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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26355 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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Make a new distribution by picking out the ~.2% of the male population that are trans women. -Does this population have the same mean athletic ability? I would guess not, there's plenty written on innate brain differences between cis men and trans women, no surprise if those affect the body and maturation as well. Also if you believe in social contagion, boys who are already 'soft' and not 'winning' at masculinity are more likely to fall to being trans as a good alternative. Also today lots of trans teens are taking puberty blockers and not going through the average male puberty in the first place. Strong correlation with autism which has a strong correlation with being an indoor kid. Etc. etc. etc. -Does this population have the same variance in athletic ability? Absolutely not, it's 500x smaller and has a strong selector on the people in it being similar to each other, both of which are going to shrim the variance and reduce the extremity of the outliers.

All this is probably true for typical transwomen. But transwomen athletes are not a random selection of typical transwomen, they are much more likely to be outdoor kids that like winning and being strong and agile. Successful transwomen athletes are also not a random selection of transwomen athletes, they are much more likely to have transitioned later in life and gone through at least some of the average male puberty, or have a body that is much less susceptible to HRT, or both, simply because these traits are what makes them more likely to win.

And I know the answer to this is "So what? Successful ciswomen athletes have also won the genetic lottery, or they wouldn't have won against equally diligent women athletes. East African ciswomen runners already dominate Olympic marathon rankings, how is it different from East African transwomen dominating them instead?"

But transwomen athletes are not a random selection of typical transwomen,

Right, they're the outliers from that distribution I'm having you picture, that was the whole point.

That's why I'm talking about the variance and range of that distribution, trans athletes are pulled from the positive tail of the overall trans distribution.

The idea you should have in your head is that the cis woman population throws outliers, the trans woman population throws outliers, and if those two sets of outliers fall into generally the same range of ability for whatever reason, then competition between them is fair.

  • -10

and if those two sets of outliers fall into generally the same range of ability for whatever reason, then competition between them is fair

if

You know, being a mod and seeing the moderation queue makes me wonder how the previous ones didn't have a nervous breakdown from the sheer number of spurious and pointless reports.

This one caught one for "low-effort", and while a laconic dismissal isn't a robust rebuttal, in this case it's clearly obvious that you're disputing a load-bearing aspect of @guesswho 's claims, and both of you have discussed your concerns in more detail. Someone following up a string of high-effort comments with a low one will not be scolded for it.

To the person who reported this, come on, you lose the right to complain about being dogpiled and unfairly reported if you're going to engage in frivolous reporting yourself.

At the very least, I have personally done the same if without the mods at the time taking umbrage, and so have many others. So from precedent and enlightened self-interest, I don't see anything here worth complaining about.

Yeah, if. That's why I'm inviting anyone at all to provide data, if they're so sure they're obviously correct.

I am glad we've identified the crux of the disagreement. You expect that two different groups of people should have broadly equivalent results because they represent two wider groups of people, one of which is doing their best to resemble the other, if the opposite isn't proven. Most people arguing with you, including me, expect that two different groups of people should have broadly different results, because they have different origins and the athletic results of transwomen depend on how much they resemble their natal sex physiologically, again, if the opposite isn't proven. Neither side really has any data, so both sides resort to "obviously-ing" they way out.

I do not claim that they will obviously have similar performance.

I claim that the other side's reasoning is deeply flawed, and we're actually at a state of ignorance about relative performance.

I claim that there's a simple empirical metric that we can use to determine fairness, that's easy to measure and calculate, and we can use that to answer the question just as soon as anyone bothers to measure it.

I claim that absent any current evidence or valid logic to expect unfairness, we should default towards liberty and freedom and granting rights for now.

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