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Neither the average male nor the average female is competing in/winning at high-level sporting competitions.
Alright, let do this again:
The actual observed evidence, unless anyone can show me otherwise, is that trans women have no competitive advantage. Competitive advantage means winning more often, and if you win more often that shows up in stats. Sports stats are among the most obsessively collected and analyzed numbers in our society, no one has ever been able to show me a simple t-test showing that trans women win more often than cis women. No matter how many anecdotes you have and how strong your intuitions are, there's a straightforward statistical definition that's easy to test, and it doesn't support the idea of an advantage.
How is that possible in the face of your strong intuitions about the average man and the average woman? Well, you need to be able to picture population distributions in your head. Like this:
Take the population distribution of males and the population distribution of females, you'll see the mean for males is higher wrt most types of athletic performance. Ok.
Now:
Make a new distribution by picking out the ~.2% of the male population that are trans women.
-Does this population have the same mean athletic ability? I would guess not, there's plenty written on innate brain differences between cis men and trans women, no surprise if those affect the body and maturation as well. Also if you believe in social contagion, boys who are already 'soft' and not 'winning' at masculinity are more likely to fall to being trans as a good alternative. Also today lots of trans teens are taking puberty blockers and not going through the average male puberty in the first place. Strong correlation with autism which has a strong correlation with being an indoor kid. Etc. etc. etc. -Does this population have the same variance in athletic ability? Absolutely not, it's 500x smaller and has a strong selector on the people in it being similar to each other, both of which are going to shrim the variance and reduce the extremity of the outliers.
Now, put that population on HRT for 2+ years, which is the minimum many professional sports organizations require. Does this shrink all the bones in a way that completely reverses teh effect of male puberty? No. Does it atrophy muscles and do lots of other shit that moves the population average on athletic ability downward? Fuck yes it does. Does it also further decrease variance? Probably, since it's a huge biological intervention that moves everyone in the same direction.
Now, compare this tiny modified population to the population of all females.
-Is the mean for the trans women population on athletics still higher than for the female population? Who the fuck knows. We've never really measured it precisely enough to say, we know it's not the same as for the larger male population anymore.
But who cares? The average person isn't winning professional athletic competitions, the most extreme outliers in the whole population are winning them. So:
-Is the most extreme outlier for the trans women population higher than the most extreme outlier for the female population? Keep in mind that the female population is 500x larger, leading to the most extreme outliers being many standard deviations further out for the female population than the trans women population. And wherever the mean for the trans women population might be, it probably has a lower variance as well for the reasons we talked about.
So there's a lot of strong reasons why the strongest outliers in the female population would be better than the strongest outliers in the trans women population. It's pretty straightforward stuff if you think in terms of population distributions, and most importantly, the male average vs the female average tells you almost nothing useful about this question.
Now, is it still possible, after all that, that the trans woman outliers are better than the female outliers? Sure, anything's possible.
And if that were true, we'd expect one of the 20 billion anti-trans pundits to have done a simple t-test on win/loss records showing that advantage, and publicized it at some point in the last 15 years we've been arguing about this.
Absent such a test and in the face of all the reasons to expect otherwise, my money is on 'no advantage' until someone shows something more persuasive than an anecdote and intuition.
Anyway: you use this sports stuff as evidence taht trans activists are inherently claiming there's no difference between men and women, because they're claiming trans women don't have an advantage over cis women in sports. But it should be blindingly obvious that these two facts are only logically related if you assume that there's no difference between trans women and men. Which you may believe, but the activists don't! For the good reasons I've shown here, and more!
So there's really nothing to this part of your claim.
That people argue this blows my mind. Do you genuinely believe that males do not have a substantial physical advantage over women, or do you genuinely believe that going on hormones for a year erases that advantage?
You dismiss the growing amount of "anecdotal evidence" of 40-to-50-year-old men suddenly "transitioning" late in life and taking up a sport and absolutely dominating professional female athletes 20 years younger than them who've been in the sport for years because... there aren't enough trans women athletes to have taken over the leaderboards in every sport, yet?
read the rest of the comment
I did, and to be perfectly honest, I found it to be a disingenuous mish-mash of conflated statistics to present an argument that you imply ("trans women aren't really better athletes than cis women") but won't commit to, just vaguely handwave at. For example:
While I don't find your "strong reasons" convincing, sure, let's suppose that the top 1% of female athletes are better than the top 1% of trans women athletes. The issue with trans women in female sports is not about how well the top 1% compete against each other, but how trans women athletes on average compete with female athletes on average.
