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I just want to know: how much of a biological advantage is too much, such that 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 it would be unfair to have those women with less testosterone compete against those with more. I can't help but Notice this ostensibly general objection about biological fairness seems to only exist in the context of how much testosterone women's bodies produce. 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?
Short answer: There is no such thing as too much biological advantage in male sports. There is in female sports, because...
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.
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.
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I have just thought of a beautiful solution to balancing the fights in the face of rare gender configurations.
Boxing would be patently unfair because some humans are twice the size of other humans. Instead of shrugging, or making one category for people above 90kg and one category for people below that, we have some elaborate system of weight classes.
We could just do the same for sex hormones like testosterone, instead of just dividing the population into low-T and high-T.
Now, you might object that this will explode the number of classes, but actually it would be the opposite, because we can just project (weight, T) to a single axis, "advantage", because having higher weight is comeasurable to having higher T using some complicated empirical function.
No more checking what junk someone has in their pants or chromosomes. And if some guy argues that having two extra pairs of testicles transplanted is just part of his gender identity, you can just let him compete, but he will be facing regular-T men twice his weight or whatever.
I for one think we should gene sequence and hormone test all athletes then do complex regressions to figure out who most overperforms expectations for their genetics, hormone profile, age, sex, socioeconomic upbringing etc.
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That's not how testosterone works. The biggest differences come from puberty. Having low T as an adult doesn't change what happened physiologically during puberty.
At the end of the day humans are supposed to be sexually dimorphic. One sex is supposed to be bigger and stronger. The weird edge cases like 1/5000 intersex people, or trans people who can't accept their biology should just accept competing with men or do anything else with their time.
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The answer to this question just goes back to the reason women's leagues were made in the first place. I personally don't really care that much what women do with their league, include or exclude trans people, none of my business. But the reason these leagues exist at all is because women want to be able to compete and know that in an open league none of them would rise to the top because men at just much stronger. If it's true that trans women being introduced into these leagues would make it so that women can not make it to the top then it's perfectly reasonable to draw the line such that women are on one side and trans women are on the other.
How far do you take this? Would a league be justified in excluding black women, on the grounds they would be too dominant? What if Russian women were really good at some sport? Should they be excluded for being too good? I expect the rejoinder here is that black women and Russian women are women in a way trans women are not, but that is precisely the point I and others dispute!
If there was some racial group of women that somehow had man equivalent strength then I think and argument could be made. I'd imagine such a thing would have a lot of trouble practically because racial lines have a bad history of being drawn with malicious intent but in the hypothetical space I don't have a fundamental issue with it. Natal women is a naturally category and drawing it there rather than a genderless weight class has obvious winners in losers, natal women win, very light natal men lose and this is fine.
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You would be perfectly justified in setting up a basketball league for only Asian women(insert other sports league for a group that's almost definitionally going to have trouble getting to the top in it).
Do you believe that there is no difference between trans and cis women? Like how is 'cis women only' dependent on 'trans women are not women'? I certainly don't believe that trans women are women, but I also don't think that that's the basic issue in 'no trans women in women's sports'- whether trans women have physical advantages as a class is. And it doesn't seem in dispute that they do.
Certain commenters on this site absolutely do dispute the claim that trans women as a class have a major physical advantage over cis women.
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My definition of "woman" is "adult human female", a standard that black women and Russian women obviously meet and that trans women just as obviously don't. I'm curious what definition of "woman" you're operating on, and how circular it is.
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I think if you could actually demonstrate, with evidence, that black women or Russian women dominate other women in all sports to the degree that men dominate women in all sports, then maybe there would be a good argument that they should be in their own league. But I doubt that this is the case, and I doubt you think this is the case.
Do you think leagues should be sex-segregated at all? Or should men and women compete in the same league?
If you believe that leagues should be sex-segregated, then why?
Let me ask another question: right now, because of the relative rarity of trans women, evidence that trans women have a "male advantage" in sports is statistically inconclusive (though the anecdotal examples keep piling up). So for now, defenders of trans women in sports can say "There isn't any proof that trans women have an advantage," and point at trans athletes who don't win every single competition.
But suppose in 20 years time, we do have conclusive, statistically compelling evidence that trans women do, in fact, have a significant advantage over women in sports. Would that change your position at all? Or do you think women just need to accept that trans women can enter their leagues and thrash them?
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If the sport was competitive suntanning.
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I thought I'd seen someone on the Motte making this silly attempt at a "gotcha!" argument before, and what do I know - it was you! Rather than rephrasing my point, I'll just reiterate exactly what I said to you the last time you made this lame argument:
You didn't respond to my counter-argument then, but now however many months later you're trotting out the exact same argument again almost word-for-word, treating it as self-evident that there is no other aspect of the sporting ethos which displays the remotest concern about fairness and pairing like athletes with like, except when trying to make trans people feel excluded.
In this case, Carini and Khelif were competing in the welterweight division. Simple question - would it be fair to expect Khelif to fight against a heavyweight opponent? If I was hypothetically concerned about athletes trying to circumvent weight class guidelines, couldn't you just as easily argue that I don't really care about fairness in sports and I'm just using this issue as another stick with which to beat overweight people? Sincerely - why couldn't a heavyweight "identify as" a welterweight? Why couldn't one have a "weight identity" known and knowable only to oneself, wholly distinct from the "biological mass" which was "assigned" to you? (FAHAWI - "forcibly assigned heavyweight at weigh-in"?)
