Biological male wins women's cycling world championship for 2nd consecutive year | Hacker News Reader

Biological male wins women's cycling world championship for 2nd consecutive year

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39 pointsvinnyglennon44 comments

Oh come on. The distinction between men and women in sports has always been based on biology and not identity. There’s no way Mike Tyson boxes in the lightweight classes because he feels skinny on the inside.

I must have missed a memo. Why are men being allowed to compete in women’s sports just because they claim to be women? Why would anyone think this was a good idea?

It's specially unfair in contact sports. If this keeps on, women champions will be all men, a backwards step for feminism.

I want to preface this with saying I am fully supportive of LGBTQ+ rights and I believe that people can be born one way but their brain is wired for another.

That being said, if a large majority of your biological self was a man while you were growing up even though a lot of your brain was the opposite, then you will likely have a significant advantage (athletically) over those that grew up biologically as a woman.

This is in the early days of normalcy in society for trans people, so I think eventually this will work out. Perhaps racing events need something like a "weight" class like you find in some martial arts.

Yeah I believe it will also work itself out. I also believe that inclusion and social acceptance are more important than fairness in sports (which let's be honest, it's already unfair due to some people using performance enhancing drugs and others not using them). History is not going to look back on us and say we were bad because we had a few decades of a very tiny minority of trans people having an advantage in competitive sports. We hear about things like this once or twice a year, I'm not really sure it warrants all the outrage it receives.

When the winner marginalizes those who reject the win as not being real champions, claims bigotry against those opposed to an obviously physical biological advantage, it deserves all the correction, protest, and outrage this gets.

Otherwise it becomes a silent ignored unfairness that never gets resolved.

> I think eventually this will work out.

This is a really hard argument to sell to top women athletes who will lose their category to men who identify as women. Categorizing by weight won't help, as women are have less muscle/bone per weight than men.

Sex is a biological trait, and it makes sense to categorize physical competitions by sex. Gender is a sexual choice, and your sexual choice isn't relevant to sports.

Would it not be better to categorize directly on the physical beneficial traits such as muscle/bone per weight? That way we can take out genetics from sport altogether.

OK, I agree that there's a small percentage of population for whom the binary distinction for make and female fails. I believe that any adult person should be able to do whatever they want to their body, so their transition is they business (and their doctor's). I even agree that just to be civilized, we should call these people with whatever names and pronouns they are comfortable with – it costs nothing to me, and supposedly, it's important for them, so why not.

But is it fair to allow a person with a make level of testosterone and muscles to compete in a category that was created specifically for women?

For what it's worth, I found this to be one of the only thoughtful posts in the entire thread, with the rest falling around either "garbage blog" or some version or "men aren't women" dripping with inarticulate sarcasm or outrage.

I'm saying this because it's deeply depressing, as normally I put extreme value in HN as perhaps the only place left I can see a group of thoughts where the majority are sane.

>Real champions want stronger competition

OK, compete as a man.

Most often there is no such thing as a "mens" league - ie there is no gender restriction or testing in the NFL, the premier league, etc. I wonder, do mens track and field events in the Olympics even do gender tests?

It's her own words, her tweet. The next part says

>If you win because bigotry got your competition banned... you're a loser.

Hard to believe it's real, wonder if she recognizes the irony.

According to this page, mixed teams are not allowed in the Premier League: https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/12206/can-a-woman...

Oops, I should have just stuck with American sports which I know, but didnt want to throw around only American centric acronyms like nba,nhl, etc

I think this is absolutely unfair. Skeleton, muscle mass, there are too many advantages to someone who went through puberty as a biological male.

Congratulations to the champion. It'll get tougher once the disabled win equality and are able to participate too using powered cycles.

This has already come up in running, but with the bionic (basically a big carbon fiber spring) foot instead of a powered cycle. And it raised a huge stink when the disabled person won.

That's in sprinting. And in marathons, there's a similar thing - the wheelchair people are in a separate category, because otherwise they would destroy the "able" people.

It would even matter in longer distance running as well - the spring being more energy efficient than feet and ankles.

https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a23133365/blake-leeper-run...

Not into sports at all, but what do people think the problem is if evolutionary biology dictates that eventually our current sports setup will trend towards being dominated by male athletics and trans athletic competition?

Women should be able to compete against other women to the exclusion of males. Simple as that.

Society only deemed this recently to be the case. It may end up that society deems gender equality more important and therefore it may go away.

> Society only deemed this recently to be the case.

Citation please.

> gender equality

Please explain how women getting what they want (getting to compete against only other women) gets in the way of gender equality.

Why are these sports categorized for gender instead of body weight? For example, I'm a below average man in proportions and a 75 kilo biological female would definitely beat me on many competitions.

Bodyweight still does not control for it. Male and female muscle composition differ, bones differ, organs function differently.

Wouldn't work well I think. Women generally have a higher bodyfat percentage than men skewing the weight classes and AFAIK each gender is somewhat better suited to particular sports, e.g. elite weightlifters are male without exception and ultra marathon runners are often female.

Women carry more body fat than men. Even adjusting for body weight, the top men are stronger than top women.

https://www.castironstrength.com/elite-strength-sports-ipf-a...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_w...

Because the closer you get to peak performance the wider the gap gets.

Women athletes will no pass qualifiers for their respective men’s Olympic events even in the same weight category.

Muscle mass, nervous system joint stability biological males have a distinct physical advantage.

Sure a female athlete at 75kg might wipe the floor with you on some events however take a 75kg male athlete and they might as well not be the same species.

The point is not whether a 75 kg female athlete would beat you, but whether she would beat a 75 kg male athlete.

> McKinnon tweeted that “real champions want stronger competition,”

Ironic that he says this while not being willing to compete against other males.

its an interesting conundrum.

I'm not anywhere near well informed enough to form an opinion or argument around it. But it'll be fascinating to watch it develop.

The fact that a man is not a woman needs an argument to be made for it?

Less blog-spam propaganda, please.

How is this Hacker News related?

Some people argue that this is a route to hacking female sports. It’s hard to argue this trend will not entirely upend the concept.

Please ban this garbage article.

Besides for LGBT activists being overrepresented among techies relative to the population at large, this topic isn't really relevant to hn and is just going to invite opinion based low effort posts imho.

This post has been disappeared by the community.

I don't know what "disappeared" means, but when enough users flag an article relative to upvotes, it falls in rank. That happened here.

It's not a proper use of English, but I surmise you do know what I meant.

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