The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned.
There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age.
> The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
Trans women have competed as women in the Olympics once ever and have 0 medals. By the numbers it's a non issue under previous rules (despite the incredible amount of ink spilled over it). People are talking about trans women here but the vast majority of people affected by this change are women who are not trans who have a "disorder of sexual development".
The IOC policy is specifically that athletes need to test negative for the SRY gene to be eligible to compete in the female category. Imane Khelif won gold in the 2024 Summer Olympics women's boxing event, and has since admitted to having the SRY gene. So it isn't a non-issue.
The ruling itself is much more nuanced and covers a lot of situations, including extremely rare disorders of sexual development (DSD) and their variations. The most recent controversies on this topic did not involve transgender athletes, but that's largely unknown or misunderstood by people who only know this topic by headlines and sound bites.
The headline writers are relating it back to the topic which brings the most clicks, which is transgender athletes.
The IOC didn't go on a crusade against transgender athletes specifically. They were refining the rules on sex-based divisions and included a lot of considerations and nuance.
That page is at the center of a massive debate on Wikipedia for that specific topic.
Khelif responded to a question about having the SRY gene like this:
> In a February 2026 interview with L'Équipe, Khelif was asked: "To be clear, you have a female phenotype but possess the SRY gene, an indicator of masculinity", to which she responded: "Yes, and it’s natural. I have female hormones."
So she was asked if she had the SRY gene and she responded "Yes". That's also consistent with the previous issues with governing bodies excluding her under their rules, but they are not allowed to share test results for obvious reasons.
The debate now is that maybe she didn't understand the question or gave the wrong answer in the interview. That's why the Wikipedia page contains the interview text but then immediately contradicts the interview content.
That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender, it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case.
Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
Which is why puberty blockers are prescribed to transgender children, delaying puberty until later in life when a "good decision" can be made, usually closer to the mid to late teens.
Sadly, it's not possible to "delay puberty" until later in life. Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. It can't be reversed later if the person changes their mind.
Yup. Absolutely insane that university "educated" people have been telling us that kids who believe in Santa Claus are capable of making decisions like this.
Have you considered that due to their education and research those people may know more on the subject than you do?
Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or enviromemtal lack of acceptance or support.
From a biological perspective, the women being banned here are not just men and as far as I'm aware cannot realistically compete in the men's division any more than any other woman. Practically these changes bar women athletes with certain medical differences from competing in the Olympics.
I'm not an expert so idk whether that's fair or not but that's what this decision is doing.
To be fair, that could be said of many other medical conditions as well, especially chromosomal abnormalities such as Down Syndrome. Many humans, from the moment they are born and through no fault of their own, have virtually no hope of ever competing in the Olympics let alone winning, just because at such competitive extremes, any significant genetic disadvantage takes you out of the running.
Like most things in biologicy, categorization is a nightmare unless you have a very specific use case in mind. In this case I'm talking about women phenotypically and socially (including self-identity) and especially athletes assigned female at birth. These women are clearly not just "males".
I think you're falling for Sticker Swap Fallacy. The goal is to have fair match-ups in sports. Gender and sex are two possible labels to use to assist with this, but they're imperfect enough that we probably ought to not use them as the primary differentiator.
The solution is simple: class every sport like boxing.
Pick a sports-relevant metric and split into divisions. Some sports will naturally fall into gendered divisions, while others will have varying degrees of co-ed competition among competitors of similar ability.
The way out of this is not to pick a better scissor of sex or gender, it's to pick a better scissor of ability.
This "solution" can really only be proposed by someone who has not played sports. This would simply result in women being unable to compete in sports professionally, outside of a couple small niches like ultra long distance swimming and a couple sub-disciplines of gymnastics.
It really depends on the way classes are divided. Dismissing the general concept demonstrates a fear of change rather than a legitimate openness to fair play.
No it doesn't, and no it doesn't. Proposing this concept demonstrates a profound ignorance of what competition at the top level of sports actually looks like.
The concept is just bad, unless your goal is to prevent women from being able to make a living playing professional sports.
The thing is, we're already using a scissor for ability, just a poor one with the exact problem you describe - it renders trans women unable to make a living playing professional sports. Throwing one group under the bus for another cannot be avoided so long as sex or gender are part of sports divisions.
You are clearly out of your depth. Have you ever competed in high level sports? Please don't speak on things you know nothing about. It takes a lot of gall to tell someone 'please let go of the need for this' when they are pointing this out. I will do no such thing, but I likely will give up trying to educate you.
I won't respond further unless you pick an example sport, and propose how your "scissor for ability" would work, in concrete detail. If you do this, I will be happy to explain why this would result in neither women _nor trans women_ having any chance to make a living as professional athletes.
Let's use the present scissor and the current state of affairs, which at present excludes some women for the sake of others. Which, I'll remind you, comes with all of the problems we currently experience.
Almost every single person on Earth is not built of the right genetic stuff to compete with male Olympic athletes, me and you included. Why do we need a carve out for one particular group because of their genetic bad luck?
The Olympics are looked up to by a large range of people and organization that don't actually participate in the Olympics.
This goes beyond just affecting the Olympics, but setting an example for the world to follow and gives other organizations the cover and courage to follow while being able to deflect to simply setting the same standards of the Olympics.
Already exists, it's what people refer to as "male olympics". As far as I know, females aren't banned from competing. It is just that they don't stand a chance in most disciplines. The whole point of female olympics is to keep males out.
Maybe they should accept that they simply aren't competitive if they can't compete against their own sex. There's no shame in it, most people aren't competitive, certainly so at this level.
Why not ignore gender labels and go by chromosomal configuration? There could be XY and XX [1] olympics. And then there should be X, XYY, XXX, XXXY, XXYY, and all the other possibilities [2].
There is more complexity than the binary in the expression of sex in humans.
All biological categories are fuzzy around the edges. Those fuzzy edges do not invalidate the category. The existence of small #'s of people with actual physical intersex conditions (not "I feel like <x>") in no way conflicts with humans being sexually dimorphic.
I agree with you in general, but I think it would be fair to let XY individuals with CAIS compete on the female side - their bodies do not respond to testosterone.
This is common sense. The only reason it didn’t happen sooner was folks being bullied to do things out of false claims of “inclusion” that resulted in deep discrimination against, mostly female, athletes.
The segregation of sports was always about sex and not gender. There are simply physical differences between across sexes that makes mixed-sex competition grossly inequitable in most sports. “Gender expression” doesn’t change that and mixing up “gender” and “sex” in sports was a trainwreck that is thankfully now being undone.
Exactly. It's impossible to have both inclusion and fair play. We have to pick one, and as a parent of daughters who compete at fairly high levels it's more important to preserve the integrity of women's sports.
Sure, I guess that's an option for youth sports in the prepubescent age groups. As a practical matter most youth sports leagues and schools aren't going to hassle with sex screening tests for little kids.
But once puberty hits everything changes. My teenage daughter played travel club volleyball on a pretty good team, and during practice they would occasionally run drills with the boys team. Even at that age the difference in hitting power and vertical was enormous, and those differences only grow larger with age. Men and women are literally playing different games. Beyond just fairness, forcing girls to compete against biological males becomes a safety risk due to concussions from taking a ball to the head.
In my experience competing in different things, that's typical: Local organizations are free to set their own local rules, but once you cross over into events that make you eligible for higher level competition they have to strictly abide by the national level rules. I couldn't use my results from grassroots competitions to qualify for national level events, generally.
So, where are the scores and scores of trans athletes dominating women's sports? If this is the sort of problem all the people crowing about it think it to be, we should have women with poorly fitting athletic gear and facial hair all over the place taking golds from ciswomen. We don't.
Like this is literally just fucking with transpeople for nothing and I am wide open for correction on this if anybody can find an actual incident of something of note happening, but until then, it's just weird reactionaries screaming into the void as far as I'm concerned, and the outcomes will be largely the same: more invasive procedures for ciswomen to endure, and excluded athletes who did nothing wrong apart from be who they are.
This is a matter of principle, fair play, and safety. Whether it's a tiny number or "scores and scores" is irrelevant.
If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site. I can't vouch for it being completely accurate but you can use it as a starting point for further research to educate yourself about the issue.
> This is a matter of principle, fair play, and safety. Whether it's a tiny number or "scores and scores" is irrelevant.
What if it's 0?
> If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site.
A deeply unbiased source, I'm sure.
Anyway I'd love to but all their archive links are the same. Looks like someone wrote a for loop incorrectly. But to be blunt, this is the exact same sort of nonsense as VAERS and deserves exactly the same dismissal: Compiled data assembled from the public with no verification, by people with no credentials, with a clear axe to grind.
Edit: Also, a SHIT LOAD of these are for second/third/whatever place, not even for wins. If reality backed the assertions made, transwomen should be DESTROYING women in sports.
There actually does have to be a lot of them, frankly, because otherwise it is just a nothingburger. Just a burger with a whole lot of nothing.
> They'd rather lose the election than let women compete against females only.
Fascinating political analysis. It's weird how a small group of people are deeply driven by identity politics above literally anything else, especially when those people typically aren't even slightly affected (and generally have never watched a single women's event in their life).
I sometimes wonder if people like you scream at politicians because of the introduction of the pitch clock in baseball, too? Do you waste this much energy on the rulebooks other sports come up with? Or just like, when you think it's icky sex stuff?
Many people like to focus on the purely physical attributes, but there's a clear distinction even in realms like chess.
The highest ranked female chess player is right around #55 globally, wherein the top 50 all are dominated by men.
Some of this may have to do with men having more interest/higher propensity of starting young which is where most grandmasters begin their journey, but still an interesting thing to consider nonetheless.
It's largely because chess has historically been a boys-club type activity. Women were actively discouraged, if not barred, from playing on grounds of misogyny. So, even today, there's very little women taking it seriously.
Of course, we all know there's no difference in the level of intellect or strategy between men and women.
That’s the greater variability theory. The male median is also higher so when you combine the two the long tail to the right will be dominated by males, so will the long tail on the left but to a lesser extent.
Many IQ tests have been designed to minimize the difference between males and females, primarily by reducing g-loading. Males pull ahead after puberty, prior to this they have an IQ disadvantage. So you have to take these factors into account when trying to make a fair and proper assessment.
Androgen insensitivity syndrome means that her cells do not react to testosterone. What male advantage is there if her cells don't react to testosterone?
Soundarajan's androgen insensitivity was reported as being partial (i.e. PAIS, and not CAIS), which implies some degree of testosterone-driven masculinization.
The rulings do not mean they now segregate by sex alone. Someone who was AFAB and does not have an SRY gene would was taking HRT would not qualify for the female division due to the HRT.
A trans man who was not taking HRT could compete, though.
The key distinction is that gender identity is not what's being tested.
They're not all taking banned substances. Case in point, Hergie Bacyadan and Elis Lundholm competed in the last Summer and Winter Olympics respectively.
Both Hergie Bacyadan and Elis Lundholm has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, and competes in the women's divisions. Their status as trans men has nothing to do with their eligibility to participate.
This would be like if two trans, who has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, would compete in men's divisions.
I thought exactly the same thing until I had a politically agnostic fencing judge sit down and explain over the course of an hour and a half all of the steps national and international regulating organizations for that sport had taken to avoid issues with unfair competition. Whether similar field-leveling safeguards could be baked into the rules for other sports is left as an exercise, but this particular instance suggests there's more nuance here than your comment suggests.
You're assuming that people arguing for bans on trans athletes are making good faith arguments about competition in sports. You shouldn't.
Here in the US a significant part of antipathy towards trans people is the deeply held belief that being trans in public is a kind of sex abuse to the public. If you listen to what much of the debate has turned into here, it has little to do with competition, and far more with the obsession over what genitals people have in locker rooms and bathrooms.
At the end of the day the number of trans athletes is so vanishingly small it's not worth caring about the impacts on competition, when the debate itself is another framing of the conservative desire to make being trans illegal.
The article addresses that. Given all the testing already, this is a trivial addition:
“Under the new policy eligibility will be determined by a one-time gene test, according to the I.O.C. The test, which is already being used in track and field, requires screening via saliva, a cheek swab or a blood sample.“
You think Olympic athletes have any expectation of privacy around drug testing already?
They have to register their every move and piss while being visible on demand.
Doesn’t really work though - and given athletes are on the edge of performance there’s probably more people that fall in between than you might expect
From the Wikipedia article:
While the presence or absence of SRY has generally determined whether or not testis development occurs, it has been suggested that there are other factors that affect the functionality of SRY.[25] Therefore, there are individuals who have the SRY gene, but still develop as females, either because the gene itself is defective or mutated, or because one of the contributing factors is defective.[26] This can happen in individuals exhibiting a XY, XXY, or XX SRY-positive[27] karyotype[better source needed]
Additionally, other sex determining systems that rely on SRY beyond XY are the processes that come after SRY is present or absent in the development of an embryo. In a normal system, if SRY is present for XY, SRY will activate the medulla to develop gonads into testes. Testosterone will then be produced and initiate the development of other male sexual characteristics. Comparably, if SRY is not present for XX, there will be a lack of the SRY based on no Y chromosome. The lack of SRY will allow the cortex of embryonic gonads to develop into ovaries, which will then produce estrogen, and lead to the development of other female sexual characteristics.[28]
The Yahoo article linked says that exceptions will be made for people with conditions like that:
“Athletes diagnosed with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) ‘or other rare differences/disorders in sex development (DSDs), who do not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone’ may still be allowed to participate in the women’s category.”
Transition changes biology. We don't yet have the technology to fully reverse the effects of male puberty, so there can be reasonable debate about trans women who transitioned after puberty, but early transitioners have no meaningful advantage. Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.
This is also true for many cisgender intersex women with XY chromosomes. Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth. Drawing the line at having a Y chromosome makes no sense.
> Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.
I'm sorry, but this is not true. "Puberty blockers" do not complete suppress the effects of male genetics. They only attempt to block certain hormonal effects.
It is not possible to completely block the effects of having male genes by simple hormone modulation.
> Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth
We do not determine eligibility for sports classes based on ability to give birth for good reason. It's not a proxy for the genetic athletic differences being addressed by these classes.
Individuals with androgen insensitivity typically cannot give birth. This an extremely rare possibility, not a typical feature of the condition.
Quite a biased source, no? This doesn't provide evidence that these differences are biological. Boys are much more likely to exercise than girls due to social norms: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10478357/.
I see this topic come up repeatedly in different guises, protect women from the evil trans-agenda. But I haven't seen where this is actually a problem.
Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
Many studies show with in ~10% female ranges of ability , but, having more fast twitch muscle fiber and bone mass from male puberty if they went through it. Bone mass does eventually drop to female levels but over decades not years so athletes would likely be out of athletic prime before that happens. Studies showing more dramatic results that stand out in my memory that lean toward transwomen outperforming transwomen are studies done on military veterans comparing to general population metrics of muscle mass for athletic activity levels also done with a very low population count I believe they only looked at under 300 trans women. Regardless we need more research, but there are a comically small amount of trans athletes seeking professional level sports, like I think <20 for all college level for instance.
Anecdotally, I found as a deskjob, pilates and casual weight lifting trans woman, I lost dramatic amount of strength and muscle mass. 20 pounds now feels like 50 pounds did for myself pre-transition. I usually participate with women and the instructor/personal helps with modifications usually aimed at women just getting into fitness. Running joke amongst friends is how easily I am outperformed by my female friends at the gym/pilates/etc. However, that's since my body is low testosterone even for females, its checked twice a year because of it, normally It's once a year for most trans people. Other friends retained a lot of their strength, but are mechanics, so its really situational in my opinion, and its a super hard and interesting topic of research because of it
Citation? I asked because I'm curious, and Googling just gives opinion pieces and not data.
[Edit] Currently -3 but no study referenced. Do people just not like the idea of providing evidence for their position? The women I've spoken to about this article cite men being the problem, whether its sexual harassment, or other sexist attitudes. Not one felt that trans participation in their sport of choice was in their top ten complaints.
Considering I was asking whether there was evidence on trans-performance, sure it matters a little.
