Isn't there always going to be someone better due to genetics? As a cis man, I know that even if I trained 24/7 with the world's best trainers, I'd never be as good a runner as some Kenyan dude or as good a basketball player as a tall and lanky dude. I have no chance due to genetics, even though I have a male body.

It's not like humans were made equally. Each body has genetic advantages and disadvantages, and your early childhood nutrition permanently changes your athletic potential too. You can't exactly level the playing field to begin with.

Why don't these sports have brackets instead of gender divides? Is a biological man/woman divide really the most useful distinguisher between athletes?

I guess for context, I just don't get the brouhaha. I am fairly active and tremendously enjoy several sports, even though I'm no good at them despite years of training and effort. A large part of it may be genetics. These are just hobbies and games.

Professionally, doing what I do for work, I'm also mediocre at best. There are people more intelligent than me, better communicators than me, more ambitious than me, more focused than me. Some of that is genetics too, though harder to tease apart.

So what? We don't know the upper limits of human potential, especially the environmental and epigenetic contributors that keep producing better and better athletes and thinkers. We're not static chess pieces with finite moves, but constantly evolving animals whose body plans keep adapting to new conditions as they arise and work to our advantage.

You can slice and dice a million humans into subgroups and there are always going to be statistical clumps, much of which is genetic. But so what? Why is that such a big deal for concern?

If the goal is to tease out the absolute best, only a no holds barred competition (with or without doping) can reveal that, and the competitors will likely get better over time. Anything else is just a handicap made for spectacle and entertainment, so why does it matter HOW you bracket? Why is the sex bracketing more important than race or weight or height or mental ability or leg strength or whatever other distinguisher? Humans never were equal to begin with.

People have been worrying about trans women in athletics for the last fifty years and the discourse against them competing has never changed. Underlying all the arguments is the belief that trans women are not women. A cis woman who is stronger, bigger, and faster than her peers is never called out for the circumstances of her birth and upbringing that allowed it to happen. But the circumstances of a trans woman's birth and upbringing is a matter of controversy instead of being a normal variation. If Lia Thomas was a cis woman with the same physical capabilities she does now, nobody would care.

This is not correct.

Underlying everything is the science that says that a person who goes through puberty as a male gets permanent increases in bone and muscle density over people who go through puberty as a female.

In day to day life this ends up washing out in a sea of averages and individuals. In competitive sports, on the other hand, where we're no longer talking about averages but about peaks of performance, peak performers that experienced male puberty will always outperform peak performers that experienced female puberty. The advantage does not go away with hormone therapies, either. You'd get the same controversy if you let heavyweight boxers identify as welterweights too.

Many sports have handicapping systems that restrict or normalize natural advantages to allow fair competition. In track and field, for example, the most basic of these was the male-female split.

Lia Thomas is cheating the handicapping system. It's not fair.

Yeah, I understand there is that controversy (should newcomers with different bodies be able to displace old timers)... and presumably there isn't as much controversy about trans men who can't perform as well as cis men?

But what I don't get is why women's brackets are so much more important than, say, racial or height or any other brackets.

As a cluster, are "people born with vaginas" more similar in athletic ability than "people born of a certain ethnicity" or "people who reliably ate at last 1500 calories a day" or whatever.

Presumably this goes the other way too, with cis women being better at ultra endurance sports than cis men. So what?

Like isn't the whole point of brackets to give lesser athletes a moment to shine in the spotlight, even though they aren't technically the best? So why don't they just make more brackets not based on genitalia?

I think you ought to tell the women who beat her that they had no chance of beating her.

In the NCAA Division I Women's Championship, she competed in the 100 yard, 200 yard, and 500 yard Freestyle events. She won only the last of those. This makes sense, as pre-transition, the longer freestyle events were her best ones.

No different to the 90%+ men like me who also have no chance due to genetics.

No, it’s very different. We’re not talking about 90%+ of women, we’re talking about the women who previously held records, who now can no longer compete because we’ve expanded the definition of “woman” to include anyone who claims to be one.

We used to separate men and women in sports exactly so this wouldn’t happen. Now, you have no chance unless you are born male.

So by your own argument, are Caster Semenya or Christine Mboma not women? In the fear around transgender individuals competing and somehow dominating all records (which is a small amount of an even smaller minority) you end up outright excluding cisgender women because they don't fit your increasingly narrow idea of what a woman is supposed to be.

Those cases are different and you know it. The athlete mentioned above is Lia Thomas. From wikipedia:

> In the 2018–2019 season she was, when competing in the men's team, ranked 554 in the 200 freestyle, 65 in the 500 freestyle, and 32 in the 1650 freestyle. In the 2021–2022 season, those ranks are now, when competing in the women's team, 5 in the 200 freestyle, first in the 500 freestyle, and eight in the 1650 freestyle.

How am I excluding cisgender women? I am arguing that forcing cis women to compete against trans women, who have the undeniable advantage of being born with a male body, is unfair. Athletics are separated by sex because, as a rule, men are just bigger and stronger than women. Like another commenter pointed out, if we remove this separation, 99% of female athletes would no longer be able to compete.

I brought up examples of women who were born with an undeniable advantage. They are faster and stronger than most other women because of their genetics. Should they be not considered women? Should they have to compete in their own bracket? Saying that it's 'different' isn't much of an argument.

I bring this up because part of the problem was transgender fears is what fuels the discrimination those individuals face despite being cisgender women.

If your answer is 'it's complicated' then you're admitting that defining what is and isn't a woman is more complicated than how it seems. The majority of transgender women competing in these sports do not break records or anything of the sort.

If we start to limit who can enter women's competitions based on traits, should we do same with males too? Like maybe not allow above average height players in basketball, to make more even field?

> are Caster Semenya or Christine Mboma not women?

My apologies for posting under a shitty throwaway, but fyi, the two athletes you mentioned are XY and thus not women by the simplest and most straightforward of definitions.

It is a very common position that they should be excluded from women's sports. In fact, the fact that all three medalists in the women's 800m at the 2016 Olympics have XY chromosomes is a very strong argument for doing so!

I'm with you on that reasoning, but it is worth noting that were we to drop the gender segregation in athletics then many female athletes lose their careers. It is easy to see why that's a concern for them, even if you don't agree that it is a good reason to keep the segregation.