guesswho
2yr ago
I can avow that when I was a crabby internet atheist in my teens/20s, I was not exposed to whichever Christians were disavowing the WBC. 'Why won't Christians denounce the WBC' was a big Atheist talking point for years on end.
If you want to have a standard of 'the denouncements have to be big and publicized enough that their opponents hear them and are convinced', then no, Christians didn't meet that standard back then.
guesswho
2yr ago
Yeah, if. That's why I'm inviting anyone at all to provide data, if they're so sure they're obviously correct.
guesswho
2yr ago
No, I do not think we could have a world where no trans woman ever wins a competition but they still have a competitive advantage.
Cool. You could have said that instead of saying that scenario sounds unlikely' and moving on to different topics, and I wouldn't have misunderstood you.
And when pressed on what "disproportionate" would mean, given the relative rarity of trans women athletes, you play games with pseudo-statistical arguments but in practice, it boils down to "If trans women don't win everything all the time, then they must not have an advantage."
Hey, who is fabricated who's position now?
It's always really funny to me when someone accuses me of misrepresenting them in the same breath they're misrepresenting me. Like, where did I ever get the impression that this is a normal way to discuss topics in this forum?
Anyway.
People here are telling me that trans women are just men, that teh difference in average athletic ability between men and women is the whole story, that women can't possibly compete and will get wiped all over teh floor. That is the rhetoric which suggests the idea of 'trans women will win every competition ever'; if that's not happening, which it isn't, obviously that rhetoric is just wrong. That's the point of that example.
As to what counts as a 'discrepancy', try me! You offered a single hypothetical in which one trans women comes in third place, which is an anecdote and not a statistical trend, and no that one imagined anecdote would not be enough to ban all trans women from every sport everywhere forever.
But you do a statistical analysis showing me that trans women place in the top 3 at 500% the rate of cis women? That's a big discrepancy!
You do a statistical analysis showing that trans women win 65% of their 1-v-1 matches in various 1-v-1 sports? That's a big discrepancy!
You do a statistical analysis showing that trans women sink 30% more free throws than cis women in actual games and teams that pick up a trans woman increase their win rate by 20%? That's a big discrepancy!
I'm easy! Show me anything at all, and then we can discuss whether it's a big enough effect to justify banning people from a league.
But right now, I've been offered nothing in this vein, at all.
there are plenty of metrics by which athletic ability is measured (muscle mass, strength, reflexes, endurance) and trans women clearly have an advantage over women on all of them.
Yeah, other people in the thread have linked studies showing that's not true, there are advantages on some of those measures in some populations studied, and not in others.
And more importantly, you're again ignoring my point. Those studies are all about group averages, not about athletes. And while some of those things are important proxies for athletic ability, none of them are perfect correlates.
As I have said to the people citing those studies, those studies are Bayesian evidence in favor of an advantage. Just like the population modeling implied by a 500x smaller population throwing less extreme outliers is a Bayesian reason to lower the prior of an advantage.
We can't actually model how all those factors add up to produce real competitors in the real world. All we can do is measure their actual performance in competitions, which is what no one is offering studies off.
And if you lost weight and got in shape and trained, as any woman competing would? Would it be fair then, asthma notwithstanding?
Probably, I don't think I have the frame or talent to be any kind of athletic athlete no matter what.
But, to that point: Yes, if I improved myself to the point where I could defeat every female Olympian easily, then it would be unfair for me to compete against them.
And if I don't improve myself to that pint, then it remains fair.
Because fairness is about whether there's a reasonable competition, not anything else.
If trans people were winning too much, it would be unfair. If they're not, then it's not.
Everything upstream of that is elliptical trees.
Far more than two anecdotes. Times like this I wish I were @gattsuru (not really), but here's the thing: I don't believe that even if I did hunt down all the links you need, it would change your mind
yeah, i you found 5 anecdotes instead of 2, that still wouldn't change my mind, you're correct.
I'm asking for a statistical analysis here.
I can find you 5 examples of right-wingers being dangerous murderous terrorists, I can find you 5 examples of people who talk about HBD being really clear uncontroversial racists, I can find you 5 examples of whatever.
You'd be an idiot to be convinced by those anecdotes alone. Me too.
Statistical analysis.
We do have data.
On the actual thing I'm talking about? Actual performance at actual competitions? A statistical analysis, not an anecdote?
If so, cite it.
Because you're about the 12th person to say we have that data, without presenting it. Usually when pushed, they present some study about some entirely other topic instead.
guesswho
2yr ago
WBC wasn't just making Christians look bad, they were actively harassing people and making their lives worse.
