Martina Navratilova dropped by LGBT group over trans athletes row

[Loren Pechtel]

They had the interest in sports before the transition, which means that as men they were very good at it. Which explains why there's loads of trans women who place very highly in female leagues while there's almost no trans men in male leagues.

I'd place the emphasis a bit differently. Let's say there are 300 men in the NBA and 200 women in the WNBA. These men and women are at the far end of the distribution in basketball skill for their respective genders. If there are 3 billion each of men and women in the world these are the top .00001%. But if you took the worst woman in the WNBA and put her on the men's distribution she might be down to the top .01% or so. This means that while she is better than almost all men, there are still hundreds of thousand of men better than her.

You can observe this to some degree. If you go watch a decent high school basketball game around here there will be 5 or 6 players per team dunking in the pre-game layup line. You will see 10 or so in game dunks.

There have been a total of 5 women with 19 in-game dunks in WNBA history, despite the fact they use a smaller ball. They get about 1 per year.

https://www.wnba.com/history_triple-doubles-dunks-and-20-20-games/

The NBA is on pace to have about 11,000 dunks this year.

That's a special case--basketball is a sport where height has a considerable advantage and men are slightly taller than women--which means at the extremes there's a lot more men of a given height than women.

 

[just_me]

I was wondering when this would come up.

(CNN)An LGBT group has cut ties with tennis great Martina Navratilova after she said it was a form of "cheating" for transgender women to be allowed to compete in women's sport.

New York-based Athlete Ally, which supports LGBT sportspeople, called the comments transphobic and removed the 18-time Grand Slam winner from its advisory board and as an ambassador.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/20/tenn...a-dropped-lgbt-group-scli-spt-intl/index.html

Personally, I don't think she's being transphobic. And I think the LGBT community/group is really overreacting and missing a huge opportunity to move their cause further.

In total agreement.

 

[dismal]

They had the interest in sports before the transition, which means that as men they were very good at it. Which explains why there's loads of trans women who place very highly in female leagues while there's almost no trans men in male leagues.

I'd place the emphasis a bit differently. Let's say there are 300 men in the NBA and 200 women in the WNBA. These men and women are at the far end of the distribution in basketball skill for their respective genders. If there are 3 billion each of men and women in the world these are the top .00001%. But if you took the worst woman in the WNBA and put her on the men's distribution she might be down to the top .01% or so. This means that while she is better than almost all men, there are still hundreds of thousand of men better than her.

You can observe this to some degree. If you go watch a decent high school basketball game around here there will be 5 or 6 players per team dunking in the pre-game layup line. You will see 10 or so in game dunks.

There have been a total of 5 women with 19 in-game dunks in WNBA history, despite the fact they use a smaller ball. They get about 1 per year.

https://www.wnba.com/history_triple-doubles-dunks-and-20-20-games/

The NBA is on pace to have about 11,000 dunks this year.

That's a special case--basketball is a sport where height has a considerable advantage and men are slightly taller than women--which means at the extremes there's a lot more men of a given height than women.

It's not just height though. There are a lot of 6' - 6' 2"players in the NBA and in high schools who can dunk, there are no such women in the WNBA. Britney Griner, who is 6'8" has more than half of the WNBA dunks ever.

Spud Webb, who is 5'7", won the NBA slam dunk contest with: an elevator two-handed double pump dunk, the off-the-backboard one-handed jam, a 360-degree helicopter one-handed dunk, a reverse double-pump slam, and finally, the reverse two-handed strawberry jam from a lob bounce off the floor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_Webb

 

[thebeave]

That's a special case--basketball is a sport where height has a considerable advantage and men are slightly taller than women--which means at the extremes there's a lot more men of a given height than women.

It's not just height though. There are a lot of 6' - 6' 2"players in the NBA and in high schools who can dunk, there are no such women in the WNBA. Britney Griner, who is 6'8" has more than half of the WNBA dunks ever.

Spud Webb, who is 5'7", won the NBA slam dunk contest with: an elevator two-handed double pump dunk, the off-the-backboard one-handed jam, a 360-degree helicopter one-handed dunk, a reverse double-pump slam, and finally, the reverse two-handed strawberry jam from a lob bounce off the floor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_Webb

Holy Shit. I wonder if there's a video of that.

I think a lot of people don't realize the real disparity in athletic ability between men and women. And we're not just talking tennis and basketball. Austrailia's top ranked Rio Olympic bound women's soccer team lost 7-0 to a team of under 15 y.o boys in a practice match a couple of years ago:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3609949/Matildas-lose-7-0-Newcastle-Jets-15s-Rio-Olympics-warm-up.html

Australia's national women's soccer team have suffered a devastating defeat in the lead up to the Rio Olympics - going down 7-0 to the Newcastle Jets under-15 boys side.

What is particularly concerning for the Matildas is that despite resting some regulars, they were still able to field experienced international stars including former AFC player of the year Katrina Gorry.

Despite the embarrassing defeat on Wednesday night at Valentine Sports Park in Newcastle, the Australian team will travel to Brazil as one of the gold medal favourites.

