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This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for ba

This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball), this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course. Remember, sport is and has always been about statistical outliers competing. Fairness has never been, and will never be, a genuine consideration. It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.) Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.

noncoml 7mo ago
[dead]
decimalenough 7mo ago
Why should open divisions not work that way? They're meant to determine who's the best, regardless of sex or gender.
orochimaaru 7mo ago
>>>> This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. What are those? fwiw - I don't think they should be included in the ban. Genetic advantage people in their natural gender is how sports works. I'm 5'7" - Lebron definitely has a genetic advantage over me. Banning him from basketball isn't doing anyone favors.
- kg 7mo ago
  http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html discusses some of the genetic anomalies that are possible and coincidentally how they've been handled by the IOC.
  - cowpig 7mo ago
    Interesting piece! I was first exposed to how complicated the biology of sex is when I listened to Radiolab's series on the subject: https://radiolab.org/series/radiolab-presents-gonads/ https://radiolab.org/series/radiolab-presents-gonads/
- mandevil 7mo ago
  Santhi Soundarajan (1) shows exactly how this ends up catching cis women who were raised as women from birth. Which is why it's a bad idea to draw strict lines. Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes. This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.
dwedge 7mo ago
Men who supplement testosterone are already banned if caught.
- hananova 7mo ago
  That if caught is doing very heavy lifting. You can only get caught if you dope to an amount that’s impossible to see naturally, and that’s a very high amount.
j_w 7mo ago
Well I think it bans women that thought/think that they are cis but actually aren't, which is a bit of a different story. A fairly tragic one. Intersex/trans/anything else people just don't really have a clean fit into a lot of places, which is unfortunate. > this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course. Well, not really. 56%[1] of young women think that trans women should not be allowed in women's sports. > It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.) IMO the "better" division should be open. If we are going to do two classes, and we find that one class has some sort of physical advantage inherently, then that class should be the "open" one. > Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught. A lot of people (the majority?) don't understand the extent of PEDs usage in sports. When everyone cheats nobody does. I've heard the argument before for going an "anything goes" division from friends for some sports, but then people are just going to start dying regularly from side effects like in body building. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-americans-oppose-trans-women-competing-female-sports-2-3-gen-z-rcna203658 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...
- hananova 7mo ago
  Interesting how it’s “unfortunate” if it doesn’t affect men. The blatant hypocrisy is disgusting. There have been women banned from women’s sports who then later literally gave birth, if giving birth doesn’t qualify one as female, then what are we doing as a society? Your linked article is also a massive category error. The people whose opinion should be polled should be actual competing athletes, that’s how the rules should be set in a sport. The biggest anti-trans athlete is some 5th place loser that couldn’t handle sharing 5th place with another woman and had to instead cry about it, only way to get in the news at 5th place, I suppose.
  - j_w 6mo ago
fxwin 7mo ago
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.) Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0] > Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball) We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0
- jakeinspace 7mo ago
  I would argue that it's the formerly presumed binary nature of sex/gender that made it a logical split for all sports. While marital arts and weightlifting tend to seperate by weight as well, that is because those particular events are particularly biased toward muscle mass and height/reach by proxy. Most sports are less clearly advantaged by size (soccer, for example). You just can't practically divide entire team sports by gradations of height, because there aren't enough players in a school for more than a few squads. If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair. I wish there was a good solution.
  - gorgoiler 6mo ago
    The sports in which I’ve competed — cross country cycling and cross country running — also have handicaps for age. I always liked that type of system because it also gives both the open results and results by category, and there are lots of categories. W20 can thrash an M30, and plenty of M20s too, even if the overall winner is likely to be an M20. It was simplistic for sure but gender identity was only a proxy for the handicap that impacted performance: the genetic disadvantage of not having been through a natural male puberty. If we can no longer rely on gender identity as the proxy then it makes sense to either drop the handicap system altogether, or refine it to look at the performance enhancing impact of genetics rather than what your pronouns are. s/W(..)/F$1/; # Women -> Female
bitshiftfaced 7mo ago
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! Hypothetically you could have three divisions: open, men, and women. In many contexts it's more practical to have two, where one is open. In those cases, if the sex that didn't win more was also the open division, then people would complain because both divisions would be dominated by players of one sex.
gorgoiler 7mo ago
The basketball league for short people would probably ban people who tested over 5’5” even if they were 6’10” but identified as short.
- hananova 7mo ago
  Good thing that’s nothing like HRT then, is it? Height is (well, mostly) immutable. Sex is not, though many people will fight tooth and nail to pretend otherwise.
  - sojournerc 6mo ago
    Can men get pregnant?
    - sevenseacat 6mo ago
      Can all women get pregnant?
      - sojournerc 6mo ago
        Can _any_ man get pregnant? No not all women get pregnant, but they generally have the plumbing to do so. My wife and I have tried for years without luck, yet no doctor has ever asked if we tried getting me pregnant instead. Smh
arjie 7mo ago
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.) It’s actually interesting. The claim in defense is that the decision was made prior to her win. This is often backformed in these committees though so on its own I wouldn’t believe it uncritically. However, it seems that other shooting sports were split already which does support this viewpoint. The real tragedy is that women weren’t allowed to shoot skeet at the Olympics after the split. Wild that flew. Anyway, I still agree that it looks suspicious that the sport where women are quite competitive is one where this happens. I think it might just be not looking hard enough, though. Equestrian sports are open in category and dressage is dominated by women, eventing leans female, and jumping leans male (just looking at Wikipedia medals - no expertise here). No split there. So the premise is not universally true and probably represents each sports federation differently.