I expect I could find trans leaders denouncing, like, actual pedophiles who claim to be trans, or whatever, for that harm.
I don't think it's common for Christian leaders to denounce other Christians merely for being annoying or having bad opinions, which I think (?) is what we're talking about here?
But anyway, this is a bit vague. I'm going to be busy the rest of the week, but if you have a specific trans analogue to WBC you want to ask about ,I can see if I have time to look around.
guesswho
2yr ago
Your attempt to leverage semantics in your favor (e.g. via the word "penalize" vs "exclude") doesn't actually defeat the basic claim about the status quo.
Yeah that's why my literal next sentence was saying this is pointless semantic games and we should use an empirical metric instead.
I've been suggesting win/loss record statistics as an unambiguous and definitive empirical metric here, so we can ignore all teh rhetorical games and just decide the matter on facts. I'd love to get more engagement on that actual proposal.
It's Bayesian evidence towards your side, of course. I'm explaining why it's not enough evidence to tip my model entirely, because I think the correct model is more complex than that.
I place a high threshold on taking rights away from people and restricting what they're allowed to do. Stuff like this is suggestive but I'm explaining why the model is too complex for it to be definitive. I'm not confident that there's no advantage, I'm confident there's not enough evidence of one to justify bans at this stage.
And again, I'm saying that there's a simple and direct measure we could be looking at instead -win/loss records - and pointing out that I'm not very persuaded by any arguments that don't involve referring to or caring about that.
guesswho
2yr ago
???
You are agreeing with me that all of the laws apply to trans men and force them to use the women's room, but saying that's ok and good because they have to be written that way (for some reason), so it's ok that they criminalize things you don't want to be criminal?
If so, that is not how I want laws to work, you should not be criminalizing things you actively want people to do on the assumption they'll just break the law and it'll be fine. That seems entirely insane to me.
And I don't know where your confidence that Republican lawmakers have no problem with trans men is coming from. That's not what their rhetoric says, at all.
guesswho
2yr ago
Yeah, I do think things would be a lot better if there magically weren't any/as many guns in the country.
Magic isn't on the table.
So I don't care much about gun control. I don't think arguing about it is actually going to lead to the utopian outcome that would be good.
guesswho
2yr ago
Your long response is open in another tab. I've responded to about 20 long replies in the last 6 hours, and I also have a job and stuff.
And it's not only a potshot. You'll note that I also make an empirical argument, and you're the one pretending it doesn't even exist.
If I reply to your one-sentence posts with 3-sentence replies, I don't feel bad about that use of effort. If you don't care to engage with anything other than the long effort posts, then wait till I get to it, don't snipe elsewhere around the discussion.
guesswho
2yr ago
One suspects you don't know many trans people.
But ok, we have different intuitions. If you were correct, again, there would be statistical evidence showing it. Which there's not.
guesswho
2yr ago
The situation is that normally ineligible people are demanding special allowance, on the basis of arguing that they have a way to nullify the impact of the property that makes them ineligible.
Not at all. The situation is that women want to play on women's teams.
Obviously, if we try to argue about what is 'the situation' in these terms we're just going to pointlessly fall to the semantics which we disagree about.
So lets just say: the freedom-maximizing position is to let anyone play on any team, we only diverge from that when we have a very good reason to (which is why there are men's and women's leagues), we currently don't have good evidence that trans women need to be excluded from women's teams.
Typically the onus is on the person wanting to penalize or exclude someone to provide proof, that's the concept behind 'innocent until proven guilty' and the like. It's a good rule of thumb.
If the transwoman only makes 3rd place, then the woman in 4th lost the bronze medal. If that's due to an unfair advantage, that's bad and she was treated unfairly.
I'm talking about 'unfair' in terms of 'not possible to compete against'.
If they didn't come in first, obviously other women can compete against them.
You're talking about some kind of metaphysical 'fairness' where you have decided that being good at something because you were born male and then transitioned is 'unfair', but being born female and really talented at it is 'fair'. I think that's always going to end up being weird and arbitrary and impractical to use as an actual standard, it just falls into promoting personal prejudices that will be different for different people, it's never going to be enforceable because it's not based on any consistent standard beyond 'I don't like this'.
And it's not relevant to the actual competitors. What's relevant to them is whether the matches they're in are competitive.
But not by mediocre cis athletes.
They're not mediocre cis athletes. They're exceptional trans athletes.
If they were mediocre trans athletes, then the exceptional trans athletes would have broken their records by even more!
That's the point, if the actual trans athletes that exist are fair competition, then that's all that matters. Maybe if the trans population were 500x larger than it is, it would throw really exceptional athletes that no cis woman could ever compete against, and it would be unfair to let them in the same league. But we're not in that world, as far as any statistical data can tell us.
