Transgender man wins women's 100 yd and 400 yd freestyle races.

but as long as you didn't imply anyone is transphobic, its all good

Oh Q, if I want to call someone transphobic, I will, and there’s nothing to stop me from doing so.

The point I’m making is that the whole “It’s not transphobic to say this, that or whatever”, is no different than the “I’m not racist but…” stuff. I don’t care whether it is or it isn’t, but the person saying it does. It’s why they claim they “can’t say anything”, but say it anyway 😂

I don’t keep bringing up gay as a comparison to trans. I’m not comparing them. I could just as easily have used disability if you’re more comfortable with that? Because the point is, and I know you get the point, because you’re able to point out that you yourself don’t have a persecution complex - you do understand that the point is the experience of discrimination on the basis of ignorance and prejudice is common to people who do not fit in with societal expectations.

Daley made exactly that point himself, in the article I linked to, so to suggest that there is no reason to know that he felt didn’t fit in because he’s gay, has nothing to do with how you feel about being gay, or how anyone else feels about you being gay for that matter.

The point is that Daley reached an audience of millions of young people who feel as he did at some point in his life and he can relate to them, and they can relate to what he’s saying. They don’t have to be gay, they just know what it feels like to not fit in. It doesn’t mean anyone has a persecution complex when they’re being made to feel like they don’t fit in, and a case in point is the social media witch-hunt that has followed Lia Thomas because they are trying to fit in, knowing there are people out there who will go out of their way to make sure people who are transgender know that they don’t fit in.

I’m truly delighted for you that you’ve never experienced what that feels like.

I dunno if it’s you or it’s me, but it’s like you purposely go out of your way to miss the point 😂

It’s not that there may be a social media witch-hunt, there is! Clearly, and it’s not just on social media but it’s in rags like the Daily Mail and it’s something which people experience in real life, that has real consequences and real impact on people’s lives.

Whether anyone makes a cogent argument about whatever else isn’t the point, and it’s not just life, it’s people - miserable shytehawks who go out of their way to try to make other people’s lives as miserable as their own, and that’s why it’s important for people who are targeted by these assholes to know that they’re not alone, there is support out there for them, and their lives will get better. Like you say - Daley hasn’t done too badly for himself, and neither has Lia Thomas, and that’s why they wanted people who felt like they didn’t fit in to know that they’re not alone.

Christ for someone who claims they don’t have a persecution complex! I wasn’t talking about you at all!

My latins shìt in any case, been years since I’d any actual use for it.

what happens when the data comes in, and it is conclusive?

the reduction in muscle mass, strength, speed, associated with hormone therapy do not cancel out the advantages of having gone through male puberty, and the majority of this reduction occurs in the first year, with 'diminishing returns' (if thats the right phrase) after that. so it's not like 5 years on hormone therapy is very different to 3 years

The problem with the conclusions of that data is that the data is sourced from small-scale studies which had numerous issues in their methodology. The data doesn’t come in at all if athletes are barred from participating in sports in accordance with their gender, which is what’s happening already.

The NCAA have effectively passed the buck and absolved themselves of any responsibility in the same way the IOC has done by leaving it up to the governing bodies in sports to determine their own criteria. It’s why athletes are having to go to court to be able to uphold their right to participate in sports, some 40 years after Renee Richard’s succeeded in suing the USTA -

"When an individual such as plaintiff, a successful physician, a husband and father, finds it necessary for his own mental sanity to undergo a sex reassignment," New York Supreme Court Judge Alfred Ascione wrote, "the unfounded fears and misconceptions of defendants must give way to the overwhelming medical evidence that this person is now female."

https://www.history.com/.amp/this-day-in-history/renee-richards-us-open-tennis-barred

Sports is looking for these "abnormalities" but one distinction between people (male puberty) utterly swamps everything else.

What evidence there was was limited but it all pointed in the same direction - that there was an inherent advantage.

What evidence there is, was not just limited, it was practically non-existent, and inconclusive, as opposed to any idea that the underlying assumptions they were attempting to prove “swamped everything else”. In a systematic review of what studies were available in 2017 -

Objective

To the authors’ knowledge, there has been no systematic review of the literature pertaining to sport participation or competitive sport policies in transgender people. Therefore, this review aimed to address this gap in the literature.

Method

Eight research articles and 31 sport policies were reviewed.

Results

In relation to sport-related physical activity, this review found the lack of inclusive and comfortable environments to be the primary barrier to participation for transgender people. This review also found transgender people had a mostly negative experience in competitive sports because of the restrictions the sport’s policy placed on them. The majority of transgender competitive sport policies that were reviewed were not evidence based.

Conclusion

Currently, there is no direct or consistent research suggesting transgender female individuals (or male individuals) have an athletic advantage at any stage of their transition (e.g. cross-sex hormones, gender-confirming surgery) and, therefore, competitive sport policies that place restrictions on transgender people need to be considered and potentially revised.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5357259/

That link doesn't work for me either. "Access denied"

Joanna Harper, the sports scientist who had more influence over the current IOC guidelines than anyone else (possibly because she is trans) admits that there is an impact. So, for anyone to claim that there is no impact is making an extraordinary claim, and the onus is on them to provide the evidence, not the other way round. The presumption until that time should be that trans women have a significant advantage over biological women.

The problem as well is that the answer isn't that you handicap trans women by some arbitrary degree and hope that that leads to a similar level of performance on average. There are so many problems with this, if it's possible at all, like how are you going to measure it, reliably and free of any bias? There are already suggestions that Lia Thomas has been swimming slower than she is capable of in some races. How can you prove or disprove that?

We have to accept that men and women are physiologically too different, that they can artificially be made the same somehow. Even the whole idea of trying to do that is not accepted by many trans people in sport, including some arguing on their behalf at times here. Being born male is just another in a list of advantages to these people, like good hand eye coordination for tennis players or quality of fast twitch muscle fibres for sprinters.