It's not clear to me if you mean the mean for trans women athletes or trans women in general (you seem to be deliberately fuzzing it a bit here), but what do you mean by "measured it precisely"? Are you claiming we have not measured strength, speed, arm length, aerobic capacity, grip strength, or other measures of ability for trans women and women? I mean, I can Google up the studies, but I'm reluctant to do so because I don't think this is a genuine question.
You are using statistical outliers when convenient and ignoring them when not: for example, one of your arguments is that if trans women were better athletes than women, then they'd be winning all the competitions, and they're not. This completely ignores how many competitions there are, how few trans athletes there are, how relatively new policies allowing trans women to compete are, and of course, as I said, the observable reality of second-rate, aging, out-of-shape male athletes transitioning, switching to the women's league, and destroying women's records. Does that happen every time? Does every trans women reach the top of the league? No, but from what I have observed, they almost always rapidly ascend far higher and faster than any actual female athlete of similar condition and experience could.
I think you're having trouble following my argument, which is reasonable because it has a lot of steps and I don't know how well I explained it.
To clarify:
The populations I'm talking about are only all cis women and all trans women.
I am not talking about athletes as a separate populations. I'm saying that all athletes are outliers from teh two general populations I'm referring to.
My point is that, if the cis women population has more extreme outliers on athletic ability than the trans women population, then most of the cis athletes will be better than most of the trans athletes.
We have, to my knowledge, done a few studies on average performance among trans women on a few simple isolated measures and tasks (like sit-ups). We have not, to my knowledge, done measures of population variance in a way that lets us compare outliers between the groups, or have we measured athletic ability on a holistic way.
The claim is not that if trans women had an advantage, they would win every competition. The claim is that if they had an advantage, they would individually have better personal win/loss ratios (or whatever is the most relevant individual metric for a given sport) than average cis women in their league/division.
We can measure that right now, regardless of how many/few trans athletes there are.
I agree there are some anecdotes of trans women winning things. There are also anecdotes of cis women winning things, so that doesn't mean much without statistics. Nor are all anecdotes representative, that's why they're anecdotes; maybe something bad was happening in that handfull of famous cases that we want policy to avoid, but that wouldn't say much about the median case which we should be concerned with.
Golf clap for the well-played condescension, sir.
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. That there are a handful of exceptional female athletes who can beat most men (but not the top men) in a sport does not mean therefore that most female athletes can beat most trans women.
I don't follow this issue closely enough to collect studies, or links, but this is one of the first hits when I searched "Trans women athletes studies." (Leaving out "studies," you mostly get articles by the ACLU and various news organizations claiming that either it's been "debunked" that trans women have an athletic advantage, or it's "unknowable.") Doing a little more digging, I see quite a few studies that measured more than just sit-ups.
And there is just... empirical observation.
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. Look, I don't want to dig up all the Jesse Singhal and Graham Linehan links because you'd dismiss them as motivated cherrypickers (and Linehan certainly is) but this is happening in sport after sport. If you actually wanted to do some sort of fair study, then you would have to factor in things like age and number of years in training which would pick up what I am claiming, which is that the advantage of trans women is such that a man who was a mediocre male athlete can fairly easily become one of the top 5% "female" athletes by transitioning.
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.
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.
You're stretching the definition of "outlier." In that the average person isn't very athletic at all, sure, but I'm not just talking about Olympic competitors, I'm talking about people who participate in neighborhood soccer leagues and the like.
If you were, then you'd stop making so many handwaving motions when we talk about comparing female apples to trans apples and stop pointing at female oranges.
No, we are not in a state of total ignorance on that question.
I am not sure if your phrasing is intentionally vague or not.
Do I believe it is possible that there could exist a (singular) trans woman who never wins a single competition against her female 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?
Yes. Of course. No one claims that all trans women will be beat all women all the time.
Do I believe it is possible that there could exist a world in which no trans women ever win a single competition against female 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?
Well, that would seem unlikely, but it's a meaningless hypothetical since we are observably not in that world.
It's not "some metaphysical sense" if their male physiology observably lets them compete at a higher level with less effort, conditioning, and training.
So if you or I competed against women, that would be fair, since women competing against us would have a reasonable chance to win? Or do you claim you would be able to beat any woman in any athletic competition?
So you believe we could only say it's unfair for trans women to compete against women if and only if trans women win every single time?
Trans women are over-represented among winners now. And women are not having fun because they're competing against men who can and have injured them (in contact sports) and are taking monetary prizes from them.
Trying to cast this as "Oh, you're just annoyed by trans women" doesn't work when you are studiously ignoring the facts you reference.
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.
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.
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.
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