In fields of competition where 0.1% makes a difference a proportion of a benefit is not the same as the full benefit.
Much simpler: just eliminate the gender divisions. Why not? All genders are equal, right? Where body weight is a factor, those divisions should be kept.
Sure, if you aren’t concerned by the fact that this would virtually eliminate the presence of women in top level competitive physical/contact sports (in the absence of some sort of special quota system, in which case you’d still have to deal with the question of eligibility).
At identical bodyweight, men will always have more muscle mass.
All genders are equal in the sense of being allowed to compete.
I don’t buy your analysis here, sorry.
That Hubbard’s performance would not have won in the men’s competition misses the point; her performance was much better than all the other women.
To use a comparison hat has actually been discussed before, suppose you took the world’s 200th best male tennis player, had him become a woman two months prior to the event, and compete in the women’s Wimbledon. The result would be pretty clear; she would win the tournament easily. She would never lose a set or come close to it. But it would make no sense to say that Francine, once Frank, could not have had an advantage because, hey, she’s clearly not as good as Roger Federer, and can’t even hold a candle to Milos Raonic.
The very reason we have separate men’s and women’s sports tournaments is women cannot hope to compete in 99.999% of sports. They’d just be blown off the map, and a competitor who was, in fact, a total mediocrity, relatively speaking, in the men’s division can easily win the women’s.
Now, I’m no biologist and can’t tell you to what degree Hubbard’s male characteristics helped her, but it’s hard to imagine they didn’t. It’s also worth noting there’s a hell of a lot more to this story besides the issue of transgenderism; wanna guess what rich person sponsored this event? Yup. Laurel Hubbard.
I don’t know Wimbledon’s rules on this (or whatever group handle int’l tennis) but the IOC:(PDF)
This is where PC crosses the line. Topics like this should not even be up for discussion. We have male and female sports. You cannot turn a male into a female or vice versa with any amount of surgery or hormone replacement, at least once they have become adults. A transgender female is exactly that not a female. Maybe a class for transgender would be better.
Sigh And I know that. I should not post after midnight.
Of course, her size is the lingering effect of being born with a Y-chromosome.
+1 for being pro-transgender rights and also believing this is a grossly unfair win. The rules should be changed to chromosomal sex divisions with admittedly tough decisions regarding intersex competitors. PC can go to far and this is an instance. I think the left really shoots itself in the foot by fighting these fights.
How is this different than an athlete who uses HGH to gain a hormonal advantage over their competition? I am all for equal rights for transgenders, but they cannot compete in women-only events, they will always have an advantage. They either compete with men or they need their own category.
And “Participation” Trophies for ALL! 
The castration plus addition of female hormones might reduce the transgendered woman’s muscle advantage, but I’ll bet it doesn’t affect bones. The new woman retains her male skeleton, complete with (generally) larger size and heftier ligament attachment points. So those muscles have the advantage of longer levers to work on and are less liable to ligament pulls and such.
It seems to me that allowing transgendered woman to compete in “women only” events cannot be made fair.
Just end segregation in sport. No more men’s or women’s leagues.
So you are saying that Olympic lifting should eliminate the snatch?
Regards,
Shodan
We literally just did this - for those who haven’t read that thread, I urge you to do so. I for one found it very instructive, in fact it was a rare instance of having my opinion changed by something I read.
Not necessarily. There are - admittedly, not a big portion of the population - biological females who are tall and large-boned. Without looking at Hubbard’s cis female relatives, it’s not possible to say whether she’s substantially taller, etc. than she would have been had she not experienced a typical male puberty.
Pretty much. Or they bring up the “bones and ligaments” theory which sounds like “common sense” but actually they never supply medical or research citations proving that this equates to any actual sports advantage (there’s even some evidence that there may be a small disadvantage in some sports IIRC (not at my computer to look up my references so I’ll hold on that for now).
And this is a key point - we’re NOT winning contests consistently, we’re NOT even by a long shot dominating ANY sport, and we’re NOT threatening any cisgender athlete’s chances of getting their fame n’ glory in sports. The entire “issue” is just a subtle bigotry tactic because the people opposed to people like me competing cannot produce proof that people like me who have undergone hormone therapy and/or surgery actually have an unbalancing disadvantage in sports.
And like DeadCat wrote, didn’t we just do this topic? Doesn’t it seem like we do this topic every 3 months?
In most cases, when we’re talking about sex or gender, it’s ambiguous whether we’re referring to the mind or the body. Sports, though, are by definition bodily competition, and so different competitions for men and women in sports must mean for people with male and female bodies. Whether the people with those bodies have male or female minds is irrelevant for purposes of this question.
Una Persson:
Is it bigotry when none other than Renee Richards expresses a similar opinion? From Wikipedia: