantage, ask for re-examination and then it might as well end up in court.
Consider the Jordan Chiles / Ana Maria Barbosu dispute from the 2024 Paris Olympics. It's still going on and it wasn't even a gender issue.
I'm not an athlete and I don't know how to solve the issue. Maybe the Olympic Comittee knows better. In the context of cycling, I have thought about mixing up all the athletes and then ranking them in as many cathegories as necessary. But even there, in the context of BMX racing for example, I don't know if it's such a good idea to have men compete against women and other non binary persons because there are faults and accidents happening.
Well, in your example, carpentry isn't about winning or being the best, it's about creating a house to sell (or flip, where you could actually frame a better argument about doing the worst possible job the fastest).
Insightful indeed. It really frames the issue with trans athletes as a competition problem. We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available.
Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.
> We search for outliers yet arbitrarily limit the range of players available.
> Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports.
That's a naive, reductive view. Competition isn't just about benchmarking and finding the global #1, nor perfect objective ranking. If it was, we would not bother with geographically-based competitions, nor tournament brackets and championships.
Competition is an entertainment product and a major form of community. It sustains itself through competitors and spectators. Seeking objectivity is backwards.
Agreed, and I think people adopt this reductive view because it can be quite difficult to reason about objectively. In terms of a framework to channel one's thinking on this, I found this paper useful in understanding the rationale behind defining distinct categories of competitors in sports: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim-Parry/publication/3...
The key takeaway in my view is that the authors make a distinction between "category advantage", which is a systematic, structural, group-based difference that exists before competition even begins, and "competition advantage", which we see play out in competitive events and is based on a mix of factors including skill, preparation, and both innate and trained talent.
Where exactly to draw the line can be somewhat subjective (e.g. in weight classes) but it helps to explain why we have a separate female category: male physiology confers such a significant category advantage that, in open competition, it would limit the ability of female athletes to compete meaningfully and demonstrate their abilities. Having a separate category fulfils this desirable outcome of showcasing and celebrating female athletic excellence.
Often we see calls to add various classes of males, particularly ones who have chosen to identify as women, framed as "inclusion" but from the perspective of who this category is actually intended for it's the opposite. Drawing a clear eligibility boundary around the female category maximises inclusion of female athletes who would otherwise be disadvantaged and excluded.
Segregation by sex is not arbitrary, and segration by weight isn't either (even if the actual values of the implementation are).
But, anyhow, the thing you're looking for is the "open" format that already exists in other competitions like chess, where there's an open category and then any specific categories.
Ironically, in dance competitions (specially swing dancing at least), the open category is done the newbies, and higher levels have other more speciallized categories: advanced, invitational, ...
We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.
> There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.
But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change definitions over time, of course. If it’s your contention that the definition by consensus has already changed, say so, but there are billions of people on this earth who haven’t got the message, which seems odd for something determined by consensus of the people who use language.
Putting that aside, since sports are about physicality and accomplishing things in the real world, it makes no sense to base them on “identity” - something that cannot be detected or defined by anyone but the self identifier - rather they should be based on physical aspects of reality.
I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.
Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.
I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports
Going even further back, gender denoted, originally, a linguistical construct associated with sex but not strictly dependent on it, as seen on romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese, etc. [1] There, words have their own gender and, sometimes, the gender of the word and the sex/social gender of the subject may disagree. Ex.: "ant" in Spanish is "hormiga", but this noun is exclusively feminine with no masculine form.
> It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.
I don't know any culture which defined gender by how you dress and how long your hair is rather than what is between your legs. You would be called a girly boy or a boyish girl.
So girly and boyish is how you are perceived, girl and boy is your sex, that is how almost every culture defined it through all time.
>except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt
"I took a drug, therefore I am now a woman" is not a reasonable position to hold. The debate starts out with one based on an identity, and then in the very next formulation reduces that identity to which medicines you take.
No, but that’s not what the statement is saying. It’s arguing that we should add the minimum restrictions we can to the women’s sports category and that hormones might be a reasonable one
This started out with a claim that “trans women are women full stop”, which implies that there’s no difference in the categories, and has since retreated to “in order for trans women to compete as women, they have to take these medicines”.