That's fine if they don't want to compete with men, but the statements were because "it's unfair". I was curious if there had been any studies on this.
> Considering I was asking whether there was evidence on trans-performance, sure it matters a little.
Well, (and I hesitate to say this because of HN guidelines, but) it was in the article, which I assumed you read. It was this assumption that made me think you wanted evidence that it is women who are complaining about competing against men.
FTFA
> Late last year Dr. Jane Thornton, the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific director and a Canadian former Olympic rower, presented the initial findings of a review of athletes who are transgender or have differences of sexual development, known as DSD, and are competing in women’s sports. That analysis, which has not been made public, stated athletes born with male sexual markers retained physical advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
The linked article is to the nytimes. I dunno which article is the yahoo one. This story was on the nytimes, it's the one under discussion.
> Does it have a link to any of the findings?
The findings I posted where from the linked article, to the nytimes. The findings were exactly as I posted them; in brief, athletes born with male markers retain their physical advantages.
I can't believe you need a study to show that a man turned woman has an advantage. It's clear men vs women have an advantage in almost every discipline... So are you simply unsure if the transition process doesn't totally ruin them and degrade their performance to that of a woman?
That's a misleading way to talk about "outperforming". When the US brings over 200 people to the olympics, then if cis and trans athletes have exactly the same performance and without other bias you'd expect to see 1-2 trans US olympians every year just by chance. And you'd expect them to have the same medal rates as anyone else from the US. When someone asks if there's evidence of trans athletes outperforming cis athletes, that's not what they're asking for.
The problem is that someone who's transitioned is no longer a man. After undergoing surgery and hormone treatment for a long period of time, a trans athlete falls somewhere between men and women in terms of capability. They'd have no more success competing against men than naturally born women would, yet they still have advantages when competing against naturally born women.
Unfortunately, while the most equitable solution might be to create a separate category unique to trans individuals, there aren't enough trans athletes to make it feasible (yet?). It's rather sad that transitioning means a person can no longer compete in sports, but I'm not sure there's a better alternative.
You still have your larger bone structure. Larger musculature structure and different muscle insertions. different ligament structure. different skin structure. different grip strength. Broader shoulders, narrower pelvis, different angled limbs. all of that isn't going away even if it atrophies. And you aren't going to let it atrophy because you are an athlete in training managing your dietary macros. Maybe recovery isn't as efficient lacking so much excess testosterone but you still have some.
Is there actually an advantage? that's toted. but no one can ever point to real data about it... and all the data suggests the exact opposite... that for most cases: cis-women out-compete trans-women.
They list their findings but no data. They effectively are just issuing an opinion. The opinion may be more considered than the rest of ours, but it’s not data.
> Late last year Dr. Jane Thornton, the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific director and a Canadian former Olympic rower, presented the initial findings of a review of athletes who are transgender or have differences of sexual development, known as DSD, and are competing in women’s sports. That analysis, which has not been made public, stated athletes born with male sexual markers retained physical advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
That very quoted section indicates the analysis has not been made public. IMO that's very fishy and makes me question the authenticity of the source. What is Dr. Thornton hiding, exactly? Why conceal the review, methodology and data? Even if preliminary it should be released.
I would be interested to see that analysis, and it's unfortunate that it is not publicly available in some fashion. I'm mainly curious about the number of DSD-expressing vs transgender athletes they reviewed. Trans athletes in the Olympics or even competing at an Olympic level are vanishingly rare.
A source is not required, taking part in the Olympics alone, means outperforming your countries other athletes. If that doesn’t happen there wouldn’t be a reason for the article.
> Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
The closest controlled study we have on this topic is not in athletes but in U.S. military servicemembers and their standard fitness test: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36271916/
This isn't a good study for professional athletes training for competition because the fitness test is not analogous to professional competition. They only need to pass with a reasonable score but most are not competing for the top position like in the Olympics
The study found that
> transgender females' performance showed statistically significantly better performance than cisgender females until 2 years of GAHT in run times and 4 years in sit-up scores and remained superior in push-ups at the study's 4-year endpoint.
So of the 3 simple activities they tested their performance remained higher in one test (run times) until 2 years, another test (sit-ups) until 4 years, and remained higher at the end of the limited 4-year study period in the last test (push-ups).
This study was widely circulated as "proof" that hormone therapy erases sex-based gains after only 2 years, but that's not even an accurate read of the study. It's also not measuring athletes who are training or trying to compete.
Depending on the sport, hormone therapy cannot be expected to compensate for sex some important sex differences like physical structure. Male anatomy is simply different in ways that provide different types of leverage or angles (like Q Angle, which runners will talk about, or reach, which is important to boxers)
This is a very taboo topic to discuss and honestly I'm a little nervous to even comment about it here pseudonymously. The popular culture discussion of the topic is very different than the sports science discussion of the topic, where sex differences have long been accepted to be innate and irreversible, regardless of hormone therapy.
The usual term is "cisgender", or "cis" for short.
"Cis" and "Trans" both come from Latin; the former means "the same side of" and the latter means "the other side of". If you are happy to be on the same side of the gender binary as what you were assigned when you were born then you are "cisgender"; if you are unhappy with that state of affairs (regardless of how much work you have put into changing it) then you are "transgender".
Adding to this: If you do not want to reference the current gender, you can also use "Assigned Female at Birth" (AFAB), or "Assigned Male at Birth" (AMAB).
This is useful when clarifying terms, when you do not know the persons identity, or when discussing groups based on the factory default settings.
Certainly some of the high profile cases have been fairly absurd. A mid-tier male athletic transitions, and then blows the female record out of the water and gets gold. What I don't know is whether there are wider stats rather than some really big notable cases. It wouldn't surprise me, I just don't have the facts at the moment.
Regardless, Lia went from not being in the front of the pack, to being in the front of the pack:
“By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to fifth on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle.”
65th to 1st in one category, and 554th to 5th in another.
It is fair to say there was a significant increase in rank post-transition.
This power lifter set regional junior records as a young man then quit the sport and didn't compete for 16 years. After transitioning she went on to win gold medals in numerous international competitions as a woman.
No idea on the hard data. but... We classify competitions for a reason. The competition is more interesting when the competitors are categorized into similar ability.
You can't bring your formula1 to a touring car race just because you feel like it is a touring car.
Personally I think at the top level there should be an unlimited class. within the rules of the sport anyone can enter, then at various lower prestige levels participation is limited according to some parameter.
One interesting example of this is the UTR system for tennis. It is agnostic in gender as wells as age, and tournaments can be held purely based on the UTR range
bad comparison - here is one better, not a perfect one...
You can't enter a car into a boating competition. The question here is: if you take basic precautions to make it the same class of boat - a modified car turned into a boat should be a valid entry - provided the engine speed roughly matches.
People worry about cars on water here, not knowing that doesn't exist by definition: any car in water has been modified from a car to be a boat. you may recognize that it was once a car - but that's vestigial shell stuff. the inter-workings are a propeller - not a wheel.
I see your argument and has some merit but isn't persuasive enough. I would posit that its a bit too loose and that it breaks down on biological people have many more complicated systems that aren't simply re-categorized similar to your car and boat comparison.
For better or worse nor is our medical science sophisticated enough to swap out the systems to be true comparables (and I don't mean to offend anyone).
> Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
No, both because there are very few trans athletes in competition, and because trans athletes (except trans women who have not started or are less than a year into hormone therapy) have net athletic disadvantages, when considering all factors relevant to performance in almost any real sport, compared to cisgender people of the same gender identity.
I mean, if you had a sport that isolated grip strength alone, trans women would have an advantage over cis women, but aside from rather contrived cases like that, they don't.
There's a reason the poster woman for the political movement around this in the US is a cisgender woman whose story of "unfair competition" is tying with a trans woman for fifth place behind four other cisgender women (and having to hold a sixth place trophy in photos, since there were not duplicates on hand for the same rank) in an intercollegiate swimming competition.
Men who weigh 100kg are also banned from participating in the 63kg weightlifting category. So what? There are physical traits that offer advantages in sports. We bucketize so that we see more interesting competitions (aka a 120kg weightlifter would completely dominate all of the smaller folks, every single time, so what's the point of competing ).
I wonder if anyone has measured the speed in which reality is codified into law or regulation. Women have been fighting against males in female sports for many, many years. Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
To educate others reading this, it's far from "obvious" how to classify gender in sports. Checking if they have the right "parts" physically doesn't do it. Checking for hormone levels doesn't do it. Even checking for Y chromosomes doesn't do it.
In my opinion the way forward is to stop trying to find arbitrary ways to define gender, and just start making competition classes based on whatever factors are relevant to the event. E.g. a women with high testosterone? They can compete with men or women with the same testosterone bracket. This would also let men with low-T compete fairly rather then be excluded from the games.
It's also relevant at what point other genetic changes are "unfair." There are absolutely genetic traits that give people HUGE advantages in various competitions. Just like the gender-related properties, these are natural and yet result in unfair competitions.
For Swyer syndrome, A 2017 study estimated that the incidence of Swyer syndrome is approximately 1 in 100,000 females. Fewer than 100 cases have been reported as of 2018.
For both the genetic disorders, they would have to be beneficial or at least not an disadvantage, for elite sport activity in order to be an issue for misclassification. For a sex-determination system, they could simply add an exception for Swyer syndrome and postpone the decision until such individual presented themselves at an Olympic competition.
If you pay attention, your source has an asterisk of “typically” and “usually”, aswell as a distinction between phenotype and karyotype traits. While it is true that the majority of people with a Y chromosome are male, there are many people with Y chromosomes you’d call female because of their phenotype (which is what society primarily cares about), among other cicumstances.
I specifically said sex. Gender is mostly undefined. If you say that gender is the societal presentation as male or female, but you can’t define male from female then what are you defining? Its the “trans women are women” contradiction.
The problem with your proposed 'fuzzy divisions' is that they're not compatible with the zeitgeist of 'seeing the best compete', and 'drug-free' sports, as there's no reason to disallow performance-enhancing-drugs if we're already splitting into divisions.
Actually, you bring up an excelling additional argument for the sort of bracketing I proposed. It also works for drugs!
There is significant grey area wrt to "doping" too in the sense that a performance enhancing drug may express as a larger than normal amount of a naturally occurring substance. So did the person dope, or is that their natural genetics? In my scheme, WHO CARES!
Beyond that, I suppose there is the usual argument against more serious and non-natural forms of doping that it is physically detrimental to the competitors and by allowing it you are encouraging or pressuring people to essentially harm themselves.
Still, competition classes could be helpful in some of the doping grey areas.
Thank you. But the Y test still seems sufficient. Every criterion will have false positives and negatives. With the Y test the false negative (you present as a woman but have a Y chromosome) is rare and the vast majority of cases are handled well. If you have this condition you must compete against men (given the Y chromosome test rule) or not compete. If you’re dying to be in the Olympics as a woman but have the Y chromosome, you’re just out of luck. Not everyone can be a concert pianist either. No rule makes things wonderful for 100% of humans. The Y test gets very close.
High level sports consists entirely of outliers. That’s kind of the point of the olympics. This newest rule is nothing more than a misogynist rule to turn the women’s division into the “no more than statistically average” division.
Almost every gold medal winner in the past games would not have been affected by this new rule, so that's a biiit hyperbolic. Those athletes are still far outside the normal performance of women (or men, for that matter).
Total nonsense. Sports are separated by sex, not gender. Sex is a biological reality, whereas gender is made up nonsense hiding behind the fact that many people equate the word 'sex' to sexual intercourse. That allowed 'gender' to flourish and confuse people.
'Gender' in it's modern form, was coined by John Money, the psychologist/sexologist responsible for the genital mutilation of many children, and the suicide of at least one of them due to his involvement of sexualized behavior during 'treatment'.
I am going to try to keep my response apolitical to try to avoid fanning a culture war. That Wiki is the exact reason we are in this situation because we are bringing up points for 1 in 20000 or 0.005% of the population. Any system designed around 0.005% edge cases is going to be so complex that it is functionally impossible to do in practice. That is why one side says the solution is "obvious" because we have a simple rule that covers 99.9% of cases and the other 0.1% is unfortunately effectively barred from high level competition. Note, high level competition already bars 99.9% of people. Even though the opposing side is correct in pointing out these edge cases, it does nothing to advance an actual solution.
There are statistically around 15 women AFAB with XY chromosomes in the NCAA by those numbers (assuming no correlation between Swyer syndrome and athletic performance).
There are currently around 10 openly transgender women in the NCAA.
Except I proposed a solution, which you ignored (I'm assuming here that I'm your "opposing side".)
Also, there are a significant number of these sorts of arguments in high-level sports, probably precisely because these "0.1%" cases are exactly the ones that result in exceptional ability relative to norms. It's also curious that there is such obsession about naturally occurring genetic outliers with respect to females or gender but absolute silence about naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender. And surprise surprise the top athletes often have such outlier genetics!
If you're drawing a distinction between natural genetic difference related to only gender and no other factors then sadly it's exactly a culture war, not a war based in science or fairness.
Because in a specific minority of the population it disagrees with the gender assigned at birth for obvious reasons. There are plenty of resources you could read on intersex instead of lol at something you don’t understand
> Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
A few reasons:
1. Sex is not as straightforward as most people think, and what to do with intersex people is not clear.
2. Trans athletes are underrepresented at pretty much all levels of sport, and aren't actually winning that much, making it not actually an urgent problem.
3. The philosophical underpinnings that advantages due to differences in body development should be disqualifying is a little broken, since we do not consider Michael Phelps being double jointed as being an unfair developmental advantage.
The Olympics used to do this. From as early as the 1960's they were doing genetic testing on female athletes. They stripped Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska of all her medals and records in 1967, in spite of the fact that she gave birth to a child a year later, which would seem to indicate that she was a woman. The Olympics only abandoned this testing regime after the 1996 Olympic Games when 8 women who were cis and assigned female from birth to that moment were wrongly tested as male (7 AIS cases, 1 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency ). The uproar from that caused the Olympics to realize that this was a lot more complicated then they thought and abandon the idea of a strict genetic test.
Because those 8 women at that one Games were a lot more than all transfem Olympic athletes in history combined, the danger of ruling people out is much greater than the danger of allowing someone in who doesn't deserve it.
well, testosterone is a pretty hard fact. having said that, i firmly believe there should be no competitions based on gender at all. olympics should be 100% unisex.
I always thought the more elegant approach to all of this was to add a mixed sex league. Keep the traditions, add a novel new one, and let people consent to who they want to compete against and watch
Correct and it’s the same in many sports. Theres generally not “men’s golf” and “women’s golf” there’s just “golf” and “women’s golf.”
Women are not excluded from golf tournaments, but the requirements to compete (primarily how far one hits the ball) are vastly different. Thats why both play the same golf course, just from different tee boxes.
I think they're trying to say that if there was a mixed league it would always end up being 100% men at the highest level. Like, mixed league basketball would almost certainly be just men at the highest level because of how the sport works.
In the sports I competed in, the men's class was an open class. Anyone could compete in it. The women's classes were the only restricted classes.
There are several sports where female physiology (skeletal structure, etc) has inherent advantages over male physiology where this may not be true, though.
This always should of been left to sports committees than our government, what a waste of our representatives times, but I guess they got the culture war points
I actually wish non-sports people would care less about sports, too.
Because the decisions should be left to those of us playing the sports. Not bystanders trying to impose their own agendas on to activities they don't even participate in.
Strongly agreed. I think there was ever a good reason for this to be a topic outside those with a direct interest in various sports governing bodies. Those should be making these decisions. It's deeply stupid that this has become a major point of contention up to the federal level of government.
Yes, putting out cones. Bending over, laying down a cone, taking five steps, laying another. Hard work. Meanwhile Malcolm Gladwell changes his mind about it. Put out some cones, Malcolm!
I always sort of speculated that sports existed to channel what would otherwise be human tendencies toward violence; an outlet enablining more stable civilization. Even though I largely ignore sports, I appreciate it over possible alternatives.
Caster Semenya is XY with a DSD (5-ARD), and absolutely should not compete with females. The same goes for Imane Khelif who was the same DSD.
