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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 24, 2021 18:11:16 GMT -5
There are no non-doped examples someone is performing at an elite level nearly 20 years past the peak age in their sport when they weren't an elite athlete in those peak years. I give you: Jamie Moyer. Though I suppose you might argue that successful baseball pitchers actually fall into two camps of prime years -- those with live arms, and those who learn how to outfox batters despite not having live arms.
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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 24, 2021 18:22:48 GMT -5
This is from a Facebook post from a group called Insufferable Intolerant Science Nerds. Pretty comprehensive reportage. I couldn't find a link to post, so here it is. Sorry for the length. Worth the length.
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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 24, 2021 18:36:22 GMT -5
I think it mainly comes down to a cultural attitude that gender is binary and discrete. You are either "male" or "female". (This ignores a long and well-documented history of people who do not fall into these categories.)
It also involves a cultural attitude that any variation *inside* one of those categories is "natural" and therefore fair, but variation that crosses those (possibly imaginary and certainly fuzzy) categories is not. Thus despite every high school girl on any track team in the US being a faster runner than I am (I'm pretty damn sure), people would argue that it is unfair -- to them! -- for me to compete against them in a race, because "men are faster".
I am not arguing that women's athletics, as a category, is a bad idea. But as long as we divide sport into binary categories even though people have a fair amount of overlap and fuzziness in these same categories, we're going to have to make some arbitrary decisions. Like, for example, a blood test for serum testosterone. (It used to be some doctor would pull down the athlete's pants and decide whether they saw boy parts or girl parts, but I'm glad we've mostly moved on from there.)
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Post by n00b on Jun 27, 2021 13:18:19 GMT -5
I think it mainly comes down to a cultural attitude that gender is binary and discrete. You are either "male" or "female". (This ignores a long and well-documented history of people who do not fall into these categories.) It also involves a cultural attitude that any variation *inside* one of those categories is "natural" and therefore fair, but variation that crosses those (possibly imaginary and certainly fuzzy) categories is not. Thus despite every high school girl on any track team in the US being a faster runner than I am (I'm pretty damn sure), people would argue that it is unfair -- to them! -- for me to compete against them in a race, because "men are faster". I am not arguing that women's athletics, as a category, is a bad idea. But as long as we divide sport into binary categories even though people have a fair amount of overlap and fuzziness in these same categories, we're going to have to make some arbitrary decisions. Like, for example, a blood test for serum testosterone. (It used to be some doctor would pull down the athlete's pants and decide whether they saw boy parts or girl parts, but I'm glad we've mostly moved on from there.) Or, you DO use the binary of chromosomes and now there is no fuzziness or overlap. (Ok, I suppose there are a VERY small percentage of people who we’d still need to figure out, but I don’t think there is much of an uproar about intersex athletes)
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Post by n00b on Jun 27, 2021 13:22:38 GMT -5
Have there been any athletes who have given up a career as a female athlete (maybe NCAA D1 or higher) to transition to a male?
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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 27, 2021 22:27:54 GMT -5
I think it mainly comes down to a cultural attitude that gender is binary and discrete. You are either "male" or "female". (This ignores a long and well-documented history of people who do not fall into these categories.) It also involves a cultural attitude that any variation *inside* one of those categories is "natural" and therefore fair, but variation that crosses those (possibly imaginary and certainly fuzzy) categories is not. Thus despite every high school girl on any track team in the US being a faster runner than I am (I'm pretty damn sure), people would argue that it is unfair -- to them! -- for me to compete against them in a race, because "men are faster". I am not arguing that women's athletics, as a category, is a bad idea. But as long as we divide sport into binary categories even though people have a fair amount of overlap and fuzziness in these same categories, we're going to have to make some arbitrary decisions. Like, for example, a blood test for serum testosterone. (It used to be some doctor would pull down the athlete's pants and decide whether they saw boy parts or girl parts, but I'm glad we've mostly moved on from there.) Or, you DO use the binary of chromosomes and now there is no fuzziness or overlap. (Ok, I suppose there are a VERY small percentage of people who we’d still need to figure out, but I don’t think there is much of an uproar about intersex athletes) Chromosomes are not as binary as you seem to think. It is possible to have extra copies of chromosomes. It is also possible for people to be chimeras, with some of their cells having one set of chromosomes and some of their cells having another one. (Chimeras are usually believed to be separately fertilized eggs that joined together -- pretty much the opposite process of creating identical twins.) Nor are chromosomes are as deterministic of sex as you seem to think, because genes have to get expressed in proteins, and that process doesn't always work as usual.
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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 27, 2021 22:29:45 GMT -5
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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 27, 2021 22:32:03 GMT -5
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Post by n00b on Jun 27, 2021 22:55:40 GMT -5
Or, you DO use the binary of chromosomes and now there is no fuzziness or overlap. (Ok, I suppose there are a VERY small percentage of people who we’d still need to figure out, but I don’t think there is much of an uproar about intersex athletes) Chromosomes are not as binary as you seem to think. It is possible to have extra copies of chromosomes. It is also possible for people to be chimeras, with some of their cells having one set of chromosomes and some of their cells having another one. (Chimeras are usually believed to be separately fertilized eggs that joined together -- pretty much the opposite process of creating identical twins.) Nor are chromosomes are as deterministic of sex as you seem to think, because genes have to get expressed in proteins, and that process doesn't always work as usual. Whatever. This conversation is not about the 1-in-1,500 people who were born with some sort of atypical chromosomes or genitalia.
