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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.
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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