[citruscomputing]

We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."

Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.

(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)

[appreciatorBus]

[flagged]

[bit-anarchist]

But that's not what they said.

[remarkEon]

Yes it is. Note the parenthetical.

>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)

This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.

[space_fountain]

I read the statement as follows:

There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.

Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt

I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?

[appreciatorBus]

> There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.

But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change definitions over time, of course. If it’s your contention that the definition by consensus has already changed, say so, but there are billions of people on this earth who haven’t got the message, which seems odd for something determined by consensus of the people who use language.

Putting that aside, since sports are about physicality and accomplishing things in the real world, it makes no sense to base them on “identity” - something that cannot be detected or defined by anyone but the self identifier - rather they should be based on physical aspects of reality.

[space_fountain]

I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.

Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.

I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports

[remarkEon]

This part:

>except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt

"I took a drug, therefore I am now a woman" is not a reasonable position to hold. The debate starts out with one based on an identity, and then in the very next formulation reduces that identity to which medicines you take.

[space_fountain]

No, but that’s not what the statement is saying. It’s arguing that we should add the minimum restrictions we can to the women’s sports category and that hormones might be a reasonable one

[rdevilla]

This implies that males who identify as women but do not undergo HRT are not women in the context of sports (and their gender in other contexts remains ill defined, especially in the absence of perverse incentive). This is a form of misgendering, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

    This is a position that one could take up, but it comes
    at a steep cost. It holds the societal acceptance of
    transgenderism hostage to a biological account of
    sex-gender. This is problematic for several reasons.

    Moreover, it is worth highlighting the problems with
    suggesting that sex, as biologically based, determines
    the gender with which one psychologically identifies
    [...] Second, whatever criterion is offered to ground
    this similarity would inevitably disqualify many women,
    for not all women share the same hormone levels,
    reproductive capacity, gonadal structure, genital
    makeup, and so on. (Tuvel 2017)

[space_fountain]

Again I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt

[rdevilla]

> When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."

I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose."

Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching.

Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor:

    “transsexual claims to belong to a sex do not appear to be metaphysically
    justified: they are claims that self-identities ought to be definitive in
    terms of the question of sex membership and gendered treatment. They are
    therefore political in nature” (Bettcher 2014, 387).

Do you agree or disagree with the above quote?

[nick_]

Do you think sex and gender are the same thing?

[rdevilla]

I am not sure, since this article uses sex and gender in senses that are entirely inverse to the common ones in 2026. How do you define those terms?

In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned."

The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender."

Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?

[olalonde]

That ontological classification is a recent invention with almost zero roots in common language. For most people, woman means "adult female".

[frumplestlatz]

If we’re going to take an ontological approach, is there a stable non-tautological definition of “woman” that admits your definition of the subcategory?

[gizajob]

Why, ontologically, are they not a subclass of men?

[NuclearPM]

No.