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[Gender and Sports] Who can compete, and what is fair?
Inquisitor77
2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
2 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered User regular
I'm starting this thread because I'm curious how folks feel about the issue of allowing trans people to participate in gender-defined competitions.
This issue has recently popped up with a U Sports ruling that allows trans student-athletes to compete in their identified gender without requiring hormone therapy. U Sports, for those who don't know, is the governing body for Canadian university sports (roughly equivalent to the NCAA).
Does allowing trans people who have not undergone hormone therapy mean that we will see an inevitable "arms race" where women's sports will be dominated by MTF competitors? Or is it the natural result of sincerely accepting people's gender identities? Is it unfair to trans people to prevent them from ever competing in organized sports because they don't fit neatly into a predefined box - something with which they already struggle in every other facet of their lives? Or is it unfair to the other competitors who may not have had the biological "advantages" that come with being born male? Is it possible to have "fair" competition in light of the fact that many such advantages are conferred prior to hormone therapy? Or that even if you take into account things like height, weight, and muscle mass, men typically have significant physical advantages regardless?
Personally, I view competition as a means to an end, rather than an end to itself. Anything that allows us to push each other to improve as human beings, and improves society as a whole, is a good thing. I don't particularly care whether competition is "pure" or "fair" in that regard except that as a general psychological principle it seems important to most people (i.e., they won't participate or care about competition otherwise). But I readily admit that I'm in the minority here and that a lot of people seem to care quite a bit about defining some kind of absolute "best".
I don't claim to have any answers here - just a lot of questions. Really curious to hear what people think, especially those of you who may be directly impacted by this issue.
This issue has recently popped up with a U Sports ruling that allows trans student-athletes to compete in their identified gender without requiring hormone therapy. U Sports, for those who don't know, is the governing body for Canadian university sports (roughly equivalent to the NCAA).
Does allowing trans people who have not undergone hormone therapy mean that we will see an inevitable "arms race" where women's sports will be dominated by MTF competitors? Or is it the natural result of sincerely accepting people's gender identities? Is it unfair to trans people to prevent them from ever competing in organized sports because they don't fit neatly into a predefined box - something with which they already struggle in every other facet of their lives? Or is it unfair to the other competitors who may not have had the biological "advantages" that come with being born male? Is it possible to have "fair" competition in light of the fact that many such advantages are conferred prior to hormone therapy? Or that even if you take into account things like height, weight, and muscle mass, men typically have significant physical advantages regardless?
Personally, I view competition as a means to an end, rather than an end to itself. Anything that allows us to push each other to improve as human beings, and improves society as a whole, is a good thing. I don't particularly care whether competition is "pure" or "fair" in that regard except that as a general psychological principle it seems important to most people (i.e., they won't participate or care about competition otherwise). But I readily admit that I'm in the minority here and that a lot of people seem to care quite a bit about defining some kind of absolute "best".
I don't claim to have any answers here - just a lot of questions. Really curious to hear what people think, especially those of you who may be directly impacted by this issue.
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If the athlete has functional testicles that's a different story, which makes the U Sports policy a bit odd. The mention of "still following the anti doping rules" makes me think we don't have the whole story though.
Why split the genders up at all in that case? Could just divvy everyone up by lung size and be done with it, people care about more than the heavy weight title in boxing.
At best work in size/weight classes because that's gonna define your athleticism more than anything else really.
Katie ledecky and Michael Phelps are closer together on 400m freestyle record times than most of the people in the pool when they set those records.
I don’t disagree with you, but realistically sports are never going away, so...
20 seconds off is an eternity in a 240 second race. Katie's best time doesn't even qualify her for a spot on the men's olympic team.
Yeah, she won't get smoked by most high schoolers. A few can beat her though. At her same level of training, as an elite outlier, she can't compete really.
Swimming and running are the worst sports to consider, I think.
There's more involved than any single physical indicator, though. Maybe have everyone involved in competitive sports be assigned an Elo score or something similar, and weight performance based on that?
