> By any mainstream definition...

Rogan has millions of downloads month and had at least one presidential candidate appear for an interview. Joe is one of the people who sets the mainstream definition.

Joe Rogan doesn't move culture by himself. It doesn't matter how many presidential candidates he talks to, he has had multiple guests on his show that have already been kicked off mainstream platforms like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook. I guarantee there will be controversy for Spotify if Rogan continues to have on this type of guest in the future.

There will surely be controversy for Spotify now, given that Rogan has had such guests in the past. I could be overly optimistic, but I would guess that means that people at Spotify have considered the issue and decided they're okay with it.

(And I'm sure you know this, but I think we should be explicit about it in this context: Joe Rogan is extraordinarily popular, with JRE being one of the most followed podcasts in the country. He's not some niche voice that Spotify could have failed to do due diligence on or silence without expecting blowback.)

Nonsense. Nobody cares about the fact that he is willing to have a conversation with just about anyone, except the whiny cancel culture twitter mob.

We need more conversations with people we don’t (think we) like.

His conversations are like empty calories. No substance. No hard questions. 100% ego stroking. His podcast is basically an advertorial. It’s painful to watch.

I disagree. I've watched most of them and have learned a lot over the years, both from the high-profile experts sharing their knowledge on topics I would never otherwise think about to the BS conversations with friends.

Rogan is also not an interviewer and explicitly does not approach the podcast as an interview (outside of special guests). The free uninterrupted conversation is what gets the best out of people.

His podcast is about getting to know the guests, it is not meant to be an adversarial interview.

Hard questions are how you get to know someone.

There many ways to do that, the format Rogan chose is to try and let each guest feel at ease and let them properly explain their stances. Rogan's role is then to play the audience role in the conversation, asking question/clarifications.

What rogan usually does not do for example is to bring up controversies about his guests.

Letting them talk for hours also works.

And what of it? JRE has routinely had both sides of debates on -- equal opportunity ego stroking.

Uhh... no. The reality is YouTube, Twitter and Facebook's censorship do not actually line up with mainstream. People _know_ Alex Jokes is mental, but they still want to hear him talk.

>The poll showed 61 percent of registered voters surveyed believed Jones, who spreads unfounded conspiracy theories through his radio show Infowars, should be banned from the sites of tech companies

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/403772-majority-of-americ...

if they try and control who he can have on and what they talk about, i hope rogan gives them a good 'fuck you!'

Alex Jones has been on JRE multiple times in the past. Will he be allowed to return under the Spotify banner?

No reasonable person would accuse Joe Rogan of "Hate Content". He disagreed with an actual instance of a recently transitioned transgender woman fighting women in MMA. This is the definition of pragmatic. That person can fight men or not fight. This is not discrimination, it is protecting fighters as much as possible in a brutal and extreme sport.

I saw it live. I remember it being crystal clear that he was talking about the context of someone's physical attributes when they are fighting. Maybe you should actually listen to someone before you call what they say "transphobic and borderline hate speech".

I did listen and have watched it more than once. I understand the context, but at the very least, he's being a dick. And he shouldn't be surprised when his words are interpreted in that way. It's a vulnerable population and there are better ways to talk about sensitive issues like that.

Before you just said it was "transphobic and borderline hate speech". Now you are saying he was being a dick, which would make a lot of sense if he wasn't talking about someone literally using confusion of how to handle transgender athletes to brutalize women.

Do you understand that this person was beating women unconscious and broke a woman's skull in 2014? Fallon Fox had a daughter, joined the navy, worked as a truck driver, transitioned, and fought in MMA without disclosing her past. This person is doing a huge disservice to transgender people.

So is it "transphobic" or "being a dick"? Just because you don't like what someone says does not give you right to censor them or label them as inaccurate labels like "transphobic".

I listen to Rogans podcast all the time , when has he ever made hate comments about transgender people ???? No way I'd have missed him saying something hateful about anyone period, let alone transgenders

He explicitly referred to Fallon Fox, saying "You are a fucking man." Not a very tactful way to speak about a transgender woman. And yes, that's transphobic speech.

He said that in the context of the physicality of someone who was fully grown, recently transitioned and was actually brutalizing women in MMA fights.

