J K Rowling and the trans furore

In My Humble Opinion
2464

Is category A exclusively for females? Or will these females be expected to compete against males? if the answer is yes, then this means females will have fewer athletic opportunities than they do under the status quo.

Let’s pretend we’re talking about track and field. A binary system (split by sex) means 50% of the events are for males and 50% are for females. This also means women will always win 50% of the events and get the good stuff that comes with that achievement. Men and women are getting equal opportunity with this arrangement.

Now let’s change this to the 4-category system you’re proposing. As you acknowledge, category B-D will be overwhelming male. Category A will also have some males. Good job, you’ve just made it so that you have greatly increased men’s access to sports. Not really a problem that needed fixing but good job anyway. But let’s look at what happens to women’s access. If they are essentially limited to category A and yet still required to compete against men, they will be represented in less than 25% of all events and will probably win an even lower percent.

This means that, compared to males, female track runners would get ridiculously fewer opportunities to reap the awards of athletic accomplishment. Despite representing more than 50% of the human population, they will never expect to see their demographic group shine more 25% of the time at the high school, collegiate level, or Olympic level.

For the species to perpetuate itself, half of the human race must endure being slower and weaker than than the other half; this “gift” of low physical prowess is intimately tied to having a female reproductive system. Is it that unreasonable for society to accommodate this half of humanity with athletic opportunities reserved just for them? I keep coming back to this question because it seems like no one is saying it’s unreasonable…and yet, no one (except a few posters) are advocating for it.

2465

As I understand it you are proposing something analogous to the weight classes in sports like boxing and power lifting. The idea would be to classify people not based on skill or ability but something more like physical potential. I see a few problems with this: 1) it would be pretty hard to measure this ‘PPS’ in any fair way. 2) it would be a harder sell to convince people the lower ‘PPS level’ teams were worth watching and funding compared to ‘women’s teams’, which would be bad for female athletes. 3) there’s the question of how it would interact with the US program of sports scholarships, which AIUI is based on sex.

2466

I also don’t know what would keep an athlete from cheating in a test of performance prowess, especially if strength is a metric.

I listened to podcast today about the natural advantage lefties have in mixed martial arts and other sports. Should we segregate righties from lefties too? Lefties comprise only 10% of the population. They don’t enjoy advantage across all athletic endeavors (and in fact, might have be predisposed to some disadvantages). But one could argue that if we’re going to go through the trouble of segregating people by natural traits/abilities, we might as well go all the way and not stop just at the obvious stuff. Which means we should test athletes on the neurological metrics that are also correlated with sports success–like reflex speed, proprioceptive acuity, and attention span.

2467

I don’t see how that really matters, if the goal is simply to prevent excessive size/strength/speed etc. disparities within a given competition category.

Sure, there might occasionally be a naturally large cisgender girl who can massively bulk up and build great strength while also increasing her speed and other physical attributes, so that her Physical Prowess Score attains levels seen mostly in cisgender boys. Then she could qualify for a higher PPS-level team where she’ll have to compete mostly against cisgender boys who are her equals in size, strength, speed etc. And she won’t be allowed to compete at lower PPS levels populated mostly by other cisgender girls who are much smaller and weaker than she is.

But ISTM that what’s being claimed by, e.g., YWTF and DemonTree and others here is that it is very difficult for a cisgender girl to attain biologically male levels of size, strength, speed, etc., no matter how hard she works at it. So overall, even naturally large and bulked-up cisgender girls are going to have PPS levels that qualify them to compete in categories populated mostly by other cisgender girls.

Like I said, in this hypothetical system sex and gender cease to be explicit criteria for competition category classification. Category A is exclusively for people with the lowest Physical Prowess Score levels, meaning the smallest and weakest athletes, which in practice will consist overwhelmingly, and in most cases entirely, of cisgender females.

?? Hold your horses, that is definitely not what I said. I acknowledged that category D, the highest PPS-level category, would doubtless be overwhelmingly cisgender male. Where did you get the idea that I’m claiming that overwhelming male dominance will extend all the way down through category B? I certainly am not making any such claim.

And if we’re concerned that such dominance of lower PPS categories by males could be a problem, then we lower the maximum score permitted to qualify an athlete for the lower categories. Simple.

If your point is that letting people compete against other people who are significantly smaller, weaker, etc., than they are is intrinsically unfair, then fine, let’s calibrate our competition categories specifically for size, strength, etc.