People with this condition have internal testes, a male level of testosterone, and a male level of muscle development. That a doctor assigned them female at birth and put a F on the birth certificate does not change this.
Sports already exclude most people as they're not performant enough. So I don't see a problem with excluding biological males from female sports.
But, we should compare actual body parts that are relevant, for example I'm male but I'd not belong in male sports as my body is more feminine..
Still, it's not who you think you are that should decide, it's the body type so the competition can be more interesting as that is the point of sports anyway..
The fair answer is to remove sex, gender, and everything related to that from classification. Dont look at it. Dont consider it. Everyone competes together.
It means that floor gymnastics is fair for *anyone* to compete in. None of this "wrong crotch shape" bullshit. Or intersex. Or trans. If you are good enough, you get in. If not, you dont.
And the whole trans argument would go away.
Means testing and gender means testing is a scourge. Time to be rid of it.
Then most vocal folks would scream to no end how its unfair first 25 positions in given sport are held by men. You know, women want to see other women getting medals and I don't blame them, I want to see that too.
Good luck with that at any sport where strength and/or endurance matter most, just look at any given sport and check top male vs top female records. Running, climbing, hockey, football, rowing and so on and on.
Thats not really a fair sport in eyes of most folks. Unless thats your goal.
I think that alt gender athletes can compete as there own group, or we do away with gender (ha), and everybody can compete in everything "fairly", and by fairly I mean nobody gets to have any feelings about this!
since when does an ancient universal reality get to be re-decided behind closed doors by anonimous interest groups?
and then become taboo to question, hmmmmm?
Not only trans athletes, but any biologically born women the IOC thinks are insufficiently feminine.
It’s an unfair advantage apparently. You know, like being born tall for basketball players. Curious how no other biological advantages are being policed.
That doesn’t seem to be the case, given the first paragraph of the article:
> The International Olympic Committee has barred transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category of the Olympics and said that all participants in those events must undergo genetic testing.
Genetic testing doesn’t leave a lot of room for accidentally or intentionally targeting women for being “insufficiently feminine.”
This might be true if the Olympics were exclusively classifying the 23rd chromosomes, and nothing but.
Leave aside the fact that very few of us here have actually tested our 23rd chromosome. Historically, the Olympics have not been (and are not) strictly chromosomal. The 2023 testosterone suppression decision requirements has exclusively impacted cis women, for one example.
Humans are biologically dimorphic in the same way winters are usually cold and summers are usually hot.
I would say that humans are sexually dimorphic in the same way that humans are bipeds. if you attempted to make a serious argument that limb agenesis implies that we’re a variable-limbed species it would be obfuscating rather than illuminating.
No, that is not a good analogy at all. It's so poor an analogy that it's challenging to interpret this comment generously. I think you might be arguing facetiously to make a different rhetoric point than the literal content of your post, bot I will respond to your text literally.
Humans have a wide variety of biological variation in metrics we think of as linked to "biological sex" and those metrics are accessibly mutable. Even within the Olympics, the natural variation of these metrics within cis women is a famous topic of debate (Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, etc.)
Bipedalism is something which varies very rarely and is especially not accessibly mutable.
That’s a very fun way to think about it, but it’s far more effective in a semantic debate than a serious one. I also don’t for a minute believe that the goal here is some broader reform of how the world talks about statistical distributions.
It was intended in good faith, to make the point that rarity alone is not a good metric for salience. In my experience, most trans people have no problem with the statement "humans are sexually dimorphic" in a biology context. They (and I) have issue with it when its used in a debate to say "Humans are sexually dimorphic (and therefore trans and intersex people are irrelevant/shouldn't be accommodated/don't exist)". In the context of sports, it is definitely relevant that there are many edge cases and substantial overlap in the distribution of phenotypes between AFAB and AMAB people.
Coming back around to the olympics: I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree without dismissing the complexity that comes from organizing across 8 billion people.
Speaking for myself I believe that trans people and non-binary people should be accommodated, but there’s a contextual limit. When it comes to equal protection, employment, healthcare, medical access, bathrooms and a dozen other issues it’s a no-brainer in favor of accommodating people.
Ironically the sports divide is probably the single area where having some physical advantages isn’t a bonus. It’s also near and dear to the hearts of billions, and such a terrible hill to die on. Ideally the solution would be a league like the Paralympic competitions, but high level athletes are rare, trans people are relatively rare, and two overlapping are incredibly rare. To make such a league would be a farce that couldn’t hope to succeed.
In the Olympics, it appears trans athletes are still a minority among the group of athletes who are excluded because of sex characteristics. Most of the athletes impacted by the ever-stricter testosterone limits in the Olympics are cis women. Such a league would include cisgender former Olympic athletes who had to undergo forms of HRT in order to qualify.
When discussing trans people in sports, the most salient contexts aren't elite sports championships like the Olympics. "Sports" is also done recreationally and is often considered a normal part of ones childhood upbringing. On the topic of trans people, the question "can my child play this sport with their friends"?
Before you hold genetic testing down to this standard of perfection (catching a single event of something so notable it merited its own article in JCEM), it would do well to compare it to the alternatives from which you are moving, and whether those alternatives met this standard of perfection.
Otherwise it might turn out you are proposing a standard that no system that bifurcates men and women can achieve, and on the basis of that, rejecting genetic testing.
It's very confusing topic. I rendered this visual map to show how SRY gene is the 'trigger' for development, not just having the Y chromosome. It helps see the signaling steps where things like AIS or XX syndrome happen: https://vectree.io/c/y-chromosome-genomic-signaling
The question comes down if the presence of the SRY gene impact athletic ability. From my reading, it seems very much like an ongoing research topic.
I recall a study looking at genetics in general and how much of professional sport abilities that can be attributed to it, and the number were fairly high for most sports, especially those involving strength and endurance. Genetic disorders like AIS could however also be a hindrance.
I do recall that in some endurance sports, certain genetic disorders involving oxygen delivery were much more common in top elites than in the average population, meaning that people without that disorder is at severe disadvantage compared to general population. It is an ongoing discussion if people with those kind of disorders should be allowed to compete in for example long distance skiing, as the disorder becomes natural doping and would be cheating if a person without the disorder was competing with that kind of blood in their system.
Genetic testing, outside of the culture war about what defines a man or a woman, really comes down to what is fair competition. Personally I can't really say. Does knowing that maybe half of the top skiers has a rare blood disorder make it less fun for people?
What would happen if we didn't allow a female category for power lifting? Just have human power lifting. Does the NFL have a ban on women in NFL? I don't know but the teams look as I expect they would even without a ban.
Don't we already sub-categorize within a gender? E.g. boxing. I don't actually know how common that is or why some sports get this treatment and not others.
Boxing is often the example
given because its someone getting hurt, but when you actually break it down it also falls apart for boxing.
If we measured everyones strength, bone density, etc... in order to stop people from risking injury that would be one thing But basing it on your Chromosomes is lazy and inaccurate.
The point is that "fairness" being tied to whether your Cis or Trans is a hilarious hill to die on when we have advanced medical technology to actually test what we deem "fair".
To be clear, I used that example because it was the only one I could think of, not for some rhetorical reason (which serves your point anyway, really).
I agree if we could just distill "here's your objective good-at-tennis score" for everybody and draw lines using those numbers, that makes sense. It feels unrealistic? I.e. we already don't do that - it doesn't necessarily feel like 100% an anti-trans thing (orthogonal obviously to the large amount of anti-trans sentiment that generally exists). Maybe Elo for everything?
I follow sport climbing, which has always seemed like a great example of this.
Climbing ability isn’t just a matter of strength or any other single dimension. E.g., the women’s routes are set on the assumption they’re more flexible than the men, not just less strong. Climbers come in many different shapes and sizes. Some climbers look like string beans, others look like they grew up lifting cows.
And BTW, there are women (Janja Garnbret, and Akiyo Noguchi before her) who dominate the women’s competition for years, to the degree that everyone else is almost playing for second place. It’s routinely speculated that Janja could regularly reach the men’s semi-finals.
Rock climbing is one sport known for small differences in performance between men and women. This is unlike about any other sport out there where a difference is huge (the worst male aspiring semi-pro is often better than a top woman).
It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
Also, so many of these anti-trans efforts end up hurting cis women too, the ones who happen to look too masculine or have too high of testosterone.
Gender is not as straightforward as bigots and transphobes would like to think. I wonder how many cis women will be affected by this ruling because their chromosomes and hormones aren't within so called "normal levels"
> It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
In most sports, the "mens" division is actually an open division that accepts all participants regardless of sex. Women just don't compete in it because they have no shot at getting a decent placement. The fact that males and females can't fairly compete with each other is the raison d'être of the women's league. This, and not culture war propaganda reasons is why only the most deranged bigots have an issue with trans men competing in "mens" sports.
Fun fact: "open divisions" only last as long as men are winning them. Women often outshoot men, and after Shan Zhang's win they were siloed into their own division.
> Fun fact: "open divisions" only last as long as men are winning them. Women often outshoot men, and after Shan Zhang's win they were siloed into their own division.
That decision was made before her win.
> the International Shooting Union, at a meeting in April of 1992, and therefore ahead of the Games, elected to bar women from shooting against men in future events.
The fact that it's only one way (banning men from competition in women's sports) is evidence against your point, not for it. If it was strictly anti-trans, then it would be an applied to both. The fact that no one cares that if a woman wants to participate in a men's event is pretty telling.
Trans men don't compete because women are essentially non competitive against men in top level athletics. Which is why trans women are controversial in women's sports. Every year there are hundreds of males highschoolers who outcompete females Olympic gold medalists. By allowing men to compete in women's sports you prioritize the notions of identity of what's usually a single individual over an entire class. It's plainly sexist.
As for intersex individuals, put them in their own competitive class.
Trans women are such a minority in women's sports it's really a non-issue that's been blown out of proportion. There was one trans woman who competed in the 2020 Olympics and she didn't even place. Riley Gaines has made a big deal in MAGA world about tying for 5th with a trans woman in a swimming competition. That means 4 cis women placed ahead of her, and if Lia Thomas hadn't competed, she still would've been in 5th. Hormone replacement therapy for trans women often results in muscle and strength loss, so the idea that trans women have some uniquely superhuman strength because they used to be men is just untrue.
> Trans women are such a minority in women's sports it's really a non-issue that's been blown out of proportion.
Indeed, but this is only a good argument for barring trans women from competing against females. You see, if trans athletes are so rare, only a very small number of people would be adversely affected by such a restriction, they can live with it.
On the other hand, the ban would calm down a large number of female athletes who are seriously disturbed by the mere possibility of competing against men, especially in contact sports, but not only.
Women are women, not only physically but also emotionally and mentally. Setting out on a crusade to change the thinking of millions of women is seriously dumb when a simple restriction, affecting 3 people total, can avoid it.
Now, think about making such a dumb idea a cornerstone of some party's political messaging... that can happen only if said party wants the other side to win.
HRT still leaves you with longer limbs and larger lungs which give a serious competitive edge. The numbers of trans individuals in sports doesn't matter, it's wrong on principle. Why segregate by sex at all? Let's get rid of it, you won't see any women, or any trans women, for that matter, anywhere on any serious athletic playing field. It'll all just be men.
What's the point of allowing trans women in women's sports anyway, especially at a top level? To affirm their identity? That throws an entire class of people, women, under the bus. Top performing males have an indisputable competitive advantage against top performing females in athletics.
I was wondering about trans men and there is actually quite a bit amount of regulations for it, as taking testosterone is generally considered to be doping. Trans men are only allowed to compete if they are under heavy supervision by a medical professional and they follow a very strict set of rules dictating how, when and what kind of treatment they do. Too high amount of testosterone or too uneven levels of testosterone will disqualify a trans man from competing.
I'm not sure that is the case in all sports. For example in golf, the top women golfers on LPGA tour in distance are only about as long as the shortest men on PGA tour off the tee, about 290 yards average. However, the women are generally vastly more accurate than the men in pretty much every distance tee to green. Their swing is just a different style of swing afforded by female anatomy. It is more hip driven, "textbook," in fact they have higher hip speed than men who rely more on hand speed.
Now imagine a pro golfer who was born female with those anatomical advantages for golf flexibility, and is now taking testosterone for power, ostensibly to identify as male. Not only do they have the anatomy advantage, they now have the power. They would probably dominate pro golf overall, both sides of the game I expect, whichever one they choose to compete in.
Trans women who have been on hormone therapy for at least a year have no overall advantage over cis women in most real, existing competitive sports. They have disadvantages in some of the most widely-sports-relevant capacities—compared to cis women—and small advantages in a couple of isolated abilities (grip strength).
They also have advantages in traits that across the population correlate positively with some broadly-sports-relevant capacities (e.g., lean body mass, both absolutely and as a share of total body mass, lung volume), but the actual sports-relevant capacities these correlate with on a population level (strength, endurance, etc.) they don't have an advantage on. There are studies that have detailed some of the low-level reasons for this with regard to oxygen use and other factors.
Men are stronger and faster and not just a little bit. If you allow men in women's sports, (basketball, soccer, boxing etc) then women will not be competitive in those sports.
Male puberty changes body composition in non-reversible ways. Muscle distribution, composition, quantity and bone density, all favor men that have gone through puberty.
There's no "culture war against trans people". It's obvious to anyone with a brain that sports were split between genders for a reason since the dawn of sport - sports can be dangerous and that keeps people relatively safe. If trans people would like to compete with others of their chosen gender, the they should just start leagues for their chosen genders. Simple, really.
At best this is willful ignorance. By many measures, there is an active persistent march towards a Denial of Identity genocide against transgender folks in the US and other countries.
Obviously there is both a culture war against (and for) trans people, and also non-hate-based arguments against trans women competing with biological women. Both things can be true.
She didn't place at the Olympics but it's worth noting she was the oldest competitor by far, and this after she had cleaned up gold medals in numerous international competitions despite having a relatively thin background in the sport. She was expected to podium at the Olympics and it's not really clear why she performed so poorly (the only athlete in the division to DNF).
Mrs Hubbard's background, if you read it honestly, is great evidence for why this decision was the correct one.
Because trans men have no advantage in men's sport, whereas trans females do. It's not even about trans people at all, it's about preserving fairness in women's sports.
Before trans issues were widespread in culture, intersex athletes were also scrutinized. Hell, I remember when people were questioning whether having a testicle removed gave Lance Armstrong an advantage...
A war? What you're seeing are at least two phenomena:
1. Practices, including their legalization, that are causing moral outrage.
2. Political actors of various political sides tapping into the emotional charge of the subject matter for other political purposes.
The second is commonplace and part of the political toolbox and doesn't need much analysis here.
The first, however, should surprise no one. The real question is why anyone would expect social and cultural changes that involve the normalization of the gender paradigm and the compulsory acceptance of it in concrete ways to be accepted without so much as a complaint. Of course you will see a reaction. Of course people will react when biological men are allowed in women's restrooms. One has to be detached from reality to find that shocking.
> this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
Because biological men are generally stronger than biological women, and we're not talking about some weak correlation here. That's one reason we have sex-segregated sports. If you wish to attack sex-segregated sports, you're free to do so, but I think this involves repressing truths about deep sexual differences for the purpose of satisfying an ideological impulse or aim.
> so many of these anti-trans efforts end up hurting cis women too, the ones who happen to look too masculine or have too high of testosterone.
How are such people hurt? By whom and in what way? A key presupposition seems to be unstated.
> Gender is not as straightforward as bigots and transphobes would like to think.
The first unmet challenge is to define "gender" in the first place. The trouble with your claim is that no one can come up with a coherent notion, let alone one that has any correspondence with reality. People are simply expected and commanded to comply; no one is ever given anything sensible they might comply with even if they wanted to.
This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball), this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course.
Remember, sport is and has always been about statistical outliers competing. Fairness has never been, and will never be, a genuine consideration.
It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0]
> Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball)
We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences.
