karaddin

That's where you get across to outcome based metrics rather than category based ones. Even that's complicated though, you can run with things like height and weight divisions - if you get good at this you can potentially do away with gendered sports completely although obviously that requires far better measurements than simply x cm = x cm or y kg = y kg. We absolutely do not have that level of precision at the moment. The other alternative is stuff like testosterone measurements which I've already made it clear I think is a can of worms that will fuck over cis women and intersex women as collateral. There aren't enough trans women to warrant that risk. --- Not to BFC - another aspect people should bear in mind when reading all this and assessing if it's transphobic is just some good old fashioned misogyny as well, and not at all the way the TERF argument would have you think. Reading some of the commentary in the article about men's vs women's brains you'd think it's saying women are unable to compete with men in a bunch of intellectual fields that just aren't backed up by reality. Exaggerating the difference between men and women can serve multiple goals on this "debate".

The Paralympics is made up of different events for people that have physical impediments to playing the sport exactly the same as the regular Olympics, there's nothing wrong or shameful about it. I'm not the one trying to say they're remotely comparable, and I'm also not the one engaging in any ad hominems here but you seem quite happy to instantly seize upon a chance to have a crack at my character. I've been denied rights before, and I'd rather honestly go without until the injustice can be corrected rather than take an insulting appeasement that will delay or prevent redressing that. That's exactly what my last post was saying.

I would. Fuck "separate but supposedly equal" here just as much as for same sex marriage. Putting some rainbow glitter on it won't disguise it as anything other than what it is.

Sorry the split in my post should have been before the second paragraph, that wasn't wasn't meant to be directed at you.

Being born trans is a quirk of genetics/epigenetics much like many other things. It carries with it a hell of a cost for your life, and we get the added bonus of being told any advantage we happen to wrangle from that is unfair and makes us cheaters. The only thing that says the remnant advantages in sport that trans women may retain are unfair is a social construct. Unless the advantage is so extreme that there's not actually a contest, and no amount of studies are going to prove that because its patently not the reality of the handful of trans women that still want to fucking try despite what the world thinks of us. --- I'm so glad I wasted so much fucking time today on a post that didn't only talk about whether transition removes all advantage or not just for everyone to ignore it.

I've already spent far too much time on this so can't read through the studies being cited by that article to give it a fair read, but I can only assume the studies its referencing on testosterone levels post transition were looking at estrogen-only therapy in individuals that had not had reassignment surgery, because testosterone levels with androgen blockers and after surgery are absolutely within or lower than the range for cis women.

