Well you gender inclusive, age inclusive, sex inclusive, adjusted for skill/mentallity for participation NBA team is sure going to look interesting.

Actually I want to see your Rugby team with a 12 year old phenom who is super skilled playing against a 300 lb monster of a man.

Please explain your plan for deciding how much of Usain Bolt's prowess at sprinting is attributable to natural talent vs. skill/mentality. Feel free to answer the same question for Tiger Woods in his prime.

And please explain what sort of handicap we will give Giannis to put him on the same approximate level as the world's most skilled and mentally tough 5 foot tall basketball player.

"Speculative" is one way to describe your plan. "Absurdly impractical" is another way to describe your plan

It wouldn't be handicapping of an individual that way. It would be an ongoing statistical process to minimise the significance of objective physical attributes in the whole result set.

Maybe a bad idea but not impractical.

Alternate Universe Ali/Foreman 2





He knocks her out in 10 seconds flat but by the way they award leveling points to her, she is awarded the win by surviving anything more than 7 seconds!

I see. So we let Lebron score 96 points against the 5 foot opponent, adjust the score at the end of the game to account for physical attributes, and then announce to the fans over the PA which team won the game. Sounds like a great spectator sport.

Let's return to my questions about Usain Bolt and prime Tiger Woods. How do we decide how much of their success is attributable to physical attributes and how much is attributable to skill/mentality? And who gets to make those decisions?

Its' merican sport. I can't be expected to make it a good spectacle.

Right. That's the problem. If only we were talking about English athletes. How does it work with Lennox Lewis in his prime when he fights a 120 lb man with impeccable skill and technique. If the little guys lasts long enough, do we tell the spectators that the little guy won, even as he is carried out on a stretcher.

There was a reason that i said ~all sports. If it covered everything including boxing then I would have not included the '~'

So yes people might not like it and yes it's hard to see how it works for the more violent sports.

Actually chez i was mostly joking as I could not take that position at all seriously for sport in general. So i was just having fun with it.

Maybe there is few niche sports where what you say could work, but for the vast, vast, vast, vast, majority of sports it would be absurd beyond any consideration.

I was not as far as Rococo was in thinking you said it as a total joke but I thought you said it more along the lines of a theoretical thought experiment where we could assume such leveling could be done.

Kind of like when people say imagine an Ant the size of an Elephant and then they go through theoretical comparisons.

But you obviously did mean this more literal than either of us could have imagined.

Anyway. No. Just NO!

Just have the men and women compete together, then we don't have to deal with this bullshit. We will also eliminate women like Megan Rapinoe who complain about being underpaid, as she and 99.9% of female athletes won't be playing professional sports.

im sure being white had something to do with ronda vs nunez starpower, but a much bigger thing in female UFC marketing is sex appeal. ronda is an attractive straight white woman, and nunez is a gay woman of color. it's not hard to see which one is going to be a better marketing darling for a sport who's fans are mostly straight white males. it's the same reason the UFC REALLY REALLY wanted paige vanzant to be good at fighting, but unfortunately she wasnt. the ufc would much rather have PVZ as the poster child.

i would bet that UFC's biggest fear much more so about any about transathelete's "competitive issues" is their lack of marketability to their existing fanbase.

OK. So we can exclude combat sports. Answer my Usain Bolt and Tiger Woods questions.

And here is another question. Is Messi's ball control and vision mostly a reflection of natural ability or skill/mentality. I assume that your natural reaction would be to characterize it as skill. But 99.999% of people would be worse than Messi with respect to those "skills", even if they put in the same amount of time as him, which strongly suggests that natural ability is a significant component. I could ask the same question about Roger Federer's footwork and court awareness.

I guess my point is that natural ability can be expressed other than through height, weight, strength, and speed.

What you really are proposing is that some group of experts put their fingers in the air and decide how much of Messi's success is attributable to natural ability and how much is attributable to skill/mentality. In other words, you are proposing to decide the outcome of every sporting event using a method that would be much more subjective than the way decisions are made in, say, Olympic figure skating. Sounds like a great idea.

I was just throwing it out there as a thought. Then answered some not very serious objections to that thought.

I would susggest it may to be taken more seriosly as genetic design and augmentation become commonplace but apart from that my only strong claim is that it's got better, stronger, fitter, longer lasting legs than trying to solve the issue by calling people names.

So Caitlyn Jenner is being called Anti Trans for a common sense science based opinion

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-...nfair-n1266138

Serena Williams made tens of millions of dollars from tennis. A guy ranked 389th in the world barely makes a living playing tennis. But he can most likely beat her. You think this can't be problematic? You think of all the guys ranked 200-400 in the world, there isn't some guy willing to be controversial and maybe embarassed to make 10's of millions of dollars? And then a few of them see how it worked out okay for him so they do it too. Bye bye women's sports. At least the ones with big money prizes.

Women's sports can easily just be a thing of the past if biological sex isn't used in sports.

I support trans rights in every other way. I'll call them whatever they want to be called, and respect them as I would any other human. They can use whatever bathroom they like, go to whatever school suits them, etc. But sports are different.

The East German gov't literally made a department to cheat the system when steroid use was young and harder to catch.

They put women on body distorting amounts of Juice just to win.

Can we not foresee a future where certain countries incentivize men to declare themselves transgender Woman to gain money and fame and power?

Many seem to take the path of 'how likely is that to happen' and thus think you don't need to contemplate it or provide rules against it.