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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 28, 2021 3:02:52 GMT -5
Chromosomes are not as binary as you seem to think. It is possible to have extra copies of chromosomes. It is also possible for people to be chimeras, with some of their cells having one set of chromosomes and some of their cells having another one. (Chimeras are usually believed to be separately fertilized eggs that joined together -- pretty much the opposite process of creating identical twins.) Nor are chromosomes are as deterministic of sex as you seem to think, because genes have to get expressed in proteins, and that process doesn't always work as usual. Whatever. This conversation is not about the 1-in-1,500 people who were born with some sort of atypical chromosomes or genitalia. No, I guess it's about the 1-in-11,000 athletes at the Tokyo Olympics who have been openly confirmed as transgender. While it is true that the percentage of people who are intersex or whose phenotype does not match their chromosomes is quite low, if we assume a random distribution among Olympic athletes then we should expect there will be several of them competing in Tokyo. More than the number of trans athletes, which so far is only known to be "1".
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Post by yupyup on Jun 29, 2021 14:07:04 GMT -5
Can you imagine if an athlete like Matt Anderson competed as a trans athlete? Transitioning has got to be one of hardest things to do in the world both physically and emotionally. If all things equal, would Matt be more dominant in the women’s league as compared to men’s league?
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Post by sammyd on Jun 29, 2021 19:26:14 GMT -5
The entire thing comes down to a question of whether or not women as a category deserve their own sport spaces.
Because when we say "transitioned," that means that current phenotype sexual expression in the body reflects a different sex than at birth. But in development, when the vast majority of potential muscle mass is decided through the expression of proteins and hormones released at puberty. THAT is what creates the difference. When someone that experienced puberty as a man with all that entails is now participating in a sport with women that went through puberty as a woman with all that entails, that person has experienced not a within-sex generic variation in potential performance, but has a croas-sex advantage in potential performance by virtue of having their formative years as a member of a group outside the category to which the sport is dedicated.
Take grip strength as an easy example. The only portion of the female distribution of grip to overlap with even the bottom of the male grip strength distribution is the top 1-2 percentiles. The extreme right tail overlaps only with the extreme left tail of men. Now, regardless of whether or not any PARTICULAR man is stronger than any particular woman in this one way, the advantage of grip strength for men over women is staggering. The same is true for someone that went through puberty as a man. Regardless of whether or not any particular trans woman outperforms any particular woman in grip strength isn't the question when we talk about "advantages." We are talking about almost completely non-overlapping distributions, and the POTENTIAL grip strength for any given man or trans woman is light-years ahead of the potential grip strength of almost every woman. And when we are talking about Olympic athletes, those potentials matter because they make the difference at the hundredth of seconds level.
There is also something to be said about acts of medical and surgical intervention synthetically influencing the boundaries of categories when women have had to fight pretty hard to have their own dedicated spaces for sports. The Olympics are a lifelong pursuit, and I am certain there is a class of person looking toward it so much that transitioning for it wouldn't be out of bounds for them, leaving other women shaking their heads wondering what happened to their own space.
We already place limits on which athletes can or cannot participate in the Olympics or in sports based on their use of particular medical interventions and substances in the name of the purity of the competition, so maintaining boundaries shouldn't be anything new.
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Post by vbnerd on Jun 29, 2021 22:34:39 GMT -5
The whole reason that this is such an issue (mtf trans as opposed to ftm trans) is that professional male athletes generally hit harder, react faster, jump higher, etc. than professional female athletes. Perhaps I didn't make the point well, but Destinee Hooker also "hit harder, reacted faster, jumped higher, etc. than (most other) professional female athletes". But we didn't say it was unfair. We just said that she was blessed to have been born with those genes. Exactly how is this any different, really? FWIW, WADA doesn't test for height or the ability to hit hard, but they do test for anabolic agents such as testosterone, which female athlete who grew up male almost certainly had more of than a female athlete who grew up female. That testosterone produced muscle, increased bone density, increased metabolism, etc. which could be expected to lead to competitive advantages. The OP and Phaedrus post both explain that a candidate must show reduced testosterone for a certain period, so the effort and intention is there to make sure things are fair with regard to testosterone specifically, but do we know what is fair yet? This is the first candidate on this level. My guess is science will sort out how to make it "fair" but does anyone have an expectation that they know that yet? And I'm not pointing in one direction or another...as was pointed out there is a lack of transgender athletes in the olympics vs what might be expected, which may suggest the testosterone rules are too strict, or maybe it's not even the right thing to be testing to determine what is fair. The point is we are still in the relatively early stages of what would seem to be a complicated issue.
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Post by archiepelago on Jun 29, 2021 22:45:25 GMT -5
I'm ok with athletes that transitioned from female to male to play on men's sports. But athletes that transitions from male to female, I don't think that should be. If they will let that happen, then majority of the players in women's tournament would be transgenders. Sports is a physical activity. Men are biologically stronger than women. Even if they transitioned, their bodies already had an advantage to biologically born women.
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Post by mikegarrison on Jun 29, 2021 23:42:10 GMT -5
If they will let that happen, then majority of the players in women's tournament would be transgenders. This is nonsense. I will point out that THEY ALREADY DO ALLOW THIS, and yet "the majority of the players in women's tournament" are not transgender.
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