I may be a few years behind on terminology (?) but surely sports has everything to do with sex and nothing to do with gender?

No one cares what pronouns an athlete uses, how they dress, what roles and behaviours society traditionally assigns/expects of them and how they respond to those traditions. They care entirely about biological advantages and disadvantages.

So the division is based on — again unsure of the terms here but — “sex” not on “gender”.

And no sport is trans exclusionary as far as I know: the person in question in this article would be welcomed everywhere to compete against other biological males, and any biological female would be welcome to compete against others of their sex whatever they identify as (so long as they haven’t taken testosterone). I’m not sure I understand why this has become an issue.

I feel like with this issue at some point we are bound to reach a breaking point. It's just a question of how far along things will go before we get there. People are more and more open about being transgender and there is more and more support for transgender individuals having the chance to live life as their correct gender. This is a great thing!

However, it presents a huge problem for women's athletics, particularly in sports where strength differences are a large determiner of performance differences. If, as it is said in some circles, a full .5% of the human population is transgender, we are going to continue to see huge increases in openly transgender people competing in sport. In sports where long term exposure to male hormones enhance performance, it's hard to see how life-long XX bodies will be able to compete. Which seems like a bad outcome since the whole point of the existence of women's sport is to allow women to have space to compete without facing insurmountable built-in disadvantages.

It may take a couple more decades but I don't see a stable equilibrium where MTF athletes are competing with cis-women in high level sport, especially if they made their transition during adulthood.

I would be fascinated to hear about different models for how this plays out. I've read the occasional news article about it but I'm not really very familiar with the thinking on the other side of this issue, particularly when it comes to the physical advantages trans women have over cis women in sport.

I understand that anabolic steroids give a life long advantage in terms of muscle memory.

Anyone who's done some semi serious lifting and then gone on a long break to return will know that progress is much faster the Nth time around.

This explains why those who have taken steroids will have a life long advantage:

Eg https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190125084106.h...

I also understand that the male puberty imprints into the muscle development for life.

As such, two opinionated observations:

1) Once you've done steroids you should be banned from high level competitions for life, not just 4 years or what.

2) Allowing someone who has experienced and lifted weights through and after male puberty to compete against those who have not is grossly unfair to cisgendered female lifters. See point 1.

This is a very controversial topic. Many have spoken about it at length. I personally believe it's not fair for women in athletics. There are several excellent suggestions/solutions discussed on this thread. I feel like there needs to be another category which would include people who're naturally male/female/others and/or identify as something/someone else. And keep the existing male and female categories as they are. And of course it goes without saying that I've written this with all due respect to such individuals and I bear no malice towards anyone.

One of the better arguments I've heard is that if you look at Hubbard's numbers when she was competing as a man and compare them when competing as a women you'll see a drop in performance, but not an enormous drop. She went from a mediocre lifter to one able to qualify for the Olympics.

The reduced testosterone requirement is still way above what the average female athlete will have and it is a very limited view of what makes a biological female different from a biological male. I can't imagine what kind of problems this will give in combat sports, just imagine the longer reach and explosiveness men have.

I'm all for people being able to identify as whatever they want, but not at the cost of fair sports.

Here are some great discussions on the topic if you're interested:

Weightlifting House - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcijSwv5YBM

Zack Telander - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjulLSX29H0

I thought Anna Vanbellinghen was very well said. It's not about questioning someone's identity, or their right to live openly. But this is about acknowledging physical reality.

One thing I'd like to add is that this is, by definition, a hard problem. The fact is sex and gender exists on a continuum, even if 99% of the time it seems binary. Anyone who says that the "other side" in this situation (regardless of which side they are on) is being idiotic is ignoring a lot of inconveniently difficult truths.

This problem is made artificial difficult. It's simple: born as a man? Sport like a man. Born as a women? Sport like women.

Gender in sport is not about identity, it's about biology.