I would argue that it's the formerly presumed binary nature of sex/gender that made it a logical split for all sports. While marital arts and weightlifting tend to seperate by weight as well, that is because those particular events are particularly biased toward muscle mass and height/reach by proxy. Most sports are less clearly advantaged by size (soccer, for example). You just can't practically divide entire team sports by gradations of height, because there aren't enough players in a school for more than a few squads.
If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair.
> We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex.
I mean, we do have weight categories in combat sports, right? I don't see why we couldn't come up with similarly neutral categories if we think it's good to segment people out by physical advantages. The parent comment is making a good point, though: it feels like some people care a lot about physical advantages that map onto gender stuff they care about, and not a lot about weird genetic anomalies that provide physical advantages that aren't gendered.
We could do that! I'm just trying to say that given categories based on (biological) sex, we should find some criterion based on biological sex to sort people into said categories, which the OC decision seems to do (at least better than the alternatives I have encountered). I don't have a problem at all with finding different ways of defining categories for competitions.
Re: anomalies - I think this is just unavoidable in any sort of category system, and I don't have a good solution for it except to consider frequency and severity.
Well I think it bans women that thought/think that they are cis but actually aren't, which is a bit of a different story. A fairly tragic one. Intersex/trans/anything else people just don't really have a clean fit into a lot of places, which is unfortunate.
> this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course.
Well, not really. 56%[1] of young women think that trans women should not be allowed in women's sports.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
IMO the "better" division should be open. If we are going to do two classes, and we find that one class has some sort of physical advantage inherently, then that class should be the "open" one.
> Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
A lot of people (the majority?) don't understand the extent of PEDs usage in sports. When everyone cheats nobody does. I've heard the argument before for going an "anything goes" division from friends for some sports, but then people are just going to start dying regularly from side effects like in body building.
>>>> This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies.
What are those? fwiw - I don't think they should be included in the ban. Genetic advantage people in their natural gender is how sports works. I'm 5'7" - Lebron definitely has a genetic advantage over me. Banning him from basketball isn't doing anyone favors.
Santhi Soundarajan (1) shows exactly how this ends up catching cis women who were raised as women from birth. Which is why it's a bad idea to draw strict lines.
Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes.
This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one!
Hypothetically you could have three divisions: open, men, and women. In many contexts it's more practical to have two, where one is open. In those cases, if the sex that didn't win more was also the open division, then people would complain because both divisions would be dominated by players of one sex.
what always strikes me as weird is how often the conversation is framed around "men competing in women's sports" when trans women cant really be said to be biologically male anymore. Taking Estrogen and blocking testosterone has a huge effect on how fast/strong/athletic someone is. I feel like that should be the key point of discussion, but somehow always gets burried under other, kind of less relevant subjects (for example I dont think it matters that up until now no trans woman has really won anything significant, as that could always change in the future).
Testosterone and estrogen are not magic substances that eliminate bone density, preponderance of type II muscle fibres, favourable tendon insertions and all of the other athletic advantages conferred upon males in the womb. I have experience with women who take steroids for strength sports and I am not exaggerating when I say they could be out-competed by 17 year old male high school students with proper coaching.
> what always strikes me as weird is how often the conversation is framed around "men competing in women's sports" when trans women cant really be said to be biologically male anymore.
Just because they are not male, does not mean that they are female.
There is no way a man would ever compete in women's sports.
Let's imagine a con-man wanted to compete in women's sports. He would have to decide this early in life. Most trans people realize before they are 10. He would then have to spend the rest of his life pretending to be trans to not get his medal revoked.
Trans women are women. They don't have to pretend to be women. However, some trans women have to hide their identity and present as men, for their safety. Presenting as a gender you're not is incredibly taxing. There are high rates of depression and increased risk of suicide for people who have to hide their gender.
Besides the incredible psychological toll, our imaginary con-man would face bullying, harassment, physical assault, sexual violence, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, exclusion from healthcare, and increased risks of poverty and homelessness, which in turn correspond to greater risks of fatal violence.
The rights and legal status of transgender people vary by country. Our imaginary con-man might have restricted access to education, to sports, to bathrooms, and to marriage and military positions. As well as much, much worse.
On top of all that, our imaginary con-man would still have to train to be an Olympic athlete. Most men are not as fast or strong as the world's fastest and strongest women. Sex differences in athletic performance also depend on more than just biological differences. Living as a woman means only having access to the resources available to female athletes.
No man would go through all that for a women's medal.
> of youth sports have created clear incentives for them to prioritize competitive fairness over principles like inclusion, well-being, and fun.
In an event that is primarily focused on competitive fairness, what does inclusion have to do with it?
If playing sport is about fun, well-being, etc, then don't play in competitive events. You can't very well want to play in competitive events while complaining about competitive fairness.
It feels one sided because the author is an outsider - as the author readily admits - "It has been brought to my attention, however, that my blasé attitude toward sports makes me an outlier".
Turning to some actual numbers - this 2024 survey tells us that only ~15% of respondents said that their children participate in club sports or independent training (note that the categories are not exclusive). The same survey also says that ~10% of respondants think that their child can compete in professional sports, or be a national level team member. Finally, a similar 10% say that the "only the best players should receive time in games" is a fair policy at your child's age and level.
I think the point of the article is to maybe highlight how large the gulf might be between an typical outsider (and looking at the numbers above... and reminding ourselves that only ~50% of American youth are involved in organized sports at all), someone who is somewhat "in the game", and those who are really playing it (that 10% from above).
The problem for this argument is that there is no actual data that trans kids and specifically trans girls are any better at sport than other girls.
Literally no trans athletes winning anything. I think hacker news skews scientific so we can do the math, if say 1% of the athletes are trans we would expect them to win 1% of the medals in a fair contest. As it is, they don't even come anywhere close. There has not been a single olympic medal won by a trans athlete, so clearly they do not have some kind of magical advantage, in fact (and common sense would make this pretty obvious) they seem to have quite a statistical disadvantage.
> The problem for this argument is that there is no actual data that trans kids and specifically trans girls are any better at sport than other girls.
There is considerable evidence that they aren't. But that's not really relevant, because you have to remember segregation in sport has never been about competitive fairness, it has always been about allowing those who are socially superior to avoid the embarrassment of having to compete in an environment where they might be defeated by their social inferiors.
It is why women were long banned from competitions, and then shortly after exclusion seemed to harsh for evolving attitudes, they were segregated from men. And it is why trans people are being excluded from competition now. It's why racial segregation in sport was a thing. When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual, not the real reason, so counterevidence is irrelevant.
>...it has always been about allowing those who are socially superior to avoid the embarrassment of having to compete in an environment where they might be defeated by their social inferiors.
Is your argument actually that women don't generally compete with men in sports because the sports don't want to embarrass the male athletes if they lose? If so, I suspect this is a bad faith argument, but if not, you can simply do a little searching to find that there is often quite a bit of difference between the performance of top tier male athletes and top tier female athletes. For example, no woman has ever run a 4 minute mile in competition and more than 2,000 men have and even about 30 high school boys have. I am sure you can find other examples.
The moralizing parts of the conclusion of this article rejects it's own evidence. There are multiple studies cited by the article where the population average of the trans women group statistically significantly exceeds that of the cis women group. The article concludes:
"The exclusion of trans individuals also insults the skill and athleticism of both cis and trans athletes. While sex differences do develop following puberty, many of the sex differences are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy. Finally, if it is found that trans individuals have advantages in certain athletic events or sports; in those cases, there will still be a question of whether this should be considered unfair, or accepted as another instance of naturally occurring variability seen in athletes already participating in these events."
Does it really insult the skill and athleticism of cis and trans athletes to exclude trans women from women's sports? I don't think it does, but the article could not help but claim that it does. Often in debates such as this one, there are multiple levels of sophistry that annoy me. Such as the sequence 1. there is no evidence that trans women have an advantage over cis women in sports (false. there is evidence) 2. if you believe that there is any evidence, you must be a bigot (well, obviously untrue, there is evidence).
Women's sports leagues often emerge due to the easy bifurcation of the population into two groups- the easiest fault line to judge this as is 1 group with the athletic benefits of natural testosterone, and 1 group without the athletic benefits of natural testosterone. People are free to make whatever sports leagues they want, and with freedom of association they can make whatever rules they want. I will just find it completely unsurprising that the women's divisions will be relatively "closed" and the men's (or more acurately the "open") divisions will include any person that has produced testosterone naturally or become a trans man (or most things in between). It's the easiest bifurcation that reduces questions of fairness. Weight classes in wrestling fall into a similar manner of thinking for me; even if it could be argued that the guy that barely couldn't make it into a lower weight class should be fighting within that class, you have to draw the line somewhere.
If you want to see men dressed as women, watch "This is the Army" (1943), an American wartime musical comedy film that features actor Ronald Regan, and a lot of musical numbers performed by men in drag.
Transgender athletes are not barred from women's events. Female athletes who identify as men, or otherwise do not identify as women, can still compete in this category, as they have been doing already.
What the IOC's new policy actually does is make male athletes ineligible for competition in the female category, with very few exceptions. These exceptions are for athletes who are technically male but have a disorder of sex development that confers no male advantage, e.g. CAIS.
If you try to define athletic divisions by sex, you're going to have a hard time. The world's best athletes probably all have some unusual biology. About 1.7% of people are not completely biological male or female. I would expect that proportion to be higher for Olympic athletes. Excluding 1.7% or 2% or 10% of the world's best athletes from competing would not be fair.
When I was growing up, I remember some drama because East German and Soviet male athletes were trying to compete as women. If male to female trans athletes were allowed to compete, I imagine it would just be a matter of time before a female athlete would HAVE to be trans in order to stand a competitive chance.
My two cents as a transfem athlete:
The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned.
There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age.
> The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany
As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.
Trans women have competed as women in the Olympics once ever and have 0 medals. By the numbers it's a non issue under previous rules (despite the incredible amount of ink spilled over it). People are talking about trans women here but the vast majority of people affected by this change are women who are not trans who have a "disorder of sexual development".
The IOC policy is specifically that athletes need to test negative for the SRY gene to be eligible to compete in the female category. Imane Khelif won gold in the 2024 Summer Olympics women's boxing event, and has since admitted to having the SRY gene. So it isn't a non-issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif#2026
So it's the headline that's inaccurate. It should read "bars women with the SRY gene" rather than "transgender."
The ruling itself is much more nuanced and covers a lot of situations, including extremely rare disorders of sexual development (DSD) and their variations. The most recent controversies on this topic did not involve transgender athletes, but that's largely unknown or misunderstood by people who only know this topic by headlines and sound bites.
The headline writers are relating it back to the topic which brings the most clicks, which is transgender athletes.
The IOC didn't go on a crusade against transgender athletes specifically. They were refining the rules on sex-based divisions and included a lot of considerations and nuance.
It should read "bars male athletes from women's events".
The page you link to doesn’t say that. “As of February 2026, Khelif had not described herself as intersex or as having a DSD.”
That page is at the center of a massive debate on Wikipedia for that specific topic.
Khelif responded to a question about having the SRY gene like this:
> In a February 2026 interview with L'Équipe, Khelif was asked: "To be clear, you have a female phenotype but possess the SRY gene, an indicator of masculinity", to which she responded: "Yes, and it’s natural. I have female hormones."
So she was asked if she had the SRY gene and she responded "Yes". That's also consistent with the previous issues with governing bodies excluding her under their rules, but they are not allowed to share test results for obvious reasons.
The debate now is that maybe she didn't understand the question or gave the wrong answer in the interview. That's why the Wikipedia page contains the interview text but then immediately contradicts the interview content.
There is a leaked medical report showing that Khelif has internal testes:
https://www.dw.com/en/algeria-condemns-baseless-imane-khelif...
The Talk page has extensive debates on whether this can be mentioned, and the current "consensus" is that it can't be.
The article is saying that there are fairly credible denials no?
The guidelines for trans female athletes for the 2024 Paris Olympics involved transitioning before the age of 12/puberty to be eligible.
There's more info at https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/paris-2024-olym...
Incidentally, many countries/states are working hard to make it impossible to transition that early.
At 12 you simply do not have sufficient capacity to make a good decision on the matter.
That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender, it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case.
Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
Which is why puberty blockers are prescribed to transgender children, delaying puberty until later in life when a "good decision" can be made, usually closer to the mid to late teens.
Sadly, it's not possible to "delay puberty" until later in life. Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. It can't be reversed later if the person changes their mind.
Yup. Absolutely insane that university "educated" people have been telling us that kids who believe in Santa Claus are capable of making decisions like this.
Have you considered that due to their education and research those people may know more on the subject than you do?
Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or enviromemtal lack of acceptance or support.
Is it fair to say that they can just compete in the men's division?
From a biological perspective, the women being banned here are not just men and as far as I'm aware cannot realistically compete in the men's division any more than any other woman. Practically these changes bar women athletes with certain medical differences from competing in the Olympics.
I'm not an expert so idk whether that's fair or not but that's what this decision is doing.
To be fair, that could be said of many other medical conditions as well, especially chromosomal abnormalities such as Down Syndrome. Many humans, from the moment they are born and through no fault of their own, have virtually no hope of ever competing in the Olympics let alone winning, just because at such competitive extremes, any significant genetic disadvantage takes you out of the running.
I'm barred from the Olympics, due to my too short legs and flat-footedness, for the high jump event.
Can you define what you mean when you use the word “women” here?
My understanding is that these are males.
If you have a genuine interest in this, I recommend starting with an understanding of the sex-gender distinction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex%E2%80%93gender_distinction
Like most things in biologicy, categorization is a nightmare unless you have a very specific use case in mind. In this case I'm talking about women phenotypically and socially (including self-identity) and especially athletes assigned female at birth. These women are clearly not just "males".
For most of the sports there is no men so division it's open for everyone.
It would not be fair, because the point of having divisions is allow women to compete in a competition that is not dominated by men.
I think you're falling for Sticker Swap Fallacy. The goal is to have fair match-ups in sports. Gender and sex are two possible labels to use to assist with this, but they're imperfect enough that we probably ought to not use them as the primary differentiator.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C7LcpRtrHiKJRoAEp/sticker-sh...
The solution is simple: class every sport like boxing.
Pick a sports-relevant metric and split into divisions. Some sports will naturally fall into gendered divisions, while others will have varying degrees of co-ed competition among competitors of similar ability.
The way out of this is not to pick a better scissor of sex or gender, it's to pick a better scissor of ability.
This "solution" can really only be proposed by someone who has not played sports. This would simply result in women being unable to compete in sports professionally, outside of a couple small niches like ultra long distance swimming and a couple sub-disciplines of gymnastics.
I do not consider that to be a good thing.
It really depends on the way classes are divided. Dismissing the general concept demonstrates a fear of change rather than a legitimate openness to fair play.
No it doesn't, and no it doesn't. Proposing this concept demonstrates a profound ignorance of what competition at the top level of sports actually looks like.
The concept is just bad, unless your goal is to prevent women from being able to make a living playing professional sports.
The thing is, we're already using a scissor for ability, just a poor one with the exact problem you describe - it renders trans women unable to make a living playing professional sports. Throwing one group under the bus for another cannot be avoided so long as sex or gender are part of sports divisions.
Please let go of the need for this.
You are clearly out of your depth. Have you ever competed in high level sports? Please don't speak on things you know nothing about. It takes a lot of gall to tell someone 'please let go of the need for this' when they are pointing this out. I will do no such thing, but I likely will give up trying to educate you.
I won't respond further unless you pick an example sport, and propose how your "scissor for ability" would work, in concrete detail. If you do this, I will be happy to explain why this would result in neither women _nor trans women_ having any chance to make a living as professional athletes.
Let's use the present scissor and the current state of affairs, which at present excludes some women for the sake of others. Which, I'll remind you, comes with all of the problems we currently experience.
Doesn’t Boxing use weight classes?
> It would not be fair, because the point of having divisions is allow women to compete in a competition that is not dominated by men.
Really, what it is is being dominated by Testosterone. Also why we ban steroid use, and many other things along the same lines.
I would suggest that most Olympians - both female and male (whatever your definition) likely have a higher than normal amount of that hormone.
Almost every single person on Earth is not built of the right genetic stuff to compete with male Olympic athletes, me and you included. Why do we need a carve out for one particular group because of their genetic bad luck?
