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The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports
(theintercept.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Do we need a protected class? If yes, there must be standards and those standards must be either endocrine or genetic or both. Yes they should be tested. Anyone failing the protected class can compete in the open class. It's really that simple.
Do you really think it's fair for a full blown man to fight women in the ring just because he identifies as a woman? Women will get very seriously hurt or possibly killed fighting someone assigned male sex at birth. I have no problem letting them do anything that doesn't hurt others, but this is a case where I think we need to be more sensible.
If it's about who might get hurt, maybe we should divide things up by something other than gender. I know plenty of women who could do a ton of damage with their fists and they aren't even boxers.
It's one thing to work within the limits of your physique to become stronger, better, etc. It's another thing to have a totally different physique that gives you a starting point higher than can be achieved naturally by anyone else.
So many sports are entirely about the physique you inherited though. Yes there is some technique to swimming and obviously you have to train hard. But these are just prerequisites, not differentiators. If we start saying that winning because of your physique is no victory, then really half of the events become meaningless. To a large extent, the Olympics does measure inherited traits and I think we ought to recognize that that is its point. If you think back all those centuries, it was very obviously the point to prove that your people are genetically superior to their people.
So put those women in a higher class. There are plenty of women with "masculine" physiques... or are you going to claim Brittney Griner is also not a woman?
I don't think it's fair to penalize a woman who works all her life to get to a certain level and just make her compete against someone who maybe hasn't had to work at all because they are physically male. If anything, we need to make a class for people who are physically male but presenting female.
Are you talking about Khelif? How do you know she is "physically male?" What does that even mean? Is Brittney Griner "physically male?" Because she looks bigger and stronger than Khelif.
As far as I can tell, that reliable information isn't out there other than the fact that a Russian judge said she tested as XY and that she's tested for high testosterone. I'd say XY is a pretty good starting place to call someone male or at least not traditionally female, if that test can be trusted.
But I think a lot of the controversy here comes from a lack of trustable info.
You mean the Russian judge who said that after she beat her Russian opponent? Cool. Let's see the evidence.
You aren't believing a Russian judge, of all people, without evidence, are you?
Also, does that mean anyone with XY gonadal dysgenesis needs to be genetically tested before they're allowed to compete? If so, at what age should they be tested? The youngest Olympian this year is a 12-year-old skateboarder from China. The youngest Olympican ever was an 11-year-old figure skater from China.
Now... bear in mind that many women who have that particular condition are not even aware that they have it.
Would you be willing to support either genetic testing or genital examination of 11 or 12-year-old girls? Do you think that might make girls and women less likely to aspire to be athletes than they might occasionally have to compete against a "man?" Because I sure do.
No, I'm not saying I believe him, and yes I would like to see the evidence. It's pretty hard to draw conclusions without it.
And no I don't support genital inspections of 12 year old girls, and frankly don't think genital inspections are probably the best way to decide this. I think chromosomes and hormone levels are probably the best we have, and maybe there's just a class for athletes that fall outside the norms for their sex, similar to weight classes, because it's pretty clear that it does give a huge advantage.
But it's worth considering that maybe 12 year olds just shouldn't be in the Olympics in the first place.
Why not, if they're the best athletes in their country?
Also, it is far more complicated than you have any idea about. This person can explain it better than me:
Fair enough. But why not handle these exceptions in the rules then? If they don't confer a major competitive advantage then let them compete as the sex they feel like.
But I don't think we can draw this out to a full blown man who identifies as a woman so gets to compete against women. As usual, there is a sensible middle ground, and you have to get into the weeds a bit to sort it out.
Its like people who say only "pure capitalism" or "pure communism" is the best system, when in fact they are both garbage options, and the best is actually capitalism constrained by socialist policies like in Scandinavia. Yes, it's messy and complicated and hard to figure out, but that's pretty much always the case for coming to the best result.
The extremes on either side are almost always wrong.
What is a "full blown man" in your definition based on what I pasted above?
Also, who gets to decide that and what is the test?
Anyone who fails the tests for the other cases you list. The governing body of the sport gets to decide, and tests are decided by scientists and doctors.
The governing sport body in this case being the IOC. Who did decide. You just don't seem to care for their decision.
So make up your mind.
When did I say I didn't like their decision? I said I wanted more information.
Why? They decided she qualified. That should be enough.
For the same reason anyone wants to know anything. Because if anyone is to have an informed conversation about this, we need to know how they come to their conclusions. Their lack of transparency is a large part of why this controversy exists in the first place.
It's none of your business what's between their legs or in their chromosomes. This wouldn't even be a question for anyone who wasn't an athlete.
Yes because outside of athletics it doesn't really matter.
Which do you think would be more likely to discourage girls and women from participating in competitive sports, the chance that they might have to compete against a "real" woman or the requirement that they let everyone else know about their private medical records?
