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Gentleman Baller posted:Yes, but not due to easily identifiable circumstances of their birth. Generally, if a woman is passionate and talented about athleticism from their childhood, and they receive the support they need, there's every chance they can compete at a national or international level. Their goal might be ambitious, but it's possible. Like Bel Shazar was implying, it is the case that many people know they'll never be able to compete at the top levels of certain sports because of how they were born. Like if you're not tall enough, or not coordinated enough, or have some kind of actual disability. The inevitable question in this discussion is, what makes being biologically female a special category that we need to accommodate? As opposed to other disadvantages like having a gene that prevents you from developing muscle mass, being short, etc? And the question is still there no matter whether trans female athletes have advantages over cis female athletes or not. That issue just brings it to the fore. Like if we have a women's basketball association, why not one for people under six feet tall? Why not horse races for jockeys that are OVER six feet tall?
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Apr 7, 2022 17:28
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mobby_6kl posted:I've seen transphobes cite this article as proof that trans people shouldn't be allowed in sport https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577.full?ijkey=yjlCzZVZFRDZzHz&keytype=ref The running thing doesn't surprise me because hip width is one of the most dimorphic traits between men and women and narrow hips give a mechanical advantage in running, preventing knee injury and increasing efficiency of stride. This is why the top contenders in women's running usually have narrow hips. What's interesting is that because female runner hip width is so far on the low end already in high-level competition, trans athletes might not even have an advantage there. Though they probably would in more casual competition where participants aren't filtered for extreme anatomy. References: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34756802/ (Maturation of the pelvis during male/female puberty influences hip adduction) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34127634/ (Female hips have greater adduction in general) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002192901930346X (Increased hip adduction contributes to knee injuries) https://boneandspine.com/q-angle/ (On average, women have a greater Q angle than men. Q angle is also associated with femoral anteversion) https://www.sid.ir/en/Journal/ViewPaper.aspx?ID=55141 (Q Angle contributes to knee pain in runners) https://web.archive.org/web/2014082...Review___1_.pdf (Narrower hips increase running energy efficiency) https://runnerclick.com/10-best-female-runners-on-earth/ (Example list of top female runners, all of whom have narrow hips)
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Apr 9, 2022 12:08
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Minera posted:Considering most sports are biased towards people with certain physiological traits (hence the existence of weight classes in many sports) wouldn't that just average out in favor of cis people anyways, because there's so overwhelmingly many more cis people competing in sports than trans people to begin with? It might in the case of higher-level competition. But you're looking at one extreme end of a distribution, which means you're no longer drawing from as big of a pool. So in lower level competitions, having the rare trait would be more of an advantage for trans athletes, just like it would be more of an advantage for cis athletes. What we're basically looking at is a Bayesian inference that we don't have enough data to make.
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Apr 9, 2022 12:32
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It seems like an unavoidable result of making fundamentally continuously distributed phenomena into discrete phenomena for categorization. The reason fighters almost kill themselves getting into a lower weight class is, ontologically, the exact same reason there's controversy about whether Caster Semenya should compete as a woman. The way I see it, there are two problems. One is the arbitrariness of the classes that arise for political reasons - i.e., we should have divisions for women but not for short people. The other is the desire to compromise and only have a few traits as relevant factors, as opposed to none or all of them. So there are two truly fair options. One is not to have divisions. Women can join the NFL, flyweights can challenge super heavyweights, and so on. The other is to parameterize every relevant trait, with weights for their statistical impact. If you're in the MMA, for example, they could measure all the physical factors you can't easily change, like reflex response time, body weight, arm length, bone density, and a dozen others, each with a coefficient that represents how important they generally are to success, and give you a single number. Those numbers could be divided into A class, B class, C class, etc. This is still a continuous into discrete division, which means it won't be perfect, but would make for more interesting matchups and eliminate sexism, transphobia and any other political concern. I have a feeling as genetic engineering and biotechnology in general advance, they're eventually going to have to do something like this either way.