The Olympics are looked up to by a large range of people and organization that don't actually participate in the Olympics.
This goes beyond just affecting the Olympics, but setting an example for the world to follow and gives other organizations the cover and courage to follow while being able to deflect to simply setting the same standards of the Olympics.
This is the most objective viewpoint on transgenders in sports:
https://shows.acast.com/realscienceofsport/episodes/whytrans...
Why?
Only logical result is Transgender Olympics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Done_Quick
Already in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Games
Why not Human Olympics?
Already exists, it's what people refer to as "male olympics". As far as I know, females aren't banned from competing. It is just that they don't stand a chance in most disciplines. The whole point of female olympics is to keep males out.
That’s not true. Men’s gymnastics and women’s gymnastics are totally different sets of events and men would get trounced in a women’s event.
Can trans male who transitioned before puberty compete in male olympics while being pumped full of steroids legally?
Maybe they should accept that they simply aren't competitive if they can't compete against their own sex. There's no shame in it, most people aren't competitive, certainly so at this level.
Why not ignore gender labels and go by chromosomal configuration? There could be XY and XX [1] olympics. And then there should be X, XYY, XXX, XXXY, XXYY, and all the other possibilities [2].
There is more complexity than the binary in the expression of sex in humans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_huma...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
All biological categories are fuzzy around the edges. Those fuzzy edges do not invalidate the category. The existence of small #'s of people with actual physical intersex conditions (not "I feel like <x>") in no way conflicts with humans being sexually dimorphic.
I agree with you in general, but I think it would be fair to let XY individuals with CAIS compete on the female side - their bodies do not respond to testosterone.
This is common sense. The only reason it didn’t happen sooner was folks being bullied to do things out of false claims of “inclusion” that resulted in deep discrimination against, mostly female, athletes.
The segregation of sports was always about sex and not gender. There are simply physical differences between across sexes that makes mixed-sex competition grossly inequitable in most sports. “Gender expression” doesn’t change that and mixing up “gender” and “sex” in sports was a trainwreck that is thankfully now being undone.
This is the right decision.
Exactly. It's impossible to have both inclusion and fair play. We have to pick one, and as a parent of daughters who compete at fairly high levels it's more important to preserve the integrity of women's sports.
Is there not an option to have inclusion at grassroots level and fair play as the level of competition gets higher?
Sure, I guess that's an option for youth sports in the prepubescent age groups. As a practical matter most youth sports leagues and schools aren't going to hassle with sex screening tests for little kids.
But once puberty hits everything changes. My teenage daughter played travel club volleyball on a pretty good team, and during practice they would occasionally run drills with the boys team. Even at that age the difference in hitting power and vertical was enormous, and those differences only grow larger with age. Men and women are literally playing different games. Beyond just fairness, forcing girls to compete against biological males becomes a safety risk due to concussions from taking a ball to the head.
In my experience competing in different things, that's typical: Local organizations are free to set their own local rules, but once you cross over into events that make you eligible for higher level competition they have to strictly abide by the national level rules. I couldn't use my results from grassroots competitions to qualify for national level events, generally.
It’s not even a level thing[0]. I think the physical advantages that come with male puberty are significant even at 14-15.
https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...
So, where are the scores and scores of trans athletes dominating women's sports? If this is the sort of problem all the people crowing about it think it to be, we should have women with poorly fitting athletic gear and facial hair all over the place taking golds from ciswomen. We don't.
Like this is literally just fucking with transpeople for nothing and I am wide open for correction on this if anybody can find an actual incident of something of note happening, but until then, it's just weird reactionaries screaming into the void as far as I'm concerned, and the outcomes will be largely the same: more invasive procedures for ciswomen to endure, and excluded athletes who did nothing wrong apart from be who they are.
This is a matter of principle, fair play, and safety. Whether it's a tiny number or "scores and scores" is irrelevant.
If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site. I can't vouch for it being completely accurate but you can use it as a starting point for further research to educate yourself about the issue.
https://www.shewon.org/
> This is a matter of principle, fair play, and safety. Whether it's a tiny number or "scores and scores" is irrelevant.
What if it's 0?
> If you're looking for specific incidents then start with this site.
A deeply unbiased source, I'm sure.
Anyway I'd love to but all their archive links are the same. Looks like someone wrote a for loop incorrectly. But to be blunt, this is the exact same sort of nonsense as VAERS and deserves exactly the same dismissal: Compiled data assembled from the public with no verification, by people with no credentials, with a clear axe to grind.
Edit: Also, a SHIT LOAD of these are for second/third/whatever place, not even for wins. If reality backed the assertions made, transwomen should be DESTROYING women in sports.
There actually does have to be a lot of them, frankly, because otherwise it is just a nothingburger. Just a burger with a whole lot of nothing.
More important than national security and government integrity, I'm told.
> More important than national security and government integrity, I'm told.
Certainly seems that way for a certain subset of voters. They'd rather lose the election than let women compete against females only.
> They'd rather lose the election than let women compete against females only.
Fascinating political analysis. It's weird how a small group of people are deeply driven by identity politics above literally anything else, especially when those people typically aren't even slightly affected (and generally have never watched a single women's event in their life).
I sometimes wonder if people like you scream at politicians because of the introduction of the pitch clock in baseball, too? Do you waste this much energy on the rulebooks other sports come up with? Or just like, when you think it's icky sex stuff?
If you can find me some politicians, I would gladly yell at them that the DH and the pitch clock are unnatural and immoral.
Many people like to focus on the purely physical attributes, but there's a clear distinction even in realms like chess.
The highest ranked female chess player is right around #55 globally, wherein the top 50 all are dominated by men.
Some of this may have to do with men having more interest/higher propensity of starting young which is where most grandmasters begin their journey, but still an interesting thing to consider nonetheless.
It's largely because chess has historically been a boys-club type activity. Women were actively discouraged, if not barred, from playing on grounds of misogyny. So, even today, there's very little women taking it seriously.
Of course, we all know there's no difference in the level of intellect or strategy between men and women.
> Of course, we all know there's no difference in the level of intellect or strategy between men and women.
Do we?
I thought it was commonly accepted that the average and median are the same but that men have more outliers on both sides.
That’s the greater variability theory. The male median is also higher so when you combine the two the long tail to the right will be dominated by males, so will the long tail on the left but to a lesser extent.
Many IQ tests have been designed to minimize the difference between males and females, primarily by reducing g-loading. Males pull ahead after puberty, prior to this they have an IQ disadvantage. So you have to take these factors into account when trying to make a fair and proper assessment.
Males have better spatial abilities compared to females. Most probably as a evolutionary trait required for hunting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polgár
But has she ever passed a test to prove she doesn't have the SRY gene?
/s
What would do about someone like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan
That athlete was excluded from the women's competition on the basis of having male physiological advantage. Exactly what the Olympics are now doing.
Androgen insensitivity syndrome means that her cells do not react to testosterone. What male advantage is there if her cells don't react to testosterone?
Soundarajan's androgen insensitivity was reported as being partial (i.e. PAIS, and not CAIS), which implies some degree of testosterone-driven masculinization.
If you segregate by sex alone then trans men get a big advantage.
The rulings do not mean they now segregate by sex alone. Someone who was AFAB and does not have an SRY gene would was taking HRT would not qualify for the female division due to the HRT.
A trans man who was not taking HRT could compete, though.
The key distinction is that gender identity is not what's being tested.
Because they're taking testosterone?
Wouldn't they be barred based on using banned substances?
They're not all taking banned substances. Case in point, Hergie Bacyadan and Elis Lundholm competed in the last Summer and Winter Olympics respectively.
Both Hergie Bacyadan and Elis Lundholm has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, and competes in the women's divisions. Their status as trans men has nothing to do with their eligibility to participate.
This would be like if two trans, who has not undergone any hormone replacement therapy or surgery, would compete in men's divisions.
I thought exactly the same thing until I had a politically agnostic fencing judge sit down and explain over the course of an hour and a half all of the steps national and international regulating organizations for that sport had taken to avoid issues with unfair competition. Whether similar field-leveling safeguards could be baked into the rules for other sports is left as an exercise, but this particular instance suggests there's more nuance here than your comment suggests.
Depends on the time of the transition. So those who transitioned before puberty are disadvantaged
You're assuming that people arguing for bans on trans athletes are making good faith arguments about competition in sports. You shouldn't.
Here in the US a significant part of antipathy towards trans people is the deeply held belief that being trans in public is a kind of sex abuse to the public. If you listen to what much of the debate has turned into here, it has little to do with competition, and far more with the obsession over what genitals people have in locker rooms and bathrooms.
At the end of the day the number of trans athletes is so vanishingly small it's not worth caring about the impacts on competition, when the debate itself is another framing of the conservative desire to make being trans illegal.
Walk me through how you think this is going to be enforced? Athletes will need to start dropping their pants? Disgusting invasion of privacy.
The article addresses that. Given all the testing already, this is a trivial addition:
“Under the new policy eligibility will be determined by a one-time gene test, according to the I.O.C. The test, which is already being used in track and field, requires screening via saliva, a cheek swab or a blood sample.“
You think Olympic athletes have any expectation of privacy around drug testing already? They have to register their every move and piss while being visible on demand.
Well the article says a cheek swab or blood test.
You think the only way to medically test for male vs female is to visually id genitals?
The article already covered it: It's minimally invasive (cheek swab) testing typically for the SRY gene - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determining_region_Y_prote...
This is less invasive than all of the other doping tests that athletes already go through, which require blood draws.
Doesn’t really work though - and given athletes are on the edge of performance there’s probably more people that fall in between than you might expect
From the Wikipedia article:
While the presence or absence of SRY has generally determined whether or not testis development occurs, it has been suggested that there are other factors that affect the functionality of SRY.[25] Therefore, there are individuals who have the SRY gene, but still develop as females, either because the gene itself is defective or mutated, or because one of the contributing factors is defective.[26] This can happen in individuals exhibiting a XY, XXY, or XX SRY-positive[27] karyotype[better source needed] Additionally, other sex determining systems that rely on SRY beyond XY are the processes that come after SRY is present or absent in the development of an embryo. In a normal system, if SRY is present for XY, SRY will activate the medulla to develop gonads into testes. Testosterone will then be produced and initiate the development of other male sexual characteristics. Comparably, if SRY is not present for XX, there will be a lack of the SRY based on no Y chromosome. The lack of SRY will allow the cortex of embryonic gonads to develop into ovaries, which will then produce estrogen, and lead to the development of other female sexual characteristics.[28]
The IOC included exceptions for certain DSDs.
Please read the linked articles first before jumping to Wikipedia to try to counter them. The decision is more nuanced than you assume
The Yahoo article linked says that exceptions will be made for people with conditions like that:
“Athletes diagnosed with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) ‘or other rare differences/disorders in sex development (DSDs), who do not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone’ may still be allowed to participate in the women’s category.”
The test is used for initial screening only.
Presence of SRY in an athlete registered as female means further tests must be undertaken, with permission of the athlete, to determine eligibility.
Absence of SRY means the screening is passed and the athlete is eligible to compete.
In a word: so? Intersex people exist, you have to draw the line somewhere, the presence of SRY seems as good as any.
Transition changes biology. We don't yet have the technology to fully reverse the effects of male puberty, so there can be reasonable debate about trans women who transitioned after puberty, but early transitioners have no meaningful advantage. Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.
This is also true for many cisgender intersex women with XY chromosomes. Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth. Drawing the line at having a Y chromosome makes no sense.
> Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.
I'm sorry, but this is not true. "Puberty blockers" do not complete suppress the effects of male genetics. They only attempt to block certain hormonal effects.
It is not possible to completely block the effects of having male genes by simple hormone modulation.
> Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth
We do not determine eligibility for sports classes based on ability to give birth for good reason. It's not a proxy for the genetic athletic differences being addressed by these classes.
Individuals with androgen insensitivity typically cannot give birth. This an extremely rare possibility, not a typical feature of the condition.
There are athletic sex differences even amongst prepubescent children, mostly caused by the testosterone surge in utero.
See https://womenssportspolicy.org/pre-puberty-male-female-child....
Quite a biased source, no? This doesn't provide evidence that these differences are biological. Boys are much more likely to exercise than girls due to social norms: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10478357/.
https://archive.is/WRmUo
Has anyone measured trans athletes performance?
I see this topic come up repeatedly in different guises, protect women from the evil trans-agenda. But I haven't seen where this is actually a problem.
Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
Many studies show with in ~10% female ranges of ability , but, having more fast twitch muscle fiber and bone mass from male puberty if they went through it. Bone mass does eventually drop to female levels but over decades not years so athletes would likely be out of athletic prime before that happens. Studies showing more dramatic results that stand out in my memory that lean toward transwomen outperforming transwomen are studies done on military veterans comparing to general population metrics of muscle mass for athletic activity levels also done with a very low population count I believe they only looked at under 300 trans women. Regardless we need more research, but there are a comically small amount of trans athletes seeking professional level sports, like I think <20 for all college level for instance.
Anecdotally, I found as a deskjob, pilates and casual weight lifting trans woman, I lost dramatic amount of strength and muscle mass. 20 pounds now feels like 50 pounds did for myself pre-transition. I usually participate with women and the instructor/personal helps with modifications usually aimed at women just getting into fitness. Running joke amongst friends is how easily I am outperformed by my female friends at the gym/pilates/etc. However, that's since my body is low testosterone even for females, its checked twice a year because of it, normally It's once a year for most trans people. Other friends retained a lot of their strength, but are mechanics, so its really situational in my opinion, and its a super hard and interesting topic of research because of it
> Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
Regularly. It's the competing women who are complaining, though. They feel it is unfair to compete with men.
Citation? I asked because I'm curious, and Googling just gives opinion pieces and not data.
[Edit] Currently -3 but no study referenced. Do people just not like the idea of providing evidence for their position? The women I've spoken to about this article cite men being the problem, whether its sexual harassment, or other sexist attitudes. Not one felt that trans participation in their sport of choice was in their top ten complaints.
> I asked because I'm curious, and Googling just gives opinion pieces and not data.
Women complaining are voicing an opinion. Is this a good enough citation for the claim that women don't want to compete with men?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gndSDgsMnKI
You can debate what policies are the most fair without calling trans women "men."
Considering I was asking whether there was evidence on trans-performance, sure it matters a little.
That's fine if they don't want to compete with men, but the statements were because "it's unfair". I was curious if there had been any studies on this.
> Considering I was asking whether there was evidence on trans-performance, sure it matters a little.
Well, (and I hesitate to say this because of HN guidelines, but) it was in the article, which I assumed you read. It was this assumption that made me think you wanted evidence that it is women who are complaining about competing against men.
FTFA
> Late last year Dr. Jane Thornton, the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific director and a Canadian former Olympic rower, presented the initial findings of a review of athletes who are transgender or have differences of sexual development, known as DSD, and are competing in women’s sports. That analysis, which has not been made public, stated athletes born with male sexual markers retained physical advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
I don't see that anywhere in the linked Yahoo article.
Does it have a link to any of the findings?
The linked article is to the nytimes. I dunno which article is the yahoo one. This story was on the nytimes, it's the one under discussion.
> Does it have a link to any of the findings?
The findings I posted where from the linked article, to the nytimes. The findings were exactly as I posted them; in brief, athletes born with male markers retain their physical advantages.
There’s probably a reason the analysis has not been made public.
It’s not evidence until published because it can’t be disputed.
I can't believe you need a study to show that a man turned woman has an advantage. It's clear men vs women have an advantage in almost every discipline... So are you simply unsure if the transition process doesn't totally ruin them and degrade their performance to that of a woman?
This is more about logic.
For this article to be relevant a spot for the Olympics of either gender has been taken by a trans athlete.
Which by conclusion means that a trans person outperformed the other gender.
Taking part in the Olympics is a difficult endeavor, for which you must qualify first.
That's a misleading way to talk about "outperforming". When the US brings over 200 people to the olympics, then if cis and trans athletes have exactly the same performance and without other bias you'd expect to see 1-2 trans US olympians every year just by chance. And you'd expect them to have the same medal rates as anyone else from the US. When someone asks if there's evidence of trans athletes outperforming cis athletes, that's not what they're asking for.