Also it creates a huge backdoor to Olympic gold medals. There's nothing that stops turning the female category into all transgender..

At some point we need to stop and realise that some problems just don’t have a solution that is going to please everybody. In this case there is an option to annihilate hopes and dreams of either transgender athletes, or women. Both options suck, but the second one affects disproportionately more people.

It's an interesting one. Considering that the athlete competed as a junior I assume she also tried to get in to the Olympic team prior to her transition but was unsuccessful. Now she is ranked 4th in the world for her division. As I see it there's only two possible reasons for her current success despite being 43. That transitioning has not nullified all advantages or that the number of women weightlifters is lower and thus less competitive. Most likely some combination of the two.

Another interesting aspect is that New Zealand now has a much better chance to get a medal in this event. Given the importance that some countries give to winning the games, e.g China and Russia, might they push to have more MtF athletes of their own.

The proof will be in the medals. The worst thing she could do for her cause is to actually win. If people see a sport where such transgender athletes are on the podium regularly and it is obvious they are doing better as a group, change will be demanded. Weightlifting looks to be that first test case but we were almost there before. Running faced a debate over allowing people with modified bodies to compete, but the so-called bladerunner disappeared from the scene and has yet to be replaced by another. The big question is the same as drugs: how much technology do we allow people to use? Are we committed to the idea of "natural" bodies in competition or do we allow technological modifications?

(Pistorius was born with feet. They were deformed feet and were surgically removed when he was very young. He used surgery to improve on his "natural" body. The prosthetic blades were then a second stage down the rabbit hole of technological augmentation.)

I think sports categories should be chromosome strings.

"XX division", "XY world record". "XXY 400 m finals", "XYY long jump trials", ...

Gender identity doesn't factor into it at all; the words "man", "woman" should not be used.

Problem solved; you don't get to wedge yourself into competition with XX persons if you're XY.

One possibility that could potentially work for certain sports, like weightlifting, where the competition is solely in terms of individual records, would be to do away with the existing division by weight and male/female and instead introduce a handicap model based on measured characteristics. For example, all players might be required to have blood testosterone levels recorded at regular intervals starting from a young age, and these measurements, along with characteristics like weight and height, could serve as inputs to the handicap model. The handicap model would be updated each year; potentially the model used in a given Olympic event for a given year could even be updated based on the results recorded in that same year.

Of course there are a lot of practical issues, and even if they were overcome, it is unclear that the results would be satisfying.

I always thought this category of problem would become acute when people with a disability became sufficiently augmented (with an advanced prosthesis for example) that they could compete with and eventually beat non-disabled athletes. At that juncture it would be necessary to create a new kind of Olympics for augmented people, because nobody wants to box with someone who has a terminator arm.

Imagine a giant athlete the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak decides to transition and has to match a testosterone level to compete. Lol. It’s ridiculous.

What is the argument in favor of allowing transgenders to compete in female sports? Does anyone actually defend this decision?

These kind of issues are really interesting because sports are by nature unfair, but it's been decided to remove part of the unfairness but now some is brought back in with that.

Radiolab did an interesting piece on gender and sports a couple years back. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dutee

Gender is a nuanced thing, and there's no way to definitively divide people into the male and female categories.

The episode explores the story of Dutee Chand, a professional sprinter who for a time was not allowed to compete as a women due to her hyperandrogenism, a condition that leads to unusually high levels of testosterone.

Spectator Sports: the act of deriving hope, happiness, failure, elation, frustration, and other emotions from the actions of others. See also: performing arts.

Competitive Sport: the act of determining your performance and subsequent identity/categorization by arbitrary comparison with other arbitrary individuals.

Here's an idea. Let's just let weightlifters lift weights. They can compare themselves to their previous efforts and broadcast their successes by beating their own PRs. If people want to find some sort of vicarious happiness from observing this process, set up (monetize) their efforts with something like Twitch.

For every thousand hacking at the leaves...

