LetsRun slammed via FiveThirtyEight

Why does she hate transgender persons? According to her, persons who were born women, but identify as male should be stripped of the ability to compete against women.

It is degrading to subject transgenders to an invasive enquiring into their background on whether or not they have been living as a woman.

I think we can safely say that calling freaking out about Semenya competing against women 'right wing' means that you've left the reservation. This is one of those issues that is an outright test of sanity, and thinking Semenya should be competing against women is a mark of the insane.

To be fair, the elite costal liberals in government and the media have (at least outwardly) completely gone insane on issues of gender 'identity' recently, so outwardly mirroring that insanity is generally some perverse virtue signaling rather than actual insanity itself, but actually coming to believe it would still be a mark of the insane.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth that this controversy forces us to confront is that there’s no such thing as a level playing field in sport. As much as we like the idea of athletes winning through hard work, guts and spirit, the fact is, much of it comes down to born talent. Most competitors never had a chance.

Paraphrase: to all you women who are butthurt about having to race Semenya: stop kidding yourself with 'hard work, guts and spirit.' You just aren't good enough to compete. Sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I think LRC's stance is simple: a woman with XY chromosomes and internal testes should not be allowed to compete against women.

Now, some of the comments on these message boards have been degrading and unnecessary. But it's LRC; any time you post here, you open yourself up to scrutiny. And if you're a professional runner, someone here will bash you for something. My opinion is that if you don't like the message board, then don't read it. Simple enough.

I think Ross Tucker has the best take on this. And I highly recommend reading his posts on the topic and his discussion with Harper as well. I think the solution to this is going to be imperfect. It is going to be the solution that a large number of people are not going to like.

My question (and I think this is where RoJo was going) is what is the criteria for separating men and women in competition. Even the most ardent feminist has to accept that in elite sports performance women are going to be inferior to men. In track, the difference is about 12% across the spectrum of events (at least the common events). So what criteria is used to categorize people for competition purposes?

I know I am wading into an area with sex here since I do accept that sex is more of a continuum, but let's say a human with a penis and testes and XY chromosome and that everyone agree is a male, decides that he identifies as a female and wants to race in female races. What happens? Would the folks be accepting of that?

pport no original wrote:

Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) FiveThirtyEight (ESPN) link to an article bashing LetsRun to demonstrate apocalyptic response to Semenya

Via a link, LetsRun's editing and message boards are rightfully compared to 4Chan trolls

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/let-caster-run-we-should-celebrate-semenyas-extraordinary-talent/

Article references LRC's right-wing freakout about Semenya, linking to this article, which expresses both appreciation for and horror at LetsRun

http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/08/11/the-gender-policing-of-women-athletes-is-a-violation-of-human-rights/

Trump and Limbaugh and Hannity followers... what should we do about this liberal media fascism? they're rigging the competition!!!! I vote that we should do the responsible thing: call for their jailing and assassination. We must protect the constitution

The Five Thirty-Eight article in itself is fine. It does link to another article that trashes LetsRun, but the article alone addresses both sides of the issue in a decent manner. The author's final opinion is different than mine, but at least she doesn't condemn and insult anyone with a different opinion.

luv2run wrote:

I know I am wading into an area with sex here since I do accept that sex is more of a continuum, but let's say a human with a penis and testes and XY chromosome and that everyone agree is a male, decides that he identifies as a female and wants to race in female races. What happens? Would the folks be accepting of that?

I would have no problem with it. As with most things, it will reach a level of equilibrium over time. So allowing athletes to compete within their mental gender rather than their biological one will no doubt result in some cisgender females finishing a few spots back, but in the grand scheme of things, that is not a big deal.

What the article fails to touch on is that Semenya would be a rather pedestrian male runner. People are getting up in arms over individuals who are running 1:55-1:57 in the 800m, which is a common time among 15-year old boys. It is akin to being upset that a women could dunk a basketball. Why should we even care?

luv2run wrote:

I know I am wading into an area with sex here since I do accept that sex is more of a continuum, but let's say a human with a penis and testes and XY chromosome and that everyone agree is a male, decides that he identifies as a female and wants to race in female races. What happens? Would the folks be accepting of that?

This is exactly what is going to happen. We're just going to have to let it happen.

This is like screaming into the wind. SJWs have started to take up this fight without thinking it through fully for sport in my opinion. Caster has handled this well by all accounts. I just don't think she should be running against other women with her current physiology. SJWs claim every guy's opinion is uneducated mansplaining, so I've decided to just tune out women's track until the women figure it out (like all of you I'm a dude). No more posts, no longer a fan.

No way. Semenya may be allowed into a couple of men's races as a curiosity, but she would have no place in elite track and field with her times. Her PR is 13 seconds slower than elite men.

