I don't think people should be challenging these rules on human rights grounds. Of course it is devastating to individuals when they get barred. They got to where they are through a mix of genes and hard work. Now one thing about them that they might not even have known about is going to end their career. But elite sports is for entertainment. It is full of arbitrary rules, and there's plenty of life outside. Most people don't get to assert their womanhood at olympics.
Llamamoe•5mo ago
I can see why it might be best to exclude transgender women from most disciplines, at least untill we have more science about whether they have any advantage in them, but as a whole this debacle just feels silly.
drankl•5mo ago
The rationale for the female category is to remove this male advantage from competition. Allowing a subset of males who have the advantage of their sex to compete against female athletes, just because these males call themselves women, undermines the whole point of women's sport.
This is why we need such testing as described in the article. It's no different in principle to, for example, weigh-ins in boxing that enable fair competition in each weight category.
Llamamoe•5mo ago
Take that and then consider that this goes even harder for people whose bodies never masculinized due to androgen insensitivity or whatever. Maybe it still carries some advantage, but... so what? So does pretty much every single gene variant top athletes have and nobody is trying to single those out.
dang•5mo ago
This is a line at which we ban accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), so please stop doing this.
Also, please don't create accounts to do this with. It's not what the site is for, and destroys what it is for.
drankl•4mo ago