I guess for context, I just don't get the brouhaha. I am fairly active and tremendously enjoy several sports, even though I'm no good at them despite years of training and effort. A large part of it may be genetics. These are just hobbies and games.
Professionally, doing what I do for work, I'm also mediocre at best. There are people more intelligent than me, better communicators than me, more ambitious than me, more focused than me. Some of that is genetics too, though harder to tease apart.
So what? We don't know the upper limits of human potential, especially the environmental and epigenetic contributors that keep producing better and better athletes and thinkers. We're not static chess pieces with finite moves, but constantly evolving animals whose body plans keep adapting to new conditions as they arise and work to our advantage.
You can slice and dice a million humans into subgroups and there are always going to be statistical clumps, much of which is genetic. But so what? Why is that such a big deal for concern?
If the goal is to tease out the absolute best, only a no holds barred competition (with or without doping) can reveal that, and the competitors will likely get better over time. Anything else is just a handicap made for spectacle and entertainment, so why does it matter HOW you bracket? Why is the sex bracketing more important than race or weight or height or mental ability or leg strength or whatever other distinguisher? Humans never were equal to begin with.
People have been worrying about trans women in athletics for the last fifty years and the discourse against them competing has never changed. Underlying all the arguments is the belief that trans women are not women. A cis woman who is stronger, bigger, and faster than her peers is never called out for the circumstances of her birth and upbringing that allowed it to happen. But the circumstances of a trans woman's birth and upbringing is a matter of controversy instead of being a normal variation. If Lia Thomas was a cis woman with the same physical capabilities she does now, nobody would care.
Underlying everything is the science that says that a person who goes through puberty as a male gets permanent increases in bone and muscle density over people who go through puberty as a female.
In day to day life this ends up washing out in a sea of averages and individuals. In competitive sports, on the other hand, where we're no longer talking about averages but about peaks of performance, peak performers that experienced male puberty will always outperform peak performers that experienced female puberty. The advantage does not go away with hormone therapies, either. You'd get the same controversy if you let heavyweight boxers identify as welterweights too.
Many sports have handicapping systems that restrict or normalize natural advantages to allow fair competition. In track and field, for example, the most basic of these was the male-female split.
Lia Thomas is cheating the handicapping system. It's not fair.
Yeah, I understand there is that controversy (should newcomers with different bodies be able to displace old timers)... and presumably there isn't as much controversy about trans men who can't perform as well as cis men?
But what I don't get is why women's brackets are so much more important than, say, racial or height or any other brackets.
As a cluster, are "people born with vaginas" more similar in athletic ability than "people born of a certain ethnicity" or "people who reliably ate at last 1500 calories a day" or whatever.
Presumably this goes the other way too, with cis women being better at ultra endurance sports than cis men. So what?
Like isn't the whole point of brackets to give lesser athletes a moment to shine in the spotlight, even though they aren't technically the best? So why don't they just make more brackets not based on genitalia?
Professionally, doing what I do for work, I'm also mediocre at best. There are people more intelligent than me, better communicators than me, more ambitious than me, more focused than me. Some of that is genetics too, though harder to tease apart.
So what? We don't know the upper limits of human potential, especially the environmental and epigenetic contributors that keep producing better and better athletes and thinkers. We're not static chess pieces with finite moves, but constantly evolving animals whose body plans keep adapting to new conditions as they arise and work to our advantage.
You can slice and dice a million humans into subgroups and there are always going to be statistical clumps, much of which is genetic. But so what? Why is that such a big deal for concern?
If the goal is to tease out the absolute best, only a no holds barred competition (with or without doping) can reveal that, and the competitors will likely get better over time. Anything else is just a handicap made for spectacle and entertainment, so why does it matter HOW you bracket? Why is the sex bracketing more important than race or weight or height or mental ability or leg strength or whatever other distinguisher? Humans never were equal to begin with.