I don't think any of this matters until you get to college level or olympic level sports, at which point I highly doubt it would dissuade any would be competitor. But I do think if it got bad enough it could dissuade women. For example, if you just let men compete openly and without scrutiny in any women's athletics competition, which seems to be what some people are advocating for here.
The youngest Olympian this year was 12. The youngest Olympian ever was 11.
Why? Why would any woman want to not only prove their biological sex, but allow that private medical information to be public?
How about letting women compete openly and without scrutiny in any men's athletics competition? Shouldn't men be tested too?
All of this I've covered in this thread except the last point.
I don't have any problem with women competing openly and without scrutiny in men's athletics competition because I can't think of any sport where it would confer an advantage. If there were one, I would be against it in that sport. Though safety would still need to be a consideration in any contact sport.
Also worth mentioning, I am not against the idea of getting away from the idea of having sports separated by sex completely, and somehow tiering them by ability. But I think that would be exceedingly difficult to do in a way where it was safe and fair for everyone, especially when it comes to boxing and martial arts. But for other non contact sports, I don't see any reason to have a division by sex at all, just have tiers from best to worst.
Which other threads? I'm supposed to find everything you wrote in conversations with other people in the hopes that I can find out why you think an 11-year-old Olympian shouldn't have their gender tested but an 18-year-old Olympian should?
Also, how do you define a gender-based advantage in a sport? Can you define it?
Also covered under the threads spawning from this parent thread. I'm starting to feel trolled here, so please just read the comments under this parent thread, I've answered all your points already.
I'm trolling because you expect me to find all of your other conversations in a thread with over 150 posts to find out whether or not you actually answered my questions and I find that unreasonable? Really?
This is the correct answer. Divide competitors up by class, skill level, or anything else besides perceived sexual anatomy.
Boxing has weight classes. As do most other martial arts.
The problem is not a 50kg men fighting a 70kg women in terms of injuries and power imbalance. And in that set up the women most likely wins. The problem is the typical situation of a 80-100 kg men smacking down on a 50-60kg women. And that is the image the demagogues try to conjure.
So if your full blown men is a 60kg feather to be able to compete against another 60kg women, the whole trope falls apart.
A man with the same body weight as a woman would still inherently have more upper body strength and higher ability to gain it as that's just how men are built vs women. It's still not a fair way of setting intersex classes.
I mean if they're doing the exact same rigor and type of training, eating the exact same diet, have had the exact same level of boxing experience and fought the exact same opponents at the same skill level, then yes there would be an advantage to whoever is assigned male
Can you cite an example of this?
No I can't because there's no data to go off of. I'm honestly unclear as to whether it's a valid issue or not. Even in this case where the data we have seems to indicate there's an issue, the data doesn't seem entirely trustable. Anyone claiming complete certainty in this environment with no evidence is clearly just blindly pushing an agenda in bad faith.
It seems odd that you've based multiple comments here on that example then, I think.
Did you actually read said comments? I've said this multiple times. It's basically the thesis of my statements.
They felt like concern trolling to me, but I admit I'm multitasking and posting this from next to my son's hospital bed, so maybe my reading comprehension hasn't been the best. I acknowledge that possibility.
Boxers and wrestlers have weight classes because weight confers a massive advantage and almost predetermines the outcome of the match. You might as well just award someone for weighing more, because skill can only overcome it to a point.
I would prefer if competitive classes were determined by things like weight which are universal and obvious and non-invasive to measure. However I don’t know if that works for everything. Hormones do in fact confer major advantages, as chemical doping does. Should we not test for doping either?
I do think it’s actually more invasive to try to measure if someone “lives as a woman” than it is to measure what’s in their blood. How do you even begin to define that, and aren’t you engaging in prescriptive sexism as soon as you start? I can tell that your suggestion comes from a place of wanting to support women and their autonomy but I don’t think you thought it through at all, at least not in the context of competitive sport. If you don’t care at all about fair sports competition, it’s all super easy. If you do want to enable fair sport competition, you have to actually deal with the complexities and not just fire off leftist slogans.
What open class? There is no open class at the Olympics. So no it isn't really that simple.
Really? They prohibit women from competing alongside men?? No thats not the case, women only sports is to prevent males with higher biological advantage from taking over the women's competition.
Is this an "Air Bud Rule" thing?
Also, we have no idea if Khelif is biologically male. We have one corrupt Russian official saying "well maybe."
We actually do have a pretty good indicator that she's biologically female - the fact that her home country, where she still lives, would've jailed her if they figured out she was a trans woman before they sent her to the Olympics. Algeria doesn't allow gender transitioning in any way, and they can and do imprison people who live as a gender other than the one they were born as.
You clearly can't convince people. Because they just move on to "even if she is biologically female..."