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Gene tests begin in women's athletics(bbc.com)
11 points by breve 19 hours ago | 3 comments
Llamamoe 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Top athletes are essentially by definition genetic outliers, and I'm willing to bet that if you looked hard enough you'd find genes far more important than SRY. This entire thing is just silly.

I can see why it might be best to exclude transgender women from most disciplines, at least untill we have more science about whether they have any advantage in them, but as a whole this debacle just feels silly.

drankl 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you compare the female and male world records for pretty much any sport, you'll very clearly see the effect of SRY and other male-making genes.

The rationale for the female category is to remove this male advantage from competition. Allowing a subset of males who have the advantage of their sex to compete against female athletes, just because these males call themselves women, undermines the whole point of women's sport.

This is why we need such testing as described in the article. It's no different in principle to, for example, weigh-ins in boxing that enable fair competition in each weight category.

Drunkfoowl 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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