This implies that males who identify as women but do not undergo HRT are not women in the context of sports (and their gender in other contexts remains ill defined, especially in the absence of perverse incentive). This is a form of misgendering, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
This is a position that one could take up, but it comes
at a steep cost. It holds the societal acceptance of
transgenderism hostage to a biological account of
sex-gender. This is problematic for several reasons.
Moreover, it is worth highlighting the problems with
suggesting that sex, as biologically based, determines
the gender with which one psychologically identifies
[...] Second, whatever criterion is offered to ground
this similarity would inevitably disqualify many women,
for not all women share the same hormone levels,
reproductive capacity, gonadal structure, genital
makeup, and so on. (Tuvel 2017)
Again I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt
Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.
> It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic
This was never said by anyone until you came along with that comment, which is a totally different idea (effectively a non sequitur). Can you quote who echoed the same argument?
I said "Sports should only be segregated by this <gender identity> category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt"
That was trying to elaborate on citruscomputing's argument where they said "Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care."
I'm rephrasing those two points. Apologies if I initially described that badly, but I'm just restating the perverse incentive they were talking about
> When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose."
Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching.
Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor:
“transsexual claims to belong to a sex do not appear to be metaphysically
justified: they are claims that self-identities ought to be definitive in
terms of the question of sex membership and gendered treatment. They are
therefore political in nature” (Bettcher 2014, 387).
I am not sure, since this article uses sex and gender in senses that are entirely inverse to the common ones in 2026. How do you define those terms?
In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned."
The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender."
Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?
If we’re going to take an ontological approach, is there a stable non-tautological definition of “woman” that admits your definition of the subcategory?
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.
Right, the purpose is to actually arrange for legitimate competition. Ideally, we would split by whatever facets actually make sense; consider something like fighting disciplines where the split is by weight, or auto racing where it's by the class of vehicle, power-to-weight ratio, etc.
The problem is that there is only so much attention to go around, so we cannot have too many splits; depending on the sport it might just not be financially doable. We also don't want the split to be effectively "the best" and "the second best", because nobody is going to fund millions in advertising for the second best. So, a split like men/women is not surprising as a historical compromise to ensure there's still some attention on those competing in a lighter weight class.
Generically changing it to lightweights/heavyweights might be a reasonable compromise as well, or an age line, or something like that; it will depend on the sport and the market to draw that out. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the thing that makes sense is to continue with the existing split, though....
I doubt that 5 billion people could watch the Olympics at all.
Where I am from, there is so little interest in the Olympics that I doubt even half my countries' population would be interested. I have never watched the Olympics ever, and amongst my family and friends, there is little to no mention of it. It is a minor cultural phenomena. This seems to me like there were large extrapolations made.
During the last few decades, for various reasons the interest in several kinds of sports events, including the Olympics, has become much lower than before. Other forms of entertainment that were popular in the past have been similarly affected.
However, when I was a child, a half of century ago, the Olympics was not a minor cultural phenomena, but a really major event in which the majority of the people all over the world would be interested.
How do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way.
I sincerely doubt more than half the population of the entire planet showed more than a passing interest in them, and I'm still curious how it'd be possible to measure that.
What I would suggest as a pathologist who deals with diagnosing these: the incidence of differences of sexual development is somewhere between 1 in 1000 - 4500 births. So this policy will not unlikely diagnose someone with a DSD who didn't know.
Women with DSD on averave have a higher testosterone level. Testosterone generally makes you better at sports. The Olympics select for the very best athletes.
In other words: the Olympics are selecting for women with DSD, so once you start doing 100% testing you'll find an incidence far above that of the general population.
If you have male chromosomes, but you have woman genitals, then that’s a proof that you are testosterone insensitive. In other words, testosterone doesn’t make you better at sports at all. The topic is way more complex than this.
There are proofs that male chromosomes are beneficial for example in boxing for women, but it’s not because of testosterone as far as we know. In almost every other sport, it’s not beneficial at all, and even negative because of the mentioned testosterone insensitivity.
If Semenya had been categorized according to his sex, he wouldn't be considered amongst the very best athletes. He is basically a middling standard 800m male runner who has been able to make a career on the back of what is essentially an administrative error.