So? "you are a fucking man" isn't some dispassionate analysis of how to develop a rule system that works for both trans and cis athletes. Just because the context isn't inherently transphobic doesn't mean that he gets a free pass.

He doesn't need a "free pass". The context and what he was saying was crystal clear and has nothing to do with disrespecting someone who is transgender.

This person was able to brutalize women because of attitudes like yours, where you are too afraid of using the incorrect pronoun even in the context of making a point about dangerous differences in physicality.

This person beat a woman until her skull cracked and you are hung up on someone saying she has the physiology of a man. What do you think sets the acceptance of transgender people back more?

That's why should verbally slap him around a bit, preventatively, just in case? Because as you admitted "the context isn't inherently transphobic".

You are choosing the most uncharitable reading which is not what he meant. How do I know that? Because, despite his meatheaddy appearances, he has consistently shown himself to not be transphobic, I watch his show. What he wanted to say is that her sex was biologically of male and that's why she has in this specific case unduly enormous advantage, to a degree that she is depriving others of fair chance at competing.

Transphobia is a property of actions, not an immutable property of people. Rogan may not hold transphobic beliefs. That does not stop a particular action from being harmful.

This isn't a judgement on his person. I don't want to shoot him into space. I want people to recognize that this specific sentence is harmful and we can be better than that. We can have conversations around transgender people in sports without using the same exact same phrasing as people who want to kick them out of their homes and call them freaks.

Whether or not trans athletes should be allowed to compete in the same classes as their cis counterparts in MMA is a conversation we can have, but it is beside the point. Trans women are women. If someone makes plainly transphobic comments, and then refuses to apologize for them (or even doubles down), I'm not going to go and listen to hundreds of hours of their content to attempt to gain a more nuanced understanding of their attitude towards the trans community. I'm just going to think of that person as a transphobe.

Respectfully, I understand you have good intent trying to stand up for a marginalized group, but you're being very ignorant. You can't just helicopter in, show no interest in understanding the situation, then cherry-pick something to spew off some unwarranted opinions about before helicoptering out again. While that singular sentence is absolutely insensitive, the context absolutely matters if you're going to judge the character of the person who said it.

And I appreciate that you are not trying to impute ill intent on me, although you may be underestimating my proximity to the transgender community personally. From my reading of the longer-form quotes – those that I have based my opinion on, I really don't think the context helps Rogan out all that much.

"Look, [Fox is] huge! She's not just huge, she's got a fucking man's face. I mean, you can wear all the lipstick you want. You want to be a woman and you want to take female hormones, you want to get a boob job, that's all fine. I support your life to live, your right to live as a woman. Fight guys, yes. She has to fight guys. First of all, she's not really a she. She's a transgender, post-op person. The operation doesn't shave down your bone density. It doesn't change. You look at a man's hands and you look at a women's hands and they're built different. They're just thicker, they're stronger, your wrists are thicker, your elbows are thicker, your joints are thicker. Just the mechanical function of punching, a man can do it much harder than a woman can, period."

"If you want to be a woman in the bedroom and you know you want to play house and all of that other shit and you feel like you have, your body is really a woman's body trapped inside a man's frame and so you got a operation, that's all good in the hood. But you can't fight chicks. Get the fuck out of here. You're out of your mind. You need to fight men, you know? Period. You need to fight men your size because you're a man. You're a man without a dick. I'm not trying to discriminate against women in any way, shape, or form and I'm a big supporter of women's fighting. I loved watching that Ronda Rousey/Liz Carmouche fight. But those are actual women. Those are actual women. And as strong as Ronda Rousey looks, she's still looks to me like a pretty girl. She's a beautiful girl who happens to be strong. She's a girl! [Fallon Fox] is not a girl, OK? This is a [transgender] woman. It's a totally different specification."

I'm not talking about a single sentence here. Despite whatever permissive or lassiez-faire attitudes he might hold, there is a constant drumbeat of "they're not really women." "Benign" transphobia is still transphobia, even if it's preferable to more aggressive forms. It's possible to be sober about physical differences that might exist between trans women and cis women without denying the former "full" womanhood. I'm not even necessarily disagreeing with the main point he's making, but I still find these comments to be transphobic, and I don't need to be a fan of his to hold an informed opinion here.

