Martina Navratilova dropped by LGBT group over trans athletes row

[Godless Raven]

Not necessarily at all. Instead, we should be tracking lifetime exposures and critical exposures. Hence the additional levels of differentiation. I'd imagine the middle levels, outside of (no limit) and (no exposure) would be (current, limited exposure w/o teenage exposure), (adult limited exposure WITH teenage exposure), and (no recent exposure WITH teenage exposure).

Of course this would require record-keeping for sports participations in some of those fields, and regular levels testing.

Well ... good job on making the implementation so clunky, overly complex and unwieldy that nothing could ever be done, I guess? I suppose it will be a little bit of consolation that when your league folds into bankruptcy because nobody wanted to bother with that and parents weren't cool with your taking constant blood samples from their kids for the sake of your own internal metrics which were irrelevant anyways due to all the various sampling inconsistencies throughout different areas so everybody signed up to other leagues, you'll have the satisfaction of sitting around in a bar complaining loudly to all the other patrons about how the problem was that everyone was stupid except for you.

Steroids testing should always be standard for all sports with steroid limitations, especially when there is pressure for steroid use by young adults and teenagers for highschool and college sports. These are also things that are monitored medically as standard procedure for just being a child in puberty. It's not data that isn't already being collected so stop acting as if it were.

Second, nothing any more "clunky" about this than a lot of other things you already take for granted in society. I mean look at the fucking weight classes in wrestling and boxing. Surely something as "clunky" as separating a sport into many gradiations on the basis of weight would bankrupt the league, right? Except it doesn't.

I'd imagine at the end of the day, there would probably be some discussion over which was the "better" league, (no limit), vs (natural limit), vs (no exposure).

If you have not already, you should consider watching the Netflix documentary Icarus. Steroid testing is nonsense. Any high level athlete can pass any test, any day of the week. Lance Armstrong passed over 400 tests by the biggest most experienced labs in the world. There are dozens of ways to cheat these tests including having state sponsored cheating. So test all you want, you're only going to catch the dumbest of the dumb, the real cheaters are breaking records and winning medals. As soon as you develop a test for a drug, someone comes out with a designer drug that isn't tested. Or like the Olympics, the athlete has months, even years to prepare so all the testosterone, winstrol, growth hormone and EPO have already fine tuned the person in to the most elite version possible, performing at their highest possible output. They just use short esters on the anabolics like a testosterone propionate or a water based Winstrol-V, stop the protocol a month or two out from the event and believe me all that muscle and performance carries on for quite a while, especially if the athlete diets and does proper recovery processes. One of the biggest benefits they've received during that time is super human recovery from injuries. Something any rival not doping will not have and their training gets impeded by normal injuries, nagging old injuries etc.

I don't even think there is any way to stop it any more. Humans have discovered ways to make the body perform far beyond it's natural capability and males and females will use it at any chance they can get. Athletes are under enormous pressure not to be out from injury. PED's do both.

 

[ronburgundy]

Or here's a novel idea: we leave "men's/women's" completely out of the discussion and instead shift the differentiation on the basis of testosterone use. Maybe 3-4 differentiations, ranging from no-limit to uninfluenced.

No-limit would essentially be "whatever testosterone you want, use it", and uninfluenced would require "never used/influenced by testosterone at all". And then 1-2 gradations between the two.

Because let's face it, talking about who was a "man" or a "woman" or whether someone has a "man-body" or a "woman-body" is arbitrary, subjective, and frankly is *offensive*, especially when the whole point is whether, and how, someone is exposed to hormones.

So instead of gendering shit and using a bad fucking proxy, just measure and base it off of the thing that is directly and *actually* affecting things.

How are you going to quantify the degree to which their body's development was determined by high testosterone exposure, independent of any currently measurable levels in their blood?

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

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?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

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?

Well, the "so what" is that this will guarantee women never winning. The best of them will be about 10% slower than the best of the men, which drops them out of the competition.