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Apr 11, 2022 17:50
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PT6A posted:Here's a question: are there are biological conditions/traits that a man could have, that would be judged to give such an advantage in a sport that they are simply banned from competition in the issue of fairness? If such a condition were found, such that men with the condition were 1700 times over-represented in a certain competition, would that be unfair? I agree that it probably wouldn't. But my point is that it should be, or rather should be incorporated into a division system. Like, let's say a mutation developed in the 80s due to all the beige plastics that caused people to start having webbed hands. Fully, not just a little. And by the mid 21st century there were enough people with it that they started destroying Olympic swimming events. Overrepresented even more than the 1700fold example. The medalists were exclusively people with this mutation, for a decade. It would make perfect sense to have a non-webbed division to open up the pool to more competitors.
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Apr 11, 2022 20:59
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VitalSigns posted:Are the women medalists all exclusively women with XY DSD? No, they are not, as I implied in my sentence immediately before you cropped the post. You can also see this in Gentleman Baller's original post on the over-representation.
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Apr 11, 2022 21:18
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VitalSigns posted:I didn't pick up that implication which is why I asked. It's only tangentially related to the topic, because the topic itself is trivial. It has an answer in the title of the thread. I'm concerned with what I see as a larger, longer-term question. In a decade or two, trans people will be socially identical to cis people thanks to cultural advances, and a decade or two after that they'll be biologically identical thanks to scientific advances. The question that interests me is what to do about overwhelming innate advantages in sport, because that issue is only going to become more severe as time goes on, both from the increasingly extreme selection of bodies that has been increasing over the last century, and genetic engineering. The conclusion I draw from it is the same one I stated earlier, that division criteria should be more detailed and relevant and agnostic to gender or transness. VitalSigns posted:To me it seems the conclusion would be that we shouldn't worry about it unless women with XY DSD were winning all the medals, is that what you mean? Semenya should be able to compete in the divisions as they are now, because she's a woman. That's not a conclusion though, it's a starting point.
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Apr 11, 2022 21:58
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UCS Hellmaker posted:this tbh, she has an androgen insensitivity disorder, whether it be mild or complete. People with this disorder may produce testosterone, but physically look identical to any woman on the street because based on the degree, they cannot physically respond to male sex hormones. Caster Semenya's exact condition hasn't been made public. We don't know if it involves AIS. In addition, it's not exactly true that everyone with AIS looks like a typical woman. There are degrees of insensitivity, as you imply, and those correspond to how typical someone usually looks.
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Apr 12, 2022 04:18
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Jaxyon posted:What does a "typical woman" look like? I invite you to interrogate what you feel that means. I'm using the term "typical" informally to mean qualities that are usually found in a category, instead of qualities that are always found in a category. VitalSigns posted:I am really skeptical that any kind of objective data exists to back this up, but I would be interested to be wrong if you have some. Persons with complete androgen insensitivity have a typical female external phenotype. - Jirásek JE, Simpson JL (1976). Disorders of sexual differentiation: etiology and clinical delineation. Boston: Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-644450-6. - Gilbert SF (2000). Developmental biology. Sunderland, Mass: Sinauer Associates. ISBN 978-0-87893-243-6. Virilization of people with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome sometimes occurs at puberty and sometimes doesn't. The majority of individuals with PAIS are raised as male. Degree of undermasculization corresponds to degree of insensitivity. - Hughes IA, Deeb A (December 2006). "Androgen resistance". Best Pract. Res. Clin. Endocrinol. Metab. 20 (4): 577–98. doi:10.1016/j.beem.2006.11.003. PMID 17161333. I'm curious why you were skeptical about this idea in the first place. It seems intuitive to me that a higher degree of expression of a masculinizing hormone would lead to a more masculine appearance.
