Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.

(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)

>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)

This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.

There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.

Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt

I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?

But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change definitions over time, of course. If it’s your contention that the definition by consensus has already changed, say so, but there are billions of people on this earth who haven’t got the message, which seems odd for something determined by consensus of the people who use language.

Putting that aside, since sports are about physicality and accomplishing things in the real world, it makes no sense to base them on “identity” - something that cannot be detected or defined by anyone but the self identifier - rather they should be based on physical aspects of reality.

Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.

I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports

[1] https://etymologyworld.com/item/gender

I don't know any culture which defined gender by how you dress and how long your hair is rather than what is between your legs. You would be called a girly boy or a boyish girl.

So girly and boyish is how you are perceived, girl and boy is your sex, that is how almost every culture defined it through all time.

    This is a position that one could take up, but it comes
    at a steep cost. It holds the societal acceptance of
    transgenderism hostage to a biological account of
    sex-gender. This is problematic for several reasons.

    Moreover, it is worth highlighting the problems with
    suggesting that sex, as biologically based, determines
    the gender with which one psychologically identifies
    [...] Second, whatever criterion is offered to ground
    this similarity would inevitably disqualify many women,
    for not all women share the same hormone levels,
    reproductive capacity, gonadal structure, genital
    makeup, and so on. (Tuvel 2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165

Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.

This was never said by anyone until you came along with that comment, which is a totally different idea (effectively a non sequitur). Can you quote who echoed the same argument?

That was trying to elaborate on citruscomputing's argument where they said "Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care."

I'm rephrasing those two points. Apologies if I initially described that badly, but I'm just restating the perverse incentive they were talking about

> I'm rephrasing those two points.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

>except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt

"I took a drug, therefore I am now a woman" is not a reasonable position to hold. The debate starts out with one based on an identity, and then in the very next formulation reduces that identity to which medicines you take.

So which is it?

I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose."

Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching.

Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor:

    “transsexual claims to belong to a sex do not appear to be metaphysically
    justified: they are claims that self-identities ought to be definitive in
    terms of the question of sex membership and gendered treatment. They are
    therefore political in nature” (Bettcher 2014, 387).

In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned."

The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender."

Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?

Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports. Perhaps we should completely do away with them, everyone competes in the same sport, separated only by leagues to reduce one-sided competition.

But, anyhow, the thing you're looking for is the "open" format that already exists in other competitions like chess, where there's an open category and then any specific categories.

Ironically, in dance competitions (specially swing dancing at least), the open category is done the newbies, and higher levels have other more speciallized categories: advanced, invitational, ...

Also, from the categories that you mentioned, do you compete in West Coast Swing?

> Gender segregation, weight classes, these are antithetical to the underlying aim of competitive sports.

That's a naive, reductive view. Competition isn't just about benchmarking and finding the global #1, nor perfect objective ranking. If it was, we would not bother with geographically-based competitions, nor tournament brackets and championships.

Competition is an entertainment product and a major form of community. It sustains itself through competitors and spectators. Seeking objectivity is backwards.

The key takeaway in my view is that the authors make a distinction between "category advantage", which is a systematic, structural, group-based difference that exists before competition even begins, and "competition advantage", which we see play out in competitive events and is based on a mix of factors including skill, preparation, and both innate and trained talent.

Where exactly to draw the line can be somewhat subjective (e.g. in weight classes) but it helps to explain why we have a separate female category: male physiology confers such a significant category advantage that, in open competition, it would limit the ability of female athletes to compete meaningfully and demonstrate their abilities. Having a separate category fulfils this desirable outcome of showcasing and celebrating female athletic excellence.

Often we see calls to add various classes of males, particularly ones who have chosen to identify as women, framed as "inclusion" but from the perspective of who this category is actually intended for it's the opposite. Drawing a clear eligibility boundary around the female category maximises inclusion of female athletes who would otherwise be disadvantaged and excluded.

It seems to me that a big part of the point of competitive spectator sports is to send, to the spectator, a message along the lines of "this could have been you". It is hard to argue that the ability to throw a 1kg+ discus exceptionally far is otherwise so useful that would justify all the expense of finding and showcasing the outlier. Therefore, the point of the competition stands and falls with whether the spectator buys this message.

When do spectators tend to believe in it? When should they? Arguably, there is a plethora of reasons why the median American spectator looking at a clip of Usain Bolt running could not in any meaningful sense have been him. Yet, somehow, the "could-have-been-me sense" that people are endowed with transcends these reasons and results in men commonly looking at him and getting some of that could-have-been-me sense that gives the sport meaning, and women looking at him and getting much less of it. To solve this, we maintain a separate women's category. The winner there is not as much of an outlier relative to the distribution of the whole population. Most likely, she is still every bit as dissimilar to the spectators as Usain Bolt is. Yet, the women watching, and the ones merely learning about this event happening through osmosis, get their heart warmed by the dubious sense that this could have been them, and perhaps encouraged to try harder and hold more hope for some other pursuit of their own, in a way that they never would have due to Usain Bolt. Would they or would they not get the feeling for a transwoman sprinter? How would we even measure this?

Entertainment value. Put a flyweight against a heavyweight and the audience are not going to care. No audience means no money for the show runners, and the Olympics is, when you get down to the brass tacks, all about money.

A combination of boxer safety and having more competitive matches.

They're rare in everyday life, but this process selects for them.

And then they get attacked and misrepresented by people who claim they are protecting women.

Consider the Jordan Chiles / Ana Maria Barbosu dispute from the 2024 Paris Olympics. It's still going on and it wasn't even a gender issue.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/college/article/jordan-ch...

I'm not an athlete and I don't know how to solve the issue. Maybe the Olympic Comittee knows better. In the context of cycling, I have thought about mixing up all the athletes and then ranking them in as many cathegories as necessary. But even there, in the context of BMX racing for example, I don't know if it's such a good idea to have men compete against women and other non binary persons because there are faults and accidents happening.