Ross Tucker has produced the tweet of the year. An epic TAKE DOWN of transactivists trying to gain access to women's sports.

Right on the money.

Your responses are comical. You are like the shortest person in the room who thinks they tower over everyone else. You're the only one who doesn't see it. Sweetheart.

Except it is not fair and never has been. These are arbitrary labels used capriciously by the unwashed masses who lack the capacity to be rigorously analytical. I have never pushed for transgenders in athletic competition but rather I expose how flimsy the argument for fairness is, but again I have an advantage, fair or not, in that I can think at levels which apparently are challenging for most of you.

Please list a fair advantage and an unfair advantage.

I agree with you that we need to eliminate categories from sports.

You think differences of ability are unfair. Obviously you have never played any serious sport or you were a dismal failure at it.

In the state where I coach high school there is a sprinter that was born biologically male but identifies as female (Not 100% sure on pronouns so I'll use "they" from here on). They run in the girls races, but officially show up in the results under a separate category called "non-binary". Everyone gets their state titles and proper recognition and this athlete gets to compete in the race that matches their identity. It's not perfect, but it's working fine and seems like a reasonable compromise for the high school level.

I'm super left-wing socially, but liberals need to get a grip with this "no advantage" nonsense. By all means we should fight anti-trans bigotry and work to create the most inclusive environment for these kids within reason. But come to one track meet or one track practice before you spout off with this nonsense. Boys have a significant biological advantage. I coach several "regionally elite" girls and they regularly get smoked in practice by my freshmen/sophomore JV boys, but my girls are far and away the better athletes. They deserve their own category and a level playing field.

If the right would kindly stop sticking their nose into the patient/doctor relationship that would be awesome. While that's happening the left can bench this ridiculously naïve argument and remember why girls sports were created in the first place.

Huh? That paper is about "hip bone geometry," specifically the width and diameter of the top part of the femur where it enters the hip joint. It's not about "pelvic bone geometry." Hip bone geomerity and pelvic geometry are two very different things. Apples and oranges.

The hip joint is a ball-and-socket joint between the pelvis and femur. The pelvis is a large and wide lateral bone structure in the lower part of the body; it has a major opening in the middle that is a different size and shape in males and females. The femur is the large vertical bone in the thigh that runs from the hip to the knee. The hip joint connects the pelvis and femur.

The pelvis gives stability to the lower torso and connects the spinal column and the legs by attaching the two femurs to the hip sockets on either side. The pelvis also plays important roles in human pregnancy and childbirth, and in maintaining healthly stability of the female reproductive organs over the life span, which is why the pelvis is shaped and sized very differently in the two sexes.

The study in the paper you cited specifically looked at the width and diameter of "the non-dominant proximal femur" - meaning the top portion of the femur bone where it enters the hip socket.

That study didn't look at the pelvis at all - or any other parts of the skeleton, either. In fact, I don't think that paper even mentions the pelvis at. It looks solely at the top portion of the femur in the non-dominant leg - that's it.

The pelvis in human males and females has a markedly different shape and size. This is because the human female pelvis has evolved to allow for a human baby with a very big head to pass through during vaginal childbirth without breaking the mother's pelvis. Moreover, during the course of pregnancy, the wider female pelvis helps support the greatly increased size and much heavier weight of the growing uterus as it expands to accommodate a full-term fetus and the large mass of amnio fluid surrounding it.

(BTW, human females have evolved to have sex-specific skeletal features in the lumbar spine that allow for the extra burdens placed on the female body by pregnancy too. Some of the structural differences in the spines of human females and males are present at birth. Moreover, male spine development and bone and skeletal development generally are probably influenced by the often overlooked but vitally important period/process known as male "mini puberty of infancy" that boy babies go through in the months after birth. Male mini puberty of infancy is one of the reasons that everywhere on earth, the growth, development and physical progress of human children from birth to 36 months are measured and tracked using two different sets of growth charts - one set for boys, another set for girls.)

It's because the pelvis is shaped and sized so differently in the two sexes that adolescent and adult males and females have "statistically significant" different Q-angles (quadriceps angle). The Q-angle in females is greater than in males, which puts females at a great disadvantage compared to males in activities like running and kicking. The greater female Q angle also puts girls and women (the female kind) who do sports or engage in other taxing physical activities at higher risk of knee and thigh dysfunction, injuries and pain inlcuding ACL tears and patellofemoral pain syndrome.

If there are studies showing that trans-identified males who took puberty blockers and estrogen in their pre-teen and teenage years grow up to have the same exact kinds of pelvises that females develop in order to accommodate human pregnancy and childbirth - and which show that these males have female Q angles as a result - please post them. I'd be happy to read them. If am in error, I will admit it.

Did you say the same thing during Covid? My doctor told me not to get vaccinated but the left wanted to dictate what everyone should do.

BTW, here's s link to the whole paper you cited rather than just the brief abstract you gave.

I'm providing it so others here can see for themselves what the actual paper looked into and what it says in full.

