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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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Not at all. The situation is that women want to play on women's teams.

Sports divisions are based on biology, and the people in question aren't biologically female. I don't want to play semantics games about what "woman" means, that's missing the point.

Typically the onus is on the person wanting to penalize or exclude someone to provide proof, that's the concept behind 'innocent until proven guilty' and the like.

The proof is easily given though: We have male biology. The burden of proof now shifts to the affirmative defense of "in this case the effects of male biology don't apply".

We have good evidence that male need to be excluded from female competition. We would now need evidence that these particular kind of males do not.

I'm talking about 'unfair' in terms of 'not possible to compete against'.

You're talking about some kind of metaphysical 'fairness' where you have decided that being good at something because you were born male and then transitioned is 'unfair', but being born female and really talented at it is 'fair'.

No, fairness is a function of the game, and if the premise of the game is that male advantages aren't allowed, then any kind of male advantage is unfair. It wouldn't automatically be unfair for a male to compete against a female as long as it's in the open division, however.

They're not mediocre cis athletes. They're exceptional trans athletes.

If they were mediocre trans athletes, then the exceptional trans athletes would have broken their records by even more!

They were mediocre athletes, then they transitioned and became exceptional. This proves that they have an advantage from transition, because they're mediocre on their own talent. This is not just "personal intuition". It improved their ranking, so it gave them an advantage.

Exceptional trans athletes would be exceptional athletes who are trans, like Caitlyn Jenner.

It doesn't affect whether the women's division is a fair and competitive environment, and there's no obvious reason why we should care about it

Allowing certain mediocre athletes to perform exceptionally based on advantages that the division is supposed to exclude is not fair. Competitive is a separate matter.

And the reason we care about excluding it is the same we have women's divisions to begin with.

or, more importantly, why we should restrict people's rights based on it.

Like I told you, there are no rights being restricted, and if you disagree, you should explain which rights are restricted how, not just assert it.