noncoml 7mo ago

[dead]

decimalenough 7mo ago

Why should open divisions not work that way? They're meant to determine who's the best, regardless of sex or gender.

orochimaaru 7mo ago

>>>> This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. What are those? fwiw - I don't think they should be included in the ban. Genetic advantage people in their natural gender is how sports works. I'm 5'7" - Lebron definitely has a genetic advantage over me. Banning him from basketball isn't doing anyone favors.

kg 7mo ago
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html discusses some of the genetic anomalies that are possible and coincidentally how they've been handled by the IOC.
- cowpig 7mo ago
  Interesting piece! I was first exposed to how complicated the biology of sex is when I listened to Radiolab's series on the subject: https://radiolab.org/series/radiolab-presents-gonads/ https://radiolab.org/series/radiolab-presents-gonads/
mandevil 7mo ago
Santhi Soundarajan (1) shows exactly how this ends up catching cis women who were raised as women from birth. Which is why it's a bad idea to draw strict lines. Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes. This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.

dwedge 7mo ago

Men who supplement testosterone are already banned if caught.

hananova 7mo ago
That if caught is doing very heavy lifting. You can only get caught if you dope to an amount that’s impossible to see naturally, and that’s a very high amount.

j_w 7mo ago

Well I think it bans women that thought/think that they are cis but actually aren't, which is a bit of a different story. A fairly tragic one. Intersex/trans/anything else people just don't really have a clean fit into a lot of places, which is unfortunate. > this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course. Well, not really. 56%[1] of young women think that trans women should not be allowed in women's sports. > It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.) IMO the "better" division should be open. If we are going to do two classes, and we find that one class has some sort of physical advantage inherently, then that class should be the "open" one. > Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught. A lot of people (the majority?) don't understand the extent of PEDs usage in sports. When everyone cheats nobody does. I've heard the argument before for going an "anything goes" division from friends for some sports, but then people are just going to start dying regularly from side effects like in body building. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-americans-oppose-trans-women-competing-female-sports-2-3-gen-z-rcna203658 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...

hananova 7mo ago
Interesting how it’s “unfortunate” if it doesn’t affect men. The blatant hypocrisy is disgusting. There have been women banned from women’s sports who then later literally gave birth, if giving birth doesn’t qualify one as female, then what are we doing as a society? Your linked article is also a massive category error. The people whose opinion should be polled should be actual competing athletes, that’s how the rules should be set in a sport. The biggest anti-trans athlete is some 5th place loser that couldn’t handle sharing 5th place with another woman and had to instead cry about it, only way to get in the news at 5th place, I suppose.
- j_w 6mo ago

fxwin 7mo ago

> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.) Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0] > Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball) We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0

jakeinspace 7mo ago
I would argue that it's the formerly presumed binary nature of sex/gender that made it a logical split for all sports. While marital arts and weightlifting tend to seperate by weight as well, that is because those particular events are particularly biased toward muscle mass and height/reach by proxy. Most sports are less clearly advantaged by size (soccer, for example). You just can't practically divide entire team sports by gradations of height, because there aren't enough players in a school for more than a few squads. If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair. I wish there was a good solution.
- gorgoiler 6mo ago
  The sports in which I’ve competed — cross country cycling and cross country running — also have handicaps for age. I always liked that type of system because it also gives both the open results and results by category, and there are lots of categories. W20 can thrash an M30, and plenty of M20s too, even if the overall winner is likely to be an M20. It was simplistic for sure but gender identity was only a proxy for the handicap that impacted performance: the genetic disadvantage of not having been through a natural male puberty. If we can no longer rely on gender identity as the proxy then it makes sense to either drop the handicap system altogether, or refine it to look at the performance enhancing impact of genetics rather than what your pronouns are. s/W(..)/F$1/; # Women -> Female

bitshiftfaced 7mo ago

> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! Hypothetically you could have three divisions: open, men, and women. In many contexts it's more practical to have two, where one is open. In those cases, if the sex that didn't win more was also the open division, then people would complain because both divisions would be dominated by players of one sex.

gorgoiler 7mo ago

The basketball league for short people would probably ban people who tested over 5’5” even if they were 6’10” but identified as short.

hananova 7mo ago
Good thing that’s nothing like HRT then, is it? Height is (well, mostly) immutable. Sex is not, though many people will fight tooth and nail to pretend otherwise.
- sojournerc 6mo ago
  Can men get pregnant?
  - sevenseacat 6mo ago
    Can all women get pregnant?
    - sojournerc 6mo ago
      Can _any_ man get pregnant? No not all women get pregnant, but they generally have the plumbing to do so. My wife and I have tried for years without luck, yet no doctor has ever asked if we tried getting me pregnant instead. Smh

arjie 7mo ago

> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.) It’s actually interesting. The claim in defense is that the decision was made prior to her win. This is often backformed in these committees though so on its own I wouldn’t believe it uncritically. However, it seems that other shooting sports were split already which does support this viewpoint. The real tragedy is that women weren’t allowed to shoot skeet at the Olympics after the split. Wild that flew. Anyway, I still agree that it looks suspicious that the sport where women are quite competitive is one where this happens. I think it might just be not looking hard enough, though. Equestrian sports are open in category and dressage is dominated by women, eventing leans female, and jumping leans male (just looking at Wikipedia medals - no expertise here). No split there. So the premise is not universally true and probably represents each sports federation differently.