The problem is that someone who's transitioned is no longer a man. After undergoing surgery and hormone treatment for a long period of time, a trans athlete falls somewhere between men and women in terms of capability. They'd have no more success competing against men than naturally born women would, yet they still have advantages when competing against naturally born women.
Unfortunately, while the most equitable solution might be to create a separate category unique to trans individuals, there aren't enough trans athletes to make it feasible (yet?). It's rather sad that transitioning means a person can no longer compete in sports, but I'm not sure there's a better alternative.
You still have your larger bone structure. Larger musculature structure and different muscle insertions. different ligament structure. different skin structure. different grip strength. Broader shoulders, narrower pelvis, different angled limbs. all of that isn't going away even if it atrophies. And you aren't going to let it atrophy because you are an athlete in training managing your dietary macros. Maybe recovery isn't as efficient lacking so much excess testosterone but you still have some.
Is there actually an advantage? that's toted. but no one can ever point to real data about it... and all the data suggests the exact opposite... that for most cases: cis-women out-compete trans-women.
> but no one can ever point to real data about it...
It's in the article. You may not agree with their findings, but it's there.
It’s not in the article.
They list their findings but no data. They effectively are just issuing an opinion. The opinion may be more considered than the rest of ours, but it’s not data.
Source?
From the article:
> Late last year Dr. Jane Thornton, the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific director and a Canadian former Olympic rower, presented the initial findings of a review of athletes who are transgender or have differences of sexual development, known as DSD, and are competing in women’s sports. That analysis, which has not been made public, stated athletes born with male sexual markers retained physical advantages, including among those that had received treatment to reduce testosterone.
Let's be a little science-focused, okay?
That very quoted section indicates the analysis has not been made public. IMO that's very fishy and makes me question the authenticity of the source. What is Dr. Thornton hiding, exactly? Why conceal the review, methodology and data? Even if preliminary it should be released.
> That analysis, which has not been made public
So much for science.
I would be interested to see that analysis, and it's unfortunate that it is not publicly available in some fashion. I'm mainly curious about the number of DSD-expressing vs transgender athletes they reviewed. Trans athletes in the Olympics or even competing at an Olympic level are vanishingly rare.
A source is not required, taking part in the Olympics alone, means outperforming your countries other athletes. If that doesn’t happen there wouldn’t be a reason for the article.
> Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
The closest controlled study we have on this topic is not in athletes but in U.S. military servicemembers and their standard fitness test: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36271916/
This isn't a good study for professional athletes training for competition because the fitness test is not analogous to professional competition. They only need to pass with a reasonable score but most are not competing for the top position like in the Olympics
The study found that
> transgender females' performance showed statistically significantly better performance than cisgender females until 2 years of GAHT in run times and 4 years in sit-up scores and remained superior in push-ups at the study's 4-year endpoint.
So of the 3 simple activities they tested their performance remained higher in one test (run times) until 2 years, another test (sit-ups) until 4 years, and remained higher at the end of the limited 4-year study period in the last test (push-ups).
This study was widely circulated as "proof" that hormone therapy erases sex-based gains after only 2 years, but that's not even an accurate read of the study. It's also not measuring athletes who are training or trying to compete.
Depending on the sport, hormone therapy cannot be expected to compensate for sex some important sex differences like physical structure. Male anatomy is simply different in ways that provide different types of leverage or angles (like Q Angle, which runners will talk about, or reach, which is important to boxers)
This is a very taboo topic to discuss and honestly I'm a little nervous to even comment about it here pseudonymously. The popular culture discussion of the topic is very different than the sports science discussion of the topic, where sex differences have long been accepted to be innate and irreversible, regardless of hormone therapy.
"born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it)
The usual term is "cisgender", or "cis" for short.
"Cis" and "Trans" both come from Latin; the former means "the same side of" and the latter means "the other side of". If you are happy to be on the same side of the gender binary as what you were assigned when you were born then you are "cisgender"; if you are unhappy with that state of affairs (regardless of how much work you have put into changing it) then you are "transgender".
Adding to this: If you do not want to reference the current gender, you can also use "Assigned Female at Birth" (AFAB), or "Assigned Male at Birth" (AMAB).
This is useful when clarifying terms, when you do not know the persons identity, or when discussing groups based on the factory default settings.
Yep. :)
Now you say it like that, I did know that. Thank you.
You're welcome! <3
Certainly some of the high profile cases have been fairly absurd. A mid-tier male athletic transitions, and then blows the female record out of the water and gets gold. What I don't know is whether there are wider stats rather than some really big notable cases. It wouldn't surprise me, I just don't have the facts at the moment.
> A mid-tier male athletic transitions, and then blows the female record out of the water and gets gold.
Do you have an example of this happening?
Lia Thomas.
Why are all these innocent questioners asking for more evidence not familiar with the existence of the evidence they are asking for?
Considering they feel so strongly about it, they should already have seen all this.
If I'm reading this wikipedia page right, she got first place in one race at a national championship but was 9 seconds behind the 4:24 record.
Pre-transition Lia Thomas wasn’t mid-tier, but I suspect you already knew that
Mid-tier or not is a judgement call.
Regardless, Lia went from not being in the front of the pack, to being in the front of the pack:
“By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to fifth on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle.”
65th to 1st in one category, and 554th to 5th in another.
It is fair to say there was a significant increase in rank post-transition.
"Just asking questions" but leftishly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Hubbard
This power lifter set regional junior records as a young man then quit the sport and didn't compete for 16 years. After transitioning she went on to win gold medals in numerous international competitions as a woman.
There is no standard 'trans athlete'. Every case is different.
Transition is a process. Potentially a long one without a clear point of completion. Which makes things more complicated.
No idea on the hard data. but... We classify competitions for a reason. The competition is more interesting when the competitors are categorized into similar ability.
You can't bring your formula1 to a touring car race just because you feel like it is a touring car.
Personally I think at the top level there should be an unlimited class. within the rules of the sport anyone can enter, then at various lower prestige levels participation is limited according to some parameter.
One interesting example of this is the UTR system for tennis. It is agnostic in gender as wells as age, and tournaments can be held purely based on the UTR range
bad comparison - here is one better, not a perfect one...
You can't enter a car into a boating competition. The question here is: if you take basic precautions to make it the same class of boat - a modified car turned into a boat should be a valid entry - provided the engine speed roughly matches.
People worry about cars on water here, not knowing that doesn't exist by definition: any car in water has been modified from a car to be a boat. you may recognize that it was once a car - but that's vestigial shell stuff. the inter-workings are a propeller - not a wheel.
I see your argument and has some merit but isn't persuasive enough. I would posit that its a bit too loose and that it breaks down on biological people have many more complicated systems that aren't simply re-categorized similar to your car and boat comparison.
For better or worse nor is our medical science sophisticated enough to swap out the systems to be true comparables (and I don't mean to offend anyone).
> No idea on the hard data
Great thanks!
> Do trans-athletes regularly out perform "born as" (not sure the best way to phrase it) athletes?
No, both because there are very few trans athletes in competition, and because trans athletes (except trans women who have not started or are less than a year into hormone therapy) have net athletic disadvantages, when considering all factors relevant to performance in almost any real sport, compared to cisgender people of the same gender identity.
I mean, if you had a sport that isolated grip strength alone, trans women would have an advantage over cis women, but aside from rather contrived cases like that, they don't.
There's a reason the poster woman for the political movement around this in the US is a cisgender woman whose story of "unfair competition" is tying with a trans woman for fifth place behind four other cisgender women (and having to hold a sixth place trophy in photos, since there were not duplicates on hand for the same rank) in an intercollegiate swimming competition.
olympics should be entirely unisex. simple as that.
Men who weigh 100kg are also banned from participating in the 63kg weightlifting category. So what? There are physical traits that offer advantages in sports. We bucketize so that we see more interesting competitions (aka a 120kg weightlifter would completely dominate all of the smaller folks, every single time, so what's the point of competing ).
I wonder if anyone has measured the speed in which reality is codified into law or regulation. Women have been fighting against males in female sports for many, many years. Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
To educate others reading this, it's far from "obvious" how to classify gender in sports. Checking if they have the right "parts" physically doesn't do it. Checking for hormone levels doesn't do it. Even checking for Y chromosomes doesn't do it.
In my opinion the way forward is to stop trying to find arbitrary ways to define gender, and just start making competition classes based on whatever factors are relevant to the event. E.g. a women with high testosterone? They can compete with men or women with the same testosterone bracket. This would also let men with low-T compete fairly rather then be excluded from the games.
It's also relevant at what point other genetic changes are "unfair." There are absolutely genetic traits that give people HUGE advantages in various competitions. Just like the gender-related properties, these are natural and yet result in unfair competitions.
If you have a Y chromosome your sex is male. It’s not a matter of opinion. Wikipedia isn’t exactly a bastion of conservatism and this is pretty clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system
Since you trust Wikipedia over us:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
For Swyer syndrome, A 2017 study estimated that the incidence of Swyer syndrome is approximately 1 in 100,000 females. Fewer than 100 cases have been reported as of 2018.
For both the genetic disorders, they would have to be beneficial or at least not an disadvantage, for elite sport activity in order to be an issue for misclassification. For a sex-determination system, they could simply add an exception for Swyer syndrome and postpone the decision until such individual presented themselves at an Olympic competition.
If you pay attention, your source has an asterisk of “typically” and “usually”, aswell as a distinction between phenotype and karyotype traits. While it is true that the majority of people with a Y chromosome are male, there are many people with Y chromosomes you’d call female because of their phenotype (which is what society primarily cares about), among other cicumstances.
I specifically said sex. Gender is mostly undefined. If you say that gender is the societal presentation as male or female, but you can’t define male from female then what are you defining? Its the “trans women are women” contradiction.
The problem with your proposed 'fuzzy divisions' is that they're not compatible with the zeitgeist of 'seeing the best compete', and 'drug-free' sports, as there's no reason to disallow performance-enhancing-drugs if we're already splitting into divisions.
Actually, you bring up an excelling additional argument for the sort of bracketing I proposed. It also works for drugs!
There is significant grey area wrt to "doping" too in the sense that a performance enhancing drug may express as a larger than normal amount of a naturally occurring substance. So did the person dope, or is that their natural genetics? In my scheme, WHO CARES!
Beyond that, I suppose there is the usual argument against more serious and non-natural forms of doping that it is physically detrimental to the competitors and by allowing it you are encouraging or pressuring people to essentially harm themselves.
Still, competition classes could be helpful in some of the doping grey areas.
Why is checking for a Y chromosome not sufficient? This does not seem to me like an arbitrary definition. What am I missing?
It's in fact possible to develop a female body with XY chromosomes:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6586948/
Also warning that article has images that may be inappropriate in a public setting. I didn't realize when I linked it.
Thank you. But the Y test still seems sufficient. Every criterion will have false positives and negatives. With the Y test the false negative (you present as a woman but have a Y chromosome) is rare and the vast majority of cases are handled well. If you have this condition you must compete against men (given the Y chromosome test rule) or not compete. If you’re dying to be in the Olympics as a woman but have the Y chromosome, you’re just out of luck. Not everyone can be a concert pianist either. No rule makes things wonderful for 100% of humans. The Y test gets very close.
There will always be outliers.
High level sports consists entirely of outliers. That’s kind of the point of the olympics. This newest rule is nothing more than a misogynist rule to turn the women’s division into the “no more than statistically average” division.
Almost every gold medal winner in the past games would not have been affected by this new rule, so that's a biiit hyperbolic. Those athletes are still far outside the normal performance of women (or men, for that matter).
Total nonsense. Sports are separated by sex, not gender. Sex is a biological reality, whereas gender is made up nonsense hiding behind the fact that many people equate the word 'sex' to sexual intercourse. That allowed 'gender' to flourish and confuse people.
'Gender' in it's modern form, was coined by John Money, the psychologist/sexologist responsible for the genital mutilation of many children, and the suicide of at least one of them due to his involvement of sexualized behavior during 'treatment'.
>checking for Y chromosomes doesn't do it
Lol why does this not do it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrom...
Among others
I am going to try to keep my response apolitical to try to avoid fanning a culture war. That Wiki is the exact reason we are in this situation because we are bringing up points for 1 in 20000 or 0.005% of the population. Any system designed around 0.005% edge cases is going to be so complex that it is functionally impossible to do in practice. That is why one side says the solution is "obvious" because we have a simple rule that covers 99.9% of cases and the other 0.1% is unfortunately effectively barred from high level competition. Note, high level competition already bars 99.9% of people. Even though the opposing side is correct in pointing out these edge cases, it does nothing to advance an actual solution.
There are statistically around 15 women AFAB with XY chromosomes in the NCAA by those numbers (assuming no correlation between Swyer syndrome and athletic performance).
There are currently around 10 openly transgender women in the NCAA.
Small numbers either way.
Except I proposed a solution, which you ignored (I'm assuming here that I'm your "opposing side".)
Also, there are a significant number of these sorts of arguments in high-level sports, probably precisely because these "0.1%" cases are exactly the ones that result in exceptional ability relative to norms. It's also curious that there is such obsession about naturally occurring genetic outliers with respect to females or gender but absolute silence about naturally occurring genetic outliers among men unrelated to gender. And surprise surprise the top athletes often have such outlier genetics!
If you're drawing a distinction between natural genetic difference related to only gender and no other factors then sadly it's exactly a culture war, not a war based in science or fairness.
Because in a specific minority of the population it disagrees with the gender assigned at birth for obvious reasons. There are plenty of resources you could read on intersex instead of lol at something you don’t understand
> Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
A few reasons:
1. Sex is not as straightforward as most people think, and what to do with intersex people is not clear.
2. Trans athletes are underrepresented at pretty much all levels of sport, and aren't actually winning that much, making it not actually an urgent problem.
3. The philosophical underpinnings that advantages due to differences in body development should be disqualifying is a little broken, since we do not consider Michael Phelps being double jointed as being an unfair developmental advantage.
The Olympics used to do this. From as early as the 1960's they were doing genetic testing on female athletes. They stripped Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska of all her medals and records in 1967, in spite of the fact that she gave birth to a child a year later, which would seem to indicate that she was a woman. The Olympics only abandoned this testing regime after the 1996 Olympic Games when 8 women who were cis and assigned female from birth to that moment were wrongly tested as male (7 AIS cases, 1 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency ). The uproar from that caused the Olympics to realize that this was a lot more complicated then they thought and abandon the idea of a strict genetic test.
Because those 8 women at that one Games were a lot more than all transfem Olympic athletes in history combined, the danger of ruling people out is much greater than the danger of allowing someone in who doesn't deserve it.
how many actual cases does that amount to, i wonder.
Can you say more details? What are you talking about?
How many of you cis folks with Strong Opinions on other people's bodies have ever actually even met a trans person IRL?
well, testosterone is a pretty hard fact. having said that, i firmly believe there should be no competitions based on gender at all. olympics should be 100% unisex.
I always thought the more elegant approach to all of this was to add a mixed sex league. Keep the traditions, add a novel new one, and let people consent to who they want to compete against and watch
That already exists. That’s the men’s category. There are no rules forbidding women from competing in men’s categories at Olympic events.
Correct and it’s the same in many sports. Theres generally not “men’s golf” and “women’s golf” there’s just “golf” and “women’s golf.”
Women are not excluded from golf tournaments, but the requirements to compete (primarily how far one hits the ball) are vastly different. Thats why both play the same golf course, just from different tee boxes.
Right but why not a specific carve out instead of a loop hole? If it's called "men's" the intention is clear.
If it's called "mixed league" the intention is clear
I think they're trying to say that if there was a mixed league it would always end up being 100% men at the highest level. Like, mixed league basketball would almost certainly be just men at the highest level because of how the sport works.
In the sports I competed in, the men's class was an open class. Anyone could compete in it. The women's classes were the only restricted classes.
There are several sports where female physiology (skeletal structure, etc) has inherent advantages over male physiology where this may not be true, though.
