Nerds: Maybe we could solve the sports problem by abolishing sports.
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Hockey in Canada generally has both a house (less competitive division) and a rep/travel (competitive) league. Should also note that this.is usually completely separate from.the school system.
Lia Thomas was top 10 among men in the 1,000 her freshman year, and fairly highly ranked in the 1650 her last year pre-transition. A lot of the âoh, she was 250thâ type arguments are based on 200 rankings, and cherry pick the notion that she also changed from the longer distances to the shorter ones, and yes, one would expect that if you change your training from distance to the 200 that your ranking will improve.
The clarified arguments still render a bad example to lead in with. You have lost everyone on the fence at that point, and you will lose them every time in the future.
Like, there needs to be space in the room for both âwe were wrong on thatâ and âa fair policy includes trans women in womenâs sportsâ.
Or, just say that sports are based on sex, not gender. That way youâre not denying anyone their chosen gender.
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Australia has been exploring the use of weight as a separator in rugby. It reduces the risk of injury..
I think peewee football has done that for a while.
This is not so easy, and is related to a point i think is often missed by conservatives.
Assume sex is real, which i think it is. We cannot define any real thing, and that includes sex. We can only describe it.
And sex must be described as multi-layered. Sex as a real thing is not just XX or XY chromosomes. That is bad, overly reductive science.
In that case, I think we have to say that person like Lia Thompson has, to a degree, changed her sex. Her hormones and phenotype exhibit many female characteristics.
That doesnât automatically mean that she should be allowed to compete in swimming like any other woman. In fact, I would guess size and strength are as much or more of an advantage in swimming as in any other sport. I think her competing is a hard question.
There is no easy answer by appealing to âsexâ instead of âgenderâ.
I disagree. I think sex is defined as XX or XY. Yes, there are others (intersex etc) but they are exceptions to the usual rules - in these cases, it means something didnât work correctly. According to how human reproduction works, a person should be either XX or XY.
The number of people who arenât XX or XY is estimated to be somewhat greater than the number of people who are trans.
So what?
You can define sex that way, but then it is no longer real. It is just an idea in your head with some usefulness. Your statement says as much. You do not have the power to define something real.
There is a similar issue with the electron. We can talk about an ideal âdefinedâ electron, which is a point in space. But a real electron is much more complicated. It has a whole âvirtualâ cloud of other particles around it so that it cannot really be called a point anymore.
Why isnât it real? Itâs more real than gender, because it has a firm basis for what it means - it can be measured. Gender as a construct doesnât make sense to me. I agree with the right wingers who ask âWhat is a woman?â If you canât define it without referring to the thing itself, then it doesnât have a real meaning.
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For it to be real, it has to be outside your head. One way you know that is that the concept of it had implications you donât think about when you first try to define it.
The exceptions mentioned earlier about intersex, etc- this is how we know sex is real. It is a real thing that manifests itself beyond any strict definitions of XX, XY, given secondary sexual characteristics, etc. It will not fit in the conceptual containers we make for it. That this is what makes it real is perhaps paradoxical.
Think gravity. It was âdefinedâ to explain the solar system. But then it also worked on Earth. And then Einstein showed it also worked for very massive objects, but you had to change the math some.
Pre modern science thought science was about figuring out the âtrueâ definition of things, and then reasoning deductively about it. Aristotle would have agreed with the spirt of âdefiningâ sex. But that just didnât work. Science is a continuing dialogue with nature with provisional definition that we have to change in response to experience.
Added: We have to distinguish between whether sex is a socially conventional classification that refers to real objects or is itself real and rooted in nature. I am arguing that the classification itself is real. It is not enough that we are able to group real objects in it. I could decide âthese 3 people are my favorite people.â Once i identify them, then they are an objective group. But the choice of grouping is just my own convention.
So is the plan to ban people with non-functioning SRY genes from school sports because their XY but functionally female?
My cousin is intersex, so itâs always galling to me when people go,
Things should be segregated strictly by sex, because chromosomal sex is a clear marker, except when itâs not, in which case⌠[lol jk nothing ever follows here]
Basically, itâs admitting my worldview is too hard to reconcile with reality, so Iâm just going to ignore that minority populations exist to feel better.
My cousin literally couldnât play a school sport or use a public bathroom if certain people made the laws.
I think the question is, is intersex considered something ânormalâ, or does it occur when something in nature goes wrong, i.e. a mutation?
Why does that even matter. They are people. They should be respected as such.
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Fully agree - I believe in treating everyone with respect.
The question revolves around creating policies. General policies are geared towards the general population. Outliers sometimes have to be handled on a case-by-case basis, or have specific policies made for them. Sometimes outliers do slip between the cracks, because thatâs the nature of things. Thatâs not a lack of respect.
Yet once this âcrackâ has been identified, we have people willfully ignoring the crack in order to make things fit their political agenda.
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