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1. Kuba Orlik (kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 15:33:38 JST Kuba Orlik

   Ciekawie podjęty temat

   Trans athletes in women's sports: Is this fair?

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU

   • Kuba Orlik (kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 16:28:12 JST Kuba Orlik

     in reply to

     • Radek Czajka

     @rcz she claims that sports is already a freak show and there's nothing fair about it no matter how one looks at trans people competing in certain categories.

   • Radek Czajka (rcz@101010.pl)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 16:28:14 JST Radek Czajka

     in reply to

     TL;DR: No, it isn't fair. She proposes, instead, ditching the notion of “fair competition” entirely in favor of a notion of a “freak show”, moving to e-sports, or eventually abolishing elite sports altogether.

     Do you think female athletes (such as Riley Gaines, assaulted yesterday for speaking on this topic) should be convinced by these argument that they don't deserve a protected category for female people?

     @kuba

   • Kuba Orlik (kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 16:28:22 JST Kuba Orlik

     in reply to

     • Radek Czajka

     @rcz

     The male/female divide in sports is made so it's less boring and less predictable. Sport is entertainment. The person with the most biological advantage wins. It's only "good" (and I'm using the term VERY vaguely here as I find sports conpetitions extremely dull) entertainment if it's not too easy to predict who in a given category will win.

   • Kuba Orlik (kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 16:31:23 JST Kuba Orlik

     in reply to

     • Radek Czajka

     @rcz I don't think the video claims what anyone *deserves*, really. I think we deserve a world where people and governments don't waste money and time watching biological extremes fighting for who is the most biologically extreme. The whole premise of professional sports is imho arbitrary, unfair and useless at the core, and recent discussions only serve to highlight that

   • Kuba Orlik (kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 16:52:12 JST Kuba Orlik

     in reply to

     • Radek Czajka

     @rcz Personally I have zero objections to trans women competing in women categories in any sport, to be clear

   • Jester Sk00n of Pooland (pawelk@noagendasocial.com)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 16:57:15 JST Jester Sk00n of Pooland

     in reply to

     • Radek Czajka

     @kuba @rcz

     Which is wrong and biased against biological women if not bigoted.

   • Kuba Orlik (kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 16:57:15 JST Kuba Orlik

     in reply to

     • Radek Czajka
     • Jester Sk00n of Pooland

     @PawelK @rcz my main takeaway from this topic is that sports in general are biased towards activities that testosterone helps with. An old xkcd comic comes to mind

     https://xkcd.com/1173/

   • Kuba Orlik (kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 17:00:35 JST Kuba Orlik

     in reply to

     • Radek Czajka

     @rcz Would you consider it acceptable then to have a separate protected category for trans women, for example?

   • Radek Czajka (rcz@101010.pl)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 17:00:36 JST Radek Czajka

     in reply to

     Professional sports are the tip of the iceberg, under which there's college sport, country-level or local amateur competitions, junior sport, children sport etc. I agree we put too much resources in the most elite events, but we should be careful not to throw the baby with the bathwater. Part of the motivation my kid gets to train at his sport was the thrill of getting an autograph from an Olympic medalist while training, for example.

     The idea of 'fairness' doesn't (and cannot) mean removing all differences so that people win or lose randomly.

     Let's say we have a sport without categories at all — sth like strong man competition. I wouldn't say it's 'unfair' — but what you lack is inclusion. This sport is for the heaviest men only.

     We introduce protected categories to achieve *inclusion*. If we introduce protected categories for women, and weight classes, and age categories — then this sport starts to include those people. If you're a girl, it only makes sense for you to even begin training in such a sport if you know there's a protected category for you. Obviously, you might never get to the absolute top, but getting to the absolute top is not the only objective in sport, and not the only value of sport.

     What we would call 'unfair' is breaching those protections — fairness is a property of processes. If you have weight categories, that creates inclusion — but for this categorization to be fair, you need to actually enforce them. If you allow people to choose their categories, e.g. allowing a 120 kg person into the category for under 80 kg, this is not fair — and you're obviously hurting the inclusion of people under 80 kg. Regardless of the fact that under-80 kg people still have other differences between them.

     @kuba

     Kuba Orlik repeated this.
   • Radek Czajka (rcz@101010.pl)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 18:15:16 JST Radek Czajka

     in reply to

     BTW, an aside point — there is a general problem with girls ditching sports, but boys do have another problem, stemming from social over-investment in particular elite sport, which is football. From what I observe, girls, if they do sports, tend to try more varied disciplines, while boys tend to over-concentrate on football, probably wasting a lot of developmental potential they could activate by trying something different.

     @kuba