ToL - Ok here goes. There's quite a few aspects to it so I think bullet points is probably the best approach. Its not immediately transphobic to be concerned about the issue when its brought up. The usefulness of trans people in sport as a wedge issue relies on fairness in sport being something a lot of people are sincerely concerned about and it also relies on the effects of hormone therapy on the body being a poorly understood subject. A personal disclaimer here, obviously I have first hand experience of switching from a testosterone endocrine system to an estrogen one. The outcome in my case has left me as one of the physically weakest women I know, the idea of me having an unfair advantage is laughable to me and I sometimes struggle to set that aside and talk in the general case rather than my specific one. If I seem impatient/frustrated at times I'd ask you to keep this in mind and give me the benefit of the doubt. Also worth noting that the argument here is exclusively for trans people who were assigned male at birth (AMAB), there's no question of fairness towards other athletes that comes into the picture for trans men participating in men's sport so I'm not going to discuss their situation at all. It's also not the situation you're asking about. Unfair advantage: Obviously even from a maximally trans-inclusive perspective this is going to be a spectrum. Someone who has not had any medical intervention and is running on a testosterone endocrine system is going to have some advantages in many sports as a result. This completely sucks for any trans people that are happy with just social transition, but there really isn't a universally fair way to resolve this one so most people (including me) accept that there will be a requirement to undergo medical intervention prior to being allowed to compete in women's sport. This can lead to a few positions No amount of medical intervention is sufficient or trustworthy so AMAB can never be allowed to compete in women's sport. This perspective does not align well with the science I'm familiar with and am inclined to trust, and obviously my own personal experience, and chooses to throw a tiny minority group under the bus in the name of the majority. Yes there are some disputes around the research, there are some permanent changes from a testosterone puberty that will persist even after hormone therapy - most obvious being height - but their existence isn't necessarily of sufficient significance to declare it an unfair advantage. There are tall cis women as well and their height isn't treated as an unfair advantage so why should the same height from a trans woman be a problem? The primary advantages relate to muscle/strength and those are changed with medical treatment. You must undergo x treatments for y years to be allowed to compete in women's sport. The main one here is hormone therapy and the standard timeframe I've seen for that is 2 years. The research that indicates this is sufficient to eliminate significant unfair advantages is what aligns with my own personal experience and there has not been a sudden avalanche of trans women winning in sports which implement this policy. It attempts to balance the rights of the minority with fairness towards the majority and is the option I favour, and it has the variables of what treatment is required and how long they need to be maintained which can be tweaked if future research requires updates to the criteria. Testosterone is actually the problem so rather than requiring specific treatments which may be insufficient for some individuals, require treatment and test testosterone levels. This one sounds good in theory, and personally would favour me significantly - I have far less testosterone than any average cis woman, let alone those in sport...which actually highlights one of the major issues with it. If you only apply this standard to AMAB trans people in sport then its a major double standard, but applying it to cis women as well winds up gross and also unfair. I'd argue this winds up far more harmful to cis women, enabling sports organizations dominated by men to control what women's bodies are acceptable in a sport and excluding those they deem unacceptable and at the end of the day there are ~50-100x more cis women than there are AMAB trans people to be impacted by it. Its a can of worm and opening it is a bad idea. I'm not sure these bullet points are actually making up a logical structure but I've got no better idea for how to break this up so I'm rolling with it Sport is inherently unfair. It's already selecting for the genetic freaks to rise to the top, Michael Phelps dominated mens swimming due to physiological advantages that are absolutely "unfair" but he won the genetic lottery and that's OK. So its a question of which advantages are not just significant but also unreasonable. There are many ways you can look at that, in a team sport the most obvious is whether the advantage compromises the safety of other participants. Once you've eliminated any strength advantage I don't think you're seeing anything major in this category that is fundamentally different to competing against someone that was just more physically blessed than you from their genetics. If a taller trans woman would be such a major problem, then the sport should be segregated by height categories as that's the relevant metric - its not at all fair to tell a 5'6" trans woman she can't play women's basketball because 6'4" trans women exist while there are 6'4" cis women competing. When the research indicates a significant advantage that exceeds the variability within cis women, ie even average trans women are going to rate higher than the top tier of cis women in that category then I think you've got your argument to punt it up to my above bullet points. If treatment eliminates or minimizes the advantage then you can require treatment, if the advantage cannot be eliminated then you've got a complex job of weighing up multiple unfair options but none of the advantages which outlast treatment rise to that level of significance in my opinion. This does have a significant interplay with my below point as well however... The numbers of trans women are very low. The people that make a lot of noise about this on the public stage are massively overinflating the size of the issue. To go back to the UK example from which this thread spun off, even after the major increase in referrals to the NHS that's less than 1% of the population. I don't have the numbers on hand to know what percentage of that <1% are AMAB and would pick women's sport if attempting to compete so lets just split that upper limit in half and say 0.5%. I'm going to continue focusing on height - even if every trans woman was as tall as the top 10% of cis women then in a group of 100 women you're increasing the "tall" numbers from 10 to 11. Its just not going to be that impactful on the sport, hence my above point about it needing to be a larger advantage than a "lucky" cis woman gets. If there were a lot more trans people, then the advantage would look more significant than genetic luck so you'd have an argument for adjusting that equation. Nothing we've seen in sports so far shows any advantage retained by trans women after treatment to be outshining the hard work, skill and genetic gifts of the cis women they're competing against in terms of getting to the top. You've got a handful of individuals that can be pointed to as competing at the top level but even then they're not dominating in a way that points to a major unfair advantage - Fallon Fox was never the champion of her division even in UFC, Lia Thomas can't hold a candle to Katie Ledecky, Laurel Hubbard* has won a single gold medal from a single appearance but that doesn't prove unfair dominance on its own. The risk of men claiming to be trans to win sporting events. I think there are multiple aspects here that make this a non-issue The kind of man who is competitive enough to think about going to these lengths is likely to devalue women's sport as the lesser prize anyway. If you're requiring an extended period of treatment then there's a lot more hoops to jump through than simply claiming to be trans, they're taking on all the social stigma and physical impacts of transition - its not an "easy" path to winning By far the biggest item for me is that they'd be subjecting themselves to gender dysphoria. I don't expect anyone that's cis to truly understand what they'd be doing to themselves but I've seen multiple cases of cis people socially transitioning (so not even going through the medican interventions) that have found themselves suicidal within a year or so. It's huge and phenomenally unpleasant and anyone stupid enough to claim to be trans just to win sport is signing up for a world of hurt that they'll regret. The number of men that might successfully go through with this is such an astronomically low number that I don't think its worth considering how they might abuse the process when deciding what a fair process is for a minority group. If they are undergoing all the requisite treatment then they're also losing the advantage that they had. If they didn't have the gifts and determination to win as men, I'd bet they're going to wind up unable to win as women as well and they'll have ruined their lives for nothing. And I'll bet you that anyone who transitions for sport and then detransitions afterwards (regardless of winning or not) will be punished with more social stigma than pretty much anyone. It's going to be a major deterrent for anyone choosing to follow their footsteps. I think I had another point or two but at this point I've forgotten what they were and this post is already enormous so I'll leave it there for now. To illustrate the way in which certain groups try to whip up concern about this issue among regular people I want to close off with an example from last year. There was a large beat up from conservative and gender critical groups about how a trans woman competed in the London Marathon last year and "beat 14,000 women" in it. They neglected to mention that she came 6159th, so barely in the top third. That's a single trans woman out of almost 20 thousand competitors who finished in the middle of the pack being treated like it was grossly unfair and ruined the performance for 14k other women - the overwhelming majority of whom didn't give a fuck. But if all you saw was coverage of the outrage, you'd think that this was indeed a major issue - that's not on you, the reader that isn't seeing anything else, its on the dishonest bigots trying to manufacture outrage. TL:DR - I argue that the advantages that remain after hormone treatment are not of a significant nature compared to genetic luck within the group of cis women, and that the tiny numbers of trans women involved are insufficient to be of concern to cis women getting a fair crack at competing. ETA: Damn, forgot to follow up on the *. *I had managed to not even hear of Laurel Hubbard until Ran raised her in this thread, it seems either misinformed or phenomenally uncharitable to accuse someone of transitioning for the purpose of winning a spot when she commenced hormone therapy in 2012 and didn't even start weight lifting again until 2017. According to comments cited on her wiki page she quit lifting completely in 2001 due to her mental state around gender dysphoria and didn't resume until that point in 2017.

