On any of the donation threads where it came up and he replied to it, the most he ever did was some half hearted corporate PR “apology” (ironic)

  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    24·
    1 month ago

    Depending on the sport it can have. Come and try to beat some of the old ones of my town to a game of Pétanque, i guarantee you being born in France would help you.

    If someone was born in France but then moved to another country as an infant and grew up somewhere else, they wouldn’t have any advantage at Petanque as a result of being born in France. Thus we can easily observe that the location of birth is not a significant factor in determining ability, but rather the socialization that occurs as a young person can be a factor. We can use the birth location as an imperfect proxy for making assumptions about developmental experiences, but it’s not a direct influence.

    In contrast, if someone were born with an XY genotype (male) and socialized as a female from birth, that person would still possess inherent athletic advantages over females. Biological sex has a direct influence over the physical characteristics of an organism.

    It’s not a slight difference, it’s a fundamental difference that makes your comparison flawed.

    • Takapapatapaka@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      3 points :

      • first of all, this disagreements just focuses on the ‘birth’ part, which is not the main part of my original statement. Replace ‘place of birth’ with ‘place of education’ or ‘origins’ and you got the same result.
      • second, you can always find advantages to being born in France, even without growing there : better chances to have parents who excel at pétanque, better chances of going back to learn, or even better birth hospitals or whatever. I’m not trying to make a good point here, just finding a bs justification, because that’s what ‘being born male gives advantages’ is.
      • last, being born male can also comes with innate disadvantages (less tolerance to pain, less flexibility) and acquired disadvantages (less elegance, more competition), not even including the hardship of being trans in our societies and the impacts of transition treatments. ‘Male chromosomes advantages’ mostly are strength and endurance, which are not the only factor in sports. Plus most of the factors that disadvantage women in sports come from social background rather than biological ones. And in the end, we cannot observe an overwhelming winrate in favor of trans athletes. ‘XY advantage’ is just a dumb argument that only makes sense when you don’t look further, just as the dumb argument i give for the impact of origins/birthplace/nationality.
      • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        first of all, this disagreements just focuses on the ‘birth’ part, which is not the main part of my original statement. Replace ‘place of birth’ with ‘place of education’ or ‘origins’ and you got the same result.

        Fair enough.

        last, being born male can also comes with innate disadvantages (less tolerance to pain, less flexibility) and acquired disadvantages (less elegance, more competition), not even including the hardship of being trans in our societies and the impacts of transition treatments. ‘Male chromosomes advantages’ mostly are strength and endurance, which are not the only factor in sports.

        So you do acknowledge that there are innate differences between males and females, although you prefer to focus on the disadvantages rather than the advantages.

        Plus most of the factors that disadvantage women in sports come from social background rather than biological ones.

        I would agree with that statement. But that still means that if you equalized the social differences, the biological ones would remain. Although it would be a much smaller discrepancy, it still wouldn’t be an even playing field. It’s just unfair, and that bothers me.

        And in the end, we cannot observe an overwhelming winrate in favor of trans athletes.

        This isn’t a topic where the statistics are helpful whatsoever. The sample size is way too small, and there isn’t any control group, so the relative performance of transgender athletes could be significantly affected by any number of variables aside from their transgender status.

        • Takapapatapaka@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          Thanks for this very fair reply !

          I agree on the last point, the actual statistics have no real use in our discussion since we seem to be in a theoretical matter (i used to discuss this subject with people actually thinking that it would lead to under representation of cis women in winning women athletes, that’s where this argument came from).

          The two remaining points (differences and fairness) are kinda the same to my eyes. I’d say i do not focus on disadvantages rather than advantages, i just do not care for any of them, in my eyes they cancel each other out. Now, saying that those differences make the sport thing unfair, does not make sense to me : sport is unfair. We sometimes try to make it more fair with arbitrary categories based on gender, age, weight, etc, but in the end we cannot erase advantages. Some swimmers have genetically better lungs or bigger arms, and we do not make a special category for them, and we shouldn’t : that’s the point, seeing who’s better. There is an unending list of differences between athletes that can lead to (dis)advantages : i think there is no sense trying to erase them all, and even if you did, trans athletes is such a small sample as you said, with such little and debated differences, that even if there were actual advantages, it would be so long down the list of advantages to erase that it should not matter anyway.

          To sum up, in my opinion : trans athletes do not have advantages, and even if they had, they would be far less impacting than other advantages that we do not and should not account for.