That way, everyone can see from the text and the images the authors provided that this study did not look at "pelvic geometry" like you claim. It looked at a small, specific part of the upper femur in the non-dominant leg of the young participants as seen on images taken from bone scans. Moreover, it only looked at two aspects of their upper femurs, namely the "subperiosteal width and endocortical diameter."

In plain language, the "subperiosteal width" refers to the size of the thickness of the part of the bone known as the periosteum, which is the dense layer of vascularized connective tissue overlying the cortical surface of bones - it's the tissue that makes up the outer covering of bones. The "endocortical diameter" refers to the estimated size of a bone's major interior parts that make up its core based on external features.

Also, for the record, this study did not show that the trans-identified youth whose bone scans were looked at had upper femurs identical to persons of the opposite sex in the two aspects looked at or estimated.

Rather, the paper says that assessment of the trans-identified youth's upper femurs based on bone scan imagery and machine computations showed that these two aspects of their upper femurs "resembled" or had developed "in the direction of" those same aspects found in the femurs of the opposite sex.

Finally, I think it's important to point out that the purpose of this study was not to test any hypothesis regarding pelvis structure of trans-identified youth put on "puberty blockers" and exogenous hormones the way your wholly inaccurate and seemingly-intentionally misleading mischaracterization of its findings suggest.

The purpose of this study was simply to see if trans-identified youths put on "puberty blockers" at, before or shortly after the start of puberty of adolescence - followed by exogenous cross-sex hormones - developed bone problems beyond the worryingly diminished bone mineral density that the use of "gender affirming medicine" in vulnerable, confused young people has already been proven to cause.

The reason the researchers looked at the upper femur near where it joins the hip and thus connects to the pelvis is because the femur is the largest and thickest bone in the human body - thus it's especially easy to see and measure on imaging scans.

When did anyone say you should ignore you doctor's instructions?

Interesting comment.

What? Where were you for about 2 full years? Everyone from Fauci to every media outlet told me daily that I was suppossed to ignore my doctor's advice.

You're right, the genetic lottery is not "fair," and nobody earned the genetic gifts they were born with. However, we create systems of rules and parameters in how we set up sports to make things as fair and even as possible. We have age groups because the vast majority of children won't be able to have the physical capabilities of adults (the outliers in both adults and children do not make these rules obsolete). The same principle applies for sex divisions.

Also, just a tip, playing the "I'm a misunderstood genius and everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" card doesn't make you look any smarter or win you arguments. You should know this.

genetic lotteries are a fact, a part of life - and they are never fair.

brad pitt is rich and famous for nothing but being born with good looks. those with high iq's generally have won a lottery. unfairness is everywhere

that being said, we have decided men and women differences are too large too compare - we decided there are apples and oranges and each needs to be part of the diet. even if an orange wants to be an apple and gets painted red - sorry, common sense says in many ways it is still an orange. but i strongly support the right for an orange to identify as an apple - just not in competitions

You are not wrong. Fairness in all spheres of life has always been a social construct. There isn’t an absolute universal truth from which the finer details of our notions of fairness predictably emerge, including and especially in sports, a domain whose primary purposes are societal entertainment and economic value for those involved.

There isn’t an intellectually and morally honest argument for why Phelps or Bolt is fair but someone born intersex isn’t. For trans inclusivity, that argument is weaker, but then again, if the regulations are such that the fraction of transwomen athletes winning women’s competitions is comparable to their prevalence in the population, it’s hardly clear why it’s unfair to anyone.

Do you think trans girls who started medical transition before puberty still have unfair advantage?

Do you think high school sports must have stricter eligibility requirement than the Olympics? (Should a teenager who would be eligible to compete in the Olympics be banned from high school competition?)

The fact is that 21 states have already banned such student athletes and the number is increasing. If the Republicans win the White House and both chambers of Congress, that ban will be extended to the entire country.

Why do we have to ban a high school athlete who would be eligible to compete in the World Athletics Championships?

High school athlete lives also matter, just just WA athlete lives. The right to feel like you're female at the expense of other females does not.

Yes there is: Phelps and Bolt are competing to see who's the best in the world, period, no restrictions. If we had "wingspan" categories, then Phelps might be in his own. But there's no category boundary that his long arms threaten. Phelps and Bolt get to compete with the other men, and we haven't tried to draw lines between them and their peers. If we did, that'd be another story.

Women's competitions exclude men because men are so much stronger that they make the competition profoundly unequal. We've drawn a line between men and women, and allowing DSD or trans athletes to cross the line we've decided on is unfair because their biology is from the other category.

This dumb "but Michael Phelps has long arms" argument is never followed to its conclusion. If it were, you'd be arguing against women's sports in general. Because gender, according to you, is just another unearned advantage. But if you believe in separating men and women, you have to believe in enforcing those rules.

So pick one: open competitions for all, with no restrictions, or separate men's and women's divisions that trans/DSD athletes can't cross.

The vaccination push was a general information campaign designed to protect the more vulnerable members of society (which ironically appears to include you) by increasing herd immunity and reducing overall spread. It was generalized health advice, whereas specific, personalized instructions from your doctor should always take precedence.

For example, if a public health campaign says bananas are good for you, but your doctor tells you you're deathly allergic to bananas, the general health advice no longer applies...