Journalism is dead. San Fran Chronicle: "(It's) difficult to determine if trans women actually are faster or stronger."

You have maintained the bolded view before, as have others, as self-evident logic, but I don’t understand what the underlying assumptions are that make it logically obvious.

Any cis man will perform much worse against elite cis men than against elite cis women. As will any cis women. As will any pre-trans, and as will post-trans. If a post-trans women tops the women’s charts, how does that obviously make it a proof of unfairly retained advantage? How does it make it any more acceptable if their pre-trans self was competitive against elite men?

I can imagine that if the underlying assumption is that the trans woman simply changed genders like hairstyle one fine day without any transition therapy as required by sporting bodies, and the male-to-female rank disparity occurs, it looks and is problematic.

Pretentious - and false - waffle. He's simply pointing out that because the average man is measurably stronger than almost all women that means an average male will likely dominate even the best women in sports. The obviousness of this strikes almost everybody - maybe not you - and is yet another reason why sports have categories based on sex.

It isn't "cross-wired". I refer to Richards as "she" because that is her identity but I don't accept that entitled her to compete as a woman, for that reason that she is biologically male. Incidentally, she appears to agree with that now because she has said that if she had transitioned in her early twenties no woman would have stood a chance against her.

From my understanding, the NCAA does not actually closely monitor (or even monitor at all) the hormone levels of trans athletes. According to Ce Ce Telfer's coach, the NCAA did not provide clear guidelines at all. This is why Ce Ce was eligible to compete in NCAA nationals but was ineligible to compete at the Olympic Trials, because at the trials her testosterone levels were tested and they were too high. It is unclear whether or not her levels were even tested prior to competition. We have no idea what Lia Thomas's T levels were during training, how often her levels were tested etc. I don't think using one individual athlete's performance, whose hormone levels we don't actually have a record of, is sufficient to determine percentage decline in performance. I could just as easily use June Eastwood's performance decline as evidence that transwomen do not have an unfair advantage after transitioning. Either way, transwomen who transitioned after puberty are now ineligible to compete at the elite level in both swimming and track and field so Lia Thomas's career in swimming is over.

So he's not entitled to respond unless addressed directly by you? That's not how it works here.

These discussions crack me up. What a waste of time.

Short of the intellectually impaired, truth serum injected, gun to head, EVERYONE knows what's what. Worst case scenario, average IQ shoots up a few points.

If combining these data sets is not a good way to determine advantage then what is? We're combining thousands of variables into a future performance outcome, it's not going to be distilled into one thing (re: testosterone).

I stand by the female category being an exclusive group, excluding those who are not biologically female. The burden of proof is on MTF advocates to prove the advantage that they had as a biological males is now removed.

In response to the above points:

We have to bracket the group somehow. Otherwise we're making case-by-case determinations. A first pass easy bracket is "MTF athletes".

The best way to determine over/under representation is to look at the average ranking of MTF athletes. So is the average MTF athlete in the 50th percentile of NCAA rankings? Or are they faster/slower than average? This is additionally obfuscated by a sample size of 40-50, many of which are on team sports that don't offer individual rankings.

I don't find individual cases (Thomas, Teller) to be helpful. Too much bias on both sides once you put a face to the issue. Easier to make an impartial judgement when looking at group data.

The biomarkers, as I've said before, is a very hard issue. Firstly because there is variability within groups, but also because there is biomarkers are not directly indicative of performance.

And if he identified as a ship of the Royal Navy, would you refer to him with the prefix "HMS?"

That just demonstrates lack of depth. You could look at the absolute times. 42s back in the 1500 as a dude, 58s back as a woman. In the 1000, 22s as a dude, 36 as a gal. It is only in the 500 where you go from 12s to 9s.

Mathematically that isn't showing a significant advantage

RunRagged, you constantly mis-gender, dehumanize, degrade, and talk down to trans people, insisting that you know them far better than they know themselves, while becoming outraged if you feel that someone (who you believe to be male) is talking down to you, or insulting you in even the most miniscule of ways.

On these message boards, you have mocked the genitals of teenage transgirls on numerous occasions, joked about their hairstyles, and even insisted, without any evidence, that you know their secrete sexual fantasies and their reasons for transitioning. How many times have you accused transwomen of being "autogynephiles" without any evidence? Imagine if someone on this board insisted that the reason you are so obsessed with transwomen is because you are ashamed of your unrequited attraction to them?

