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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.
Reports (so far):
Hey! I use lots of drugs when it comes to my walls of texts, if my ADHD meds count. It's not a crime.
This is almost certainly not ChatGPT either, it's not remotely as good at making isolated claims for rigor.
Logical incoherence isn't a violation of the rules by itself, even if paired with activism, and that's a claim I'm utterly disinterested in investigating unless someone has an automated theorem prover that's great with natural language. As far as I can tell, this argument is coherent. It's empirically terrible, and an exercise in demanding that you have to be logically compelled to believe something unpalatable instead of simply summing up the evidence, but that's not the same thing.
Feel free to make a counterargument. So far no one's got past misunderstanding the math or naked incredulity.
I'm responding to a comment that came in out of nowhere saying I couldn't be chatGPT because chatGPT makes fewer logical errors. I don't think I should be taking the blame for introducing an arrogant and condescending tone to the conversation.
I do have a tendency to respond with whatever tone I feel is being addressed at me, which has certainly gotten me into trouble in the past. If I'm misinterpreting the tone of the comment I was replying to and shouldn't have taken it that badly, then it's my mistake, but that's definitely what I was playing off of.
In guess' defence, they are literally always on defence when arguing here. That's going to taint their interpretation of even innocuous statements, and it's been going on for years at this point. Plus there's the fact that they are basically alone - if smh had written that post about folamh's op can you imagine the outcry? It wouldn't be fair to write it about folamh's op, and we users would be falling over each other to defend him - but nobody is coming to guess' defence. Except me I suppose, but I'm not defending their post, I agree with smh's description. And I felt it necessary to clarify that for my cred or something, so even their defence has caveats (smh's post is like a caveated defence too). No wonder they don't feel like being nice about it.
Also maybe this is unfair, but this kind of reads like "you would look prettier if you smiled". In both the second wave and the third wave sense. Like, guess comes here to talk about the culture war, gets body checked by everyone and their dog and now they have to smile about it too? (second wave) But also you have framed it like it's guess' problem, but if you won't argue with them when their argument style isn't breaking any rules then they win the argument by default. (third wave).
Obviously part of the inspiration for my response here is rampant contrarianism, but I really do think this thread is a bit unfair to guess. I won't try and relitigate the issue I have with the assymetry of using mod information in arguments that don't need it, but I think there is also assymetry in the way some things read depending on whether you think your interlocutor is hostile or not, so while if smh had posted that about me it would appear to me as acerbic but good natured ribbing, I think it would look like an attack if I were in guess' shoes. Similarly if you told me that you thought I was being a dick about everything and so you didn't want to argue with me, I would try to be nicer because you are my ingroup, whereas because we are guess' neargroup that will probably only serve to annoy them further.
And while I would never suggest that that means smh or you shouldn't post like that (as a separate argument from the power differential argument) I do think guess deserves some leeway in how they respond to it. And I know you guys do give guess leeway, and this was meant to be more of a "come on dude, dial it back a bit", but from a defensive position it feels like a bit of a dogpile. It's rashomon.
Edit: clarity
Darwin is not a new poster on the Motte, and people have repeatedly pointed out his consistently bad behavior and bad-faith posting in the past.
Actions have consequences.
I know, I've bitched about them too. I think raggedy responded beautifully, because it doesn't really matter how guess behaves, what matters is how we react, and I think it's better to recognise potential pitfalls before they occur and talk about them cordially rather than waiting for shit to fall apart and picking up the pieces.
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