Ok I tried to watch it but can't. He just sits there when "she" tells him she's a biological woman. SHe says, "I'm a biological female as well" and he does nothing. Imagine if I went on that show and put on blackface and said, "I'm a black man." How would that go over?
I listened to the first 96 seconds and then stopped as I answered the question she led with. “It all boils down to, do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women and are really female, or not? "
Of course not. A trans woman isn't female. A transwoman is a transwoman. An intersex women is an intersex woman. Biologically, they are either male or intersex - certainly not female.
Next.
What do they talk about for the next 12 minutes? She's right about what it boils down to. The rest of it is nonsense.
That's actually the precise moment I closed the video as well.
I kind of feel like the progressives' roots in eugenics is still a major driving ideology, although expressed a bit differently now. The liberal ideology seems to be that once a person exists, no matter how mentally ill, deluded, or criminal they are, we need to respect them and make a place for them in society. But we'd rather not have them exist in the first place. So we make a place for everyone, but also highly encourage behaviors that would result in producing fewer people. Abortion, acceptance and celebration of homosexuality, narcissism, incelism, obesity, general physical and mental weakness.
The conservatives' ideology isn't as clear to me, although it seems to have something to do with personal responsibility. Since pro-life/anti-abortion is a major part of the conservative platform I would say the attitude is that everyone should at least get a fighting chance in life, although some may be highly disadvantaged. Then, in adulthood, those that don't make the cut can't be tolerated at all. The conservatives aren't really clear at this point about what their solution is. What I see in practice is that the conservative solution is to just get rid of the undesireables as adults, by putting them in jails or making conditions so bad for them that they have no choice but to flee to liberal cities where they'll be accepted. In a way I kind of see this as violating the personal responsibility part of conservatism. If your family or culture has produced people you don't like, it's your collective responsibility to deal with them, not just ship them off somewhere else for others to deal with.
The 'natural testosterone' comment in fact strengthens the argument against including biological males from women's sport; as Ivy pointed out that 0.5% of male Olympians had extremely low testosterone at the Olympics and competed against men with 80x higher T levels and had 'no competitive disadvantage'! Surely that is the ultimate example of retained male advantage after testosterone suppression?
Not quite. Testosterone suppression is known to affect performance, as is supplementation, just not the natural levels, so her argument is that natural T disparity shouldn’t be used as an argument to exclude trans women from women sports. I agree it doesn’t immediately lead to the inclusive conclusion that trans women have no advantage over women.
(Just to clarify, I found most of her other arguments disingenuous.)
Her claim is hogwash, bad interpretation.
The research she is quoting is saying natural T levels don't separate performances at a high level. For example, for all elite sprinters at the world level. T levels can't distinguish between a 10.5 100m women and a 10.9. No one would expect it would. Nothing we could test would distinguish between that small of a performance gap.
That is an entirely different finding then the claim "natural T levels don't matter for performance."
One of the reasons is this is tricky to study. We can't just artificaially change natural T levels in an experiment. So we have to look at surrogate markers.
For example, boys get a massive jump in performance when natural T levels surge at puberty.
Or, when natural T levels are suppressed, there's a significant decline in performance.
levels
Ivy is taking advantage of the fact that regular people don't understand the science.
No, it is not complicated at all. There are two sexes. And the idea of removing male advantage by manipulating testosterone levels makes the "conservative" side as foolish and presumptuous as the transexual side. We don't know enough to manipulate hormones.
GG
Trans people have a right to compete in sports, just like anyone else. The question is what level is appropriate. They should have their own league, but there aren’t enough trans athletes to form local leagues. We shouldn’t force them onto mens teams, that also wouldn’t be fair. So we need to provide opportunities for them, but we don’t have the leagues to do it.
I listened to the first 96 seconds and then stopped as I answered the question she led with. “It all boils down to, do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women and are really female, or not? "
Of course not. A trans woman isn't female. A transwoman is a transwoman. An intersex women is an intersex woman. Biologically, they are either male or intersex - certainly not female.
Next.
What do they talk about for the next 12 minutes? She's right about what it boils down to. The rest of it is nonsense.
Simple, to the point and true...one of your best posts!
Ok I tried to watch it but can't. He just sits there when "she" tells him she's a biological woman. SHe says, "I'm a biological female as well" and he does nothing. Imagine if I went on that show and put on blackface and said, "I'm a black man." How would that go over?
The substantial number of studies (eleven at last count?) that prove retained male advantage after transition versus the zero studies that disprove it *cannot* be unknown to Ivy. And let's be honest, anyone with a functioning brain didn't need the studies in the first place, but they're nice to have. Therefore, knowing that there is no relevant science that supports this position, Ivy is forced to use obfuscation to a spectacularly silly degree. When "I call myself female and I'm made of biological stuff so I'm a biological female am I not?!" is one of your key arguments, it's time to let a genuine expert in on the debate. I would LOVE to have seen Ross Tucker take over from Noah for that segment.
As a man I applaud her efforts to allow equal opportunities to men. I am too slow to race against men, so I would like to race against women instead. She is trying to make this happen. Thank you, Veronica.
Whether or not this is true, and I don't really care either way, what the hell does it have to do with males horning in on women's sports?