Just as a random example, London 2012 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y4xQqDuOVbn4mkEFUhW_xE5bgAy51raR1vlNZeXyl3Y/edit#gid=0)
Andrew Chetcuti 73kg Men's 100m freestyle, 51.67 did not qualify
Jemal le Grand 70kg Men's 100m freestyle, 51.86 did not qualify
Ranomi Kromowidjojo 69kg, Women's 100m freestyle, gold with 53.00
Tang Yi, 70kg, Women's 100m freestyle, bronze with 53.44
The women's world record is 52.07, smashed by two guys just a couple pounds heavier than the average women's competitor who otherwise didn't qualify for the men's
My understanding is that the argument goes something like this:
Women's sports exist because we readily acknowledge that men have physical advantages that go beyond controlling for basic attributes like height, weight, and even muscle mass. This means that even if we had gender-neutral competitions, women would almost never be able to compete because all the spots would go to men. Women's sports exist as a solution to this problem - they provide an environment where women can compete and better themselves (and each other), an environment to which they de facto would not have access even if nominally they were given the chance.
This basically defeats the entire point of competition, though. Like, you can't realistically combine "separate people into groups by ability" and "test whose abilities are the greatest."
If it's impossible to design competitions in that way, such that such divisions would inherently disadvantage men or women, then we should keep the sexes separate and trans people should probably be required to remain in the division of their birth assignment.
Neither solution is perfect, and there will be outliers who get shafted no matter what we do, but I think the only alternative is "don't do sports", which is not realistic.
I am deliberately not going into specifics here because I don't know enough about either sports or biology to say "this sport should be separate, this one shouldn't."
It's inequitable and essentially the same as allowing them to use steroids and compete. Any solution that doesn't address this is an incomplete one.
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Isn't that the idea of weight classes in fighting?
Even if you look at something like the current UFC you can see the hazard of using weight class as a means of separating divisions. Some fighters can weigh in at 185 on Friday and walk into the ring on Saturday at their "walking around weight" of 210 with no drop in physical performance due to the cut.
Some fighters can cut even more and still be fight ready 24 hours later.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
That's why you use more than one metric.
Like, there are ranges of things a person can do.
Example:
When I was a tubby teenager, they had me and all the other heavy kids race, with weight being the only factor. But I was a stronk tubby teenager, so I was so much faster that I ran backwards at one point and still won easily.
Because using weight alone was absurd.
It's not just weight though. Look at the numbers I posted above. A man with the same weight as the women's medallists beat the women's world record. If they had gotten sorted together the women would have to literally be better than any other worman ever at swimming to stand a chance
You'd probably have to apply some sort of handicap, say men go into a class ~10kg above their weight so 60kg men compete with 70kg women at which point you're basically fudging the numbers so that women can either have weight classes to themselves or classes they can actually win in
That's weight, not ability.
But again, this seems to be eliminating the entire point of competition. If you're at the point where you're using multiple different factors to judge the fairness of the competition and make divisions that are basically equal, you are no longer really having any sort of competition.
I'm not saying there isn't a solution to gender divisions in athletics, but it seems like your solution is saying "I don't want sports to be competitive" in a roundabout way.
It seems most objections are based on the advantages a higher testosterone level gives. Still a long way from perfect though.
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
You say that, but we have the collective will to eventually make it less of the toxic behemoth it is
Regardless, I can’t in good faith argue anything else re: trans folks and sports when I think sports in general are not a positive thing
This is a pretty big cop-out. Weight classes exist because, in boxing, a match between athletes of wildly different stature are almost always going to be uncompetitive. A match whose outcome is obvious before it begins isn't going to sell tickets.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It isn't a cop-out at all. The idea of creating divisions based on "physical ability", in a broad enough sense that competitors would be equal regardless of gender, is an entirely different concept from merely using weight classes. This is especially true in light of Incenjucar's example of being faster than his classmates as the kind of thing that should have put him in a separate division.
