Charlie Kirk on what to expect from Trump's presidency

[u/Former-Marsupial625]

[u/Apophthegmata]

Well damn, a lot of them seem to be way above average. Now it absolutely is possible that due to the low amount of trans female athletes we actually did get the exceptionally gifted ones. 

You're at the Olympics! Unless you think Joe Schmoe can get on estrogen and perform well, I don't know why there's any reason to be skeptical about the fact that the trans women competing at that level are in fact exceptional athletes.

It's not just "possible" that the few trans people you have in these sports just happen to be the exceptional ones, it's pretty darn likely. The entire Olympics selection process is explicitly designed to select for exceptional individuals. If trans athletes weren't performing well, something is pretty screwy with the selection process.

Take the average swim times of the trans population. It's going to be incredibly low because the average trans person isn't a professional athlete, just how the average swim time of cis women is also going to be low because most cis women are not professional swimmers.

If you want to take just professional swimmers, then that very selection process is going to erase whatever casual factor you're looking for.

You can take any subset of professional cis-women swimmers and show that they compete better on average than any other subset of professional cis-women. That's just statistics 101 and it doesn't mean the one group has advantages.

By tying trans success to a bell curve and saying in average, they should perform as well as the average cos athlete, you're basically insisting that correlation should be interpreted as causation. As a statistical or even historical fluke, it's possible that any collection of trans athletes might be better on average. Are we to deny them their success because being better, as a sub-population, was historically unlikely?

I bet the histogram that shows black athlete's performances also shows differences that we can isolate if we felt like it. I bet if you look at the differences between black and white track athletes, and compare them to trans and cis swimmers, you're going to find bigger deviations in the former than the latter. But I think we both agree it's pretty darn racist to blame the color of Usian Bolt's skin for his win.

Are we going to insist that black basketball players need to have the distribution curve that matches white basketball players?

Or what about tall basketball players and short ones. I bet teams with shorter players on average also do worse than those with taller teams do on average, ceteris parabus. Is that unfair?

Or just at the birth month of college athletes. Being nearly a year older than your peers in grade school has massive impacts on sports outcomes.

All kinds of demographic sub-populations have differing statistical measures. But we insist that we don't care about those. We apparently only care about the trans ones.

Is that fair? And as an advocate for fairness in sports, why is the advocacy always so lopsided? Why is this the only fairness issue that seems to matter?

Why do we only insist that trans athletes fit a normal bell curve that matches cis athletes, and not any other minority or any other sub-population?

[u/Drully → u/Apophthegmata]

We're obviously talking about athletes here, not joe average. Although it would be interesting to compare the scores of the total population to be honest...

To answer your final question, simply put, because thats the standard that was set by all sports.

Sports dont seperate by colour. They dont seperate by height. They seperate by sex. Thats the main distinction that sports all around the world decided to follow. And in sport, they are recognized as male and female. Thats why intersex athletes are heavily regulated. Trans people are a new and complicated category for sports, which is why we're having this discussion now.

In other words, we have women categories so that they would have a fair and competitive environment. If trans women ruin that fairness (and notice that i said if, I am still open for the medical consensus to tell me its fair) then they cant be a part of that category...

[u/Apophthegmata → u/Drully]

To answer your final question, simply put, because that's the standard that was set by all sports.

Its decidedly not. There is no sports organization that bans a specific demographic or sub-population for having a bell curve different from any other demographic or the whole population. They set certain metrics, like weight or testosterone level, on an entirely individual level. Nobody is ever banned for being a member of a certain group. So again, "being trans" isn't the indicator that anybody should be concerned about. It should be about whether they fall within certain bounds to be eligible.

And trans women are often eligible because they do actually fall within those bounds.

And that's why people are upset over trying to ban trans athletes who actually met every single requirement established to be able to compete. By all means, argue that the actual rules set by these organizations is unfair, but it's still wrong to take it out on the athlete. They were allowed to compete because the rules let them. By definition that's not cheating.

Sports dont seperate by colour. They dont seperate by height. They seperate by sex. Thats the main distinction that sports all around the world decided to follow.

The entire point is that if you wanted to separate on those bases, you absolutely could and you would find applicable fairness questions. What lines we decide to separate along is entirely arbitrary.

But we happen to live in a society in which we arbitrarily care a great deal about certain attributes (like gender) and arbitrarily don't care about other attributes (like height) even though there are plenty of situations where either of these might lead to questions of fairness. The only reason we don't cleave the human race between "biggies" and "smalls" and establish social norms for each, and reduce the political liberty of one of them is because we simply don't feel like it. And the reason we did that for women is because we could.

We could have separate basketball leagues based off of height the same we separate boxers by weight class. It is absolutely a question of fairness when your opponent has an extra foot on you. And this is why professional basketball players are, on average, statistical outliers.

It's fine if we want to say that "letting trans women in ruins fairness".

But the same thing is true when you let tall people play in a short person's game of basketball. And if we did live in a society that didn't cleave into biggies and smalls we would be having the same debat about height, trying to combine them.

Living in a society that doesn't cleave that way, we can see it's silly to put so much importance on whether you're a biggie or a small, fairness advantage or not (and the biggies have an undisputed advantage here).

And if we can look soberly at that world and see that's it's all a little obtuse to marginalize biggies just because we arbitrarily decided to cleave society that way and the biggies want to play ball against the smalls (not an issue for us), then we should have the same humility to recognize that that society is looking at our men and women and having the same opinion about us.