Talent scouts specifically sought out males like Semenya who were erroneously registered as female at birth, knowing that their male physical advantage would give them an edge in women's competitions.
The specific condition he has (5-alpha reductase deficiency) is one that only affects males, conferring upon them internal testicles and a micropenis. But male development, including all the testosterone-driven advantages that distinguish male and female athletic performance, is otherwise normal.
His gold medal in the 2016 Rio Olympics women's 800m, along with silver and bronze being taken by two other males with similar conditions, is the reason why World Athletics (then the IAAF) and, later, the IOC started to move policy away from eligibility by identity documentation to empirical testing of sex advantage.
The policy change discussed in the linked article wouldn't have happened without athletes like Semenya taking advantage of the previous flawed policy, to the detriment of female athletes.
Caster Semenya is a woman, not sure why you're referring to her as him. The fact that she has a potentially unfair advantage due to her unusual genetics in women's competitions doesn't in any way make it fair to refer to her in this way.
If you look at accounts from Semenya's early life there is evidence against his account of growing up as a girl. For example, there have been school photos published showing him wearing a boy's uniform near to a group of girls who were all wearing girl's uniforms. His former school headmaster, when interviewed years later, said he thought that Semenya was a boy and was very surprised to hear that he was now competing in women's athletics.
And of course he would have gone through male puberty, not female puberty. This would have been obvious then, and the result of this is obvious now if you see him in interviews. Male-typical build, male-typical vocal tone. Even his now-wife assumed (correctly) that he is male when she first met him.
Semenya has to double down on this narrative that he is a woman otherwise he will have to admit that his successful sporting career as a woman will have been a lie.
Even if you believe that it is the case that she lived her early life as a male, at the point that a person has made it clear that they have some preferred pronoun/is trans would it not just be disrespectful to intentionally refer to them counter to that?
It will certainly do that. Previous attempts at this (the Olympics did genetic tests from the 1960's through the 1990's, other organizations have done similar tests into the present) always did wind up discovering cis women raised as women from birth, with female presenting genitalia, who failed whatever genetic tests they were doing. At least one of these women even went on to give birth to a live human baby! You would think that would prove that they actually were a woman, but their medals were still kept from them. They were still driven from the sport, branded as cheaters, etc. Because someone who was so much better than the rest can't really be a woman, they have to be cheating somehow, they have to be a man.
In fact, I'm not aware of any genetic testing program ever catching any deliberate cheating, only people who were raised from birth as women. The very first example of this, (1), Dora/Heinrich Ratjen (2) seems to have been an intersex person who was definitely raised as a girl from birth who was a bit confused about what their body was doing. But all the way back in the 1950's when their 1936 Olympics became a big deal, we have lurid tales in the English language media of deliberate cheating that don't seem to have been supported by anything that Ratjen ever did.
I wouldn't call it cheating. But I have no trouble drawing lines that exclude some people, if that levels the field for a bigger group. In this case the female olympics would soon be known as the intersex olympics given the selection pressure. I can understand the decision to make the competiton more interesting by barring intersex people. No need to frame it as cheating though.
Since we don't actually do genetic tests at birth, this would only ocurr in the context of national qualifying, think about what the experience of someone who trains to be good enough to qualify for the Olympics, then gets this test and is told, "Sorry, you aren't really a woman. Too bad. No Olympics for you. Sorry you wasted all those years training."
How else should the person who just got that information interpret it except... Sorry, you're not really deserving, even though your score qualifies you. And what do call someone who has a score that qualifies but doesn't get to go?
And there are far more of people with this experience than the experience of being born and treated by society as a man and becoming an Olympic athlete as a woman.
When I’ve researched this it’s turned out that among elite athletes it tended to be a bit higher since some of these intersex conditions can confer benefits
Seems to me like the obvious answer is to categorize these events by weight division rather than gender, but this will never be considered because the hysteria is the point.
