alt Hacker NewsI wonder if anyone has measured the speed in which reality is codified into law or regulation. Women have been fighting against males in female sports for many, many years. Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
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> Why did it take so long for something so obvious to be acted upon?
A few reasons:
1. Sex is not as straightforward as most people think, and what to do with intersex people is not clear.
2. Trans athletes are underrepresented at pretty much all levels of sport, and aren't actually winning that much, making it not actually an urgent problem.
3. The philosophical underpinnings that advantages due to differences in body development should be disqualifying is a little broken, since we do not consider Michael Phelps being double jointed as being an unfair developmental advantage.
how many actual cases does that amount to, i wonder.
Can you say more details? What are you talking about?
To educate others reading this, it's far from "obvious" how to classify gender in sports. Checking if they have the right "parts" physically doesn't do it. Checking for hormone levels doesn't do it. Even checking for Y chromosomes doesn't do it.
In my opinion the way forward is to stop trying to find arbitrary ways to define gender, and just start making competition classes based on whatever factors are relevant to the event. E.g. a women with high testosterone? They can compete with men or women with the same testosterone bracket. This would also let men with low-T compete fairly rather then be excluded from the games.
It's also relevant at what point other genetic changes are "unfair." There are absolutely genetic traits that give people HUGE advantages in various competitions. Just like the gender-related properties, these are natural and yet result in unfair competitions.