Transgender inclusion in sport has brought to the front that sports are inherently unfair. Wherever you draw the lines there is someone thats going to be just the other side of that line.

Trans people have been allowed compete in sports for the last 18 years, however this is the first trans athlete to make it to the olympics, this seems to suggest that trans people competing in sports has not pushed IFAB people out of sports to any significant degree, especially not at the highest levels of competition.

So how about a third class/sex? We have male competitions, female competitions, why can't we have transgender competitions?

Seems to me to be the simplest, fairest solution, given that hormone treatments might give a person an unfair advantage that we're trying to keep out of male and female sports, but that are inherently impossible to avoid in transgender sports.

if sex is a social construct and men and women are exactly the same then let’s just get rid of distinction between male and female sports and combine them.

women will never come in the top 100 again for the vast majority of sports, but it’ll force people to reconcile the contradictions they claim. or maybe they’ll just say sports are sexist

Yup - finally this has reached the point where gender politics crashes into reality.

I’m not against any gender doing what they wish.

But really, the point is when you (by nature) have testosterone coursing through your bloodstream… even if you transitioned, by the very nature of things you have an advantage of strength, agility, speed and desire over your female peers.

As much as we would love to believe it, men are wildly physically different from women. And that’s how nature intended it for whatever reasons nature intended.

You can see it in the sports stats very clearly for every sport where women and men compete.

Men and woman are not the same and can never be. Each has strengths and weaknesses which make them fit very well together.

I understand the need to transition. But sports is one of those examples that we can’t put our head in the sand and believe we live in a world of make-believe.

the most elegant and fair solution to problems like this is to eliminate all gender distinctions in sports and collapse all leagues, competitions and record categories into a unified human category. let the best human win, regardless of their birth gender, sex preference, or sex organs at moment. yes, there will be certain sports or events that will tend to favor male. but there will be some that favor female. let the chips fall where they may. it will still be limited to humans, regardless. its not like human athletes will have to worry how they will compete in the Olympics in swimming against dolphins or sharks. Humans wont have to compete in sprinting against cheetahs or gazelles. wrestling against gorillas, etc.

The idea that an athletic competition--conferring a first, second and third place, holds any substantial meaning at all is completely absurd. All other controversy simply flows from this fact.

In the case of weightlifting you could add a handicap for fairness (if I remember correctly that is where the term handicap comes from). If men can on average men lift about, say, 1.5 as much as women then you can penalize transgender female by a factor of 0.66. The choice of the factor might be a bit arbitrary but that could be a relatively good compromise.

(Note : my terminology may be wrong but I think the meaning is clear)

Let's consider getting rid of gendered sports entirely. Even women don't like women's sports as much as men's sports. Why would they? It's like watching the kids' league. Or like a bad B movie when you could be watching a Hollywood movie.

You might say, well then women will have no chance of ever being involved in those sports at that elite level, and you'd be right. But 99% of men have no chance of being involved in them either. We're talking about elite sports here. We don't care about the second-best percentile of men, why do we care about women?

What I'd really like to see is some kind of team sport or game where there is a strong advantage in having a "mixed" team. Surely someone can think of a game that won't be entirely dominated by men? If that existed then we could choose the team sports with women in them over the 100% male individual sports. But ultimately the choice will come down to which one is the most interesting, impressive and exciting.

The effects of testosterone in the womb and during puberty have extremely profound effects on the body that do not ever go away throughout your entire life. Bone density and neuromuscular efficiency are vastly different between the sexes and do not regress with the introduction of hormones later on. The level of testosterone on competition day has by comparison almost no effect on anything. National women's teams in many sports regularly compete with and LOSE to normal boys' high school teams. The lie that MtF people have no significant advantage in sports is just a lie agreed upon. You know it's a lie, so don't agree with it. It's a lie for purely political purposes.

This is truly, deeply, anti-woman.

There is a great deal of panic in recent years about transwomen competing alongside ciswomen in athletic events, but how much data do we actually have on this? Are these instances of success just outliers and transwomen not even placing, ignored?

