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I remember the people who said 'Gay men aren't missing any rights, we both have the same right to marry a woman' back when gay marriage was on the docket. It wasn't convincing then, either.
Of course, we're in early days on this question, too. I expect a lot less variance and a lot more knowledge in another 10 years, and a lot more in another 50. I'm just looking at history on these types of fights and saying 'lets hedge towards giving the people the rights they want so long as we don't see any clear harm in doing so'.
Anyway. My post was full of proposed mechanisms that are directional, towards trans athletes being worse than cis male athletes. The 'uncertainty' is about whether all those negative factors on trans women bring their performance down to match cis women, or not. Not uncertainty about whether their performance is moving away from teh cis male mean, or in which direction.
Is there a right to "win at sports" that you are defending? This doesn't really seem like the same level of importance as gay marriage. I was also never one to say that about gay marriage. My stance has been and still is that the state should never have been involved in approving marriages. The original purpose of that was to prevent mixed race couples.
You seem certain that trans people aren't winning a bunch in the female leagues, so can't they also just lose in the male leagues?
I'd say the harm is a lesser or possibly equivalent version of just eliminating women's leagues altogether. Depends on entry requirements. The most permissive entry requirements would be the same as just eliminating the women's leagues. Super super strict entry requirements would make the harm non-existent, but probably only at the point where they are banning most trans athletes anyways.
Yet you've also spent a bunch of time denying the existence of directional effects that point to trans athletes being better than female athletes. You accept directional evidence when it suits you and deny it when it suits you. This is isolated demands for rigor.
I could also make up directional effects for why trans athletes might be better than cis gendered male athletes. The experience of being trans might give them more grit, having a trans community could give them a better support structure than most individual male athletes, and the increased awareness of their bodies might make them better at body awareness sports. The magnitude of these directional effects is about as well studied as the directional effects you mentioned. And I could again follow your line of arguments and say that without the win/loss ratio study we can't possibly know how things actually shake out.
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