[qingcharles]

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.

[scoofy]

The issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory. That the issue of discrimination comes up is to be expected.

The idea of competitive sports exists in a framework of discrimination means that you will always have unhappy people.

The good news is that sports, for the most part, is mostly symbolic, and rarely affects ones livelihood.

[TurdF3rguson]

Assuming you have already procured food and shelter, everything important in your life is symbolic.

[scoofy]

Right, which is why civil rights laws tend to be about employment and housing.

[TurdF3rguson]

Civil rights are symbolic, I'm not sure I understood the point you were making.

[bluescrn]

> The issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory.

Just about anything competitive is discriminatory. People are disadvantaged by genetics, disability/health issues, age, wealth inequality, and more.

But as a society we love competitive activities, so the best we can do is come up with rules to try and impose a reasonable amount of fairness.

[mikestorrent]

Right, the purpose is to actually arrange for legitimate competition. Ideally, we would split by whatever facets actually make sense; consider something like fighting disciplines where the split is by weight, or auto racing where it's by the class of vehicle, power-to-weight ratio, etc.

The problem is that there is only so much attention to go around, so we cannot have too many splits; depending on the sport it might just not be financially doable. We also don't want the split to be effectively "the best" and "the second best", because nobody is going to fund millions in advertising for the second best. So, a split like men/women is not surprising as a historical compromise to ensure there's still some attention on those competing in a lighter weight class.

Generically changing it to lightweights/heavyweights might be a reasonable compromise as well, or an age line, or something like that; it will depend on the sport and the market to draw that out. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the thing that makes sense is to continue with the existing split, though....

[leoedin]

I’m the same age as my wife. More or less the same height and weight too. Neither of us have a history of weight training.

I’m much stronger than her. I’ve got 2x the lung capacity she does.

If you’re going to divide competition by one trait, sex is the clear winner.

[lolc]

Just comparing genes, a male human is more closely related with all male chimps than with any female human.

[TimorousBestie]

Unfortunately pointless, mostly symbolic things attract the most hysterical reactions from people.

[peyton]

Five billion people followed the Paris Olympics. It’s actually kind of important.

[AlOwain]

I doubt that 5 billion people could watch the Olympics at all.

Where I am from, there is so little interest in the Olympics that I doubt even half my countries' population would be interested. I have never watched the Olympics ever, and amongst my family and friends, there is little to no mention of it. It is a minor cultural phenomena. This seems to me like there were large extrapolations made.

[adrian_b]

I assume that you are relatively young.

During the last few decades, for various reasons the interest in several kinds of sports events, including the Olympics, has become much lower than before. Other forms of entertainment that were popular in the past have been similarly affected.

However, when I was a child, a half of century ago, the Olympics was not a minor cultural phenomena, but a really major event in which the majority of the people all over the world would be interested.

[AlOwain]

You are very much right, I appreciate your comment.

[squigz]

How do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way.

[secondcoming]

You're most likely part of the 2bn that showed no, or a passing interest, in the Olympics.

[squigz]

I sincerely doubt more than half the population of the entire planet showed more than a passing interest in them, and I'm still curious how it'd be possible to measure that.

[Aurornis]

> and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises.

This is a gross (literally) misunderstanding of the entire topic

The ruling covers a lot of the nuanced cases, including rare DSDs that may never even apply to Olympic athletes

The tests DO NOT check for genitals, and that is irrelevant to the decisions! It's a cheek swab that checks genetics.

[dillydogg]

What I would suggest as a pathologist who deals with diagnosing these: the incidence of differences of sexual development is somewhere between 1 in 1000 - 4500 births. So this policy will not unlikely diagnose someone with a DSD who didn't know.

[crote]

Have we forgotten about Caster Semenya already?

Women with DSD on averave have a higher testosterone level. Testosterone generally makes you better at sports. The Olympics select for the very best athletes.

In other words: the Olympics are selecting for women with DSD, so once you start doing 100% testing you'll find an incidence far above that of the general population.

[ruszki]

If you have male chromosomes, but you have woman genitals, then that’s a proof that you are testosterone insensitive. In other words, testosterone doesn’t make you better at sports at all. The topic is way more complex than this.

There are proofs that male chromosomes are beneficial for example in boxing for women, but it’s not because of testosterone as far as we know. In almost every other sport, it’s not beneficial at all, and even negative because of the mentioned testosterone insensitivity.

[dpd_dpd]

If Semenya had been categorized according to his sex, he wouldn't be considered amongst the very best athletes. He is basically a middling standard 800m male runner who has been able to make a career on the back of what is essentially an administrative error.

Talent scouts specifically sought out males like Semenya who were erroneously registered as female at birth, knowing that their male physical advantage would give them an edge in women's competitions.

