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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Gender Identity and Sports - Once More Around The Track

There has been ample discussion regarding whether trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports, ranging situations as unpopular as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights to the silliness of the Boston Marathon extending women’s qualifying times to anyone that says they’re non-binary. For better or worse, some of this is starting to wash out to actual policies at the highest levels of sports, with World Athletics banning trans women from competing as women in the Olympics. Personally, I would regard this as an obvious and easy decision, with no reasonable debate to be had. For the other side, here’s trans sprinter Halba Diouf’s feelings on not being allowed to compete as a woman and here is Science insisting arguing that the null hypothesis should that be trans women don’t necessarily have an advantage.

This is sufficiently well-worn territory that I don’t really expect anything fresh to be said at this point. Instead, I want to focus on something that I’ve always personally thought was quite a lot more difficult to judge correctly, which is athletes that were assigned female at birth, but have conditions that cause them to have abnormally high testosterone, such as XY chromosomes. In recent years, this seems to be coming up more often, possibly because of awareness of it being a thing that happens, possibly because the increased money and visibility of women’s sports has begun to select for increasing levels of biologically unusual people, or possibly because of something that’s not occurring to me. The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl, lived your life as a woman, competed and won at the highest levels, then get told, “nope, sorry, your chromosomes don’t match, so you’re banned in the future”. I hope that regardless of my positions on these issues to always extend that basic level of empathy to someone who truly was not at fault in the creation of a difficult situation.

I recently bumped into an article tying the plight of Diouf to a Senagalese sprinter who turned out to have XY chromosomes and high T, resulting in a ban from the Olympics and this is what gets to the heart of the matter:

LGBTQI advocacy groups say excluding trans athletes amounts to discrimination but WA President Sebastian Coe has said: "Decisions are always difficult when they involve conflicting needs and rights between different groups, but we continue to take the view that we must maintain fairness for female athletes above all other considerations.

First, I’d like to note that this objectively is discrimination and that takes us right to the heart of the point - having a women’s category in sports is inherently discriminatory. That’s the whole point, to discriminate men from women and create a category that is feasible for the best women to win, hence we must determine what a woman is for the purposes of that competition. That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!

Second, I think Coe’s answer is correct and neatly covers all of these scenarios. I used to have a tough time with them, precisely because of the desire to be fair to women like Semenya, but the reality is that Caster Semenya simply isn’t a female and the whole point of women’s sports is to allow women to compete on equal footing against other women. That this will feel unfair and exclusionary to some tiny percentage of the population that has either a gender identity disorder or chromosomal abnormality is barely an argument at all - elite athletics isn’t actually an inclusive activity, it is exclusive and filters for the absolute best in the world for a given ruleset. Within track, use of performance-enhancing drugs is strictly monitored, with spikes in biological passports used to ban athletes even if what they used cannot be identified. With such tight constraints and rules on what physical specifications athletes are allowed to have, I no longer favor something so inclusive as to allow XY or other gender-abnormal athletes to compete - the women have to be actual women competing against other actual women. If nothing else, Lia Thomas has helped provide me some clarity on the absurdity of muscle-bound, testosterone-fueled males in women’s sports.

I find the idea of women's sports chuckle-worthy, about the same tier of interest as the Little Leagues. Aww, you poor things, incapable of standing up in absolute terms, let's make a nice carveout for you so that you can say you tried.

At least in tennis you have something sexy to look at.

The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl

The real tough break is having a name that sounds like castor oil with semen in it, as far as I'm concerned.

At any rate, I've always watched the whole trans in sports debacle simply for the popcorn munching potential, since I don't give a shit about the outcome either way, it's always fun to see people tearing their hair out when trying to reconcile mutually incompatible maxims and desired outcomes.

Fuck it, let's have a Transhuman Olympics, where PEDs, augmentation and everything you can do short of fighting the other participants is legal. As a tweet once said, let's see how high humans can really jump.

as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights

Whats that phrase again, play stupid games and win stupid prizes? Unless those women were coerced with cattle prods into stepping into the ring, they made the eminently stupid move of embracing their fate instead of boycotting or bowing out. Certainly, if I participated in a wrestling match and my opponent was a Silverback gorilla, I'm conceding right there and then.

  • -18

Aww, you poor things, incapable of standing up in absolute terms, let's make a nice carveout for you so that you can say you tried.

This but unpatronisingly.

