5 ms·

People born as men who transition to women, and I fully support them, have unfair advantages against people born as women. Would you agree with that statement?

by voz_ 6y ago

People born as men who transition to women, and I fully support them, have unfair advantages against people born as women. Would you agree with that statement? A better solution would be to allow a gender-agnostic bracket alongside women and men, where anyone can compete. To people downvoting me: Please use the upvote/downvote as marking my contribution relevant or irrelevant, not to mark disagreement. PS: I fully support trans people in all their rights, should go without saying but that is far from the default these days.

slg 6y ago
The part of that first statement that I question is the "unfair" part. Almost all world class athletes are born with a natural gift that most of us don't have. Most of those athletes need to train and hone that gift over decades to be truly elite, but that natural gift is still present. No matter how many hours I train playing basketball and no matter how long Lebron James goes without touching a basketball, I am never going to beat him in a game of one-on-one. Is that "unfair" or is that just how sports work? I don't see birth gender as any different than that. That said, I think it is reasonable to put certain restrictions on transgender athletes such as rules regarding hormone treatments. I am just not an expert enough in the field to say exactly what those restrictions should be. Also we generally do have gender-agnostic brackets in sports. What we call men's sports are generally gender-agnostic. People of any gender are free to compete in them. The question for transgender athletes is almost always whether than can compete in women's sports.
- look_lookatme 6y ago
  If you were born an average American male and you trained your whole youth (and I mean really trained) to be the best basketball player you could be, you wouldn't ever beat Lebron James but you'd beat a lot of elite women basketball players. The physical gifts bestowed upon you by your mom would give you the advantage
  - slg 6y ago
    We just don't have any evidence of that. Like I said in a previous post, we are in the second decade of this being allowed. Where are all the world class transgender athletes that are dominating men on a routine basis? People always point to the same 2 or 3 examples while acting like this is a widespread epidemic of men deciding to switch genders just to win athletic competitions. I don't think this is as big of a problem as people pretend it is. EDIT: Please keep my post in context. When I say there is no evidence for that, I am not referring to a basic physiological difference between men and women. I am referring specifically to this: "If you were born an average American male and you trained your whole youth... you'd beat a lot of elite women basketball players." There is no basis for a statement like that.
    - creato 6y ago
      > We just don't have any evidence of that. Are you aware that high school boys soccer and hockey teams are competitive with elite, world class women's teams? Do you think the advantages that men appear to have are anywhere near fully erased by transitioning genders? > I don't think this is as big of a problem as people pretend it is. This is not really about the specific issue to anyone on either side. To you, it's about acceptance of transgender people. To your opponents, it's about not accepting the denial of what seems like blindingly obvious reality.
      - slg 6y ago
        >Are you aware that high school boys soccer and hockey teams are competitive with elite, world class women's teams? Do you think the advantages that men appear to have are anywhere near fully erased by transitioning genders? You are exaggerating with that first claim. It is in no way common for high school male athletes to be competitive against world class female athletes. Secondly, the advantage that men have is certainly decreased when transitioning. I don't believe it is "fully erased", I simply don't think we need to have the goal of fully erasing any advantage. I won't agree with you on that until there is an NBA for men under 6 feet for me fairly compete in against my peers who were similarly disadvantaged at birth. >This is not really about the specific issue to anyone on either side. To you, it's about acceptance of transgender people. To your opponents, it's about not accepting the denial of what seems like blindingly obvious reality. I am perfectly willing to admit that my primary motivation here is the acceptance of transgender people. I don't know what to tell you if you don't prioritize that over the sanctity of the outcome of some high school girls soccer game.
- xupybd 6y ago
  Rogan is happy for people born female to complete in male sports just not the other way around. You can't discount how unfair it would be for women to compete against people who have lived for years with high testosterone levels. Maybe we need a new non gendered sports category where athletes are free to take any hormones they wish. That might be fair. But may cost the athletes their health.
  - XMPPwocky 6y ago
    > You can't discount how unfair it would be for women to compete against people who have lived for years with high testosterone levels. If a man has had naturally low testosterone all his life, should he be allowed to compete against women? If a woman has had naturally high testosterone all her life, should she only be allowed to compete against men?
    - xupybd 6y ago
      Perhaps, I think that would be worth investigating. You'll find that most athletes at the top are genetic outliers. There is already some unfairness towards those with low testosterone. However if you allow people that have lived long periods of time with high testosterone to complete against women who have not I suspect you'll find very few of those women ever make it to the top.
      - XMPPwocky 6y ago
        Maybe, but why is fairness on this one particular axis the only one I ever hear about? Look at the 100m sprint. Of the top 25 (regardless of gender), as far as I can tell, none of them have two X chromosomes. But none of them are Caucasian, either. Why isn't there a large movement arguing that sprinters should only be allowed to compete against those of the same race? If I (as a white man) took up sprinting (ha!), it would kind of suck knowing that I don't seem to stand a chance of setting the world record just because of my genes. But it seems like white sprinters manage to deal with it. And, well, if there were separate races for people of different races... that wouldn't really change anything, would it? The world's fastest sprinter would still probably be non-white, the only real difference would be that the world's fastest white sprinter would get to say "I'm the world's fastest white sprinter (but still not the world's fastest sprinter)". You're just giving out an extra trophy- everybody knows who's actually the fastest. Why isn't this argument valid for sex separation in sports, too?
- afiori 6y ago
  In many sports there is actually no rule that forbid women to joining the other championship. The reason a separate women sport exist is the same as why there are weight brackets in boxing, to allow athletes that score lower in brute-metrics to compete reasonably. Trans women would be less of an issue if women sports did not exist. (Trans men are a different issue if they take hormones, as that often fall under doping technically)

