alt Hacker NewsThis is common sense. The only reason it didn’t happen sooner was folks being bullied to do things out of false claims of “inclusion” that resulted in deep discrimination against, mostly female, athletes.
The segregation of sports was always about sex and not gender. There are simply physical differences between across sexes that makes mixed-sex competition grossly inequitable in most sports. “Gender expression” doesn’t change that and mixing up “gender” and “sex” in sports was a trainwreck that is thankfully now being undone.
This is the right decision.
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What would do about someone like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan
Exactly. It's impossible to have both inclusion and fair play. We have to pick one, and as a parent of daughters who compete at fairly high levels it's more important to preserve the integrity of women's sports.
If you segregate by sex alone then trans men get a big advantage.
Depends on the time of the transition. So those who transitioned before puberty are disadvantaged
I thought exactly the same thing until I had a politically agnostic fencing judge sit down and explain over the course of an hour and a half all of the steps national and international regulating organizations for that sport had taken to avoid issues with unfair competition. Whether similar field-leveling safeguards could be baked into the rules for other sports is left as an exercise, but this particular instance suggests there's more nuance here than your comment suggests.
Walk me through how you think this is going to be enforced? Athletes will need to start dropping their pants? Disgusting invasion of privacy.
Transition changes biology. We don't yet have the technology to fully reverse the effects of male puberty, so there can be reasonable debate about trans women who transitioned after puberty, but early transitioners have no meaningful advantage. Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.
This is also true for many cisgender intersex women with XY chromosomes. Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth. Drawing the line at having a Y chromosome makes no sense.
Many people like to focus on the purely physical attributes, but there's a clear distinction even in realms like chess.
The highest ranked female chess player is right around #55 globally, wherein the top 50 all are dominated by men.
Some of this may have to do with men having more interest/higher propensity of starting young which is where most grandmasters begin their journey, but still an interesting thing to consider nonetheless.