On a recent thread, you insisted that Andraya Yearwood, Ce Ce Telfer and a few others were homosexual men, who only transitioned because they longed to be with heterosexual men, and that their parents were conservatives who would be more tolerant of having a transgender child than a gay one. Apparently you know their personal thoughts better than they know themselves, and if they say otherwise, they are simply lying because you said so and you know best! You condescend, make degrading comments, and strip people of agency, while insisting that you are the real victim.

I will refer to you with female pronouns since you say you are a woman, but none of us have any real idea who other posters are on these message boards, or what their true intentions or personal motives are. I mean, you could be some type of AI generated TERF bot, but I will take you at your word that you are a woman and refer to you accordingly.

Uou can't go one day without insulting others, can you?

I like the general direction of this type of analysis for assessing fairness and have advocated it in my other posts, but I don’t understand how you are determining above that a single podium maker in the NCAA championships is an “overrepresentation” when the baseline representation in NCAA is a “significant underrepresentation“.

For the woman who is bumpedfrom the podium, it does not really matter whether the trans athlete used to be#1 or #100 in the men's competition. She is still bumped either way. So you can make an argument that both situations are equally unfair.

But if you look at this from the other side, someone who used to be #1 in men's competition might be more deserving of the podium than someone who used to be #100. The former person is foregoing the opportunity to win a national title in one division in exchange for an opportunity to win a national title in another division. The latter person
is exchanging an opportunity to be on the second team all-conference in one division for an opportunity to win a national title in another division. It seems rather undeserving to me.

Another perspective is the implication for the big picture. If only top level male athletes can possibly transition to become top level female athletes, then there simply won't be enough of them to "take over" women's sports. It is not likely to happen anyway, but at least there is somewhat greater chance of it happening if a mediocre male athlete could become an outstanding female athlete.

I know there is disagreement on whether one situation is more unfair than the other. But most of the disagreement seems to be whether it is less unfair if a top level male athlete transitions to become a top level female athlete. There seems to be pretty strong agreement that a mediocre male becoming a top level female is unfair regardless. (I
didn't write "consensus" because there is disagreement on that as well.)

I also did not write "fairness" in my previous post, because it is hard to determine what is fair. Any solution to this problem is probably "unfair" to someone to a certain extent.

If I know a good way to determine advantage, I would probably be proposing that to NCAA instead of writing on this forum.

Comparing the average MTF athlete to the 50th percentile of all women would not work, because the overall number is very small to begin with, and they are spread across multiple sports in three different divisions. The number of MTF athlete in any single sport is probably a low single digit. The "average" of 3-5 people is not a meaningful data point.

If we need to "bracket" MTF athletes, the first step is to divide them between those who started their transition at or before the start of puberty, and those who started after the start of puberty. It is not perfect, but that's what World Athletics and World Aquatics are using at the moment.

But here is something interesting I learned recently. Before the state government passed the total ban, there were four MTF athletes in Utah. The minimum requirement was at least one year of hormone replacement therapy. Two of them started their transition before puberty. The other two started it later. The latter two were approved based on their actual performance level.

When the total number is this small, it is possible to evaluate one case at a time. And that might be the right approach at K-12 level.

Thanks for the explanation. I hear you but can’t at all relate to the two concerns that seem to be where your philosophical buck stops, i.e., self-evidently good without the need for a higher-level root fairness or moral principle from which they derive (apologies if I’m misparaphrasing you):

1) A male athlete likely making a sacrifice or taking a risk is more good compared to one who seems likely to benefit.
2) Fewer male athletes transitioning to women is good.

For me, either of the above two concerns is irrelevant to the issue at hand and smacks of suspicion as opposed to a trust-but-verify default. What is relevant is that a trans person didn’t choose to be how they were born and how their body wants them to identify, so we as a society must try to ensure dignity and equal opportunity to them like every other person (my buck stopping place).

To preserve fairness in and integrity of the women’s category as well as equity for trans, the necessary and sufficient condition is to institute eligibility policies that ensure that the fraction of trans women winning medals as a fraction of all trans women is comparable to the fraction of cis women winning medals as a fraction of all cis women. Finding such policies needs continued research and (unfortunately) some real-world experimentation, but WA and FINA have ensured that the fraction is practically 0 for trans women today.

That comment is both absurd and irrelevant. It is a fact that there are people who identify as the opposite gender to their sex. That does not imply that identifying with a particular gender is equivalent to identifying with anything you might choose. A male person may feel themselves to be female - and we see quite a few do - but no one other than a lunatic thinks they are a ship.