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.
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.
I appreciate your reply though.
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.
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".
Flamebait is about tone and formulation, not necessarily facts
It's that those masquerading as progressive have a penchant for misconstruing in the most creative ways: https://twitter.com/sadydoyle/status/1220513471995031554
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
Who says this? Most people I think naturally assume that’s not going to ever happen.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 support trans+ rights, but I haven’t been able to get my head around some of the assertions that seem to be bedrock here.
They're not though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sports/comments/3ceeih/the_us_mens_...
Anyway's here another link: https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...
And yes, having women's sports not be dominated by former men is a priority for people.
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.
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").
> 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...
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I don't really know?
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.