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The ideal solution technically is an ELO/MMR system like literally any other competitive environment ever, the issue however is that this is just impractical with sports. They don't play enough games to get a solid baseline, especially not when the teams are set in place so bad teammates can be carried by good ones and vice versa.
Because how sports are set up right now is inherently unfair, everyone knows it and no one seems to care about this issue except in the one limited circumstance of trans athletes. But trans athletes are not an actual issue, they mathematically can not be.
Even if every single trans athlete was an elite player that their cis counterparts can not match, the amount of people they displace from sports if they are allowed to join is only .5-1% of the population. Meanwhile 99% of the population is already displaced and that's because most men and most women are not allowed to do sports in a meaningful competitive manner already. Only the top most genetically gifted people are able to. Most people already have no chance.
Some sports are more blatant than others, basketball for instance is very obvious. The average height of a basketball player is 6'6, this is well over the 99th percentile. People say that men's sports are open to everyone, but that's not true. Men's basketball is not even open to the average man, it is only available to the genetic freaks who tower above everyone else. Likewise the WNBA is six feet. The average WNBA player is taller than the average man. The WNBA is not open to the average woman, only the genetic freaks who tower over everyone else.
Competitive sports are not inclusive, they are not fair, and they are basically impossible for the large majority of humans to participate in already. Men's sports do not include most men, women's sports do not include most women. 99% of the population is already displaced, so trans athletes barely even make a splash in the fairness discussion because the additional displaced is a basically invisible amount compared to the number who already have no access. They're a drop in the ocean of unfairness.
But no one actually cares about fairness in sports and therefore discussion of how we stop displacing 99% of the population from playing are nonstarters. They just want to see genetic freaks playing against other genetic freaks, and the trans sports discussion isn't about fairness, because again we already know no one gives a shit about that, and is instead a proxy for whether or not they're "really" their identified gender.
This argument is the wrong way around. Even if a random woman in the world is unlikely to win a particular competition, the winner of that competition is always a woman. That gives an opportunity to women that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Dozenshundreds of women won medals in the last Olympic Games. If the women's division didn't exist, that number would be in the single digits, perhaps 0. (I guess there are a few disciplines where women have a legitimate advantage, like gymnastics, and a few where gender differences aren't too pronounced, like archery.)If you're born female your chances of winning an Olympic medal during your lifetime are around 1 in a million. A small chance, and heavily influenced by circumstances of your birth, but it's not zero, so it's something that can motivate you to train hard and try to become the best you can be. That's what literally all female Olympians who did win medals did, despite their prior odds not being particularly high.
So the consequence of allowing males in women's sports isn't just that it reduces the number of spots available to women, but that it reduces each woman's chance of victory at the highest levels by several orders of magnitude.
If you sincerely believe that I suggest you join your local peewee football club, and see if none of the parents have a problem with it. Let's see how far you get with your argument that it doesn't matter if it's unfair for an adult to play, because most of the kids competing wouldn't have won anyway.
Or get Usain Bolt to compete in the Liechtenstein national athletics championship, despite being ineligible due to his nationality. I'm sure the Liechtensteiners won't mind one bit.
Or enter a 150 kg boxer into a featherweight competition.
Or a number of other situations we can imagine where people would be pretty upset if a person who does not meet the eligibility criteria nevertheless demanded to be included in the competition.
The true reason that we only talk about this in the context of transgender people, is that transwomen are the only group that is so entitled and egotistic that they demand access to spaces that were specifically created to keep males out. Even cisgender men respect women's spaces more than transwomen do.
There are virtually no adults trying to join children's leagues, and if there were, they'd get sufficient pushback from everyone else that it doesn't turn into a national discussion. If that wasn't the case, you bet we'd be talking about them too.
Not really. Everyone knows transwomen aren't really women; if they were, there would be nothing to discuss. The discussion is about what level of accomodation we should give to people who aren't women but would like to be viewed that way.
It's like asking if an adult with Down's syndrome should be allowed to participate in children's activities which they might enjoy because they're more fitting to their level of mental development. In that case the answer is probably “it's fine if it doesn't endanger the children or ruin their fun” but at no point is anyone confused about whether the Down's syndrome patient is actually a child or not. That means it may be more acceptable to include them in a fingerpainting competition than in a wrestling competition.
The same way for transwomen: what level of accommodation is due of course depends on whether you believe transwomen are simply women born in the wrong body or that you view them as egotistical sexual fetishists. But fairness enters into it, too: it matters whether the transwoman ruins things for the real women.
Okay, so like I said the discussion is a proxy for whether or not trans mtf people count under the category of "women" and not about whether or not 99% of women have any chance.
