the reality today is that we still divide sports teams by gender
No we don’t. And I find it funny that your argument boils down to “that’s the rule, end of story” and accusing me of “trying to sound progressive”, lol. Maybe you need to think about what that means.
Your example is excellent to point out your mistake.
Phelps is in the top percentage, but there are swimmers with a bigger wingspan. He was a great swimmer, but he was still within range for his competitors. For example: at his peak in say 2008, he handily beat the swimmer in second place by less than 2% in the 200m. The winner in the women’s category, however, was 11,5% percent slower. Can you see the difference? The gold medal in the women’s category would not have even qualified for the olympics, if there hadn’t been a women’s caterory. Do you understand what that means for her?
Meanwhile, Phelps has been beaten, and had his records have been broken, by swimmers with a smaller wingspan.
Of course you could divide swimming categories by wingspan, but the reason they don’t do it is because they don’t feel it’s necessary to create a more meaningful competition. ‘They’ being the athletes and officials that cooperate to regulate the sport.
But that’s entirely different from combining athletes that just don’t stand a chance against eachother. For example, a ‘classic male’ boxer can punch around 100% harder and around 20% faster than a ‘classic female’ boxer with the same weight. Do you think it would be meaningful to put the two into the ring against eachother? What reason could you think of to do so?
In all of this rambling you have fundamentally failed to understand any of what I said. You’re trying, but you can’t even begin to grasp the points, can you?
As you yourself point out, Phelps has been beaten, despite the unusual advantage given by his wingspan. And there are people who have failed to beat him despite having a greater advantage of wingspan. Both of which underscore exactly the point I was making; that ultimately these minutiae of biological differentials are meaningless. Yet you insist that they matter intensely, only and specifically when it comes to the subject of trans people playing sports. In any context we would write off factors like muscle-to-weight ratio and muscle distribution as valuable, but not something worth subdividing a sport over. But because this is about trans people, suddenly we must do everything in our power to prevent those factors from “unfairly” unbalancing the competition.
If you want teams to be divided by physiology, you will need to devise meaningful measures of physiology. But all of your arguments so far have just come down to gender essentialist claims that somehow dividing by sex is dividing by physiology. For every example where this is true, there as many where it is not. Human beings are infinitely complex creatures. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it here. If you want to make the claim that sports should be divided on physiological measures then you need to figure out what those physiological measures are, and accept that sometimes this will end up with XY and XX chromosomes competing against each other. And if that’s not a reality you’re willing to live with then you need to admit that all of this is just pearl-clutching transphobic nonsense.
I have a feeling you’re trying to say that dividing by XY/XX is too broad of a brush (which is why you think the wingspan thing is a great counter argument). But, sadly, broad the brush must be. It’s impossible to organise 8 billion sports competitions where you only compete against your exact genetic equal, aka yourself. Not having a perfect solution doesn’t mean you should opt for a worse one.
Also we do sometimes decide that XY and XX can compete against each other. Interestingly enough, we do this in cases where the physiological differences are unimportant. In most sports, for example, they are lumped together when it’s more meaningful to create age groups, and only split up when differences caused by sex become too large.
The weird argument at the end shows exactly the inverse of what you think it does. I don’t have any problem ‘accepting’ that they are grouped by physiology, and sometimes not, after deciding on measures we find meaningful. In fact, it is you who cannot accept this.
We’re where we started: Deep down you understand that there are meaningful reasons to divide categories on scientific factors, but at the end you decide to brush all that away because you believe that ‘being pro-trans on all fronts’, with a big emphasis on all, is more important.
You still haven’t even begun to grasp any of what I’m saying and at this point it’s clear that no amount of explanation on my part is going to change that.
Your claim that dividing categories by chromosomes will create meaningfully useful groupings is based on total ignorance of the actual science. But you obviously have no interest in correcting your ignorance, so ignorant you shall remain.
Ah ok I am the one ignorant of the science. I am the one saying the science is too difficult and then chooses to “just separate by gender” because checks notes “that’s how it is”. Lol
Let’s use an easy example to see how this translates to the real world. Imagine you want to take up boxing.
So you’ve got the gear on. You learned the basics. You’re ready to start your first practice match against an actual opponent. You think physiology shouldn’t be taken into account.
Imagine you are a midget and they put you up against someone three times the weight.
In any context we would write off factors like muscle-to-weight ratio and muscle distribution as valuable, but not something worth subdividing a sport over.