How many areas of life and society are we willing to exclude a minority from before we are satisfied that the playing field is leveled? How many minorities are we willing to target?

This is a complicated, messy issue and society at large isn't going to be perfect at it in these early days. Knee-jerk reactions, like those we're seeing from conservative politicians, are hurting people who don't have the power to fight back.

I encourage anyone interested in this subject to read this[0] article, it is a comprehensive analysis of the subject. If not the whole thing, at least the final sections "Recommendations and Conclusions" and "Executive Summary". It really underlines how complex this is.

[0]: https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gend...

Would it be reasonable to compete in three categories: cismen, ciswomen, and others? The others category would have relaxed doping rules wrt hormones. Or is this too naive a solution?

What if women compete with/against men based on weight, or perhaps muscle mass class or something like that, could a gender-neutral competition be possible?

Let's frame the problem like this:if we accept Hubbard as participant in the women field, we should accept also women to men transgenders in the male field(who wouldn't stand a chance of qualifying ever) therefore it is clear we need a transgender category if we don't want to disqualify an entire field of transgender athletes.

It'll be interesting to see if the IAAF goes along with this and reinstates Dora Ratjen's 1939 high jump record.

Is the decline in athletic performance from pre-transition to meeting the regulated testosterone levels greater or less than the gap in athletic performance between average cis men and women? Top-level cis men and women?

I’m curious as to what the biologically female competitors think about this.

Given that this discussion has more than 500 comments at this point it's probably a little too late for this, but I suggest that as the HN community we check ourselves before we wreck ourselves. We are by and large a collection of cisgendered privileged white nerds who for the most part don't go to the gym, let alone compete in sports at the elite level. Talking about how women (cis or trans) feel about this issue is probably not our forte and given the clear transphobic undertones of about half the comments here, I think we are definitely not the domain experts here. Perhaps this is an instance where it would be wiser for this community to do more listening than talking.

Political correctness has caused women rights to go backwards over half a century. Nobody had the spine so far to stand up for obvious women rights and unfair treatment to the point where Olympics - one of the highest sports organizations has become a complete joke with allowing this to happen. This will only stop when women and girls simply boycott all these events.

And this isn't just happening in Sports, even women beauty pageants are now being won by transgender.

"What a great message for young girls... No matter what you do, men will always be better than you at it- including being a woman!"

Absolutely absurd.

If this is an issue for all MTF weightlifters, would it be reasonable to disqualify someone only if they had previously competed at the same level as a male?

Very simple, men are biologically different than women. Anything else is subjective. When did we stop using science to protect women?. This is nuts. Hope they ban this guy, that's cheating

As a trans woman, every time something like this hits the news, it makes me absolutely miserable. Conservatives and TERFs respond with vitriol and attack all of us as a group. I'm made to feel like some viking juggernaut, perverting the youth and forcing my way into women's spaces, when I really just want a quiet happy life as a cripple who can barely walk, much less dominate at weightlifting.

The backlash against trans people is getting worse. It's why I'm stealth. I don't have to deal with the prejudice, with everyone seeing these headlines and talking points and fitting them into narratives and applying them to me. It's cowardly for me to hide, but I just can't deal. I hate being trans because of stuff like this.

I don't have a big problem with people who "identify as" someone else. I have a big one with people who insist that *I* must call them in a particular way. It clashes with the idea that freedom of one person stops where freedom of another person starts. What about my right to call another person as I see them? This is invasive. I'm not telling them how to live - they are. This is *gaslighting* and promoting *taboos*.

Margaret Thatcher once said: "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/bear-boy/

In case anyone was wondering exactly why a condition that affects a tiny fraction of the population has such a disproportionate effect on global policy, it's because many in power subscribe to a religion that worships dualism, a modern form of Gnosticism.

