Congrats on taking on a ‘controversial’ topic and conveying the complexity of the science as opposed to taking a ‘stance’ as is often expected from commentators. I note that people on both sides of the conversation have a tendency to over-simplify and reach for easy answers, which sadly are not readily forthcoming. I use the same term to describe athletes btw - freaks! But the physics conference follow-up burn was perfectly on brand 🔥😂
Both sides tends to over-simplify but it’s pretty obvious that ONE side is doing it on purpose and on repeat to further their hateful agenda, while the other side is simply trying to defend a marginalized group, sometimes in a clumsy manner. The dynamic is such that there is a clear aggressor in this discussion and I find it ironic to reduce this to “both sides are wrong”, because it’s an oversimplification.
@@AiguilleVoodoo sounds like steel man/strawman interpretation based on perspective. One could be just as uncharitable and say "one side is protecting a marginalized group (women) and the other is trying to set progress back by excluding women's achievements and purposefully misrepresenting the facts" Like your statement, it's an incredibly unhelpful summary and not acknowledging that these divisive ways of talking about these issues aren't moving the needle for any dissenters
@@maverick9708 There's plenty of other evidence that the great majority of people screaming loudest about "save women's sports" (1) actually couldn't care less about women's sports and (2) hate any kind of gender nonconformity.
I'm a dressage trainer and therapeutic horseback riding instructor, and equestrian sports stand out as not being segregated by sex, even at the elite level. On the other hand, there's one big unfair advantage that determines a person's high level success at these sports, and that's money. There are exceptions, of course, but starting out wealthy is a big indicator of whether you can ascend to the top level. Competitive sports are not fair in many ways, and I love the concept of meaningful competition instead.
I never got the fairness argument. If we are to say, “Sports is unfair anyways, why try to make it fair now?” then why not remove the division between men and women’s sports completely? The reason for the separation in the first place is because we acknowledge the physical advantages men have over women. But if you’re going to accept these and still go on with it, then why limit it to trans athletes?
I mean there’s no reason to keep a division. Sure there will be a lopsided representation of men over women but since it’s purely competition, no reason not to allocate athletes to divisions purely by performance. Un-ironically many sports SHOULD remove gender divison
@@woolfie8766 There is no gender division. There is no such thing as a men's sports. Leagues that are mostly or all men are open to women. The problem is that women can rarely compete at the level men do, so the leagues appear to be men's leagues. Women's leagues were started because women wanted to play and compete in sports too. Allowing men to compete in women's leagues takes us back to a time when women will simply not do sports. That is unacceptable.
@@woolfie8766 I don't think you appreciate just how lopsided such representation would be. Sports would be *dominated* by men. Many elite female athletes will lose against teenage boys. Celebration of female athletic excellence would be almost impossible. Women and girls who love sports would have to accept they would likely never be able to properly compete. What a tragic, misogynistic world that would be.
@@boredom2go Dude. thats called gender division. you said yourself..."The problem is that women can rarely compete at the level men do, so the leagues appear to be men's leagues." if gender division is not a thing, women and men can compete in the same match. I still dont get what you are trying to say. From what i understand is that you dont see the "division" because 'hey, women can play that sports too. just like the men. so there really is no gender *division*'. I think what you are trying to prove is the fact there is a *representation* of women in the sport that is "fair". not about the gender division topic..
@@hanjoyitsu1414 I'm saying that the leagues that men compete in are already open to any gender. There's no need to create some combined leagues because they already exist. Women's leagues were created because either women compete only with other biological females or they don't compete at all. Women's sports should be off limits to transgender women (biological males).
Im a female. I box. I fought a 17 year old boy that I could break over my knee like a dry stick. About all I remember is a yellow flash and the canvas hitting me in the head. He hit like a truck; one of two times in my life Ive been KTFO. Its much more than muscle mass and gross strength. Its about the way your body is put together. Well trained, experienced, fit and 15lb heavier and I couldn't hit as hard as that little noob on my best day
But surely you know that the ability to hit hard is often not a determining factor in boxing competition. Speed, accuracy, stamina, determination, arm length and a host of other things all play large parts.
@@rickl5596The point of a "woman's boxing competition" is to see which WOMAN is the best at boxing. Letting a man compete is an insult to both men, women, and the concept of sports itself
In martial arts it is axiomatic that a good, large fighter will defeat a good small fighter. There are exceptions, but this is exactly the reason there are weight classes in these sports-- they create a level of fairness. And I won't get into how the gambling aspect helps drive this system.
@@amorfo9127 nah, it definitely was completely logical. It’s an undeniable fact that athletic competitions are heavily impacted by your genetic makeup. do you really think splitting competitions between male and female makes it fair? She already listed every variable and difference. feel free to try to argue against it 😂
@@arturintete2461 The same logic applies to all sports. It's not fun to watch a 2000 elo play against a 400 elo chess player past the first few rounds. It's not fun to watch the world's most athletic men compete against the world's most athletic women.
"Athletes are biological extremes. Fairness has never been the point of these completions. They are really more like freak shows! Kind of like Physics Conferences." LOL - I love it.
This is a complete misunderstanding of professional sports and athletes. Athletes aren't biological extremes, they are just people that have decided to focus their efforts on improving themselves in their chosen sport like almost anyone can. They aren't special. And fairness has been a VERY important point when it comes to competitive sports where people are playing as a career. Otherwise things like using steroids would be permitted, or really ANY other kind of cheating. To say that "Fairness has never been the point" Is either totally ignorant or willing disingenuous.
@@GiRR007 athletes aren't biological extremes? how many 5'8" basketball players are you seeing succeed in the NBA? effort is absolutely a major part of the equation, but it's disingenuous to act as though biology has nothing to do with top athletes' success. you need both to succeed.
There was a comedian somewhere that suggested we should have one "normal" person off the street compete as a "control"... just to up the entertainment value.
i saw the suggestion yesterday that the olympics should have a random public draft - that it's just random people who are called up and you just have to do it. i'd watch.
In the video you explain that the advantages decrease over time with the administration of hormone therapy. I think this situation is compounded by the fact that, for the most part, sports are a young persons game. Very few athletes stay relevant even in middle age. The average age of medal winning gymnasts at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics was 20.6 years old. Athletes don't have the time to wait for the playing field to level. I also guess, but don't know for certain, that the biological differences between the physical performance of men and women is most pronounced at younger ages, the age demographic where they athletes are competing.
Still you have body height and bone structure even without going through male puberty. It just isn't fair. Especially in stregnth based sports. She said that it is not so much the case with endurance but even there the difference is not as small as she made it look. It is still significant.
Laurel Hubbard is a good example of what you're speaking to. She competed in the Olympics at age 43 and was considered a serious medal contender having ranked 7th in the IWF's women's +87 kg division. The biological women she was competing against were 10 to 20 years younger than her. She had a previous lifting career, then took more than a decade off and did not compete internationally for 16 years. That is an eternity to be out of training for an Olympic level competitor. She had only been training again for 3 years when she was selected for the Olympics. That is a suspiciously small amount of training for that level of competition. The fact that she took so much time off, but at age 43 was an Olympic contender after just 3 years training again demonstrates your point: even though her age has diminished her competitive abilities, as a biological male she continues to lift at the same standard as female competitors who have consistently trained and are in their prime.
@@XXXX-yc6wvhe* Can't believe your grandmother gave birth to your mother for you to turn around and reduce womanhood to a costume a man can put on. Get rid of your misogynistic views.
I find the story of Tom Dempsey really illustrative here, especially when compared with Michael Phelps. Tom Dempsey was a kicker in American Football who, in 1970, kicked a successful field goal from 63 yards (57.6 meters) out. This record stood for over 40 years, only being beat in 2013 by a single yard. Tom Dempsey also only had half a kicking foot. He was born with no toes on his right foot (and no fingers on his right hand). This mild disability gave him the ability to kick a football straight-on rather than needing to use the side of his foot. The advantages that would give are obvious. He had a custom shoe made to fit his foot, but investigation by ESPN sports science determined that that hadn't given him any more advantage than a normal shoe would a normal kicker. Even so, people were pissed. Noted union-busting piece of shit, Tex Schramm, openly said that he thought there should be an asterisk by Dempsey's record. And in 1977, a rule was made specifically saying that anyone kicking had to wear a normal shoe, no matter how much of a foot they did or didn't have. Tom Dempsey had a unique body that let him do something incredible, and people really didn't like that. Contrast this with Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps is a mutant who was genetically engineered to swim really fucking good. He has a huge torso and short legs (relatively speaking, he is 6'4"), a wingspan longer than he is tall, hyperextended joints that let him move like a mermaid, huge paddle feet, and he even produces half as much lactic acid (the thing that makes your muscles hurt when you work them hard) as his competitors. Michael Phelps and Tom Dempsey both worked incredibly hard and pushed their unique bodies to the peak of athletic ability. But one of them is celebrated, and one of them had the guy who invented the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and their hotpants say that his record didn't count.
This is not random and it makes sense. Phelps is still using his own body whereas Dempsey is relying on specialized external apparatus to enhance his performance. This is like if a boxer lost his arms in an accident and replaced them with metal prosthetics. We would not cheer for him either. Furthermore I should note that Phelps genetic mutation (Marfan Syndrome) is less obvious and well understood by the general public than the idea of having half a foot. So it makes sense that one would generate more ire than the other. They are simply not aware of Phelps' advantage.
@@yessum15 I said in the original post that an investigation determined the shoe hadn't given him any particular advantage. But even so, he still had to have immense leg strength and incredible aim to make that kick. He didn't have a rocket boot attached to his foot. That said, I will grant you Phelps' mutations are significantly less obvious than Dempsey's. But that's honestly kind of my point.
@@elijeschke You did say that the investigation determined the shoe gave no advantage. And I ignored that. Just like the people in your story. Want to know why? Because that is likely nonsense and people intuitively know it. People know that the likelihood the man with this rare physical abnormality and specialized equipment also just happens to be the best kicker ever is too big a coincidence. They also know that such a dramatic change to the major variables present having no effect positive or negative on outcomes is basically 0. This is like if every football player kicks a football but I throw a Frisbee and score dramatically different from the rest. It's gonna take more than a scientist simply declaring "the Frisbee made no difference" to convince people. We're going to need a mountain of high quality evidence here. Now consider the problems with getting _any_ evidence at all. Science is a slow process. It operates best when questions are narrowly defined and variables are limited. When sample sizes are large and research is conducted by disinterested neutral parties ashering to strict protocols. The number of variables present here is insane and the physics is very complicated. Having half a foot dramatically changes the muscle to weight ratio between his power generating hips, and the weight of the foot they have to lift. The swing is totally different. And the shape contacting the football is totally different. The traction on that shape is different. His body mechanics as a whole are different. It would take a great deal of money and time to attempt to get a solid scientific answer to these questions. On top of that their sample size is literally n=1 And the "investigation" is probably as far from scientific as one can imagine and is being organized by a non-scientific organization with a vested interest in a particular outcome. This "investigation" probably has about as much scientific credibility as that ridiculous simulated fight between Rocky Marciano & Muhammad Ali. Which is to say it probably has less credibility than the the scripted fights of Rocky Balboa. So given the extremely obvious nature of the deformity, its hugely intuitive likelihood of influencing outcomes, and the dearth of any real evidence to the contrary some skepticism is totally understandable.
@@yessum15 In case of all that, then what would you suggest Dempsey do? Should he not be allowed to play the game because he only has half a foot? Should he be forced to play with no shoe, disadvantaging him compared to every other player? Should he have to have an extra half-foot stuffed into a shoe, and if that's the case, wouldn't that also be a device that could potentially aid him? What's the solution here?
@@elijeschke No. Because everything I just described is good reason to _suspect_ an advantage but it is not by any stretch of the imagination proof of an advantage. The best solution is to do what they did. Let him play and let the losers talk trash. I was only pointing out that his detractors' talk wasn't entirely unreasonable. It is understandable why they would feel that way. But that doesn't mean we should act on their feelings.
Science as it should be. Not just throwing numbers and studies at the viewer, but actually understanding the method used, number of subjects tested and context of the study to weight the real compatibility of the resulta with the whole population. Keep up with the great content!
That being said, the numbers in these studies are quite small. Too small by most standards (11-12). Also, who funded the studies? Unfortunately, science is rarely unbiassed as there is always an incentive to satisfy the stakeholders (funders) with results they want or expect. After all, The tobacco industry funded peer reviewed studies that determined cigarettes are good for you and Coca-Cola funded peer reviewed studies that concluded that sugary beverages have no adverse health effects.
I am trans myself and heartily support the LGBTQ community, but prior to viewing this wonderful thoughtful educational video, I was also of the opinion that this was an unfair practice. Bless you for your no-nonsense fact based analysis that presented all sides without bias or sensationalism. Knowledge is power. I just wish more people sought after wisdom and acquiring knowledge rather than having knee-jerk reactions by listening to social media disinformation, their feelings or unquestioningly following the crowd. What a wonderful world it would be.
@@seth7745 Not all studies follow american practices that can lobby and pay off results to their liking. There is an international scientific community where this kind of practice simply doesn't work. We also have far more transparency with the scientific community today, so while your extremely common knowledge examples from over 50 years ago are examples of one kind of practice that does not mean that practice is a universal concern in an internet age where peer reviews, conflicts of interest, money trails, credibility of scholars, universities and institutions, are under constant scrutiny from anyone with an internet connection. "That being said", studies on top trans athletes in particular might be quite small, studies on the effects hormones have on muscle atrophy and or muscle increase, on the performance of top athletes with invisible intersex conditions, on the sexually dymorphic traits that influence competitive advantages, how prominent they are, and to what extent trans people carry them, are better documented, at least to a point where we can have a much more informed opinion on the issue even if we don't reach a definitive consensus. And keep in mind, the tobacco industry and Coca-Cola directly benefitted from these studies being published which is why the studies are directly related to what they are selling. Who exactly would benefit financially from trans people being allowed to compete in sports? I gotta be honest, I've yet to hear a person bring up "big money" being involved in regards to trans people being treated fairly and equally in society that didn't end in "the jewish question".
10:18 Sport have been "fair" based on the common understanding of the word "fair". We (humans) have sought to eliminate the most pronounced sources of unfairness (age&sex) by creating alternative leagues or divisions. An inability to achieve perfect fairness (not the goal anyway) is not the basis of an argument to give up on the pursuit of fairness entirely.
In terms of biological sex, trans women are closer to cisgender women than they are to cisgender men. If you are truly interested in pursuing fairness, you should know it's unfair to have trans women compete against cisgender men who haven't transformed their bodies and biochemistry in ways that align more with women than men.
Just legalize hormones and put everyone in the same league without exceptions on weight, gender or age. Lets ruin all sport careers for once as we have already started with women
2024 --> none participated and media tried to bully an athlete that was a cis women, born as a women but looked not that female in the public eyes and was framed by a russian boxing organization that couldn't even name the test they said female athlete failed. In the end the transgender debate will hurt female athletes too, because they don't look like a germany's next topmodel but an athlete of their sports.
Perhaps... But the money in pro sports comes from people willing to watch it (and their ads), so if most people turns their back on it because it's just about what rich people/teams bought/developed the most extreme gene modification, the money incentive will be gone. Still people want to be entertained, so perhaps either a shift towards blood/death/gladiator things (humans are humans), or things like driverless motor sport (no driver, so no genetic enhancement - just best motor, sensor, and programming/AI).
Also sports will always be part of our society because it is part of our human nature in so many ways. And since we love to optimize and earn money (love /need) there will always be the road to professiinalism
@@TheRealFlenuan I suppose it'll depend on why you follow sports... For the acheivments? Gone! It's about who could afford the best mods. Because you dream it could be you out there, or remembering how you almost made it as a youth? Nope! Anybody good were moded, injected and trained from before birth. Rooting for the underdog? No such thing anymore! Celebrating human acheivment and endurence? No! ...Unless you mean our ability to tamper with genes &c. Sure there are many other reasons to follow sport, but I do think they'd loose many - if not most - viewers.
The part at the end about how sports would incentivize unethical behavior brings to mind the Futurama episode where Lela tells fry about the time that steroids became mandatory for all Blernsball players to make the game fair.
Isn't that essentially the case now? I've heard that in many sports you can't be competitive unless you are taking steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. And none of our current pro sports even have "multi ball mode". As far as I know.
the steroids thing is tame compared to genetically modifying babies to maximize athletic output, but we're likely to be dealing with that in all aspects of life if it's not heavily regulated :(
To be fair, I would love to see professional basketball with different height groups. Not only would that allow for shorter men/women to compete professionally, but it would also be quite refreshing, since different height teams would have to utilize very different techniques.
The “transgender women should have their separate sports” argument always strikes me as a rehash of the “separate but equal” doctrine from the segregation era. “White people feel uncomfortable sharing a restaurant with black people! Why do you demand to be let into the white restaurant when there’s a perfectly good black restaurant down the street?”
I live in Seoul, Korea, where in 1988 Griffith Joyner set a women's 100-meter dash record of 10.49 seconds that remain unbroken to this day. But that same 10.49 seconds, which no other woman has been able to match for 36 years, would rank Joyner at around 3000th in the world as a male athlete. The athletic gap between men and women, especially when it comes to muscular strength, is quite substantial. World's best female tennis couldn't beat the world's best 300th best male player, etc.
Sabine picked a one off study. The results are nonsense. We know that even low tesosterone males stil have 5 times (!!!) more testosterone than a high T female. Read LARGE DIVERGENCE IN TESTOSTERONE CONCENTRATIONS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN: FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR ELITE ATHLETES IN SEX-SPECIFIC COMPETITION IN SPORT, A NARRATIVE REVIEW if you want to know more.
And Joyner was doped obviously. She was the female Ben Johnson. Perhaps contributing to her early death (yes I know not according to the official version)
Thank you for offering such a fair and unbiased look at the issue. As a transperson I cannot tell you how sick I am of everything trans-related being political or pushed with an agenda one way or the other. Please keep making great content, bringing facts, and offering many angles; It is refreshing.
I know what you mean. It's also really condescending to be told to not talk about politics as much or to watch less news as a trans person when everyone is out here making our very existence political -_- Edit: Not trying to make, /are/ making *
I think we’re all sick of the politics. I personally feel like we could have had a reasonable discussion about this as a society, taking into account the challenges of natural advantage balanced against the feeling of the individuals. There’s probably no perfect solution, but we could keep trying to make it better with time. Instead, it has been politicized with one side saying you must accept it without question and the other side predictably reacting to try and prevent all of it under concerns like unfair advantage. Both sides are ignoring the science, resulting is a lot of improper transitions (causing serious harm in society) while further stigmatizing those with actual physiological needs from the other end. It really is the extremes that are killing us.
@@michaelturner7641 pretty sure you mean people have either male or female genitals but can express themselves externally in a large amount of ways that don't conform to your backwards worldviews
@@michaelturner7641 It's actually not that simple unfortunately. Some people don't identify as male OR female. They're known as "Non-Binary" and might prefer an "X" gender marker on their ID. They don't generally look like boys or girls, but something in between. They feel uncomfortable using men's AND women's restrooms, and probably wouldn't feel comfortable competing on Men's OR Women's sports teams. They're the only reason we need a third bathroom or a third sports league; for the nonbinary individuals who don't want to be viewed as male or female. 🙃
She recovered from the 'freak show' comment with the 'physics conferences' comparison. I wonder why athletic competitions are more interesting freak shows? Hmm...
It's not fair, at every physics conference I've been to there's someone smarter than me and at every basketball game, many people way taller and somehow they're hardly ever trans. (though not always, that said, my basketball, swimming, and running careers were not derailed by trans people.)
I don’t think your argument at 10:19 about fairness really follows/makes sense. Especially after showing that the research suggest that trans women maintain a physical advantage over cis women. Even though your point that it’s technically unfair that any given individual has a physical advantage over another is true, I think we still want to avoid letting trans women compete with cis women because in the ultra-competitive world of elite sports trans women with such advantages will likely categorically rise to the top of their ranks and beat their opponents. People want to be aware of and praise the top performing biological females (cis women) for what they can do within that biological category
10:36 I’m pretty sure many people want to know what is the best that someone can perform considering their natural advantages *within the category of biological sex*
I agree with you but here in the posts for this video we seem to be a minority. I believe if a person wants to compete they should be able to. But thing's need to be balanced where they can. The only time I hear the word "fair" in any competition, sports,monopoly etc. is when cheating is suspected. If fair is the bar then a person could only compete against themself. Balanced allows for divisions. But more importantly with rules in place then it's on the person to decide if they will give it a shot. If I enter a row boat race and halfway in they announce we're allowing the use of Motors that's unfair to those that made their decision to compete based on the rules at the time. My question for those that think this happening is ok. So do we allow let's say Olympic athletes who have not won a medal to compete in the Special Olympics? Yes there will always be exceptions. Runners who have lost legs and compete with the help of prosthetics. In some automotive quarter-mile racing we had a Run what you brung. Cars were never even/fair. The choice to still compete knowing the rules was up to you which made it fair. Sorry I should have put this as a post.
Yeah, feels like mental gymnastics. I'm so confused when she said this part. We want fair competition so try to make it most fair. Fighting sport usually have weight range which reduce physical advantage.
@@Rheologist "I’m pretty sure many people want to know what is the best that someone can perform considering their natural advantages *within the category of biological sex"* But why "within the category of biological sex"? Is it just that we are so accustomed to partitioning people by sex that we can no longer imagine not doing it? What if someone wants to know what is the best that someone can perform within the category of having size-9 feet? Or the best that someone can perform within the category of being between 5' and 5' 6" tall? If any attribute affects performance, we can imagine partitioning people based on that attribute. Why single out sex, specifically, rather than any other?
@@omp199 Because sex is one of the biggest differences. Comparing 5'11" Allen Iverson to 6'10" Kevin Durant is interesting but they also played against each other, neither has played against Diana Taurasi and likely never will because the athletic gap is insane. There's been less than 20 total dunks in WNBA history. There's more difference between the sexes than any other category. There's only a few sports women can even compete with men at the highest level, yet you'll find men of all shapes and sizes throughout professional competitions.
Another sport where females tend to do as well as, and even better than males at times, is rock climbing. I'm just adding this to the pot.. I love how someone actually addressed the complexity of what is "fair" in sports, and what is meaningful. For the record I was a downhill mountain bike racer (I was much better at working with gravity than against it) I was also 35 when I started. This sport belongs to 19 year old males and I don't care.. I'm a HUGE fan of these wonderful freaks... my god they are fast and fearless. I love that. I was proud to be a part of this sport and showing women, even older women, that it's do-able. I've even seen older male cancer survivors enter races and I love this too. There is a bond between all of us. Age is definitely a huge factor. There were no age classes in women's DH mountain biking. I was competing with women half my age who lived in the resorts I was racing at. (They also had a training advantage) There was a controversy as well, with the first trans woman competing with the women in this sport. I wasn't at the pro level, so I had no problem with it. In fact, she was cheering all of us women in sport class at the end of the course, This was something I'll always remember. If I were at the pro level, I don't know what I would think, to be honest. One problem I have is when those with any kind of advantage stick around in beginner, sport, or expert classes when they should be competing in the sport, expert, or pro levels. (sandbagging) It's also true that some advantages may be because of funding.. I was lucky to be sponsored and had a great bike and mechanics in my corner. Sometimes it's about funding and access to resources...and now we can talk about Formula One and Nascar racing.. (Danica) and get into an entirely new discussion. Most of all, as a former competitive athlete, there has to be some meaning and entertainment value. For me, I was happy to just be on the race circuit. I was more of an ambassador to the sport. The primary entertainment value belongs to males in their late teens and early 20's. And I'm there for that. At the same time, this sport taught me so much and is accessible to women and older athletes as well. We all hung out together. I'll never forget that. Sponsorships can also happen for more reasons that being biologically exceptional. I was obviously not sponsored because of my great speed or technical abilities, but to be an ambassador for the sport. The point: It's complicated. LOVE this video. Thank you, Sabine!!
I was initially worried about how this video would shake out, but it was remarkably clear headed and dignified to all! I should have known that ultimately Sabine would end by completely dunking on professional athleticism entirely.
@@kathleenpearson-dh9od Those are entirely different moral questions. We are here to talk about the science, at least Sabrına is. What you are doing is shaming another person for not entertaining a personel belief on a science video, which I think is indefensable. I would be happy to discuss why the beliefs you hold are bigoted however. I am not a scientist (though I am a med student) so discussing morality is more in my wheelhouse.
@@yttrxstein4192 that’s usually how it is. Lots of new stuff are happening, so it’s to early to tell, and there might be things that might occur in the future that might take what we already know, and flip it on its head. Mainly due to reality being extremely complicated.
and let's not forget that those competitions mean something to those who put a lot of effort into training to compete! it is not only about winning a trophy but also money and opportunities afterwards.
I mean, most won’t get any money and opportunities afterwards. Thinking about profesional sports as a competition for money is flawed because most will make extreme sacrifices and still don’t make money. The effort and years of training and dedication do mean something to the athletes. But it’s not as if sports being unfair and taking away money that could have been theirs is their main risk.
@@yucol5661 nobody said it was the “main risk” Simply another cost for women from men participating in their sports.. despite their leagues being separated BY sex. It’s just so ridiculous…
Very informative and well-articulated. I especially appreciate the brief coverage of intersex conditions at the start, the philosophical exploration of "fairness" in sporting events at the end, and the humourous bits interspersed throughout. Thank you for making this.
But it isn’t though it’s the same exact thing every other person says “yes it’s not fair but sometimes life isn’t fair” ignoring the difference between controllable and uncontrollable advantage
It was a low quality compared to what she normally produces. Her conclusion is literally a Nirvana fallacy lol. Her analysis is also lacking a lot of relevant physiological differences between males and females yet she only focuses on males who have undergone "transition" of which the data pool is extraordinarily small while we already know for a fact that muscle insertions, distribution, and bone density stay the same. She, like so many others, is afraid of having her career assassinated by political zealots.
Intersex people are so rare you may as well say they are statistically zero. The issue is not people being born with female and male parts, it is people who feel they do not have the right parts.
would have been good to have a look at safety issues in contact sports. international rugby did quite comprehensive research into the safety of those who haven't gone through male puberty, playing with/against those who have, and there was about a 30% increase in injuries, including concussions. given that we are learning more and more about the very serious and long term affects of concussion, it seems extremely irresponsible to allow women who haven't undergone male puberty to be put at increased risk.
Sabine picked a one off study. The results are nonsense. We know that even low tesosterone males stil have 5 times (!!!) more testosterone than a high T female. Read LARGE DIVERGENCE IN TESTOSTERONE CONCENTRATIONS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN: FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR ELITE ATHLETES IN SEX-SPECIFIC COMPETITION IN SPORT, A NARRATIVE REVIEW if you want to know more. Yes! Women are way more injury prone. There are also studies looing at the injury rate in the British Navy I think. It was even hihger than your numbers. Women have crazy high injury rates in these fields.
@@thealrightygina5725 i actually mean people (cis women and girls, some transwomen and girls, and prebuscent boys) who haven't gone through male puberty are at risk playing with people (cismen, some transwomen) who have gone through male puberty. its not that hard to use clear language and also not be an a-hole.
@@trishna_6815 Oh, so you mean that you believe both that transmen shouldn't be allowed to play contact sports with cismen and that transwomen shouldn't be allowed to play contact sports with ciswomen because there's a purported 30% increase in injuries amongst transmen and ciswomen in such groupings? The way you put it didn't make a lot of sense to me but I think perhaps I've got it now.
11:16 context for those curious like me, she's talking about how professional athletes already represent the best of the best and can't be considered representative of the rest of the population.
That's right. And if in reality I was a Chemical Engineer, Structural Engineer or some other scientist who actually worked for a living, but insisted on admission into the Physics conference because I "identified" as a Physicist, then I could increase my chances of consideration if I took enough cognitive suppressing drugs that allowed me to share in the wonderful joy of string theory, supersymmetry and all of the other topics presented at the average conference.
"Woah woah woah, you used to say you were a Chemical Engineer but through years of hard work and persistence in study, you now have a paper certifying from the experts of your higher learning institution that you have a degree in physics and you want to be let in and treated like a Physicist since accredited experts say you are one? Nice try, Chemical Engineer. Maybe in another life" - physics conference people *and _certain other folks_
One issue not mentioned is bone structure which is a huge factor in why men are more powerful runners than women since their gait is straight versus a woman's gait is more rounded (hip structure allows more circular motion of the leg as it moves). No discussion about VO2 Max, fast twitch fibers, bone density, skeletal structure, and many other factors that contribute to the differences among men and women. A woman's fertility cycle also becomes an issue when she cannot devote an entire month of training. I thought these studies were incredibly simplistic in their view. You cannot limit a study to one or two variables and claim little difference but rather it must be viewed from a holistic approach that takes in all the differences among genders which cumulatively contribute to the differences. Since men lose so little with hormone therapy and they have a distinct advantage in sports in general, the unfairness is limited to the females. A "good" high school male runner can easily beat a world record holding female runner every time. I once compared Florence Joyner's world records for the 100 m and 200 m to high school males and she would not have ranked in the top 400. Those extremes cannot be overcome by simple hormone therapy treatments hence making female athletes unable to compete at these levels. If we are going to dismiss the notion of fairness, then we really don't need women's sports, paraolympics, special olympics, or any other category other than just sports. I am not in favor of the 'games just for the fittest' which would be limited to only male sports. I do believe there is an argument to be made that we must have distinct categories to offer a space for those who can compete at the highest levels just not against their male counterparts.
Well said. I can't believe the arguments put forth by Sabine in this video. The plethora of scientific evidence, decades old, tells us plainly there are significant differences in the kinesiology and performance of females and males. That can not be disproved by a few biased studies on transgender athletes performance that focus on a single metric. But then Sabine, after quoting all of this science, then negates the relevance of any scientific study, because of the "entertainment" factor. Well if a trans athlete competing with women will be more entertaining, why not go for the full show and have men and women compete? There is more to sports than entertainment. Solidarity and support, the witnessing of expertise and performance, receiving inspiration from dedicated people. You can have all the natural advantage in the world, but it's training and dedication that win events.
What it all boils down to is whether these differences, no matter how large or small, and regardless of whether they are attributable to one or more factors, can be overcome with training and effort. As she mentioned, the average male has no chance of becoming a successful NBA player. If you're 5'8'', no amount of training can overcome this and put you on an equal footing with a 6'6'' player.
@@Adam-nw1vyIt matters how large or small the differences are. If they're too vast, no amount of human, non-chemically aided, training could overcome those differences. Which they are, indeed, vast af.
@@Donald6309 And, like her, I'm saying that the difference between the average person and the typical successful NBA player is too vast, and that no amount of human, non-chemically aided training could overcome this difference. Do you disagree with this?
When I first read the title, I thought to myself “oh no, is she really gonna go there?!” I’m sure glad you did! I’ve never seen this topic tackled in such an objective and multidimensional manner and I commend you for doing so.
I agree. It's a "hot topic," but a valid question to ask and discuss. And science should be able to ask the uncomfortable of questions and look at them in an objective way. Although it may be a hallmark of transphobia, I believe it isn't transphobic to discuss how trans people in sports should work, or in prisons. And this was a good discussion of those issues, without being bogged down with feelings.
sense of fairness is important to competition. for certain contact sports such as wrestling, boxing or karate, weight is used to level the playing field. a 50kg player will be disadvantaged against someone who is 100kg.
"This is why I suspect a century from now, professional athletics will not exist anymore. It creates too many incentives for unethical behaviour." I agree that competitive athletics create incentives for unethical behaviour but that hasn't stopped anyone yet.
I really appreciate the sources in the comments. So many popular and trusted channels provide no sources which I think is messed up. Its a huge relief to be able to watch your videos and not have to worry about being lied to.
@@raykings5244 that's because that doesn't happen. Hard to find sources about something that doesn't happen. That's like trying to find sources about the dimensions of Santa's house in the North Pole.
I like the idea of "meaningful competition." We don't have to account for every variable either. Boxing has weight classes. Why not apply similar classes to sports based on advantages? Yes, it would be imperfect, but most things are until we observe and adapt.
I find it funny how the "fairness" goons are trying to force women's sports that include trans women to exclude them. The fairness goons FUCKING HATE flat-track roller derby because we've told them in no uncertain terms to get bent.
It's not just a matter of 'imperfect'; it's a matter of 'does it work at all'. For instance, the same blow landed on a woman will be much more likely to cause injury than on a male, due to bone strength and size (the latter applying even in cases of similar height-weight, curiously enough). So a woman competing against a man in a boxing match will be much more likely to suffer a broken bone or other serious injury than her opponent, EVEN IF they fall into the same weight class. That is neither fair nor meaningful competition.
@@katherineberger6329 'actively trying to destroy'? What on earth are you talking about? People pointing at the scientific literature and demonstrating that temporary HRT exposure doesn't magically erase the significant physical differences between male and female competitors are not trying to "destroy" people who don't fit neatly into "male" and "female." There is a complicated ethical discussion to be had about intersex people who have advantages within female sex segregated sports (with the most significant being XY chromosomal people with partial/complete androgen insensitivity and as a result naturally present as female). That conversation has nothing to do with the fairness of allowing natal males to compete against natal females under the (empirically verified to be false) presumption that undergoing hormone therapy to aesthetically appear more female makes one physically equivalent to a natal female competitor in sports performance.
@@KhukuriGod yeah but in many fighting games there are woman who consistencely in top 16. Its just that gaming events/ online evironment is generally toxic for woman so I think that I also why woman are less likely to participate in them
"They're freak shows. Kind of like physics conferences" that is pretty much spot on. There's no better argument for Borg infiltration than attending a large conference.
You think that pro sports will disappear due to high incentives for unethical behavior? I admire your optimism. Personally, I think we're much more likely to increase unethical behavior than get rid of sports.
perhaps it all boils down to people just wanting to enjoy the thrill of overcoming or outcompeting each other without any care for the methods or ethics involved therein...
The definition is professional is to get paid for the activity. The idea is that the money gets removed from the equation. But yes, agreed, I can't see prof sports going away in the foreseeable future.
I used to compete internationally at orienteering. It’s an interesting Sport in that all competitors can compete at self assigned levels, males and females, young and old, able bodied and those with disabilities, or those outside these groups. Awards were given for fastest time, as well as by gender, age and category. If you won in lower levels you moved up, regardless of body make-up. Seems like a very fair way of doing things.
That sport is basically irrelevant to physical ability, unless you're really messed up. Orienteering is more mental than physical. You might be able to run 4 minute miles, but if you suck at reading maps, you're probably not going to do all that well. The same way physical ability doesn't matter much in chess. I don't think anyone would really care who was what in chess. Nor would they in orienteering. But physical sports are a whole nother ballgame, so to speak. A 140 pound female would get near killed on a NFL field full of men....
11:24 regarding the entertainment value of sports; It's more interesting to watch a sporting event where the contestants are closely matched but have slight variations in abilities than watching one team curb-stomp the other. That is, of course, unless the one doing the stomping is the one that is considered the underdog.
I think this is going to be the ultimate relevant factor in sports competitions. Does anyone really want to watch a trans man destroy a bunch of cis women in any kind of competition? Is that interesting? Exciting? It would be boring as hell, and honestly would make me pretty mad. I don't see how any trans man can possibly think he is earning that win. If I joined a kid's competition and wiped the floor with them, have I earned it? It's not a fair competition. Everyone knows it isn't. The trans man especially should know that it isn't. No one is going to pay to watch events like that.
Its interesting to note that the paralympics do classify people by giving them a handicap; thus enabling many people with varying levels of the same type of handicap to compete against one another. Of course this doesn't remove all differences, but does allow for a certain level of reasonable competition. In the end this is all that can be done; like the way we separate competitors with respect to age. Today we even have senior competitions. Should we provide every person in the world with a handicap evaluation such that someone who is half-blind can complete on the same level as someone who has perfect vision in archery? I'm sure there isn't a perfect answer to this question; as the answer will depend on the objective of competition. Is it to amuse the spectators, it is to make money for the performers, or profit to the business people? Good luck solving that riddle!!
Perhaps what should then be included in professional sports is an active 'handicapping' negotiation segment where teams or individuals are handicapped based on pre-event negotiations by the managers or coaches. Like in hot rod street racing! Michael Phelps, no one will race you unless you give them x seconds head start!
