Author J.K. Rowling has fallen silent on her usually busy X (formerly Twitter) feed, after Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif filed a legal complaint in France for alleged cyber harassment over statements regarding her gender.
On August 9, lawyers for Khelif filed a lawsuit with a special unit of the public prosecutor’s office in Paris, stemming from false statements that spread online about her gender after the Algerian boxer defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in her first fight of the 2024 Olympic Games. Carini pulled out 46 seconds into the bout and told reporters afterwards that she had “never felt a punch like this.”
I am sure that’s the case, but I think this has not to do with “breaking records” I.e. having success in sport. It might have to do with general gender stereotypes related to body types, for example, or with other stuff.
So either way the comment I was answering to seems counterfactual and sensationalistic.
obviously stereotypes make people’s story more believable and easier to go viral and that is why people choose the stories they choose. doesn’t change the fact that there are people who would rather explain an unexpected level of success shown by a woman by saying she is probably not a woman. the story they choose is irrelevant really. They could have claimed she has cybernetic extensions in her muscles and it would be the same thing. And all you are saying is “but there are other very successful women who have not been treated that way”. Sure, did not say every single very successful woman is deterministically being treated unfairly. I am saying it is a tendency.
There are people who are transphobic to the degree of investigating born women, time and again. (Are you aware of the lesbians “bathroom problem”? It predates the current antitrans moral panic by a decade.) It seems their hatred is so rotten that eventually they are the ones unable to define what a woman is. Now even a vagina at birth is not cutting it. Just not beat around the bush, this is about transphobia, and Khelif naming Rowling, Musk, and Trump in her suit (all of them billionaire transphobes with a platform) is no coincidence.
Ah and don’t forget that trans women are not men either. Too many let that slip in this debate because Khelif is cisgender, but let’s not forget that when nazis say “men are stronger than women” they mean trans women as men. They aren’t. Nazi punks fuck off.
What I am actually saying is that the vast majority of successful women athletes didn’t suffer from this at this time at all. If this argument works only for Imane Khelif (not even the Taiwanese boxer, who has been mostly ignored), out of the hundreds of women who just won medals, maybe it is not an argument that can be generalized to “women of success”, and other causes have to be searched.
This to me is basic common sense: if a thesis works only on a handful of examples and there are hundreds of counter examples, maybe the thesis is wrong. A tendency would require also more examples.
So are you claiming that there is no historical bias towards downplaying women’s successes in general or that in history there was but now as a whole Earth has progressed so far that we have left all those behind? Or is it just that it doesn’t happen in sports but happens in other areas? Or women have been downplayed but never because of success but always for other reasons?
What you call a handful of examples is taking a magnifying glass and only looking at this particular event. If %10 of successful women have ever been downplayed because of their gender (due to unconscious biases for example) vs %1 of successful men, then this is still a handful of examples which nevertheless points to a significant bias.
None of those, really. Just that downplaying successful women doesn’t happen as much in sport, and when it does it’s not by stating they are men.
It has to do with the fact that testosterone is a performance enhancement drug and men are categorically stronger than females, and a man punching a female is strictly unsafe.
An breakdown of your wannabe argument would be:
A: “Testosterone enhances performance” B: “Men are in most cases stronger than women” C: “A man punching a woman is unsafe”
This vaudeville of ideas have no apparent link between them, the real product of a scattered mind. Scientists are still out about A.
B is a statistical truism at this point irrelevant to the topic, since Khelif is a cisgender woman, and there is no evidence (for the time being) that she is intersex.
C is also immaterial to the discussion. Perhaps you are trying to say that high-testosterone women are “comparable” to men in combat sports, because they pose a greater threat to cisgender women but this is quite the leap, since she is no man.
Testosterone levels vary between individuals. Taking part in combat sports entails a risk of serious injury. The weight categories are in place to make things comparable between opponents, testosterone levels are not. Scientists have questioned whether testosterone level correlate that much to performance outcomes as people think.
The ersatz argument makes no sense.
Are they?
I think so, yes.
Quoting from Transgender Woman Athletes and Elite Sport
Quoting from Sport and Transgender People: A Systematic Review of the Literature Relating to Sport Participation and Competitive Sport Policies
Quoting Scientific American Trans Girls Belong on Girls’ Sports Teams my emphasis
Quoting from UK-transphobe-funded Strength, Power, and Aerobic Capacity of Transgender Athletes my emphasis
So even those highly motivated to prove trans women are disproportionately advantaged have difficulty tapping it. As for combat sports, don’t forget Joe Rogan as well female MMA athletes ended up apologizing to Fallon Fox for all the transphobic BS they had spewed at the time.
What was your point again?
Bodybuilders everywhere in the world are using testosterone boosting steroids.
Anecdotal evidence? Marketing scheme? Performance enhancing drug manufacturer snake oil? How does this respond to a score of peer review evidence. People everywhere in the world believe in astrology and crystals as well. So what?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2917954/
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.00502.2001
Plenty of studies and practical experience. Why do you think administration of testosterone and testosterone inducing drugs is forbidden for professional athletes?
You have chosen a strange hill to die on.
Sure, I don’t care about individual studies, due to publication bias and statistical error. I care only about reviews and meta analysis where study hacking and design bias are controlled. Some of the studies will show a positive effect of testosterone. This is included in the studies I posted. A consistent result should show invariably in numerous controlled studies. Some nazis also publish studies in shithole journals, reiterating their 4chan self-complementing arguments. The review I cited show that the effects of testosterone are flaky at best. Also, testosterone in trans women is less than cisgender women, so this is also useless as a premise for either trans women or high-testosterone cis women in sports. So it is a flaky premise, that means nothing for the policies under discussion.
Lol this has just as merit as “why do you think they don’t take homosexuals in the military”. Um… because it only takes a bunch of prejudiced guys to believe so in order to regulate so, ever since the Old Testament.
Is the effect comparable across sports? Are the effects meaningful for high-testosterone women and/or trans women in sports? I doubt it, so do most organizations I cited.
At the moment we don’t have any concrete data, so in case it is based on a suspicion at most.