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For me it boils down to this: - biological gender is not binary - there's more to it than XX and XY Unless we embrace gender is - like many things - a spectr
by chiefalchemist 2y ago
For me it boils down to this:
- biological gender is not binary
- there's more to it than XX and XY
Unless we embrace gender is - like many things - a spectrum, there will be debate.
I'll add, that equal is a high - perhaps unattainable - bar. It might make sense to first focus on fair / fairness, and that at times the many might have to take precedence over the few.
C'est la vie.
- stonethrowaway 2y agoAssuming a spectrum, where do you draw the line? How should mens vs womens competitions be split up, if at all? How do you make it “fair enough”?
- Dalewyn 2y agoNot parent commenter; I believe that any sport which looks at gender/sex is undeniably sexist, this includes the Olympic games which are by far the most blatant and prominent examples. True equality can only be achieved by not considering if someone is a man, woman, or whatever they might want to classify as. Lump everyone together, equal opportunities given, and may the best man as in mankind win. And no, don't give me "Women will almost always lose!". That is sexist bullshit. Equality is equality, we can't have our cake and eat it too. There is no line to be drawn.
- Steven420 2y agoWhat you are describing is the end of women playing sports. What is the point of competing in something you are guaranteed to lose?
- AlexandrB 2y agoThis is silly for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that there are already "weight classes" for many sports as a way to have different body types compete on a more equal playing field. Perhaps dividing competitors by gender is arbitrary, but all game rules are arbitrary. If we want to remove gender from the equation, perhaps we should have "testosterone classes" where athletes compete against others with a similar testosterone level.
- blinkedup 2y agoBut then males could pharmaceutically suppress testosterone, compete in the low testosterone class, and still make use of the male physical advantage they have from going through male puberty and having had testosterone shape their body for many years. You can't unbuild a male, even by adjusting testosterone.
- jgust 2y agoI understand the point you're trying to make, but this entire thread misses the forest for the trees. Rules & regulations don't exist to create equality or fairness, it's to foster competition. We don't watch competitions for how equal and fair they are. By separating competition by gender, we have increased the opportunities to witness competitiveness. How, going forward, can we maximize that metric? That will be the future of sport.
- abenga 2y agoDo you know how low the highest ranked man Serena could beat (at her prime) was?
- NoRagrets 2y agoThis is the exact definition of Mansplaining. The past few weeks have seen men in droves mansplaining to women.. ‘what is a woman?’
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThe spectrum means that for sports involving strength, at the highest levels of competition women that are most like men will dominate. That’s what we are observing. Whether it’s fair or not is for the armchair philosophers.
- sli 2y agoIf you're referencing the posted article, that is absolutely not what we're "observing" right now, that claim is political propaganda from the American right-wing. Khelif is not trans.
- cube2222 2y agoI think the parent wasn’t suggesting this. I think that they suggested that in many strength-oriented disciplines biological women with the most masculine features (e.g. high testosterone level) will win.
- blinkedup 2y agoNo-one who's been making any serious commentary on this topic has claimed that Khelif is trans. That's not the issue at all. What all the available evidence so far indicates is that Khelif is male, most likely with a difference of sex development (DSD).
- thomquaid 2y agoThat is not true. What we are seeing is people using an identity to gain unsportspersonlike advantages in sport competition.
- cko 2y agoThe article says that many people with this condition don't even know until much later. So they were born, raised, and identified with a certain gender all their lives. It's hardly "using an identity."
- subjectsigma 2y agoBiological sex is binary. Not all humans have two arms, but it would be wrong to say the number of arms we have is “a spectrum”. 99% of people start out with two arms. If you think that the number of arms humans have is some unknowable value because amputees exist, that doesn’t make sense to me, it favors a technically correct philosophical argument over reality. Biologist Richard Dawkins agrees (though his argument is much better stated than mine): https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-binary-debate-richard-dawkins https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-bi... Note that this doesn’t really “solve” all parts of the debate around gender and sports, but it’s a good starting point.