This is a crazy utopian idea that will, if implemented, destroy elite sports for spectators and thus lead to their complete collapse. We watch sports to see the amazing feats the very best athletes can pull off. Seeing Bolt win by 0.5 seconds in a ten second race makes more people want to watch, not less. Seeing a man who identifies as a woman beat people by that distance in a women's race, would have those who aren't utopian fantasists throwing their remote control through the TV and not replacing it.
I am very used to seeing videos with titles like this one ending up being statements of opinions with half hearted proofs, and I am very happy to have learned so much in this one! Very comprehensive and truly instructive, thank you for making this topic so understandable !
It's unbelievable how such basic concepts (the difference between males and females when it comes to strength, endurance etc, and not only in terms of testosterone) are now "controversial". Great of you to talk about it, many don't have the courage and unscientific messages are allowed to go around and spread.
@@thesunreport who's trolling? You're the one who's insulting without even trying to come up with an argument. An example of why this kind of videos are so important
Sabine, it is possible that the low testosterone scores for elite male athletes was a result of them coming off of their steroid cycle. These kind of scores are often seen in athletes who are known to use steroids, Jon Jones is a good example. It is very unlikely that a man with levels of testosterone comparable to elite female athletes would be able to compete at an elite level with men… unless of course he’s just coming off a steroid cycle
Just read the discussion of the paper. These levels were measured after an event, and extreme stress can deplete your testosterone levels apparently. Often this is recovered after a good night's sleep. This study was a spin-off from a study on the effects of doping, so roids have definitely been checked for :) The interesting part of this paper isn't necessarily about testosterone, but differences in lean body mass. They even conclude that using serum testosterone as a means to exclude certain women from competition is untenable, and that LBM is likely a much more important marker.
@@sandrawiersma2512doping still takes place at extraordinarily high levels at the olympics and not usually in very specific and borderline undetectable way, very hard thing to control for even in a study of this magnitude
Arguments of some people that sport in general is unfair because for example some women are taller than others, therefore, they have advantage in playing basketball makes no sense. It's only natural and normal that within a sex category (male or female) obviously the people with the best physical attributes for a given sport will participate in it. Tall women will play basketball etc, short women might go into figure ice skating etc.The issue comes when we have a group of the best female athletes, both when it comes to a talent and innate physical attributes necessary to perform best in a given discipline, so we cannot actually find anyone better in the female category, and then comes someone whose only talent was being born male. All female basketball players will be tall and female, but one can be as tall and male. And this is what makes it unfair.
"All female basketball players will be tall and female, but one can be as tall and male" and what does it matter? In that case "male" means you have another power, being genetically stronger what is an advantage just like "a tall woman". So the Person would have simply two advantages, being a Woman that is tall and genetically stronger. It is not the Gender that is the problem, it is the genetically advantage the Transwoman has then. But that doesn't make her less of a Woman. Just a double strong Woman. Therefore Sports should be devided by abilities and advantages, that take the biological sex obviously in account. But the Biological Sex has not to do with what Gender the Person is. It just shouldn't be called Women Sports or Men Sports, if it excludes Transpeople. They should just say Sports or use Terms that refer to the Genetically Advantages and Abilities. But thats "difficult" and "complicated" so people rather refer to it as Women and Men Sports, even if it excludes Men or Women with different Biological Advantages. There are alot of Ciswomen that are Tall and just as strong as a man, that have the two advantages then. But then it would be fine? As already said, Sports should be seperated by abilities, not gender.
I'm increasingly skeptical that science actually has much to say on this. It's a democratic, collective issue, not a facts-and-logic issue. All this discussion of HRT is a red herring. The point of female athletes is for women to have relatable individuals to look up to in the domain of sports and physical achievement. The same for male athletes. The majority of the female population is cis. It's only fair that they get a category that fits their general experience. Ideally there's simply a category for everyone. Who cares which is most prominent... the Special Olympics can be incredibly meaningful for the athletes who compete in it. And objectively it is just as "hard" as the regular Olympics, if not harder. Similarly for the hypothetical Trans Olympics.
We don't allow employers to join unions because we recognize it is not in the collective interests of the majority of the workers. But employers *are* employees, they work for the company too. And there are pro-labor employers out there, who identity with workers and would likely not negatively impact the union. There's no perfect dividing line. Yet unions generally don't open membership to employers. There's just bits of inflexibility in the world that you have to accept, because none of these institutions are perfect, and none by themselves safeguard the general welfare.
@@theshadowsroses Well, you can say that transwoman's gender is "woman", but her sex is still male. The division in sports has never been based on gender (self-identification) but on sex (physicality) because that's what matters in sports performance. I find it "fascinating" that although "gender community" has always been saying that sex and gender are two different things, now they seem to conflate the two when it benefits them.
@@ZawieHahis sex is still men. It's pretty offensive towards women that just because a man says so, he is suddenly seen as a woman. It's denigrating and humiliating against real women. And the women that support this misogyny are just women too eager to humiliate middle class workers by forcing us to accept men in the same bathrooms our daughters are.
No completely solar panels can be placed in area like water canals that would help with algae growth without disturbing land also solar can work with distribution verses Transission and battery storage like Hopedale Australia has proven the concept while also showing how batteries have helped during g peak operation instead of starting up a peaked plant which is vastly expensive saving the customers money united Arab emeritus use solar for pumping gas at 5 cents a kilowatt hour and if no sun or wind for 3 days we'll we would have another more to worry about than energy
Sorry, but she's a professional LIAR: TWO QUESTIONS THE SABINE HOFFSTEDER AND OTHER LIARS WILL REFUSE TO ANSWER Firstly, if at some point in a physical endeavor, strength becomes a secondary factor to endurance, and women are supposedly able to cope better than men when it comes to physical endurance, why is it that even in extreme endurance events like the Navy Seals Hell Week and Ultra Marathon Runs that men still continue to show significantly higher levels of endurance than women? Why is it that only ONE woman Grace O’Rourke, has ever been recorded in all the history of Hell Week to endure its brutal and punishing physical regimen and practically ALL the most significant endurance records listed in the Guinness Book of World Records are held by men? Secondly, if fairness is essentially a meaningless concept in competitive sporting events, what’s the point of even having rules that punish cheating or doing anything that gives one competitor an unfair advantage over another?
@@allijnera That was based on skewed data collected from the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim ( between the years 2009 and 2010). The women in the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim were on average significantly YOUNGER than the men (33.7 versus 41.5 years) In marathon swimming events where men and women are the same age, the men dominate.
I'm reminded of an analysis of world speed records. I believe the conclusion wasn't just that some athletes born since the 1900s are longer limbed and faster, but also that they have much better technology to assist their training and performance. The improvements in running footwear, performance monitoring, nutrition/hydration improvements, training and much more all play a part. It's not entirely accurate to say that the worlds' athletes are better/taller/faster now than 100 years ago, but that they are better trained, have better gear, and have been socially/financially selected for specific characteristics that push them into those fields as well as possibly being born with more/different advantages than their predecessors. Is it "fair" that some nations are willing to spend more to select and enhance their athletes for certain events/sports than other nations can? That's an advantage that could be controlled for, yet we don't. They certainly have better outcomes most of the time. Look at China/Russia with gymnasts. You see nations recruiting people from around the world to compete in their sports, when those people could be representing their nations of birth if that country had similar resources to train/promote their athletes. Not unlike politicians who can spend/fund raise unlimited money vs those nations where campaigns are limited in from where and how much money they can spend, it makes a huge difference in the outcomes and representation of the general population.
Explain to me how that justifies men joining women's leagues. If sport's unfair so who cares anyways, then just get rid of women's leagues and disability leagues entirely, no?
Ladies and gentlemen this is a Nirvana fallacy. "Because we can't filter all the contaminants out of the water we shouldn't filter any" ps. If your ideology is blatantly embracing a fallacy as its Flagship argument you should probably reevaluate Your alliance.
10:16 THIS! This is something I've been thinking a lot. Can we not do things to make this more fair? How come combat sports have not only gender division but also weight divisions that allow a much wider range of people to participate, while if I, for example, I'm not lucky enough to be at least 2m tall, my chances of becoming a professional basketball player are basically crashed.
Firstly, there are many basketball players well under 2m, usually playmakers, Spud Webb even won the dunking competition at 1.7m. Of course height helps, but taller players are often also way clumsier and slow so it's a fairly fair trade off. Volleyball is actually the sport where height matters a lot more. But anyway, you can't really create a separate league for players 170-180cm, another for 180-190cm players, etc, whereas division by gender is very simple and also (in most sports) not something that can be overcome with training. A team of average sized male players would still destroy a female basketball team with everyone being 190cm+ for example. The differences are far bigger. The same actually comes into play in martial arts, as someone with about 80kg I have absolutely not chance against someone of roughly similar skill with 100kg, body mass just matters that much more in those sports
We already do this by having different leagues ranging from hobby to professional, there are amateur and semi-pro leagues for virtually every sport including fighting. But the sports that people watch are the best of the best, they want to see the top athletes competing and that's where the money is, the more you try to include athletes at lower levels, the less people will want to watch.
Thank you for your objective and honest depiction of the science! An important (in my opinion) question that hasn't been addressed here is the question of whether trans people might also have to deal with the disadvantage of having gone through gender dysphoria? I.e. are trans people statistically less fit than other people of their biological sex at the start of their transition?
"Sports have never been fair" It's a fantastic way to put it. Just look at the birth months of professional baseball players. August 18.6 26.6% September 17.8 21.1% October 15.9 8.2% Why would this be? What does their birth month have to do with ability? These kids were as old as possible when they start school. In fact in many states if haven't turned five by a certain date you don't have to start school that year. This means children will be larger and have an advantage in sports for their age. This is an example of the Matthew effect where people with an advantage gain more advantages over time. The month that you were born in contributes overwhelmingly to the possibility of you being a professional athlete. That's definitely not fair.
No it's not, the only reason women's sports exist is to let women compete against other women without men. Excluding males from competing is the entire reason women's sports exist. It's a terrible argument.
I learned this fact a few months ago and was so surprised. It perfectly shows how unfair sport is. People really underestimate the effect luck have on an outcome. So many people like to believe it’s all a 100% hard work.
@@juimymary9951 Absolutely, but everything we're talking about today is statistical. Taller basketball players are statistically more successful in basketball, but that doesn't erase the fact that Muggsy Bogues was successful and was only 5'3.
@@AiguilleVoodoo We all like to think that we deserve what we have because we work hard, and while working hard does contribute, there is so much luck in everything we do. Being born into a country where you can get an education, being born to a family that can afford to feed you good food, pay for college and on and on. It's uncomfortable fact that working hard is only one factor in being successful in anything.
@Sabine, in the video, you presented percentage statistics for the effects of hormone therapy on trans men and trans women. But percentage increase vs. decreases aren't directly comparable. A 1% increase in body mass does not always correspond to the same amount of mass as a 1% decrease. The former can be smaller than the latter when starting from different body masses. This is important in comparing the statistics about the effects of hormone therapy on trans women and trans men. If the body changes happen after puberty, the trans women's changes are likely measured from a larger body mass than for the trans men. So a 1% decrease in body mass for trans women can on average be a larger amount of mass than a 1% increase in body mass for trans men. In comparisons between countries with different population sizes, this kind of problem is handled by quoting changes per some fixed amount of people (e.g. percent per 100,000 of population). Might a similar comparison help somewhat here (e.g. percent per kilogram of body weight)? It may not change which of trans women and trans men experience the larger change, but it will make the gap appear smaller.
When I saw the card, I can't say I wasn't concerned. This is something that hits close to home for me. After watching it I have to say this was extremely well done. Thank you for compiling all this data and presenting it as you did.
Same here. And let's not forget why this topic is hot right now. Because American conservatives, who never cared for woman sports, are creating a moral panic around trans people.
We need to make a separate category for them. I have no bad feelings for trans people, to each their own. However, just because someone wants to become another sex identity does not mean you developed the same.
This video was an absolute blast. I love how dry your joke delivery is, you made me laugh so hard and presented a logical and well-supported argument at the same time. Keep on producing such amazing content!
I thought the random Meghan Trainor lyric would be the highlight of this video, but then there came: "Athletes are biological extremes. Fairness has never been the point of these competitions. They're really more like freak shows. Kind of like physics conferences, basically." 😆
This quote is so degrading to people who put in hard work and determination. And also degrades the people who lose... As though winning is the only reason we have sports. A tall lazy man always loses to a short hardworking one. The people who think trans people can compete don't even watch sports.
@@dansfrance188 There are no lazy tall athletes at elite level. They are competing with other motivated abnormally tall athletes. The short person has no place there no matter how hard he/she trains.
@@66Kusmu Us women’s Olympic soccer champions lost to 15 and under boys. Same with the Australian women’s Olympic soccer team. They lost to 14 year old boys. Trans men have an unfair advantage on women when it comes to physical sports. That’s why you don’t have any examples of transitioned women to men in male sports.
"Fairness" is indeed a complex concept in sports. I have a condition that was at one time known as "Clumsy Child Syndrome," but despite the name, I did not grow out of it. It is more than just what typical people mean by being "clumsy," but is not the same level of physical impairment as would be seen in, for example, cerebral palsy. (At one point, it was thought to be on a spectrum with cerebral palsy.) I cannot compete "fairly" with typical people in sports. With very hard work, I might be able to get to the low end of normal in some specific sport, but if the people I'm competing against work just as hard or even quite a bit less hard, I will still lose. Whether you call it "fair competition" or "meaningful competition," the only way for me to have it would be if there were a Clumsy Child Syndrome version of Special Olympics. There isn't. For one thing, there aren't enough of us. "Competing with myself" is not an absurdity to me; it is the only meaningful participation in score-keeping sports I can have. I sometimes say that I am "the worst bowler you will ever meet with my own ball and shoes," and I get very excited if I can bowl my age, a feat which, obviously, keeps getting more challenging as I get older, but still involves a score even most casual bowlers would consider embarrassing. Interestingly, the one and only advantage my condition has given me is that I do not have very strong left/right hand dominance; I am fairly ambidextrous. But the rules of bowling say I cannot use this advantage, because it would be "unfair" to people who weren't born with ambidexterity. Funny how that works, huh? The ONE advantage I, a very disadvantaged bowler have, would be "unfair" to everyone else, but my clumsiness is not considered "unfair," just the way things are. I can't help but think, "Oh, NOW you care about fairness? Heads you win, tails I lose, THAT'S what's 'fair'?" See what I mean about fairness being complicated?
As a kid, used to play pickup sports with someone who definitely would have fallen into “clumsy child syndrome” (tripped a lot, odd way of running). I THINK he started taking a certain medication and ended up being one of the better athletes on high school sports teams (especially basketball.) Was an amazing transformation.
I was just a nerd. I sucked at all sports, though I wasn't as bad as they portray it in movies, I could actually hit a softball. I did actually play youth soccer, but I was a bench warmer. My coach would put me in a few minutes a game.
Fairnes does not exist. It's an illusion of perception, an abstraction like luck, success, money, and power. Nothing is really fair. It's just rules we invent to make sense of the world. Should we even be surprised those rules are biased to our beliefs and, in essence, also unfair? Luck, or random chance, is by far the most important factor for anyone's success, and yet successful people still attribute most of it to their hard work or talent. Most world records in runs were achieved with a tailwind. Most professional athletes are born in certain months, and becoming super rich is mostly achieved by already being richer than average to begin with. The entire discussion of fairness on inconsequential things like sports or art or what have you, is meaningless. Is it fair that most workplace accidents with power tools happen to left-handed people? Is it fair that the chances of achieving your dreams are basically 99% determined by where you were born? No. Of course not. Should we still strive to make it fair? Probably. Will we ever get there? Absolutely not.
@@FractalParadox That said, what would you suggest for trans women athletes? Seems to me it’s “fair” to allow trans women athletes to compete if did not experience puberty as a male as a start while the issue is looked into more (the position taken by one of the sports institutions.) I’m curious if competition by weight class regardless of gender would be a solution.
@@FractalParadox The fact that something is an "abstraction" does not mean that it does not exist as something "real," even if it is intangible. For example, "success" means "achieving your goals." It doesn't in itself define what the goals are, and some goals people set for themselves are more achievable than others. People succeed at a wide variety of things every single day. In a similar way, just because some things are things that we realize we will never fully achieve does not mean they are not real, any more than an asymptotic value is unreal in math. It is real as something to be striven toward, even if it never becomes real as something already achieved. People who too readily say "Life will never be fair" sometimes use that as an excuse not to strive to make it any more fair than it already is. I think it's good to value fairness as a real concept, because it keeps us striving. It's also worth considering that maybe "unearned" is not always "unfair." It is what we do with unearned advantages that can determine whether a situation is fair. People of equally good will may not always agree on what's fair, but it's worthwhile to continue debating it, such as whether ambidexterity is any more "unfair" an advantage than other unearned qualities that increase performance in sports. I think in the course of that debate, some people might face the fact some of their own advantages are just as unearned as those they want to outlaw because they happen to be held by other people rather than by themselves.
Excellent breakdown. Your analysis exposes the challenges here and the need for divisions in sports without going overboard. There are obvious differences, amateur vs pro, high school vs college, women vs men, weight classes in boxing and wrestling. Differences that are undeniable but within those divisions you are free to excel. I started racquetball league in "C" class, but after winning the league I had to move up to "B" league and then "A" were I was outclassed by about half my competition. Was this due to an unnatural advantage they had? No, they worked harder than me. Should I have been allowed to stay in "C" class where I had no competition and no one else had a chance to win? Why should someone who has worked hard, a lot of them most of their lives, to excel within their division be forced to compete with those that obviously don't belong in that class that?
Before I went on HRT I tried to see how many pushups I could do. My sedentary ass could do 10. Now I'm 6 months on T, and I could do 20. I'm still a sendentary ass obviously. But it kinda surprised me, cuz it had never been easy for me to do 20 pushups, even back in my weird gym bro phase
Why can't you do a pushup? I was 32 when I went to US Army basic training in Jan of 1982. I started training for my enlistment and was in much better shape than others were. I was 5'7" and weighed 130 lbs. At the end of USArmy Basic Training I was able to do 67 pushups in 2 minutes, 69 situps in 2 minutes and run 2 miles in 13.2 minutes. 20 years later, at age 50, I could equal the same scores. At age 34, I went to USArmy Parachute school. I saw Marines get run off. I saw men that were age 18 - 30 drop out of runs that were very challenging. At parachute training school, 5 women got their wings. They weren't men transitioning to female. They were petite, small girls. There is no reason a man cannot do a pushup. If you are willing to train, you can do it. Your mind is your biggest enemy. I was never an athlete. In school, I was always the last one picked. I couldn't run fast, I couldn't throw a ball, and I couldn't get a basketball into the basket. What happened? What was different at Airborne School? I decided I was a winner. Nothing was going to stop me. Attitude is the key.