Again, you have some personal intuition that if someone has a rank in the men's division then transitions they should have the same rank in the women's division. But that's just an arbitrary weird thing you made up. It doesn't affect whether the women's division is a fair and competitive environment, and there's no obvious reason why we should care about it - or, more importantly, why we should restrict people's rights based on it.
guesswho
2yr ago
So first of all, as I say in another reply, that's a measure of some specific atomic abilities, not of athleticism in general, which is the thing I specifically said we don't have a good measure of. I realize that's a mushy distinction and there's no real solid operational definition of 'athletic ability' beyond 'do they win more often at athletic competitions,' but that's my point... 'Do they win more often at athletic competitions' is the thing we actually care about here, and the data already exists in the form of actual results from actual competitions, so let's look at that.
But more importantly, my next sentence after that is
But who cares? The average person isn't winning professional athletic competitions, the most extreme outliers in the whole population are winning them.
My argument doesn't hinge on the population average because that's not where competitive athletes are drawn from. It hinges on the positive tail of the distribution, which is why a lower population having a lower range of outliers is central to the argument.
guesswho
2yr ago
I should have said 'a trans athlete' rather than 'the trans athletes', sorry about that.
guesswho
2yr ago
But transwomen athletes are not a random selection of typical transwomen,
Right, they're the outliers from that distribution I'm having you picture, that was the whole point.
That's why I'm talking about the variance and range of that distribution, trans athletes are pulled from the positive tail of the overall trans distribution.
The idea you should have in your head is that the cis woman population throws outliers, the trans woman population throws outliers, and if those two sets of outliers fall into generally the same range of ability for whatever reason, then competition between them is fair.
guesswho
2yr ago
Yes. Of course... Well, that would seem unlikely, but it's a meaningless hypothetical
The point of hypotheticals is to get people to examine the boundaries of their ideas and see if they hold up and make sense in the least-convenient world.
It sounds like your answer is 'yes, we could have a world where no trans woman ever wins a competition but they still have a competitive advantage', but you won't come out and say that because you recognize it makes your position sound absurd.
And, yes, I do believe it is absurd for that reason.
We can't actually settle the question of whether trans women have an unfair advantage until we agree on an operational definition of 'unfair advantage'.
I've offered mine, I'm trying to pin you down on yours. But you won't do it, you jump from 'that's an unlikely hypothetical' to 'obvious physiological advantage' to 'yes they are winning more' to 'could you or I compete against female athletes' to etc. The metric switches to whichever thing is convenient in the moment, so it's impossible to address.
Forget reality. Indulge in the thought experiment.
In the abstract, what is your personal operational definition of an unfair advantage?
Once you say what it is in the abstract, we can start to discuss whether it exists in reality.
So if you or I competed against women, that would be fair, since women competing against us would have a reasonable chance to win?
Are you saying, would it be fair for me, fat and desk-bound and asthmatic and with zero training, to join the women's olympic track and field event?
Yes, that would be fair.
I have zero chance of winning anything at all, no other competitor is at a disadvantage from including me.
Again, why do men's and women's leagues exist in the first place?
So that women have a place where they can compete and have a real chance of winning.
If including someone in the women's league doesn't alter that, then it doesn't interfere with the purpose of the league. It's fair.
Trans women are over-represented among winners now.
And you are, what, intuiting this from 2 anecdotes across all sports and divisions in the country?
This is the central empirical question I'm saying we have no data on.
If you have data on it, by god please share with the class, it will solve this entire debate instantly.
If you're talking about 2 anecdotes where a trans woman won some competition, then no. That's not a national statistical trend demonstrating anything.
guesswho
2yr ago
That's all very possible!
And if it were true, it would show up in win/loss records!
To be extremely clear, the form of my argument is this:
-
Intuitions that trans women athletes must have a huge advantage because the average man has a huge advantage over the average woman are wrong. We have no idea what the trans woman distribution looks like, and the relevant measure is the outliers rather than the average. So we should acknowledge our state of ignorance about that and have really weak priors about whether there will be any advantage and in which direction.
-
Absent strong priors based on ability, the way to figure out whether someone has an unfair advantage in a game is to look at whether they win that game significantly more often than chance. This is the type of sports record that shows up on ESPN 5 times a minute and is generally easy to access.
-
Since no one has ever demonstrated a statistical advantage in win/loss records and we have weak priors about innate ability, we should assume then null hypothesis for now and let trans women compete. If that leads to gathering enough data to demonstrate an unfair advantage some day, then we'll have a legitimate reason to revisit that decision.