- defrost 2y agoreproductive sex is binary. Dawkins knows better and knows that that humans are born that are not clearly male, not clearly female, and also very clearly neither male nor female. That's actual empirical observed science. There are peer reviewed medical papers in respected journals that look at hundreds of thousands of birth records and break the numbers down on distributions of chromosonal variations at birth.
- subjectsigma 2y agoWould you mind linking a study? It seems like that directly contradicts what Dawkins says in his article
- defrost 2y agoI bought a first edition copy of Dawkin's The Selfish Gene in 1978 and a good number of his books since. He understands genetics and these days, when talking to the likes of Piers Morgan et al. he plays a cagey game and talks about reproductive sex, what is required to make a baby outside of a lab the good old fashioned way, when a sperm fertilises an egg. He's well aware there are more than two types of human birth, he glosses over what he knows to keep things simple to avoid contraversy or something. If this is all news to you, rather than something you might have read, as I did, some 40+ years ago, then you might choose to start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex IIRC it links to medical papers and meta papers. There are several people here in Australia that were born neither male nor female. That's a fact. One took a valid complaint through the Australian courts that they would be lying on an official document if they checked either [F] or [M] on an Australian passport. Doctors and genetics experts gave evidence, the Australian passport system was changed. This wasn't some "cultural gender" thing based on someone's feelings about gender, it was stone cold genetic reality about "sex" at birth .. which in reality is a lot more complicated than many Fox cable hosts claim it to be on camera.
- kcplate 2y agoWhat always seems lost in this debate is how a trans men can’t generally be competitive in either men’s or women’s sports groupings. Either due to a physical disadvantage due to chromosome and hormonal differences or due to having to settle for an identity disadvantage (forced to identify as their biological sex instead of their gender to be in a competitive group). Honestly it seems like the easiest solution is eliminate sports groupings by their references to sex or gender, and just divide up by those sciencey things which are generally known to provide the athletic advantages. Group 1 Above a testosterone baseline and/or if you have XY chromosomes Group 2 Below a testosterone baseline. If you don't feel binary grouping is fair, set up multiple groups to accommodate.
- blinkedup 2y ago> due to having to settle for an identity disadvantage There is a female athlete who identifies as a man currently competing in the Olympics: Hergie Bacyadan, in women's boxing. This doesn't seem to have caused any actual disadvantage. In fact, Bacyadan is reported as saying: > I'm very thankful that I got to the Olympics. It's a big deal to me.
- kcplate 2y agoHe may be ok with it, and good for him, but isn’t the fact that he is competing in the women’s brackets to be able to fight competitively sort of proving my greater point? I don’t know of any trans man in a men’s sport that relies on physical athleticism that is dominating or even competitive. But we tend to see the opposite when trans women compete in women’s sports. Why not just eliminate the gender/sex delineations and focus on benchmarks we know create competitive differences?
- blinkedup 2y agoI think this illustrates the opposite point: that being of the female sex is the most important eligibility criterion for ensuring fairness and maximising safety in women's sports, and identity is irrelevant to this.