creato 6y ago
> I am perfectly willing to admit that my primary motivation here is the acceptance of transgender people. I don't know what to tell you if you don't prioritize that over the sanctity of the outcome of some high school girls soccer game. Here's the problem (aside from deriding something a lot of average people care deeply about): you are forcing these two things to be in conflict, when they simply aren't to most people, including Joe Rogan (and myself). By forcing them into conflict, you are hurting the cause of transgender rights far more than helping it.
- slg 6y ago
  Banning trans women from competing in sports it telling them they aren't "real" women. The societal repercussions of that are much larger than the outcome of high school athletics (and this issue is almost always about high school athletics and below). I fundamentally don't understand arguments to the contrary. For the record, I care deeply about sports. I think it is fundamental part of both our culture at large and the education of a lot of people. You can dig deep into my comment history on HN and see I regularly defend the importance of sports to the usually derogatory "sportsball" comments that are common in intellectual and technological communities like HN. I just don't think the outcome of specific games is important enough to justify further ostracizing a group of people who are already incredibly marginalized.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jasonv 6y ago
    I don’t understand equating competing in a sport as representative of being a “real” [gender]. I support trans+ rights, but I haven’t been able to get my head around some of the assertions that seem to be bedrock here.
parthdesai 6y ago
> You are exaggerating with that first claim. It is in no way common for high school male athletes to be competitive against world class female athletes. They're not though. https://www.reddit.com/r/sports/comments/3ceeih/the_us_mens_u17_soccer_team_played_the_uswnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sports/comments/3ceeih/the_us_mens_...
- slg 6y ago
  The US Men's U-17 team is not a high school team. It is a team made up of world class athletes who are high school aged. That is a huge distinction. You are saying a team a world class men can beat a team of slightly older world class women. That isn't surprising.
  - parthdesai 6y ago
    The US women's team is best in the world, US men's team doesn't even come close to being best 20 teams in the world. They are high level athletes but not world class (especially for soccer) by any sorts. Anyway's here another link: https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/ https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...
    - slg 6y ago
      Come on, you are just splitting hairs now. Neither the youth national team or the academy team of a professional sports club are anywhere close to being equal to normal high school teams. I'll admit "world class" is a vague phrase, but wouldn't you admit these athletes are all much closer to a world class standard than they are to the average high school player?
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  That's the best under 17 soccer players. It's essentially people who will be pro soccer players in 1-2 years. That's not the same as common hs male athletes.
mydongle 6y ago
I know you don't care about the high school girls soccer game, but the girls do, and their parents do. And yes, having women's sports not be dominated by former men is a priority for people.