I premise that your is a perfectly valid interpretation, he said the things your criticize him for saying.

I would disagree with calling this transphobic... On the topic of the statement "trans women are women" for example wikipedia notoriously offer an interesting position

Trans woman: A trans woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth.

Woman: A woman is a female human being.

This is not necessarily contradictory, but it as the effect that the statements "Trans women are women" and "Trans women are females" are linked together.

My assumption (which I believe you agree with, if you disagree with the next statement I would be interested in hearing your opinion on it) is that many people that (strongly) agree with "trans women are women" do not necessarily fully embrace "trans women are female"

I am not arguing for or against any of those statements (I am trying not to inject my opinions (if any) on them in this comment), but to me this says that the linguistic concept of woman is not intrinsically obvious in this phase of an evolving language.

In my opinion what Rogan says here is that in term of fighting he believe the only contextual concept of gender is similar to duck-typing: If you punch like a man, then you are a man.

Agree or disagree with that I believe it is (still) important to be able to express that concept without being transphobic, as in my opinion that would impede our ability to talk about the complex multidimesional bimodal distribution that is human sexuality.

What I am trying as hard as I am able to is to steel-man Rogan's position without straw-manning yours.

A short summary of what I am trying to say is that I believe that Rogan's position is not transphobic; maybe he is toxic, maybe he is poisoning the conversation with inflammatory language, maybe he is on the wrong side of history. And maybe he deserves being called transphobic for what he said; I am not trying to defend Joe Rogan the person, I am trying to find a small reasonable kernel of his position where I believe we can agree.

> Agree or disagree with that I believe it is (still) important to be able to express that concept without being transphobic

I fully agree with this. But if he is viewed as transphobic then surely that falls flat?

I am not entirely sure what you mean, what I am trying to say is that if someone believe he was transphobic, then it would be enriching of the conversation if they took care not to use the fact that he is making that distinction as an argument for that statement.

Specifically I think it is in the interest of the side challenging the status quo to keep their arguments as precise as possible.

Otherwise conversations become extremely difficult and layered, like a relationship fight that stem from a resentment decades old. There are so many branches and so many directions that even if the core problem might be easy it requires a monumental effort just to get close to it.

Intrinsically examples of where I think this happened would be flamebait topics :)

> what I am trying to say is that if someone believe he was transphobic, then it would be enriching of the conversation if they took care not to use the fact that he is making that distinction as an argument for that statement

Yes, I think I'm definitely not understanding you correctly. It seems like you're objectively stating that conversation would be of higher quality if people would construct arguments more like you do. But what if people do want to use that argument for their statement that they find JR transphobic?

"Don't use this argument; it's wrong and devalues the conversation" reads very strange to me when discussing something as fuzzy as "does this person exhibit transphobic behaviour?"

One more reply just to make sure we hit the depth limit...

This is close to what I am saying. If people want to use that argument they are free to do so, I intend to keep butting and try to steel man the opposing position without strawmanning their argument.

In part I see this as trying to avoid the `Proving too Much` fallacy [ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/ ]

Also I need to confess that, no, I do not actually want people to argue like I do, I argue this way because otherwise I would make terrible, inconsistent, and vague arguments. Many other people are better than me and they do not need a whole paragraph where they preemptively state their intentions.

Overall I believe that there is great value in trying to find a common ground we can agree on and base the discussion. In my perception arguments in forums like this one should be the complete opposite of a debate. If I believe A is true and you believe B is true and they are mutually exclusive, I believe that the "proper" way to argue my position by exposing the basis of my opinion so that you can both understand why I believe A and explain me your interpretation of those positions.

Now I am devolving into rambling, but I think that shaping conversations as debate is indeed damaging. As an example if I am convinced of A by some internal reasoning and you prove not A to me then only half the job is done. We (or I) need to also resolve the conflict between my internal reasoning and what you are saying. Or at the very least take note of the fact that there is an internal conflict to be resolved.

There is no foundation in anything for this opinion, but I believe that the lack of this second step in the popular sciences made the scientific community elitist and was fertilizer for things like antivaxxers.

>Whether or not trans athletes should be allowed to compete in the same classes as their cis counterparts in MMA is a conversation we can have

Thats the conversation he was having. You don't have to listen to hours of content, just take it from people here telling you that that was the context of the discussion. Or don't and simply don't comment on the matter. You are not obliged to have an opinion on everything.