The Olympics Committee allows trans women to compete in womens' events if their blood testosterone is under a certain threshold. The specific number is itself controversial.
It's also controversial to require only trans women. The Committee has gone back and forth about whether cis women should only be allowed to compete if their blood T is under a certain threshold.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'd say the problem with that phrasing is in the word "equal."
We don't need them to be perfectly equal. We need them to be similar enough that the outcome of the match isn't a foregone conclusion before it begins.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Which is fine, but if that's your practical goal then the idea of gender segregated sports immediately becomes, if not completely necessary, at least massively more practical than ad-hoc weight class adjustments varying depending on sport. Like... Incenjucar's original argument was that divisions should have never been made on gender, but if you want "similar enough" classes that matches aren't a foregone conclusion, weight-and-gender restrictions get you 99% of the way there, and the IOC's current rules on transgender athletes probably get you 99.5% of the way there.
Size is a massive factor in combat sports. Weight aside (which correlates very strongly with factors like strength), something as basic as a 6-inch reach difference in boxing is a devastating advantage that can't be overcome short of a massive skill gap. And if you are talking about the top tier of boxing, then no such skill gap will exist because the best heavyweights will be "just as good" as the best middleweights.
In a lot of ways the justification for weight classes is very similar to the justification for gender differentiation - in a straight boxing match there is almost no chance that the smaller fighter will win given enough of a disparity. It is so much of an issue, in fact, that many people view it as a matter of ethics, because allowing a smaller person to fight a significantly larger person is so unfair that it is, at best, criminally-negligent behavior.
To continue with the fighting analogy, I've always thought that weight classes were unnecessary given there are only two fighters in the ring at any time. You can set basic parameters that will ensure there isn't a significant deviation between the two fighters to determine whether they should be allowed to compete against each other, rather than force them to sit in a specific predetermined weight class. In "big" boxing matches this tends to happen, where fighters will negotiate specific weight requirements between each other, but the more common approach is to have set weight classes across the board, which can cause problems for two fighters who want to compete but can't agree on which division (because the smaller person wants the lower weight class and the larger person wants the higher weight class).*
If you translated this to something like sprinting, where you had gender-agnostic qualifying rounds which then turned into gender-agnostic races, the issue you may run into is that nearly every single race, at least as they are currently defined (by distance), would be dominated by men. For example, let's say you wanted to make the 400 meter dash gender-agnostic. So you have a qualifying round that says the top 10 runners will get to compete for Division 1. Then the next 10 fastest runners will get to compete for Division 2. And so on.
It is almost certain that you will need to run a few dozen divisions before women start appearing with any consistency. As a basic matter of feasibility it will be difficult to argue that any top-tier organization should manage dozens of concurrent gender-agnostic races/divisions just to get to a point where women have a meaningful chance to compete. If the point is to allow women a place to compete, why wouldn't they just start there?
*I'm also not convinced that you can ever have a man and a woman fight at the top levels of a combat sport and expect a fair match, even if you gave the woman a significant size advantage. The differences between the two are too fundamental to allow for weight to serve as a sufficient proxy.
This sort of contradicts your first part? Because you can't say "Well I don't know enough specifics" and also say blanket ban trans people.
Also trans men competing in women's divisions would essentially be allowing doping. So..
This fear of trans takeover of sports kinda smacks of bathroom fears to me.
No, the idea is to make sure that the fight is "fair" by controlling for size basically. There can be a huge skill range within a single weight class. Matchmaking is where promoters try to "control for skill/ability" by matching fighters with similar levels of experience, typically the amount of previous fights. In some sports this is gamed in order to groom prospects, like boxing, where "cans" will be matched up with prospects and the "can" will either be someone with a lot of fights but who is a professional "can" or the promoters will put someone up who has significantly fewer fights against a prospect who has more.
We've already seen this play out with Lucia Rijker, one of the best female kick boxers in history, getting essentially crushed by a middle of the road male Muay Thai fighter.
