I would be very upset if even the most liberal posters didn't agree with Martina. Doubly so if any of them buy the argument "well if once being a man was advantageous why aren't they winning medals right and left?" (Hopefully you realize that the answer is that virtually none of the top 5000 or so men in any of these sports have gone that route.)

Nothing wrong with trans men competing against woman in contests where there aren't great rewards for winning. But I would think that those who champion woman's rights would agree with me (Mat's Commie mother does.)

Who is Martina?

I assume Martina Navritalova

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/t...cent-klsrq6h3x

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...ender-comments

I think she's wrong to frame trans issues as arbitrary decisions (or as intentionally fraudulent, i.e. as cheating), and I think it's understandable that people pushed back on that.

I also think it's true that sports is a context in which sexual differences are more fundamentally important than gender constructs given the competitive goals. It seems to me that her comments highlight the problem of distinguishing between biological sex and socially constructed aspects of gender, and the difficulty people have expanding their concept of gender separately from sex. It's probably exacerbated by thinking of transgender as involving switching from one sex/gender to the other, while still maintaining a strong belief in the fundamental and unchangeable dichotomy between male and female.

But I think the obvious solution is to stop classifying competitors by gender ("men's sports" and "women's sports") and start thinking of it more like weight categories in boxing, i.e. focusing on more concrete physiological differences in the construction of competitive classes. That gets to the problem that I think Navritalova does correctly identify: keeping the current categories and using gender identification to assign which group you compete with doesn't really work with transgender competitors, at least not given the typical physiological justifications for separating sports by sex.

It's not cheating though and she is being enormously callous, probably mostly out of a lack of real understanding of the issues.

Alright...I mean I get what you are saying...

But let's take basketball, how do you separate this except mens/women?

If you think that's the "obvious" solution, you probably need to think about it some more. You can start with chuckleslovakian's question.

I was watching March Madness on a holographic TV in the future. Jim Nantz had the call. I forget the teams, but he declared it a trap game for the tournament favorite. He's the last person to use that term on a televised broadcast in American history. Sent him to Guantanamo. For you trivia buffs out there.

I think the only fairly unique thing in basketball is that it selects more for height, but that would probably be true across any set of competitive classes. Keep in mind that given that biological sex is approximately dimorphic if you restrict your competitive classes to only two then you're going to get classes that correspond pretty closely to biological sex. For the ~97% of non-transgender/non-intersex people it's still going to look like "men's" and "women's" sports (but there's nothing that says we can only have two classes...).

My point is that the problem is how we think about it: we conflate sex and gender. MtF transgender people want to play women's sports because they identify as women, and this is predicated on a certain understanding of how sports are segregated by gender. But it would probably make more sense to think of it as placing people into groups based on defined ranges for relevant physical characteristics, which just happen to correspond closely to gender identity for most people when there are only two groups. Although in other contexts we recognize other relevant characteristics, i.e. dividing kids up into different age groups.

Maybe this is too subtle and the approximately dimorphic nature of sex differences will make it too hard for people to grasp the distinction so long as you only have two major classes of competition. Also it may only ever be feasible at a pro-level because it's pretty intrusive to even measure (but perhaps not more so than drug testing). Using gender as a indicator is a lot easier and happens to work well for the overwhelming majority of people in more casual settings, so it makes sense that people use it. But pro sports are already all about selecting for physical outliers, so it seems like some way of addressing the fairness argument while respecting the legitimacy of trans-identification is possible at an elite level.

Outside of pro sports, I doubt there's an easy solution, but I think it's important to understand what the conceptual problem really is, which has to do with how we understand the relation between gender identity as a socially negotiated and constructed thing and sexual characteristics which are less so, but more highly relevant for sports. I don't think it makes sense to refuse to acknowledge that gender identity doesn't override some of the relevant biology (n.b. that I do recognize that transgender identity may be associated with real biological differences from cis-gender people). That's why I think there is some validity to the complaint about the fairness of competition. But I also think it's important that transgender be socially legitimized, and that we make some room in our concepts and institutions for them. I don't know that this means necessarily collapsing any and all distinctions between cis-gender women and trans-gender women (or men), but if there are ways of re-conceiving gendered activities to do this then I think it's worth thinking about. For sports though, I doubt you can make that work without preserving some notion of biologically relevant differences associated to gender via sex. Hence mostly just wanting to relabel the categories from "gender" to "<people in this range of physiology>", more or less.

I over-use the word obvious in my writing when I really mean I just think something is the best and clearest answer I can think of. But sure, it's not actually obvious. The rest of the post points out why it's not obvious: because traditional gender/sex categories are pretty deeply baked in, mostly because they really do correspond closely (just not perfectly) to biology. Anyway, it was a bad choice of words.

Move to Sporting Events.

I’d say hormone level brackets. But the olympics are already weaponizing them against a female runner they don’t like that is really good.

was that hormone or chromosome?

From reading /r/23andme, I've learned that a small percentage of women are actually XY instead of XX, yet never know it and show no physical signs of not being a biological female.