Then, e.g., transgender girls who are significantly larger, stronger, etc. than most cisgender girls due to inherent physical advantages of their male birth sex will not be allowed to compete in the categories populated mostly by cisgender girls. Everybody will have equal access to competitive sports participation irrespective of biological sex or gender identity, but nobody will be forced to compete against athletes who have disproportionately large physical advantages over them.

2468

The way I’m envisioning @Kimstu’s PPS, it would be an index. You’d have a bunch of metrics, each independently scored. The sum of those scores would give you the PPS.

Which would result in, if you aren’t careful, athletes with different abilities earning the same score–which defeats the point of the whole exercise. You could reduce the likelihood of this by only selecting a few metrics to comprise the index. But the quintessential “natural athlete” probably does not have a few super superior traits. They’ve probably got a few excellent traits accompanied with a lot of good ones–some that are natural and some developed through practice.

2469

But as @filmore said, she would have gotten that spot only by working her ass off. She’d be playing against individuals who don’t have to work their ass off as much. Which literally defeats the purpose of the whole scoring system.

The scoring system you are proposing disincentives training unless you figure out a way to control for training.

2470

“Cheating”? As I mentioned, what makes such a system at least notionally feasible is the fact that we have all sorts of sports-physiology technology nowadays that can directly measure different aspects of physical capacity. I was not envisioning, say, testing strength by just showing the testee a stack of weights and asking them to lift as much as they can.

If the technology is not in fact developed enough yet to obtain such measurements in a reliably cheating-free way, then we may have to wait longer for such a system. But I think it would be naive to assume that athletes could always just cheat their way down into a lower PPS category than they qualify for.

:face_with_raised_eyebrow: If you like. I proposed this hypothetical “Physical Prowess Score” system because I was, perhaps naively, taking seriously several posters’ claim to be concerned about the unfairness of requiring cisgender girls to compete against transgender girls who are significantly bigger and stronger than they are due to the effects of their male biology.

It seemed to me, and still does seem to me, that we could address this legitimate concern by calibrating sports competition categories based directly on these qualities of size, strength, etc.

I’m not aware that there are similarly significant concerns about unfair lefthandedness advantage in transgender female athletes (and of course, plenty of cisgender female athletes are lefthanded too). YMMV, of course.

But thanks at least for setting my mind more at rest about the apparent incomprehensibility of my proposed “PPS” competition-category system, as I’m starting to see that some of the apparent incomprehension may be more willed than involuntary. If the actual underlying goal is more about continuing to call transgender girl athletes “boys” than about ensuring fair competition for cisgender girl athletes on size/strength criteria, then of course we can’t tolerate a system that would eliminate explicit sex-labeled competition categories, even if it provided equal access to fair competition opportunities for everyone.

2471

It naturally follows that this would be the case. You acknowledge this when you said this:

But ISTM that what’s being claimed by, e.g., YWTF and DemonTree and others here is that it is very difficult for a cisgender girl to attain biologically male levels of size, strength, speed, etc., no matter how hard she works at it. So overall, even naturally large and bulked-up cisgender girls are going to have PPS levels that qualify them to compete in categories populated mostly by other cisgender girls.

Exceptionally few females will qualify for anything except the lowest PPS category. This means the higher ones will be overwhelmingly populated by men. I don’t know what kind of PPS breakpoints you’d be using you to base these categories, but if they arent specifically designed to adjust for sex-based differences , then men will always be overrepresented until you get to the bottom category (and not maybe even then). Male and female don’t overlap enough in their physical traits to permit any other outcome.

If you’re going to go through the trouble of adjusting for sex in developing this scheme, then you might as well just go to a binary system divided by sex. Those B and C categories aren’t doing anything except creating games that no one will be arsed to watch.

And if we’re concerned that such dominance of lower PPS categories by males could be a problem, then we lower the maximum score permitted to qualify an athlete for the lower categories. Simple.

If your point is that letting people compete against other people who are significantly smaller, weaker, etc., than they are is intrinsically unfair, then fine, let’s calibrate our competition categories specifically for size, strength, etc.

This fix still doesn’t address the disparate impact of substantially increasing men’s access to sport opportunities while substantially decreasing women’s. Which makes this assertion…

Everybody will have equal access to competitive sports participation irrespective of biological sex or gender identity…

…untrue.