I just came here to flex on you specifically. I can casually do 20 push-ups no drugs after not doing it for weeks. To be fair I'm a short teen but still.
11:35 That's just wrong. We did not segregate sports by sex because otherwise they'd be too predictable. A non-segregated sport would be no more predicable than a male sport, since women would simply fail to qualify. And we know this, because many "male" leagues are in fact "open". We segregated sports because we wanted women to practice them, and this requires that they have a change of winning. Not winning the Olympics necessarily, just winning at some level. And allowing transwomen to compete against women does defeat this goal. It's like allowing non disabled people in the Paralympics.
@@lomiification Transwomen are men. But even if they were women it would be irrelevant, because the goal is to protect a physically disadvantaged group, hence the criterion has to be physical not psychological.
I like the picture at 10:42 because it makes it obvious that certain sports select for certain traits in their athletes. If going through puberty as a male and transitioning afterwards is an accepted feature of an athlete, it will be a trait some sports will select for. I imagine it will be an advantage in let's say boxing or rugby. Maybe in the future there will be pictures like these with exclusively trans athletes because, as sabine said, sports isn't fair and some women are just born lucky to have long legs, great flexibility, or testis.
The fact that sport, like life, is not exactly fair, is not an argument for making it less fair. If it was then we would remove all categories: sex, age, disability etc. but nobody is arguing for that, so I don't see why anybody can make a special case for sex.
disabled athletes CAN compete… its just that due to (depending on disability) they may not qualify. same with age, you can be 60 and try to qualify all you want, your just probably wont make the cut. the trans in sports argument outright bans those competitors, preventing them from even qualifying.
@@philipripper1522 If she does then she does. I'm pointing out unless she says it unambiguously then it's not a stance. That's all. It's unfair but it's still OK. It's wrong but it's acceptable. It didn't fit the current fact but it's still not contradictory. That's basically what she said. (Rephrasing)
4:35 - "And there was a significant overlap between them." Not seeing much overlap on those slides myself. Unless you mean 'significant' to mean 'it exists' rather than 'there's a lot of it.' Re: 'Fairness' - The broader a net we cast to find a person fit for a certain task, the more 'extremely fit' our finds will be. If we search 10 people, we're unlikely to find anything extraordinary. If we search a million, we're likely to find many. If we search a billion, we'll find the people absurdly fit for purpose. Thus it's worth thinking about the selection pool w.r.t 'representation.' Trans people being a tiny minority, casting a net therein should yield mediocrity compared to the much larger selection pool of men/women in general. Yet trans women excel. And trans men do not. I don't think there's a great mystery to be found here, or anything particularly difficult or complicated to parse. Male puberty brings advantages that don't seem to go away, and the sex categories in sport were introduced precisely to work around this. If, in the end, we find that the top spots are consistently taken by trans women, then the 'women's category' becomes one where the biological women play second fiddle to trans women. I think it's a self-correcting problem in the end; Women will eventually object to losing to trans women. Then the trans women will be kicked out of their league, or women will make a new one with requirements that keep trans women out of it. As for your argumentum ad absurdum 'if we're going to make a category for trans people, why not for everything else as well?' I'll note that this argument cuts against categorisation as a whole, not just against the idea of a trans category. And as both you and I know that we're not abolishing the whole categorisation system nor introducing infinitely many new ones until we hit the individual level, presenting this idea seems either pointless or at best misleading. We could of course simplify the whole thing by just making a lot of 'leagues' anyone can compete within to rise to the 'league' above. The 'top 100' league would be the top 100 people in the world. Top 200 would feature the 101st to the 200th, and so on. In some competitions we'd start finding women in the 500-1000's. In others, we'd find them near or in the top 100. I don't know how much interest people would have in looking at the 500-1000's, so it seems likely to abolish 'female sports' in those areas. Who knows, that kind of competition might bring out new and interesting things in our female athletes.
The Problem of the TOP 100 Leages is, that in most sport you will never find a woman in there, because of the huge differences between the sex in the "exceptional" people.
By significant she probably means statistically significant, meaning it is enough of an overlap to not be a statistical anomaly. So yes, significant as in it exists.
This is the red flag. I can't understand how natural T levels can overlap between healthy, athletic men and women without drugs. A man with a level of 300/DL is borderline hypogonadal. How many women on earth are walking around with that much testosterone? That's crazy
In sociology we think competition is mainly between peers (who's are seen as similars), because of comparability principle. When protagonists look not comparables, we not see it as a competition.
Sabine picked a one off study. The results are nonsense. We know that even low tesosterone males stil have 5 times (!!!) more testosterone than a high T female. Read LARGE DIVERGENCE IN TESTOSTERONE CONCENTRATIONS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN: FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR ELITE ATHLETES IN SEX-SPECIFIC COMPETITION IN SPORT, A NARRATIVE REVIEW if you want to know more.
@@markus4925 She spends the second half of the video saying that it’s not just about physiology and they need to analyse fairness, competition, and entertainment. Did you not watch that far?
Hi Sabine Appreciate the video and quite informative. I must say though, I'm a bit lost with the conclusion, or it has gone over my head, but it appears you are arguing that segregating sports by sex is not benefical, "because athletes have so many differences (usain bolt legs, etc) that sex alone is insufficient"... however it occurs to me that if we removed sex as a category, or removed all categories, and women and men competed together, does that not mean we will never see women tennis players competing in finals? women soccer teams competing at high levels? women boxing, women any physical sport pretty much, because men will simply dominate in every field? I saw a website which compared 16year old school boy athletes against Olympic level adult women and by direct comparison the school boys would have gotten gold/silver/bronze in almost all categories when compared against adult women? So essentially, my question is, by removing categories as suggested, are we not simply erasing women's chance for competing at top levels? Is that an end result we want to achieve? Thanks
That wasn't her point. She said that while gender makes sense as a categorization, not every difference does. So the question of trans people in sports is one of interesting competition, not whether there's a difference. Trans women have been allowed to compete with cis women in the olympics since 2003, but they're not dominating the playing field. It seems pretty clear that despite the differences between trans and cis women, there's interesting competition there.
@@kirablagoev8534 While it's true that transgender athletes have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2003, none openly did so until 2020. Two did that year and one qualified as an alternate. The one who was an alternate did so in freestyle BMX. Not sure how much advantage being born male brings to that sport. This was also the first year it was an Olympic event. Of the other two, one was competing and contending for a medal at an age that is extremely rare for Olympians in her sport, weightlifting. She had trouble at the Olympics, but was ranked 7th in the world even as an older competitor. The other trans woman athlete at the 2020 games received a gold medal. Yes, while technically true that trans women are not dominating the playing field, it is still early days and the data we have seems to indicate that it is possible, if not likely.
@@kirablagoev8534 the incidences of men with identity issues beating women off the podium are increasing in number. I notice men's sports are not at all affected by this issue.
We're going through some of this in our sport, powerlifting, with a heavy component of strength (and as a result, testosterone plays a large role in performance). We think the international governing body will only be forced to take a position if and when a trans athlete wins their weight class at the world level. I really appreciated your comments on fairness in general amid the genetic differences in the human population as a whole. In sport, we never see clones facing off against each other. Thanks for the video!
@@rudolphschmitler725 Yeah, and she didn't complete a single lift... I think that's proof enough that being AMAB doesn't automatically make you better 🤷
@@sianmilne4879 If you think that proves something, you really need to go back to high school biology class. The science is overwhelming. Average male athletes utterly dominate world-class females 1st time out. There are dozens of examples of this and more every day. Educate yourself.
@@revspikejonez There was no point made there. If you think men do not have an inherent (and overwhelming) physical advantage over women (I can't believe that this is even a conversation. This world is insane), then show me one example of a woman competing with men at a high level in any sport. NCAA, Olympics, NFL, etc. Go ahead. I'll wait.
@revspikejonez to his point, with 0.4%-0.7% representation in general population that weight lifter almost managed to get to the finals. If this truly doesn't make a difference, wouldn't we see trans men represented in men sports?
Where exactly do they allow people to have surgical and hormonal transition before puberty? Here in the US as far as I know you're not allowed to do any of that before age 16 even with parental consent, and most people, especially XX people, will be well on their way through puberty before then.
Kudos to you for taking on such a “third rail” topic, and doing it so well. I absolutely love your analysis of current professional sports and the prediction for its future. I have always felt the same way, professional sports is basically a six-sigma freak show. Some people find it entertaining, some people find it kind of pointless.
All professional pursuits are pointless, as is life itself. That doesn't mean one can't find meaning on a personal and group level doing pointless things
@@DavidHRyall I don't think they mean like it is for nothing, it's that some people don't care for it. Like, I don't care to watch sports but it's mostly because I end up wanting to play the sport rather than cheer on gladiators.
Taking on a third rail topic to mouth the pieties of 99% of our elites is not really so third rail. It's akin to publicly opining one's on board with defund the police.
@Shnizza pie sports aren't just a whose the born the strongest competition. The level's of ridiculous dedication and love for the craft is what's incredible. You watch them to learn and figure them out to try and perfect it, to push yourself. Just like you do anything you want to excel at. You learn from the masters.
@@KristopherNoronha "when she said "all sports are freak shows" i thought that's going to be a tough statement to keep socially acceptable" Same here. I thought: 'No, Sabina, you can't say that!'. And then, when she said: "Kind of like physics conferences", I thought: 'Right, that self-deprecating remark is going to save you from all that horrible kick back that was coming'.
Of course some people have athletic advantages over others. The goal of sport is to see who is best. Categories exist to allow similar types of people to compete against each other, to make it fair. Fairness is a goal of sport. That is why we have so many different events. This allows the opportunity for those with many different body types and skill sets, to participate in sport. I think you are incorrect to say you could never be an athlete. Have you ever trained enough to find out what your athletic abilities are? It is motivation which is a major factor in ability, however whatever sport you competed in it is highly likely a man (who also trained for that sport) of same age and size would beat you.
Yes, but look at Stricly Come Dancing. We COULD watch the very best dancers, but we don't. We watch a bunch of celebs competing to dance, not so well, but there's going to be a winner. Athletics could go this way.
@@rogerstone3068 I doubt it. The Olympic games started over 2700 years ago and it is still around. Humans are competitive by nature, that is what evolution has created in order to survive. We are still competitive in modern society in an economic way as men want money and power because that attracts a mate and a woman wants beauty and charm. There are outliers, but this is rather a rule for the vast majority. Simple evolutionary biology. People want to see the extremes of what a human body can do, so there will always be competitive physical sports at the highest limits because that is also a way we can say our team (tribe) is better than your team (tribe).
@@joeiborowski9763 "It is still around" makes it seem like it has been practiced continuously for 2700 years, whereas the reality is that the modern Olympics were rather spontaneously created about 130 years ago. As an aside, I've noticed that people who say something is categorically "simple evolutionary biology" are often the least suited to explain evolutionary biology to others.
In regards to genetics engineering ending professional sports, I think a few points have been missed. One such point is that we don't always know what constitutes a genetic advantage. It is especially true for complex sports. Who would have guessed that one of the best football (soccer) players of all time would be a short man with growth problems as a kid? Even in more simple events, it can be hard to know. In the early 2000's it was generally accepted (and backed by research) that the ideal body for the 100m dash was a fairly short and very muscular to achieve the best compromise between top speed and acceleration. Fast forward a few years and the fastest sprinter of all times is 6ft5. I think that in most sports, genetic engineering won't provide as much of an advantage as we think. Another point, and perhaps the most important, is that professional sport has only one main driver : money. As long as people remain interested, there is a financial incentive. The numerous doping scandals have never stopped people from watching the olympics, so I don't see why genetic engineering would. I guess my conclusion is that I don't see professional sport disappearing anytime soon.
Basing "advantage" on who can do more push-ups or whatever stupid one-dimensional metric gets used is bad-faith "science," as well. It's creating a predetermined conclusion and backforming procedures to find the measurements that will most likely reach that conclusion.
The point isnt whether genetic engineering is too much of advantage.The point is countries will try to create super-sport babies to win the Olympics, that's why it incentivises too many ethical problems therefore will or should get ridden of if the time comes
@@exosproudmamabear558 Maybe it should, but if anything I would say its going to be the other way around - countries are more likely to use it as another race and the competition will be partially moved from a stadium into the lab.
@@notyetidentified9720 She just thought the best case scenario, bless her heart, but yeah the world doesn't really go a sociologically and politically good place despite technology moving faster than ever. This discrepancy going to give unwanted results one way or another, so your scenario is more likely to happen than hers.
At 10:20 “the most important factor isn’t your sex it’s your age…” - well that may be the case within the same sex category but definitely not between the sexes. Also I may have missed it, but didn’t hear a good explanation for why trans men in male sports has not been an issue (I.e. because there barely are any that will be competitive in vast majority of categories).
She totally strawmanned the anti-trans position. Everyone knows Lia Thomas is a narcissist with a bone to pick with his brother. Women's collegiate swimming was destroyed by a male sibling rivalry.
I don't think "fairness" is even relevant to this discussion. There are teams for handicapped athletes; but no provision is made for "normal" athletes to compete with them. Nobody argues that this would be "fair". Why should physically superior trans women be allowed to intrude on an event for biological women without their genetic advantages? If you could get enough trans women and spectators to make an event, I don't think anyone would try to stop it- but don"t match them up head to head with bio-women and talk about "Fair".
I guess fairness becomes an argument when you start from the position that trans women are women and therefore qualify for women's competitions by default. Fairness would then be the reason to exclude them. But I basically agree with your view that they should compete in their own category.
There was a short story in Omni magazine about a future Olympics. The cold war was still very much a thing the author assumed would be active in the future. There were wrestlers with scales, swimmers with blowholes and fins, 10 foot basketball players, and on it went. The head of the Soviet side kept lodging complaints of genetic engineering with the Olympics committee as did his American counterpart. Naturally, both sides were denying the dead obvious. In the end, all the complaints were upheld and all the medals went to athletes from places like Togo or Nauru that lacked the technology for genetic engineering.
Really interesting video. On the subject of endurance in sports, my favorite sport to watch is actually women’s tennis. Men’s tennis has a much higher focus on hitting the ball so hard and fast that the opponent is unable to respond to it. Women’s tennis has a much higher emphasis on using strategic angles to force your opponent to run more than you do.
@@cyberpsybin While not being classified as an endurance sport, with the scoring system allowing for long matches, it's a sport containing elements of endurance.
@@FriedEgg101 but its not in anyway an endurance sport, the scoring system is irrelevant as you could just have each player scoring aces its a rally sport
And when Serena and Venus Williams tried to play doubles against the lowest rated pro men's teams, they got smoked. As good as Serena and Venus are at women's tennis, they still couldn't beat the lowest ranked men's. Serena would not beat Nadal, Federer or Djokovic in an honest head to head match. So I don't want to see Trans-Women playing in women's sporting events with an unfair advantage. If Nadal, Federer or Djokovic decided to trans years ago, Serena would have a lot less tennis titles to her name.
Sabine. Thank you for your sincere research. I appreciate that you on the one hand show empiric data and on the other hand take the ethical aspects into account. Perfect mix.
That ending really had me laughing. Video summary: Here's a detailed breakdown of all the nuanced factors affecting this issue. Conclusion: Screw the whole thing, competitive sports are dumb anyway.
It creates a kind of meta-problem though. If the experts/informed people don't care about sports, why should people who _do_ care trust or pay mind to the experts?
@@WWLinkMasterX let's not forget that Sabine isn't an expert in sports. She's an expert in physics. This is just kinda her personal opinion - and a very simplistic one at that: "nothing matters so no one should care about anything". I mean... this does sound like the nerd who got a turbo-wedgie during P.E., and now is salty about sports.
There IS fairness in sports competitions I think. It's just that in this case fairness isn't to make sure that the game is fair... It's to make sure that product is entertaining. Ultimately sports are entertainment, and entertainment is about making money. "Should this be allowed?" kinda isn't as important as "Will people watch this?" when it comes to this discussion.
But wouldn’t you say that in the quest for sports to garner profits, it engenders the usage of unfair practices and selectivity bias, effectively elimination almost any notion of fairness? While I agree with you that the game has always been “in it for the money,” I don’t think fairness in competitive sports can truly be quantified simply because of this fact.
Nah you’re reaching at this point looool entertainment is only ever generated in sports when it follows a set of rules, no one likes seeing cis woman get beat up by trans woman and that is a fact! Imagine if a few select men had a legal reason to spend all their youths openly taking steroids , who tf would think it’s fair to compete against them? This problem is not about genetics advantage, but about a biological one
Olympic sports are not making money at all, nobody paying money to watch most of these sports. That's why a lot of olympic athletes still need to get another job lol.
You're not allowed to be on roids or hormones to compete. Unless you got testes you need to take hormones to sustain your muscle mass, which, is against the rules.
This is fantastic. I've been starting to question the underlying ideology of modern competitive sports for some time now. As a martial artist myself, I've watch how the sports I love has been changed and molded by competitive forces. Competition is an invaluable way to stress test whatever it is that you're working on, and there's no better way to root out and expose your weaknesses. But the second "winning" becomes the whole point, the rules you originally created for practical reasons start to take center stage and shape the nature of the game itself - and strange strategies develop. This is why people butt-scoot in jiu-jitsu, and why punching your opponent in the skull with a closed fist is a "good" strategy in MMA even though it would break your hand without the gloves.
@@xxportalxx. MMA since 1997. lol "Ground and pound" alone would be a completely different game without gloves/wraps. And nobody would ever have knocked out Cabbage without gloves. 😄
@@BrassicaRappa interesting, didn't realize those little gloves they wear where that protective. It certainly changed the whole sport in boxing when the gloves where introduced, made it a hell of a lot more dangerous overall.
Competition is not what has been a hindrance to combat sports, rather particular rule sets are what has created phenomenon such as butt scooting in jujitsu, or closed hand strikes and MMA.