Is it gender, or is it sex, that matters? This is exactly the point, that it is sex that matters, and specific ruling for intersex conditions also matters.
eh, the article didn't seem to clearly define the differences and I find it boring. People should do whatever they want with their lives and their own genitals. Just don't cheat at sport or pretend that Laurel Hubbard -- who was a modestly good lifter as a man (like... good for a hobby level?) but went to the olympics as an (old for the sport) woman had any business in the olympics. And that Laurel didn't steal a spot from an actual woman who deserved to be there.
Fighting sports are divided by weight (boxing, judo, etc) but no woman would even be close to winning in the same weight category of men, so we will never see a woman in those sports at the Olympics or anywhere it matters.
And who would pick a woman to play in a team of volleyball, basketball, soccer? I think that historically the only sport in which men and women are absolutely equal is shooting. Maybe curling but it's usually the man that sweeps the ice (a little bit of extra strength.)
Explain how you'd do basketball? Marathons? Maybe it isn't obvious, but weight isn't the main difference between men and women, nor is it necessarily an advantage in different sports.
It seems like we are creatively bankrupt if we can’t think of any solution. I think many of us could think of a good solution in literally seconds.
And there’s a really good argument that a solution isn’t actually needed.
Does the NBA need a solution for Steph Curry being the best 3 point shooter of all time and dominating his competition? Did the NFL need a solution for Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl 30% of the seasons he played in his career? Did Ohio high school basketball need a solution for LeBron James only losing 6 games in his entire high school career?
Athletes dominating their league happens all the time without the issue of transgender and intersex players.
If there is some kind of mass influx of men playing women’s sports to win easy championships that’s when we can deal with the problem. But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale. E.g. there has never been a time when washed up NBA player that decided to try and join the WNBA. We don’t need to solve problems that do not yet exist.
But let’s say we have to solve this problem to make everyone shut up about it. Here’s one I just thought of off the top of my head:
Anyone who performs at a level of play at an abnormally high gap between themselves and their competition (a set statistical percentage better) can be forced to seek a higher league of play if it exists and they are eligible if and only if other competitors in the league request they do so with a strong consensus.
Is this a perfect solution? No, but I thought of it in literally ten seconds, it doesn’t even involve gender, and I didn’t resort to sitting on my hands and saying “aw shucks there’s no solution” or “I guess we’ll just have to ban trans people from sports.
I think not many people are arguing that we shouldn’t exclude people based on testosterone in elite events, but none of these were trans women, these were all women who lived their entire lives as women from the moment they were born
I'd argue about testosterone. High testosterone happens in some woman naturally, why exclude them? They still are woman, they should have a right to participate.
Height is also an advantage in sports, and women statistically are much shorter then man, should we ban tall woman from sports? Should we say "she exhibits a male amount of height, it isn't fair to let her participate with 'normal' woman"?
The more "fair" we make woman competition the narrower our definition of a woman gets.
If you want to make it fair, let's pick a random chemical in man exclude people from competition based on their readings. That surely would make sport career look more fun for everyone, training all your life only to find out that some committee doesn't consider you a man. And then we can celebrate equality by noticing that man-to-woman sport participation ratio got closer to 50-50
My view is that testosterone is a reasonable thing to discriminate on because:
1. It is causally connected to primary and secondary sex characteristics
2. It has a large impact on performance in many sports
3. It's easy to explain to most people and somewhat matches people's intuitions around fairness
But, yes, it is true that there are cis women with high T levels and it is somewhat unfair and arbitrary to include them when not excluding other random advantages that people have. I'm just not sure if I have a better solution
> But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale.
This is not the same as saying there's no problem.
A fraction of humans will ever compete in the Olympics. People train their whole lives for it. It's not about 'scale', it's about safety and fairness. It's not reasonable to expect them to 'shut up' about it.
I don't want to watch a man beat up a woman in a boxing ring.
> So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?
Yeah. It would work like video game rankings. Top-ranked players are top-ranked because of skill, and if they happen to be mostly men for most games, so be it.
But I get your point. The crux of the problem is most people don't want to see skill-based matchmaking. They want to see the best man, the best woman, or the best disabled person, etc. The categories are already defined in people's minds as cultural constants. The trans people don't like this because they feel excluded by both male and female categories, so they argue in bad faith that there's no physical difference between females and trans-females or males and trans-males. Our long-term options as a society are to either 1) change culture so that people get used to skill-based matchmaking like in video games, or 2) ignore trans people and wait for this issue to disappear when future tech allows a man to transfer his consciousness into a female body and vice versa.
