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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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I don’t understand what point you are making. You’re upset Carini gave up too easily and feel this degrades women’s sports. You’re upset people are questioning Khelif’s gender despite evidence that there are legit questions there. You feel that because Khelif has lost to a biological woman that their sex is irrelevant.

Is it that you want the anti-trans side to wait for Prime Mike Tyson to transition and kill a few women before raising any objections?

It's that I'd like both sides to rely less on their political assumptions and priors and actually watch the damn games.

In Track and Field we've been forced to watch dominant male-bodied athletes cruise past their competition and been told nothing to see here. Now we're seeing a mediocre competitor treated as "Prime Mike Tyson" by the anti-trans press, who simply refuse to actually watch the damn fight and examine what is happening. I'm sick of being told "Who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?" Sports questions require answers that come from examining the outcomes of the sport, not from internet shibboleths.

In the discussion of women's sports, there's a meme that women athletes are overmatched by male athletes: Womens' national soccer team vs 14-year-old boys and Serena Williams vs Male tennis players are two instances that pop up with some frequency here.

In the Trans sports debate, there's a meme that allowing trans athletes in combat sports is a super bad idea, because biological males overmatch females in this way.

It seems relevant to the discussion to ask how dominant a particular trans athlete is. If they've been defeated by biological women, then obviously their particular advantage is not as overwhelming as the standard male vs female athletes meme would suggest. A lot of the description of this event is pretty clearly claiming overmatch. If this competitor has lost to normal female competitors before, then I don't think overmatch is supportable.

This is the wrong standard for combat sports. A contestant being both 40% stronger and objectively bad doesn’t make the event safe!

Not so simple, a person having advantage in muscle mass, bone density, strength and speed can lose a match if they lack the skill. But they may improve still.

https://boxrec.com/en/box-am/899786?allSports=y

Check her box record - the losses are heavily concentrated in the start of her career. Her last loss is in 2022.

I was thinking about and imagining what it would look like if someone like myself just up and started boxing... but in women's leagues. I'm a decently-trained gym-goer, with regular levels of those various male physical advantages, but I've never boxed in my life. How much training would I want to do before competing? ...would I still get thwacked by some women for the first several matches? It's sort of weird and fascinating to think about.

That's valuable data. My point is that "this competitor is a man, men have an unfair advantage" should cash out in observable lopsided results, so appealing to the results should trump raw priors. My impression is that it generally does, but more data either way is a good thing for my confidence in that argument.