But that's a contradiction, no? We're saving women from other women and barring trans people also (ones we consider men) because of a perceived risk that I don't see evidence for (i.e. people choosing to compete as women on a malicious basis or with an 'innate advantage' that makes it dangerous - we've had a long time of running these sports without this sort of regulation, and it seems to be a political choice more than a reaction to evidence that women are being outcompeted by trans people). This is also assuming that having a y chromosome makes it fair for people with a y chromosome to compete against one another, but if you compare people's physiology these people who present as women often have low/no testosterone. Separating on the line of testosterone picks up a lot of female athletes (especially at the olympic level) that are not trans, and overall I just see this hurting women without evidence that it's actually a response to harm. In any case, trans people and gender non conforming women become the victims of this in the public sphere.
It just seems very misguided.
If you were required to compete with people of a gender you do not identify with, even when event organisers recognise you as more fitting among the other group, that's a ban. There are trans masc people. Requiring them to compete with women is unfair and disrespectful. Requiring trans fem people to do so is the same. The rules around gender identification in regulated sports require proof of medical treatment yada yada to accept that people are 'trans enough', which is itself discriminatory. Trans people are a lot less distinct and separate from everyone else than you'd be led to think.
We probably don't want to head down the path of creating new competitions for people that meet arbitrary criteria. White-straight-man only olympics anyone?
I'm guessing you wouldn't say this if you attended the paraolympics, or perhaps it would enforce your already held views, I'm not sure. But there are already 64 different classes of impairment that compete as far as I can tell. Frankly I found it a bit fascinating.
"This might feel counterintuitive" is precisely why the religious right has seized on transgender participation in athletics as a wedge issue. When they say "well, somebody who was born as a man obviously has a natural advantage over people born as women," it feels logical, right? The fact that it largely isn't supported by data rarely comes up, and when it does, it's easy to deflect with "maybe there's just not enough data yet" (which, of course, could just as easily be an argument against imposing such bans, but never mind).
It is infuriating how successful the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd has been at pushing discriminatory legislation through in the last few years based largely on feelings rather than facts.
The classification has always been based on sociological conceptions and is still based on such after this change. There have always been outliers who are sociologically women, but don't have the biological makeup most women have.
That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.
I'm claiming that there were always women with outlier biology which is not at all easy to classify and not obvious at a glance.
People caring about this issue in sports now and changing the objective admission criteria to exclude them is a political phenomenon more than anything else.
The categories were created at a time when “sex” and “gender” were universally considered synonymous, but they were created for the purpose of sex segregation — were they not?
This issue genuinely confuses me — and I don’t seem alone in that. Re-defining words does not redefine categories or change the underlying motivation for creating categories in the first place.
I'm not trying to define away biology here. Although "sex" is surprisingly hard to nail down.
Rather, I'm arguing the underlying motivation for creating these categories was and is a sociological one. Why carve out womens sports, as opposed to short peoples sports, low testosterone sports (or other categories which would be similarly disadvantaged)?
The only reason people pay attention to sex here is sociological, i.e. because of gender. This implies that the admissions criteria do not automatically have to follow these strict biological lines -- and I see little reason to enforce them this strictly now. Why exclude trans people and why make yourself a headache trying to classify e.g. intersex people?
More of an aside: a society which fully accepted trans women as women would think looking at the biological markers you're looking at is complete nonsense. Suggesting trans women should be banned would be as ludicrous as suggesting all women with a specific gene which might increase your chances of winning should be banned.
We carved out women’s sports because otherwise there would be no biological women in competitive sports, and that was considered to be a significant enough exclusion of half the human population as to warrant such direct intercession.
Whether or not a similar case can be made for other categories does not have bearing on the case for sex categorization. Such claims can and should stand on their own merits.
You've posted this several times, and I think it represents a pretty narrow understanding of humans.
Like, gender clearly and obviously exists. Why do women wear make up and skirts, while men typically dont? Is there a biological need to do those things? Is that universal across all cultures?
Of course we have social norms for men and women. That set of norms is what gender is. Denying the idea that society expects different behaviors from men and women is frankly a pretty absurd take.
There's no such thing as gender separate from sex. There's the recognition of one's immutable, inherent, sex, and tacking social expectations on top of it, but never that one could choose, or "feel". Always derived, never a choice. And when people allowed cross-dressing, it was always clear it was fake, pretending, never true. But they allowed people to have their personal delusions.
The origin of this use of "gender" itself is due to the prudishness of English upper classes in pronouncing the word "sex", so they repurposed "gender" which is just the French word "genre" meaning "kind" or "category". Much more acceptable in polite company than something that can allude to a sexual act, fornication.
The "tacking social expectations on top" is the part that is gender!
There's no biological foundation for wearing a sari, hijab, miniskirt, etc. Those are social expectations for women, or part of the role women fill in society.
It's a wholly different concept than biological sex. My penis does not make it impossible to wear eyeliner. But society has a social expectation that I do not. It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic.
You might believe gender is immutable. I'm not going to argue that with you. But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
> It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic.
They're one and the same.
> But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
I don't deny the existence of social expectations (you severely misread what I wrote), but those expectations were deriving from the recognition of the objective truth of one's sex. They were never a matter of one's "internal feelings", they were an extension of one's sex.
You seem to be partly arguing from a position of ignorance.
The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis. Some people feel pressured by this to, despite all the societal dis-incentives, medically transition. They then are not only their gender in behavior and reported experience, but also physically (with the exception of some hard-to-change stuff such as fertility).