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Apr 12, 2022 06:47
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VitalSigns posted:Maybe I misunderstood you, it sounded like you were saying you could diagnose Semenya's level of insensitivity just by looking at pictures of her at sports events based on whether she looks like a "typical woman" You can't accurately diagnose someone's level of AIS just by looking at them at a sporting event. It probably is a component of why they have a masculine or feminine appearance, but it's only one of many factors that cause a masculine or feminine appearance, so you can't disentangle it as a variable. The only way you can find the grade of AIS specifically is looking at someone's genitals.
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Apr 12, 2022 15:43
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Shageletic posted:I feel like that, and pretty much this entire thread, is a solved problem? As previous pages have shown, if a sport is prestigious enough that there's actually money on the line, the people overseeing those leagues will impose incredibly stringent and invasive levels of testing regarding hormones, their fixed ideas of gender, etc that its nearly impossible for a trans person to compete with an "unfair" advantage? I wouldn't mind continuing to use the thread as a jumping-off point for discussion of why parametric divisions of sport are better than gender divisions, but yes, if the point is to answer the question in the title, it's useless. Whether transgender athletes should be allowed compete is a trivial definitional issue. If there are divisions exclusively for women, and trans women are women, then trans women may compete in those divisions, regardless of any advantages they get from being trans.
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Apr 15, 2022 16:48
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Colonel Cool posted:Should non-transitioning trans women compete in women's divisions? Genuine question. If by non-transitioning you mean not engaging in hormone therapy, yes. They'd annihilate, but like I've been saying that's a problem with having gender divisions.
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Apr 15, 2022 17:00
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:Sex divisions generate an obvious philosophical issue, but I'm not sure how you'd replace them in a sport like elite running. There's no easily observable characteristic that would act as a proxy, and we're not going to be measuring maximal oxygen uptake or doing muscle biopsies to put collegiate runners into the right competitive bins. There plenty of anthropometrics you could use for elite running. They'd differ between marathon running and sprinting. General: - Ratio of leg length to overall height - Q-angle or other measure of pelvic mechanical advantage (this is the one that differs most between men and women) Sprinting: - Height - Fast twitch muscle fiber mass Marathon: - Somatype (higher points for ecto) - Slow twitch muscle fiber mass Colonel Cool posted:Again, not an expert, but it seems like sorting for other characteristics is just going to end up sort of de facto recreating sex divisions anyway, isn't it? Maybe with a very small handful of outliers. Which might be a thing worth doing in a vacuum, but in reality seems like spending a lot of effort and burning through an enormous amount of goodwill over something that's a pretty niche philosophical issue. It would have some divisions that had more men or more women but none of them would exclusively be men or women. You could also have more divisions this way, allowing more people to compete meaningfully, like they do in combat sports because of weight divisions. The other advantage of this is that it's future proof, which male and female divisions aren't. When you start seeing genetic engineering and in vivo biomods, worrying about people like Caster Semenya will feel quaint.
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Apr 15, 2022 17:26
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Dr. Stab posted:What do you do about the significant overlap in typical male and female values for those measurements? In a fully paramaterized system you do nothing, because that's irrelevant to performance. In fact, them having overlap is one of the reasons why this system is better.
