Five-ring circus: The Thread of the XXXIII Olympiad

Women's sports exist for a reason. ... as in women don't compete against men for fair competition reasons. For reasons similar to why 11 year olds generally compete against other kids, not against full-grown adults.

Depending on what you believe, you can create distinctions about advantages -- Michael Phelps physical gifts that someone else doesn't have, so why should he be allowed compete? -- but there are going to be lines somewhere. Otherwise you'd just throw everyone into the same pool, no gender divisions, no age divisions, etc. ... and relatively young biological men who are physical specimens would win everything that requires speed and strength and endurance.

But most people draw lines and do make distinctions. Which is why these conversations seem natural to me.

I think it is cheap to dismiss anyone who has an opinion one way or the other about those lines to bigotry, at least without establishing that they are really bigots. Yes, there are bigots who get in a twist over things like this for all the obvious reasons. But women's sports exist in the first place for a reason -- trying to establish parameters of fair competition -- and whether or not bigotry exists in the world toward minorities (such as transgenders, for example). ... these are legit discussions about where those lines should exist for those fair competition reasons. I think the Michael Phelps stuff or emergency hysterectomy stuff is kind of absurd to bring into it, because those have never been lines where a majority of people made a distinction. We're not all blessed with the same physical gifts, which to me is actually the point of what makes one person an Olympic gold medalist and another a weekend warrior. But generally, the idea has been that men compete against men to try to get that medal, and the best man wins (for example, Michael Phelps with his physical gifts). Women compete against women and the best woman wins.

People want to lump things into big categories, but I also think there is a major difference between a male-to-female transgender who was born biologically male and now wants to compete against biological women, and a female with a DSD condition of some sort that made her be born with some biological attributes of a man.

I personally don't think it is out of bounds or necessarily motivated by bigotry when people question these things either, and I think what has happened in the case of transgenders (I am not talking about this Algerian boxer) was that people trying to advance broad acceptance of transgenders cowed a lot of people and shouted down the discussion at all by screaming "bigot" loudly, for example, while that Lia Thomas stuff was going on at UPenn. But you had women swimmers -- Thomas' competitors -- who really thought that it was unfair that Thomas (who had been a top male swimmer) was pasting them in the pool, and felt that their wants and desires -- to compete against other biological women, what they had trained for -- were being unfairly subjugated to the wants and desires of Thomas.I was actually really sympathetic to that . Not to the point where I was on a soapbox in the park (maybe I would have been if I was woman who was capable of competing at that level) because my life goes on either way. But as a person with an opinion, I could totally see how Thomas just wasn't the same and that lack of sameness was making a mockery of the reason that women's sports (women competing against other women, not men) came into being in the first place.

The case of a woman with (potentially) a DSD condition, such as this Algerian boxer, doesn't feel as cut and dried in the same way to me. The question for me, I guess, would really be, "Is how she was born a disqualifer for her to compete in women's competitions?" . ... pretty much the way most people would agree that the way I was born is a disqualifer? I can see it both ways, honestly. I don't see it quite as clearly as I do with transgenders.

But regardless of my opinion it just depends on where the line gets set. There are no definitive, all-knowing or scientific answers (as much as people who feel strongly try to establish them to shut down the conversation) about where the line should be, and as I said in an earlier post, in some cases gender / sex development isn't very clean, and there are degrees of DSD, so it will always be a messy distinction to make. ... there will always be that unique outlier who will come up. At the same time, I certainly don't think an honest discussion about it is out of bounds, and I can understand if there are people who feel, for example, that something like having XY chromosomes is where a line should be when it comes to women's sports.

 

JFC, it's become a parody account. Just ... stop.

 

Sorry. Not you. The ACC account has become parody.The ACC needs to stop.