If Lia Thomas or Laurel Hubbard go from average in the male division to record-breaking in the female division, then clearly transition doesn't guarantee to nullify the sex advantage, and therefore shouldn't allow competing in the female division.
So 2 responses.
1 is 'I disagree'. There are a trillion local and regional sports records for a trillion things, records get broken literally every day by cis athletes. The question is whether trans athletes break them more often than than would be proportional. Furthermore, it doesn't matter what men's division you were in, it matters whether the women's division is a fair contest with you in it. If they win every contest they ever go to and no one can compete with them, that's probably unfair. If they won one competition once and then lost every other competition, well, it seems like cis women are competing against them just fine and there's not a problem. (Thomas broke no records for example, just had one good meet)
2 is 'Yeah anecdotes aren't data, for all I know something fucky was going on in those situations and the optimal policy precludes those situations. I already talked about sports requiring 2 years of HRT as a fine thing that needs to be part of the conversation, did those anecdotes have 2 years before competing? Did they go of it before competition? Maybe weightlifting is a sport where it's actually not fair and a statistical analysis would show that, if so then maybe you have a ban there but don't need one in soccer or tennis. Etc. If we took away entire demographics rights because of 2 anecdotes, we'd be in a lot of trouble as a society. 2 white men have ever committed insider trading, maybe white men can't be trusted with high-level positions in corporate America. Etc.
guesswho
2yr ago
I don't see much fuss about trans men using bathrooms
... Except for the law making it illegal in many states?
That seems like a fuss.
I seems like you're saying 'well Buck Angel can and should just casually break the law every day, it's no big deal'... Maybe if you're fighting for a law that you want lots of people to break every day, you should be fighting for a different law instead?
Listen, if people were passing bills that said 'You must have 1 year of HRT and FFS before using the women's room' in an effort specifically only to make sure trans women using the women's room mostly pass, that would still be contentious but it would at least be credible that that's what the laws are worried about and trying to fix.
That is not at all what the actual laws say, the actual laws say Buck Angel uses the women's room, and no one backing the laws in reality has any problem with that. The laws are anti-trans in concept, not just focused on a single set of outliers.
guesswho
2yr ago
I spent a long time explaining why the operational definition I want to use is what actual matters to athletes and fans on the ground and is therefore the best metric to use. I spent a lot of time examining your analogy to the olympics and pointing out why it supports my position.
You could, you know, explain your metric in more detail, and argue for why it's better, if you believe it is.
Remember, the issue at stake here is not 'which population is innately better at sports' but rather 'should trans women be allowed to play in women's sports leagues'.
guesswho
2yr ago
But I'm not talking about a super rare event?
Trans athletes exist. More than enough to do a statistical analysis on.
In sports that are competitions between two people, the average win rate must but 50%. Do trans athletes in those competitions win statistically more than 50% of the time?
In swim meets with 2 trans and 48 cis competitors, we would expect the trans athletes to place in the top 5 ~20% of the time. Do they place that often, or more, or less?
In women's baseball, what's the average RBI of cis vs trans hitters? What's the spread?
Etc. None of this is low probability stuff, it's normal sports records of the type you could see at any moment when you turn on ESPN.
guesswho
2yr ago
Yup, that sure is a bunch of my posts from 5 years ago in which I don't personally advocate for gun control, alright.
I didn't think I needed to post examples from 5 years ago backing up my claims about my beliefs, but I guess it's nice that you went and found them anyway.
guesswho
2yr ago
I'm responding to a comment that came in out of nowhere saying I couldn't be chatGPT because chatGPT makes fewer logical errors. I don't think I should be taking the blame for introducing an arrogant and condescending tone to the conversation.
I do have a tendency to respond with whatever tone I feel is being addressed at me, which has certainly gotten me into trouble in the past. If I'm misinterpreting the tone of the comment I was replying to and shouldn't have taken it that badly, then it's my mistake, but that's definitely what I was playing off of.
guesswho
2yr ago
This does not follow. The female population is much larger; there will be more outliers and probably more extreme ones. That says nothing about how well the average female athlete compares to the average trans athlete.
All athletes are outliers from the general population.
There's no population of athletes with normal population dynamics over their athletic ability, because they're already selected to be outliers from the general population. There won't be a normal distribution of talent among athletes, they'll look like what they are, one tail of a different normal distribution (the general population).
When I talk about outliers and extremes, I'm talking about all athletes. Not just the best ones.
And my claim isn't that most cis women athletes can beat most trans women athletes. As I said a lot, no one has bothered to report on those statistics from actual competitions, so we are in a state of total ignorance on that question.
