LogFAQs > #950409370

Ilishe posted...

@logical you made a good and convincing case.

I'd like to ask you something else. What about the trans athletes' rights to participate in sports as equals? They probably have biological advantages (some more, some less) but so does a tall man over a short one in competitions where height is a deciding trait, and so on.

We accept trans women as women, therefore they should be able to compete as equals, regardless of their biological advantages, such as they are. Do you agree or not?

There's two problems with this as I see it, one qualitative and one quantitative.

The quality is that "short men" is not a protected category. So take basketball as the example: We know that being tall is an advantage in basketball, but we don't have height categories. Why? Because no one has thought "we need to protect the class of short men who are disadvantaged in this sport". You could make an argument to say that we should, but we simply haven't. If there was a short person basketball category in elite sport, we'd have to defend it and prevent people from simply wanting to be in it. We have a women's sports category, so it has to be defended, or justified in some way that makes sense.

The second problem is quantitative. All else being equal, being short (or at least, not tall) is not an insurmountable problem in elite basketball. We have the data to show for that. Some basketball players have managed to enter the NBA and compete at that level despite being well under the general height range.

But sex? Or specifically, the androgenisation caused by male puberty, driven primarily by testosterone in normal individuals without DSDs? No way. This is a completely insurmountable advantage. There is basically not a single female in the history of any athletic event or weights event who is even in the top 3000 men. The fastest females in history are being beaten by teenage boys and semi elite athletes.

We have the data to show for that too. And it doesn't help to make arguments like "but my friend Sarah is faster than me at running". The point isn't to look at atypical examples, or a mediocre male athlete vs an elite female athlete. It's to look at typical, like-for-like examples. And this model basically erases women from elite sport altogether, except in a few fringe cases like equestrian and so on.

The point is, having a female category allows women a protected space to compete as equals. When Shelly-Ann Fraser Price won a Olympic gold medal, she did so even though she was 10% slower than Ussain Bolt. We recognise them equally, even if the raw performance is different, because categories create equality in sport. If this category did not exist, there would be no women (trans or cis) competing in any events at any elite level, let alone winning medals.

Now you might still argue "so what, trans women are women, let them compete in that protected space". Fine, but then you undermine the reasoning for having that space in the first place (namely the insurmountable male physiological advantage).

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