this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Okay I promise I'm not a eugenicist but I am kinda interested in the genetics and physiology of top athletes. At the highest level that last 1% of advantage from just genetic luck is pretty interesting to me. Obviously it doesn't diminish from what the athletes have accomplished but I do think it's interesting. Like we're all just piloting meat based mech suits and the underlying base stats fluctuate between models and even individual units. I think that's pretty cool to think about and also worth acknowledging on top of the hard work an athlete puts into perfecting their chosen sport.
It's totally fine to be interested in these things. Where it gets murky is when people say things like: women with too much testosterone are too good and should take drugs to block their natural testosterone levels. Just because someone is at that 1% advantage level doesn't mean we should stop them from competing. If anything we should let them cook so we can see what the upper limits of human potential could be
Yeah but it's not like it's unheard of to group different people im different divisions according to their abilities. Like most sports have women's and men's divisions, which as we are finding out, is at best kinda not a perfect way to divide people as it leaves quite a bit up for interpretation and at worst entirely arbitrary. But that's not the only examples, younger people tend to be organized by age which is unfortunate for those going into puberty later and busted for those going in earlier.
I think re-evaluating what constitutes a separate division and how people are organised into them is a totally fair thing to do and approaching that from a standpoint of the potential biological and physiological advantages a person might have, is in my opinion a valid way of doing so, though probably not how I would go about it.
Okay but then would you put Michael Phelps in his own category for having:
Or do you just accept that some people are extraordinary and that a Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps or [insert female athlete with unusual physical characteristics] can come along once a generation and dominate a sport because they were born to do so?
But in this case, we're not talking about '1%'. Generally, women can go to 35% muscle mass while men can go to 45%. I can imagine it's a world of difference between fighting someone who has 1% more more muscle than yourself, or 25%.
Who said anything about women fighting men??
Well that's an important part of the discussion: it's not as binary as you want to present it
Except the people who are opposed to Imane Khalief are not engaged in a good faith argument about gender not being binary and what a woman even is. They're trying to impose a binary by saying a woman has to conform to our standards.
Look at how they've targeted female rugby players and boxers who have 'less feminine' features in their conception by accusing them of secretly being trans women. It's all about appearances because these women dared to be strong while having strong facial bone definition
I think it's great that you want to oppose these people, but I think it's wrong to start using bad faith arguments ourselves to do it