He was probably using the word "man" in reference to Fox's biological sex rather than gender identity.

I agree not very tactful. But also not enough to be 'cancelled' over.

Why does he have to abide by your personal ultra-conservative moral compass as to what is deemed "appropriate" or "not tactful enough"?

Most people agree with Rogan that transgender women who have only recently started on female hormones should not hide that status from biologically female opponents in mixed martial arts. It isn't feminist for women's bodies to be brutalized by men's bodies.

> It isn't feminist for women's bodies to be brutalized by men's bodies.

If you broach the topic in this way—jumping straight to an inflammatory statement on one of the most divisive of all topics—you're guaranteeing a flamewar. That's vandalism, nay, trolling. It breaks the site guidelines, damages this place badly, and you've done it more than once before. You also committed to us that you wouldn't to do it again. Would you please stick to that and not actually do it again?

Your comment would be fine, from a site guidelines point of view, without that last sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I apologize. I thought that statement was inoffensive, but clearly I was wrong. I would edit it out if I could. Fortunately it seems not to have ignited the flamewar you anticipated, since none of the 36 replies other than your own have referenced it.

The main complaint seems to be that I didn't portray the full variety of statements that Rogan has made on this issue. I had listened to a recent podcast in which he claimed to make his definitive and comprehensive statement about this, but perhaps I shouldn't have taken his word for it.

I'll have to think about this more than I have.

They don't have to reference it in order to react to it or otherwise be affected.

I appreciate your reply though.

How is that even remotely inflammatory? It’s the truth.

Those two things are compatible. Why wouldn't they be? If you know some truth that others don't, you have more responsibility, not less, to express it in a way that isn't inflammatory. Otherwise you just end up discrediting the truth, because you give the people who don't know it an excellent reason to resist and reject what you're saying. (I don't mean you personally, of course. We all do it.) Previous comments on this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

See also my reply in the current thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23243538.

Btw, if you read those links and still feel like there's some question that hasn't been addressed, I'd love to know what it is. I'm beginning to feel like years' worth of moderation comments (the ones I keep linking to with HN search URLS) are converging into a set of building blocks that can be articulated relatively clearly.

Did you also know that the government add hydroxyl acid (a chemical commonly found in cancer cells and many vaccines) in the water supplies of many cities? Sometimes it is even illegally used to accelerate vegetable growth for our own food.

Facts are inflammatory!

People frequently bring this up with a triumphant tone, as if they have the point that trumps all points and they can't wait to blow its horn, certain that all opposition will crumble before them. I'm not sure what's going on there, since there's no logic in this. Is it magic imputed to the word "facts"? Or an inability to think beyond one step? If it made sense, you could win any argument by shouting "1+1=2!" over and over. It's a fact!

Go one step beyond that magic word to see that nothing follows from this. There are infinitely many facts. They don't choose themselves. Humans do that, and they do that for complicated reasons that have nothing to do with "facts" being transparently pure and true. Previous comments on this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Errors of logic aside, the GP comment was not "facts". The word "brutalize" is an interpretation, not a fact—and let's not get started on "feminism".

8 hour old account, with a one liner about "facts", and using the right wing "cuck" as a pejorative.

How the fuck is this comment flagged? This is not controversial at all. To think otherwise is truly absurd.

It is flagged as flamebait, not specifically controversial.

Flamebait is about tone and formulation, not necessarily facts

The risk has never been that Rogan is holding reprehensible views.

It's that those masquerading as progressive have a penchant for misconstruing in the most creative ways: https://twitter.com/sadydoyle/status/1220513471995031554

I mean, this isn't quite a misconstrual. The author of this tweet just comes from a bizarre subculture where "puberty blockers for kids" is not only good policy but self-evidently right. I'm sure it's legitimately challenging for her to understand what Rogan is saying - such a large inferential gap is hard to cross.

You are not giving the full extent of his comments on transgender people. He is against women who transitioned as adults from competing against other women. He is also against people taking steps as a child to make transitioning easier as an adult such as taking completely reversible hormone blockers to delay puberty until they are old enough to transition. So he leaves no possible path for a transgender woman to compete in sports. It seems like he wants transgender people out of sports completely.

