alt Hacker NewsMy 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.
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This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue.
Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises.
How do you ever come up with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting)
Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.
No one cares at amateur levels but we are speaking of the Olympic. I'm all for transgender to do sport, have fun and even compete but Olympic games are about who is the best of the world.
If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.
400 transfems at Olympic events is rare?
> but would be sad to be banned.
Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted.
> 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.
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You can tell the IOC does not care about fairness in competition: they focus on this, instead of the rampant cheating (eg doping) which they do nothing about.
Honest question, you say you compete for fun, but what about the folks you beat who are competing for the sake of competition, which is a little different than fun? I am generally open minded at least in comparison to folks I encounter but I can’t square this one in my head. I am just one person with a single opinion but would like to better understand where I am wrong on this topic.
Competitive sport is unusual in that the whole thing is, in a sense, a search for outliers.
Finding very rightmost person on the histogram of running speed or swimming ability or weightlifting strength. The very, very rare. The 7ft 6in guys. Then we put them on a podium, hand them a medal, and wrap them in a flag.
In most other fields, outliers average out. The new subdivision of houses gets framed at the speed of the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1.
In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about.