The specific condition he has (5-alpha reductase deficiency) is one that only affects males, conferring upon them internal testicles and a micropenis. But male development, including all the testosterone-driven advantages that distinguish male and female athletic performance, is otherwise normal.

His gold medal in the 2016 Rio Olympics women's 800m, along with silver and bronze being taken by two other males with similar conditions, is the reason why World Athletics (then the IAAF) and, later, the IOC started to move policy away from eligibility by identity documentation to empirical testing of sex advantage.

The policy change discussed in the linked article wouldn't have happened without athletes like Semenya taking advantage of the previous flawed policy, to the detriment of female athletes.

[simiones]

Caster Semenya is a woman, not sure why you're referring to her as him. The fact that she has a potentially unfair advantage due to her unusual genetics in women's competitions doesn't in any way make it fair to refer to her in this way.

[dpd_dpd]

If you look at accounts from Semenya's early life there is evidence against his account of growing up as a girl. For example, there have been school photos published showing him wearing a boy's uniform near to a group of girls who were all wearing girl's uniforms. His former school headmaster, when interviewed years later, said he thought that Semenya was a boy and was very surprised to hear that he was now competing in women's athletics.

And of course he would have gone through male puberty, not female puberty. This would have been obvious then, and the result of this is obvious now if you see him in interviews. Male-typical build, male-typical vocal tone. Even his now-wife assumed (correctly) that he is male when she first met him.

Semenya has to double down on this narrative that he is a woman otherwise he will have to admit that his successful sporting career as a woman will have been a lie.

[mandevil]

It will certainly do that. Previous attempts at this (the Olympics did genetic tests from the 1960's through the 1990's, other organizations have done similar tests into the present) always did wind up discovering cis women raised as women from birth, with female presenting genitalia, who failed whatever genetic tests they were doing. At least one of these women even went on to give birth to a live human baby! You would think that would prove that they actually were a woman, but their medals were still kept from them. They were still driven from the sport, branded as cheaters, etc. Because someone who was so much better than the rest can't really be a woman, they have to be cheating somehow, they have to be a man.

In fact, I'm not aware of any genetic testing program ever catching any deliberate cheating, only people who were raised from birth as women. The very first example of this, (1), Dora/Heinrich Ratjen (2) seems to have been an intersex person who was definitely raised as a girl from birth who was a bit confused about what their body was doing. But all the way back in the 1950's when their 1936 Olympics became a big deal, we have lurid tales in the English language media of deliberate cheating that don't seem to have been supported by anything that Ratjen ever did.

1: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ratjen

[lolc]

I wouldn't call it cheating. But I have no trouble drawing lines that exclude some people, if that levels the field for a bigger group. In this case the female olympics would soon be known as the intersex olympics given the selection pressure. I can understand the decision to make the competiton more interesting by barring intersex people. No need to frame it as cheating though.

[mandevil]

Since we don't actually do genetic tests at birth, this would only ocurr in the context of national qualifying, think about what the experience of someone who trains to be good enough to qualify for the Olympics, then gets this test and is told, "Sorry, you aren't really a woman. Too bad. No Olympics for you. Sorry you wasted all those years training."

How else should the person who just got that information interpret it except... Sorry, you're not really deserving, even though your score qualifies you. And what do call someone who has a score that qualifies but doesn't get to go?

And there are far more of people with this experience than the experience of being born and treated by society as a man and becoming an Olympic athlete as a woman.

[space_fountain]

When I’ve researched this it’s turned out that among elite athletes it tended to be a bit higher since some of these intersex conditions can confer benefits

[grogg]

Seems to me like the obvious answer is to categorize these events by weight division rather than gender, but this will never be considered because the hysteria is the point.

[dpark]

You might want to look at strength standards for women and men at the same weight.

https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards

Weight classes are a great thing in some sports. They do not solve for the discrepancies between women and men, though.

[x0x0]

As an example: men super heavyweight snatch record: Lasha, 225 kg. With Krastev 217 way back in 1987. Women: 149kg, Li Yan. So a 76kg delta.

Clean and Jerk: Taranenko 266kg in 1988; current Lasha 267kg. Women's is Li Wenwen 187kg. An 80kg delta.

Gender matters.

[BonitaPersona]

Is it gender, or is it sex, that matters? This is exactly the point, that it is sex that matters, and specific ruling for intersex conditions also matters.

[x0x0]

eh, the article didn't seem to clearly define the differences and I find it boring. People should do whatever they want with their lives and their own genitals. Just don't cheat at sport or pretend that Laurel Hubbard -- who was a modestly good lifter as a man (like... good for a hobby level?) but went to the olympics as an (old for the sport) woman had any business in the olympics. And that Laurel didn't steal a spot from an actual woman who deserved to be there.

