[humanrebar]

Strawmen usually have stupid philosophies, yes.

The simpler and more convincing explanation is that lawmakers write bad laws, regulators write bad regulations, and everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports. School lunch policy details don't get enough attention.

[apercu]

> everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports

Everyone votes emotionally on issues they don't even understand (e.g, there is ~1 trans athlete out of 10,000 NCAA athletes right now, so why the hell is it even a minor issue, let alone a national debate?).

[dani__german]

Because there is only room for 1 gold medal. Only room for 1 silver medal. This is in Pool, which almost a best case scenario for women to beat men and yet, in the UK, its two former men gunning for gold and silver.

https://www.newsweek.com/trans-sport-pool-women-harriet-hayn...

If you truly believe transwomen are women, then its great. For anyone who doesn't share that arbitrary idea, it looks like women's sports is basically over, at least at the high end. Might as well get back in the kitchen, huh? Even women's sports is a man's game now.

[apercu]

I'll go back to there is ONE out of TEN THOUSAND so why is this an issue trumping healthcare and the economy?

[dani__german]

If you put a man into a game of finding the best person out of 10,000 women, you're going to find the man at the championship. This isn't a per capita or population scale thing. Competitions are intensely personal games.

Sports are a big part of American culture and smugly ruining them with nonsense makes Americans mad. This is not difficult to understand.

[mrguyorama]

Having sex the night before a competition can increase your testosterone levels, a known performance enhancing chemical.

Should we ban sex for athletes? At a high school level?

[dani__german]

Testosterone levels fluctuate more on a minute by minute scale with such activities rather than a day by day scale. We should ban exogenous testosterone use, and we already do.

Men and women are not the same. They are a distinct, binary grouping. One cannot measure up to the metrics, characteristics, etc of the other. Women have their own sports leagues because of this. Men do not have exclusive leagues, its illegal in most western countries anyway under discrimination laws. Women just cant compete at these levels though. Thats not a moral judgement but a plain reading of the facts.

As far as the incoming remark about "controlling what high school students do in private with each other", I will rather present you with a question:

Should we make it impossible for thousands of girls to get a gold medal, XOR allow 1 person, born a male and currently pretending/presenting as a woman, to dominate the competition? This is the actual, real life decision that leagues of all kinds must make, from football to chess.

[aaaja]

Sports governing bodies in the UK are rapidly rewriting their policies to stop these men from competing in women's sports, after a recent Supreme Court judgement ruled this amounts to unlawful sex discrimination against women. So hopefully this ongoing insult to all the women who've worked so hard to compete in their sport of choice will soon be over.

That said, the ideal outcome would be apologies to every female athlete affected by this, and for these men to be retrospectively disqualified and stripped of any medals or titles, with these instead being awarded to the women who would have won had these men not been competing. I doubt this will happen any time soon, but if those running these competitions had an ounce of integrity and sense of fair play, they would do.

[dani__german]

This is a morally correct and minimum acceptable response. Leagues must admit they were wrong (probably impossible), and mail out letters and trophies (trivial).

These governing bodies need to Do Better. They need to work on themselves.

[vlovich123]

The problem is that sharp drop offs instead of gradients are a known and well documented problem as is the desire to get rid of the welfare state by one party. You don’t need to assume best intentions here when the GOP has consistently made it clear where their priorities lie on this topic. Oh and the GOP has constantly taken “starve the beast” and weaponized incompetence approaches to try and kill the programs they don’t like.