 

[dismal]

Holy Shit. I wonder if there's a video of that.

I think a lot of people don't realize the real disparity in athletic ability between men and women. And we're not just talking tennis and basketball. Austrailia's top ranked Rio Olympic bound women's soccer team lost 7-0 to a team of under 15 y.o boys in a practice match a couple of years ago:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3609949/Matildas-lose-7-0-Newcastle-Jets-15s-Rio-Olympics-warm-up.html

Australia's national women's soccer team have suffered a devastating defeat in the lead up to the Rio Olympics - going down 7-0 to the Newcastle Jets under-15 boys side.

What is particularly concerning for the Matildas is that despite resting some regulars, they were still able to field experienced international stars including former AFC player of the year Katrina Gorry.

Despite the embarrassing defeat on Wednesday night at Valentine Sports Park in Newcastle, the Australian team will travel to Brazil as one of the gold medal favourites.

Yes, I think there are a couple of variables that explain most of the relative level of women's teams (or individuals) versus men's. One is the importance of strength and athleticism, the second is how many people play.

In sports like basketball and soccer where a lot of people play and athleticism is important I think top women's teams tend to be on par with somewhere around a good high school team. There are hundreds of thousands of men who could play for a top women's team. In tennis athleticism is important, but relative few people play a relatively strong and athletic woman with tens of thousands of hours of practice and top coaching (like Serena Williams) is going to better than all but maybe 500 or 1000 men. In a sport like American Football where strength and athleticism are extremely important and lots of men play but few women, I'm not sure a top women's team can beat a typical high school freshman team. In the US where there are at least 10x as many female volleyball players as males and athleticism is somewhat important, I'd guess the top women's team may even be competitive at the elite high school level.

It's notable that people who run women's sports leagues go out of their way not to demonstrate exactly where this would all shake out. It would be easy enough to settle such debates on the field.

 

[dismal]

Saw this article today. It gets into a fair amount of detail on the practical issues with boiling everything down to testosterone.

I also had not heard of the 51 year old trans woman who made a college women's basketball team. Of course, maybe she identifies as 21 years old...

https://www.t-nation.com/opinion/trans-athletes-the-death-of-womens-sports

 

[Starr]

*snip*
Particularly silly comments come from the transwomen handball player (take a wild guess who she is below).https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jappl.2000.89.1.81 First, she claimns that average men are only 8%-12% stronger than average women, when the figure is 30% (lower body) and 50% (upper body). And that is average including older adults. The differences are even greater for people in their teens through 30. And it isn't just b/c men are larger, b/c controlling for overall body mass, men average 20% more skeletal muscle mass than women (and again, that difference is even greater for teens to 30 year olds). Then there are skeletal differences, where even when they are of equal overall height, men tend to have longer arms, fingers, and feet, all of which can impart major advantages in athletic competition.

Then she says "But we have to recognise that the average difference between men and women is far smaller than between the weakest and strongest woman, or the shortest and tallest woman."

Yeah, but no competitions pit the strongest woman against the weakest. The weakest don't compete. Even at grade school levels it mostly just the top 10% and at pro levels its just the top 1% of each gender in the world. There is huge if not even bigger gender difference between a man in the top 1% percent and a woman in top 1% percentile, that is much larger than the difference between the strongest and weakest women within that 1%.
*snip*

What is particularly funny about that is there is a difference between men and women that is of particular significance in handball that makes this even worse: grip strength. Male grip strength is just insanely higher than female grip strength. They are almost non-overlapping distributions. In one study, there were three testing populations, all in their early 20s. Healthy men, healthy women, and specially trained women for whom grip strength was important, judo competitors and handball players. 90% of random healthy women had weaker grip strength than all but 5% of the healthy men. More strikingly though were the results for the trained women: while their mean grip strength was very high compared to the untrained sample, it was still below the lower 25th percentile of untrained male grip strength, and the very strongest female athlete tested was only stronger than 58% of the male sample. I kind of wish they had included a sample of trained males with their study so we could see how all the relevant numbers compare.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The easiest solution is to simply get rid of "women's sports" and have women who want to compete, compete with the men. Some may do well. Others won't. But so what?

That'd be great if the "easiest" solution was usually the "best" solution. Trying to determine how to create the best solution here. And there is a lot of intolerance, bigotry, pride, misinformation, and ignorance piled in the way to getting at it.

 

[dismal]

The easiest solution is to simply get rid of "women's sports" and have women who want to compete, compete with the men. Some may do well. Others won't. But so what?

That'd be great if the "easiest" solution was usually the "best" solution. Trying to determine how to create the best solution here. And there is a lot of intolerance, bigotry, pride, misinformation, and ignorance piled in the way to getting at it.

It seems like the win-win would be to have a definition of "woman" that keeps "women's sports" a meaningful category, and gives the people who get off on squealing "bigot" something to squeal "bigot" about.

As opposed to the option where no one can squeal about bigotry in women's sports because women's sports have ceased to exist.