If a featherweight was asked to compete against a heavyweight, the appropriate response from the featherweight is "that's completely unfair, he's twice my size". If the boxing commission replied "no you don't understand, this heavyweight is taking a regimen of drugs which reduce his performance to within two standard deviations of the expected performance of the typical featherweight boxer", the appropriate response from the featherweight is still "that's completely unfair, he's twice my size".
Please stop with the juvenile argument that no one really cares about fairness in sports and are just using the issue as a stalking horse to persecute trans women. It's tiresome and trivial to refute.
My point then and now is that it's not obvious how much of an advantage Khalif actually has. She was eliminated in the Olympic semi-finals in the Tokyo Olympics. She lost the welterweight IBA championship in 2022 to a cis-woman. The idea that she has the kind of advantage over other women the same way a heavyweight has an advantage over a featherweight is exactly what's in dispute. It is not something you can just assume, as your comment does.
No, your point then and now is that anyone claiming to care about fairness in sports is doing so in bad faith as a stick with which to beat trans women. I resent this characterisation of my opinion that it's unfair for unambiguously male athletes to compete in female sporting events. I remain agnostic on the question of whether Khalif is unambiguously female, unambiguously male, or a female with a DSD which gives them a competitive advantage.
Then let me clarify. I do not think literally everyone who talks about fairness in sports is only using it as a stick to beat trans women. But I do think there are a lot of people out there who do see fairness in sports as a stick to beat trans women.
Sure. Doesn't mean they're wrong though - that's Bulverism.
And please stop doing this unbelievably dumb thing of saying "wow, isn't it interesting how this debate about fairness in sports only comes up in the context of allowing trans women to compete? I wonder why that would be!" The very existence of weight classes, age classes etc. demonstrates, with zero room for ambiguity, that you are simply wrong.
Right now the only reason this debate only comes up in the context of sex-segregation in sports is because sex-segregation is a contested category, while weight classes are a settled matter: currently there's no broad social movement demanding that heavyweights to be permitted to compete alongside welter- or feather-weights, on the grounds that they "identify" as a body mass different from their objective bodily mass. Any heavyweight who demanded such a thing would rightfully be laughed out of the room; but when a six-foot tall swimmer who has never been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and who has been competing as a male for years, suddenly "discovers" that he is actually a woman (barely even hiding that he is doing so to fulfil an autogynephiliac sexual fantasy) and demands to be included in female sporting events on that basis - for some reason society at large (and sporting bodies in particular) react with "of course, right this way
sirma'am".When the transfats in sports movement arrives (when, not if), I want it known both that I foresaw it, and that I promised in advance to fight against it just as stridently as I am currently fighting against the "right" of unambiguously male people to compete in female sporting events.
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I live in a society where high school football is a very big deal.
Now the law in Texas says that, theoretically, any high schooler who wants to play American football can do so. There not being enough interest for a girl's division, that means that girls who want to badly enough, and whose parents have taken leave of their senses, get to compete on the boys team. This is discouraged but it happens. There are periodic news stories about a- usually junior varsity, these girls tend not to make the cut for a varsity team- high school football team forfeiting a match rather than expect their players to tackle a girl. Functionally football is an open sport, and I think most men's sports are like this in general- as long as there's no doping, anyone who wants to compete in that league gets to. Women's athletics is the restricted one.
"Production" and "Open". It's possible to beat Open competitors with Production equipment but Open is its own division because the equipment is specifically designed to be more capable (and less practical).
Ex-men are trying to win Production division by bringing Open hardware into Production via a bunch of bad-faith arguments and the judges are too captured by politics to notice the intent. So it goes.
Are these actual categories of football equipment, or is this a metaphor? The usage here reminds me particularly of competitive shooting, or perhaps also auto racing.
Yeah, these are competitive shooting divisions.
But then that's the thing- the reason they're like that is that sure, you can get an advantage by buying the meta gun, but you can't strap a bunch of other bullshit that doesn't fit in the general spirit of the category and then claim it's balanced (yeah, I'm sure that high-end 2011 with a comp and a dot identifies as a stock Glock 17).
I guess the difference is that even if I had a 2011 I don't want to compete against people running stock Glock 17s, because it's not really even a measure of skill at that point, it's also a question of how hard you can game the gun itself (because in that division, if you're the first guy to come up with putting a red dot on your handgun you deserve the win you're going to get by doing so because that's what that division is for).
It's poor sportsmanship to be intentionally trying to break the categories, which is the reason the entirety of the men's division isn't doing this even though at the end of the day they're passing up another chance to win. And once you lose that concept you don't have a game any more.
I feel like the solution is usually to have a bunch of categories/divisions (see Le Mans racing and 2-Gun shooting), though maybe this doesn't work so well when it comes to humans vs. machines.
If you don't have the ability or the willingness to give poor sports the boot it's not going to work regardless.
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It's not a general objection. It's specifically about eligibility to compete in the women's division.
That's not the question. The question is whether the advantages Khalif might have due to her biology are due to her biology being male.
Incredible that none of Khalif's family, or government, or various sporting organizations she participated in could determine this fact for the first 24 years of her life!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif
She was disqualified from the women's world boxing championships last year on gender grounds.
And she was permitted to compete in the same competition in 2022. Did she become a man between 2022 and 2023?
Perhaps she did, but notably, she had beaten a Russian athlete shortly before being disqualified by a "separate [from testosterone screening] and recognized test".
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And I just want us to stop playing postmodernist deconstruction games. You're not going to get a rigorous formula for that, you shouldn't expect to get it, and I even doubt if you would accept a question like that if it was used to deconstruct something you care about.
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