World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
There are several cases in sports already where people who are born women and have a female phenotype and genotype, but have naturally higher levels of testosterone, who have been banned from competition.
The message they use is the they're "protecting women" but it isn't actually the goal. Often there aren't any cases of transgender athletes outperforming their cis opponents, yet they still try to create these rules. It's frequently actively harmful to many cisgendered women.
The problem with all of this is the "basic biology" crowd never learn that biology is really fucking complex. What they learn in grade school is not the totality of biology, yet they assume they must be experts and force their very limited and wrong views on other people. It's bad and harmful and siding with them makes them feel all the more justified in their crusade of bullshit and misinformation.
I'm not particularly familiar with the politics of sports, nor am I particularly interested - as such I won't comment on what their goals are. I am, however, very familiar with human biology and healthcare. 5 yrs of secondary + tertiary education familiar in addition to several years of work experience. You'll unfortunately have to take my word for that. I don't intend to dox myself with documentation.
With my outlook on the topic, it doesn't seem like a "crusade of bullshit and misinformation". Headline news, physiology and most importantly "data and medical evidence from an extensive range of sources and consulted widely with other sports and experts across the world" - as they claim. I don't have time to personally look into that (sucks to have a life amirite) but am inclined to trust that they care for the athletes and have done due diligence. If you (or anyone else for that matter!) has material that disputes the validity of their work do feel free to link it in a reply. I and others I'm sure would be interested in reading such material.
Thanks.
Here's the issue we have: you trust them because they put out a press release with this claim. I don't, because it's a press release. You want others to prove them wrong instead of needing them to prove they're right.
I'm sure there's some truth to the statement, but did they actively look at the points made by the opposition and weigh it all? There's no claim for this here even, and even if there were I wouldn't trust it implicitly. To be scientific you need to actively try to disprove your assumptions. If they still hold then cool, but you have to be critical.
At the end of the day, this is a business. They're trying to make money. This is something that I'll never just give my trust to. If they prove their claims then fine, but I'm going to assume all decisions are business decisions first, not the best decision for all athletes necessarily.
Thing is, my time is limited. I don't have time to look into every single thing. No, this isn't some empiric process on my part. It comes down to judgement.
On the one hand there is a well established organization (and several others actually, I did do a cursory internet search) backed by an army medical professionals, which will get sued into oblivion by these athletes if they are egregiously wrong. What they're saying also happens to check out with my own knowledge on the topic and news that has circulated (both in regular papers and on occasion medical news).
On the other hand, there are a bunch of random internet strangers who, without citing any external sources say that the well established organization is wrong and lying.
So, which one would you be inclined to believe?
Again, feel free to drop in some material that you think disproves this, I would love to have a look!
You can't disprove it. It's a value call. Is it worth restricting players who should (in my opinion at least) be allowed to play for this? Are the trans (or higher testosterone cis) players actually that big of an issue, or is it a culture issue?
Here's a case where cis-female Zambian soccer player was barred from playing. Did that do more good than harm? I doubt it. This is far from the only case where cis women are prevented from competing because of made up rules that make them ineligible. I'm sure it'll happen in this scenario too.
You can though - at least to the extent that we in empirical science usually refer to "proving" or "disproving" (or rather, indicate or contraindicate a hypothesis). In this case it'd be studies/metastudies on injuries in different kinds of matchups (which can either show a statistically significant difference or not) or in performance of different athletes.
The case you linked here is regarding football, not boxing, which simply makes it a question of performance rather than also safety (as it is with boxing or other combat sports). The key difference in judgement here is the same reason that there are weight classes - simply wouldn't be safe (or fair for that matter) to match up a 120kg vs a 60 kg athlete - the latter might literally get killed.
Performance wise, the most "fair" might be to sort athletes into leagues based on testosterone levels. It's already known that higher testosterone levels tend to correlate with higher performance, so rather than imposing an arbitrary limit where only the athletes in the "sweet spot" just below the limit get to excel, grade them into brackets based on that. Women's sports were established in the first place to give women a fair chance at competing, since male vs female competitions in the vast majority of cases end up very one sided.
Yes, and I'm sure (especially for boxing) there are more injuries. I'm not trying to argue against that. I'm saying, it isn't worth the witch hunt. Iif you care about injuries caused by trans athletes, are there actually a large enough number to warrant this. Presumably we shouldn't be preventing cis-women from competing, even if they cause more injuries, right? It's boxing. Injuries are going to happen. If there are cis-women who just hit really hard for some reason, that's part of the sport.
Exactly. Even when injuries aren't the issue they're pushing these rules, so I don't trust that this is particularly strongly inspired by injuries. It's about people complaining trans athletes (or rather people they, usually baselessly, suspect are trans) are ruining the sport for "real" women.
This has been my argument for ages, or at least it's the logical extension of the argument that we should be protecting women in sports by banning certain women who we don't want competing. The fact of the matter is high level sports selectively choose certain attributes. I'm sure as hell not a top athlete and could never be. I'm not asking for rules to be made that allow me to compete against top athletes, but if we need to protect women's "fair" competition strongly for some reason, shouldn't we also have leagues for all types of people? Doesn't longer arms lead to more injuries in boxing? Is it "fair" that sports aren't designed specifically for me to be able to win?
I don't know what the answer is, but breaking sports into a "premier" league (no barriers; anyone can compete so only the best of the best rise) and then having a ton of leagues with different sets of rules to exclude people seems like the logical conclusion to this. I can't honestly say I think that's the best solution, because it'd make it ridiculously hard to watch, find teams, and track. I do think it's the only way the argument for testosterone testing works though. It doesn't work if you're excluding cis women from women's sports, otherwise it isn't actually protecting the integrity of women's sports. Top level competition is a game of outliers.
I think you're being sarcastic here, but there is a trend in that direction, with paralympics and such. It all comes down to this. How is the protected class of athletes defined? If a space for female athletes is going to exist at all, there needs to be some definition, which inevitably is going to feel arbitrary to some. The one they've gone with excludes males and most intersex individuals - allowing a little wiggle room here for folks with XY who have no male testosterone production which medically speaking makes it into a "woman at birth with low androgens" competition since those people will usually have a female phenotype at birth.
In the case of Imane - it may speculatively (after now reading a little about the circumstances and the "leaked" results) be a case of XY intersex with some kind of androgen dysfunction, either through reduced production via enzyme deficiency or partial insensitivity to testo. Being from a less developed country it's quite possible that Imane wouldn't even be aware of such a condition until it came to light due to the testing, and even if it was noticed earlier by Algerian medical professionals it may have been hidden from the patient due to how controversial intersex individuals are in traditionally muslim countries. This was the case for a long time even in the west, some countries even into the 2000's - "in the best interest of the patient". Quite tragic really.
I'm not being sarcastic. High level competition is defined by outliers. There's many cis women competing in top level sports who naturally have high testosterone, and they're often blocked by these rules despite them supposedly being to "protect the integrity of women in sports." They should be allowed to compete in women's sports, if we're calling it women's sports. If we want to divide it by testosterone level then fine, but be honest about that and allow men with naturally low testosterone too. Women's sports should include all women.
There are many things it could be. We could speculate all day. This rule is not targeting those strictly though. It's targeting testosterone level, which varies by person and there are cis women with higher levels than some men. Biology is complex. Top level sports will inharently choose those best at the sport. It's going to choose outliers, not representative of the average person. Women's sports still don't allow most women to compete reasonably. It never has, and probably never should. If it self-selects for people with higher testosterone then fine. They shouldn't be banned for it, especially since they also can't compete with men usually.