The Olympics are making it about hormones, namely, androgens (male hormones, like testosterone).

The runner Slighted is talking about is not a MtF trans, she's a woman with abnormally high androgen levels. The Olympic committee chose an androgen level arbitrarily and if a woman has levels above that mark, even if that's just how her body chemistry is, she is accused of cheating.

Sean Carroll had Alice Dreger, who is an expert on this stuff, on his podcast a few months ago. I found it really interesting.

One thing she said, if I'm remembering correctly, is that the Olympic committee set their arbitrary numbers and use it as a raw male/female demarcation because they think if they don't the Chinese will raise their boys as girls (or have them operated on?) to get more gold medals. But that's kind of salacious, and doesn't do the episode justice. It's kind of a thorny issue and there aren't any clear-cut answers that will make everyone happy.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com...h-and-justice/

That certainly would have changed the careers of people like Lindsay Davenport, unless she figured out a way to drop 50+ pounds to be closer to the weights of many of her opponents at the time.

No idea what she would have done about the 6 extra inches of height.

i think if someone were to be grossly offended having to compete with people that look like them, there should be a third group for trans. there’s basically no way a woman could hit more than 70 home runs in a season - which requires a megaton of PEDs.

Well named there are significant physiological differences between people who are born as a male versus a female and it is not all magically undone with adult hormone therapy. Things like bone and tendon growth, muscle density and many other things provide an overwhelming advantage in many physical activities.

It is a legitimate issue/problem and there is not a good solution other than seperating based on birth gender. The difference in performance is so significant in many competitions that any reduction or balancing doesn’t even things out.

What if the 1000th ranked male tennis player struggles to get by but then transitions and plays on the women’s tour. Odds are they would be ranked significantly higher and make much more money. Eventually this would shred the top women sports. Not having any gender based seperation in sports at all and just going by size or weight is just to deny the biological differences.

I can only think of one instance of one competitive sport, ultra marathoning, where a female (and it is one female) can beat and even dominate relevant male competitors. That being said it’s not a sport that necessarily has the most capable athletes participating, and given the extreme lengths of events many participants believe that the mental component eventually overtakes the physical component.

I’m just not sure who is being serviced by any of this.

in all sports I think you can separate by testosterone. like, right now an athlete is not allowed to have T levels above a certain point. for women that point is lower than men.

isnt that what happened to th Semenya from SA? she took hormones that lowered her T to certain levels.

There was a graph posted to reddit a couple years ago showing that at least when it comes to grip strength, almost all men are stronger than almost all women:

Can we move this to sports? How come politics always has to suffer these Skalansky threads?

I did not know that. I wanted to suggest categories that allow or do not allow y-chromosomes.

Some quick googling:

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/sw...ome#statistics

Maybe we could still separate by y-chromosome but allow certain exceptions, like for example for persons with Swyer's syndrome.

I think you either misunderstood me or I wasn't clear enough, because we aren't disagreeing about this, and I explicitly mentioned it in my response to chuckles.

I agree that it's a legitimate issue (I said as much), but I think your wording here speaks to the point I was trying to make about distinguishing sex and gender. Basically I think the phrase "birth gender" suggests some conceptual confusion which -- if it could be cleared up in popular culture -- would help disentangle some of these issues. "Birth sex" would be closer but then it's not really physical sex characteristics at birth which are relevant here, it's physical characteristics associated to sex at the time of competition.

The point was that we conflate all these things because they are closely associated in the overwhelming majority of people, but become dissociated for transgender people in various ways (gender vs sex in basically all cases, sex characteristics at birth vs post-transition, ...).

Probably because it's a hot political issue based on feelings but attributed to science that falls apart when you apply it to real world situations with consequences.

At the end of the day you're just a creeper if you're a man who wants to use the women's bathroom, but if you're going to use your supposed transgender status to unfairly beat on the opposite sex in prize competitions, that's a dick move. If you allow the former under certain pretenses, you can't logically argue against the latter without looking ridiculous by moving the goalposts.

Whatever. Switch around.

There's little incentive for men to become women to get into that sport because women's sports often pays far less than men's sports.

My concern is if it happens in something like MMA where you basically have a woman with the frame and muscle mass of a man beating other women to death in the octagon. But again, the pay cut is large enough to prevent anybody from doing it.

The new controversy isn't going to be that though. When owners become rich enough, they'll use gene editing to create the ultimate sports team. How are you going to test for cheating in that case? Every single team will be the perfect team. Hell, tissue engineering can be used to turn average athletes into massive muscle bound freaks who are impossible to overpower.

Do you want to win $1M 1% of the time, or $100k 30% of the time?

Our understanding of gene editing isn't remotely there yet, and it may not be for decades. Like, even basic cloning where you are just making a copy without tinkering, is really hard. If you try to clone Gronk, the most likely outcomes are not more Gronks, but actually some poor wretched creatures that never make it to birth or that die painful deaths shortly thereafter (at least, that is the current state of the art with animal cloning).