2472

Because it it isn’t just size, strength, and speed that are the makings of a superior athlete.

Women are more prone to knee injuries

Why Are Female Athletes More Prone to Knee Injuries?

Numerous factors contribute to the discrepancy between male and female knee injury rates (Adachi et al., 2008; Barber-Westin et al., 1997; Beynnon et al., 2006; Giugliano and Solomon, 2007; Hal & Hoch, 2007; Lohmander et al., 2007; Parkkari et al., 2008; Renstrom et al., 2008). Much of the research focuses upon the following causes:

Structural and Anatomical Differences

  • Wider pelvis, coupled with shorter bones that increases the Q-angle between the quadriceps muscle on the front of the thigh and the patellar tendon.

  • A narrower intercondylar or femoral notch that may cause a “shearing” effect (fraying and weakening) on the ACL by the femur during cutting and jumping movements.

  • Pronation at the foot causing internal rotation of the tibia coupled with a greater degree of rotation at the femur, which increases stresses along the ACL.

  • Smaller ligaments and bone surfaces for ligament attachment.

Hormonal Differences

  • The ACL contains receptors for both estrogen and progesterone and some researchers suggest that increases in one or both of these hormones may loosen the ACL and heighten its potential for injury. A woman’s ligaments exhibit greater laxity during pregnancy due to changing hormonal levels, which may also explain why the risks for injury may vary within the menstrual cycle (e.g., higher during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle).

  • The use of oral contraceptives, which alter hormonal levels of estrogen.

  • Estrogen directly and indirectly affects the female neuromuscular system and may alter neuromuscular response activity.

Here’s a study on gender differences in proprioceptive accuracy in the context of knee joint position:

Conclusion
Sex-based difference in the accuracy of knee joint proprioception may imply that knee proprioceptive sensitivity might potentially contribute to the high incidence of knee injury in females compared with males, particularly during adolescence.

There’s an entire constellation of traits that can differ between males and females. Males aren’t just bigger and stronger, on average, than females. There’s all kinds of biological differences between them that can explain why they perform differently. Like, males tend to perform better than females on spatial skills tests. You could segregate on the obvious stuff like size and strength and still not account for all the natural advantages that males have over females.

2473

Did I understand your proposed system correctly? I don’t think you’ve directly addressed my objections.

2474

But I don’t recall anyone just keying in on just those traits. That’s an inference you’ve drawn from the discussion, but no one has said that the advantages that male athletes have over females boils down to their superior size and strength. Folks on my side of the discussion have repeatedly talked about sex traits as a constellation. Not as single organ or characteristic.

But thanks at least for setting my mind more at rest about the apparent incomprehensibility of my proposed “PPS” competition-category system, as I’m starting to see that some of the apparent incomprehension may be more willed than involuntary.

I don’t know what you mean by this or what you’re implying. You proposed a system and we poked holes in it quite respectfully. It’s rather obvious you are neither a kinesiologist or a scientist and that there are folks here with more expertise than you. You seem to think there’s a simple solution to this problem that we’re too close-minded to see. But I assure you that we are a lot more thoughtful than you think we are.

2475

No, it doesn’t. The proposed “Physical Prowess Score” competition category system disincentivizes working your ass off just to disqualify yourself for your current competition category in favor of competing against athletes who are naturally bigger, stronger and faster than you.

But that’s not what we want most athletes to be doing anyway. We want athletes in general to be working as hard as they can to out-skill and out-compete other athletes who are of roughly comparable size and strength with them. And the PPS system doesn’t disincentivize that behavior in any way.

Can’t have it both ways, folks. If the natural differences between athletes with biologically male physiology and athletes with biologically female physiology are as overwhelming as you claim they are—even taking into account wide individual variation in skill, talent, determination, etc.—then we simply are not going to have any non-negligible number of cismale or transfemale athletes competing at the qualification levels dominated by cisfemale and transmale athletes. Or vice versa.

If, on the other hand, there do turn out to be significant numbers of cisgender athletes competing across the effective “gender divide” around the middle of the PPS-level range, then that indicates that individual variation can outweigh biological sex differences when it comes to physical size/strength/etc., at least around the middle of the spectrum.

Either way, all athletes will be competing fairly on the basis of athletic ability and skill against other athletes who are comparable to them in fundamental physical capacity. And we’ll be allowing for the natural average advantages of male anatomy in physical capacity, while not automatically pre-judging the varying capacities or abilities of individuals based just on their sex or gender category.