[pmontra]

Fighting sports are divided by weight (boxing, judo, etc) but no woman would even be close to winning in the same weight category of men, so we will never see a woman in those sports at the Olympics or anywhere it matters.

And who would pick a woman to play in a team of volleyball, basketball, soccer? I think that historically the only sport in which men and women are absolutely equal is shooting. Maybe curling but it's usually the man that sweeps the ice (a little bit of extra strength.)

[FartinMowler]

Luge too :)

[servo_sausage]

Doesn't really work, men are stronger than women at the same weight...

And that's at the peak of fitness; lower level competitions with juniors or not optimallyfit people exaggerate the strength difference.

[WillPostForFood]

Explain how you'd do basketball? Marathons? Maybe it isn't obvious, but weight isn't the main difference between men and women, nor is it necessarily an advantage in different sports.

[dangus]

It seems like we are creatively bankrupt if we can’t think of any solution. I think many of us could think of a good solution in literally seconds.

And there’s a really good argument that a solution isn’t actually needed.

Does the NBA need a solution for Steph Curry being the best 3 point shooter of all time and dominating his competition? Did the NFL need a solution for Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl 30% of the seasons he played in his career? Did Ohio high school basketball need a solution for LeBron James only losing 6 games in his entire high school career?

Athletes dominating their league happens all the time without the issue of transgender and intersex players.

If there is some kind of mass influx of men playing women’s sports to win easy championships that’s when we can deal with the problem. But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale. E.g. there has never been a time when washed up NBA player that decided to try and join the WNBA. We don’t need to solve problems that do not yet exist.

But let’s say we have to solve this problem to make everyone shut up about it. Here’s one I just thought of off the top of my head:

Anyone who performs at a level of play at an abnormally high gap between themselves and their competition (a set statistical percentage better) can be forced to seek a higher league of play if it exists and they are eligible if and only if other competitors in the league request they do so with a strong consensus.

Is this a perfect solution? No, but I thought of it in literally ten seconds, it doesn’t even involve gender, and I didn’t resort to sitting on my hands and saying “aw shucks there’s no solution” or “I guess we’ll just have to ban trans people from sports.

[kelipso]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_O...

See all three medalists.

[space_fountain]

I think not many people are arguing that we shouldn’t exclude people based on testosterone in elite events, but none of these were trans women, these were all women who lived their entire lives as women from the moment they were born

[lesostep]

I'd argue about testosterone. High testosterone happens in some woman naturally, why exclude them? They still are woman, they should have a right to participate.

Height is also an advantage in sports, and women statistically are much shorter then man, should we ban tall woman from sports? Should we say "she exhibits a male amount of height, it isn't fair to let her participate with 'normal' woman"?

The more "fair" we make woman competition the narrower our definition of a woman gets.

If you want to make it fair, let's pick a random chemical in man exclude people from competition based on their readings. That surely would make sport career look more fun for everyone, training all your life only to find out that some committee doesn't consider you a man. And then we can celebrate equality by noticing that man-to-woman sport participation ratio got closer to 50-50

[space_fountain]

My view is that testosterone is a reasonable thing to discriminate on because:

1. It is causally connected to primary and secondary sex characteristics

2. It has a large impact on performance in many sports

3. It's easy to explain to most people and somewhat matches people's intuitions around fairness

But, yes, it is true that there are cis women with high T levels and it is somewhat unfair and arbitrary to include them when not excluding other random advantages that people have. I'm just not sure if I have a better solution

[nerdsniper]

It's dumb because there are two types of hyper/hypo-gonadism. "Primary" hypergonadism is where you have way more of the hormone in your blood stream. You're advocating testing for only "primary hypergonadism" in women.

Secondary hypergonadism is where someone has a normal concentration of the hormone in their blood, but they have an unusual abundance of hormone receptors.

The effects are the same, but currently we can only measure secondary hypergonadism during an autopsy/dissection.

[gizajob]

Hmm that is pretty damning.

[testbjjl]

Tom and his team were cheating and penalized accordingly but likely not enough, but more than the Astros.

[secondcoming]

> But as of now there is no such problem on any kind of significant scale.

This is not the same as saying there's no problem.

A fraction of humans will ever compete in the Olympics. People train their whole lives for it. It's not about 'scale', it's about safety and fairness. It's not reasonable to expect them to 'shut up' about it.

I don't want to watch a man beat up a woman in a boxing ring.

[txrx0000]

The solution is to develop relative skill rating systems like Elo.

[dpd_dpd]

No, the solution is to exclude male advantage from the female competition via evidence-based analysis, as the IOC's new policy does.

[txrx0000]

Grouping based on skill would achieve what you describe and then some. It would eliminate every kind of advantage, not just sex-based advantage.

[bluescrn]

Sport does that already. The Olympics is the very top skill tier.

So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?