If your goal is to stop women from being athletes, this is a good solution. If you have any other goal, it's a bad solution.\

 

[ruby sparks]

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?

Well, the "so what" is that this will guarantee women never winning. The best of them will be about 10% slower than the best of the men, which drops them out of the competition.

If your goal is to stop women from being athletes, this is a good solution. If you have any other goal, it's a bad solution.\

I think the general approach, here as on other issues, is to aim for a level playing field, so that those with advantages get to do best.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

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?

Well, the "so what" is that this will guarantee women never winning. The best of them will be about 10% slower than the best of the men, which drops them out of the competition.

If your goal is to stop women from being athletes, this is a good solution. If you have any other goal, it's a bad solution.\

I think the general approach, here as on other issues, is to aim for a level playing field, so that those with advantages get to do best.

Ya, but that doesn't address the issue. If you have men and women compete on a level playing field for athletics, the playing field is not level. That means that either you accept that women athletes aren't a thing or you have a separate league for them.

 

[ruby sparks]

Ya, but that doesn't address the issue. If you have men and women compete on a level playing field for athletics, the playing field is not level. That means that either you accept that women athletes aren't a thing or you have a separate league for them.

I know. But there may be something about certain versions of 'issue-blindness' that have certain implications.

 

[dismal]

I think the general approach, here as on other issues, is to aim for a level playing field, so that those with advantages get to do best.

Ya, but that doesn't address the issue. If you have men and women compete on a level playing field for athletics, the playing field is not level. That means that either you accept that women athletes aren't a thing or you have a separate league for them.

I suppose it's a semantic point but the issue is not that the playing field is not level it's that when the playing field is level some players are better than others.

 

[ronburgundy]

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?

The so what is that there would be almost no females engaged in athletic competition at any level. Athletic competition and the training to prepare for it is the primary form of exercise for youth and a major source of exercise for young adults, and exercise is a good thing. Hell, it even reduces health care cost burdens on the public purse, so even sociopathic "libertarians" should endorse it.
None of the other benefits of sports are nearly as important to society as it's encouragement of public health. So, no solution to the problem of fair competition could be worse than yours.

 

[repoman]

If you don't want to be in a position where DJT Jr is right, something has to give

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-jr-teen-sprinters-beaten-transgender-athletes-grave-injustice-1342886

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If you don't want to be in a position where DJT Jr is right, something has to give

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-jr-teen-sprinters-beaten-transgender-athletes-grave-injustice-1342886

May I remind you of stopped clocks?

 

[ronburgundy]

If you don't want to be in a position where DJT Jr is right, something has to give

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-jr-teen-sprinters-beaten-transgender-athletes-grave-injustice-1342886

May I remind you of stopped clocks?

Also, I'm not so sure Trump Jr is "right" in labeling it "a grave injustice". That sounds like hyperbole from someone who is oblivious to and unconcerned with far more severe and impactful injustices, many of them caused by his daddy's lifetime of criminal activities.

 

[repoman]

What if the XX female who won third place had a t-shirt she wore that said something like "First Place Biological Woman Track Winner"?

Would that be good or bad?

Would it be accurate to put first place winner on her college application?

 

[dismal]

What if the XX female who won third place had a t-shirt she wore that said something like "First Place Biological Woman Track Winner"?

Would that be good or bad?

Would it be accurate to put first place winner on her college application?

So, you're saying the women who finished first and second aren't "biological"?

What are they, inorganic matter?

 

[ronburgundy]

What if the XX female who won third place had a t-shirt she wore that said something like "First Place Biological Woman Track Winner"?

Would that be good or bad?

Morality aside, it would scientifically wrong. Neither you nor she know what chromosomes she or the other runners have. There are anatomical males with XX, XXY, and XXXY chromosomes, and there are anatomical females with XY. And beyond chromosomes, there is the scientific problem of confining "biological female" to those with female genitalia, since neurological studies show that many transgenders have brain regions that more closely resemble what is typical of the gender they identify as than the gender implied by their genitalia, and the sex-differences in these brain regions are shaped in-utero. IOW, saying that a transgender female is not a "biological female" is to deny that the brain is part of biology.