Does Ivy think that that because some elite male athletes remain competitive with other elite male athletes even when they currently have much lower natural T than most other guys, it somehow means that males have no physical advantage over females?
It’s true. I checked the papers and they are by clinical researchers and she just cites their findings. She herself doesn’t have a science background. She also doesn’t appear to be twisting what’s actually in those papers.
Her argument is that natural T disparity shouldn’t be used as an argument to exclude transwomen because that doesn’t provide competitive advantage. To her credit, natural T is overemphasized by media and WA and other athletic bodies as a difference between men and women, to the extent that they have set limits for what is permitted in the women’s category.
If I were Ivy and you told me that natural T is hardly the only factor and there’s a whole host of other physiological features that T and other factors help develop in boys at puberty, here’s what I’d presumably force you to do:
1) Either identify every one of those factors or at least the dozen or so most significant ones, and place exclusion limits on them. This would be a losing proposition and you’d end up excluding some women from women sports and allowing some men into women sports (if they so chose).
2) Accept that we don’t know really understand what all matters for performance and therefore err on the side of inclusion.
(Just the messenger and playing devil’s advocate here.)
If I were Ivy and you told me that natural T is hardly the only factor and there’s a whole host of other physiological features that T and other factors help develop in boys at puberty, here’s what I’d presumably force you to do:
1) Either identify every one of those factors or at least the dozen or so most significant ones, and place exclusion limits on them. This would be a losing proposition and you’d end up excluding some women from women sports and allowing some men into women sports (if they so chose).
It's an interesting thought experiment and often people who side with Ivy call for measures like this, e.g. categorise based on performance level rather than sex. The problem is that if you begin to flesh out the idea even in its most basic form, you soon realise how utterly uncontrollable and non-scalable it would be. To pick just two random issues of perhaps hundreds:
1) Athletes would sandbag their performance in qualifying to ensure they could medal in the level below their real potential.
2) I understand there are perhaps 1000-2000 athletes between the fastest 400m male and the fastest 400m female in any given year. How would you begin to create categories that adequately capture every performance level without turning the 'female' event into some sort of Z list category?
As for the physiological factors, again, it's just too unrealistic to imagine you could stay on top of an ever-changing athlete to ensure they were competing in the correct group. Things like weight, height (for younger athletes), muscle mass, vo2 max, hormone levels, etc. are very fluctuating, some of them changing on a daily basis. Who is going to pay to regularly test these athletes on every recognised variable and then administrate who goes where and deal with the constant appeals that they've been placed in an unfair category?
If I were Ivy and you told me that natural T is hardly the only factor and there’s a whole host of other physiological features that T and other factors help develop in boys at puberty, here’s what I’d presumably force you to do:
1) Either identify every one of those factors or at least the dozen or so most significant ones, and place exclusion limits on them. This would be a losing proposition and you’d end up excluding some women from women sports and allowing some men into women sports (if they so chose).
It's an interesting thought experiment and often people who side with Ivy call for measures like this, e.g. categorise based on performance level rather than sex. The problem is that if you begin to flesh out the idea even in its most basic form, you soon realise how utterly uncontrollable and non-scalable it would be. To pick just two random issues of perhaps hundreds:
1) Athletes would sandbag their performance in qualifying to ensure they could medal in the level below their real potential.
2) I understand there are perhaps 1000-2000 athletes between the fastest 400m male and the fastest 400m female in any given year. How would you begin to create categories that adequately capture every performance level without turning the 'female' event into some sort of Z list category?
As for the physiological factors, again, it's just too unrealistic to imagine you could stay on top of an ever-changing athlete to ensure they were competing in the correct group. Things like weight, height (for younger athletes), muscle mass, vo2 max, hormone levels, etc. are very fluctuating, some of them changing on a daily basis. Who is going to pay to regularly test these athletes on every recognised variable and then administrate who goes where and deal with the constant appeals that they've been placed in an unfair category?
Agree it’s a ridiculously complex problem to do PCA on performance, so I (wearing my fervent trans activist role playing hat) could leverage that to argue that neither of us nor state-of-the-art science understands what all factors matter for performance, so it’s simply your favorite philosophical position against mine:
You: A woman is biological based on organs at birth.
Me: I’m a woman because my body and mind says so. Doctors agree I’m genuine and the DMV and the government agree I’m a woman, so I have women’s human rights.
For me one of the most telling aspects of this discussion is that there has never, ever, not once, been a trans man fighting to be placed in the men's category. Every single conversation we have around this, including Ivy, is about trans women competing again cis women. If someone born male really has no physical advantage over someone born female, why wouldn't there be a proportionate amount of trans men competing in mens fields? Why is it only trans women that feel the need to compete against their cisgendered counterparts? I would earnestly like to ask Ivy this to see if it is something I am missing
I would only be able to take this as a quasi-religious belief that I could pretend to believe, but ultimately I'd just be pretending. The most I can do is believe that they believe it, like any religion. I certainly can't realistically expect to debate anyone with that mindset. Imagine the furore if Noah had said to Ivy: "No, I don't believe you're a biological female" even though that would be 100% factual.
The bigger picture being that the category is there to protect 'females' not 'people who feel feminine'.