At its very core, the exclusion is seen as a form of "well you're not really a woman".

I could write more on the arguments both sides present, but that's the crux of it.

> At its very core, the exclusion is seen as a form of "well you're not really a woman".

For the supporters of trans-women being women, is there a canonical / generally accepted list of criteria which would classify people "objectively" as a woman? If there is such a thing as a group of people that can be called "women", how would membership in that group be established?

I.e., what really is a woman?

Pretty easy to answer. A women is someone who can naturally create a child inside of them, or naturally possesses the organs to do so.

It’s amazing our collective intelligence has dropped this far. We solved this problem quite a long time ago…

Are people with Müllerian agenesis not women then? Your definition doesn't seem to match up with colloquial usage, even ignoring trans women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCllerian_agenesis

Contra:

> The first, preferred by Fowler, is that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. A more explicit phrasing might be "the exception that proves the existence of the rule".[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

Or perhaps:

> The phrase means that an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases. In other words, a general law is better drafted for the average circumstance as this will be more common.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law

Further it can be argued that the fact that a defect is present in the biological system does not invalidate the presence of said system generally. The complete lack of a system could be the determining factor.

If someone considers themselves a woman, they are a woman. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that for 99% of life. I can understand some objections in a very limited number of contexts and sports is one of those contexts, but otherwise just allow people to choose where they fall on the gender spectrum.

What makes 'woman' a special class in this regard? We wouldn't accept the same kind of self definition elsewhere. I couldn't decide to be a Native American without meeting some external criteria around my birth and life. Nor can I decide to be 6 foot 4 or thin even if I sincerely believed it. Someone who did self define like that would be regarded as delusional.

Is there some principled way to decide what things one can self define as and which one can't?

This is a difficult topic. A key difference between your example of height and something like gender is that gender is socially constructed, while height is a physically reality that can be objectively verified. So one part is that it has to be socially constructed.

However, race is also socially constructed, so it's tricky. People who claim to be "trans-racial" are still regarded as delusional by society despite this. This is mostly just the position of the society we are in.

But there is something more that makes gender transition more valid than racial "transition": Gender dysphoria is a real condition, that has the medically recommended solution of social and medical transition. This is a good reason for why society should adjust it's social construction of gender, and this is why it is happening right now. To date, "race dysphoria" is not medically recognized and has not been formally observed. It has no history dating back hundreds of years like being transgender does.

I largely agree, but I will add that we generally do allow people to self-identify their race. Lots of college and job applications that ask for your race will use this type of self-identifying terminology. The problem is when people are perceived to be lying about their identity as a means of getting some sort of advantage. Rachel Dolezal for example was caught lying about her parentage. Trans people generally don't lie to cover their transness (except maybe socially to avoid the attention their transness would garner).

This lying to get an advantage can potentially apply to trans people in sports too. People are always claiming that near elite male athletes who can't win in men's competitions will just say they are women to face easier opponents, but we haven't really seen any evidence of that occurring. This is primarily because the obstacles to check a box on a college application are so drastically different than the obstacles in front of someone who wants to publicly and officially change their gender. Considering that, I think the best approach is to not waste too much energy on "fixing" this problem until it is actually shown to be a problem.

> I couldn't decide to be a Native American without meeting some external criteria around my birth and life.

For the record, people have self-identified as being Black:

* https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jessica-krug-rachel-do...

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/rachel-dolez...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

But that's the point. Rachel Dolezal is a grifter and a laughingstock, not a black person.

If anyone can be a woman, then no one is a woman.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. If you start calling names like "social signalling" and "progressive elites", you're somewhere between pouring fuel on the flames and starting new ones. Not cool—regardless of what your views are.

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

Sorry about that, I could have made that point more constructively and will edit my post accordingly.

Why wouldn't people support transgendered people able to be the gender they wish and being able to do so in all possible aspects? Be they transwomen wanting to play female sports, or transmen wanting to play male sports (which you oddly leave out of your question).

Because the fittest people with an expressed SRY gene (aka "biologically male") are generally 10-15% better at sports than those without it (aka "biologically female") so if you allow SRY-expressing MtF transgender people to compete in the female category against non-SRY cisgender female people (rather than only letting them competing in the male category), and there are enough of them at top levels, no cisgender woman will ever win anything.

Also, this incentivizes male athletes that can't win medals but are close to take hormone replacement theory solely so they can compete in the much easier female category and win medals, which runs in the same arguments against doping.

On the other hand, if you don't, then MtF transgender people are not likely to win anything, since hormone replacement therapy reduces performance (but not enough to match non-SRY people).

>incentivizes male athletes that can't win medals but are close to take hormone replacement theory solely so they can compete

This might seem absurd but when you consider that they already go to extreme lengths to sneak in highly dangerous and life altering drugs just to win, I can see it happening.

There has been normal athletes pretended to be disabled to cheat the paralympic game, so yeah, it obviously will happen.

I have heard this is a very serious problem with even genuinely disabled athletes pretending to be in worse condition than they actually are to get in easier games/handicaps.

Does it seem absurd when you consider that some totalitarian regimes pluck 4 year olds from their families and send them to gymnastics schools, all for the chance to get an extra gold medal?

That's a strong claim, and so far women's sports aren't being dominated by trans people. Can you provide any evidence?

> Why wouldn't people support transgendered people able to be the gender they wish and being able to do so in all possible aspects?

Ok, that is a plausible argument. However, it's missing one major component: How could anyone argue that this is one of the aspects or life where it is actually possible to treat someone as their preferred gender? If I had to cherry pick an example of an aspect of life where it is not possible to treat a transgender person as their preferred gender, it would be Olympic sports.

That's probably precisely why they are doing this. They're obviously trying to make a political statement. They want it to be the inspiring event that puts this Olympics in the history books. But I mean... Come on people, there are obvious reasons why this athlete is not going to be remembered heroically for their political message in the same way as someone like Jesse Owens.

> or transmen wanting to play male sports (which you oddly leave out of your question).

It’s not odd, because it just hasn’t come up as an issue. In fact most pro sports leagues are not men-only. If a woman or f2m transgender could make the cut on an NFL team, there are no rules against it.

Because it's cheating with unfair advantage? Transmen wanting to play male sports is left out intentionally because it's the highest level of competition of human being. Male sports became male sports simply because female could not compete and it's unfair for female, any human think they can compete at that level is welcome to try, there won't be any complains.

> transmen wanting to play male sports

I don't think it's odd to leave out of the question, since there would be very little opposition to such a proposal.

The argument against would be mostly twofold: 1) it might be 'weird' to have a 'girl' in the men's locker room 2) depending on the sport, there might be an issue of safety

either way, not a big deal- as some other commenter said on here, women's sports is a carveout for a specific demographic (biological females, as if that's in question), and transgenders of all kinds would be much more welcome in regular 'men's' sports, or their own 'hormone free-for-all' programs, than an already established subgroup that does not wish to be so infiltrated.

Sports only work on a fair playing field.

People use “gender” to mean all kinds of different things. What do you mean by the word in your question? The second part is easy to explain: “Be they transwomen wanting to play female sports”. If by “transwomen” you mean biological males who have “transitioned” to women (more neutrally called “trans-identified men”), the answer is because they are not female, so it is unfair to allow them to compete with females.