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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Short answer: There is no such thing as too much biological advantage in male sports. There is in female sports, because...

it's unfair to have people who don't have that advantage compete against people who do have it. That's the motivation for having some kind of testosterone limit for women's competitions right?

that's the motivation for the entire existence of separate women's competitions at all.

You're making the mistake of trying to look at men's vs women's sports in the same way. They are fundamentally different things.

Is it fair for other men's swimmers to have to compete against Michael Phelps with all his biological advantages? What about Usain Bolt? Are the advantages Khalif might have due to her biology greater than the advantages others have due to their biology?

The crucial difference is, there is no higher level of competition in which Phelps or Bolt can compete. The best male athletes are also simply the best athletes period (looking at raw physical performance*). They aren't only competing against men, they are de facto competing against the entire human race, without qualifier. Their natural advantage is not just against other men, it's against everybody. This is not the case for Khalif; her advantage is against women, and is in fact the very one that led to the creation of separate women's sports in the first place.

The more accurate way of looking at things probably isn't "Men's sports vs Women's sports", it's "Sports" without any qualifiers for biological advantage (this is where all the men compete, and have always competed), vs "Women's Sports" (which has qualifiers). Phelps is (or was) the fastest swimmer on the planet. Katie Ledecky is the fastest swimmer on the planet that has a specific biological disadvantage. This is why discussion about what exactly constitutes an "unfair biological advantage" is 100% fair game for women's sports, and doesn't make sense for men's sports. If there was a woman swimmer who was faster than Phelps, she would get credit as the fastest swimmer in the world, but this only goes one way; the 8th place male swimmer doesn't get "credit" for beating all the women's times.

As an aside, I'll point out that this qualifier for women-only competition is a GREAT thing for sports. The whole reason we can have stories like Katie in our society, and boys and girls all reaping the same great benefits of sport, is because this biological disadvantage was something uncontroversial that everyone understood straightforwardly.

Also, to be clear, my rant here is less about the specifics of this particular situation (I really couldn't care less about boxing), and more about rebutting your conflation of Phelps/Bolt vs women with high T.

*Caveat, there are probably some forms of physical competition in which women have a natural advantage over men, in which case all of this logic still holds.