Tracker - for what it's worth I think there is a cultural issue with progressive groups that manifests in being overly aggressive and unforgiving. I don't think the way you're conceptualizing it is the best to think about it, and I think that's leading you to some faulty conclusions and that approach you're taking on pushing back on it is unlikely to succeed. That said I don't exactly have a solution to it either other than trying to avoid engaging in it myself. Understand you not wanting to get into it, it's a very hard discussion to have in good faith, but it's worth acknowledging that there are problems - I'm not going to try gaslight you over that.

Sorry - busy day with a migraine, just wanted to note I haven't forgotten!

I'll do my best to give a response then, but it will take a while.

Genuine question - Are you open to an actual discussion of the issue with the possibility of changing your mind, or Was this the only question you were actually asking? I'm asking separate from the two responses you've already received, I don't want to waste either of our time if that's the only thing you were asking but I'm willing to engage if you're actually interested.

Well let me ask you another one - when did your skepticism around the suitability of trans treatments develop? It certainly predated the release of the Cass review which you seemed to receive as vindicating your skepticism rather than causing it. Have you always felt the research was insufficient and just didn't voice that opinion much until the last couple of years? I ask because I'm human and wind up drawing conclusions based on what I see like everyone else and perhaps those conclusions aren't the whole picture. Based on what I've seen it looks a lot like you became concerned about trans activists strategy of attempting to deplatform TERFs, which you view as deeply illiberal and a threat to free speech on the left. Given I have only seen you posting about trans treatments since then it made me feel this has colored your view of all trans issues since then, but that's obviously a major assumption on my part. Hence this question.

I guessed electricity after reading your post (Brook guessed water so point to her) so I guess there's at least 1 other business that its plausible for.

At this point in my life I only take 1 medication "for being trans" - estrogen. I take a bunch of others for migraine and chronic pain and I'm pretty sure the majority of them would not be allowed for the purpose I take them if this high bar of evidence was a pre-requisite for ever getting to use them. Perhaps the evidence available now would be sufficient, but the years/decades of off-label usage that provided that evidence would not have been allowed which amounts to the same thing. The medications that I have been on or am still on covers two different categories of blood pressure medication, multiple anti-depressants, multiple epilepsy medications*, and botox injections. There's now anti-migraine medications (made for that purpose) in the mix as well which are fantastic, but if I try drop any of the other 3 medications I'm also on alongside them my quality of life and ability to work nosedives very dramatically. This off label usage of medications quite literally makes my life worth living. *Two of the epilepsy medications cause severe side effects for me, and they're judged as high risk - one caused me to become susceptible to seizures and major personality changes, the other had some weird undocumented effect that I think weakened my connective tissue causing most of the major joints in my body to start popping in and out. They were really unpleasant. My doctor informed me of the risks in advance as best as he was able, suggested I loop in my family and trusted workmates to keep an eye out for dramatic personality shifts, and I then consented to try these medications out. Informed consent in practice. Its a bedrock of our medical system for a reason.