"Well sports is not fair, so we can be unfair here as well" is the worst cop out ever. Imagine if anyone said "Some people are poor. But we're not going to attempt to do anything about it, because life is unfair, sorry!"
I understand your frustrations, but tbf, very little people who have a problem with trans athletes also happen to have a problem with the well-known unfair bits of their favorite sports. You must agree that’s a double standard, yes?
@@phamdung3884 How about we turn the tables? I'm not tall, so I could never be a basketball player. I'm also kinda bad at sports, so I'll never be a professional athlete. Or a astronaut. Or a billionaire. Some people were born in the wrong body, so they can never be professional athletes. It's okay if they want to do sports recreationally or in "Sunday league"/amateur competitions, that's fine! And this way, it's much less discomfort, and less controversial, for everyone, especially regarding women's sports.
@@DudeWatIsThis eh… maybe? I don’t necessarily disagree with your suggestion on how we could go about it as I dislike the concept of elite sports (the kind people watch on TV) since it’s so detached from fitness reality. I’m just asking whether you think it’s a double standard towards trans athletes that *THIS* is the aspect of “fairness” we’re focusing so much on. Side note: while I respect a bandaid solution in the mean time we figure out a *real* one, I also doubt that half of the people currently against trans athletes actually want to build a better system. Granted, just allowing people to announce their gender willy-nilly like Canada’s lifting did was a pretty bad bandaid.
@@phamdung3884 I don't believe it's a double standard. It's had arguably the highest impact regarding results, besides using performance-enhancing drugs. It was sudden, it was impactful and it is recent, so it is talked about. If you're trying to dig for latent transphobia, you won't find it here. Just because I'm in favour of social progress, it doesn't mean I'm not equally critical of it as I am about other political or social views. Nobody should get a pass for BS. Not even those in our side. I don't think we're doing the community any service by defending this issue. I do enjoy elite sports extensively. And I find this to be unnecessary. It's like putting lemon in the conservatives' wounds. Why would you give them legitimate reasons to hate other people?
"professional athletics will not exist because it creates too much incentive for unetchical behaviour"... Who is going to tell Sabine about politics? 😅 Jokes aside, good video. One thing I think could have been useful to talk about is the "real life" data of how trans athletes perform. I am not sure if there is data on that, but if on average trans athletes dont win more medals proportionally than cis athletes that also reflects onnwhether they have an advantage or not.
You can tell by a quick google that when biological males - no matter how they identify - compete in female sport, they tend to win regardless of their testosterone levels and the time that they have spent transitioning. This is purely due to the fact that males develop with testosterone and those effects cannot be reversed with oestrogen (if they choose to take it): the muscles and bone structure, even lung and heart capacity. This is a problem. The whole idea of sex segregated sports was exclusively for female benefit, as a way for women to compete against other biological women and have the chance to win. You can see this by the fact that biologically female athletes, regardless of how they identify, have never won a competition in the men's category. I don't even know if any have entered. But biologically male athletes regularly win in female sports. Now that the women's sports category has become "not man" instead of "female", women are losing out on not only winning in competitions, but qualifying in the first place. This is especially difficult for young women and girls who are doing sport - now they not only have to beat the other competitors, but they also have to beat someone who is going/gone through male puberty and the sporting advantages that it brings. I could see myself just giving up at that point, and many unfortunately do now. It stops being fun when it becomes a vanity project for someone else. Just recently two trans women cyclists took first and second place in a woman's cycling race. The third place was biologically female. You can tell by looking at them on the podium that they had obvious advantages: they had drastically bigger muscles and skeletal structure than the woman who won third place. One of them had only recently announced that they identified as trans and did not even wait long enough for their testosterone levels to go down, but nobody at the race organisation seemed to care. It was obvious they would win to anyone looking, so that means two biologically female competitors were not given a place in the competition meant for female athletes, and that two biologically female competitors were not able to place at the end. This is done despite biology, not because of it. But speaking about this is considered an issue because it goes against what people - especially biologically male people - are saying. It is not transphobic to point this out, it is misogynistic to not talk about it. There is a reason that there are sex categories in sport, and as humans are physically incapable of changing sex, they should be stuck to in the interests of fairness for *all* participants, not just the ones with the trans identities. Personally, I think there should be a third category that anyone can compete in regardless of sex. We know realistically that it would be dominated by anyone who has gone through male puberty, but that can be the one that we pretend is fair based on gender ideology rather than sex, not turn to old-fashioned ideas about women being "not-men" and the throwaway category for everyone else instead of a section of sports on its own. Women deserve better than that - that's not transphobia, that's just the truth. It's insulting to the women who spend their lives dedicated to their sport to lose to a male however they identify. It doesn't do women's sport justice that this is being fought over when there is no issue with this in men's sport for obvious reasons. It doesn't do women's sport justice that the women and athletes who speak about this are ignored and criticised as "right-wing" and "transphobic" (for what it's worth, I'm a scary disabled lesbian communist who has done work in both disability rights activism and feminist activism). When the people (women) who are affected most by this are saying that they don't like it but are overlooked in favour of the people (men) who run the sports governing bodies and don't have to compete (and can profit off of the perceived goodwill it brings), there's something going wrong. Even if every single female athlete (and the plenty of male ones, too) who has criticised this hates each individual trans person...well that's a lot of people, maybe we should ask them why and not assume we know their reasoning. We all know what assuming does.
@@rosehipowl The real travesty is all of the women who never stood a chance because they were born lacking talent. Sports are not and have never been fair, this is just the next installment of unfairness.
I'm glad she mentioned the fact that competitive athletes have a variety of physiological advantages over the rest of us. That's why they became athletes and why they win.
@@AntonAdelson I've just realized that you're trying to say trans women are getting an unfair advantage from taking hormones, which is not true. They're LOSING some of the advantage that they were born with, but not enough to become on par with cis women. It's the opposite of something like doping. Therefore, any advantage that they have is a born advantage.
I have to disagree with you. Being a former athlete and nation coach in both men and women's sports you've put too much too much value on genetics. The greater component is epigenetics, in other words environmental expression. Bolt as an example, defied the physics, but you have to understand the physics of sprinting to understand thar. Steve Prefontaine is another example, too short, but became a world class middle long distance runner. Cultures that live at higher elevations develop larger lung capacity, not because of genes, but because of environment. Then why is it some coaches produce more elite athletes than others? Why do some coaches bring home more championships than others. This is not a simple topic, it is very complex. As for the transgender competition goes, you can throw all the studies etc out there you want, but the reality is a trans women can't compete against men, and women cannot compete against trans women. I have coach both elite men and women, but I have yet to coach an elite woman athlete that could compete against elite men. Trust me I would love to be the coach who did it. Did you see the USA national women's soccer team play against a U15 boys team? Women got killed by these boys. I have done the battle of the sexes as a coach, U13 girls vs U13 boys. both at the state level. My girls team beat the boys 3 -0. I knew this would be the results, before stepping on the field, why? 1) Girls were well into puberty and where bigger than the boys as the boys hadn't hit puberty yet. 2) the girls had it mentally together more than the boys. Had we did this with u15 girls and against u15 boys, we would not have stood a chance. The is evidence based science that Sabine, who is awesome, misses the boat on this one!!
I think the big point to consider here is the question of, "what is a woman?" If you accept the statement, "trans women are women", then going through a male puberty is just part of the natural variation of women. Logically, this means that denying trans women the ability to compete in women's sports while allowing natural variations in cis women means denying that trans women are women. It's simple logic; "if A then B" immediately implies "if not B then not A". The fairness argument is just a smokescreen for denying that trans women are women, and it's why conservatives have paid more attention to women's sports in the last couple of years than any mainstream media platform did for the two decades before that.
What is unambiguous is that there are no (that i am aware of) cases of trans men beating out the male counterparts in elite sports (there are numerous trans athletes competing at that level). if there is a need to continue to marginalise woman, then there should be a separate category for trans athletes and their female counterparts ie two potential winners(even with different times ) and separate records. But for this aspect of the gender debate, I think you should be allowed to live your life your way and how you choose, without harassment.
You can live your life, but like the first admendment, you do not have the right to control other's lives. If a trans person takes a slot on a roster, they are effectively harming an otherwise legit person the ability to compete in their respective category. Tell me that a system should be forced to allow someone with Tourettes, to attend lectures and disrupt others. Sounds fair, but life is not fair. But we should not force behavior that disrupts the rest of society. This is why gay men should not be Boy Scout leaders.
High level sporting events are pretty much a freak show. Everyone puts in similar amounts of effort and so more than skill or training it's luck and genetics that determine who gets to sit at the top. With genetic engineering increasingly becoming reality, there are definitely ethical considerations to be had for professional sports. What meaning does athletics hold if it comes down to research and money? Do we run the risk of turning people into objects built for a specific purpose, instead of being free to determine their own course in life?
Nope. People put in unequal effort, have unequal genetics, and are born into unequal circumstances. The determiner of who's at the top is the combination of all of those. Try harder.
@@Ormaaj Everyone can control the effort they put in, and to some degree can change their circumstances. Genetics is pretty much immutable for the duration of their lives, and becomes the limiting factor for any aspiring athlete. To be a top level athlete you have to be an extreme in every category, so everyone at that level are maximizing effort and circumstance, but cannot maximize thier genetics. It's why so many are tempted to use doping, which raises an athletes potential beyond what thier genetics says are possible. For most people, they can try as hard as they want, they will never sit at the top.
@@Darth_Insidious Yes that's more like it. :) I'd even qualify the effort thing. People feel like they have autonomy over effort. Some think their control is unlimited, and many overestimate. This is maybe less apparent in athletics but certainly applies to academics and certain demanding fields. "I tried to try!" ~Bart Simpson
@Sava Ok (posted this above, reposting here as relevant). sports are not really in the same category as athletics. athletic performance is highly linear, so the parameters that end up governing become highly sensitive to initial conditions such as genetics. with sports you dont need to be the best athlete to be effective, look at Lionel Messi in soccer/football or many basketballers also can be in this category such as James Harden, Luka Doncic etc where skill becomes more important. its true height plays a big role in basketball, but not for every position which is important too, because height is generally more correlated with less coordination and in basketball 3 pointers incentivise better coordination, so you get players that are guards that arent that tall (when i say not that tall theyre still around 6ft, bigger than general population avg) like Steph Curry, Patty Mills etc etc. Sport also has the nonlinear variable of making space via passing the ball. So for all these reasons sports wont go away, but genetics will probably make its way into sport too as if it hasnt already. In basketball young players with some talent sometimes turn to hormones to try to get more growth. In the 2021-2022 NBA season, the average basketball player was 6’6″ tall this is 2 inches heigher than it was in 1955. However the curve seems to be rounding off to flatten here as the discoordination factor seems to set in after about 6"6. But if tampering with genetics could get rid of that then thats a whole other ballgame.
Your point about entertainment value in sports is an important one, and I hadn’t seen it mentioned before in discussions regarding the topic at hand. I would argue that many female athletic competitions with the status quo (i.e., involving cis-females only) have plenty of entertainment value (and get as much coverage and "air-time" as their male equivalents). Some examples: gymnastics, swimming, track, downhill skiing, and, especially, in the U.S., soccer. As is, they are anything but boring. Where athletic competitions could become "boring" is when the same competitor wins time and again to the point where it is an a priori foregone conclusion. And, when, in female sports, such an outcome is due to measurable phenotypical advantages of a trans-female athlete (the conclusions in the studies and meta-analyses you cited), then we have the "perfect storm" for creating a boring competition: predictable outcome due to uniquely and grossly obvious advantage. Further, in sports that are already "co-ed" (target shooting and equestrian events, for example), fans do not find them boring because they lack any predictable outcome based on sex. Ultimately, however, this may end up being a tempest in a teapot because of the very small number of circumstances where it will be an issue in real life.
@@tapiir For races where I really believed he was going to win, yeah, the race, itself, as a competition was fairly boring and, after he crossed the finish line first, the experience was underwhelming. Now, I did like to watch Usain Bolt compete, but for a different, potentially exciting, and unpredictable outcome: would he set another world record. That is something I’d pay good money to see! Remember the 1973 (?) Belmont Stakes. Everybody "knew" Secretariat was going to win. But winning by 31 lengths? Uncanny. The most exciting horse race I ever saw!
It's so few trans women in sports that will never be an issue, like she said too, it's not only sex that determines it, it's many other genetic varibles like height, body desnity etc. and enviroment like where you grew up, if you rich, if you got a good trainer etc. And it really varies on what type of sport it is too. I also see people who think we should ban trans people from sports AND take away puberty blockers when puberty blockers and hormone therapy early solves the problem because then they are just the same as cis women then like the video said. It also helps if you are accepted as a girl and get to be on a girl team. And the unfortunate truth is that usually boy's sports team take it to the extreme and do it moslty for competition, so they get better training. Which also is another partically social thing that makes them get better edge. So truly best soution in mind is to be trans supportive and let trans people be accepted in society and have puberty blockers (it's been used for a long time on other things so it's not a new thing but of course it can be studied more but like girls get birth control and stuff which is more side effects so like it's not controversial) have case by case rules based on sports and also maybe still have the same 2 year rule. At least that's what the science leads me to think, and she had a point that it's actually dangerous stuff they rather should focus on.
Answer: no, of course not. Anyone who refuses to recognize the difference between a man's body and a woman's is out of touch with reality. It has nothing to do with sexual preferences or identification. It has to do with athletic classification, so body types matter more than psychological makeup.
Surely, a scientific approach would be to look at actual sporting results. For example: men's record for javelin is 98.5 m and women's is 72.3. A pretty clear advantage for males.
*Cisgender men's record; *cisgender women's record I suspect for transgender women who compete professionally, those on HRT anyway would achieve records between those two figures.
@@ishmamahmed9306 I agree with your assumption, which reflects that transwomen athletes have an advantage over biological women. This means they should not be allowed to compete in the same category/for the same prizes.
@@ishmamahmed9306*Men's records *Women's records The sexes are not 'cis' or 'trans'. You keep saying transwomen have always competed, so what are these athletes and what are their times?
But this is compounded by societal advantages. There are way more males participating in most sports than female. If you want an accurate evaluation of potential performance you need to look at more general measurements.
This is an excellent presentation! BTW, I took a deeper dive into other topics that caused me to watch some of your earlier videos from 4 years ago. Your production quality has really improved. Congratulations on your great work!
Taking into account all the relevant differences (as far as is practically feasible) is exactly what happens in most sailing (except one-design racing). A complicated handicap system is put in place and the last ship to cross the line could indeed easily be the winner, conceivably by a large margin. Even that system isn't completely fair due to different economic circumstances for each team and the use of as yet unregulated emergent technology...
Sports is supposed to be good because it teaches "Sportsmanship". But all we have now is disputes, arguing, business, lawsuits, hatred, nationalism, sexism and money, money, money.
@@gillifish Right. Some people are clearly failing at even trying to take responsibility for their own lives, if petty or even total non-issues seem worth trying to try start an argument over. For those who are relatively mentally healthy, I recommend Mark Manson's work, including his recent RUclips vids. Else: Growth Mindset, Dr Tracey Marks, Uncommon Knowledge UK, Psych2Go, Practical Psychology. If it wasn't for two truly terrifying concerns for humanity at this time, this would be unquestionably the best time to be alive in human history.
A more direct question is the utility of knowing anyone's donor status and level. The visibility of the donor status and level is a form of distinction and validation. Other onlookers may, theoretically, feel respect, envy, or intimidation, relative to the "donor." That appears intended to engender a sense of competition among people. It's a bit of marketing psychology. Did it work? Does it mean anything to anyone here? Is anyone rushing out to top that donation? Anyone made to feel self-conscious about not donating at any level?
This was very informative and encourages good faith discussion. I just wasn’t clear on one part. Doesn’t the question of fairness logic completely reason away the need for separate women’s leagues? I get that long legs, big feet, whatever biological features are all advantages that would be very tedious to dispute. Following this logic, why not have every sport just be like an open? In this way, men are the “freaks of nature” and women will likely not have much representation because they simply are not capable of achieving such feats because they truthfully speaking are just “weaker” in this way. (Please take all of this neutrally without assuming I meant any slight to either trans/ciswomen) Yet we have women’s leagues anyway. Predictable outcomes could be a way of explaining why we make the exception for dividing sex. Women competing with men’s “freakish” biological advantages is what causes this predictable outcome, no? These are the same features that give trans women an edge, so doesn’t that still leave that point kind of moot? I’m definitely not trying to criticize, I don’t have a good answer. It feels unfair to both groups of people with no clear resolution. Thanks for making this video.
That's a really good point. It opens up some really difficult questions. Beyond just men and women, if it's not fair for separate women's leagues, what about weight classes in boxing? Being bigger or smaller is in large part genetic, right? And going the other way, should we have draw length classes in archery? A longer arm is a natural advantage, and as far as I know it's entirely genetic luck, I never heard of any exercise regime to make your arms longer.
She talks a bit about this from 11:40 on. It's hard to figure out the best way to divide a population to ensure fairness - I like the idea of talking about "meaningful competition" instead of fair competition. I think the main takeaway I learned from this video is that trans people are still under-represented in sports, so it's probably worth waiting around for a while and seeing if it ever becomes a problem for cis women to meaningfully compete.
@@stephenwatson2964 I mean... exactly in the case of Lia Thomas, it already is questionable, whether it's even possible "for cis women to meaningfully compete". From what I have understood, she already makes it impossible for a cis-female to reach first place.
@@notlisztening9821 Considering that Lia placed first in only one event, with second place being less than two seconds behind her and Katie Ledecky having a best time in that event over nine seconds better than Lia's, I don't see how you can argue that it's 'impossible' for a cis woman to reach first place while competing with Lia. Indeed, in the 100 freestyle, Lia placed dead last, and in the 200 freestyle placed only 5th, behind four cis women. Is that really indicative of 'not possible to meaningfully compete'? I would say not.
she made the dumbest video I ever seen about this topic, should have continued talking about physics. She missed entirely the point when simple forget the fact that a big feet or big legs isn't all that benefit compared as born male. This is obviously when you compare the overall performance of trans athletes and the consistent record breaking they are making in the women sports. The conclusion is pointless and don't solve anything. That's why scholars nowadays are so mocked, she is a f scientists who should think logically but instead she goes bonker diving in her thoughts.