- blinkedup 2y agoI don't think a spectrum is the most helpful way to model the problem. What may be more useful is to consider normal males and normal females as the baseline, and then a set of discrete edge cases within each sex involving differences in sex development (DSDs) as the outliers. The question when it comes to competitive sports is, which of these DSDs confer male physical advantage onto the individual? As an example, though we can speculate with some now quite strong evidence on these two Olympic boxers, perhaps it's best to look at an athlete whose DSD is already known and confirmed: Caster Semenya, who won gold in the Women's 800m of the 2016 Olympics in Rio. Because of a ruling published by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, we know that Semenya has 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), a male-specific (XY) DSD that, due to a recessive gene mutation, impairs the conversion of testosterone to DHT such that the penis is underdeveloped and the testes typically remain internal to the body. Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation. This is what happened with Semenya. However, the testes are still functional. Individuals with 5-ARD go through male puberty, produce testosterone in the normal male range, and in athletic competition, will therefore have male physical advantage. In response to Semenya's case, the IAAF (now World Athletics) instituted a rule change so that 5-ARD individuals, and others with DSDs that are known to confer male performance advantage, are by default deemed ineligible to compete in women's events. That is: on the basis that being male is not a talent, they chose policy that does not reward male physical advantage in competitions that should be about celebrating female athletic excellence. So I think this isn't really about if sex or gender can be thought of as a spectrum, but what policy decisions, regarding DSDs, need to be made to ensure fairness in women's sport. And in the case of contact sports like boxing, safety as well.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoI disagree and I think the reason there is disagreement and debate is exactly because of how hard it is to define male and female, man and woman (which may be either four or two categories) in a way that covers every individual case. The BBC article makes exactly that point: you can't just look at someone's Y chromosome and say whether they're male or not. Not for 100% of humanity. And remember we can't see chromosomes. You say this with apparent certainty: >> Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation. Who is to say that a baby born with female external genitalia is "erroneously" observed to be female? If we observed them to be male, how would that not be erroneous? Again: we don't observe chromosomes directly. The line between the categories of "male" and "female" we understand was drawn long before anyone knew anything about chromosomes and there is no reason why knowing that a majority but not all individuals in the male or female category have the same "chromosomes" (the same karyotype, really) should eliminate the criterion we used before that, i.e. external genitalia at birth. In the same vein, who is to say that someone who was assigned female at birth, who grew up as a girl, socialised as a girl, grew up to be accepted as a woman by their entire society - was "erroneously" so? I think that would be a very lazy attitude to adopt (no offense to you) and that we should instead be prepared to accept that sex determination is hard in the fringes where people are not like most of us and we shouldn't make absolute proclamations like "XY is male". And we should not forget that telling a person who grew up as a woman that she is now a man, or that she is stripped of some of the natural rights of a woman, like competing in women's sports, is cruel and a form of violation. It's like a forced sex change, a forced intervention to a person's identity that they developed spontaneously by living the only life they have in the only body they have. We should tread very carefully when dealing with people with DSD, especially when it's all in the name of "fairness". Scientists certainly do and not for reasons of fairness but for reasons of accuracy.
- NoRagrets 2y agoEveryone has the right to ‘boil down’ anything to whatever. But science says otherwise. XX or female is the default setting. If there is any deviation from the default, then there is a change or transformation. And the result is no longer female. It could be male. Or not. But it’s not ‘female’.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoOP here. That's my point. In shooting for absolute equal, we're trying to take what is not binary - it's more of a biological spectrum (chromosomes, hormones, etc.) - and make it binary. Square peg, round hole, and so on. Putting equal aside (because it's not realistic) leaves "What is fair? To all?" and that's a different question. Not to make light or sound snarky (but to make a point), if we use equal as the goal, then what's to stop those who are height-challenged from demanding to play basketball?
- sssskskss 2y agoBasketball does have restricted height leagues https://wdg2023.com/sports/our-sports/basketball-2/ https://wdg2023.com/sports/our-sports/basketball-2/
- NoRagrets 2y agoWomen have periods, pregnancy and menopause. Our entire lives have been shaped by this journey we were meant to make. It’s our design. That’s what defines women. That’s our identity. The opposite binary and other uncategorised versions are not the default female. The genders are not equal. I lost my farm after 12 years because I was in ‘violation of farm management policy’ because I didn’t follow their list of 6 different PTO implement. As a female, I don’t have the upper body strength to operate and change all those PTO implements. I spent not a small amount to fabricate and fashion my own small implement that was originally imported from Italy. And yet.. even though my design was better..I was constantly compared to male farmers .. “why are you not following their methods and same equipment as the dudes? Well..because I have breasts, shorter arms and lesser upper body strength, you idiots!” And this was the State of California public agency that controlled my land access that I lost and subsequently lost my farm due to lack of land access. I am particularly depressed now because there is no way I expect a fair hearing ..the world has gone mad. Daft as a drunk duck, I am telling you.. and it’s just depressing. They have stolen 12 years of my life and my work(I was working on automating my farm equipment) because I am not a man. I don’t want to be equal to a man. I want to be myself. I empathize with those training for female sports. We can’t win anywhere. Soon we will only be relegated for one job..for the one thing only we can do..and what only we possess: wombs. I don’t even want to live in this world anymore.