But IF it does happen you cannot go back in time and reverse it after the fact. Bio Woman's sport is just ended at that point.

That is the normal response to anyone who says what Caitlyn did.

Imagine Caitlyn, then Bruce, instead becoming Trans during his peek competition years. Womens sporting records in all those events would be out of reach forever for any bio female.

I also follow MMA so it was very controversial when Fallon Fox transitioned from a man and began beating up bio women in that sport.

Fallon is a real nasty person who bragged about loving to find out she had fractured the skull of the women she fought who had made 'transphobic comments saying she should not be fighting women'.

She was not a skilled fighter at all but she could bully bio women and win via sheer power. She finally got beat and beat up by a more technical woman and instantly quit the sport. Could not handle losing.

“I think every trans person, if they’re into athletics, should have an opportunity to compete and to improve themselves. I think sports is such a great way to learn a lot about yourself. And yeah, I want to, hopefully they’ll have the opportunity in the future to do whatever they can do. I’m all for it. I’m all for it.”

“I also want to acknowledge all the young trans athletes who are out there — given the chance to play sports as who they really are”

-caitlyn jenner, before she decided she wanted to win bigot votes
(eta- to be fair, she could have been lying in these quotes when she wanted to win good person awards and PR..)

Because if the internet has taught us nothing, it's that changing your mind on a subject is completely unacceptable in any and all circumstances. Anyone who does so is pandering, an idiot, both, or _________ (insult applicable to your post here).

I like to think of myself as very pro-trans but honestly this subject is a minefield. It was for that reason I was pleased to see David Sklansky say it was simple.

A lot of the difficulty comes down to the huge variability of what being trans entails. There's a huge difference in physicality between someone who transitions as an adult and someone who goes on hormone blockers and never experiences the puberty they otherwise would have. There's a huge variability to what extent someone takes hormone therapies.

My gut is that sport should be as inclusive as possible but one of the baselines we've had in the past has been that when you start taking any medications that impact on sporting performance then you're ruled out of a lot of competitive fields. Deviating from that baseline (for example, a number of MMA fighters who have found ways to skirt rules and take testosterone) hasn't typically gone well. As for men and women having different sections, I don't think we ever set those divisions with self-identityn in mind.

I'm open to better solutions than throwing people to the wayside but this is a problem I haven't heard a good solution to yet.

I have said many times that I actually don't think it is that challenging an issue.

You are correct that the PRIME ideal of sport is a level playing field. Thus why steroids or other such treatments have been banned. It is not perfect in its execution but the ideal is laud worthy.

For sport the ideal was never to group people by 'gender identity' and it was ALWAYS to group people by 'biological sex'. It was just that they never foresaw that the words Male and Female would be unattached from biological sex and attached to Gender only.

OK so the change happened and that is fine and good. Male, Female, Men, Women are no longer attached to biological sex and are gender terms.

But that does not mean then that sports need to stay attached to those Gender terms. Just instead define sports by biological sex.

it is simple fair and inclusionary to all. No one is treated differently and no one gains or loses an advantage.

The only issue I have seen anyone ever say about that is that a transwoman might want her privacy protected and not want others to not know she is biological a male and this would force her to be outed. To that I say, 'no one is forced to participate in competitive sport'.

I don't say that flippantly. If you want to keep your biological sex private, by all means do so, but then don't demand to compete against biological women.

You simply cannot undue a 30 year advantage of being a biological male and then transitioning. I feel genuine sympathy for the biological women who have trained their entire life to be competitive at the top of their sport and then finds out they no longer are even competitive.

That defies the entire ideal of a level playing field.




WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard’s gold medal-winning performance at the Pacific Games continues to reverberate long after the event, with a New Zealand women’s group demanding sports authorities put a stop to “unfair” competition.

Hubbard, who competed for New Zealand in men’s weightlifting before her transition in her thirties, won two golds and a silver in three of the women’s heavyweight categories at the Games in Samoa earlier this month.

She topped the podium ahead of Samoan runner up and Commonwealth Games champion Feagaiga Stowers in both categories, triggering outrage in the Pacific island nation.

...

With Hubbard free to compete at next year’s Tokyo Olympics, the 41-year-old has become a lightning rod for criticism of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s guidelines for the inclusion of transgender athletes.

On Monday, New Zealand based lobby group “Speak Up For Women”, which advocates that sport must be categorized by sex rather than gender identity, called on the country’s Olympic committee and sports minister to “defend women’s sport”....

Cite

How does a trans person even feel proud of that accomplishment?

If being trans is totally normal and not a mental issue (I'm generally in favor of anything trans other than biological men competing in women's sports), then it's definitely some sort of mental issue being displayed by Laurel when she goes and wins medals lifting in a women's division. That's like someone winning medals in the special olympics because they identify as a special olympian.

We have enough evidence on this particular person to know she is pandering. I'm on the back she really doesn't have a firm position on anything, but tilts to what's popular.

Hopefully we get the opportunity to see a top level athlete transition and just completely wipe the floor with women's MMA . I seriously doubt there is any amount of estrogen that could bring Herschel Walker to the same level of athleticism as a woman.

Just imagine Greg Hardy all tattooed up wearing a pink tutu. That's one scary *****. I can imagine the fear on the faces of the other women that get locked in the cage with her. That's pretty much the definition of must see TV. I imagine ESPN would win the 18 to 34 demo that night.