I am sure that there would be a huge fight among female competitors if a person with XY chromosomes, testes, and a penis wants to fight to be able to enter women's races simply because they feel like a female. That person would be essentially taking money out of their pockets. The entire reason to have women's sports is to create a protected class based on physical characteristics! Otherwise we'd just use one classification.

it will happen wrote:

I am sure that there would be a huge fight among female competitors if a person with XY chromosomes, testes, and a penis wants to fight to be able to enter women's races simply because they feel like a female. That person would be essentially taking money out of their pockets. The entire reason to have women's sports is to create a protected class based on physical characteristics! Otherwise we'd just use one classification.

I would also be in favor of one classification. That's essential how it works in pro baseball, basketball, football, and those are 100000x more popular than track.

As for women being upset that they won't get paid the big bucks to run 1:59 anymore, I can't say I feel all that sorry for them.

Would this be okay transferring over into other sports? I legitimately don't know what people would think. Do people who think that mental gender should be the distinguishing factor believe that Ronda Rousey should be fighting men who identify as female in the UFC? She was a good fighter and there was lots of talk about her taking on men, but if Floyd Money Mayweather said he identified as a woman now and got in the ring with her and landed a punch, would people be okay with that?

I don't really have an issue with it I guess, if everyone understands the potential consequences, but what I do worry about is a country (such as Russia) that wants to win a lot of medals covertly "assigning gender" to certain athletes to better their chances at winning. There are already state-run doping programs in Russia with rumors of other countries too, are we ready for a state-run gender assignment scandal?

Let's see. The original post is poorly written, and attempts to drag in some sort of political slurs, but even those are incomprehensible.

Chance of it being serious?

Sadly, non-zero :)

Well we already have following rules from IOC:

I guess I have no interest in combat sports, and especially women's combat sports. It wouldn't even take Floyd Mayweather to beat Rousey. I am sure there is a boy in the high school wrestling team in your town that could take her down.

That's what I tried to say earlier. It's not like women's sports is all that impressive. Didn't our women's soccer team lose to a U-17 boys team by a ridiculous score?

I loved the first comment in the comment box:

John Smith wrote:

"But it’s hard not to see sexism in the answers that the IAAF is providing." The very concept of dividing contests by gender is itself sexist. Your enlightened view logically means the end of female only events and it's crazy you're refusing to accept that, delusionally insisting you can somehow have a fair option. You have to draw the line somewhere. You don't want to draw a line at all, so all males can compete as female. If you do want to draw the line anywhere at all, there will be some people unfairly caught in the grey area on the wrong side of the line. This article is extremely biased and is unfit to be on 538.

Jeff Albertson wrote:

I guess I have no interest in combat sports, and especially women's combat sports. It wouldn't even take Floyd Mayweather to beat Rousey. I am sure there is a boy in the high school wrestling team in your town that could take her down.

That's what I tried to say earlier. It's not like women's sports is all that impressive. Didn't our women's soccer team lose to a U-17 boys team by a ridiculous score?

Australia national women's team lost to 7-0 to U15 boys.

Couldn't find much on US women's team losing to U17.

rojo wrote:

1) We're not even mentioned in the article.

2) The article had one glaring mistake. It was embarrassing she tried to make this racial.

She wrote, " It’s notable that the women who’ve made the news for being scrutinized under the testosterone rule have been people of color."

No ti's not notable. A very high percentage of the people with condition are result of having children to people related to you. Incest doesn't normally happen in the developed world

Rojo I totally agree with you on basically everything you've said about this issue.

That said, I cracked up reading your last paragraph while imagining the collective aneurysms of thousands of SJWs upon reading it: "White Cis-Gendered Tech Guy Claims Blacks Are Normally Incestuous".

Flounder wrote:

Jeff Albertson wrote:

I guess I have no interest in combat sports, and especially women's combat sports. It wouldn't even take Floyd Mayweather to beat Rousey. I am sure there is a boy in the high school wrestling team in your town that could take her down.

That's what I tried to say earlier. It's not like women's sports is all that impressive. Didn't our women's soccer team lose to a U-17 boys team by a ridiculous score?

Australia national women's team lost to 7-0 to U15 boys.

http://www.dailywire.com/news/6072/australias-national-womens-soccer-team-lose-7-0-amanda-prestigiacomo

Couldn't find much on US women's team losing to U17.

http://forums.bigsoccer.com/threads/uswnt-vs-u-17-usmnt.1939180/

The Australian's are sexist. They should allow more men on their team:

rojo wrote:

2) The article had one glaring mistake. It was embarrassing she tried to make this racial.

She wrote, " It’s notable that the women who’ve made the news for being scrutinized under the testosterone rule have been people of color."

No ti's not notable. A very high percentage of the people with condition are result of having children to people related to you. Incest doesn't normally happen in the developed world

What percentage of intersex conditions result from incest?

What is the source of your information on that?

What is the rate of intersex condition in developed countries vs. the developing world?