In my opinion, the whole discussion of transgender people in sports is a proxy war for their role in society as a whole. Transgender people have been allowed to compete in the Olympics and most American sports (at least at the college level) for roughly a decade if not longer. It is still extremely rare for a transgender woman to dominate other woman in any of these sporting events. It just doesn't seem like a possibility worth focusing on when compared to the downside of further marginalizing the transgender community at large by singling them out for harsher treatment.

People born as men who transition to women, and I fully support them, have unfair advantages against people born as women. Would you agree with that statement?

A better solution would be to allow a gender-agnostic bracket alongside women and men, where anyone can compete.

To people downvoting me: Please use the upvote/downvote as marking my contribution relevant or irrelevant, not to mark disagreement.

PS: I fully support trans people in all their rights, should go without saying but that is far from the default these days.

The part of that first statement that I question is the "unfair" part. Almost all world class athletes are born with a natural gift that most of us don't have. Most of those athletes need to train and hone that gift over decades to be truly elite, but that natural gift is still present. No matter how many hours I train playing basketball and no matter how long Lebron James goes without touching a basketball, I am never going to beat him in a game of one-on-one. Is that "unfair" or is that just how sports work? I don't see birth gender as any different than that.

That said, I think it is reasonable to put certain restrictions on transgender athletes such as rules regarding hormone treatments. I am just not an expert enough in the field to say exactly what those restrictions should be.

Also we generally do have gender-agnostic brackets in sports. What we call men's sports are generally gender-agnostic. People of any gender are free to compete in them. The question for transgender athletes is almost always whether than can compete in women's sports.

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.

In track and field the 800m race is my favorite race because it's every bit training and determination as it is natural ability.

Here are the results of the women's Olympic 800m championship in Rio in 2016: https://www.olympic.org/rio-2016/athletics/800m-women

Here are the results of the 2016 Texas UIL 5A high school boys 800m championship in 2016: https://tx.milesplit.com/meets/224994/results/451208/formatt...

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.

https://goo.gl/maps/azHysT8zDYgVJwim9

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeQYdyDsioY&t=1m03s

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francine_Niyonsaba

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTC3B2sgYf4

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Wambui

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpCPnTBAWF4

> “Where are all the world class transgender athletes that are dominating men on a routine basis?"

Who says this? Most people I think naturally assume that’s not going to ever happen.

I was quoting verbatim from this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23242020

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.

Let me leave this moving video here about a "right answer" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP6eZAfO0Yg

> We just don't have any evidence of that.

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.

I don’t understand equating competing in a sport as representative of being a “real” [gender].

I support trans+ rights, but I haven’t been able to get my head around some of the assertions that seem to be bedrock here.

> 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.

They're not though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sports/comments/3ceeih/the_us_mens_...

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.

Anyway's here another link: https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...

I know you don't care about the high school girls soccer game, but the girls do, and their parents do.

And yes, having women's sports not be dominated by former men is a priority for people.

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.

I'm surprised you think there's no basis.

>We just don't have any evidence of that.

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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_in_sports#Basketball

[3] https://www.ncsasports.org/womens-basketball/recruiting-guid...

Imagine this conversation:

"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.

Rogan is happy for people born female to complete in male sports just not the other way around.

You can't discount how unfair it would be for women to compete against people who have lived for years with high testosterone levels.

Maybe we need a new non gendered sports category where athletes are free to take any hormones they wish. That might be fair. But may cost the athletes their health.

> You can't discount how unfair it would be for women to compete against people who have lived for years with high testosterone levels.

If a man has had naturally low testosterone all his life, should he be allowed to compete against women?

If a woman has had naturally high testosterone all her life, should she only be allowed to compete against men?

Perhaps, I think that would be worth investigating.

You'll find that most athletes at the top are genetic outliers. There is already some unfairness towards those with low testosterone. However if you allow people that have lived long periods of time with high testosterone to complete against women who have not I suspect you'll find very few of those women ever make it to the top.

Maybe, but why is fairness on this one particular axis the only one I ever hear about?

Look at the 100m sprint. Of the top 25 (regardless of gender), as far as I can tell, none of them have two X chromosomes.

