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.

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ragall an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> sociologically women

There's no such thing.

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ahhhhnoooo an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	ragall 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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". 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.

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frumplestlatz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You’re claiming female sports categories were not biologically rooted classifications?

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allreduce 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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frumplestlatz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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allreduce 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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frumplestlatz an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
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