Since 2) is quite far out technologically, I propose 1).
That's a possible compromise, but a high maintenance one. It would set a precedent for other groups, and then we'd have to add a new category every time people complain.
I think we should just make the Olympics universal and let anyone compete for the title of absolute best in the world, no qualifiers. Detach the existing categories too, like men-only or women-only. Make all category-gated games a separate deal, like Paralympics. Each group can organize their own variant if they want.
However, the point is not to group by advantage. It is to create a separate category for women to compete in where women can win. Any grouping that failed at this purpose misses the mark
It’s interesting how the evidence based analysis switched as soon as the republicans came into power. Maybe this is less about evidence and more about opinion actually?
Not sure how this helps. Olympic events already have relative rating systems that ranks all the participant: pretty complicated and sport dependent systems that determine qualification for the games and competition amongst all the competitors at the games. The problem how to have separate competitions for different groups of participants when there isn't a universally shared agreement on who should be in which group.
If you have a relative skill rating system, then there's no need to split competitors into groups. But if you insist, then you can split them based on skill ratings (define a rating range for beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc). And for games with one-on-one matchups, sampling from a gaussian centered on each player's skill rating is good enough.
It doesn't.In tennis a 14 UTR whatever wins against a 13 UTR whatever. UTR is your effectiveness rating against every other player. Same in chess with ELO.
The issue is woman would disappear from profesional sports. Sinners 16.27 rating means that he double bagels Sabalenkas 13.29 essentially 100% of the time. The 500th ATP player has a UTR of 13.81, half a point is quite a bit stronger, do he's still very much stronger than Sabalenka. You probably have to start looking well into the thousand somethings for something that is consisently beaten by her.
Only the top 200 players make money, the top 100 good money, and the top 50 ridiculous money.
So women would not be in something like top 2000 of tennis players or worse. Which would basically remove any incentive for women to participate in pro tennis at all.
I don't get how you can compare Sinner's UTR against Sabalenka's when they're based to two disparate group scores? Doesn't there need to be at least a modicum of cross-pollination to make a meaningful comparison?
There is some cross pollination. Women can play vs men, just usually don't. I'm fairly certain singles UTR is universal across players, it only distinguishes between doubles and singles UTR.
UTR can also include unranked games if one of the players submits a score and the other approves it.
Basically proving my point. Very few women in top chess. Currently there are 0 women in top 100 chess players. Only 3 women were ever in the top 100 chess players. And chess is not even a game where men have a natural advantage like in almost all of the physical sports.
I don't deny that there are very few women in top chess, but that wasn't your point. You said it would end up being all men at all the skill rating levels, which is not true. Take chess as an example: there are a lot more women at around 1500 elo than at 2500 elo. So if you host an intermediate-level tournament just for players around 1500 elo, plenty of women will participate.
The ratio of men to women who are at 1500 Elo in chess is like worse than 90:1, so no, you host an intermediate level tournament and it will be almost all men. Well, mostly boys but that’s current chess for you.
But it’s not just that. If there are no top women in any kind of leagues in chess, that will only further discourage women from participating competitively in chess in the first place.
Note that most competitive women chess players play in women’s only tournaments even though they can easily join open men’s tournaments as well. For various reasons, one being that these women’s only tournaments are where they have the best chance of winning or being in the top k for prizes.
The male-to-female ratio at 1500 elo is not 90:1, but more like 9:1. 10% is a visible minority.
But I see where our disagreement is. You think there ought to be more women in chess. I think different people can do different things, so women don't need to match men in every statistic and vice versa. If we open it up to universal participation and it turns out to be a male-dominated game, then let it be. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
> I think different people can do different things, so women don't need to match men in every statistic and vice versa. If we open it up to universal participation and it turns out to be a male-dominated game, then let it be. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
You don't have a say though, others want to see women play chess against each others and happily pay for and organize that event. Or do you want to make female only events illegal? As long as they are legal they will continue to be held.
>This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue.
similar problem in boat races - different boats have different characteristics, thus PHRF rating. Not perfect, yet it works.