This always should of been left to sports committees than our government, what a waste of our representatives times, but I guess they got the culture war points
>should of
why
Because they're probably a native speaker.
unless you live in the olympics the olympic committee is not your representative
Try reading the comment again.
ohhhh :)
The easiest way to explain this nonsense
is that in 100+ years of Olympics, there are ZERO elite athletes who were transgender
none
it's brought to you by the some of the very same people who want you to prove you are a citizen every time you vote
because there have been no previous cases of that either
However there are women who have given birth who will fail that SRY test
Because biology is messy, not black and white, never "on" or "off", there is always overlap
They tried this before in 1996 and quickly ended it by 2000 because the result was a disaster
I wish people would care a lot less about sports.
I actually wish non-sports people would care less about sports, too.
Because the decisions should be left to those of us playing the sports. Not bystanders trying to impose their own agendas on to activities they don't even participate in.
Strongly agreed. I think there was ever a good reason for this to be a topic outside those with a direct interest in various sports governing bodies. Those should be making these decisions. It's deeply stupid that this has become a major point of contention up to the federal level of government.
And money from non-sports people should be left with the non-sports people.
Yes, putting out cones. Bending over, laying down a cone, taking five steps, laying another. Hard work. Meanwhile Malcolm Gladwell changes his mind about it. Put out some cones, Malcolm!
So much interest in fairness in the tiny slice of human existence that is sports, and so little interest in the rest of it.
I always sort of speculated that sports existed to channel what would otherwise be human tendencies toward violence; an outlet enablining more stable civilization. Even though I largely ignore sports, I appreciate it over possible alternatives.
Generally.. I think people takes sports far too seriously.
So if I take your house. And you complain, I just say: „some people take ownership far too seriously!“
For some people sports is their life and livelihood for that matter, this should be acknowledged.
I think a more fair and accurate comparison would be religion.
It's gonna get buried, but petesergeant had a good comment sharing this article.
They are also banning females from female sports as well with this ruling.
https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...
Caster Semenya is XY with a DSD (5-ARD), and absolutely should not compete with females. The same goes for Imane Khelif who was the same DSD.
People with this condition have internal testes, a male level of testosterone, and a male level of muscle development. That a doctor assigned them female at birth and put a F on the birth certificate does not change this.
Intersex category would be perfect fit but this is very rare condition so there wouldn't be enough competition.
Sports already exclude most people as they're not performant enough. So I don't see a problem with excluding biological males from female sports.
But, we should compare actual body parts that are relevant, for example I'm male but I'd not belong in male sports as my body is more feminine..
Still, it's not who you think you are that should decide, it's the body type so the competition can be more interesting as that is the point of sports anyway..
The fair answer is to remove sex, gender, and everything related to that from classification. Dont look at it. Dont consider it. Everyone competes together.
It means that floor gymnastics is fair for *anyone* to compete in. None of this "wrong crotch shape" bullshit. Or intersex. Or trans. If you are good enough, you get in. If not, you dont.
And the whole trans argument would go away.
Means testing and gender means testing is a scourge. Time to be rid of it.
Then most vocal folks would scream to no end how its unfair first 25 positions in given sport are held by men. You know, women want to see other women getting medals and I don't blame them, I want to see that too.
Good luck with that at any sport where strength and/or endurance matter most, just look at any given sport and check top male vs top female records. Running, climbing, hockey, football, rowing and so on and on.
Thats not really a fair sport in eyes of most folks. Unless thats your goal.
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URz-RYEOaig
I think that alt gender athletes can compete as there own group, or we do away with gender (ha), and everybody can compete in everything "fairly", and by fairly I mean nobody gets to have any feelings about this! since when does an ancient universal reality get to be re-decided behind closed doors by anonimous interest groups? and then become taboo to question, hmmmmm?
Not only trans athletes, but any biologically born women the IOC thinks are insufficiently feminine.
It’s an unfair advantage apparently. You know, like being born tall for basketball players. Curious how no other biological advantages are being policed.
That doesn’t seem to be the case, given the first paragraph of the article:
> The International Olympic Committee has barred transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category of the Olympics and said that all participants in those events must undergo genetic testing.
Genetic testing doesn’t leave a lot of room for accidentally or intentionally targeting women for being “insufficiently feminine.”
This might be true if the Olympics were exclusively classifying the 23rd chromosomes, and nothing but.
Leave aside the fact that very few of us here have actually tested our 23rd chromosome. Historically, the Olympics have not been (and are not) strictly chromosomal. The 2023 testosterone suppression decision requirements has exclusively impacted cis women, for one example.
Humans are biologically dimorphic in the same way winters are usually cold and summers are usually hot.
I would say that humans are sexually dimorphic in the same way that humans are bipeds. if you attempted to make a serious argument that limb agenesis implies that we’re a variable-limbed species it would be obfuscating rather than illuminating.
No, that is not a good analogy at all. It's so poor an analogy that it's challenging to interpret this comment generously. I think you might be arguing facetiously to make a different rhetoric point than the literal content of your post, bot I will respond to your text literally.
Humans have a wide variety of biological variation in metrics we think of as linked to "biological sex" and those metrics are accessibly mutable. Even within the Olympics, the natural variation of these metrics within cis women is a famous topic of debate (Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, etc.)
Bipedalism is something which varies very rarely and is especially not accessibly mutable.
99.8% of all matter by count is either hydrogen or helium, are atoms dimorphic?
If you're a cosmologist ;) usually they talk of 3 elements though - H, He and "metal".
That’s a very fun way to think about it, but it’s far more effective in a semantic debate than a serious one. I also don’t for a minute believe that the goal here is some broader reform of how the world talks about statistical distributions.
I’d rather not have discussions in bad faith.
It was intended in good faith, to make the point that rarity alone is not a good metric for salience. In my experience, most trans people have no problem with the statement "humans are sexually dimorphic" in a biology context. They (and I) have issue with it when its used in a debate to say "Humans are sexually dimorphic (and therefore trans and intersex people are irrelevant/shouldn't be accommodated/don't exist)". In the context of sports, it is definitely relevant that there are many edge cases and substantial overlap in the distribution of phenotypes between AFAB and AMAB people.
Coming back around to the olympics: I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree without dismissing the complexity that comes from organizing across 8 billion people.
Speaking for myself I believe that trans people and non-binary people should be accommodated, but there’s a contextual limit. When it comes to equal protection, employment, healthcare, medical access, bathrooms and a dozen other issues it’s a no-brainer in favor of accommodating people.
Ironically the sports divide is probably the single area where having some physical advantages isn’t a bonus. It’s also near and dear to the hearts of billions, and such a terrible hill to die on. Ideally the solution would be a league like the Paralympic competitions, but high level athletes are rare, trans people are relatively rare, and two overlapping are incredibly rare. To make such a league would be a farce that couldn’t hope to succeed.
In the Olympics, it appears trans athletes are still a minority among the group of athletes who are excluded because of sex characteristics. Most of the athletes impacted by the ever-stricter testosterone limits in the Olympics are cis women. Such a league would include cisgender former Olympic athletes who had to undergo forms of HRT in order to qualify.
When discussing trans people in sports, the most salient contexts aren't elite sports championships like the Olympics. "Sports" is also done recreationally and is often considered a normal part of ones childhood upbringing. On the topic of trans people, the question "can my child play this sport with their friends"?
Genetic testing for what?
I'm just going to leave the headline of this article for you to consider while you answer:
"Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2190741/
Before you hold genetic testing down to this standard of perfection (catching a single event of something so notable it merited its own article in JCEM), it would do well to compare it to the alternatives from which you are moving, and whether those alternatives met this standard of perfection.
Otherwise it might turn out you are proposing a standard that no system that bifurcates men and women can achieve, and on the basis of that, rejecting genetic testing.
Is the "genetic testing" for the presence of a Y chromosome or the presence of the SRY gene? And what about people with AIS?
If it's just karyotype, are men with XX male syndrome (SRY gene without an Y chromosome) then allowed to participate in women's sports?
It's very confusing topic. I rendered this visual map to show how SRY gene is the 'trigger' for development, not just having the Y chromosome. It helps see the signaling steps where things like AIS or XX syndrome happen: https://vectree.io/c/y-chromosome-genomic-signaling
The question comes down if the presence of the SRY gene impact athletic ability. From my reading, it seems very much like an ongoing research topic.
I recall a study looking at genetics in general and how much of professional sport abilities that can be attributed to it, and the number were fairly high for most sports, especially those involving strength and endurance. Genetic disorders like AIS could however also be a hindrance.
I do recall that in some endurance sports, certain genetic disorders involving oxygen delivery were much more common in top elites than in the average population, meaning that people without that disorder is at severe disadvantage compared to general population. It is an ongoing discussion if people with those kind of disorders should be allowed to compete in for example long distance skiing, as the disorder becomes natural doping and would be cheating if a person without the disorder was competing with that kind of blood in their system.
Genetic testing, outside of the culture war about what defines a man or a woman, really comes down to what is fair competition. Personally I can't really say. Does knowing that maybe half of the top skiers has a rare blood disorder make it less fun for people?
wouldn't a woman with a y chromosome be disqualified then?
just going to leave this here for you to read...
https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...
Oh thank you, but I’m not uninformed, and genetic testing wouldn’t have missed Castor Semenya either.
The differences between cisgender bodies are already so varied that the logic falls apart almost immediately.
For that matter why not restrict rich athletes who have access to training and equipment that poor athletes do not?
The point at where the line is drawn is entirely arbitrary. Gattaca vibes.
What would happen if we didn't allow a female category for power lifting? Just have human power lifting. Does the NFL have a ban on women in NFL? I don't know but the teams look as I expect they would even without a ban.
Don't we already sub-categorize within a gender? E.g. boxing. I don't actually know how common that is or why some sports get this treatment and not others.
Boxing is often the example given because its someone getting hurt, but when you actually break it down it also falls apart for boxing.
If we measured everyones strength, bone density, etc... in order to stop people from risking injury that would be one thing But basing it on your Chromosomes is lazy and inaccurate.
The point is that "fairness" being tied to whether your Cis or Trans is a hilarious hill to die on when we have advanced medical technology to actually test what we deem "fair".
To be clear, I used that example because it was the only one I could think of, not for some rhetorical reason (which serves your point anyway, really).
I agree if we could just distill "here's your objective good-at-tennis score" for everybody and draw lines using those numbers, that makes sense. It feels unrealistic? I.e. we already don't do that - it doesn't necessarily feel like 100% an anti-trans thing (orthogonal obviously to the large amount of anti-trans sentiment that generally exists). Maybe Elo for everything?
Yeah for sure.
My point is just that fairness in the Olympics is fake and always has been.
Someones Chromosomes are such a poor way to measure their physical abilities especially when the bar is so high for top athletes in the field.
I follow sport climbing, which has always seemed like a great example of this.
Climbing ability isn’t just a matter of strength or any other single dimension. E.g., the women’s routes are set on the assumption they’re more flexible than the men, not just less strong. Climbers come in many different shapes and sizes. Some climbers look like string beans, others look like they grew up lifting cows.
And BTW, there are women (Janja Garnbret, and Akiyo Noguchi before her) who dominate the women’s competition for years, to the degree that everyone else is almost playing for second place. It’s routinely speculated that Janja could regularly reach the men’s semi-finals.
Rock climbing is one sport known for small differences in performance between men and women. This is unlike about any other sport out there where a difference is huge (the worst male aspiring semi-pro is often better than a top woman).
It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
Also, so many of these anti-trans efforts end up hurting cis women too, the ones who happen to look too masculine or have too high of testosterone.
Gender is not as straightforward as bigots and transphobes would like to think. I wonder how many cis women will be affected by this ruling because their chromosomes and hormones aren't within so called "normal levels"
> It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
In most sports, the "mens" division is actually an open division that accepts all participants regardless of sex. Women just don't compete in it because they have no shot at getting a decent placement. The fact that males and females can't fairly compete with each other is the raison d'être of the women's league. This, and not culture war propaganda reasons is why only the most deranged bigots have an issue with trans men competing in "mens" sports.
Fun fact: "open divisions" only last as long as men are winning them. Women often outshoot men, and after Shan Zhang's win they were siloed into their own division.
> Fun fact: "open divisions" only last as long as men are winning them. Women often outshoot men, and after Shan Zhang's win they were siloed into their own division.
That decision was made before her win.
> the International Shooting Union, at a meeting in April of 1992, and therefore ahead of the Games, elected to bar women from shooting against men in future events.
<https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/2753773/2021/08/05/in-tokyo...>
The fact that it's only one way (banning men from competition in women's sports) is evidence against your point, not for it. If it was strictly anti-trans, then it would be an applied to both. The fact that no one cares that if a woman wants to participate in a men's event is pretty telling.
Trans men don't compete because women are essentially non competitive against men in top level athletics. Which is why trans women are controversial in women's sports. Every year there are hundreds of males highschoolers who outcompete females Olympic gold medalists. By allowing men to compete in women's sports you prioritize the notions of identity of what's usually a single individual over an entire class. It's plainly sexist.
As for intersex individuals, put them in their own competitive class.
Trans women are such a minority in women's sports it's really a non-issue that's been blown out of proportion. There was one trans woman who competed in the 2020 Olympics and she didn't even place. Riley Gaines has made a big deal in MAGA world about tying for 5th with a trans woman in a swimming competition. That means 4 cis women placed ahead of her, and if Lia Thomas hadn't competed, she still would've been in 5th. Hormone replacement therapy for trans women often results in muscle and strength loss, so the idea that trans women have some uniquely superhuman strength because they used to be men is just untrue.
> Trans women are such a minority in women's sports it's really a non-issue that's been blown out of proportion.
Indeed, but this is only a good argument for barring trans women from competing against females. You see, if trans athletes are so rare, only a very small number of people would be adversely affected by such a restriction, they can live with it.
On the other hand, the ban would calm down a large number of female athletes who are seriously disturbed by the mere possibility of competing against men, especially in contact sports, but not only.
Women are women, not only physically but also emotionally and mentally. Setting out on a crusade to change the thinking of millions of women is seriously dumb when a simple restriction, affecting 3 people total, can avoid it.
Now, think about making such a dumb idea a cornerstone of some party's political messaging... that can happen only if said party wants the other side to win.
HRT still leaves you with longer limbs and larger lungs which give a serious competitive edge. The numbers of trans individuals in sports doesn't matter, it's wrong on principle. Why segregate by sex at all? Let's get rid of it, you won't see any women, or any trans women, for that matter, anywhere on any serious athletic playing field. It'll all just be men.
What's the point of allowing trans women in women's sports anyway, especially at a top level? To affirm their identity? That throws an entire class of people, women, under the bus. Top performing males have an indisputable competitive advantage against top performing females in athletics.
I was wondering about trans men and there is actually quite a bit amount of regulations for it, as taking testosterone is generally considered to be doping. Trans men are only allowed to compete if they are under heavy supervision by a medical professional and they follow a very strict set of rules dictating how, when and what kind of treatment they do. Too high amount of testosterone or too uneven levels of testosterone will disqualify a trans man from competing.
Trans men have no advantage against cis men.
I'm not sure that is the case in all sports. For example in golf, the top women golfers on LPGA tour in distance are only about as long as the shortest men on PGA tour off the tee, about 290 yards average. However, the women are generally vastly more accurate than the men in pretty much every distance tee to green. Their swing is just a different style of swing afforded by female anatomy. It is more hip driven, "textbook," in fact they have higher hip speed than men who rely more on hand speed.
Now imagine a pro golfer who was born female with those anatomical advantages for golf flexibility, and is now taking testosterone for power, ostensibly to identify as male. Not only do they have the anatomy advantage, they now have the power. They would probably dominate pro golf overall, both sides of the game I expect, whichever one they choose to compete in.
Trans women who have been on hormone therapy for at least a year have no overall advantage over cis women in most real, existing competitive sports. They have disadvantages in some of the most widely-sports-relevant capacities—compared to cis women—and small advantages in a couple of isolated abilities (grip strength).