No we don’t. And I find it funny that your argument boils down to “that’s the rule, end of story” and accusing me of “trying to sound progressive”, lol. Maybe you need to think about what that means.
Your example is excellent to point out your mistake.
Phelps is in the top percentage, but there are swimmers with a bigger wingspan. He was a great swimmer, but he was still within range for his competitors. For example: at his peak in say 2008, he handily beat the swimmer in second place by less than 2% in the 200m. The winner in the women’s category, however, was 11,5% percent slower. Can you see the difference? The gold medal in the women’s category would not have even qualified for the olympics, if there hadn’t been a women’s caterory. Do you understand what that means for her?
Meanwhile, Phelps has been beaten, and had his records have been broken, by swimmers with a smaller wingspan.
Of course you could divide swimming categories by wingspan, but the reason they don’t do it is because they don’t feel it’s necessary to create a more meaningful competition. ‘They’ being the athletes and officials that cooperate to regulate the sport.
But that’s entirely different from combining athletes that just don’t stand a chance against eachother. For example, a ‘classic male’ boxer can punch around 100% harder and around 20% faster than a ‘classic female’ boxer with the same weight. Do you think it would be meaningful to put the two into the ring against eachother? What reason could you think of to do so?
In all of this rambling you have fundamentally failed to understand any of what I said. You’re trying, but you can’t even begin to grasp the points, can you?
As you yourself point out, Phelps has been beaten, despite the unusual advantage given by his wingspan. And there are people who have failed to beat him despite having a greater advantage of wingspan. Both of which underscore exactly the point I was making; that ultimately these minutiae of biological differentials are meaningless. Yet you insist that they matter intensely, only and specifically when it comes to the subject of trans people playing sports. In any context we would write off factors like muscle-to-weight ratio and muscle distribution as valuable, but not something worth subdividing a sport over. But because this is about trans people, suddenly we must do everything in our power to prevent those factors from “unfairly” unbalancing the competition.
If you want teams to be divided by physiology, you will need to devise meaningful measures of physiology. But all of your arguments so far have just come down to gender essentialist claims that somehow dividing by sex is dividing by physiology. For every example where this is true, there as many where it is not. Human beings are infinitely complex creatures. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it here. If you want to make the claim that sports should be divided on physiological measures then you need to figure out what those physiological measures are, and accept that sometimes this will end up with XY and XX chromosomes competing against each other. And if that’s not a reality you’re willing to live with then you need to admit that all of this is just pearl-clutching transphobic nonsense.
I have a feeling you’re trying to say that dividing by XY/XX is too broad of a brush (which is why you think the wingspan thing is a great counter argument). But, sadly, broad the brush must be. It’s impossible to organise 8 billion sports competitions where you only compete against your exact genetic equal, aka yourself. Not having a perfect solution doesn’t mean you should opt for a worse one.
Also we do sometimes decide that XY and XX can compete against each other. Interestingly enough, we do this in cases where the physiological differences are unimportant. In most sports, for example, they are lumped together when it’s more meaningful to create age groups, and only split up when differences caused by sex become too large.
The weird argument at the end shows exactly the inverse of what you think it does. I don’t have any problem ‘accepting’ that they are grouped by physiology, and sometimes not, after deciding on measures we find meaningful. In fact, it is you who cannot accept this.
We’re where we started: Deep down you understand that there are meaningful reasons to divide categories on scientific factors, but at the end you decide to brush all that away because you believe that ‘being pro-trans on all fronts’, with a big emphasis on all, is more important.
You still haven’t even begun to grasp any of what I’m saying and at this point it’s clear that no amount of explanation on my part is going to change that.
Your claim that dividing categories by chromosomes will create meaningfully useful groupings is based on total ignorance of the actual science. But you obviously have no interest in correcting your ignorance, so ignorant you shall remain.
Ah ok I am the one ignorant of the science. I am the one saying the science is too difficult and then chooses to “just separate by gender” because checks notes “that’s how it is”. Lol
Let’s use an easy example to see how this translates to the real world. Imagine you want to take up boxing.
So you’ve got the gear on. You learned the basics. You’re ready to start your first practice match against an actual opponent. You think physiology shouldn’t be taken into account.
Imagine you are a midget and they put you up against someone three times the weight.
Is it ok because it’s the same gender?
You literally haven’t read a single sentence of theirs, first response they sent you had a counter to this. Learn to read. Lol.
Do you mean when they said “we divide by gender, not by any physiological characteristics”?
How is that a counter to this?
-1
Here’s another nice sentence I read