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This article has been referenced a few times, and it seems pretty sketchy to me. In addition to using what more informed people than I itt have indicated is sharply disfavored terminology ("biological males and females" is right in the abstract), I have my doubts about their premise. Their whole discussion of trans athletes is based on their claim that the competitive advantage cisgender male athletes have over cisgender female athletes is "insurmountable", and I really don't think they supported it in any rigorous way. Looking at a sample of competition records from selected gender segregated sports, as they do in the section on elite athletes, and chalking the difference entirely up to biology (1) looks a lot like cherry picking and (2) involves making some huge assumptions. A paper using the same approach to evaluate a hypothetical performance difference related to race or ethnicity would be laughed out of the thread. I mean, sure, dimorphism is a thing, and nobody's going to be surprised by the difference seen in, say, Olympic lifting records. But they really didn't do a lot to justify going from a discussion of elite athletic performance and selected world records to quote:These data overwhelmingly confirm that testosterone-driven puberty, as the driving force of development of male secondary sex characteristics, underpins sporting advantages that are so large no female could reasonably hope to succeed without sex segregation in most sporting competitions. To ensure, in light of these analyses, that female athletes can be included in sporting competitions in a fair and safe manner, most sports have a female category the purpose of which is the protection of both fairness and, in some sports, safety/welfare of athletes who do not benefit from the physiological changes induced by male levels of testosterone from puberty onwards. That's a really strong statement! But they don't actually articulate any methodology for how they picked specific athletic tasks or why they should be regarded as so broadly representative. It's just presented as kind of a gish gallop of different facts, most of which seem to have been picked because they knew they'd be able to find a number. Like...why two (related!) golf metrics, whereas all other sports with different disciplines have them averaged together and shown with an error bar? By what criteria was, say, a task related to cricket included, but wrestling was not? Why didn't they look at any of these sports in the amateur context in the next section, instead jumping to a completely different analytical approach? I would also expect such an article to at least engage with the idea that a different reason for gender segregation might exist in a sport. Given how readily posters here were able to reference counter examples, this is at best a pretty big blind spot. Likewise socioeconomic factors - the paper cites several gender segregated events as comparable without addressing the history of support (or the lack thereof) for women's meaningful access to those competitions. They seem to have latched on to whatever records are already published in association with a sport as being representative of important performance characteristics in that sport, so I'd also say they need to account for the possibility of gender bias in what sporting records have come to be regarded as important. eviltastic fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Apr 16, 2022 |
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Apr 16, 2022 22:13
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Hawkperson posted:I’m curious to know if there is an elite trans athlete/competitor who has been excluded from competition. There’s no doubt it happens passively and indirectly. But it seems to me like the people who are actually being currently and directly affected by policies trying to address trans people are 1) elite cis women such as Caster Semenya and 2) non- elite trans kids who just want to play some sportsball. The only trans adult athlete I can think of in this category is the trans man who can’t get a boxing match. Is there anyone else? fwiw in reading up on that, I also found one of the more extreme examples I've seen of faux concern for the integrity of women's sports as a cover for bigotry. There's a few recent right wing articles that come up when you search for trans women and rugby, cheering on a coach trying to get trans women banned from his high school rugby league after some injuries on the field involving a trans athlete...said school being in Barrigada, Guam (population 7956, per wikipedia). Obviously the subject of the story in question being remote from the continental US has no bearing on the importance of the lived experience of the athlete(s) involved, I just really kinda doubt that your average right wing media consumer would find a story about high school sports injuries in the Guam Daily Post to be newsworthy were a key fact different. eviltastic fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Apr 17, 2022 |
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Apr 17, 2022 21:33
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