Nuntius wrote:And speaking on the particular case that triggered this discussion, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, I do not believe that their records are good enough to constitute an outlier. Therefore, it doesn't appear evident to me that they have an unfair advantage.
So first, I appreciated your other post recognizing my lack of stubbornness.
Now, this might be a bit of a backslide here, but I'll say a few things on the part in bold.
1. I think it's understandable in theory to say "Hey, until we see people from Type B dominate people from Type A, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude fundamental advantage." The tricky thing then is what you do when Type B people begin to dominate.
If you ban them from competing with A at that point, then you're basically saying "You were only allowed to compete as long as you didn't win." That's not good.
If you don't ban them then, then the prior use of logic is reveled to have been disingenuous. That's not good either.
2. I think it's important to be thinking statistically when considering what an advantage should be expected to look like. There are surely 120 lb women who can beat some 120 lb men and basically any sport, but no one thinks this is a reason the sexes shouldn't be separated in competition. Why? Well there are many ways to answer this, but when we're talking about something like the Olympics we're not interested in competition between randos, we're interested in the absolute peak of what humans are capable of. And if we expect that the two categories are going to have to clearly differing peaks, we either separate them, or we know that one group will dominate.
I think this should be kept in mind as we consider intersex conditions, we're not talking about 50% of the population, we're talking about quite rare conditions. Quite possibly more like .005% of the population. Now, if every person on Earth devoted themselves to training to compete in a particular sport, a .005% group is more than enough for that group to dominate competition.
But of course, most people don't devote themselves to compete in a particular sport, and in general women are historically considerably less likely to be trained as athletes.
So I think we have to consider that it's possible that a .005% group is too small given the lack of importance of sport for us to know that such a group doesn't have an advantage.
And of course, that .005% number is not a real measure, just something I'm typing. It's entirely possible that if we were to break things into sub-sub-types, there are particular phyla that are way more rare than that. How are we to make performance-based judgments on such ultra-rare groups?
3. So yeah, all of this gets me back to the 3 possible approach as I see them:
A) We go by agreed upon physical traits that we know have no direct impact on performance - such as the existence of external female genitalia.
B) We go by agreed upon chemical traits that scientists conclude are likely to impact performance - such as testosterone levels.
C) We use an agreed upon hybrid model with both physical and chemical traits.
(A) has the advantage of being something we know we can do coherently, and it is the kindest to the athletes in question, but the disadvantage of not actually being the competitive reason why it makes sense to split categories.
All this boxing talk deserves a thread of its own. I come to see Olympic discussion and 50% of it are long winded posts about some girl for an event nobody really cared about 2 weeks ago.