Because currently they aren't allowed to? A male to female transgender person who is transgender simply by virtue of saying they are (A perfectly acceptable way to be if you are a man who wishes to express herself as a woman but doesn't wish to have surgery or take drugs) is not allowed to compete, as far as I am aware in any major tournament for money as a woman. Certainly they can't in the big 'massive male advantage' sports, like Tennis, Golf, Boxing (although the womens purses are pathetic) and so on.
This discussion is about whether or not they should be allowed to. Because currently they can't. They can compete as male, but not female.
I mean, what barriers do you plan to put in front of these athletes who decide they want to compete in the womens league once you say they can compete? Do they have to be stereotypically female enough? No female golfers named Bob who wear pants, and are married to a woman? No female tennis players unless they have long hair? Considering I can see no reasonable barrier you can put in front of them if you allow them to compete simply by 'saying they are and identify as' a woman. What is your, 'Not doing this just for the prize money' threshold?
Bathroom fear is irrational because its people creating imagined incentives for other people to do bad things. Men are not going to dress as women to sneak into bathrooms and spy on women. Not because men are moral and good, but because there are many other easier ways that corrupt and malicious men use to spy on women. Why would corrupt men bother with the immense hassle of pretending to be a transgender woman?
Fear of men responding to enormous financial incentives, to the tune of millions of dollars in prizes, to play womens tennis instead is not an imagined incentive towards corrupt behavior. Men already do hundreds of explicitly corrupt things which are expressly forbidden to win prizes in tennis (doping, cheating etc) knowing they will face censure and loss of prizes if they are found out. Do you really believe that these same men who are frantically cheating and doping their way to the world #500 slot where they can win $100k on their best ever year in prizes aren't going to say, "Screw it" and roll the dice in the womens game if you make it expressly legal?
This is some slippery slope stuff and honestly I'm not sure this is a widespread enough problem to start yelling about men in dresses faking it so they can beat lower tier women players for money.
I expect any sport to deal with this similarly to the Olympics, which Feral pointed out uses T levels.
So, I think its worth pointing out that in the US at least at many levels "Men's" sports aren't actually "Men's" in the same way "Women's" are, they are technically open to everyone. So this argument of never being able to participate is somewhat disingenuous, and the entire argument is inseverable from "fairness". MTF athletes were born with an advantage and have forsaken some measure of that advantage and now want to be able to compete against those who don't have any measure of it, because they see that as more fair than competing against those who still have all of it. All this "push yourself" "be the all we can be" type arguments ring a bit hollow to me in that light. It seems a lot more like "I want to push myself...and win".
Yours is an entirely valid opinion, but "should sports even exist" isn't really the topic of the thread.
Which is fine, but not what the discussion here is about. To quote the OP...
Inquisitor77 -
"This issue has recently popped up with a U Sports ruling that allows trans student-athletes to compete in their identified gender without requiring hormone therapy.
Does allowing trans people who have not undergone hormone therapy mean that we will see an inevitable "arms race" where women's sports will be dominated by MTF competitors?"
And so on, meaning that I'm explicitly responding to a discussion about trans people who have not had surgery, or hormone therapy who wish to compete as their identified gender.
Regarding pushing for rule changes, while people are EXCEPTIONALLY good are figuring out what existing incentives there are and responding to them, they are routinely bad at realizing how they could change an incentive structure to benefit themselves. In addition, there is also a vastly different perceived cost to advocating for a change to be implemented so that you can exploit it, than to be the person who exploits the change.
"I want to change the rules so that I can beat up girls for money!" -> Everyone hates you, low chance of reward because the rule change you want is unlikely
plays very differently to the bros on Fox Sports than
"Those liberal idiots over at the Tennis Association are so stupid that they think men and women can play on the same court. Well I'll show them. I'm going to register in the women's tournament and thrash them all" -> LGBTQ advocates hate you, Sports Bros love you, and the chance of reward is really high
Honestly, men 'advocate' for rule changes in this field by opposing equal prizes.