[txrx0000]

> So you're just suggesting making everything mixed-sex, and having very few women at the Olympics?

Yeah. It would work like video game rankings. Top-ranked players are top-ranked because of skill, and if they happen to be mostly men for most games, so be it.

But I get your point. The crux of the problem is most people don't want to see skill-based matchmaking. They want to see the best man, the best woman, or the best disabled person, etc. The categories are already defined in people's minds as cultural constants. The trans people don't like this because they feel excluded by both male and female categories, so they argue in bad faith that there's no physical difference between females and trans-females or males and trans-males. Our long-term options as a society are to either 1) change culture so that people get used to skill-based matchmaking like in video games, or 2) ignore trans people and wait for this issue to disappear when future tech allows a man to transfer his consciousness into a female body and vice versa.

Since 2) is quite far out technologically, I propose 1).

[bombcar]

If we can admit of best male, best female, best disabled, best under the age of 18, etc, we can certainly admit of best trans-male; best trans-female.

[s1artibartfast]

However, the point is not to group by advantage. It is to create a separate category for women to compete in where women can win. Any grouping that failed at this purpose misses the mark

[space_fountain]

It’s interesting how the evidence based analysis switched as soon as the republicans came into power. Maybe this is less about evidence and more about opinion actually?

[ordersofmag]

Not sure how this helps. Olympic events already have relative rating systems that ranks all the participant: pretty complicated and sport dependent systems that determine qualification for the games and competition amongst all the competitors at the games. The problem how to have separate competitions for different groups of participants when there isn't a universally shared agreement on who should be in which group.

[txrx0000]

If you have a relative skill rating system, then there's no need to split competitors into groups. But if you insist, then you can split them based on skill ratings (define a rating range for beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc). And for games with one-on-one matchups, sampling from a gaussian centered on each player's skill rating is good enough.

[kelipso]

It will end up being all men at all the skill rating levels.

[fgonzag]

It doesn't.In tennis a 14 UTR whatever wins against a 13 UTR whatever. UTR is your effectiveness rating against every other player. Same in chess with ELO.

The issue is woman would disappear from profesional sports. Sinners 16.27 rating means that he double bagels Sabalenkas 13.29 essentially 100% of the time. The 500th ATP player has a UTR of 13.81, half a point is quite a bit stronger, do he's still very much stronger than Sabalenka. You probably have to start looking well into the thousand somethings for something that is consisently beaten by her.

Only the top 200 players make money, the top 100 good money, and the top 50 ridiculous money.

[kelipso]

So women would not be in something like top 2000 of tennis players or worse. Which would basically remove any incentive for women to participate in pro tennis at all.

[tremon]

I don't get how you can compare Sinner's UTR against Sabalenka's when they're based to two disparate group scores? Doesn't there need to be at least a modicum of cross-pollination to make a meaningful comparison?

[txrx0000]

No it would not. Look at chess ratings.

[kelipso]

Basically proving my point. Very few women in top chess. Currently there are 0 women in top 100 chess players. Only 3 women were ever in the top 100 chess players. And chess is not even a game where men have a natural advantage like in almost all of the physical sports.

[mc32]

One solution is to have more categories. Then people can compete in their relevant categories.

[trhway]

>This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue.

similar problem in boat races - different boats have different characteristics, thus PHRF rating. Not perfect, yet it works.

The same thing i expect to happen with human sports too - analyze DNA, assign handicap score, and let everybody run. Of course that wouldn't work for say boxing or judo - though even here with time we can come up with exoskeletons (or some drugs) equalizing your DNA-based advantages/disadvantages.

Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories - "only those assigned male at birth", "only those assigned female at birth", "anybody can choose to compete in that category". The 3rd category may just naturally become most competitive and interesting without any "males in female sports" issues we currently have.

[no-name-here]

> Or we can just have competitions in 3 categories [1. assigned male at birth (AMAB), 2. assigned female at birth, 3. anybody]

Wouldn't we expect AMAB to consistently win #1 and #3 (and obviously only AFAB can compete in #2), so trans men/trans women would never be a likely top competitor in any category? And categories 1 and 3 would likely always have exactly the same winners?

(I’m not stating a value judgment to the idea, just making sure we’re on the same page. And even the above idea still runs into issues with intersex people, or objections from some about women with high testosterone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_O... )

[trhway]

>And categories 1 and 3 would likely always have exactly the same winners?

no, the point is that you can't compete in more than one category.

>so trans men/trans women would never be a likely top competitor in any category?

we don't really know. What if trans confirms strong biological advantage? Like getting best things from both sides?

>And even the above idea still runs into issues with intersex people

why not compete in the category 3?

> or objections from some about women with high testosterone

if it is biologically natural - cat 2, otherwise, as long as it is medical and not illegal doping - cat 3.