But none of them are Caucasian, either.

Why isn't there a large movement arguing that sprinters should only be allowed to compete against those of the same race? If I (as a white man) took up sprinting (ha!), it would kind of suck knowing that I don't seem to stand a chance of setting the world record just because of my genes. But it seems like white sprinters manage to deal with it.

And, well, if there were separate races for people of different races... that wouldn't really change anything, would it? The world's fastest sprinter would still probably be non-white, the only real difference would be that the world's fastest white sprinter would get to say "I'm the world's fastest white sprinter (but still not the world's fastest sprinter)". You're just giving out an extra trophy- everybody knows who's actually the fastest.

Why isn't this argument valid for sex separation in sports, too?

Perhaps it's the historical significance of womens sports as part of the feminist movement?

I don't really know?

In many sports there is actually no rule that forbid women to joining the other championship.

The reason a separate women sport exist is the same as why there are weight brackets in boxing, to allow athletes that score lower in brute-metrics to compete reasonably. Trans women would be less of an issue if women sports did not exist.

(Trans men are a different issue if they take hormones, as that often fall under doping technically)

> In my opinion, the whole discussion of transgender people in sports is a proxy war for their role in society as a whole.

There are a lot of people out there who care way more about sports than they do about the role of transgender people in society.

Have you ever been an athlete in a serious way? Honest question. If people who've competed or deeply cared about sports seem to all get hung up on this, maybe they're seeing something you're not?

Your two issues are issues because, even without any prejudice, there are physical differences that we have to handle and it's not easy to figure out how to be fair to all parties.

In the case we're talking about, for example, the trans women fractured a woman's skull. Broke her skull. Was the skull the problem here? Should it have been less breakable to match the rhetoric?

It's important to make a distinction here. One that Rogan fails to make in his comments.

Fox fractured her opponent's orbital. This is a facial fracture, not a skull fracture. Skull fractures are life threatening whereas facial fractures generally are not.

There is a large discrepancy in the force required to cause a facial vs skull fracture as well.

Yes, I have been heavily involved in high level athletics.

MMA is a violent sport. There are risks to anyone participating in it. If you are seriously worried about protecting athletes, there should be more widespread changes than just eliminating the handful of transgender athletes because I guarantee the majority of injuries occur in matches between two cisgender athletes.

What if the reality is that transgender people already have a reasonable set of rights in our society?

If the front line of the battle is people being assholes about pronouns and transgender women competing in combat sports... maybe the war is won?

I dont know, I'd say the front line of the battle is things like transgender persons having 9x the suicide rate of the general population. Is that a war that looks won to you?

Some women are uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with trans-women. Should we continue to dictate how these women should behave and feel?

We generally established that "I don't feel comfortable being around them" is not an excuse to discriminate back in the 60s.

To clarify: would you argue that the existence of separate drinking fountains for white people and black people is justified because many white people feel uncomfortable drinking from the same fountain a black person has just used? If not, why not?

Isn't this an argument that there should be no bathroom segregation whatsoever? Why should women care if men use the same bathroom as them?

Yup and gender neutral bathrooms are a thing without much ceremony in a whole bunch of places.

I have to say that I have seen a lot of arguments in support of bathroom bans, but trans women have stinkier shits is new to me and perhaps the most outlandishly petty reason I could imagine. So while I disagree with the entirety of your post, I will give you kudos for coming up with that one.

Well, thank you. Eyerolls and disgust right back at 'cha.

> It seems like he wants transgender people out of sports completely

I think this is something you're reading that's not quite there. He isn't sensitive to the topic, but I don't think he hates trans people.

It is the "if you aren't with us you are against us" mentality. Any opposing opinion (even when based on valid arguments) is labeled as hate speech.

Can you help me understand how it's fair for transitioned women to compete against men? I would expect this to be unfair in many sports because of natural biological differences. Not a troll, just looking for relevant facts to inform my world view.

His comment was specifically aimed at martial arts and I think could be extended to any contact sport. The on average smaller stature, different bone structure etc are giant disadvantages and would most likely lead to a higher potential of harm and damages.

I think nobody cares if differently gendered people run a race, you would see who is the fastest and people can draw their own conclusions if that is fair or not. I think this is very different if people start punching or run into each other at full speed.