[ExI] Trans athletes and fairness

[Darin Sunley]

The problem isn't even just professional athletics. You can't have
meaningful athletic contests even at an amateur level between people whose
hormone-influenced muscle density and skeletal architecture are too
different.

Even within a biological sex, even at an amateur level, many sports require
weight clases to keep the competitions even remotely meaningful. Weight
classes are admittedly a blunt approximation of bodily optimality in, for
example, wrestling, and are gamable to some extent, but without them you
don't even have a sport.

For something like swimming, if the governing body doesn't want to fall
back to sex essentialism [which it appears they have], they're going to
need more finely grained divisions - some combination of height, weight,
muscle mass, body fat percfentage, and shoulder width. They simply can't
pretend anymore that excellence in their sport is independent of some very
specific morphological qualities, and that anyone too far from the median
in their division, no matter what they identify as, is simply going to
curbstomp everyone else.

On Sun, Jun 5, 2022 at 9:04 AM Dave S via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Thanks, Dan. I agree that in the long run professional sports should
> probably go away. In the near term, we should consider dropping the
> distinction between men's and women's sports at the elite (serious
> amateur/professional) level. Gender-specific recreational leagues could
> provide opportunities for non-elite athletes to play and compete on a
> somewhat level field.
>
> On Sat, Jun 4, 2022 at 9:42 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> https://youtu.be/cZ9YAFYIBOU
>>
>> This is mainly aimed at Spike. ;)
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Dan
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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