I'm far from an athlete, the only sports I do is for health, I never liked competing, and yet I find myself wanting to smack the living hell out fellow nerds who completely miss the point of sports. It is the least surprising thing in the universe, that the person saying the above is also a transhumanist.

In sports, the actual physical achievement is just the cherry on top, a certificate of accomplishment, a badge you can wear and show off, but which you only get for putting in the work, but the actual thing is about the work itself. It's about showing up for training every day, and persisting throughout all the failures. Virtually all benefits of sports, to the individual as well as society, come from the latter not the former, and it's blindingly obvious it should be encouraged in everyone, regardless of their level of achievement. But some people seem to be indeed blinded by it.

It's about showing up for training every day, and persisting throughout all the failures.

Does showing up for daily events in Genshin/WoW/the likes and persisitng useful for society somehow?

Your posting doesn't show causal mechanism besides "blindingly obvious"

About as much as going on a rigorous diet of pizza, hamburgers, coke, and chocolate cake.

How can you not see the difference?

What is the causal mechanism?

Actual professional sportsmen usually like their chosen discipliple (self-selection), so this point doesn't fly.

Maybe a fairer comparison is having a team and playing a ranked RTS with them?

Depends on the RTS. Chess is complex enough that we kind of treat it as a sport. With video games some of them would probably go in the fast food category, while others could go in the sports category.

In sports, the actual physical achievement is just the cherry on top, a certificate of accomplishment, a badge you can wear and show off, but which you only get for putting in the work, but the actual thing is about the work itself.

This isn't what sports is about at all. Sports IS about the physical achievement - Usain Bolt doesn't train harder than other people, but he still gets medals, because the medal is for the physical achievement, not for how many hours of your life you can sink into training. And wouldn't this be an argument in favor of women's sports? Women can train just as hard and obsessively as men. But the point is not the training but the result.

And wouldn't this be an argument in favor of women's sports? Women can train just as hard and obsessively as men.

Yes, that's why we subsidize it.

But the point is not the training but the result.

The result is what gets the eyeballs, and what inspires people, but I don't think it's the point.

I think you're 100% right here. Fat little kids running around kicking worn out soccer balls to play like Messi is an infinitely positive social good, even if they never get any better than "pretty bad at this." I used to be a pretty big sportsball hater, but now I'm in favor of anything that gets people off their phones and moving around.

Striving for self-improvement every day is a commendable goal. I agree with your entire last paragraph. However, my frustration with non-transhuman sports is that we've been approaching it wrong. By establishing boundaries on the extent of self-improvement, we've failed to encourage individuals to truly maximize their potential. Imagine how much stronger and healthier you could be with a carefully developed and safe PED stack? Society discourages such considerations. How much greater could you become by aiming for a pair of cybernetic limbs? Integrating the best technology is a core component of human betterment. Rejecting this notion undermines the very premise.

The purpose of sports is to teach people to continuously strive to push the limits of human physicality—except, it seems, when it comes to genuinely pushing those limits. Sports have always been constrained, sanitized by the types of self-improvement that the general public finds acceptable. This approach is marred by the sentiment, 'I don't want to better myself in this way, so no one else should be rewarded for it either.' It's affirmative action for bioconservatives.

I think the easy strawman to this is Mr. Tex's vision of unrestricted sports.

The purpose of sports is to win. It is, at it's core, a competition. And the goal of competition is to be the victor.

There is no high-minded 'pushing the physical limitations' involved here. I assure you, the last thing you want is to have transhuman philosophy applied by people that, while not insane, are atleast slightly off kilter from the rest of humanity.

You have to be. Consider; These are the people that literally and metaphorically torture themselves just for... what, five minutes of glory? If that? You have the apex, the celebrities, yes, but that's some long odds to bet with chancy return on that investment.

And you don't find reasonable men at the top of mountains.

Sports and competition are the last places I'd be applying transhumanism.

There is no high-minded 'pushing the physical limitations'

I agree that there is a focus on victory. But come now. Hardly anyone reaches the top without falling in love with something about the feeling of climbing.

And I'm not looking to the tops of mountains for reasonable men. I look to the tops of mountains for Great men. For men so mad that when they reach the top, they begin to teach themselves to fly.

Maybe there does exist a carefully-developed and safe PED stack which could significantly enhance performance without significant side effects, but as soon as you allow any PEDs, there would be a strong incentive to disregard health and take the highest possible dose. In the end, the ranking still ends up being a combination of genetics and hard work, except all the athletes have now destroyed their hearts and livers. It's a prisoner's dilemma.