Sabine! What I like about you is that you’re not afraid to come to the conclusion “It’s complicated. I don’t have a definitive answer”. This attitude is missing from society today. Thank you for being brave enough to offer information we can use to try to understand the issue rather than stuffing a pre-packaged “answer” down our throats.
True although in this case it's less complicated I think. If someone is on steroids for 20 years and stops for a day to enter a tournament then that person will have a unfair advantage. Regardless of all the gender ideology that's going around, this is in issue of biology and chemicals. Or people should stop being hypocrites and demand for complete freedom on sports. So no gender division, no restrictions on doping and no restrictions electro mechanical body modifications.
I don’t think it is complicated. Those born female take part in female events and those born male take part in male events. Very simple. And yes, I did watch the video.
Shades of Harrison Bergeron (the Kurt Vonnegut story, not the awful movie) which shows “fairness” legally carried to its ridiculous extreme. Thanks for the info. And thanks, too, for all the interesting comments people added.
In my opinion, we are not going to solve the issue by committing the fallacy of equivocation on the word "fair." It is indeed a fact that there are a ton of physiological variations from athlete to athlete, and no one expects all athletes to be clones. Limiting variations within athletes of the same biological gender can be overcome with technique, effort, discipline, diet, training, dedication, focus, and intensity. That's why upsets happen all the time in sports, and what makes watching sports enjoyable. That is "fair" the way we have defined it through the end of the 20th century--not just in sports, but in every aspect of life. Now we have trans athletes like Lia Thomas, who make the mental/emotional/psychological transition to female, and Lia wins all kinds of meets with biological females and sets all kinds of records. If we are going to formulate a view based on numbers, let's include those numbers. It's not "fair" in the same sense that it was before. 14:35 "And as long as athletes can make a lot of money from having a genetic advantage, someone's going to breed children who'll bring in that money. This is why I suspect a century from now professional athletics will not exist anymore. It creates too many incentive for unethical behavior." Clearly based on your opinion, not on science. First, athletic competition certainly involves a lot of money, but it's not all about the money. Artists, architects, physicians, psychiatrists, engineers, scientists, etc. make money, but they are also in it for the fulfillment, meaning, and purpose it provides. Second, every single pursuit in life has plenty of incentives for unethical behavior. Incentives for unethical behavior has not brought an end to politics, religions, art, commerce, etc. for thousands of years. I"m truly sorry that something had jaded your view of professional sports.
How do you feel about the inclusion of transitioned athletes subject to various handicapping methods designed to even the playing field? For example, I'm fairly certain that a ~13lb post cut weight disadvantages would entirely negate any potential advantage for 2+ year transitioned athletes in MMA. Similarly, in Power Lifting applying something like a modified Wilkes Coefficient could allow us to maximize inclusion while also maintaining an eye towards fairness.
@@yessum15 Great idea - let males compete with females, and tip the scales exactly enough for the males to always come second or worse. We'll need some data to devise the scales, but what are the next 5 - 10 years of women sports in the grand scheme of things... I especially like your ~13lbs disadvantage for MMA. Why not 12, or 14 lbs? Some may say we'd need some experimentation to determine the exactly right number. Which could lead to women (the female and the male variety!) getting beaten unfairly in the process - but what kind of a woman wouldn't be happy to take a few punches in the name of inclusion. Then only the group sports will remain "unbalanced" - but who cares about football, anyway.
@@jeronimo196 *_"Tip the scales enough for males to always come in second place"_* Not necessarily. But this seems more like an emotional outburst on your part rather than a sincere retelling of what I said. The goal would be to tip the scales enough to compensate for an unfair advantage to either competitor in order to establish an approximately level playing field. This is always the goal. *_"We'll ruin the next 5 years of women's sports collecting data"_* Unlikely. This sounds like hyperbole. Truth is, there are so few athletes for whom this rare condition applies that virtually any decision we take will have a negligible effect on women's sports overall. That said, this is really nothing new. Rules are constantly being tweaked by various athletic federations and venues giving certain athletes better or worse advantages at any given time. So long as we approach the adjustments conservatively, and examine the data we already have, we can minimize the disruption. *_"~13lbs disadvantage. Why not 12 or 14?"_* I guess you don't understand what the tilde (~) symbol means, huh? Just look it up and perhaps you'll understand why this comment is a bit silly. *_"What kind of woman wouldn't be happy to take punches in the name of inclusion?"_* So I think this statement makes it clear you don't understand how MMA works at all. No one is actually required to take a fight with anyone. Your manager pitches you fights which you either reject or accept. Now, given that among the tens of thousands of MMA fighters that have ever competed, there have only ever been 2 that fall into the category we're discussing, it is basically impossible that any woman would ever be in a position to have to "take punches for the sake of inclusion." Women get to select their fights and given that the vast majority of participants are female, the only women who would ever fight a transitioned competitor are the ones who would go out of their way to track one down and single her out. We know this because this is literally what is happening right now with the single transitioned competitor currently active. So yeah, this sounds like panicky hyperbole. Tbh, given the current level of data from both transitioned fighters and fighters known to use illegal substances I think we probably already have enough information to make a pretty good guess. A ~13lb handicap, maintaining proper T levels, with the currently required minimum time post transition, guarantees no advantage to the transitioned fighter. The only question left to ask is whether a _smaller_ handicap is more appropriate. However, there is no chance that a larger one would be required. So as you can see, no female fighter would be incurring any additional risk using this system. *_"Then only group sports would remain unbalanced"_* You've failed to provide any support for this claim. Why would group sports be immune to handicapping? In any case, it's important to note that maximizing inclusion doesn't necessarily mean that every sport is going to work out. The idea is just that you try your best to do it with as many sports as you actually can. That's what the word "maximizing" means. It seems odd to have to explain this. *Conclusion:* As you can see most of what you said seems like a knee-jerk emotional response rather than a well thought out criticism. You also seem pretty unfamiliar with and disinterested in the actual subject matter. My recommendation would be to probably just let this conversation pass you, rather than get yourself angry about something you aren't really interested in.
@@yessum15 Perhaps if I start using less sarcasm, I'll seem more dispassionate, and therefore smarter... "The goal would be to tip the scales enough to compensate for an unfair advantage to either competitor in order to establish an approximately level playing field. This is always the goal." What would be the suggested methodology, to decide what constitutes "enough"? "Rules are constantly being tweaked by various athletic federations and venues giving certain athletes better or worse advantages at any given time." What happens, when the trans-woman version of Usain Bolt appears and beats all previous records - do we tweak the rules again? How do we know we haven't tweaked the rules so much, that even trans-Bolt cannot win? Over-fitting the data until trans-athletes can only place second (or worse) seems an obvious danger to me. "Truth is, there are so few athletes for whom this rare condition applies that virtually any decision we take will have a negligible effect on women's sports overall." n
@@jeronimo196 Sorry, busy with important stuff. Here's your response: *_"What would the suggested methodology be?"_* I've already explained it. Please re-read the previous comments. *_"What happens when the T version of Usain Bolt comes along?"_* We already know the mean, mode, and range of margins of victory for women who win gold, as well as the theoretical upper limit. If a transitioned athletes deviates from this range significantly this would be a legitimate reason to change the handicap. Because the truth is, the odds that a transitioned athlete demonstrating a level of dominance outside of this range is doing so not because of an advantage related to the transition process but rather because of Usain Bolt like natural talent are astronomical. You are taking two incredibly low probabilities and multiplying them to produce an even less likely scenario. Then using that essentially non-existent scenario to justify scrapping an idea that would work the rest of the time. Yes, I suppose if the first transitioned athlete also happened to be a werewolf the system would also fail. *_"We could only have somewhat adequate data until the number is large enough to have a negligible effect on women's sports"_* You misunderstood this point. My point was to say transitioned athletes are such a rare phenomenon that overall this question is pretty unimportant. So anyone who begins with the claim that any strategy "will ruin all of women's sports" is being silly. Given that your responses with riddled with this energy and with statements like this, the first and most important thing to remember is: settle down. *_"To quote Randy Dewey..."_* Yeah Ramsey Dewey says a lot of weird things. I've turned down fights. Guys I've trained with have turned down fights. UFC fighters have turned down fights. WBC boxers have turned down fights. Amateurs who went on to compete in Golden Gloves have turned down fights. This happens pretty frequently. I doubt that the stigma associated with being a transitioned fighter is going to make it _harder_ to turn a person down. *_"I understand enough to know the rule book should use an equal sign"_* Did you think you were reading a rule book right now? And let's be honest, 1lb isn't going to be the difference. You're already allowed 0.5lb deviation anyway. The important part is what range you settle on. *_"I'd be worried about the transitioned athlete incurring additional risk"_* Different kind of risk. It's pretty common for fighters to fight oversized opponents. This is a well known phenomenon and the nature of the risk is well understood. So even in a situation where we were trading one risk for another yet the total size of the risk remained the same, we would _still_ be better off. Because we are trading a less understood and more difficult to counter risk, for a well understood one with long established mitigation strategies. However, realistically people who have enough experience in the sport would be quite good at making this determination within a range likely to reduce total risk, which while not perfect, is significantly better. Also, let's be honest: No you're not. *_"Maximizing means optimizing for a certain parameter. If you're optimizing for this, you're not optimizing for that."_* Indeed. That's why maximum strength Benadryl has killed so many. When will the madness end?! Lol Come on, stop being silly. Obviously maximizing within the parameters establish by a ranked priority list is a thing. *_"Group sports are vastly more complex"_* Yes, but fortunately group sports also have a vastly wider acceptable margin of error. Unlike something like the 100 meter dash, a game like football or basketball often experiments with making dramatic rule changes that will have a great deal of unknown effects with far less than conclusive research. Because there are so many unknown variables the fans are pretty used to this sort of thing. No one actually knew what would happen when we banned dunks, changing the charging rules, changing the rules of the drafting system, etc. There was literally almost no data to support these dramatic changes that all had a much larger impact than any rule about transitioned athletes ever could. And yet they were all implemented on the basis of enhancing fairness, with a wide variety of actual results. So yeah there's actually significantly more room for experimentation here. *_"Ad hominem"_* I don't think you know how to properly use that phrase. In any case we can agree to disagree on this point. *_"I'll decide when my fun/annoyance reaches the point of bailing out"_* Translation: "I'm actually not very confident in the validity of my point and feel discomfort being challenged, therefore I reserve the right to frame my imminent retreat as snobbery." Cool man, whatever works for you. Just glad I could inject some reason into your thinly veiled prejudice. *Conclusion:* It appears that your entire objection boils down to: "It cannot be done perfectly, therefore it is entirely unacceptable. My experience has been that is typically the disingenuous sentiment expressed by people who want society to continue to act in accordance with their personal bigotry but do not care to be openly associated with such a regressive attitude. It is the "[blank] people will never achieve full equality so we should segregate them" position of the disingenuous moderate. It seems pretty clear that many sports can accommodate this ridiculously small number of outlier individuals and risk mitigation strategies are plentiful. We should bring together the experts and proceed carefully along trying them with a clear priority list of maximizing safety, fairness, and inclusion. With full knowledge that frankly, we've taken far greater risks before.
Congrats on taking on a ‘controversial’ topic and conveying the complexity of the science as opposed to taking a ‘stance’ as is often expected from commentators. I note that people on both sides of the conversation have a tendency to over-simplify and reach for easy answers, which sadly are not readily forthcoming. I use the same term to describe athletes btw - freaks! But the physics conference follow-up burn was perfectly on brand 🔥😂
We demand more videos with various poorly attempted accents, Rohin.
Both sides tends to over-simplify but it’s pretty obvious that ONE side is doing it on purpose and on repeat to further their hateful agenda, while the other side is simply trying to defend a marginalized group, sometimes in a clumsy manner. The dynamic is such that there is a clear aggressor in this discussion and I find it ironic to reduce this to “both sides are wrong”, because it’s an oversimplification.
@@AiguilleVoodoo sounds like steel man/strawman interpretation based on perspective. One could be just as uncharitable and say "one side is protecting a marginalized group (women) and the other is trying to set progress back by excluding women's achievements and purposefully misrepresenting the facts"
Like your statement, it's an incredibly unhelpful summary and not acknowledging that these divisive ways of talking about these issues aren't moving the needle for any dissenters
@@maverick9708 There's plenty of other evidence that the great majority of people screaming loudest about "save women's sports" (1) actually couldn't care less about women's sports and (2) hate any kind of gender nonconformity.
Nothing brings me more joy than seeing one of my favorite youtubers adding a well thought out comment to a video from another.
I'm a dressage trainer and therapeutic horseback riding instructor, and equestrian sports stand out as not being segregated by sex, even at the elite level. On the other hand, there's one big unfair advantage that determines a person's high level success at these sports, and that's money. There are exceptions, of course, but starting out wealthy is a big indicator of whether you can ascend to the top level. Competitive sports are not fair in many ways, and I love the concept of meaningful competition instead.
I feel like the horse is the one doing all the work, if we're being honest....
lol
Are male horses stronger than female horses? I have no idea
Can we really call this a sport? You do less work than a race car driver.
YES COMRADE!!!❤
Money is a huge advantage in every single sport. I'm glad you agree that it's an *unfair* advantage.
I never got the fairness argument. If we are to say, “Sports is unfair anyways, why try to make it fair now?” then why not remove the division between men and women’s sports completely? The reason for the separation in the first place is because we acknowledge the physical advantages men have over women. But if you’re going to accept these and still go on with it, then why limit it to trans athletes?
I mean there’s no reason to keep a division. Sure there will be a lopsided representation of men over women but since it’s purely competition, no reason not to allocate athletes to divisions purely by performance. Un-ironically many sports SHOULD remove gender divison
@@woolfie8766 There is no gender division. There is no such thing as a men's sports. Leagues that are mostly or all men are open to women. The problem is that women can rarely compete at the level men do, so the leagues appear to be men's leagues. Women's leagues were started because women wanted to play and compete in sports too. Allowing men to compete in women's leagues takes us back to a time when women will simply not do sports. That is unacceptable.
@@woolfie8766 I don't think you appreciate just how lopsided such representation would be. Sports would be *dominated* by men. Many elite female athletes will lose against teenage boys. Celebration of female athletic excellence would be almost impossible. Women and girls who love sports would have to accept they would likely never be able to properly compete. What a tragic, misogynistic world that would be.
@@boredom2go Dude. thats called gender division. you said yourself..."The problem is that women can rarely compete at the level men do, so the leagues appear to be men's leagues." if gender division is not a thing, women and men can compete in the same match. I still dont get what you are trying to say. From what i understand is that you dont see the "division" because 'hey, women can play that sports too. just like the men. so there really is no gender *division*'. I think what you are trying to prove is the fact there is a *representation* of women in the sport that is "fair". not about the gender division topic..
@@hanjoyitsu1414 I'm saying that the leagues that men compete in are already open to any gender. There's no need to create some combined leagues because they already exist. Women's leagues were created because either women compete only with other biological females or they don't compete at all. Women's sports should be off limits to transgender women (biological males).
Im a female. I box. I fought a 17 year old boy that I could break over my knee like a dry stick. About all I remember is a yellow flash and the canvas hitting me in the head. He hit like a truck; one of two times in my life Ive been KTFO. Its much more than muscle mass and gross strength. Its about the way your body is put together. Well trained, experienced, fit and 15lb heavier and I couldn't hit as hard as that little noob on my best day
But surely you know that the ability to hit hard is often not a determining factor in boxing competition. Speed, accuracy, stamina, determination, arm length and a host of other things all play large parts.
@@rickl5596The point of a "woman's boxing competition" is to see which WOMAN is the best at boxing. Letting a man compete is an insult to both men, women, and the concept of sports itself
@@rickl5596it is when you’re talking about KO’s.
In martial arts it is axiomatic that a good, large fighter will defeat a good small fighter. There are exceptions, but this is exactly the reason there are weight classes in these sports-- they create a level of fairness. And I won't get into how the gambling aspect helps drive this system.
Yeah...trying to blunder the meaning of "fair" it wasn't a solid argument...first time I caught her on a slopy point though, usually solid as rock.
“create a level of fairness” that doesn’t mean it’s fair. It just means it’s more fair. Not to mention this same logic doesn’t apply to every sport.
@@amorfo9127 nah, it definitely was completely logical. It’s an undeniable fact that athletic competitions are heavily impacted by your genetic makeup. do you really think splitting competitions between male and female makes it fair? She already listed every variable and difference. feel free to try to argue against it 😂
@@arturintete2461 The same logic applies to all sports. It's not fun to watch a 2000 elo play against a 400 elo chess player past the first few rounds. It's not fun to watch the world's most athletic men compete against the world's most athletic women.
@@erseshe no, it doesn’t. Because not every sport separates people in the same way, lmao.
"Athletes are biological extremes. Fairness has never been the point of these completions. They are really more like freak shows! Kind of like Physics Conferences." LOL - I love it.
This is a complete misunderstanding of professional sports and athletes. Athletes aren't biological extremes, they are just people that have decided to focus their efforts on improving themselves in their chosen sport like almost anyone can. They aren't special. And fairness has been a VERY important point when it comes to competitive sports where people are playing as a career. Otherwise things like using steroids would be permitted, or really ANY other kind of cheating. To say that "Fairness has never been the point" Is either totally ignorant or willing disingenuous.
@@GiRR007 athletes aren't biological extremes? how many 5'8" basketball players are you seeing succeed in the NBA?
effort is absolutely a major part of the equation, but it's disingenuous to act as though biology has nothing to do with top athletes' success. you need both to succeed.
@@xynix1549 no you need both to be one of the best, you only need 1 to succeed.
@@GiRR007 okay, how many successful 5'8" basketball players are there in the NBA?
@@xynix1549 quite a few, actually theres one guy who was in the NBA at 5,3
There was a comedian somewhere that suggested we should have one "normal" person off the street compete as a "control"... just to up the entertainment value.
i saw the suggestion yesterday that the olympics should have a random public draft - that it's just random people who are called up and you just have to do it. i'd watch.
That's actually a really good idea.
@@eeeaten You would have a bunch of broken necks in olympic gymnastics.
@@Alkis05 party pooper
@@eeeaten Hey, I didn't object. It would be the olympic version of jackass movies.
