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Post by dbro1970 on Dec 18, 2023 21:11:06 GMT -5
The biological differences are why we have separate divisions in the first place. They are true on a macro-level but not always on a micro-level. But that's how all rules work in sport. It doesn't matter the circumstances or the emotion of the play. If the rule says don't go out of bounds, your shoelace touches and you're out. If the rule says don't touch the net, your jersey touches and that counts as a touch. It doesn't matter if its championship point and you just leaned back to avoid colliding with your teammate or if it's a hail mary to win the super bowl. It doesn't matter if you did everything right or if it wasn't your fault. It doesn't matter if it was an accident or if it was on purpose. The rules are rigidly enforced to the letter of the law down to the nearest millimeter we can see with available technology.
Male puberty creates the biological differences between males and females. There would be no inherent advantage to a boy who did not get the boost provided by the surge of testosterone produced by male puberty. That is the difference,. I am not against trans athletes in womens sports. I am against trans athletes that have gone through male puberty competing against women.. They have advantages equal to the Russian female athletes that used to shoot up with steroids. We were all against that in the states.
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Post by biodogtexas on Dec 18, 2023 21:16:26 GMT -5
The biological differences are why we have separate divisions in the first place. They are true on a macro-level but not always on a micro-level. But that's how all rules work in sport. It doesn't matter the circumstances or the emotion of the play. If the rule says don't go out of bounds, your shoelace touches and you're out. If the rule says don't touch the net, your jersey touches and that counts as a touch. It doesn't matter if its championship point and you just leaned back to avoid colliding with your teammate or if it's a hail mary to win the super bowl. It doesn't matter if you did everything right or if it wasn't your fault. It doesn't matter if it was an accident or if it was on purpose. The rules are rigidly enforced to the letter of the law down to the nearest millimeter we can see with available technology.
Male puberty creates the biological differences between males and females. There would be no inherent advantage to a boy who did not get the boost provided by the surge of testosterone produced by male puberty. That is the difference,. I am not against trans athletes in womens sports. I am against trans athletes that have gone through male puberty competing against women.. They have advantages equal to the Russian female athletes that used to shoot up with steroids. We were all against that in the states. Yes and no. The differences between adult males and females are not solely attributable to hormone production during puberty. Unfortunately, the reality is that there is no good science supporting either argument.
Equally as unfortunate, that doesn't matter. A lot of people draw the line hard and fast at biological male or female.
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Post by dbro1970 on Dec 18, 2023 21:16:39 GMT -5
well thats because she was not considered an elite swimmer at all before transitioning, very average in for D1 for a male but now considered elite as a female I don't think that is true. She was pretty highly ranked as a freshman and sophomore male swimmer before she started undergoing HRT. She was ranked #2 in the Ivies in a number of distances in her sophomore year swimming as a male. You'd expect she would improve as a male later in her career. It was only after the HRT began that she started to fall in male rankings and become "mediocre." You'd expect an advantage would carry over to the female sport quite a bit - but her ranking as a female swimmer isn't really out of expectation for what could happen as a male swimmer if she hadn't transitioned. She won one national event at one distance as a female, and did not break any records. None. Is that elite? I guess it's a matter of opinion. Anyway, speaking more generally and not to you specifically, I've been avoiding this whole thread for a while because the whole debate is at once a tempest in a teapot, and an extremely serious issue. Relative to the first aspect, there are so few trans athletes. I've not seen anything to convince me that even this one cherry picked example proves an unfair advantage. Literally no one would undergo transition just to get such an advantage - it's hard and socially brutal, although studies clearly show it's not nearly as brutal as NOT getting one for the few people who do it. Upper level sporting bodies have been figuring out guidelines specific to the sport in question to decide what constitutes an unfair advantage or not, because they want to be humane. Those rules are not perfect, but they are a start and generally they are agreed on by everybody, including trans people. The only people who don't agree with those rules are those who don't want trans people to even exist for some reason, and that is where it gets serious. That is a social and moral question not really fit for a sports related board. I will say that what we might call trans people - those who act and feel counter to socially imposed expectations based on their biological sex (ie. gender) - have been around throughout history. You have to deliberately ignore that history and mistakenly think societies have all imposed the same gender roles for the same reasons not to appreciate that fact. I'd argue that a large reason we have medical transitions is that we have been so unforgiving (and frankly simple minded) in our expectations that biological sex should equal behavior and, therefore, the societal roles someone should play. If we understood that biological sex is not a simple dichotomy, that those within a biological sex category display a wide range of physical and biological traits that often overlap with the other sex categories, and if we weren't so damn hard headed about pinning our expectations to biological sex and trying to impose those expectations on others, literally everybody would be way happier with themselves as they are. I can't believe I have to say that on a board dedicated to women sports full of examples of extraordinarily exceptional athletes. I understand that the male-female divide is useful in organizing sports because it accounts on average for a lot of very real differences, and it applies to most people. But the biological determination of sex is actually quite complex so that divide does not account for nearly all of the differences, and it doesn't apply to everyone. There are people with XX chromosomes that present as male, for instance, in most cases because one X chromosome just happens to have a genetic transposon that carries the hormonal regulatory pathway that converts non differentiated gonads into male ones. Because sex determination involves hormones, environmental context also plays a role in humans. More generally, there are whole groups of organisms where biological sex is determined by temperature during development, where biological sex flips during life history, sometimes based purely on social on context cues, where the genetic mechanisms determining sex vary among related organisms and re-evolve repeatedly among lineages. Most people who talk about sexual differences as "natural" and "immutable" have a ridiculously simplistic understanding of biological sex. By contrast, gender is a social construct, much as race is, and so it's both way more complicated and way simpler. It is something we can control consciously. A major reason people seek hormonal or medical transitions is because we impose such uncompromising gender expectations based on physical sexual characteristics. Those that deny any deviation from such expectations essentially and paradoxically make transitions necessary if you want to be humane. They are the source of the very thing they would eliminate. Sex is rediculously simplistic. If you have testicles, you are a male.