Edit: If you allow cybernetic enhancements, implants, etc., you would still need some restrictions, otherwise a shot putter could just mount a trebuchet on their back. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and "no cybernetics at all" is a very natural place to do it.

If the Olympics committee doesn't ban cochlear implants or pacemakers, then we're already past the "no cybernetics" line.

At any rate, I'm personally not concerned about the prisoners dilemma here because the athletes in question are competent adults who can simply choose not to compete or stick to the kiddy leagues/baseline only competitions instead.

It's a prisoner's dilemma.

This is a valid concern. Ideally, sports would gatekeep based on the actual end result concerning health and sustainability. Currently, it is acceptable to destroy your body through non-PED methods but unacceptable to improve your health with PED methods. If health is part of bettering oneself, and that's the point of sports, the current system is using very poor heuristics for it.

Regarding restrictions on cybernetic implants, I believe you might be mistaken about where we are drawing the line right now. We do permit glasses, for instance. So, our boundary is more like "Only cybernetics that enhance people to a perceived human norm," which is also a somewhat natural distinction.

I do think the appeal of sports needs to relate in some way to the human body, and technological advancements should be integrated into that body. Otherwise, it becomes more like a vehicle expo than a competition to enhance human morphology. In the long term, we might decide to move on to less human morphologies, but at that point, I think there will be plenty of room to subdivide by factors such as morphology type and weight class.

The purpose of sports is to teach people to continuously strive to push the limits of human physicality—except, it seems, when it comes to genuinely pushing those limits.

Well, yes. The point is pushing to the limits, and even going too far with that is frowned upon (see: doping scandals). You're arguing for pushing past the limits, and if you do that, you're no longer human. As a transhumanist, you likely believe this is the entire point, but there's a whole bunch of us naked monkeys that would like to remain the way we are, thank you very much.

Well, regarding your affinity for the classically human, I'll just reiterate from a past post that I'm fine with the neo-Amish existing. And am even willing to protect them if they decide to stay human while I race ahead into the unknowns of the alien frontier. But I'm not going to sit by and let "you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up" remain an empty platitude parents tell their children. When I say it I mean it.

Yeah, that seems fair.

Virtually all benefits of sports, to the individual as well as society, come from the latter not the former,

Citation needed

Even experience for programming contests generalize poorly to useful programming, and what about growing more muscles or doing useless things?

I think that professional sports are detriment to the society. As they age, athletes can't compete anymore, many did not accumulate enough money, some can find work as a coach but many do not, and often find themselves in crime.

often find themselves in crime

Do you have any examples of this? I'd genuinely never heard of that before.

It was big in ex-USSR, here's song "We are former sportsmen, current racketeers"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=APPx0VtwYpw

Of course, obviously less an issue in richer countries.

OJ after the civil trial, but he's admittedly somewhat a special case.

I do not miss the point, I simply do not care about the point.

Not that I'd expect you to notice that, you treat transhumanists like they killed both your parents in a deserted alley.

  • -12

More chill, please.

I'd like to say that Arjin has been less than charitable before, to the point of threatening to murder all transhumanists.

In that light, pointing out his jaundiced perspective on the matter is me being about as chill as it gets.

I do not recall any death threats, but be sure to report them if you see them.

Maybe he means this. It was an obvious joke IMO, but if I deserve to be spanked, you can spank me, daddy.

I any case, I was also a bit unchill with "that the person saying the above is also a transhumanist".

It's more about what you're planning to do to my descendants, than what you did to my ancestors, but yeah, I suppose you're right.

It is also about what they did to our ancestors. Do not forget that eugenics was a progressive and transhumanist idea. Unlike backwards conservatives, we progressives understand The Science of Darwinism, and we also have moral strength to do what is right. We will employ population-wide controls to weed out genetic diseases, and make humanity clean once and for all. There will be some eggs broken making this omelette, but the only thing that can cast moral judgement on us is the man at the end of history. And we know for sure that this Man is a transhumanist of unspecified cultural and ethnic background, but who has unlocked the universal [trans]human potential in his true consciousness. This man will thank us for progressing The Work ushering him forth.

Do not forget that eugenics was a progressive and transhumanist idea

Oh, I do bring that up when appropriate, but for the most part I let bygones be bygones.

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