In the video you explain that the advantages decrease over time with the administration of hormone therapy. I think this situation is compounded by the fact that, for the most part, sports are a young persons game. Very few athletes stay relevant even in middle age. The average age of medal winning gymnasts at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics was 20.6 years old. Athletes don't have the time to wait for the playing field to level. I also guess, but don't know for certain, that the biological differences between the physical performance of men and women is most pronounced at younger ages, the age demographic where they athletes are competing.
Still you have body height and bone structure even without going through male puberty. It just isn't fair. Especially in stregnth based sports. She said that it is not so much the case with endurance but even there the difference is not as small as she made it look. It is still significant.
Laurel Hubbard is a good example of what you're speaking to. She competed in the Olympics at age 43 and was considered a serious medal contender having ranked 7th in the IWF's women's +87 kg division. The biological women she was competing against were 10 to 20 years younger than her.
She had a previous lifting career, then took more than a decade off and did not compete internationally for 16 years.
That is an eternity to be out of training for an Olympic level competitor. She had only been training again for 3 years when she was selected for the Olympics. That is a suspiciously small amount of training for that level of competition.
The fact that she took so much time off, but at age 43 was an Olympic contender after just 3 years training again demonstrates your point: even though her age has diminished her competitive abilities, as a biological male she continues to lift at the same standard as female competitors who have consistently trained and are in their prime.
@@XXXX-yc6wvhe*
Can't believe your grandmother gave birth to your mother for you to turn around and reduce womanhood to a costume a man can put on.
Get rid of your misogynistic views.
@@XXXX-yc6wv "as a biological male she..."
That's the problem right there.
🤡🌎
Gymnasts are particularly young, not a great event to choose
I find the story of Tom Dempsey really illustrative here, especially when compared with Michael Phelps. Tom Dempsey was a kicker in American Football who, in 1970, kicked a successful field goal from 63 yards (57.6 meters) out. This record stood for over 40 years, only being beat in 2013 by a single yard. Tom Dempsey also only had half a kicking foot.
He was born with no toes on his right foot (and no fingers on his right hand). This mild disability gave him the ability to kick a football straight-on rather than needing to use the side of his foot. The advantages that would give are obvious. He had a custom shoe made to fit his foot, but investigation by ESPN sports science determined that that hadn't given him any more advantage than a normal shoe would a normal kicker.
Even so, people were pissed. Noted union-busting piece of shit, Tex Schramm, openly said that he thought there should be an asterisk by Dempsey's record. And in 1977, a rule was made specifically saying that anyone kicking had to wear a normal shoe, no matter how much of a foot they did or didn't have. Tom Dempsey had a unique body that let him do something incredible, and people really didn't like that.
Contrast this with Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps is a mutant who was genetically engineered to swim really fucking good. He has a huge torso and short legs (relatively speaking, he is 6'4"), a wingspan longer than he is tall, hyperextended joints that let him move like a mermaid, huge paddle feet, and he even produces half as much lactic acid (the thing that makes your muscles hurt when you work them hard) as his competitors.
Michael Phelps and Tom Dempsey both worked incredibly hard and pushed their unique bodies to the peak of athletic ability. But one of them is celebrated, and one of them had the guy who invented the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and their hotpants say that his record didn't count.
This is not random and it makes sense. Phelps is still using his own body whereas Dempsey is relying on specialized external apparatus to enhance his performance.
This is like if a boxer lost his arms in an accident and replaced them with metal prosthetics. We would not cheer for him either.
Furthermore I should note that Phelps genetic mutation (Marfan Syndrome) is less obvious and well understood by the general public than the idea of having half a foot. So it makes sense that one would generate more ire than the other. They are simply not aware of Phelps' advantage.
@@yessum15 I said in the original post that an investigation determined the shoe hadn't given him any particular advantage. But even so, he still had to have immense leg strength and incredible aim to make that kick. He didn't have a rocket boot attached to his foot. That said, I will grant you Phelps' mutations are significantly less obvious than Dempsey's. But that's honestly kind of my point.
@@elijeschke You did say that the investigation determined the shoe gave no advantage. And I ignored that. Just like the people in your story. Want to know why?
Because that is likely nonsense and people intuitively know it.
People know that the likelihood the man with this rare physical abnormality and specialized equipment also just happens to be the best kicker ever is too big a coincidence. They also know that such a dramatic change to the major variables present having no effect positive or negative on outcomes is basically 0.
This is like if every football player kicks a football but I throw a Frisbee and score dramatically different from the rest. It's gonna take more than a scientist simply declaring "the Frisbee made no difference" to convince people. We're going to need a mountain of high quality evidence here.
Now consider the problems with getting _any_ evidence at all.
Science is a slow process. It operates best when questions are narrowly defined and variables are limited. When sample sizes are large and research is conducted by disinterested neutral parties ashering to strict protocols.
The number of variables present here is insane and the physics is very complicated.
Having half a foot dramatically changes the muscle to weight ratio between his power generating hips, and the weight of the foot they have to lift. The swing is totally different. And the shape contacting the football is totally different. The traction on that shape is different. His body mechanics as a whole are different.
It would take a great deal of money and time to attempt to get a solid scientific answer to these questions.
On top of that their sample size is literally n=1
And the "investigation" is probably as far from scientific as one can imagine and is being organized by a non-scientific organization with a vested interest in a particular outcome.
This "investigation" probably has about as much scientific credibility as that ridiculous simulated fight between Rocky Marciano & Muhammad Ali. Which is to say it probably has less credibility than the the scripted fights of Rocky Balboa.
So given the extremely obvious nature of the deformity, its hugely intuitive likelihood of influencing outcomes, and the dearth of any real evidence to the contrary some skepticism is totally understandable.
@@yessum15 In case of all that, then what would you suggest Dempsey do? Should he not be allowed to play the game because he only has half a foot? Should he be forced to play with no shoe, disadvantaging him compared to every other player? Should he have to have an extra half-foot stuffed into a shoe, and if that's the case, wouldn't that also be a device that could potentially aid him? What's the solution here?
@@elijeschke No. Because everything I just described is good reason to _suspect_ an advantage but it is not by any stretch of the imagination proof of an advantage.
The best solution is to do what they did. Let him play and let the losers talk trash.
I was only pointing out that his detractors' talk wasn't entirely unreasonable. It is understandable why they would feel that way. But that doesn't mean we should act on their feelings.
Science as it should be. Not just throwing numbers and studies at the viewer, but actually understanding the method used, number of subjects tested and context of the study to weight the real compatibility of the resulta with the whole population. Keep up with the great content!
as well as contextualizing the dry facts into the real world with societal nuances!
Really, this is the most neutral yet extremely informative piece of video essay material on a touchy societal/social subject I've seen
That being said, the numbers in these studies are quite small. Too small by most standards (11-12). Also, who funded the studies? Unfortunately, science is rarely unbiassed as there is always an incentive to satisfy the stakeholders (funders) with results they want or expect. After all, The tobacco industry funded peer reviewed studies that determined cigarettes are good for you and Coca-Cola funded peer reviewed studies that concluded that sugary beverages have no adverse health effects.
I am trans myself and heartily support the LGBTQ community, but prior to viewing this wonderful thoughtful educational video, I was also of the opinion that this was an unfair practice. Bless you for your no-nonsense fact based analysis that presented all sides without bias or sensationalism.
Knowledge is power. I just wish more people sought after wisdom and acquiring knowledge rather than having knee-jerk reactions by listening to social media disinformation, their feelings or unquestioningly following the crowd.
What a wonderful world it would be.
@@seth7745 Not all studies follow american practices that can lobby and pay off results to their liking. There is an international scientific community where this kind of practice simply doesn't work. We also have far more transparency with the scientific community today, so while your extremely common knowledge examples from over 50 years ago are examples of one kind of practice that does not mean that practice is a universal concern in an internet age where peer reviews, conflicts of interest, money trails, credibility of scholars, universities and institutions, are under constant scrutiny from anyone with an internet connection.
"That being said", studies on top trans athletes in particular might be quite small, studies on the effects hormones have on muscle atrophy and or muscle increase, on the performance of top athletes with invisible intersex conditions, on the sexually dymorphic traits that influence competitive advantages, how prominent they are, and to what extent trans people carry them, are better documented, at least to a point where we can have a much more informed opinion on the issue even if we don't reach a definitive consensus.
And keep in mind, the tobacco industry and Coca-Cola directly benefitted from these studies being published which is why the studies are directly related to what they are selling. Who exactly would benefit financially from trans people being allowed to compete in sports? I gotta be honest, I've yet to hear a person bring up "big money" being involved in regards to trans people being treated fairly and equally in society that didn't end in "the jewish question".
10:18 Sport have been "fair" based on the common understanding of the word "fair". We (humans) have sought to eliminate the most pronounced sources of unfairness (age&sex) by creating alternative leagues or divisions. An inability to achieve perfect fairness (not the goal anyway) is not the basis of an argument to give up on the pursuit of fairness entirely.
In terms of biological sex, trans women are closer to cisgender women than they are to cisgender men. If you are truly interested in pursuing fairness, you should know it's unfair to have trans women compete against cisgender men who haven't transformed their bodies and biochemistry in ways that align more with women than men.
Well said.
This video made me realize that this channel is not about science at all but rather about indoctrinating people into leftist ideology
Just legalize hormones and put everyone in the same league without exceptions on weight, gender or age. Lets ruin all sport careers for once as we have already started with women
There's no common understanding for fairness, only constant negotiation and renegotiation.
I feel this only ever goes one way. Like how many ftm are being represented in the Olympics?
2024 --> none participated and media tried to bully an athlete that was a cis women, born as a women but looked not that female in the public eyes and was framed by a russian boxing organization that couldn't even name the test they said female athlete failed. In the end the transgender debate will hurt female athletes too, because they don't look like a germany's next topmodel but an athlete of their sports.
Several? You don’t hear about them because it doesn’t suit the transphobic narrative
"... too many opportunities for unethical behavior..." is exactly why pro sports will still exist.
Perhaps... But the money in pro sports comes from people willing to watch it (and their ads), so if most people turns their back on it because it's just about what rich people/teams bought/developed the most extreme gene modification, the money incentive will be gone.
Still people want to be entertained, so perhaps either a shift towards blood/death/gladiator things (humans are humans), or things like driverless motor sport (no driver, so no genetic enhancement - just best motor, sensor, and programming/AI).
@@baardkopperud I think most people would complain but still watch it.
@@baardkopperud What evidence is there that people would actually do that? Or are you just projecting what you see as an ideal world?
Also sports will always be part of our society because it is part of our human nature in so many ways. And since we love to optimize and earn money (love /need) there will always be the road to professiinalism
@@TheRealFlenuan I suppose it'll depend on why you follow sports...
For the acheivments? Gone! It's about who could afford the best mods. Because you dream it could be you out there, or remembering how you almost made it as a youth? Nope! Anybody good were moded, injected and trained from before birth. Rooting for the underdog? No such thing anymore! Celebrating human acheivment and endurence? No! ...Unless you mean our ability to tamper with genes &c.
Sure there are many other reasons to follow sport, but I do think they'd loose many - if not most - viewers.
The part at the end about how sports would incentivize unethical behavior brings to mind the Futurama episode where Lela tells fry about the time that steroids became mandatory for all Blernsball players to make the game fair.
Isn't that essentially the case now? I've heard that in many sports you can't be competitive unless you are taking steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. And none of our current pro sports even have "multi ball mode". As far as I know.
the steroids thing is tame compared to genetically modifying babies to maximize athletic output, but we're likely to be dealing with that in all aspects of life if it's not heavily regulated :(
Lol!
To be fair, I would love to see professional basketball with different height groups. Not only would that allow for shorter men/women to compete professionally, but it would also be quite refreshing, since different height teams would have to utilize very different techniques.
I wanna see Lebron James identify as female and go play in the WNBA. 😆
The “transgender women should have their separate sports” argument always strikes me as a rehash of the “separate but equal” doctrine from the segregation era. “White people feel uncomfortable sharing a restaurant with black people! Why do you demand to be let into the white restaurant when there’s a perfectly good black restaurant down the street?”
@@smokexsmoke99, except here it's not about "comfort", bot fairness.
In college, there were under-6' intramural basketball leagues. I enjoyed being able to play against people who did not tower over me.
Muggsy Bogues disagrees.
I live in Seoul, Korea, where in 1988 Griffith Joyner set a women's 100-meter dash record of 10.49 seconds that remain unbroken to this day. But that same 10.49 seconds, which no other woman has been able to match for 36 years, would rank Joyner at around 3000th in the world as a male athlete. The athletic gap between men and women, especially when it comes to muscular strength, is quite substantial. World's best female tennis couldn't beat the world's best 300th best male player, etc.
Sabine picked a one off study. The results are nonsense. We know that even low tesosterone males stil have 5 times (!!!) more testosterone than a high T female. Read LARGE DIVERGENCE IN TESTOSTERONE CONCENTRATIONS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN: FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR ELITE ATHLETES IN SEX-SPECIFIC COMPETITION IN SPORT, A NARRATIVE REVIEW if you want to know more.
It’s not « couldn’t beat », it’s « was utterly crushed » after he has a beer and a smoke.
@@andyvirus2300 Yeah Karsten Braasch was not the best player. But he absolutely annihilated the Williams sister.
Can't wait to live in Seoul soon
And Joyner was doped obviously. She was the female Ben Johnson. Perhaps contributing to her early death (yes I know not according to the official version)
Thank you for offering such a fair and unbiased look at the issue. As a transperson I cannot tell you how sick I am of everything trans-related being political or pushed with an agenda one way or the other. Please keep making great content, bringing facts, and offering many angles; It is refreshing.
I know what you mean. It's also really condescending to be told to not talk about politics as much or to watch less news as a trans person when everyone is out here making our very existence political -_-
Edit: Not trying to make, /are/ making *
it's really not an issue either You're a man or you're a woman It's pretty simple
I think we’re all sick of the politics. I personally feel like we could have had a reasonable discussion about this as a society, taking into account the challenges of natural advantage balanced against the feeling of the individuals. There’s probably no perfect solution, but we could keep trying to make it better with time. Instead, it has been politicized with one side saying you must accept it without question and the other side predictably reacting to try and prevent all of it under concerns like unfair advantage. Both sides are ignoring the science, resulting is a lot of improper transitions (causing serious harm in society) while further stigmatizing those with actual physiological needs from the other end. It really is the extremes that are killing us.
@@michaelturner7641 pretty sure you mean people have either male or female genitals but can express themselves externally in a large amount of ways that don't conform to your backwards worldviews
@@michaelturner7641 It's actually not that simple unfortunately. Some people don't identify as male OR female. They're known as "Non-Binary" and might prefer an "X" gender marker on their ID. They don't generally look like boys or girls, but something in between. They feel uncomfortable using men's AND women's restrooms, and probably wouldn't feel comfortable competing on Men's OR Women's sports teams. They're the only reason we need a third bathroom or a third sports league; for the nonbinary individuals who don't want to be viewed as male or female. 🙃
You had me laughing at, " They're really more like ... freak shows. Kind of like physics conferences."
She recovered from the 'freak show' comment with the 'physics conferences' comparison. I wonder why athletic competitions are more interesting freak shows? Hmm...
It's not fair, at every physics conference I've been to there's someone smarter than me and at every basketball game, many people way taller and somehow they're hardly ever trans. (though not always, that said, my basketball, swimming, and running careers were not derailed by trans people.)
That line of Sabine's got a spontaneous fist-pump from me! Then I had an urge to check the physics conference photo to she whether she was in it…😜
I loved the Meghan trainor “all the right junk in all the right places” line
@@bcwbcw3741 So what you’re saying is… the true question is why aren’t we segregating physics conferences by sex???
I don’t think your argument at 10:19 about fairness really follows/makes sense. Especially after showing that the research suggest that trans women maintain a physical advantage over cis women. Even though your point that it’s technically unfair that any given individual has a physical advantage over another is true, I think we still want to avoid letting trans women compete with cis women because in the ultra-competitive world of elite sports trans women with such advantages will likely categorically rise to the top of their ranks and beat their opponents. People want to be aware of and praise the top performing biological females (cis women) for what they can do within that biological category
10:36 I’m pretty sure many people want to know what is the best that someone can perform considering their natural advantages *within the category of biological sex*
I agree with you but here in the posts for this video we seem to be a minority.
I believe if a person wants to compete they should be able to. But thing's need to be balanced where they can. The only time I hear the word "fair" in any competition, sports,monopoly etc. is when cheating is suspected. If fair is the bar then a person could only compete against themself. Balanced allows for divisions. But more importantly with rules in place then it's on the person to decide if they will give it a shot. If I enter a row boat race and halfway in they announce we're allowing the use of Motors that's unfair to those that made their decision to compete based on the rules at the time.
My question for those that think this happening is ok.
So do we allow let's say Olympic athletes who have not won a medal to compete in the Special Olympics? Yes there will always be exceptions. Runners who have lost legs and compete with the help of prosthetics. In some automotive quarter-mile racing we had a Run what you brung. Cars were never even/fair. The choice to still compete knowing the rules was up to you which made it fair.
Sorry I should have put this as a post.
Yeah, feels like mental gymnastics. I'm so confused when she said this part.
We want fair competition so try to make it most fair. Fighting sport usually have weight range which reduce physical advantage.
@@Rheologist "I’m pretty sure many people want to know what is the best that someone can perform considering their natural advantages *within the category of biological sex"*
But why "within the category of biological sex"?
Is it just that we are so accustomed to partitioning people by sex that we can no longer imagine not doing it?
What if someone wants to know what is the best that someone can perform within the category of having size-9 feet? Or the best that someone can perform within the category of being between 5' and 5' 6" tall? If any attribute affects performance, we can imagine partitioning people based on that attribute. Why single out sex, specifically, rather than any other?
@@omp199 Because sex is one of the biggest differences. Comparing 5'11" Allen Iverson to 6'10" Kevin Durant is interesting but they also played against each other, neither has played against Diana Taurasi and likely never will because the athletic gap is insane. There's been less than 20 total dunks in WNBA history. There's more difference between the sexes than any other category. There's only a few sports women can even compete with men at the highest level, yet you'll find men of all shapes and sizes throughout professional competitions.
Another sport where females tend to do as well as, and even better than males at times, is rock climbing. I'm just adding this to the pot.. I love how someone actually addressed the complexity of what is "fair" in sports, and what is meaningful.