My point is just that talking about the average for the male population tells you basically nothing about what we're actually measuring here, which is outliers from the trans women population vs outliers from the cis woman population.
If a trans women competes in a bicycle race and finishes third, she's #3 and you can easily say "See, two women beat her, so on average, they aren't better." Until you find out that this trans woman is 45 years old and just started bicycling competitively four years ago.
Ok, lets just settle on an operational definition here.
Is it your position that a world could exist in which no trans woman ever wins a single competition ever against her cis competitors, and yet it is still also true that trans women have an unfair competitive advantage that means cis women shouldn't have to compete against them?
Because that seems to be what is implied by you citing a case where trans women do not win yet still have an unfair advantage. So is this actually compatible with how you are defining fairness here?
If so, I think that's just incredibly silly.
Maybe there's some metaphysical sense in which it is unjust that a trans woman with fewer years of training can be competitive with a cis woman with more years of training (in this hypothetical).
But what actually matters for fairness is whether every competitor in an event has a reasonable chance to win.
If cis women can go to a million events and know that they will never win anything because the top spots are always trans women shattering all their records, that sucks and is unfair to them and unfun for everyone involved.
If trans women aren't over-represented among winners and cis women can easily win in competitions with them all the time, then the sport is healthy and everyone can have fun and no one is at an unfair disadvantage.
Anything outside of that fact is irrelevant, even if it annoys you.
guesswho
2yr ago
0.2% is not 50x smaller than the baseline, it is 500x smaller. You've stuck with 50x throughout the rest of the comment, so maybe it was just a typo for 2%?
You're right, when I was googling I first got the 2% number for trans identification among teens and thought 50x, but that includes non-binary. The overall percent of trans women is more like .2%. So yes, it should have been 500x throughout, meaning my argument is an order of magnitude stronger than I was saying.
(other numbers say maybe it's more like .4, so 250x smaller instead of 500x. Proportionally not a big change to the argument either way since we're talking about number of standard deviations, I don't think the difference between 500x vs 250x population size adds another standard deviation to the outliers)
A smaller group would naively have the same variance as a larger one.
So I am kind of moving fast and combining two ideas there. As I said, I'd expect the variance to be smaller because the population is more homogeneous. But more importantly, the smaller population means the range covered by the outliers in either direction is much smaller, which is the central argument I'm making about how good athletes from a population are vs. the average member of that population.
For an analogous situation, I'd say that Finland outperforms China at producing elite athletes, because it has 100x the Olympic medalists per capita. A fair application of your argument would say that China has twice the medals therefore it outperforms Finland.
This is a great analogy.
Should Finland and China have to compete in different leagues, because Finish athletes are just so superior to Chinese athletes that it's unfair for them to compete against each other?
Well, given that China beats Finland the majority of the time, it seems really weird to say Finland has a huge advantage over China.
Again, per capita athletes is not a meaningful measure to this conversation. We're not pitting the entire cis population against the entire trans population to see who makes the most athletes.
What matters is the actual trans athletes vs the actual cis athletes. They are the ones that we care about having a fair competition between.
It doesn't matter if China needs a billion people to produce athletes good enough to compete against the athletes Finland can produce with only 5 million people. As long as the actual athletes in the competition are evenly matched, it makes sense for them to compete against each other.
Same here. Even if it takes a population of a million cis women to throw a set of athletes who are equivalent to what a population 2,000 trans women can produce, who cares? Since that is the actual ratio in the populations, if we end up with a set of athletes from the two populations who are on equal footing and can compete fairly against each other, then there's no reason not to let them compete.
guesswho
2yr ago
Not sure how Buck Angel is relevant here, but under the trans-acceptance framework it seems like women are expected to put up with both Buck Angel and "IT'S MA'AM'.
First of all, your mask is slipping - your original claim was that you were worried about cis men pretending to be trans in order to access women's spaces, not about trans people themselves. But you have immediately moved your rhetoric to 'women putting up with trans people', revealing pretty much exactly what I was talking about in relation to the 'scrutiny' thing.
Second of all, I'm not sure if you're confused or what... under the trans-inclusive framework, Buck Angel and people who look like him go to the men's room. He only goes to the women's room if forced to do so by bathroom bills. That's the point.
With actual compassion.
It's not like homelessness is an unsolvable problem.
Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup? More to the point, do you realize that the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%? We have plenty of excess capacity that could be turned towards solving this problem, if we wanted to.
Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices. We could make a big impact just by lifting the zoning restrictions that economists are already telling us to lift for non-compassionate reasons.
It may be true that some specific types of half-measures towards compassion are worse than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should accept doing nothing. It means we should use full measures.
More options
Context Copy link