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Post by donut on Dec 18, 2023 21:16:47 GMT -5
So men are just automatically stronger than women? I know quite a few women who could out lift, out run, and out jump me. Good lord. I literally took the time TWICE in this thread, at times when you were actively engaged in the conversation, to spell out that the bell curve of strength/height/etc is significantly different between men and women. I didn't fully type that out a third time, and your gotcha is that some women are stronger than some men? Dude, lol, your last like 3 replies to houstonbear have been attempted "gotchas"
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Post by n00b on Dec 18, 2023 21:28:39 GMT -5
Good lord. I literally took the time TWICE in this thread, at times when you were actively engaged in the conversation, to spell out that the bell curve of strength/height/etc is significantly different between men and women. I didn't fully type that out a third time, and your gotcha is that some women are stronger than some men? Dude, lol, your last like 3 replies to houstonbear have been attempted "gotchas" Because the posts make no sense. If the physical differences between men and women are only "assumed" and it's just on "on the basis of seeing women as weaker", what is the point of having separate divisions? How are you not marching the streets for equality that looks like men and women competing in the same league? Why are women being excluded from the NFL? It would have to just be sexism, right?
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Post by VB48 on Dec 18, 2023 22:13:38 GMT -5
At what point did we shift from competing against the same biological sex to competing against the same social gender?
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Post by dbro1970 on Dec 18, 2023 22:32:23 GMT -5
Male puberty creates the biological differences between males and females. There would be no inherent advantage to a boy who did not get the boost provided by the surge of testosterone produced by male puberty. That is the difference,. I am not against trans athletes in womens sports. I am against trans athletes that have gone through male puberty competing against women.. They have advantages equal to the Russian female athletes that used to shoot up with steroids. We were all against that in the states. Yes and no. The differences between adult males and females are not solely attributable to hormone production during puberty. Unfortunately, the reality is that there is no good science supporting either argument.
Equally as unfortunate, that doesn't matter. A lot of people draw the line hard and fast at biological male or female. There is quite a bit of good science if you look for it. It takes longer than a year of hormone therapy to erase the biggest differences between males and females....and some advantages can never be erased. For volleyball, men have larger and hea her hands than women allowing them to hit the ball with more force. No hormone therapy will change yourbone structure.
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Post by badgerbreath on Dec 18, 2023 22:49:53 GMT -5
Sex is rediculously simplistic. If you have testicles, you are a male. My comment was mainly targeted at those who appeal broadly to "natural" sexual differences in opposition to things like non-binary sex categories which are often described as "unnatural." I'm not sure if you are using "simplistic" with the negative connotation that word typically has. That said, there are other definitions than the morphological one. They are used both in science and law. For example. 1. Genetics: e.g., Possesses at least one Y chromosome 2. Absence of function: e.g., Incapable of giving birth to offspring 3. Presence of function: e.g., Produces motile male gametes 4. Hormonal: e.g., Presence of key hormones in particular ratios (often key in athletics guidelines) These definitions work in general, but they don't always align and they are often in themselves non-binary. It's not simply two overlapping bell curves either, though that can be a useful frame in the vast majority of cases. Intermediates exist in every case. Despite the victorian fixation on "type specimens" to define species and sexes, that non-binary quality is not isolated to humans so it's not a cultural thing unique to us. It has to do with how sex biologically arises from various combinations of genes and development. The non-binary characteristic is in fact a natural outcome of the complicated way that sex differences develop. I remember talking about these instances as an UG student in the 80s and becoming aware that which definition you use isn't really down to objective science. It's just a judgement call and we tend to use the rule that just feels right for whatever reason. The adopted rules are convenient in most cases, but they also carry judgements on those lying outside the binary frame. This overview in Nature discusses the broad outlines of the problem and the discussion about whether sex more consistently seen as a spectrum. It's an accessible read. It starts with the example of a pregnant chimeric male/female formed from the fusing of a male and female zygote just after fertilization. This person presented as functionally female and was coming in to have amniocentesis to monitor her fetus!
