4 ms·

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

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.

jazzpush2 7mo ago
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).
citruscomputing 7mo ago
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.)
- appreciatorBus 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - bit-anarchist 7mo ago
    But that's not what they said.
    - remarkEon 7mo ago
      Yes it is. Note the parenthetical. >(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.
      - space_fountain 7mo ago
        I read the statement as follows: There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related. Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?
        rdevilla 7mo ago
        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)
- whackernews 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- frumplestlatz 7mo ago
  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?
- rdevilla 7mo ago
  > 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). Do you agree or disagree with the above quote?
  - nick_ 7mo ago
    Do you think sex and gender are the same thing?
    - rdevilla 7mo ago
      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?
- olalonde 7mo ago
  That ontological classification is a recent invention with almost zero roots in common language. For most people, woman means "adult female".
- NuclearPM 7mo ago
  No.
- gizajob 7mo ago
  Why, ontologically, are they not a subclass of men?
fyredge 7mo ago
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.
- BonitaPersona 7mo ago
  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, ...
  - r-johnv 7mo ago
    Not sure I fully understood what you meant by 'the open category is done'? Also, from the categories that you mentioned, do you compete in West Coast Swing?
- computably 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - dpd_dpd 7mo ago
    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/352490929_The_Logic_of_Categorisation_in_Sport/links/60ed5a6316f9f313007c7b2b/The-Logic-of-Categorisation-in-Sport.pdf 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.
4bpp 7mo ago
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?
- PepperdineG 7mo ago
  >why is boxing, for example, divided into weight classes? A combination of boxer safety and having more competitive matches.
- dspillett 7mo ago
  > 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.
ZeroGravitas 7mo ago
And those outliers are much more likely to be women born with Differences in Sex Development than trans. Like over 100x more likely. They're rare in everyday life, but this process selects for them. And then they get attacked and misrepresented by people who claim they are protecting women.
petre 7mo ago
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. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/jordan-chiles-2024-olympic-medal-controversy-21955965.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/jordan-ch... 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.

jazzpush2 7mo ago

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).

citruscomputing 7mo ago

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.)

appreciatorBus 7mo ago
[flagged]
- bit-anarchist 7mo ago
  But that's not what they said.
  - remarkEon 7mo ago
    Yes it is. Note the parenthetical. >(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.
    - space_fountain 7mo ago
      I read the statement as follows: There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related. Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?
      - rdevilla 7mo ago
        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)
whackernews 7mo ago
[flagged]
frumplestlatz 7mo ago
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?
rdevilla 7mo ago
> 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). Do you agree or disagree with the above quote?
- nick_ 7mo ago
  Do you think sex and gender are the same thing?
  - rdevilla 7mo ago
    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?
olalonde 7mo ago
That ontological classification is a recent invention with almost zero roots in common language. For most people, woman means "adult female".
NuclearPM 7mo ago
No.
gizajob 7mo ago
Why, ontologically, are they not a subclass of men?

fyredge 7mo ago

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.

BonitaPersona 7mo ago
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, ...
- r-johnv 7mo ago
  Not sure I fully understood what you meant by 'the open category is done'? Also, from the categories that you mentioned, do you compete in West Coast Swing?
computably 7mo ago
> 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.
- dpd_dpd 7mo ago
  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/352490929_The_Logic_of_Categorisation_in_Sport/links/60ed5a6316f9f313007c7b2b/The-Logic-of-Categorisation-in-Sport.pdf 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.

4bpp 7mo ago

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?

PepperdineG 7mo ago
>why is boxing, for example, divided into weight classes? A combination of boxer safety and having more competitive matches.
dspillett 7mo ago
> 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.

ZeroGravitas 7mo ago

And those outliers are much more likely to be women born with Differences in Sex Development than trans. Like over 100x more likely. They're rare in everyday life, but this process selects for them. And then they get attacked and misrepresented by people who claim they are protecting women.

petre 7mo ago

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. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/jordan-chiles-2024-olympic-medal-controversy-21955965.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/jordan-ch... 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.