2019-nCoV 6y ago

American males are an average of 5½ inches taller [1], which is an extreme advantage in Basketball [2]: > Empirically, the over-representation of extremely tall athletes in basketball lends credence to the theory that the sport provides tall players with a very significant advantage. The average American male is 5 ft 9.3 in (1.76 m).[18] Yet, in a 2007-08 player survey, the average player in the National Basketball Association (NBA) is listed at 6 ft 7 in (2.01 m) in shoes. The average male is either taller or within a couple of inches of the top female Basketball players [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_in_sports#Basketball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_in_sports#Basketball [3] https://www.ncsasports.org/womens-basketball/recruiting-guidelines https://www.ncsasports.org/womens-basketball/recruiting-guid...

XMPPwocky 6y ago
Imagine this conversation: "Hey, remember that 'basketball' game we invented?" "Yeah, what about it?" "Well, lots of people are playing it, but some of them are unhappy." "Oh no! What's wrong?" "Well, they say they're not winning." "Hm. Well, by the rules of the game, only one team can win, so... maybe we should split the sport up into different divisions, based on skill? We can use the Elo-like algorithms to determine which teams should play each other so that each team has a good chance to win." "Well, we don't want to do that- it sounds a bit complicated to implement in practice. And, see, there's another thing." "What is it?" "Taller people tend to win more. From the stats, they have a big advantage, and it just makes sense if you think about what playing basketball well requires- being taller really does make you better at the game. A lot of the players who aren't having fun are shorter- they feel like they don't really have a fair shot at winning, just because of their height, which is something they can't really change." "Ah! So you want to split the players up based on their height. Well, we might have some unwanted second-order effects from that - since we aren't accounting for things like muscle mass or aerobic capacity, anybody who is disadvantaged in those attributes might still not feel like they're getting a fair shot. But if the main effect really is height, then I guess-" "No, no, no, we don't want to do that, either. We want to do it based on genes." "Oh! Well, that's a bit tricky- loads of genes might affect height, and even more probably affect how good somebody can be at basketball- but maybe with enough data we can build a model to roughly determine somebody's 'innate' basketball ability, and split players up based on that, instead. Now, we need to be careful, because this won't take into account things besides genetics- say, early childhood environment- that folks could reasonably argue are outside of their control- but I guess it could be a clever solution to the pr-" "Well, that sounds hard. So we want to do it based on whether somebody has two X chromosomes or only one. It's correlated with height, and height is correlated with innate basketball ability." "But if you care about height, why not just split players up based on height?" "Well, there are other factors related to basketball ability, too. Not just height, that's a straw man. And many of them are correlated with how many X chromosomes players have." "But you brought height up... Well, okay, maybe a weighted combination of different metrics that affect basketball ability? Seems like that might be easier than doing genetic testing on everybody." "No, we're not going to actually do genetic testing on everybody- honestly, that just sounds invasive and creepy. We're going to look at other attributes that correlate with how many X chromosomes players have, and we can usually guess how many X chromosomes they have that way, without having to test. If a player wants to do genetic testing to prove how many X chromosomes they have, maybe we'll let them do that, too. But mostly, we'll guess based on things like their facial structure, voice pitch, whether they have breasts or not, and their genitals." "But none of those things directly affect height, much less basketball ability, to any meaningful degree! You're measuring a proxy of a proxy." "... Well, that's what we're going to do." If what you care about is basketball ability, try to split the sport up based on that, based on actual wins and losses. If that's too hard in practice, and what you care about is height, then split the sport up based on height. Don't segment based on some second-order proxy measure- that's just sloppy. And, honestly, it makes it a bit hard to believe this is actually some high-minded concern for fairness- it starts to seem like it's being motivated by something else.

