Gene tests begin in women's athletics | Hacker News Reader

Gene tests begin in women's athletics

bbc.com

11 pointsbreve6 comments

Top athletes are essentially by definition genetic outliers, and I'm willing to bet that if you looked hard enough you'd find genes far more important than SRY. This entire thing is just silly.

I can see why it might be best to exclude transgender women from most disciplines, at least untill we have more science about whether they have any advantage in them, but as a whole this debacle just feels silly.

If you compare the female and male world records for pretty much any sport, you'll very clearly see the effect of SRY and other male-making genes.

The rationale for the female category is to remove this male advantage from competition. Allowing a subset of males who have the advantage of their sex to compete against female athletes, just because these males call themselves women, undermines the whole point of women's sport.

This is why we need such testing as described in the article. It's no different in principle to, for example, weigh-ins in boxing that enable fair competition in each weight category.

The overwhelming majority of that advantage comes from sex hormones, not the gene itself. Depending on discipline, most or all of the advantage goes away within several years on HRT.

Take that and then consider that this goes even harder for people whose bodies never masculinized due to androgen insensitivity or whatever. Maybe it still carries some advantage, but... so what? So does pretty much every single gene variant top athletes have and nobody is trying to single those out.

Your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

This is a line at which we ban accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), so please stop doing this.

Also, please don't create accounts to do this with. It's not what the site is for, and destroys what it is for.

I'm just commenting on a topic I'm interested in, like the person I replied to did.

If we want a separate female category in sports we have to draw the line somewhere. This test seems to be quite a good line, even having allowances for women that cross it.

I don't think people should be challenging these rules on human rights grounds. Of course it is devastating to individuals when they get barred. They got to where they are through a mix of genes and hard work. Now one thing about them that they might not even have known about is going to end their career. But elite sports is for entertainment. It is full of arbitrary rules, and there's plenty of life outside. Most people don't get to assert their womanhood at olympics.

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