You haven’t successfully demonstrated
That “women” would not be the group adversely impacted.
There’s a lot of sophistry, but it doesn’t get around the fact that because your motivation isn’t
“Let’s find the best way of categorising athletes”
But is, in fact
“Structure sport around trans peoples feelings”
you are mentioning several combinations of characteristics, without having an example of what a race would look like under your vague idea, and are actively disregarding the most meaningful distinction in athletics, which is “sex”; the category in which Laurel Hubbard can compete fairly is “male people”.
So come on, put it into practice; you get to go back in time to the last olympics and are told “we’re not dividing the 100metres by sex this Olympics, but by more meaningful criteria”
Lay out how this works. What replaces the men’s and women’s 100m final?
What does the 100m determine? Currently, in the two sex categories, it determines these things;
1: the world’s fastest man presently (gold medal winner)
2: the world’s fastest woman presently (gold medal winner)
1: fastest man of all time (world record holder/Olympic record holder)
2: fastest woman of all time (world record/Olympic record holder)
What might your category determine?
If it’s “world’s fastest person”, you’ve erased female sporting success, so it can’t be that. So what is it? Which people compete in the olympics? Is one sex over represented? is equality of participation by male and female people something which your categories will seek to ensure? How?
Once again, as I mention below - Chesterton’s Fence; why *is* sport segregated by sex?unless you can accurately summarise the answer, you’re not arguing in good faith, and are in fact, an ideologue.
(, Thu 1 Jul 2021, 13:30, Reply)
Fastest athlete (gold medal) in each of the new categories. Record holder in each of the categories.
(, Thu 1 Jul 2021, 14:53, Reply)
What are the categories?
You’ve said “a combination of different characteristics”
What combination of what characteristics?
(, Thu 1 Jul 2021, 15:07, Reply)
from the comment just above:
"Classification would be based on a combination of multiple physical characteristics such as weight, testosterone level, VO2 max, muscle mass and density, body fat content, etc. That's not a definitive list, but the objective would be to build a representative measure of potential athletic performance, and assign competitors to a resulting competition category."
(, Thu 1 Jul 2021, 15:25, Reply)
Yes.that’s your abstract
It gets us no closer to how it would look in practice, so you haven’t even begun to demonstrate its usefulness.
Why don’t you lay out some specifics; what characteristics, at what intervals of measurements.
You can’t do it, and you’re embarrassing yourself here. “We could have a combination of weight, muscle, height, strength, hormones”…
Yep. We could. Now explain what that event looks like in practice. And why it’s better than “separate by sex, find fastest man and fastest woman”
But you won’t, because you can’t.
(, Thu 1 Jul 2021, 16:21, Reply)
No problem, I don't mind embarrassing myself.
I'm quite happy to say that I can't definitively author a complete specification for Olympic sports classification. As I have already said, that's an immensely complex problem, for people with much more specialised knowledge than I have.
A very simplified version would be something like this:
Category I: athletes with testosterone levels ranging from a to b, VO2 max ranging from x to y, etc
Category II: athletes with testosterone levels ranging from over b to c, VO2 max ranging from over y to z, etc
Obviously it gets a lot more complex because some athletes might satisfy criteria in different categories, so you would have to carefully define categories to handle that, or place athletes based on the category they match most closely.
I'm not pretending this is anything like a concrete proposal, but I think what I am proposing is clear enough to have a discussion about. It seems you are refusing to even consider the possibility of alternative classification systems because they are not already fully detailed and defined?
(, Thu 1 Jul 2021, 16:56, Reply)
What I’m saying
Is that your proposal doesn’t even begin to show itself to be more useful than the existing category, and doesn’t even begin to show itself as being practical, and doesn’t even begin to address any concerns that a shift away from sex distinctions wouldnt hang women out to dry.
Again - without saying, clearly “this is what sex categories are designed to do…. And this is why they are limited…. And that’s why I propose this…” all you’re actually doing is saying “here are some things that are categories. And I don’t have any further insight”
It’s very lucky that you’re comfortable with embarrassing yourself
(, Thu 1 Jul 2021, 20:38, Reply)
I have addressed all those questions in my previous answers, with specific examples.
I pointed out earlier that you complained I had failed to answer a question you asked, but you had actually replied to a comment which contained the information you wanted! That does make me wonder if you are actually reading what people are writing here.
(, Thu 1 Jul 2021, 22:00, Reply)
Naming a potential criterion without outlining how you see it impacting the structure of the sport
Isn’t an example without you giving your understanding of how it works in practice and why it’s better than what we’ve got currently.
Unless your next post does so, I’m done here.
(, Fri 2 Jul 2021, 8:59, Reply)