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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 remain
by qingcharles 7mo ago
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.
- scoofy 7mo agoThe issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory. That the issue of discrimination comes up is to be expected. The idea of competitive sports exists in a framework of discrimination means that you will always have unhappy people. The good news is that sports, for the most part, is mostly symbolic, and rarely affects ones livelihood.
- TimorousBestie 7mo agoUnfortunately pointless, mostly symbolic things attract the most hysterical reactions from people.
- junofan 7mo agoFive billion people followed the Paris Olympics. It’s actually kind of important.
- squigz 7mo agoHow 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.
- secondcoming 7mo agoYou're most likely part of the 2bn that showed no, or a passing interest, in the Olympics.
- squigz 7mo agoI 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- AlOwain 7mo agoI 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.
- adrian_b 7mo agoI assume that you are relatively young. 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.
- AlOwain 7mo agoYou are very much right, I appreciate your comment.
- TurdF3rguson 7mo agoAssuming you have already procured food and shelter, everything important in your life is symbolic.
- scoofy 7mo agoRight, which is why civil rights laws tend to be about employment and housing.
- TurdF3rguson 7mo agoCivil rights are symbolic, I'm not sure I understood the point you were making.
- bluescrn 7mo ago> The issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory. Just about anything competitive is discriminatory. People are disadvantaged by genetics, disability/health issues, age, wealth inequality, and more. But as a society we love competitive activities, so the best we can do is come up with rules to try and impose a reasonable amount of fairness.
- mikestorrent 7mo agoRight, 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....
- leoedin 7mo agoI’m the same age as my wife. More or less the same height and weight too. Neither of us have a history of weight training. I’m much stronger than her. I’ve got 2x the lung capacity she does. If you’re going to divide competition by one trait, sex is the clear winner.
- lolc 7mo agoJust comparing genes, a male human is more closely related with all male chimps than with any female human.
- deleted 7mo ago
- qingnonce 7mo ago[flagged]
- Aurornis 7mo ago> and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises. This is a gross (literally) misunderstanding of the entire topic The ruling covers a lot of the nuanced cases, including rare DSDs that may never even apply to Olympic athletes The tests DO NOT check for genitals, and that is irrelevant to the decisions! It's a cheek swab that checks genetics.
- dillydogg 7mo agoWhat 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.
- mandevil 7mo agoIt 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. 1: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ratjen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ratjen
- grogg 7mo agoSeems 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.
- servo_sausage 7mo agoDoesn't really work, men are stronger than women at the same weight... And that's at the peak of fitness; lower level competitions with juniors or not optimallyfit people exaggerate the strength difference.
- WillPostForFood 7mo agoExplain 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.
- dpark 7mo agoYou might want to look at strength standards for women and men at the same weight. https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards Weight classes are a great thing in some sports. They do not solve for the discrepancies between women and men, though.
- x0x0 7mo agoAs an example: men super heavyweight snatch record: Lasha, 225 kg. With Krastev 217 way back in 1987. Women: 149kg, Li Yan. So a 76kg delta. Clean and Jerk: Taranenko 266kg in 1988; current Lasha 267kg. Women's is Li Wenwen 187kg. An 80kg delta. Gender matters.
- BonitaPersona 7mo agoIs 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.
- txrx0000 7mo agoThe solution is to develop relative skill rating systems like Elo.
- dpd_dpd 7mo agoNo, the solution is to exclude male advantage from the female competition via evidence-based analysis, as the IOC's new policy does.
- txrx0000 7mo agoGrouping based on skill would achieve what you describe and then some. It would eliminate every kind of advantage, not just sex-based advantage.
- bluescrn 7mo agoSport does that already. The Olympics is the very top skill tier. So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?
- txrx0000 7mo ago> 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).
- trhway 7mo ago>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.
- no-name-here 7mo ago> 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_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Women%27s_800_metres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_O... )
- trhway 7mo ago>And categories 1 and 3 would likely always have exactly the same winners? no, the point is that you can't compete in more than one category. >so trans men/trans women would never be a likely top competitor in any category? we don't really know. What if trans confirms strong biological advantage? Like getting best things from both sides? >And even the above idea still runs into issues with intersex people why not compete in the category 3? > or objections from some about women with high testosterone if it is biologically natural - cat 2, otherwise, as long as it is medical and not illegal doping - cat 3.
- mc32 7mo agoOne solution is to have more categories. Then people can compete in their relevant categories.
- dangus 7mo agoIt 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.
- kelipso 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Women%27s_800_metres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_O... See all three medalists.
- space_fountain 7mo agoI 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
- ragall 7mo ago[flagged]