Now that's just not true. You can't just say "everyone secretly agrees with me, including the people whose words and actions indicate disagreement" so easily.
Which you even contradict yourself later here!
Exactly, some percentage of the population genuinely views trans women as under the category of women. There are genuine understandable theories in which this could occur, such as intersex neurological development is a leading theory for instance. But one also could go into the spiritual/metaphysical direction. Most people believe in some concept of souls or soul like idea, thus the idea of female oriented soul in male body is not some inherently irrational idea under many soul frameworks. And a person defining man/woman based off neurology or souls or whatever else can be valid disagreement.
You do the exact same thing though, here it is:
Your entire argument is centered around fairness, but you never really establish what you consider to be fair.
You missed a very key part of what I said. "everyone secretly agrees with me, including the people whose words and actions indicate disagreement"
Do you think there is a sizeable amount of people whose words and actions indicate disagreement with the statement "Height is an advantage in basketball"? I've literally never seen it, and if I were to ask 100 random people on the street I think every single one would agree in both words and actions.
This is not the case if you were to ask about trans identity. There is a large portion of the population (around 40%) with words and actions that indicate a genuine belief.
Thus it is completely true to say that everyone agrees with the basketball statement, because there is not any stated disagreement with it to be found! It is not true to proclaim everyone agrees on trans identities.
Now if you can find me a large group of people who contest height advantage in basketball, then I will concede that it's not "everyone" who knows sports can be unfair.
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You only addressed the least interesting part of my comment. Why don't you address the division in age groups? Should adults be allowed to self-identify as children? Why not?
No, it still isn't. It's pretty obvious that women's sports were created for the 50% of the population with a biologically female body, based on the observation that having a male body gives you a huge advantage in sports, separate of what other advantages (height, weight, etc.) might exist, not for the 1% of males who self-identify as women.
If the intent had always been to create one division for males-who-identify-as-men and one division where the only people able to win medals would be males-who-identify-as-women feminists would never have supported it. But they did, because back then everybody assumed that women were female and the female division was not easy mode for autogynephilic men. If you didn't know this you can infer it from the fact that the Olympics have had sex tests from the start to weed out male competitors, which would not have made sense to do if males were allowed to compete in the first place.
Your argument was that being female-bodied is just one way of being disadvantaged in sports, which may be true (though I doubt there is any other gene that is both as common and advantageous as the SRY gene) but that doesn't contradict the fact that this one way was the basis of the formation of a woman's division.
To use the boxing analogy, it might be true that a person who was born without arms is at a bigger disadvantage than a boxer who is 50 kg lighter than their opponent, but it doesn't follow that therefore weightclasses shouldn't exist or that boxers can self-identify their weight.
But that's essentially the argument you're trying to make here: because you can imagine other advantages (e.g., height) therefore we're not allowed to divide people based on sex. This is equally nonsensical.
Maybe, I can't rule out a tiny fraction of true believers, but I think there is a much larger percentage that just goes along with the nonsense because it doesn't affect them directly, and they've learned that saying the Emperor has no clothes gets you labeled as a hateful bigot who ought to be fired from their job. In that kind of environment, you cannot accurately judge what percentage of people truly believes the Emperor's clothes are marvellous, compared to the people who are just going along with it because apparently that's expected of them.
How is this any different than what I said already about it being a proxy on whether or not trans identity is legit?
Plenty of sports organizations have allowed trans participants for decades, it must not have been obvious to them then.
Then why is one of the most feminist sports organizations, the WNBA, trans accepting?
The entire analogy falls apart when the richest and most powerful individuals to have ever existed ever in the history of the world are the ones against accepting trans identity as valid! The Emperor creates a silenced people because he is the Emperor and has power. Everyday social pressure from other ordinary everyday people however is genuine evidence that said other people believe what they are saying, to at least some degree.
It is a story of speaking truth to power, so if you want to use it as an analogy you should probably consider who the most powerful people are first. It is those like Trump and Musk and Xi Jinping and Putin and other such rich individuals or powerful politicians who are the Emperor, and they're anti trans identity.
Answer my question first. You're doing nothing but dodging questions then answering questions with different questions, never doing anything to support your own point. If you're not willing to answer any of my questions I don't see why I should continue engaging with yours.
I was talking about the founding of women's sports like a 100 years ago, before gender ideology existed. Nobody back then considered males to be women.
To the extent that the WNBA is trans-accepting today it's because they have been ideologically captured by the woke mob. But even that isn't uncontroversial, see e.g. comments from dissenters like Sophie Cunningham.
This is wrong on so many levels.
