If you were born an average American male and you trained your whole youth (and I mean really trained) to be the best basketball player you could be, you wouldn't ever beat Lebron James but you'd beat a lot of elite women basketball players. The physical gifts bestowed upon you by your mom would give you the advantage
We just don't have any evidence of that. Like I said in a previous post, we are in the second decade of this being allowed. Where are all the world class transgender athletes that are dominating men on a routine basis? People always point to the same 2 or 3 examples while acting like this is a widespread epidemic of men deciding to switch genders just to win athletic competitions. I don't think this is as big of a problem as people pretend it is.
EDIT: Please keep my post in context. When I say there is no evidence for that, I am not referring to a basic physiological difference between men and women. I am referring specifically to this: "If you were born an average American male and you trained your whole youth... you'd beat a lot of elite women basketball players." There is no basis for a statement like that.
If those boys had competed in the same race as the Olympic women -- women athletes who have the benefits of the best sports science in the world at their disposal -- the boys would have taken the top 4 spots and it wouldn't have been close.
At the class 1A level, which means high schools with enrollments of less than ~100 kids, the top boys runner in 2016 would have beat the womens olympic gold medal winner.
Here is the satellite view of the dirt track he trained on.
In the women's 800m in Rio, the top 3 all had XY chromosomes and lived with high testosterone levels through puberty.
- Caster Semenya[1] (1st place). Here is an interview with her.[2]
- Francine Niyonsaba[3] (2nd place). Here is an interview with her.[4]
- Margaret Wambui[5] (3rd place). Here's an interview with her.[6]
I see a lot of people saying things like, "Where are all the world class transgender athletes that are dominating men on a routine basis?" Well they've failed to notice the intersex XY people who are dominating women's events.
You are moving the goalposts by switching from a highly skilled game like basketball to one that is mostly dictated by physiology. There are certainly athletic competitions in which the gap between men and women differs.
I also notice you chose a race in which Caster Semenya won. I don't know it that was intentional, but that specific race highlights the ridiculousness and arbitrary nature of a ban on transgender athletes. By seemingly all credible accounts she was born, raised, and identifies as a women however she has a genetic condition that gives her some characteristics of a man. Should she be banned from competing against women? If so, what precedent does that set? Do we need to test the chromosomes of all athletes to see if they have rare genetic conditions? Are XX males allowed to compete against women even if they identify as men? What if they are on testosterone therapy?
> You are moving the goalposts by switching from a highly skilled game like basketball to one that is mostly dictated by physiology. There are certainly athletic competitions in which the gap between men and women differs
There are no goalposts, but this is just an internet argument for you so I can see why you'd think that.
As for Semenya I don't know what the right answer is. Intersex is hard. It's also rare. So I don't know. Despite being easily the most elite 800m female runner in the world she wouldn't have even touched the top 150 high school boys times that year, so it's hard to know what to do. Forced downregulation of natural T levels just to compete seems immoral.
Are you aware that high school boys soccer and hockey teams are competitive with elite, world class women's teams? Do you think the advantages that men appear to have are anywhere near fully erased by transitioning genders?
> I don't think this is as big of a problem as people pretend it is.
This is not really about the specific issue to anyone on either side. To you, it's about acceptance of transgender people. To your opponents, it's about not accepting the denial of what seems like blindingly obvious reality.
>Are you aware that high school boys soccer and hockey teams are competitive with elite, world class women's teams? Do you think the advantages that men appear to have are anywhere near fully erased by transitioning genders?
You are exaggerating with that first claim. It is in no way common for high school male athletes to be competitive against world class female athletes. Secondly, the advantage that men have is certainly decreased when transitioning. I don't believe it is "fully erased", I simply don't think we need to have the goal of fully erasing any advantage. I won't agree with you on that until there is an NBA for men under 6 feet for me fairly compete in against my peers who were similarly disadvantaged at birth.
>This is not really about the specific issue to anyone on either side. To you, it's about acceptance of transgender people. To your opponents, it's about not accepting the denial of what seems like blindingly obvious reality.
I am perfectly willing to admit that my primary motivation here is the acceptance of transgender people. I don't know what to tell you if you don't prioritize that over the sanctity of the outcome of some high school girls soccer game.
> I am perfectly willing to admit that my primary motivation here is the acceptance of transgender people. I don't know what to tell you if you don't prioritize that over the sanctity of the outcome of some high school girls soccer game.
Here's the problem (aside from deriding something a lot of average people care deeply about): you are forcing these two things to be in conflict, when they simply aren't to most people, including Joe Rogan (and myself). By forcing them into conflict, you are hurting the cause of transgender rights far more than helping it.
Banning trans women from competing in sports it telling them they aren't "real" women. The societal repercussions of that are much larger than the outcome of high school athletics (and this issue is almost always about high school athletics and below). I fundamentally don't understand arguments to the contrary.