The problem is that we simply lack the needed terminology to make the distinctions, because our current words for talking about it stem from a scientifically inaccurate view of the phenotype expression of biological sex as binary and one dimensional (which wrongly assumes that the sex differences in the genitals and the brain are the same dimension with identical causal influences).

To be accurate, she'd have wear a shirt saying "First place person assigned a female gender at birth, due to my typical looking vagina."
The complexity of reality means that scientific accuracy doesn't pair well with pithy sayings and ideology.

Would it be accurate to put first place winner on her college application?

Clearly not. First place winners are determined by the judges of the competition, based upon the rules of the competition to determine who is qualified and what actions can disqualify a person, etc.. Who crosses the finish line when is only part of any determination of a winner in competition. So, unless the official judges declared her the winner, then she was not. Also, what would be the point? Does being born with longer legs make you better at science and math? No college worth a shit is going to care if she was first or third, unless they are specifically considering her for a track scholarship, in which case they will have access to her athletic records.

There is an unfairness in the competition and she has a legit gripe, but I don't think your proposed responses would be valid or productive.

 

[DrZoidberg]

A balanced article on transexuals in sports

https://www.bbc.com/sport/46453958

 

[dismal]

A balanced article on transexuals in sports

https://www.bbc.com/sport/46453958

I didn't find it close to balanced. It doesn't really tackle the issue that men tend to be better athletes at the elite level. It tries to be dismissive of this easily observable fact.

It also tries to be dismissive of the impact trans athletes would have by citing how few of them there are. Even if it's only a few, it's just going to take one second tier male athlete in each sport to be declare himself a woman for the greatest woman athlete of all time in the sport to be a trans athlete.

For example, the Dallas Mavericks have an end of the bench mostly garbage time guy named Ryan Broekhoff who the announcers call "the accountant" because he looks so unlike a typical NBA player. Broekhoff individually has more dunks this year (1) in the NBA than the entire WNBA has seen in 2 years (0), despite the fact the WNBA uses a smaller ball. I have little doubt that if he declared himself a woman and was allowed to play on that basis alone he'd be the greatest WNBA player of all time. By far.

https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/b/broekry01.html

If you think this happening would be good for the league and boost attendance, etc, I'd be inclined to disagree. People who watch women's basketball aren't watching because they think it's the best basketball they can watch.

 

[ronburgundy]

A balanced article on transexuals in sports

https://www.bbc.com/sport/46453958

While it raises a couple points worth considering, that is not a balanced or well reasoned article. It gives about 5 times as much space to the perspective of transathletes in favor of unrestricted participation in women's sports, and almost all of that from one particular athlete. It ignores that some transathletes, including the most historically famous one, Rene' Richards have come to recognize the unfairness of it for other women. It also casts the clear scientific facts about hormones and body development as just something "some people say", and allows a transathlete with zero relevant scientific background to just deny those facts and spout made up factually wrong nonsense.

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%.

 

[DrZoidberg]

A balanced article on transexuals in sports

https://www.bbc.com/sport/46453958

While it raises a couple points worth considering, that is not a balanced or well reasoned article. It gives about 5 times as much space to the perspective of transathletes in favor of unrestricted participation in women's sports, and almost all of that from one particular athlete. It ignores that some transathletes, including the most historically famous one, Rene' Richards have come to recognize the unfairness of it for other women. It also casts the clear scientific facts about hormones and body development as just something "some people say", and allows a transathlete with zero relevant scientific background to just deny those facts and spout made up factually wrong nonsense.

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%.

Exactly. Trans female athletes don't suddenly develop an interest in sports after the transition. 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.

At this point I'm on the queer theorists side. They've always claimed that the trans identity is a third gender. I agree. I think they should have their own leagues. I think trans athletes are sufficiently different to warrant this. Either that or make all sports ungendered.

 

[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.