First, let's be clear that gender ideology is very impopular among the public. The New York Times did a poll and found that 80% of Americans oppose transwomen in women's sports, including 95% of Republicans and two thirds of Democrats. So it's actually the common people who oppose gender ideology. To the extent that the rich and powerful do too, they are only agreeing with the public.
Second, and related, is that you have cause and effect reversed. It's not true that everyone accepted transwomen until Donald Trump came into power. The opposite is true. Everybody understood what a woman was, until the woke captured the institutions, then started to push gender ideology that contradicted what people knew to be true. Many people disliked this, but understood that if they didn't endorse gender ideology they'd be labeled a hateful bigot and could get fired from their job. Only because genderism was so impopular could it be exploited by populists like Trump, who realized they could get free votes by siding with the public against the woke elites.
Third, and finally, you're (intentionally) confusing individual power with institutional power. Maybe Trump is more powerful than any individual progressive, but the power of progressives is that they've thoroughly captured all the institutions. Virtually all journalists are progressives, virtually all artists, virtually all academics, virtually all bankers, virtually all school teachers, virtually all CEOs, and so on. And all of these institutions will survive Trump. They just need to bide their time.
That's why Wokeism is more powerful than Trumpism. Trumpism will die with Trump, but Wokeism will live to fight another day. It's reminiscent of what Vaclav Havel called the post-totalitarian dictatorship: a system that's based on ideology rather than individual leaders is much harder to displace exactly because you can replace the leader while keeping the ideology in power.
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Dressage/equestrian is the obvious one here, which I believe are mixed gender (and, contrary to the standard mocking, do in fact require a significant amount of skill from the rider).
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I feel like you're basically agreeing with me, right? The current situation is a weird mix of brutal competition ("oh you're not in the top 1% of athletic genes? too bad, cry me a river") but also special welfare for some groups (the girls get their own league, scholarshops, and recognition). The WBNA might be taller than the average man, but they'd still be rocked by the average highschool boys' team, even the boys shorter than them. The NBA subsidizes the WNBA because of politics, not because they're the best.
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This might be true at the elite level, but despite being quite a bit slower than NCAA-tier elite women, as a guy I still feel "allowed to do sports" when I show up at a local foot race. At smaller races I sometimes even manage to place well in my age group.
IMO even individual sports benefit from a clear basis of comparison. I can be impressed at masters runners putting up solid times even well behind the elite winners. I think it'd be disheartening and disappointing if a 25 year old could win the 60+ division just because he "felt old". And women's divisions were created basically whole cloth in living memory (notably with opposition from some feminists in favor of a gender blank slatism that generally seems disproven today) to give these sorts of opportunities: I don't think we should part with them lightly.
If you're talking about a competition that has separate categories for men, women, juniors, masters, sport, first-time participants, and people who weigh more than 200 lbs., you're not talking about a serious competition but an event designed to attract the widest participation possible. I've been semi-involved with the organization of these kinds of competitions (I wasn't part of the organizing committee but involved with the host organization), and I can assure you that the resources don't exist to do any kind of verification beyond the honors system. A 25-year-old who "feels old" isn't going to sign up for the masters division just to increase his chances at a trophy for the same reasons that people who are actually good don't sign up for the sport division.
And these categories don't matter much for the average participant. I pulled the results for the Great Race, a 10k held in Pittsburgh every September. The top men's time this year was 31:05, and the top women's time was 34:46. The top men's master was 33:49, and the top women's master was 38:33. If the top woman raced in the men's category, she'd have finished in 30th place, which doesn't sound impressive until you consider that the men's category had 2,458 participants with a median time of 56:26. For comparison, the women had 2,671 participants and a median finish time of 1:03:02. The median man could certainly increase his success by racing with women, but going from 1,229th place to 671st place isn't the kind of improvement most people think of.
yeah running is in general a category where women and men are most equal, strength is generally where the differences lie the most. Look at a weightlifting competition and try to see what it looks like. I was shocked that me a total wimp who deadlifts 345 would be among the top lifters in the female division of a local comp.
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What would also be disheartening (IMO) is if top runners in the 60+ age category demanded the same level of social status, respect, and money received by top runners in their 20s. And if those demands were taken seriously.
It's somewhat true already: they get trophies and podium time and even press coverage in excess of much faster athletes who place outside of the top three (prize money may go a bit further, but not to say the 100th finisher). "Local athlete won the [not young] age group in [big marathon]" is a pretty regular headline in local news in my experience. The oldest finisher sometimes gets coverage too.
I'd like to see examples of 60+ runners demanding social status, respect, and/or money commensurate with that of top runners overall. And those demands being taken seriously.
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