The same thing i expect to happen with human sports too - analyze DNA, assign handicap score, and let everybody run. Of course that wouldn't work for say boxing or judo - though even here with time we can come up with exoskeletons (or some drugs) equalizing your DNA-based advantages/disadvantages.
Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories - "only those assigned male at birth", "only those assigned female at birth", "anybody can choose to compete in that category". The 3rd category may just naturally become most competitive and interesting without any "males in female sports" issues we currently have.
> Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories [1. assigned male at birth (AMAB), 2. assigned female at birth, 3. anybody]
Wouldn't we expect AMAB to consistently win #1 and #3 (and obviously only AFAB can compete in #2), so trans men/trans women would never be a likely top competitor in any category? And categories 1 and 3 would likely always have exactly the same winners?
(I’m not stating a value judgment to the idea, just making sure we’re on the same page. And even the above idea still runs into issues with intersex people, or objections from some about women with high testosterone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_O... )
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.
at the highest levels are the most rigorous standards and testing. this is where it makes the most sense to allow trans athletes to. compete. trans women who have been on hormone replacement do not have an advantage over cis women. this is discrimination plain and simple and creates an atmosphere of misunderstanding, mistrust, and misinformation towards trans people (which incidentally also affects non-gender-conforming cis women).
Except people clearly fucking do for some reason, and all that's going to happen is make life worse for women both cis and trans. Trans women will get excluded, and cis women who are "too good" or not fitting societal ideals of femininity will be accused of being trans. This is already happening to children.
> If you chose to identify as another sex
When did you choose to identify as the gender you were born with?
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.
This kind of argument was not persuasive when Alito deployed it for his pedantic dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County [0, specifically p. 17], and it remains not persuasive now.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
You've posted this several times, and I think it represents a pretty narrow understanding of humans.
Like, gender clearly and obviously exists. Why do women wear make up and skirts, while men typically dont? Is there a biological need to do those things? Is that universal across all cultures?
Of course we have social norms for men and women. That set of norms is what gender is. Denying the idea that society expects different behaviors from men and women is frankly a pretty absurd take.
There's no such thing as gender separate from sex. There's the recognition of one's immutable, inherent, sex, and tacking social expectations on top of it, but never that one could choose, or "feel". Always derived, never a choice. And when people allowed cross-dressing, it was always clear it was fake, pretending, never true. But they allowed people to have their personal delusions.
The origin of this use of "gender" itself is due to the prudishness of English upper classes in pronouncing the word "sex", so they repurposed "gender" which is just the French word "genre" meaning "kind" or "category". Much more acceptable in polite company than something that can allude to a sexual act, fornication.
The "tacking social expectations on top" is the part that is gender!
There's no biological foundation for wearing a sari, hijab, miniskirt, etc. Those are social expectations for women, or part of the role women fill in society.
It's a wholly different concept than biological sex. My penis does not make it impossible to wear eyeliner. But society has a social expectation that I do not. It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic.
You might believe gender is immutable. I'm not going to argue that with you. But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
> It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic.
They're one and the same.
> But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
I don't deny the existence of social expectations (you severely misread what I wrote), but those expectations were deriving from the recognition of the objective truth of one's sex. They were never a matter of one's "internal feelings", they were an extension of one's sex.
You seem to be partly arguing from a position of ignorance.
The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis. Some people feel pressured by this to, despite all the societal dis-incentives, medically transition. They then are not only their gender in behavior and reported experience, but also physically (with the exception of some hard-to-change stuff such as fertility).
We usually handle such general, durable "personal delusions" by accepting them. If I studied some math for years, can do said math and am employed at my local university doing mathematics, I am a mathematician. I do not have delusions of being a mathematician. If I move to, say Germany, and after years speak the language, have children there, participate in the local culture, and have a citicenship I am now German. Only the most backward people would say I have delusions of being German. Although, this cultural rigidity of course exists, I do not see it as desirable. An advanced society should accept and accomodate its outliers instead of steamrolling over them and making them suffer.
[^1]: Afaik currently a neuroscientific explanation is not forthcoming
> And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.