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Post by biodogtexas on Dec 18, 2023 22:57:06 GMT -5
Yes and no. The differences between adult males and females are not solely attributable to hormone production during puberty. Unfortunately, the reality is that there is no good science supporting either argument.
Equally as unfortunate, that doesn't matter. A lot of people draw the line hard and fast at biological male or female. There is quite a bit of good science if you look for it. It takes longer than a year of hormone therapy to erase the biggest differences between males and females....and some advantages can never be erased. For volleyball, men have larger and hea her hands than women allowing them to hit the ball with more force. No hormone therapy will change yourbone structure. I'm sorry but there's simply not. I'm a chemist. I work with research papers and literature all the time. I've tracked down and read most of the common studies people cite. At the simplest level, there hasn't been enough time or people going through this process for there to be any good science yet. It just isn't possible yet. Beyond that, the evidentiary standards being met are, to put it nicely, insufficient for anything to be taken seriously in my field. Medicine and Psychology are a bit different than the "harder" sciences in that regard, though. If you want to go even deeper than that, you can go all the way down to the funding and people doing the studies. I'm not going to impugn the integrity of any researcher, but we're not talking about "Just Stop Oil" showing fossil fuels are actually good.
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Post by AmeriCanVBfan on Dec 19, 2023 2:25:05 GMT -5
Thank you for your well thought out response. The only thing I question where the topic of XX and XY are concerned is that you said that the biological sex of groups of organisms can be determined by temperature. While this is true, unless humans happen to be one of those organisms, I’m not sure how relevant that fact is. As for males who are XX, I highly doubt that their physical development is the same as an individual who is XY. If they want to compete with XX, I say “Let ‘em.” they meet the criteria (This of course is the hypothetical criteria that I have in mind) And while gender can be considered a social construct, XX,XY is not. It is biological fact and not a bad basis to categorize people for physical competition. imo Science shows that biological sex/gender is much more complicated than just looking at chromosomes. If you insist, but to me it shows that there is greater commonality amongst those who are XX with a few exceptions, and greater commonality amongst those who are XY with a few exceptions. When it comes to physical competition, I'm still not convinced it's as complicated as you make it seem.
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Post by jcvball22 on Dec 19, 2023 2:35:53 GMT -5
If some of your high school bio teachers/college biology professors could read some of these comments, they’d cry at how little information some of you retained from their classes.
Kudos to those of you with the patience to keep explaining to people who clearly revel in malicious ignorance. More power to you.
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Post by volleyguy on Dec 19, 2023 2:47:32 GMT -5
I don't think that is true. She was pretty highly ranked as a freshman and sophomore male swimmer before she started undergoing HRT. She was ranked #2 in the Ivies in a number of distances in her sophomore year swimming as a male. You'd expect she would improve as a male later in her career. It was only after the HRT began that she started to fall in male rankings and become "mediocre." You'd expect an advantage would carry over to the female sport quite a bit - but her ranking as a female swimmer isn't really out of expectation for what could happen as a male swimmer if she hadn't transitioned. She won one national event at one distance as a female, and did not break any records. None. Is that elite? I guess it's a matter of opinion. … Most people who talk about sexual differences as "natural" and "immutable" have a ridiculously simplistic understanding of biological sex. By contrast, gender is a social construct, much as race is, and so it's both way more complicated and way simpler. It is something we can control consciously. A major reason people seek hormonal or medical transitions is because we impose such uncompromising gender expectations based on physical sexual characteristics. Those that deny any deviation from such expectations essentially and paradoxically make transitions necessary if you want to be humane. They are the source of the very thing they would eliminate. Sex is rediculously simplistic. If you have testicles, you are a male. There are no simple answers, just simple minds. Ovaries reveal their inner testes Brendan Borrell Nature (2009) Knocking out a single gene transforms gonads in mice. Inside every ovary lurks a testicle just waiting to develop. So says a study in mice that further overturns traditional views of sexual development — and reveals that females must constantly suppress their masculine side. www.nature.com/articles/news.2009.1135
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Post by mikegarrison on Dec 19, 2023 5:13:38 GMT -5
If you insist, but to me it shows that there is greater commonality amongst those who are XX with a few exceptions, and greater commonality amongst those who are XY with a few exceptions. The entire discussion is about those "few exceptions", so handwaving them away is nothing but an attempt to dismiss the issues without addressing them.
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Post by mervinswerved on Dec 19, 2023 6:48:25 GMT -5
A lot of people are acting like competitive balance is the primary concern for the NCAA when it's really not.
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Post by mikegarrison on Dec 19, 2023 7:06:41 GMT -5
A lot of people are acting like competitive balance is the primary concern for the NCAA when it's really not. That's because, on this board, mostly colleges and universities are seen as institutions whose primary purpose is to field the best possible volleyball team.
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