We usually handle such general, durable "personal delusions" by accepting them. If I studied some math for years, can do said math and am employed at my local university doing mathematics, I am a mathematician. I do not have delusions of being a mathematician. If I move to, say Germany, and after years speak the language, have children there, participate in the local culture, and have a citicenship I am now German. Only the most backward people would say I have delusions of being German. Although, this cultural rigidity of course exists, I do not see it as desirable. An advanced society should accept and accomodate its outliers instead of steamrolling over them and making them suffer.
[^1]: Afaik currently a neuroscientific explanation is not forthcoming
> You seem to be partly arguing from a position of ignorance.
Quite the contrary. I speak partly from personal experience.
> The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis.
A human cannot change sex no more than one can become another species, no matter ho much one can be convinced of it. And there's no such thing as gender detached from sex.
> The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable
The transness is nothing more than a general condition of self-loathing which is quite durable, I agree. And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.
And while I agree that personal delusions should be allowed as long as they're harmless, this one isn't: many young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones, and when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering". We must always remember what the truth is, even when allowing this kind of lie.
> And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.
I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie if there are people whose mental makeup is better suited to a gender expression not corresponding to their sex, who then inhabit that different role in everyday life.
I frankly don't get your assertion that this cannot happen, as there exist people for whom this is reality right now (in part because they are simply not easily identifyable as trans).
> young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones
My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention. Where is the problem here? People do cosmetic surgeries for similar, if not more vain, reasons.
> when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering"
Trying to ignore the reality that ones body is different in medical contexts would be indeed harmful. If this kind of activism exists, I do not condone it. I imagine that treating a trans person does not boil down to treating them like a cis person of their sex however, as hormone replacement causes a bunch of differences.
> I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie
A lie is defined in terms of it not being the truth, not in terms of effects on someone. Those effects are entirely irrelevant.
> My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Men getting oestrogens are getting osteoporosis in their 20's and 30's.
> Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention.
It's not even doing that in most cases, because the self-loathing that caused people to look for the "transness" escape hatch turns out to have outside causes and won't go away.
I don't think the point is that you have to be all of those things, or even any of them. Just that imagining what kinds of things people you'd like do is a good way to know what might enrich you also. You shouldn't be discouraged if that seems far off, but all of it can be broken up into as many pieces as you like. If it all feels too much
The question is: will and or when will the response to this violence exceed levels which can be controlled by the same mechanisms?
I believe there is a window here, where in most countries experiencing this shift, there are still many individuals who have the power to effect change if they accept the risk. This won't be the case forever - at some point it will be few, not many.
Community is important; look after it.
Becoming more politically active has been a massive source of community for me. And if community is already endangered (which isn't something I disagree with, by the way - so many people are inadequately supported), that's all the more reason we should find and build it.
half of Europe is on the verge of shifting to parties with nostalgia for 20th century fascism and the Trump admin declared it a foreign policy goal to help bring them to power.
Not to get into politics too much, but surely that is a bit different. EU right wing populism and conservative raise had been slowly happening for some 15-20 years. US for 14 months.
The AfD in Germany scheduled their party conference in Weimar, Thuringia to take place exactly 100 years to the day after a famous Nazi rally in... Weimar, Thuringia...
uh...fox news started from NIXON, so too were the far right judges. this republican farce hit a tipping point, it didnt just suddenly be fascist. its like bitcoin and they suddenly saw they had 51%. whether its true is debateable but this isnt just a few months.
"NIXON" (also known plainly as Nixon) was "far right?"
You must be joking.
By any measure, and in every poly sci department, Nixon is viewed as moderate or even slightly left wing.
He created the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, created OHSA, signed NEPA, monkeyed with wage and price controls, signed a breath-taking number of anti-discrimination and affirmative-action orders, pushed school desegregation in the South...Nixon would be called a "progressive" today.
I know. Your baby boomer grandparents thought anyone who wasn't McGovern must be Hitler, but...Nixon was pretty liberal. Regan ran against him in the 1968 primaries just for this reason.
By policy standards you could say Nixon was the last truly liberal president. Does this mean that Nixon himself or his cabinet was liberal? Nixon and the types of people surrounding him were not liberally minded. Nixon's 'southern strategy' serves to demonstrate the contradiction in his administration's policy versus internal beliefs.
This is important because if Nixon's administration wasn't ideologically liberal, why pass liberal policy? The reason has to do with the political environment of the 60's and early 70's, which had enough populist solidarity that it could effectively pressure the administration. Compare he Privacy Act of 1974 - what the was in response to - to the insane privacy violations going on today, yet we aren't capable of passing an updated privacy act because we lack populist solidarity on the issue. The populism of today is apathetic and fragmented compared to the movements of the 60's and 70's, so consequently it exerts less political pressure.
Why would they do that? Once they have their win-condition, there's no reason to innovate. Only to reduce the costs of existing solutions. I expect that unless voice becomes a parameter which drives competition and first-choice for adoption, it will never become a focus of the frontier orgs. Which is curious to me, as almost the opposite of how I'm reading your comment.
As an aside, do you use dvorak as your keyboard layout? The ' for 1 typo is quite rare with qwerty, but I could see you meaning '1900s, though that becomes two characters in a short space.
Thanks for the recommendation!
I think, unfortunately, this is something which requires the development of good taste: the ability to distinguish good abstractions and clean implementations in advance of their creation, to direct it. There is little replacement of experience in this endeavour, and most time people spend learning to do software engineering pays no attention to it.
Intentional analysis of existing projects and developing your own new things is incredibly helpful for this, and the sort of development we recognise in the workplace we may recognise but fail to prioritise and reward appropriately.
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