It's impossible in the sense that people will know it happened because there will be some reporting, but even just removing mentions of that would be beneficial. It sounds stupid but human psychology is weird.

I don't think it's impossible, there are pretty clear guidelines for media reporting on suicide and I think they should try and apply those as much as possible for this particular form of protest. Or at least those guidelines exist outside the US, perhaps they're not in use there?

On another note - just saw some discussion of the new self immolation protestor which says that you can see his psychology fall apart after his mum died. Perhaps she was the one that got him to take meds and he stopped without her, maybe it was just the shock of losing her that cracked him but either way I'm going to feel sympathy and sorrow for it. I was stuck away from home and completely isolated for a few weeks when I lost my mum and my connection to reality was very tenuous by the time I got to come home. Could certainly imagine it just worsening over time if I hadn't had family to come back to and get grounded. It does speak to the other concern that was expressed after the previous self-immolation protest which I shared, that the coverage of protest like that could serve to encourage others in a vulnerable emotional state to do the same.

He's lost a *lot* of weight for his cheeks to be that gaunt. Gas issues are certainly a possibility from semaglutide, but I feel the weight loss is greater than is typically seen - I guess he could have been on it a long time and we just didn't notice the weight loss for a long time rather than it being over only a few months. What I'm saying is - semaglutide is the most likely explanation, but illness is possible.

Thank god it wasn't restricted to 8eps like almost everything has been lately. Would love more as well, its just fantastic.

On the nuclear proliferation discussion - I think the US invading Iraq was a serious body blow to non-proliferation and Putin using the "you give us your nukes and we promise we won't attack you" treaty as toilet paper put a stake through it's heart. I'll be very surprised if there's no new nuclear powers over the next 20 years. To answer Ty however I'd be extremely shocked if Australia already has some, especially with the below in mind I think there's a pretty clear sign in the AUKUS deal, namely that the nuclear subs Australia will be buying will have the capability to carry and launch nukes, that the US and/or the UK may want Australia to share the load so to speak. I highly doubt we'd develop our own weapons program though, if it happens it will be another somewhat corrupt form of pork barreling where the deal to purchase the weapons is politically a gift to whichever leader is selling them to give a big economic injection to whichever state they need to bribe for an upcoming election. The other possibility is that they simply want to introduce ambiguity into whether Australia has them - if our subs have that capacity and you do a couple of other things to make it ambiguous then you might get some of the value without actually risking another nuclear power. The big thing I'll say is that for now at least this would be extremely unpopular politically in Aus so it's a forward planning thing.

I know the 50s America aesthetic is part of the appeal for some as well. It really puts me off though lol, both just that it doesn't appeal but my brain also really struggles to imagine a technological branch that's done all it has but still doesn't have any screens bigger than 14" by 2077? If the bombs fell in the 1990s/2000s I'd accept it much better since then it's only a few decades of technological divergence rather than over a century. Wasn't enough to stop me really enjoying this though, everything else is more than sufficient to overcome that initial hurdle. It did put me off playing the games though - I gave 4 a try and bounced off.

I guess that's one of the indications Wert was talking about that although they were ready and willing they didn't actually do it themselves in the end.

I missed these signs, would you mind elaborating? Yeah it was fantastic, the last 2 seasons have some of the best episodes of television I've ever seen and it did end quite well. That's definitely a useful word. I'd say there's something along those lines going on with some shows that don't have any genre trappings, Sex Education utilizes elements of it in the setting as part of creating a setting that's kinda both US and UK and neither. I'm sure I've watched something else recently that also had a similar vibe.

Yeah I don't think I worded that the best, I still don't think (or at least hope) escalation to war is inevitable, but if Israel does what you're saying here it will be because that's the course of action they chose/were softly persuaded into - I don't think Biden can force them into backing down if they're set on escalation if this is the rhetoric we're seeing.

The accompanying statement from US officials sounds like they've already resigned themselves to being unable to talk Israel out of it and have switched to mitigating the damage which really isn't promising https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/15/israel-will-respond-to-iran-missile-attack-idf-chief-of-staff I feel like the only message that could actually punch through would be saying you're on your own if you start a full blown shooting war, and backing off on your messaging already really doesn't inspire confidence that you'd hold to that bluff.