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Notes -
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
insistingarguing 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:
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 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.
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.
Unfathomably based.
As Sailer likes to remark from time to time, the most popular men’s sports are like a stand-in for war, the most popular women’s sports are like beauty contests.
And the women are happy to oblige. Hence why female indoor volleyball players wear skin tight booty shorts to spend much of their time bent over in the ready position, women’s MMA has a well-trodden MMA -> e-thot -> OnlyFans pipeline, and many female tennis players are more than eager to engage in some Instathottery. Kournikova walked so Bouchard could run.
Meh. I watch MMA and the actual contests aren't beauty competitions. See this. Obviously tastes may vary, but I don't try to get my titillation from any place that might lead me to seeing a woman like that. Women's dress is also not that different from men's (women get a rash guard) so it's not like a volleyball thing.
A few women (Paige VanZant) who are atypically attractive (by sport standards) go into Onlyfans but then you might as well say that being a lawyer, KFC employee and random internet sensations famous for totally different reasons are beauty contestant winners.
Prominent successes like Amanda Nunes and even Valentina Shevchenko aren't really in that niche.
The simple take is that Onlyfans, by virtue of "Uberizing" sex work, allows any attractive woman to translate even a minor platform more directly into simp-provided income. A sport like MMA which pays less will simply have more people joining the game.
You might be surprised (or not) at how much female MMA fighters enjoy being sex objects. An example would be Joanna herself, who got breast implants even when weight cuts were already difficult for her. Her revealed preference was that she preferred optimising being a sex object rather than optimising competitive performance.
Indeed, women’s MMA or volleyball or tennis or even gymnastics or figure skating aren’t literal beauty competitions in the strict sense, where the winner is declared based on who’s supposedly more beautiful. Even literal beauty contests aren’t literal beauty contests, as they typically involve political and idpol considerations, and ability to deliver some progressive-aligned opinion.
Nonetheless, the point of metaphorising popular women’s sports to a beauty contest is that oftentimes, women’s sports are but paths for women to launder and leverage their sexuality, another path to have a plausibly deniable way to display, exhibit, advertise their assets.
I certainly know of Amanda, but I’m not too familiar with her on-goings. However, Valentina is totally in the e-thot niche. “The Bullet” knows what she’s doing: her Insta is filled with bikini pics, and she often posts videos of her doing little dances on social media as can be sometimes seen on /r/ufc and less so /r/mma. It's no coincidence that Valentina is a face that’s launched a thousand simps, hence the infamous ‘complete’ pasta:
*Of all the women's MMA champions of all time (so far) she seems like the most 'complete' human being - by far. Skilled, tough, smart, beautiful, extensive world travels and has lived in the 3rd world for long periods, speaks multiple languages, tactical firearms training/enthusiast, dancer, film/arts school, actress, outdoorsy, etc.
You can tell she genuinely has her shit together, like she could probably be a millionaire running just about any business, if she wanted.
Are there any other female fighters that impressive?*
I would posit it’s mostly because, chances are, a given female MMA fighter has had a lot less paternal investment in her life compared to say, a given WTA player, where fathers are typically quite involved. Thus, many more female MMA fighters will engage in what is sometimes referred to as “fatherless behavior.” The Bouchards, Badosas, and Giorgis of the world will post slutty photos on Instagram to their fathers’ annoyance and exasperation (RIP to their fathers, especially Sergio Giorgi), but haven’t crossed the Rubicon to OnlyFans or porn. At least so far! Growth mindset.
Fair point on JJ's absurd implants - which slipped my mind. Though I don't know what personal circumstances motivated her. Lots of different targets when you optimize sex appeal. It's possible she was seeing the end of her career and wanted to be sexier for the final catch.
My point was that those sports do things that are clearly for titillation e.g. how female volleyball players dress compared to men. In MMA women either dress equally modestly (given existing norms about male-female modesty) or dress more conservatively (from a gender-blind perspective).
And then they go engage in a traditionally masculine activity that is not known to improve anyone's beauty, let alone a woman's.
MMA is...not a good sport for that. Because it pays less at the low end, comes with significant potential physical downsides that affect your sex appeal and is also mainly not a self-feeding sport: people in MMA got there through something else, usually a lifetime of training something else. Something that avoids at least some of these problems (e.g. grappling poses less of a risk to your pretty face).
Mackenzie Dern was already hot. She could have been a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instathot. Her sex appeal is not improved by getting punched in the face, I don't care what feminists say; that sort of "empowerment" isn't hot.
How bout: plenty of women will use their sexuality as suits them. Attractive athletes will leverage it where they can but it's probably not why they were training at 13. Ronda Rousey didn't give up her youth becoming a judoka to launder and leverage her sexuality I don't think (she did it, like many, cause that's what her mother wanted). But, when she got famous, she did leverage her "hot - for sports" nature.
TBH she could have just dressed provocatively rather than ruin her knees trying to place in Judo. Works for most women.
Oh, I'm well aware of /r/MMA's crush on Valentina. That's why I said "even Shevchenko".
She's "sports-hot" and gets simps for that reason. But my general perception of her is not as an Thot and not that the UFC promotes her that way.
She's promoted (or was promoted) on the grounds of being a technical (some might say "boring") fighter. But, tbf, I don't really follow her Instagram besides the general idea of her as a jet-setting, multilingual, gun-toting, James Bond-esque badass. Maybe I missed things.
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