alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
Replies
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.
Look up Elizabeth Swaney, she got to the Olympics by not falling off her skis. And I mean that quite literally: Ignoring DNFs she was dead last in all the qualifying events, but by doing a massive amount of them she somehow managed to get enough points in total to qualify.
Or there's Eric Moussambani, who participated in the 100 meter freestyle swimming without ever having seen an Olympic-sized swimming pool before. Similarly with a Jamaica bobsleigh team: horribly equipment, very little experience, still at the Olympics.
At the top it is indeed about being the absolute best, but at the bottom it is very much about being a competition between nations, and for some countries being the best at an obscure sport can still mean being pretty bad at it.