For the record, I care deeply about sports. I think it is fundamental part of both our culture at large and the education of a lot of people. You can dig deep into my comment history on HN and see I regularly defend the importance of sports to the usually derogatory "sportsball" comments that are common in intellectual and technological communities like HN. I just don't think the outcome of specific games is important enough to justify further ostracizing a group of people who are already incredibly marginalized.
> You are exaggerating with that first claim. It is in no way common for high school male athletes to be competitive against world class female athletes.
That's the best under 17 soccer players. It's essentially people who will be pro soccer players in 1-2 years. That's not the same as common hs male athletes.
The US Men's U-17 team is not a high school team. It is a team made up of world class athletes who are high school aged. That is a huge distinction. You are saying a team a world class men can beat a team of slightly older world class women. That isn't surprising.
The US women's team is best in the world, US men's team doesn't even come close to being best 20 teams in the world. They are high level athletes but not world class (especially for soccer) by any sorts.
I'll leave the epidemic of "men deciding to switch genders" to one side.
Let's dig in where you wrote:
"If you were born an average American male and you trained your whole youth... you'd beat a lot of elite women basketball players. There is no basis for a statement like that."
No. That is incorrect.
If I took some of the top 1000 male tennis players and pitted them against the top 50 female players you think the women would dominate?
Perhaps serving speed is more specific? Benchmark that. There's just one basis of discussion.
Unfortunately delusional statements like this only end up hurting the cause you are trying to promote. Biological males are physically stronger than biological females - full stop. If biological reality doesn't line up with your ideology then you should consider the flaws in your ideology rather than ignoring reality (and insisting that everyone else ignore reality too, or be guilty of "hate speech").
American males are an average of 5½ inches taller [1], which is an extreme advantage in Basketball [2]:
> Empirically, the over-representation of extremely tall athletes in basketball lends credence to the theory that the sport provides tall players with a very significant advantage. The average American male is 5 ft 9.3 in (1.76 m).[18] Yet, in a 2007-08 player survey, the average player in the National Basketball Association (NBA) is listed at 6 ft 7 in (2.01 m) in shoes.
The average male is either taller or within a couple of inches of the top female Basketball players [3].
"Hey, remember that 'basketball' game we invented?"
"Yeah, what about it?"
"Well, lots of people are playing it, but some of them are unhappy."
"Oh no! What's wrong?"
"Well, they say they're not winning."
"Hm. Well, by the rules of the game, only one team can win, so... maybe we should split the sport up into different divisions, based on skill? We can use the Elo-like algorithms to determine which teams should play each other so that each team has a good chance to win."
"Well, we don't want to do that- it sounds a bit complicated to implement in practice. And, see, there's another thing."
"What is it?"
"Taller people tend to win more. From the stats, they have a big advantage, and it just makes sense if you think about what playing basketball well requires- being taller really does make you better at the game. A lot of the players who aren't having fun are shorter- they feel like they don't really have a fair shot at winning, just because of their height, which is something they can't really change."
"Ah! So you want to split the players up based on their height. Well, we might have some unwanted second-order effects from that - since we aren't accounting for things like muscle mass or aerobic capacity, anybody who is disadvantaged in those attributes might still not feel like they're getting a fair shot. But if the main effect really is height, then I guess-"
"No, no, no, we don't want to do that, either. We want to do it based on genes."
"Oh! Well, that's a bit tricky- loads of genes might affect height, and even more probably affect how good somebody can be at basketball- but maybe with enough data we can build a model to roughly determine somebody's 'innate' basketball ability, and split players up based on that, instead. Now, we need to be careful, because this won't take into account things besides genetics- say, early childhood environment- that folks could reasonably argue are outside of their control- but I guess it could be a clever solution to the pr-"
"Well, that sounds hard. So we want to do it based on whether somebody has two X chromosomes or only one. It's correlated with height, and height is correlated with innate basketball ability."
"But if you care about height, why not just split players up based on height?"
"Well, there are other factors related to basketball ability, too. Not just height, that's a straw man. And many of them are correlated with how many X chromosomes players have."
"But you brought height up... Well, okay, maybe a weighted combination of different metrics that affect basketball ability? Seems like that might be easier than doing genetic testing on everybody."
"No, we're not going to actually do genetic testing on everybody- honestly, that just sounds invasive and creepy. We're going to look at other attributes that correlate with how many X chromosomes players have, and we can usually guess how many X chromosomes they have that way, without having to test. If a player wants to do genetic testing to prove how many X chromosomes they have, maybe we'll let them do that, too. But mostly, we'll guess based on things like their facial structure, voice pitch, whether they have breasts or not, and their genitals."
"But none of those things directly affect height, much less basketball ability, to any meaningful degree! You're measuring a proxy of a proxy."
"... Well, that's what we're going to do."
If what you care about is basketball ability, try to split the sport up based on that, based on actual wins and losses. If that's too hard in practice, and what you care about is height, then split the sport up based on height. Don't segment based on some second-order proxy measure- that's just sloppy. And, honestly, it makes it a bit hard to believe this is actually some high-minded concern for fairness- it starts to seem like it's being motivated by something else.