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Apr 15, 2022 18:03
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woozy pawsies posted:You sound like a person who doesn't watch sports. It's human vs human, in all the different shapes and forms. Sports are cool because different shaped people compete despite apparent biomechanical advantages and disadvantages, and it is also competitive despite them. Weight classes exist in certain sports where there is greater chance of harm or major loss of competitiveness based on body mass. Same with age brackets. And, to some extent, this is the same reasoning for different divisions based on sex. The idea is to be as inclusive as possible to allow all people to compete in a way that still fosters competitiveness -- the sport will self-select for those certain biomechanical and anthropometric advantages. It's loving stupid and even more exclusive, incredibly tedious, and just nerdy as gently caress (in the derogatory pointdexter style nerdy) to try and make up categories based off these measurements. You're pissing me off. I know sports are about people with different shapes and forms competing, and there'd still be just as much of that if not more, because all of the parameters would be weighted. So you could have one person who happens to have a disadvantage in one shape and an advantage in another vs someone with the inverted advantage and disadvantage. And that's how it already is. You're just selecting for the same things intelligently the way the competition does automatically. Having these brackets is exactly for the goal you're talking about of being as inclusive as possible while still fostering competitiveness. The more divisions you had, the more different people would be eligible to compete, instead of just Men's and Women's plus Pro and Amateur. And because it's parameterized, everyone competing would feel like they have an actual fair chance. It would be more competitive. Edit: Reading your post again, you might have been under the impression I was advocating different divisions for things like "long-legged people" or "ectomorphs." I should have made it clearer that I'm talking about having a single talent/predilection score that takes everything into account with weights for how important they are. So the divisions would just be like, A, B, C, etc. Dog King fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Apr 15, 2022 |
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Apr 15, 2022 18:28
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Here's a paper by three bioethics experts who agree with me: https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/6/395 One of the authors, Dr. Alison Heather, is an athlete herself as well as a specialist in doping and how hormones affect non-reproductive tissue.
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Apr 15, 2022 18:36
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:There is no accurate indirect way of measuring muscle fiber type, you have to go in and take a chunk out. It's probably only scalable at the world elite level, certainly not for collegiate athletics. VO2Max is more predictive for distance events than either of those, but also requires laboratory measurement. And these are variables that change over time and with training, so they have to be regularly assessed. None of those other measurements you provided actually have predictive value in those disciplines, to my knowledge, though I'm only an expert in physiology for 5km+ events. Well, weight fluctuates just as much as any of these would and we still use it as a division criterion. We have probably a few decades before switching to biometrics instead of our current divisions gets really important, so we'll probably have much more sophisticated measurements by then, taking into account not just phenotype but genotype. Also I gotta disagree with you that evenly-matched races between top female athletes and guys with weird/weak bodies would be boring. That sounds really entertaining.
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Apr 15, 2022 18:44
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woozy pawsies posted:Being a big fish in a small pond is boring and stupid. Okay, go ahead get rid of women's leagues, weight divisions, the special olympics, college sports, and amateur bowling leagues then.
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Apr 15, 2022 18:49
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Colonel Cool posted:I never said I didn't care about the issue. I think the question of how to sort transitioning people into gender segregated sports is interesting and meaningful in the real world right here and now for a number of practical and philosophical reasons. What I said probably isn't worth doing right now is going ten steps further and breaking down the concept of segregated gender in sports entirely. Because that position is going to lose 90% of the population immediately, even if we were to grant that it might be something worth thinking about, which I'm not convinced it is. The data generally indicates MtF athletes do have an advantage, even on hormone therapy. Different studies show different levels of advantage, but some advantage is always almost always conferred.
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Apr 15, 2022 19:24
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empty whippet box posted:What data indicates this? Apologies if I missed it. No you're good, I hadn't posted it in the thread before because it's doesn't matter for the point I'm making. Here are the two most recent reviews of I know of: https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503/
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Apr 15, 2022 19:44
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woozy pawsies posted:except you should probably read the full text. That's right. Most of the data requires some inferences from non-athletes, and there's no large-scale truly empirical study, but as one of your quotes says there the sparse data we do have on athletes matches the non-athletes and the overall findings are still strong.
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Apr 15, 2022 20:16
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empty whippet box posted:I think it's important that we be careful about saying stuff like "data shows mtf athletes have an advantage". That's strong language for something without strong support, and the statement 'mtf athletes have an inherent advantage' is used to harm trans people by arguing for their exclusion. I don't think this data supports what you said. That's fair that I expressed it too strongly. It would be better to say "overall, the data shows that being trans is likely to give female athletes an advantage, though there aren't enough of them to say this with empirical certainty."
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Apr 15, 2022 21:59
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