The variance between cis women in athletic ability is much much larger than the difference between the mean athletic ability of trans and cis women, if such a difference even exists. (I’ve seen no evidence that it does, but there is probably a small difference.)
Unless you are saying it’s unfair that cis girls that can’t run as fast as other cis girls don’t get to be on the cross country team, all you are doing is saying ‘those trans girls are different and make me uncomfortable, so I’m going to call it unfair to make myself feel better’.
Might be worth to specify what we’re talking about here in terms of skill-level.
Large portions of the discussion have focused on the Olympics and Professional Sports while other portions have talked about low-stakes high school games.
If some form of transgenders confer even a small advantage, and the stakes are high enough, then transgenders will rise to the top of the competition. If that happens, it will certainly feel unfair to cis-gendered women who have no way of getting past 2nd best.
I disagree with your math. The # of standard deviations above the mean is what matters for the elite, not a small advantage in the mean. Plus all the training and work that is required. Neither the WBNA or any of the women’s sports leagues have rules banning trans women from competing, and yet aren’t overrun by trans athletes. In fact, I think they both have trans masculine players in their league (though they may be non-binary, I don’t remember the details right now).
If we’re talking about a bell curve here, then a small bump in the mean translates directly to standard deviations. Standard deviations don’t count for much until you get to the end, and then suddenly they matter a lot. The “small bump” in performance gets harder and harder to achieve. The person who is willing to put in 40,000 hours gets outplayed by a person who puts in 5,000 hours but is an inch taller. Which is why professional sports in general are dominated by people with extremely rare genes.
Of course, to be fair, women’s sports were already had a lot of women with unusually high levels of testosterone. Non-binary doesn’t really change that.
Probably have to wait until trans-athletes (and trans-people in general) become completely accepted before we get proof one way or the other.
At the moment, I would say Semenya is, just by herself, some evidence for the claim. The odds are against any current female gold medalist being born with testicles.
Let’s do the math. There are about 160M women in the US, and about maybe 10,000 of them are elite level athletes. That’s about 4 SD above the mean. If the “shift to the right” for trans women was 1 SD, there would be almost 400 trans women in the elite class. It would be ~75 if there it was more like .5 SD, and still around 30 if there it was just .25 SD.
160m would include all sorts of ages, and 10k elite level athletes would include all sorts of athletes, that’s a pretty generous group.
Plus, the ability to transition is a developing phenomenon, not to mention recognition and acceptance of the concept of being a trans woman, so we’d be below steady state.
And lastly, we wouldn’t be shifted by a standard deviation, I’d imagine the CVs are very similar. The entire curve would likely be shifted to the right by some amount.
I’d disagree. The vast majority of trans women are going to have much lower testosterone that Semenya does. I mean, a lot of elite female athletes have naturally high T levels. There are of course, non-medically transitioning trans women, but for the majority that do medically transition, their T levels are likely as low or lower than the average cis-woman.
I was using shorthand. I just made the trans women a normal(1,1) instead of (0,1). And the numbers of people are just scaling factors, and don’t matter to the ratio.
OK, it wasn’t clear to me whose SD you were shifting by.
And the ratio is defined by the numbers, you’ve used generous numbers in opposite directions for the numerator and denominator and then point to the ratio as evidence.
This sort runs into some follow-up issues… Will we require that trans-women to go through medical transitioning? Presumably not??? But if not, it will create an incentive to not medically transition.
Which could result in both more trans-athletes rising to the top, and a pretty fucked psychological dilemma?
The ratio is defined by the mean, the SD, and the ratio of trans women to cis women, which is about and 1/250 to 1/1000. My numbers used 1/1000 — so if trans people are more prevalent it would be even more.
Again, medical transition is a necessity for most trans people. Gender dysphoria is dehabilating for many people. People that can’t medical transition because of cancer or issues with reactions to the medication often end up suicidial, which isn’t conducive to elite athletic performance.
Being trans isn’t a choice, and it’s not something that we take lightly. Requiring medical transition isn’t needed.
Many people who identify as trans do not undergo hormone therapy. I think in some cases, people are making a choice. It’s a choice that shouldn’t be encouraged or discouraged.
FWIW, it’s just a passing thought. I think you’ve made solid arguments throughout this thread, and I don’t think anybody here is opposed to the EO. It seems like a good idea. If for some reason or another it turns out to be a bad idea, we can fix it in 20 years.
(or more likely the next republican will reverse it no matter what).