Even in something like chess the males are at advantage.
Transgender Athletes
- Thread starter Stack
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Even in something like chess the males are at advantage.
Well if nothing else it's going to be very interesting watching the event from a technical point of view.
The clean and jerk should be pretty standard, but the snatch could be very unconventional.
The clean and jerk should be pretty standard, but the snatch could be very unconventional.
I'm sorry.
That’s a bit of a stretch isn’t it?
Unfortunately not, Olympic weightlifting is full of state sponsored doping. I'd be amazed if 80% of gold medals haven't involved it over the past 20 years. China, Russia, anywhere Eastern Europe, old Soviet Block, or South American. USA and Germany are probably one of the only few examples of clean good performance.
Edit: I should add this I do (for once) actually know the subject, I'm a Olympic weightlifting lifter, coach and technical official and know many of the elite GB squad and Olympic squad. I've trained many times with one of Laurels direct competition, Emily Campbell. Emily and other GB women (Emily Godley, Sarah Davies) are hopefully showing promise in a clean system with some European medals this year.
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I'm a 40 years old male, if I become a transgender tomorrow and face Serena williams, chances are she'll beat me 100-0.
Changing gender doesn't mean you'll be number 1, but comparing apple to apple let's say the trans trained since 10 vs a natural woman who also starts training at 10 the transgender athletes would still be ahead of the curve. And just because you eventually don't win the number 1 spot doesn't mean it's OK. It simply means it's ok if they "cheat" they never won it anyway. And olympics only have 3 medals for each class doesn't mean being 4th is meaningless for some.
The male and female classification is not the only one, it's one of the First thing you classify. When they finished with male and female, they'll move on with age, weight, etc.
Name any professional sport that only classified male / female.
We want to see determination, perseverance, strength, skill, mental fortitude, and probably bit of luck for the drama when we see sports. While not perfect the current classifications is the closes mankind can get, where players trained hard, and the eventual winner is normally within the same wave length, only separated by things that are beyond their capabilities to train and improve. In this system, normally (off course there's always exceptional case like Caster Semenya) players compete in a healthy competition where everyone that puts roughly the same amount of effort can compete in a similar difficulty.
We can never be 100% fair, but at least we tried. Putting a transgender against natural woman is beyond reason, it skews the curve too far.
Lance Amstrong says hi
He wasn’t an Olympic weight lifter
How many trans people have qualified for the Olympics since 2004 when they were first allowed to compete?
I know there is a lot of doping in weightlifting but that’s totally different than a born male competing with women isn’t it? There is a lot of doping in cycling too but it would be even more unfair if Lance Armstrong would go in transitioning and ride with the women.
It’s sad that it’s unfair and I fully understand that you want to compete with women if that’s what you identify as and in amateur sports I don’t see a problem but it is unfair.
There's a big difference in strength based sport rather than skill and stamina based.
Unfair to say the least.
Unfair to say the least.
This is flawed because all else equal and the male almost always beats the female. Why is this important ? Because it's an unfair advantage.
Now saying there are other unfair advantages might be right. Like Federer had a world class coach while my family couldn't afford bread but that's not something we introduce as a rule at least.
Even in snooker and chess men have an advantage.
You're right, I was more making a daft point about weightlifting being unfair in general, this is just another on the list.
Quite different, I'm talking about doping at a state level, it would be surprising to me if USA cycling (or whatever they are called) would be th one aiding Lance in his cheating.
Then we agree mate.
It’s just daft allowing them to compete - it’s the whole you can be anything you want to be sentiment. Well, if you are a biological male transitioned to female that’s great, but one of things you’ll have to give up to do that is competing in some sports. It’s a shame but it’s just the way it is.
what’s going to happen if she wins a medal at the expense of a biological female? That would be awful.
what’s going to happen if she wins a medal at the expense of a biological female? That would be awful.
What will be really hilarious is if she doesn't get within an ass's roar of a medal.
Probably the most desired outcome. If she gets on the medals we won't hear the end of it.
Strong disagree. There's no sport that doesn't have some element of physical sexual dimorphism. Motor racing, horse racing, even darts. Whether that influences competing against same sexes is a different matter, but you can't have a physicality metric.
With chess there simply is not enough female chess players playing.
They make the greens smaller for female golfers?
Why on earth to they do that? If anything, that would suggest female golfers are better and more accurate than males. The would need to be better at generating spin to have the balls stop on these smaller greens. It also sounds like a groundskeeping nightmare.
Are you sure you're not thinking about them having different tee boxes for female golfers? They play a shorter version of the entire hole, but then so do seniors, amateur golfers, members, pros and various other categories of golfer.
Yea it could be that. They make something shorter.
Not my experience with women.
It’s the tee boxes.
Their courses are shorter in comparison to PGA tour events, but the LPGA courses are still in the 6500-7000 yard range, which is long for what non-professional men play.
This is a simple issue. Transwomen (with an XY chromosome pair) should not be competing in women's sport. Putting transwomen up against biological women is trashing women's rights. If you see it as an issue of competing rights, then there are way more biological women in the world than transwomen. So biological women's rights rule.
Most people tend to subscribe to this view from what I’ve seen, hence the controversy around the recent ruling that she will be competing.
Maybe Leona Messi can lift the world cup.
Cheers my bad.
What though was Sergio Garcia saying about spin? I can vaguely recall it. Something about the female players not being able to generate enough spin.
You have to be very naive to think that “marginal gains” and “more training” led to Sky / British cycling dominating and mediocre cyclists at 25 like Froome becoming GOATs.
It is a classical Western view, dirty foreigners cheating against clean locals.
The article I read said that Laurel Hubbard is the first.
He’s talking about the ball’s spin rate. The spin rate affects ball flight and the ability to make the ball stop on greens & roll different directions after it has landed.
PGA average spin rate for a 6 iron is about 6200 rpm while the LPGA average for a 6 iron is about 5900.
Cheers thanks.
Do you know anything about snooker? Would there be a similar difference in controlling the cue ball between male and female players?
You realize that his original comment is being made about weight lifting, a sport that he’s already said he is involved with at the Olympic training level?
He isn’t who brought cycling into a discussion about weight lifting.
No clue about snooker. I didn’t even know what snooker was until I joined this forum
In competitive sports it’s dangerous. Ridiculous that there was a trans MMA fighter fighting women.
Putting peoples lives at risk to avoid offending people
Putting peoples lives at risk to avoid offending people
Read Tyler Hamilton's book a few months ago who was a team mate of Armstrong.
Basically they're all on it (or were at the time, probably still are now) and the smallest of percentage of gains due to PEDs would make a huge difference to them. Interesting book really probably pick it up pretty cheap now due to the amount of stuff that's out there about Armstrong.
Yeah, you make some very good points. I’ve generally thought that trans women competing vs cis women is wrong/unfair but it’s easy to forget how tiny this problem really is.
Obviously elite male athletes are far superior to elite female athletes in almost every sport you can imagine but I don’t think many average male athletes would cause the best female athletes many problems.
If you imagine a venn diagram of “men good enough at sports to beat elite female athletes” vs “men who transition” the cross over must be absolutely tiny.
That’s not to say that some biological females won’t lose out to trans women and feel hard done by as a result. But maybe that small number of disaffected athletes is a price worth paying to make trans women feel more accepted in sport at all levels?
Yes, there are few ones but when women play against men of the same elo they perform worse, it can be something psychological but the same happens in other type of sports like motorsports or e-sports.