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Notes -
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.
I'm not sure if averages will necessarily be enlightening, because we can easily imagine a multimodal distribution. On one hand, transition doesn't necessarily lead to removal of all biological sex differences, on the other it's a medical procedure that can have negative health effects impacting athletic performance. Both seem very plausible.
If, as an exaggerated toy model, transition half of the time does nothing, half of the time completely cripples the patient, we'd observe it averaging out, but half of transwomen would easily dominate.
We don't need to look at averages when we can look at individuals. If we take a specific individual and compare their relative performance before and after, that tells us what transition did in their case. If Lia Thomas or Laurel Hubbard go from average in the male division to record-breaking in the female division, then clearly transition doesn't guarantee to nullify the sex advantage, and therefore shouldn't allow competing in the female division. It doesn't matter if even 90% of transwomen are average and some have health issues - the women competing against Thomas or Hubbard still got robbed.
That's all very possible!
And if it were true, it would show up in win/loss records!
To be extremely clear, the form of my argument is this:
Intuitions that trans women athletes must have a huge advantage because the average man has a huge advantage over the average woman are wrong. We have no idea what the trans woman distribution looks like, and the relevant measure is the outliers rather than the average. So we should acknowledge our state of ignorance about that and have really weak priors about whether there will be any advantage and in which direction.
Absent strong priors based on ability, the way to figure out whether someone has an unfair advantage in a game is to look at whether they win that game significantly more often than chance. This is the type of sports record that shows up on ESPN 5 times a minute and is generally easy to access.
Since no one has ever demonstrated a statistical advantage in win/loss records and we have weak priors about innate ability, we should assume then null hypothesis for now and let trans women compete. If that leads to gathering enough data to demonstrate an unfair advantage some day, then we'll have a legitimate reason to revisit that decision.
So 2 responses.
1 is 'I disagree'. There are a trillion local and regional sports records for a trillion things, records get broken literally every day by cis athletes. The question is whether trans athletes break them more often than than would be proportional. Furthermore, it doesn't matter what men's division you were in, it matters whether the women's division is a fair contest with you in it. If they win every contest they ever go to and no one can compete with them, that's probably unfair. If they won one competition once and then lost every other competition, well, it seems like cis women are competing against them just fine and there's not a problem. (Thomas broke no records for example, just had one good meet)
2 is 'Yeah anecdotes aren't data, for all I know something fucky was going on in those situations and the optimal policy precludes those situations. I already talked about sports requiring 2 years of HRT as a fine thing that needs to be part of the conversation, did those anecdotes have 2 years before competing? Did they go of it before competition? Maybe weightlifting is a sport where it's actually not fair and a statistical analysis would show that, if so then maybe you have a ban there but don't need one in soccer or tennis. Etc. If we took away entire demographics rights because of 2 anecdotes, we'd be in a lot of trouble as a society. 2 white men have ever committed insider trading, maybe white men can't be trusted with high-level positions in corporate America. Etc.
I disagree. The situation is that normally ineligible people are demanding special allowance, on the basis of arguing that they have a way to nullify the impact of the property that makes them ineligible. The onus is on them to prove that it's really nullified. If we don't know either way, we play it safe.
Doesn't need to. If the transwoman only makes 3rd place, then the woman in 4th lost the bronze medal. If that's due to an unfair advantage, that's bad and she was treated unfairly.
But not by mediocre cis athletes.
Hubbard and Thomas perform better than before, by a lot. This shows that transition gave them an advantage.
This isn't a rights issue, there is no right to compete in the women's division with a male body. Cis men don't get to, and no one has a problem with it. The question is whether transwomen should get a special allowance.
Not at all. The situation is that women want to play on women's teams.
Obviously, if we try to argue about what is 'the situation' in these terms we're just going to pointlessly fall to the semantics which we disagree about.
So lets just say: the freedom-maximizing position is to let anyone play on any team, we only diverge from that when we have a very good reason to (which is why there are men's and women's leagues), we currently don't have good evidence that trans women need to be excluded from women's teams.
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. It's a good rule of thumb.
I'm talking about 'unfair' in terms of 'not possible to compete against'.
If they didn't come in first, obviously other women can compete against them.
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'. I think that's always going to end up being weird and arbitrary and impractical to use as an actual standard, it just falls into promoting personal prejudices that will be different for different people, it's never going to be enforceable because it's not based on any consistent standard beyond 'I don't like this'.
And it's not relevant to the actual competitors. What's relevant to them is whether the matches they're in are competitive.
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!
That's the point, if the actual trans athletes that exist are fair competition, then that's all that matters. Maybe if the trans population were 500x larger than it is, it would throw really exceptional athletes that no cis woman could ever compete against, and it would be unfair to let them in the same league. But we're not in that world, as far as any statistical data can tell us.
Again, you have some personal intuition that if someone has a rank in the men's division then transitions they should have the same rank in the women's division. But that's just an arbitrary weird thing you made up. 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 - or, more importantly, why we should restrict people's rights based on it.
You say "not at all" but nothing you say actually changes that they were "normally ineligible" to play in female teams with attempts to change that only recently (despite attempts to promote female sports going back to Title IX).
Your attempt to leverage semantics in your favor (e.g. via the word "penalize" vs "exclude") doesn't actually defeat the basic claim about the status quo.
Even if they were uncontroversially considered women - and they aren't - they were/are still ineligible.
Yeah that's why my literal next sentence was saying this is pointless semantic games and we should use an empirical metric instead.
I've been suggesting win/loss record statistics as an unambiguous and definitive empirical metric here, so we can ignore all teh rhetorical games and just decide the matter on facts. I'd love to get more engagement on that actual proposal.
Per your claim, the situation of fact is that we don't have good evidence, so we need to decide what to do as a default until we attain it, whether the burden of proof is on excluding or allowing transwomen in. You are the one who started rhetorical games about "women on women's sports", weaponizing the ambiguity of "woman", with regards to that.
And you are the one playing rhetorical games conflating 'male' and 'man' with regards to that.
The entire trans debate is about language and classification. Everything is always going to end up being an arbitrary semantic game, if you don't agree ahead of time on some empirical metric to use to settle the issue. That's why I'm advancing one.
And I don't say they should be allowed to play women's sports because they're women, I've said repeatedly that we should default to a policy of maximum liberty and freedom until we find compelling evidence of a conflicting interest. That's a bog-standard libertarian argument that you are ignoring.
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