2476

We do have some criteria which are like PPS, such as age and weight. Some of these can be arbitrary, such as all 9-10 year olds compete together regardless of ability. Or all 150-160 pound people wrestle against each other regardless of whether their weight is from fat or muscles. It seems really all we need is some filtering criteria for the labels “men” and “women”. In the past these terms were well understood, but now there is a lot of variation. If we had ill defined weight categories like light, medium, heavy and very heavy, there would be lots of confusion about who was allowed in each category. But instead when it’s concrete like 150-160 pounds, there’s no confusion. We need something similar for “men” and “women”, and the most simplest is the XY and XX genetic match (with tweaking for the variations). Considering these choices:

  1. Men and Women sports are for anyone who considers themselves as that gender
  2. Men sports are for XY people and Women sports are for XX people
  3. Men sports are primarily for XY and Women are for XX, but there can be genetic crossover with some restrictions

I would support 2 or 3. But the only one which I think is really possible in practice is #2 because it’s clear and easily enforced.

2477

Males are stronger than females in much the same way that chimpanzees are stronger than humans. It’s not just muscle size or some other simple thing. They are built entirely differently. Skeletal conformation, bone density, musculature, limb proportions, relative hand and feet size…I mean, the list is endless.

Using technology to sort people based on all these traits is a solution in search of a nonexistent problem. We already can do this sorting very reliably, just going by sex.

2478

I’ve read this five times and I can’t make sense of it.

How do you determine what’s natural and what’s acquired? I am going to keep asking you that question until you give a satisfactory answer.

You are the one trying to have it both ways. You can’t ignore the fact that training can mask natural ability and then say your scoring system matches athletes by natural ability.

2479

They have, as in the quoted lead of the article cited by DemonTree back in post #2096:

So? If such differences in other traits in that “constellation” overwhelmingly tend to track with the more “macro” sex-based differences such as size and strength, then we don’t need to test all or even most of such traits in order to arrive at a calibration of “Physical Prowess Score” levels that reflects those average differences.

? Based on what calibration? You’re just making up an imaginary calibration system for PPS in which large numbers of athletes with male birth sex qualify to compete in almost all the categories, and consequently dominate or force out most of the athletes with female birth sex in almost all the categories.

You can go on complaining about the undeniable unfairness of your particular imaginary PPS calibration all you want. But it’s a straw opponent that I’m not going to bother arguing about, since there’s no reason a PPS system would have to be calibrated in such an unfair way.

I may well not have, and if so, I apologize. Would you please quote, or state the post number of, the post you made that you would like me specifically to address?

2480

Except the problem of exclusion of transgender athletes does exist. If transgender female athletes are not allowed to compete on male-designated teams unless they self-identify and present as “male”, and are not allowed to compete on female-designated teams because of their male anatomy, then that’s a problem.

If your proposed solution is just to have two competition categories based on birth sex but not discriminating or designating on the basis of gender identity, then fine. In that case, what you’ve got there is basically just a two-level PPS system, with birth sex serving as a proxy for B-level versus A-level Physical Prowess Scores.

But in that case, the B and A teams should not be called “boys’” and “girls’” teams, nor should they require athletes to self-identify or present as “boys” or “girls” in order to be allowed to compete on the team corresponding to their birth sex.

(And I still think a four-level PPS system, if logistically feasible, would make for more interesting competitions than a two-level one.)

Yes, ISTM that this is basically another vote for what’s essentially a two-level A/B PPS system, this time using chromosomes instead of birth-assigned sex as the proxy for a measured score.

2481

I might suggest a new thread for this side topic, as it comes with a number of potential pitfalls and caveats that may be distracting from the main topic.

2482

It’s your proposal, so you tell me. How do you envision setting these categories? How would you go about defining these categories without essentially recreating the binary system that we have now, just with more steps?

2483

As it stands now, there are elite male and elite female. They occupy (in most cases) a relatively equivalent level of prestige with interest and reward to match.
Your proposal does away with that and replaces it with mutiple levels that no longer have such clarity. The effect of this, I believe, will be to dilute the interest in the lower tiers, how can it not do? there are 4 main divisions in the English football league dvided by ability rather than physical capability but the effect is the same.

How much money and prestige do you think is created in the 4th level compared to the top? I struggling to see how the (mainly) biological female tiers would maintian their current commercial pull.