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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Discrimination in sports? Like 73% of the NBA players being black? There are no level playing fields in sports. You can compensate for some genetic advantages (like high testosterone), but then the people who win will simply win through other genetic advantages.

Precisely. If we let everyone play, women would simply be shut out.

Which is why women's sports gives women a place to play that they otherwise wouldn't have, society has decided that 50% of the population being mostly locked out is bad, even if we don't care that Michael Phelps crushes the dreams of all his male competitors daily. There are critiques of Title IX and how it's interpreted wrt what counts as a "sport" but the plain purpose was not to facilitate males destroying the whole point of having female sports.

There's no point in trying to even have a philosophical discussion about which biological advantages society decides counts: what they're doing is just against the law. There's already a law passed to protect women's sports and many universities are simply acting against those rules. That they may feel coerced by a past administration to do it simply says that that administration was also wrong.

If you want to have that debate push for another law and we can have a real discussion on the merits of mixing sports, with a positive case made for this stuff outside of bogus definitional arguments and suicide threats, instead of skin-suiting Title IX and then pushing the burden of proof unto the side that wants to stick to it as it was.

And the "endangering women" thing is even worse. Are there credible accusations of people abusing their trans status to rape or grope women in their protected spaces, above the base rate?

Can you explain your thought process here? Like...why is it that people always go to "a trans person wouldn't abuse their trans status"?

Besides the obvious problems with this, it's a bit akin to saying there's no problem waving through Orthodox Jews in airport security because Jews aren't as likely to do suicide bombings. The point is obviously that weakening the standard allows any bad actor to exploit the situation because trans status isn't exactly based on having completed surgeries now.

This seems self-evident to me. But it is not to a whole swath of people, the question is why we have a gap here.

I was going to suggest that it's caused by priming but OP did say "men in women's spaces" not "transwomen in women's spaces" so I don't even have that explanation.