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So I am roughly on your side (in that I think trans women should be allowed to compete against women), but I'll bite this bullet. It is perfectly possible for this world to be true yes. A competitive advantage just means doing better against women than against men in this scenario. Whether you ever win, is irrelevant. An athlete who was on average 2170th against men and on average 2050th against women, is demonstrating they have a competitive advantage when competing against women than against men. The fact they never win doesn't change that. That being the case a world where no trans athlete ever wins could indeed still have them with an advantage.
What needs to be measured is not a win rate it's the comparative improvement. The change in their performance pre-transition against men, to their performance post-transition against women. This is because competition is about comparing you to your peers, we change the person (through hormones, surgery etc.) and we change their peers. If the worst man athlete transitions and is now the worst woman athlete, then who cares, nothing has changed. If the 1000th man athlete transitions and becomes the 1st top woman athlete, that might be a problem. But it's also a possible problem if they go from 2000th, to 60th. You cannot measure against winning alone because....
Again this is incorrect, it is so they have a fair chance of competing. For some that might be winning, for others it might be a fair chance of coming 20th. Winning is not everything. Imagine a race where the winner is a woman but the next 3000 positions are filled by trans-women. That is likely to indicate a potential fairness problem even if the winner happens to be an even greater outlier.
Where we agree, is that I don't really see this happening either. But limiting your argument to only looking at winners is trying to look at the best possible version of our position. And I don't think it's the position the majority of people (correctly) take. So that is the one we must engage with. If someone juices and comes 3rd, that is still a problem even if it doesn't change the winning statistics. So that must also be the case here.
Does transitioning change someone's comparative ranking enough that it constitutes a significant unfairness to other competitors whether those competitors would otherwise be coming first or 25th when weighed against the other factors involved. I think the answer appears to be no, hence why I agree with your position, even though I think your argument is wrong.
I am confused. Assuming men are better than women at these sports, wouldn't any woman competing against men rank lower than they rank against women?
IE, doesn't your test for 'unfairness' produce a positive result for literally any person you use it on?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I talk about winners because the other side is predicting that men have such a huge advantage they should always win, and because they bring up examples of teh 2 or 3 trans women that won big competitions. My argument itself is not limited to winners.
If there's any statistical relationship where trans women are consistently out-performing their cis peers, whether that means coming in first or third or twentieth, that would be evidence of an advantage.
If the hypothetical data was that trans women are coming in 20th 50% more often than they should assuming a random distribution, then we might have to have a discussion about how much that's actually warping things in a way that ruins the sport for anyone, and if it's actually worth restricting rights over it.
But for a statistical relationship much stronger than that, it wouldn't have to be just winning all the time, I'll accept a lot fo things.
I just haven't seen anything, so far.
Well, it's a problem because juicing is bad for your health and we don't want to create a pressure to force everyone to do it.
It's not a problem when someone, like, trains really hard and improves to third, or has proper nutrition and improves to third, or whatever. That's normal.
The problem with juicing isn't 'did some thing and got a good outcome', the problem is the thing being harmful and us not wanting to incentivize it.
Doesn't apply here.
And here I just disagree. If no one is being hurt, it's not immoral.
Not if it's a transwoman who competed against men in a body with male advantage, but underwent a procedure that nullified the male advantage before competing against women.
Your claim is that transition is such a procedure. If that's true, we should expect the test to show no comparative advantage.
It's not an individual test for infairness like a doping test, it's a measure for judging transition as nullifier of the male advantage.
Again, no, that wasn't my argument.
One of several points in my argument was that HRT should be expected to lower performance, but I didn't claim that it magically makes relative rankings in athletic leagues exactly the same. I specifically called out limb length as a thing that doesn't get reversed. And even if it magically reversed everything perfectly, a different number of men vs women play sports,.so the relative ranking would still be different.
But those several points weren't in a causal chain with each other, they were each a directional factor that should make us expect trans women athletes to have worse performance than men athletes.
The point about a 500x smaller population leading to less extreme outliers is the biggest factor, and doesn't interact with this argument.
Fair enough, but I take it you understand now how @SSCReader's unfairness test measures comparative advantage, you just think comparative advantage isn't relevant?
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But the person who would have finished 60th is "hurt" and everyone else below that is pushed down similarly. Not very much, its true, but more than the world in which trans athletes are not allowed to compete. Now I think that is out-weighed by the positive benefits. But it is a "harm".
And thus de facto immoral by your lights at least. Now that can be ok because i think excluding trans people is also immoral, so its the lesser of two evils. We often have to trade off things by which has the smaller negative impact. But we should at least acknowledge that those affected who feel its a problem are suffering some level of "harm". Its not made up, it's real. Introducing more people into their pool, as competition is a negative for them. Just like with immigration putting pressure on peoples ability to get jobs by adding competition. Its a real problem. It's just not enough (in both cases!) to stop the changes in my opinion, because the positives outweigh the negatives. But we should accept the negatives are real, even if they are small and outweighed by the positives.
But as long as you accept it doesn't have to be an impact on winning itself before it might become a problem then i think we are pretty close in outlook. Increased competition can be bad for the people being competed against, even if some of those people still win.
Juicing is cheating in that it is getting an illegal advantage. Even if it isn't harmful its a problem, because it puts pressure on others to also juice to keep up. Its even worse if its harmful but its not the ONLY reason its a problem. A sport which allows juicing would be fine,but if one doesn't then doing so to get an advantage your competitors don't have against the rules of the competition is wrong even if juicing was net positive for your health. Part of fairly competing in a sport is agreeing to follow whatever arbitrary rules everyone else has to follow. If you don't you are morally wrong.
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