A (very) conspiracy theory-minded overview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUkiBz9rYEs

Couldn't even get past the equivocating this poor woman felt she had to do before saying what we all know: this is bullshit.

You knew this would happen, didn't you?

I don't see it he argument for why "women's" sports should exist, once transgender competitors cause an imbalance.

That is to say, of course people should be welcome to participate regardless of gender, but the championships and prizes should be based on objective measurements (like boxing weight classes, or heights, or whatever), and whatever the public is so enamored of as to generate funding for tournament prizes.

IMO for athletics instead of focusing so much on competitions among a field of elite competitors with tiny differences, and overburdening and destroying their bodies, we should focus on challenges and achievements, and support many many people working to improve their personal records. And "sports ad entertainment" should be a more well rounded entertainment and aesthetic performance, not pointless contests of who gets a slightly lower or higher number on a metric.

I don't know the history of all sports, but the few tidbits I know all point to sex/gender separation as being initially based on beliefs that women were inferior to men. From physical sports to mental ones like chess, sex separation was due to women not being seen as equal to men.

I think its time to do away with separations on sex, and go with ones based on ability and size. Boxing does it with weight classes, why can't we do it with everything?

Everyone should agree that it's fundamentally unfair for biological males to compete against biological females in most sports. But the problem is any strict rules against this will lead to discrimination in so many other areas, I'm basically willing to look the other way as it's such a rare occurrence anyways. How many trans athletes are there?

It's very sad that this is a political issue - it makes any reasonable solution impossible. Any restrictions that liberals might find practical and fair (like a ban on competing where muscles are involved) will inevitably be used by conservatives to justify bigotry and prejudice in a number of other areas (exclusion from public bathrooms, for example, or even restrictions based on race, nationality or sexuality).

Almost everybody at olympic level takes testosterone and other "supplements". They either dodge testing, use untestable substances or take it right up to the allowed thresholds.

Given that, categories in competitions should be based on different bands of hormone levels etc, taking gender/sex out the discussion completely and also helping with this ridiculous projected view that there's no doping going on.

I already see a bunch of uninformed and transphobic arguments, including phrases such as "harmful to women" without including trans women, assuming sex is completely decoupled from gender, sex is binary (do you really think it's possible to have true binary in a physical world, let alone in a natural process?), and classical "I know their gender better than themself and nobody can object."

I know what HN demographics are like and what they work with, and it's not LGBT. So please, get yourself educated.

Physical sport competition shouldn’t be separated by n number of genders, but by weight class.

In my opinion there should no longer be any restrictions based on gender at all. Statistics will show that people with male primary genitalia will do better in some sports while in others those with mostly female primary genitalia will be advantaged. I don't see the problem and I think this differentiation is antiquated.

In short: stop differntiating between men, women, transgender, transsexual, men identifying as women, women identifying as men - just bunch them up together and call it a day.

So you know how few years back companies were peddling this idea that forcing your real name in comments will make the discussion more civil and proper?

Yeah, I can click on every single one of those people in this comment section, see their real name and their FB profile, and it still doesn't stop them from being vile on the internet.

This has become the perennial "test case" to use in order to frame generalized trans discrimination.

It's an outlier that's being pushed in as a substitute to set the framing for the entire discussion as if broad policy should be generalized from an extreme outlier.

This is the same tactic that was used to argue against gay marriage, finding some unusual extreme event and then trying to substitute it as commonplace.

Isolate these things. It honestly shouldn't bleed into mainstream discussion. This is a slight of hand substitution.

Transgendered status doesn't affect 99% of human interaction. I easily might have worked with or been neighbors to a trans person for years and never known it. You could have worked with many yourself.

You've probably worked or lived next to somebody for years and then found out they were LGBTQ and were like "well that's actually pretty irrelevant" just like how our grandparents would freak out if they were, say, Catholic or married to a foreigner. It's not a big deal.

I refuse to outsize the tiny isolated cases where it matters, it's a propaganda technique.

No thanks