Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jfengel 1825 days ago
The Olympics has been dealing with the question of womanhood for a very long time. For a while they were literally stripping and groping female athletes. Later they did chromosome testing, until they discovered intersex individuals who confound that theory.

Even their current testosterone-levels theory is imperfect, since some people have obviously female bodies but inordinately high testosterone levels.

So they seem to be muddling along about as well as they can. If they want to have a separate women's category, it's a question they're going to have to answer.
1 comments
fallat 1825 days ago
I've basically had a thought recently about this.

The Olympics will eventually become a contest of the best humans, regardless of sex / gender. This is already how it is more or less today: people born with the right body types, into the right families, etc, will make it to the top.

Thank for you attending my TED talk.

link
Smithalicious 1825 days ago
This is the most elegant solution, but it's also functionally equivalent to "women can't do high level sports anymore"

I feel like women's sports is extremely cursed - a sporting competition with a handicap, except the handicap is not specified in the rules but is instead a randomly distributed quirk of biology, meaning that people have to judge who does or does not have it, except that the handicap is also an integral part of a person's identity...

(no I don't mean to say being female is a disability, the context is sports)

link
throwkeep 1825 days ago
That would be the end of females in the Olympics. Male High School Athletes beat Female Olympians in most events:

https://boysvswomen.com

link
fallat 1824 days ago
Wow that website is incredible!

Yeah it definitely destroys my little thought :D.

link
jfengel 1825 days ago
They're already in an arms race about performance enhancing drugs. And even without those, there are artificial limitations like age in women's gymnastics, because of the damage it does. Football players are grappling with decades of head injuries.

If you want to know the very best a human can do, you will destroy them. It's just not a question we can safely know the answer to.

So it's never really going to be fair, and we need to ask a different question. Exactly what that question is remains to be seen.

link