They also have advantages in traits that across the population correlate positively with some broadly-sports-relevant capacities (e.g., lean body mass, both absolutely and as a share of total body mass, lung volume), but the actual sports-relevant capacities these correlate with on a population level (strength, endurance, etc.) they don't have an advantage on. There are studies that have detailed some of the low-level reasons for this with regard to oxygen use and other factors.
Men are stronger and faster and not just a little bit. If you allow men in women's sports, (basketball, soccer, boxing etc) then women will not be competitive in those sports.
Yes but trans women on hormone replacement therapy are not as strong as cis men across the board.
Male puberty changes body composition in non-reversible ways. Muscle distribution, composition, quantity and bone density, all favor men that have gone through puberty.
Comparing them to cis men is a red herring, they aren't competing again cis men
Are they stronger than cis women?
No, they’re not. Not after about a year of HRT.
Maybe the trans men issue gets less attention because they have already been excluded from both women's and men's events?
I assume trans men are administered testosterone as part of their medical care, and that's already universally banned from competitive sports.
There's no "culture war against trans people". It's obvious to anyone with a brain that sports were split between genders for a reason since the dawn of sport - sports can be dangerous and that keeps people relatively safe. If trans people would like to compete with others of their chosen gender, the they should just start leagues for their chosen genders. Simple, really.
> There's no "culture war against trans people".
At best this is willful ignorance. By many measures, there is an active persistent march towards a Denial of Identity genocide against transgender folks in the US and other countries.
https://lemkininstitute.com/so/e2PpT6aRi
>There's no "culture war against trans people"
I don't say this often: Oh, come on.
Obviously there is both a culture war against (and for) trans people, and also non-hate-based arguments against trans women competing with biological women. Both things can be true.
Also there has only been one (1) trans woman, Laurel Hubbard, who has competed in a women's event (weightlifting) and she not place.
She didn't place at the Olympics but it's worth noting she was the oldest competitor by far, and this after she had cleaned up gold medals in numerous international competitions despite having a relatively thin background in the sport. She was expected to podium at the Olympics and it's not really clear why she performed so poorly (the only athlete in the division to DNF).
Mrs Hubbard's background, if you read it honestly, is great evidence for why this decision was the correct one.
Because trans men have no advantage in men's sport, whereas trans females do. It's not even about trans people at all, it's about preserving fairness in women's sports.
Before trans issues were widespread in culture, intersex athletes were also scrutinized. Hell, I remember when people were questioning whether having a testicle removed gave Lance Armstrong an advantage...
>It's clear how insane this culture war against trans people is when you consider this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
I believe the logic is based on the fact that male athletes are stronger than female athletes.
> culture war against trans people
A war? What you're seeing are at least two phenomena:
1. Practices, including their legalization, that are causing moral outrage.
2. Political actors of various political sides tapping into the emotional charge of the subject matter for other political purposes.
The second is commonplace and part of the political toolbox and doesn't need much analysis here.
The first, however, should surprise no one. The real question is why anyone would expect social and cultural changes that involve the normalization of the gender paradigm and the compulsory acceptance of it in concrete ways to be accepted without so much as a complaint. Of course you will see a reaction. Of course people will react when biological men are allowed in women's restrooms. One has to be detached from reality to find that shocking.
> this only applies to trans women and not trans men?
Because biological men are generally stronger than biological women, and we're not talking about some weak correlation here. That's one reason we have sex-segregated sports. If you wish to attack sex-segregated sports, you're free to do so, but I think this involves repressing truths about deep sexual differences for the purpose of satisfying an ideological impulse or aim.
> so many of these anti-trans efforts end up hurting cis women too, the ones who happen to look too masculine or have too high of testosterone.
How are such people hurt? By whom and in what way? A key presupposition seems to be unstated.
> Gender is not as straightforward as bigots and transphobes would like to think.
The first unmet challenge is to define "gender" in the first place. The trouble with your claim is that no one can come up with a coherent notion, let alone one that has any correspondence with reality. People are simply expected and commanded to comply; no one is ever given anything sensible they might comply with even if they wanted to.
This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball), this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course.
Remember, sport is and has always been about statistical outliers competing. Fairness has never been, and will never be, a genuine consideration.
It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0]
> Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball)
We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0
I would argue that it's the formerly presumed binary nature of sex/gender that made it a logical split for all sports. While marital arts and weightlifting tend to seperate by weight as well, that is because those particular events are particularly biased toward muscle mass and height/reach by proxy. Most sports are less clearly advantaged by size (soccer, for example). You just can't practically divide entire team sports by gradations of height, because there aren't enough players in a school for more than a few squads.
If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair.
I wish there was a good solution.
> We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex.
I mean, we do have weight categories in combat sports, right? I don't see why we couldn't come up with similarly neutral categories if we think it's good to segment people out by physical advantages. The parent comment is making a good point, though: it feels like some people care a lot about physical advantages that map onto gender stuff they care about, and not a lot about weird genetic anomalies that provide physical advantages that aren't gendered.
We could do that! I'm just trying to say that given categories based on (biological) sex, we should find some criterion based on biological sex to sort people into said categories, which the OC decision seems to do (at least better than the alternatives I have encountered). I don't have a problem at all with finding different ways of defining categories for competitions.
Re: anomalies - I think this is just unavoidable in any sort of category system, and I don't have a good solution for it except to consider frequency and severity.
Well I think it bans women that thought/think that they are cis but actually aren't, which is a bit of a different story. A fairly tragic one. Intersex/trans/anything else people just don't really have a clean fit into a lot of places, which is unfortunate.
> this is nothing more than a misogynist attempt to make women’s sport as unimpressive and average as possible. Rules set by mostly old men of course.
Well, not really. 56%[1] of young women think that trans women should not be allowed in women's sports.
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)
IMO the "better" division should be open. If we are going to do two classes, and we find that one class has some sort of physical advantage inherently, then that class should be the "open" one.
> Stuff like this is why professional sports is widely seen as a cheater’s club where everyone tries to cheat as hard as possible just shy of getting caught, then acts completely innocent and indignant when someone else just barely crosses the line into getting caught.
A lot of people (the majority?) don't understand the extent of PEDs usage in sports. When everyone cheats nobody does. I've heard the argument before for going an "anything goes" division from friends for some sports, but then people are just going to start dying regularly from side effects like in body building.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-american...
Why should open divisions not work that way? They're meant to determine who's the best, regardless of sex or gender.
>>>> This also bans cis women with genetic anomalies. What are those? fwiw - I don't think they should be included in the ban. Genetic advantage people in their natural gender is how sports works. I'm 5'7" - Lebron definitely has a genetic advantage over me. Banning him from basketball isn't doing anyone favors.
Santhi Soundarajan (1) shows exactly how this ends up catching cis women who were raised as women from birth. Which is why it's a bad idea to draw strict lines.
Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes.
This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html discusses some of the genetic anomalies that are possible and coincidentally how they've been handled by the IOC.
Interesting piece! I was first exposed to how complicated the biology of sex is when I listened to Radiolab's series on the subject:
https://radiolab.org/series/radiolab-presents-gonads/
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one!
Hypothetically you could have three divisions: open, men, and women. In many contexts it's more practical to have two, where one is open. In those cases, if the sex that didn't win more was also the open division, then people would complain because both divisions would be dominated by players of one sex.
Men who supplement testosterone are already banned if caught.
The basketball league for short people would probably ban people who tested over 5’5” even if they were 6’10” but identified as short.
what always strikes me as weird is how often the conversation is framed around "men competing in women's sports" when trans women cant really be said to be biologically male anymore. Taking Estrogen and blocking testosterone has a huge effect on how fast/strong/athletic someone is. I feel like that should be the key point of discussion, but somehow always gets burried under other, kind of less relevant subjects (for example I dont think it matters that up until now no trans woman has really won anything significant, as that could always change in the future).
Testosterone and estrogen are not magic substances that eliminate bone density, preponderance of type II muscle fibres, favourable tendon insertions and all of the other athletic advantages conferred upon males in the womb. I have experience with women who take steroids for strength sports and I am not exaggerating when I say they could be out-competed by 17 year old male high school students with proper coaching.
> what always strikes me as weird is how often the conversation is framed around "men competing in women's sports" when trans women cant really be said to be biologically male anymore.
Just because they are not male, does not mean that they are female.
except they still have the biological markers of a male body.
dna never lies.
That isn't the key point. Taking hormone therapy as an adult doesn't erase the huge athletic advantage conferred by going through male puberty.
i agree
There is no way a man would ever compete in women's sports.
Let's imagine a con-man wanted to compete in women's sports. He would have to decide this early in life. Most trans people realize before they are 10. He would then have to spend the rest of his life pretending to be trans to not get his medal revoked.
Trans women are women. They don't have to pretend to be women. However, some trans women have to hide their identity and present as men, for their safety. Presenting as a gender you're not is incredibly taxing. There are high rates of depression and increased risk of suicide for people who have to hide their gender.
Besides the incredible psychological toll, our imaginary con-man would face bullying, harassment, physical assault, sexual violence, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, exclusion from healthcare, and increased risks of poverty and homelessness, which in turn correspond to greater risks of fatal violence.
The rights and legal status of transgender people vary by country. Our imaginary con-man might have restricted access to education, to sports, to bathrooms, and to marriage and military positions. As well as much, much worse.
On top of all that, our imaginary con-man would still have to train to be an Olympic athlete. Most men are not as fast or strong as the world's fastest and strongest women. Sex differences in athletic performance also depend on more than just biological differences. Living as a woman means only having access to the resources available to female athletes.
No man would go through all that for a women's medal.
I thought this article does a good job explaining why some people care a lot about this topic https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/how-youth-sports-supercharg...
That article does seem very one-sided:
> of youth sports have created clear incentives for them to prioritize competitive fairness over principles like inclusion, well-being, and fun.
In an event that is primarily focused on competitive fairness, what does inclusion have to do with it?
If playing sport is about fun, well-being, etc, then don't play in competitive events. You can't very well want to play in competitive events while complaining about competitive fairness.
It feels one sided because the author is an outsider - as the author readily admits - "It has been brought to my attention, however, that my blasé attitude toward sports makes me an outlier".
Turning to some actual numbers - this 2024 survey tells us that only ~15% of respondents said that their children participate in club sports or independent training (note that the categories are not exclusive). The same survey also says that ~10% of respondants think that their child can compete in professional sports, or be a national level team member. Finally, a similar 10% say that the "only the best players should receive time in games" is a fair policy at your child's age and level.
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Na...
I think the point of the article is to maybe highlight how large the gulf might be between an typical outsider (and looking at the numbers above... and reminding ourselves that only ~50% of American youth are involved in organized sports at all), someone who is somewhat "in the game", and those who are really playing it (that 10% from above).
On this topic, I feel like "why do some people care a lot about this" is probably the question least in search of an answer.
The problem for this argument is that there is no actual data that trans kids and specifically trans girls are any better at sport than other girls.
Literally no trans athletes winning anything. I think hacker news skews scientific so we can do the math, if say 1% of the athletes are trans we would expect them to win 1% of the medals in a fair contest. As it is, they don't even come anywhere close. There has not been a single olympic medal won by a trans athlete, so clearly they do not have some kind of magical advantage, in fact (and common sense would make this pretty obvious) they seem to have quite a statistical disadvantage.
> The problem for this argument is that there is no actual data that trans kids and specifically trans girls are any better at sport than other girls.
There is considerable evidence that they aren't. But that's not really relevant, because you have to remember segregation in sport has never been about competitive fairness, it has always been about allowing those who are socially superior to avoid the embarrassment of having to compete in an environment where they might be defeated by their social inferiors.
It is why women were long banned from competitions, and then shortly after exclusion seemed to harsh for evolving attitudes, they were segregated from men. And it is why trans people are being excluded from competition now. It's why racial segregation in sport was a thing. When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual, not the real reason, so counterevidence is irrelevant.
There is considerable evidence that they aren't.
Why did Lia Thomas go from being nowhere near winning in the male division to getting fifth in the women's?
When competitive fairness is raised as an argument for segregation, it is pretextual
If sports were not sex-segregated, most events would never be won by a woman. How is that a pretext?
Fifth is still nowhere near winning. So she went from nowhere near winning to nowhere near winning.
cope
>...it has always been about allowing those who are socially superior to avoid the embarrassment of having to compete in an environment where they might be defeated by their social inferiors.
Is your argument actually that women don't generally compete with men in sports because the sports don't want to embarrass the male athletes if they lose? If so, I suspect this is a bad faith argument, but if not, you can simply do a little searching to find that there is often quite a bit of difference between the performance of top tier male athletes and top tier female athletes. For example, no woman has ever run a 4 minute mile in competition and more than 2,000 men have and even about 30 high school boys have. I am sure you can find other examples.
There is considerable evidence that trans girls and women have a competitive advantage over women in many sports.
Please present some.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10641525/
The moralizing parts of the conclusion of this article rejects it's own evidence. There are multiple studies cited by the article where the population average of the trans women group statistically significantly exceeds that of the cis women group. The article concludes:
"The exclusion of trans individuals also insults the skill and athleticism of both cis and trans athletes. While sex differences do develop following puberty, many of the sex differences are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy. Finally, if it is found that trans individuals have advantages in certain athletic events or sports; in those cases, there will still be a question of whether this should be considered unfair, or accepted as another instance of naturally occurring variability seen in athletes already participating in these events."
Does it really insult the skill and athleticism of cis and trans athletes to exclude trans women from women's sports? I don't think it does, but the article could not help but claim that it does. Often in debates such as this one, there are multiple levels of sophistry that annoy me. Such as the sequence 1. there is no evidence that trans women have an advantage over cis women in sports (false. there is evidence) 2. if you believe that there is any evidence, you must be a bigot (well, obviously untrue, there is evidence).
Women's sports leagues often emerge due to the easy bifurcation of the population into two groups- the easiest fault line to judge this as is 1 group with the athletic benefits of natural testosterone, and 1 group without the athletic benefits of natural testosterone. People are free to make whatever sports leagues they want, and with freedom of association they can make whatever rules they want. I will just find it completely unsurprising that the women's divisions will be relatively "closed" and the men's (or more acurately the "open") divisions will include any person that has produced testosterone naturally or become a trans man (or most things in between). It's the easiest bifurcation that reduces questions of fairness. Weight classes in wrestling fall into a similar manner of thinking for me; even if it could be argued that the guy that barely couldn't make it into a lower weight class should be fighting within that class, you have to draw the line somewhere.
Trans women are women.
If you want to see men dressed as women, watch "This is the Army" (1943), an American wartime musical comedy film that features actor Ronald Regan, and a lot of musical numbers performed by men in drag.
If they were you wouldn't need to call them "trans"
We don’t have to, it’s outsiders who insist on it.
I can't imagine trans women who avoided male puberty are statistically any better athletes than cis women. A total ban seems discriminatory to me.
You’re getting into a separate issue of blocking puberty in children, which may would consider abuse.
Separate from that there are still measurable differences between sexes that you can’t just magically change with a pill or surgery.
Headline is inaccurate.
Transgender athletes are not barred from women's events. Female athletes who identify as men, or otherwise do not identify as women, can still compete in this category, as they have been doing already.
What the IOC's new policy actually does is make male athletes ineligible for competition in the female category, with very few exceptions. These exceptions are for athletes who are technically male but have a disorder of sex development that confers no male advantage, e.g. CAIS.
Transgender women aren’t ’male athletes’
Why not? Aren't you mixing gender and sex?
If you try to define athletic divisions by sex, you're going to have a hard time. The world's best athletes probably all have some unusual biology. About 1.7% of people are not completely biological male or female. I would expect that proportion to be higher for Olympic athletes. Excluding 1.7% or 2% or 10% of the world's best athletes from competing would not be fair.
Why do you believe that?
When I was growing up, I remember some drama because East German and Soviet male athletes were trying to compete as women. If male to female trans athletes were allowed to compete, I imagine it would just be a matter of time before a female athlete would HAVE to be trans in order to stand a competitive chance.
your imagination is wrong. obviously.
Doubtful. Despite your articulate counter-argument, I am unconvinced of your viewpoint.