I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie if there are people whose mental makeup is better suited to a gender expression not corresponding to their sex, who then inhabit that different role in everyday life.
I frankly don't get your assertion that this cannot happen, as there exist people for whom this is reality right now (in part because they are simply not easily identifyable as trans).
> young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones
My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention. Where is the problem here? People do cosmetic surgeries for similar, if not more vain, reasons.
> when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering"
Trying to ignore the reality that ones body is different in medical contexts would be indeed harmful. If this kind of activism exists, I do not condone it. I imagine that treating a trans person does not boil down to treating them like a cis person of their sex however, as hormone replacement causes a bunch of differences.
> I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie
A lie is defined in terms of it not being the truth, not in terms of effects on someone. Those effects are entirely irrelevant.
> My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Men getting oestrogens are getting osteoporosis in their 20's and 30's.
> Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention.
It's not even doing that in most cases, because the self-loathing that caused people to look for the "transness" escape hatch turns out to have outside causes and won't go away.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Surely this is something that can be addressed if it ever becomes a problem. Surely we don't need to write rules for scenarios that aren't causing issues...
> Surely this is something that can be addressed if it ever becomes a problem.
You're advocating to create pressure and incentives to commit this class of abuses, which have already been committed even at an industrial stage for decades, and your strategy is to ignore history and facts until the consequences of your actions catch up to you.
And all this in exchange for which tradeoff?
Even the fight against doping is far more proactive than what you are advocating.
Trans athletes at the Olympics are causing disruptions at an industrial scale?
There's been exactly one trans woman in the Olympics, Laurel Hubbards, competing for New Zealand. She won zero medals.
I'm advocating for "there is zero documented evidence this is a problem, the IOC should use their time and energy solving actual problems like doping."
All three medallists in the women's 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were male. This was highly controversial, as having three male athletes take gold, silver and bronze in what should have been a celebration of female athletic excellence wasn't exactly a desirable outcome.
Although the headline of the linked article focuses on males with a transgender identity, the purpose of the IOC's new policy is to exclude all male physiological advantage from the female category, including cases like the above.
I'm aware, but those women aren't trans. They have disorders of sexual development, were assigned female at birth.
Laurel Hubbard is trans, was assigned male at birth, and competed under hormone therapy. (Which studies have shown reduces or eliminates the biological male advantage for trans women.)
We can discuss DSD AFAB athletes as well, but I was focused on trans athletes.
> As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.
It affects the rights of transgender people, so it is directly related to transgender rights. Also, I don't at all think that it's coincidence that people spreading hate about transgender people are the same ones so concerned about this particular issue?
People spreading hate and prejudice always have <reasons>.
> We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s
We all do? People born in the 1950s or earlier might remember, making them at least 65 years old. I've never heard of it from people of any age. In any case, it's hard to connect this 60 year old issue with today's decision.
If an unscrupulous regime wanted to get medals with that method they'd just give cis women testosterone during puberty. Nothing about the new trans-exclusionary standards would deter that.
No XY chromosome no SRY gene. You're left with validating that someone's entire development was done in the absence of testosterone, which would--if even possible--require incredibly invasive and extensive testing.
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.
We are not talking about elite athletics here. If someone is upset about a transwoman finishing 150th in the local 10k race they need to work that out with a therapist or something.
No one's talking about 10k races that don't matter much. But people are talking about races and events in high school or college that do affect things like scholarships or future professional athletic endeavors. That's really where most of the heartburn started, as far as I can tell. I suppose one option could be to have two lists, the nominal ranking of participants and then a trans-adjusted one that removes those participants.
Plenty of people are talking about things that don't matter. They're trying to ban amateur leagues from including trans women even if the league wants to include them.
> That's really where most of the heartburn started, as far as I can tell.
The "heartburn" really started when conservatives decided they could exploit hatred of the other by attacking non-binary folks. They got a "spokeswoman" who finished sixth in the NCAA swimming championships (no future professional career potential) to spread their hate and divisiveness.
It allowed Republican politicians to claim children were allowed to identify as animals and use litter boxes in schools. Spreading lies to breed hate.
It's just a modern application of the playbook against other races (which has also been revived).
