LogFAQs > #934548052

TommyG663513 posted...

People aren't digging into it on that level, because what you're talking about is a deconstruction of everything a sport is.

They literally are though. Did you read about the Caster Semenya IAAF CAS case? Sporting bodies are employing entire teams of scientists and ethics committees to dig into it at the absolute deepest level.

We have one very major divider in sports which is biological sex and that is being challenged. The biggest reason for this is that very few women can compete with men on any meaningful level athletically. It just is that big of a gap. Women are way smaller than men on average. It takes a pretty large statistical anomaly of a woman's athletic prowess to even compete with men.

Yes, no one should disagree with that, and neither was I.

Reality is that treatment options available for transitional purposes can't completely change someone's physical characteristics 100% to match that of a cis individual. This difference is apparent in athletics where the advantages of being born biologically male are still partially retained after going through a transition.

So where do you drop the pin? What do we do with intersex athletes that are neither transitioning nor cut and dry male/female? That's the problem at the moment. We don't have neat and proven lines for how much testosterone is too much/not enough.

Going back to Frolex's post, your point seems more true in some sports than others, and indicates a lack of sufficient evidence to back the point on a legal level.

I'm not saying I have a solution. I'm not sure what can be done to make everyone happy. It just seems really disingenuous to get overly philosophical to dodge the main point of this entire debate. It is fair to propose any number of solutions. You just need to take the fact into account that allowing MtFs in athletics with cis females will result in a disproportionate level of representation of MtFs in the very top ranks of the female gendered (seems more appropriate in this case to use gender instead of sex) divisions to the detriment of many cis females.

Yes, I wasn't debating that point. I'm debating the particulars. It's easy to say testosterone provides a physiological advantage in sport. Much harder to define exactly how much that advantage is, whether it can be corrected sufficiently or what to do about it in trans people.

What people are struggling with is where exactly to draw the line, and what to do in exceptional cases such as with DSD athletes.

Even sports scientists who agree in principle with "testosterone is too unfair of an advantage, that's why we separate men and women" are not entirely sure how to quantify this.

I think a lot of people are very severely misunderstanding how much of an advantage being born biologically male is over being born biologically female. I don't know how that can be made any more clear. It is difficult not to assume that people struggling to understand this are just very inexperienced in spending time around male and female athletics. The difference is pretty huge.

Literally never argued that point, not sure why you keep bringing it up.

Let me be clear. I understand exactly how much men outperform women. It's roughly 10% in nearly any sport. Or in numerical terms, the difference between rank 1 and rank 4000. Women cannot compete with men at the same level because of androgenisation, that much is very clearly.

So clearly that distinction needs to remain, but that still doesn't neatly resolve how to treat intersex and transitioning athletes.

Read this article on the caster semenya case, written by a sports scientist. It agrees with you in principle but also highlights why it was ever a debate in the first place.

https://sportsscientists.com/2019/05/on-dsds-the-theory-of-testosterone-performance-the-cas-ruling-on-caster-semenya/


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