look_lookatme 6y ago

In track and field the 800m race is my favorite race because it's every bit training and determination as it is natural ability. Here are the results of the women's Olympic 800m championship in Rio in 2016: https://www.olympic.org/rio-2016/athletics/800m-women https://www.olympic.org/rio-2016/athletics/800m-women Here are the results of the 2016 Texas UIL 5A high school boys 800m championship in 2016: https://tx.milesplit.com/meets/224994/results/451208/formatted https://tx.milesplit.com/meets/224994/results/451208/formatt... If those boys had competed in the same race as the Olympic women -- women athletes who have the benefits of the best sports science in the world at their disposal -- the boys would have taken the top 4 spots and it wouldn't have been close. At the class 1A level, which means high schools with enrollments of less than ~100 kids, the top boys runner in 2016 would have beat the womens olympic gold medal winner. Here is the satellite view of the dirt track he trained on. https://goo.gl/maps/azHysT8zDYgVJwim9 https://goo.gl/maps/azHysT8zDYgVJwim9

slg 6y ago
You are moving the goalposts by switching from a highly skilled game like basketball to one that is mostly dictated by physiology. There are certainly athletic competitions in which the gap between men and women differs. I also notice you chose a race in which Caster Semenya won. I don't know it that was intentional, but that specific race highlights the ridiculousness and arbitrary nature of a ban on transgender athletes. By seemingly all credible accounts she was born, raised, and identifies as a women however she has a genetic condition that gives her some characteristics of a man. Should she be banned from competing against women? If so, what precedent does that set? Do we need to test the chromosomes of all athletes to see if they have rare genetic conditions? Are XX males allowed to compete against women even if they identify as men? What if they are on testosterone therapy?
- look_lookatme 6y ago
  > You are moving the goalposts by switching from a highly skilled game like basketball to one that is mostly dictated by physiology. There are certainly athletic competitions in which the gap between men and women differs There are no goalposts, but this is just an internet argument for you so I can see why you'd think that. As for Semenya I don't know what the right answer is. Intersex is hard. It's also rare. So I don't know. Despite being easily the most elite 800m female runner in the world she wouldn't have even touched the top 150 high school boys times that year, so it's hard to know what to do. Forced downregulation of natural T levels just to compete seems immoral.
  - sidthekid 6y ago
    Let me leave this moving video here about a "right answer" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP6eZAfO0Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP6eZAfO0Yg
chroma 6y ago
In the women's 800m in Rio, the top 3 all had XY chromosomes and lived with high testosterone levels through puberty. - Caster Semenya[1] (1st place). Here is an interview with her.[2] - Francine Niyonsaba[3] (2nd place). Here is an interview with her.[4] - Margaret Wambui[5] (3rd place). Here's an interview with her.[6] I see a lot of people saying things like, "Where are all the world class transgender athletes that are dominating men on a routine basis?" Well they've failed to notice the intersex XY people who are dominating women's events. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeQYdyDsioY&t=1m03s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeQYdyDsioY&t=1m03s 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francine_Niyonsaba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francine_Niyonsaba 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTC3B2sgYf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTC3B2sgYf4 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Wambui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Wambui 6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpCPnTBAWF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpCPnTBAWF4
- lol_u_cuck 6y ago
  Failed to notice? They have been specifically pointing this out for years. MtF transgendered athletes have been dominating women's sports. FtM transgendered have not been dominating sports. Have you been under a rock?
- throwaway20148 6y ago
  > “Where are all the world class transgender athletes that are dominating men on a routine basis?" Who says this? Most people I think naturally assume that’s not going to ever happen.
  - chroma 6y ago
    I was quoting verbatim from this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23242020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23242020