> "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - President Lyndon B. Johnson
Being on feminine hormones pretty much removes any advantage if you've been on them for a while. There are typically rules about that for (at least) high level competitions. You can't just walk in and state your gender for that kind of thing.
For example, the olympics were open to transgender women for over 20 years. Number of participants? One. And she finished dead last.
There are some high-profile cases, like Riley Gaines making an entire career out of "losing" to a trans woman - but they were actually tied fifth, and the whole drama is about her getting her trophy in the mail, because who gets to hold the trophy at the ceremony is decided by alphabetical name ordering.
Can you find examples of any trans woman ever beating a cis woman? Obviously - just like you can find examples of a blonde left-handed aquarius beating a righ-handed pisces redhead. But trans women dominating a competition? That just doesn't happen.
I run marathons. It’s not terribly dangerous but a few people die every year, and it’s a good idea to have the medical oversight, aid stations, etc. that an actual race provides.
If I was an unfair threat to some poor girl’s scholarship I’d be happy to find a solution like just not being on the leaderboard.
Instead I see laws, headlines, and debates on my favorite orange site about whether I should be allowed access to that infrastructure at all.
Ask chat gpt how to increase your understanding using Blooms revised taxonomy of learning using college level textbooks and primary source information with Amazon purchase search links.
And follow up every side with a steel man, good faith critical thinking summary with deep, cross cutting questions that strike at the heart of the arguments.
Additionally follow up with which demographics and political class does each position serve.
Also ask for examples of bad faith comments and questions to help identify them to not waste your time engaging.
You can also ask to explain all of that output to a 6th grade reading level if it helps
Asking wishy washy middle of the road questions instead of just asking directly is a political choice to reduce the chance of criticism and to help manipulate the convo in your psychological favor instead of seeking a wide array of information like a normal person that has access to literally to every single philosopher that ever existed writings
If the rules changed mid competition and I lost a race to someone who had been competing on a men’s varsity team and then shortly after competed on the women’s team, it would be very hard for me to just shrug and say they beat me fair and square. That reaction is not unreasonable.
It may not justify sweeping laws, but it absolutely justifies having an honest conversation about fairness.
Welcome to name names instead of wacky hypothetical situations. Probably shouldn't be a national conversation for such a small percentage of people this affects. Like what less than 200 vs hundreds of millions for Healthcare or better labor laws?
Also rules for competition change all the time, random tariffs, random corrupt laws, tax changes, work from home policies, welcome to life, sorry its not fair.
Its unreasonable to get hung up on this trans athlete "problem" when there are so many other things the collective can pay attention to to try to solve
> 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.
This is completely misinformed. Biological women and biological men at identical testosterone levels do not have the same grip strength or endurance attributes, because their bodies are fundamentally different particularly in bone size and muscular composition.
The average MTF and the average female have wildly different hand sizes, among many other physical differences.
first of all, you need a source for 400. 2nd of all 400/11000 athletes is 3%. that's roughly inline with population statistics in the 15-25 demographic
Here's a helpful map of cultures with transgendered subsets that are accepted in society. Cultures on every continent have a deep historical record of transgendered folks.
No it's because in almost every sport, male sex development bestows significant performance advantages.
This is easy to see even with a casual glance. Look at the world records for any sport with measurable and comparable metrics, like times for swimming, running, etc. The difference between the most elite female and male athletes is stark.
The differences are marginal and mostly depend on the hormonal load present in each individual athlete.
Males are not scrutinized anywhere near as closely, so they always get away with higher levels of anabolic steroids/hGH/rhEPO/random peptides than women would. Women are subject to constant, consistent testing, while male doping testing is basically an honor system (just don't be too obvious about it).
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.
I'm pretty sure there are folks involved in doing drug testing for many sports so saying are doing nothing seems hyperbolic. Are there specific things you think the bodies in charge of drug testing should be doing but aren't? Genuinely curious.
Doping is a problem which offers offenders unfair advantages -the IOC combats that and looks like they are looking at other unfair advantages as well. It's a cat-and-mouse game. As of yet there is no perfect doping detector (it can have false positives) but just because it's imperfect doesn't mean they should ignore the advantage it offers these offenders.
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.