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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.
No, I'm not. I have consistently been talking about biology, and I have made it explicit where necessary (by pointing out that sports divisions, which use the terms "men" and "women", are about biology.)
I'd like you to retract that accusation and apologize.
That's one of the arguments you made, but not the one discussed in this comment thread.
Respond to the actual points made. Don't jump around between different arguments when you can't defend the one at hand.
I'm not ignoring it, you're ignoring my counterargument upthread:
Right, saying that 'Mens team' means 'Males team' is the conflation.
Yes that is literally the thing that my entire initial comment was doing.
I explicitly made an argument as to why this is the case, without even referencing the term "Men". There's no conflation.
I also made sure to avoid terms like "men" or "women" when they were potentially ambiguous, so asking again for your retraction and apology.
So to be clear, you are accepting that the burden of proof lies on the trans-inclusive position and conceding your argument of
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