you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Spikygrasspod 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

You say it's fair for a person to compete if they meet the requirements, but the question is: what should the requirements be? What categories are supposed to exist in sports, and why? It's not "lame" to pose hypothetical scenarios; it's a very useful way of figuring out what priorities someone places on different values, and for clarifying their positions when they seem ambiguous or inconsistent.

If sporting organisations wish to protect purely non physical identity categories, why do they have testosterone or other physical requirements? And why should we have separate sporting categories for personal identities at all?

These are questions worth asking because there are good reasons to have male and female sporting categories. Allowing males to compete in the women's category contradicts the purpose of the women's category, and adding a testosterone requirement is a useless papering over of this contradiction. There is no coherent principle or reasoning behind these rules, and the hypotheticals are designed to reveal this.

[–]FlanJam[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm glad someone understands lol

[–]Porcelain_QuetzalTabby without Ears 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

That's a different question from the originally proposed hypothetical thou. Which is why I consider it pretty lame. Because the answer is simply: if they are fair then the man should be able to compete. If the rules aren't then they shouldn't.

You say there are good reasons to have men's and women's sports categories. I don't see any beyond creating a competitive environment with a simple divider. If you have other good reasons I'm always open for input.

[–]Spikygrasspod 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

It's not lame, the questions are designed to probe your ideas of fairness in sport, and of what defines men and women.

The reason to have men's and women's categories (when I say men and women, I mean adult male and female people) is that men have a large systematic average advantage in almost every sports category. If there were only an open category, men would win virtually everything, except maybe some ultra endurance events and a couple of other things where speed and strength aren't important. There are benefits to women when they can compete in sports: it boosts confidence; it is good for health; sporting excellence is an achievement in its own right; we are committed to enabling women to take part in the same aspects of public life that men enjoy; and some people make a career out of it. We should encourage girls and women in sports, and celebrate when they achieve excellence. However, excellence simply looks different for women because our bodies are a compromise between athletic performance and the ability to bear children (whether we choose to or not). A category just for women means that they can compete without the likelihood of being so dramatically outclassed by men that they are at risk of injury (in contact sports), or that they have no reasonable chance of winning anything. Splitting sports by sex doubles the number of people who can profitably compete, just as splitting boxing or weightlifting into weight classes increases the number of people who can sensibly compete in those sports. Unlike weight classes, however, women are also from a socially disadvantaged class, whom many people like myself desire to see especially encouraged in public life. Virtually all the people who benefit from sports being split into sex categories are women and girls, and virtually all the people who would suffer from sports being mixed sex are also women and girls. Why the flip would we want to take away those benefits from women and girls?

I'll answer the thought experiment for you, because you seem unwilling to commit to any principles or definitions: It's always unfair for men/males to compete in the women's category, regardless of their gender identity. Low testosterone rules are worse than useless, because they create the illusion of objectivity around the women's category while eroding its original, actually useful meaning.

[–]Porcelain_QuetzalTabby without Ears 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

And here is where we disagree. I make two assumptions for the sake of argument. 1) that the current rules are fair and that if they aren't 2) a fair set of rules exists and can be implemented. And under these assumptions I think it's fairly reasonable to let a man and a trans women compete against cis women as long as they follow the guidelines.

When you're talking about mixed sports you're always assuming that there is no possible set of rules to effectively level the playing field. Only under that assumption can you reach the conclusion you have for our little thought experiment.

[–]Spikygrasspod 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Assuming the current rules are fair is begging the question, because the question is whether the current rules are fair. The hypothetical given by the original poster is designed to reveal this.

I don't see how fair rules could be devised for mixed sex sports (at least those involving strength or speed), because men's advantages are multiple and relate to various body parts and systems: size, body fat percentage, joint thickness, q-angle, lean mass, metabolic ability to utilise glycogen vs fat, explosive power, tendon and ligament stiffness (important for transferring force), upper body strength, heart size, lung size, bone strength. And those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are undoubtedly others. We don't know all of them because we don't study women athletes adequately, and because there is always more complexity to uncover about the human body.

Trying to make rules so men can compete with women seems like a losing proposition to me, but I wouldn't be against trying it, as long as women's sports remain intact as well (that is, if women could decide to compete against other women or against small men with high body fat, thinner bones, etc.). What I am against is the elimination of the women-only categories with a very badly designed testosterone rule which makes zero sense either from a physical perspective or a gender identity perspective.

[–]Porcelain_QuetzalTabby without Ears 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Not sure if it is. The way I read the question it was setting up the premise that QT assumes these rules are fair. Then proposes the question if it would be fair for men to compete under the same rules. So to me it seems to be designed to spot hypocrisy in QT ranks and highlight those focusing on identity over competitive sports.

I mean so we're against the same thing. I don't think trans women competing in women's sports currently is fair. But I don't think it can never be. I also admit that I don't know enough about the subject to suggest an accurate ruleset. I don't have any formal education in sports and my only experience comes from HEMA.

[–]Spikygrasspod 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The way I read it, it's meant to reveal the silliness and unfairness of the testosterone rule. The sports organisations seemingly can't decide if their categories are about gender identities or bodies. They're letting in male people who identify as women, only if they meet some arbitrary rule that in no way accounts for the differences between male and female bodies. It should be clear that allowing males with feminine gender identities to compete with women is unfair because of the systematic average advantage of males (which is barely touched by testosterone rules), but a lot of people seem to suppress their knowledge of sex differences when prompted to focus on gender identity, so the question is meant to probe whether people really think that low testosterone equalises male advantage and makes it fair for males to compete alongside female athletes. It doesn't.

You don't need formal education in sports to get an inkling of the differences between male and female bodies. If you're interested in learning a tiny bit about female physiology I can recommend Stacy Simms' Ted talk "women are not small men" about women's training needs. Or you could read Caroline Criado-Perez's book Invisible Women--in particular the chapter on sports and medical research (or rather, the lack thereof) on women.

I mean, maybe, theoretically you could make some rules to totally negate the average advantage of males against females in sports. But then you have another problem. Even though women perform worse at, say, weightlifting than men (with some exceptions), we recognise excellence in women's weightlifting by comparing them to other women. Or take boxing. While the heavyweight champions may be the best, we still recognise excellence in the lightweight categories, too. But a man who competes at the same level as the top female athletes is not an excellent sportswoman, he's a less excellent sportsman. For example, women have on average 8 or 10 percent more bodyfat than men, and that holds for athletes as well as mere mortals. It's absolutely necessary from a health perspective, but an athletic disadvantage because it decreases the power to weight ratio, which is crucial for speed and power. Now imagine we make weight classes based on bodyfat percentage. If your average elite male sprinter has, say, 7% bodyfat and the average female elite sprinter has 14% (just guessing, doesn't matter exactly), what would you make of a male sprinter who has 14% bodyfat and competes with the women? Would he be an example of excellence in that category (let's call it the 14% category)? Or is he a non-elite sprinter? I'm going to say it's the latter. Same for all the other aspects of male advantage. If you found a shorter, weaker, fatter male athlete with lower upper body strength, thinner bones, more flexible ligaments etc... would you say 'here's an example of excellence amongst women-and-some-men!' ? Personally, I don't think so. You'd see at least some excellent women (by which I mean they're the top of that category) being displaced by non-excellent men.