For the record I was a downhill mountain bike racer (I was much better at working with gravity than against it) I was also 35 when I started. This sport belongs to 19 year old males and I don't care.. I'm a HUGE fan of these wonderful freaks... my god they are fast and fearless. I love that.
I was proud to be a part of this sport and showing women, even older women, that it's do-able. I've even seen older male cancer survivors enter races and I love this too. There is a bond between all of us.
Age is definitely a huge factor. There were no age classes in women's DH mountain biking. I was competing with women half my age who lived in the resorts I was racing at. (They also had a training advantage)
There was a controversy as well, with the first trans woman competing with the women in this sport. I wasn't at the pro level, so I had no problem with it. In fact, she was cheering all of us women in sport class at the end of the course, This was something I'll always remember.
If I were at the pro level, I don't know what I would think, to be honest.
One problem I have is when those with any kind of advantage stick around in beginner, sport, or expert classes when they should be competing in the sport, expert, or pro levels. (sandbagging)
It's also true that some advantages may be because of funding.. I was lucky to be sponsored and had a great bike and mechanics in my corner. Sometimes it's about funding and access to resources...and now we can talk about Formula One and Nascar racing.. (Danica) and get into an entirely new discussion.
Most of all, as a former competitive athlete, there has to be some meaning and entertainment value. For me, I was happy to just be on the race circuit. I was more of an ambassador to the sport. The primary entertainment value belongs to males in their late teens and early 20's. And I'm there for that.
At the same time, this sport taught me so much and is accessible to women and older athletes as well. We all hung out together. I'll never forget that.
Sponsorships can also happen for more reasons that being biologically exceptional. I was obviously not sponsored because of my great speed or technical abilities, but to be an ambassador for the sport.
The point: It's complicated. LOVE this video. Thank you, Sabine!!
they do well yes, they dont do better than males.. all the ones doing the craziest and hardest tracks are always men...
I was initially worried about how this video would shake out, but it was remarkably clear headed and dignified to all! I should have known that ultimately Sabine would end by completely dunking on professional athleticism entirely.
What? You're not even qualified to understand the pubs yet you're confident in your understanding of the validity of the peer review??
@@kathleenpearson-dh9od Those are entirely different moral questions. We are here to talk about the science, at least Sabrına is. What you are doing is shaming another person for not entertaining a personel belief on a science video, which I think is indefensable.
I would be happy to discuss why the beliefs you hold are bigoted however. I am not a scientist (though I am a med student) so discussing morality is more in my wheelhouse.
@@kathleenpearson-dh9od Kathleen - take a fucking chill pill.
Yes. I had to laugh that the final conclusion was that sports are dumb and incentivize poor ethical behavior. Such a nerd argument. I loved it.
@@yttrxstein4192 that’s usually how it is. Lots of new stuff are happening, so it’s to early to tell, and there might be things that might occur in the future that might take what we already know, and flip it on its head. Mainly due to reality being extremely complicated.
and let's not forget that those competitions mean something to those who put a lot of effort into training to compete! it is not only about winning a trophy but also money and opportunities afterwards.
I mean, most won’t get any money and opportunities afterwards. Thinking about profesional sports as a competition for money is flawed because most will make extreme sacrifices and still don’t make money. The effort and years of training and dedication do mean something to the athletes. But it’s not as if sports being unfair and taking away money that could have been theirs is their main risk.
@@yucol5661 nobody said it was the “main risk”
Simply another cost for women from men participating in their sports.. despite their leagues being separated BY sex. It’s just so ridiculous…
Very informative and well-articulated. I especially appreciate the brief coverage of intersex conditions at the start, the philosophical exploration of "fairness" in sporting events at the end, and the humourous bits interspersed throughout. Thank you for making this.
But it isn’t though it’s the same exact thing every other person says “yes it’s not fair but sometimes life isn’t fair” ignoring the difference between controllable and uncontrollable advantage
It was a low quality compared to what she normally produces. Her conclusion is literally a Nirvana fallacy lol. Her analysis is also lacking a lot of relevant physiological differences between males and females yet she only focuses on males who have undergone "transition" of which the data pool is extraordinarily small while we already know for a fact that muscle insertions, distribution, and bone density stay the same. She, like so many others, is afraid of having her career assassinated by political zealots.
@@deuscoromat742 EXACTLY !!!!!!
@Deus Coromat if she would care to be canceled, she doesn't criticize hardly string theory.
Intersex people are so rare you may as well say they are statistically zero. The issue is not people being born with female and male parts, it is people who feel they do not have the right parts.
would have been good to have a look at safety issues in contact sports. international rugby did quite comprehensive research into the safety of those who haven't gone through male puberty, playing with/against those who have, and there was about a 30% increase in injuries, including concussions. given that we are learning more and more about the very serious and long term affects of concussion, it seems extremely irresponsible to allow women who haven't undergone male puberty to be put at increased risk.
Sabine picked a one off study. The results are nonsense. We know that even low tesosterone males stil have 5 times (!!!) more testosterone than a high T female. Read LARGE DIVERGENCE IN TESTOSTERONE CONCENTRATIONS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN: FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR ELITE ATHLETES IN SEX-SPECIFIC COMPETITION IN SPORT, A NARRATIVE REVIEW if you want to know more.
Yes! Women are way more injury prone. There are also studies looing at the injury rate in the British Navy I think. It was even hihger than your numbers. Women have crazy high injury rates in these fields.
Don't you mean men who haven't gone through male puberty?
@@thealrightygina5725 i actually mean people (cis women and girls, some transwomen and girls, and prebuscent boys) who haven't gone through male puberty are at risk playing with people (cismen, some transwomen) who have gone through male puberty.
its not that hard to use clear language and also not be an a-hole.
@@thealrightygina5725
They should, but i think they’re hiding bigotry behind concern trolling
@@trishna_6815 Oh, so you mean that you believe both that transmen shouldn't be allowed to play contact sports with cismen and that transwomen shouldn't be allowed to play contact sports with ciswomen because there's a purported 30% increase in injuries amongst transmen and ciswomen in such groupings? The way you put it didn't make a lot of sense to me but I think perhaps I've got it now.
“They’re really more like freak shows, kind of like physics conferences.” Lol!!!! Great presentation.
I lol
11:16 context for those curious like me, she's talking about how professional athletes already represent the best of the best and can't be considered representative of the rest of the population.
That's right. And if in reality I was a Chemical Engineer, Structural Engineer or some other scientist who actually worked for a living, but insisted on admission into the Physics conference because I "identified" as a Physicist, then I could increase my chances of consideration if I took enough cognitive suppressing drugs that allowed me to share in the wonderful joy of string theory, supersymmetry and all of the other topics presented at the average conference.
I knew someone would get this comment in before me - Sabine excelling herself (again).
"Woah woah woah, you used to say you were a Chemical Engineer but through years of hard work and persistence in study, you now have a paper certifying from the experts of your higher learning institution that you have a degree in physics and you want to be let in and treated like a Physicist since accredited experts say you are one? Nice try, Chemical Engineer. Maybe in another life" - physics conference people *and _certain other folks_
One issue not mentioned is bone structure which is a huge factor in why men are more powerful runners than women since their gait is straight versus a woman's gait is more rounded (hip structure allows more circular motion of the leg as it moves). No discussion about VO2 Max, fast twitch fibers, bone density, skeletal structure, and many other factors that contribute to the differences among men and women. A woman's fertility cycle also becomes an issue when she cannot devote an entire month of training. I thought these studies were incredibly simplistic in their view. You cannot limit a study to one or two variables and claim little difference but rather it must be viewed from a holistic approach that takes in all the differences among genders which cumulatively contribute to the differences. Since men lose so little with hormone therapy and they have a distinct advantage in sports in general, the unfairness is limited to the females. A "good" high school male runner can easily beat a world record holding female runner every time. I once compared Florence Joyner's world records for the 100 m and 200 m to high school males and she would not have ranked in the top 400. Those extremes cannot be overcome by simple hormone therapy treatments hence making female athletes unable to compete at these levels.
If we are going to dismiss the notion of fairness, then we really don't need women's sports, paraolympics, special olympics, or any other category other than just sports. I am not in favor of the 'games just for the fittest' which would be limited to only male sports. I do believe there is an argument to be made that we must have distinct categories to offer a space for those who can compete at the highest levels just not against their male counterparts.
Well said. I can't believe the arguments put forth by Sabine in this video. The plethora of scientific evidence, decades old, tells us plainly there are significant differences in the kinesiology and performance of females and males. That can not be disproved by a few biased studies on transgender athletes performance that focus on a single metric. But then Sabine, after quoting all of this science, then negates the relevance of any scientific study, because of the "entertainment" factor. Well if a trans athlete competing with women will be more entertaining, why not go for the full show and have men and women compete? There is more to sports than entertainment. Solidarity and support, the witnessing of expertise and performance, receiving inspiration from dedicated people. You can have all the natural advantage in the world, but it's training and dedication that win events.
What it all boils down to is whether these differences, no matter how large or small, and regardless of whether they are attributable to one or more factors, can be overcome with training and effort. As she mentioned, the average male has no chance of becoming a successful NBA player. If you're 5'8'', no amount of training can overcome this and put you on an equal footing with a 6'6'' player.
Also, not all of these factors are useful in all sports. As she mentioned, there are certain sports in which women have an advantage over men.
@@Adam-nw1vyIt matters how large or small the differences are. If they're too vast, no amount of human, non-chemically aided, training could overcome those differences. Which they are, indeed, vast af.
@@Donald6309 And, like her, I'm saying that the difference between the average person and the typical successful NBA player is too vast, and that no amount of human, non-chemically aided training could overcome this difference. Do you disagree with this?
When I first read the title, I thought to myself “oh no, is she really gonna go there?!” I’m sure glad you did! I’ve never seen this topic tackled in such an objective and multidimensional manner and I commend you for doing so.
Me too! Another really good video.
I agree. It's a "hot topic," but a valid question to ask and discuss. And science should be able to ask the uncomfortable of questions and look at them in an objective way. Although it may be a hallmark of transphobia, I believe it isn't transphobic to discuss how trans people in sports should work, or in prisons.
And this was a good discussion of those issues, without being bogged down with feelings.
Obliterating the gender divide after decades of hard work giving women a fair way to play is objective?
I was also worried! But I thought this was very well done
I feel like this creator is interested in a purely rationalistic approach. Such an approach seems to support the basic tenets of trans rights.
sense of fairness is important to competition. for certain contact sports such as wrestling, boxing or karate, weight is used to level the playing field. a 50kg player will be disadvantaged against someone who is 100kg.
"This is why I suspect a century from now, professional athletics will not exist anymore. It creates too many incentives for unethical behaviour."
I agree that competitive athletics create incentives for unethical behaviour but that hasn't stopped anyone yet.
And it breed animosity within children and promotes troubling dynamics of power (e.g. bullies get a platform)
It won’t exist because people won’t exist
Yeah, I find that prediction somewhat unlikely, what will happen though is that records will be reset as they cannot be compared to older ones.
@@noxiousophidian9634 I don't think anyone is talking about the end of sports in general especially not for kids.
The existence of many incentives for unethical behavior hasn't done that much to get rid of politicians or elite universities.
I really appreciate the sources in the comments. So many popular and trusted channels provide no sources which I think is messed up. Its a huge relief to be able to watch your videos and not have to worry about being lied to.
I get that about other topics but if you need sources to know women get crushed by trans women idk what is going on up there.
@@raykings5244 that's because that doesn't happen. Hard to find sources about something that doesn't happen. That's like trying to find sources about the dimensions of Santa's house in the North Pole.
I will never trust anything without a source, so I love this channel.
@@hollisticc But it does happen, and it will happen more and more.
@@hollisticc wdym it doesn't happen?
I like the idea of "meaningful competition." We don't have to account for every variable either. Boxing has weight classes. Why not apply similar classes to sports based on advantages? Yes, it would be imperfect, but most things are until we observe and adapt.
I find it funny how the "fairness" goons are trying to force women's sports that include trans women to exclude them. The fairness goons FUCKING HATE flat-track roller derby because we've told them in no uncertain terms to get bent.
It's not just a matter of 'imperfect'; it's a matter of 'does it work at all'. For instance, the same blow landed on a woman will be much more likely to cause injury than on a male, due to bone strength and size (the latter applying even in cases of similar height-weight, curiously enough). So a woman competing against a man in a boxing match will be much more likely to suffer a broken bone or other serious injury than her opponent, EVEN IF they fall into the same weight class. That is neither fair nor meaningful competition.
We already divide them into classes for fairness - those classes are called male and female
@@OutsiderLabs And you actively try to destroy anyone and anything who steps outside those classes because those classes aren't about fairness.
@@katherineberger6329 'actively trying to destroy'? What on earth are you talking about? People pointing at the scientific literature and demonstrating that temporary HRT exposure doesn't magically erase the significant physical differences between male and female competitors are not trying to "destroy" people who don't fit neatly into "male" and "female."
There is a complicated ethical discussion to be had about intersex people who have advantages within female sex segregated sports (with the most significant being XY chromosomal people with partial/complete androgen insensitivity and as a result naturally present as female). That conversation has nothing to do with the fairness of allowing natal males to compete against natal females under the (empirically verified to be false) presumption that undergoing hormone therapy to aesthetically appear more female makes one physically equivalent to a natal female competitor in sports performance.
i am OUTRAGED and OFFENDED that you think my Boston Red Sox will cease to exist in 100 years
"So maybe the solution is in the end we all just do eSports."
I CAN'T
Hey I've seen impressive things in evo
Too bad men dominate e-sports as well, and no amount of screaming about "patriarchy" is going to change it that much.
@@KhukuriGod
Its a joke calm dowm
@@KhukuriGod yeah but in many fighting games there are woman who consistencely in top 16. Its just that gaming events/ online evironment is generally toxic for woman so I think that I also why woman are less likely to participate in them
She legit had me waiting for her chuckle. It never came.
"They're freak shows. Kind of like physics conferences" that is pretty much spot on. There's no better argument for Borg infiltration than attending a large conference.
Ya, that was hilarious.
This statement was hands down the best! 😆😆
What do you mean, why would the Borg help?
@@watcher8582 I think he means "take me now, make it stop", lol.
Really though, aren't conferences actually dating forums for scientists now??
You think that pro sports will disappear due to high incentives for unethical behavior? I admire your optimism. Personally, I think we're much more likely to increase unethical behavior than get rid of sports.
perhaps it all boils down to people just wanting to enjoy the thrill of overcoming or outcompeting each other without any care for the methods or ethics involved therein...
Being trans is unethical?
The definition is professional is to get paid for the activity. The idea is that the money gets removed from the equation. But yes, agreed, I can't see prof sports going away in the foreseeable future.
@@BooksAndShitButNotLiterally did u even watch the video…?
@@user-bl2vr9jj2z Some of it.
Sex is not “assigned at birth”. It is OBSERVED at birth. Even by the progressive definitions, it would be gender that is assigned at birth, not sex.
I used to compete internationally at orienteering. It’s an interesting Sport in that all competitors can compete at self assigned levels, males and females, young and old, able bodied and those with disabilities, or those outside these groups. Awards were given for fastest time, as well as by gender, age and category. If you won in lower levels you moved up, regardless of body make-up. Seems like a very fair way of doing things.
Right on Luke. That's the way forward in sport without alienating any competitors.
presumably, making out of the forest alive is 'winning,' but how many categories will be enough? how many gender categories were there?
That sport is basically irrelevant to physical ability, unless you're really messed up. Orienteering is more mental than physical.
You might be able to run 4 minute miles, but if you suck at reading maps, you're probably not going to do all that well.
The same way physical ability doesn't matter much in chess.
I don't think anyone would really care who was what in chess. Nor would they in orienteering.
But physical sports are a whole nother ballgame, so to speak.
A 140 pound female would get near killed on a NFL field full of men....
@@curtisnixon5313 women’s sports won’t exist. The top 1,000 male runners are faster than the fastest woman.
The reason we seperate sports by sex is so females can win something
11:24 regarding the entertainment value of sports; It's more interesting to watch a sporting event where the contestants are closely matched but have slight variations in abilities than watching one team curb-stomp the other.
That is, of course, unless the one doing the stomping is the one that is considered the underdog.
That's not true, Usain Bolt stomped his competition for over a decade and was really fun ti watch
Or any team against the Dallas Cowboys.
@@jamonnaranjo Now replace all his opponents with the fastest women.
If its the Pats or Colby Covington getting stomped, I'm here for it any day.
I think this is going to be the ultimate relevant factor in sports competitions. Does anyone really want to watch a trans man destroy a bunch of cis women in any kind of competition? Is that interesting? Exciting? It would be boring as hell, and honestly would make me pretty mad. I don't see how any trans man can possibly think he is earning that win. If I joined a kid's competition and wiped the floor with them, have I earned it?
It's not a fair competition. Everyone knows it isn't. The trans man especially should know that it isn't.
No one is going to pay to watch events like that.
Its interesting to note that the paralympics do classify people by giving them a handicap; thus enabling many people with varying levels of the same type of handicap to compete against one another. Of course this doesn't remove all differences, but does allow for a certain level of reasonable competition. In the end this is all that can be done; like the way we separate competitors with respect to age. Today we even have senior competitions. Should we provide every person in the world with a handicap evaluation such that someone who is half-blind can complete on the same level as someone who has perfect vision in archery? I'm sure there isn't a perfect answer to this question; as the answer will depend on the objective of competition. Is it to amuse the spectators, it is to make money for the performers, or profit to the business people? Good luck solving that riddle!!
Perhaps what should then be included in professional sports is an active 'handicapping' negotiation segment where teams or individuals are handicapped based on pre-event negotiations by the managers or coaches. Like in hot rod street racing!
Michael Phelps, no one will race you unless you give them x seconds head start!
This is a crazy utopian idea that will, if implemented, destroy elite sports for spectators and thus lead to their complete collapse. We watch sports to see the amazing feats the very best athletes can pull off. Seeing Bolt win by 0.5 seconds in a ten second race makes more people want to watch, not less. Seeing a man who identifies as a woman beat people by that distance in a women's race, would have those who aren't utopian fantasists throwing their remote control through the TV and not replacing it.
Paralympics is rife with cheating
Thank you Sabine. Your work is amazing. Your communication is very clear and the sprinkling of humour is refreshing.
I am very used to seeing videos with titles like this one ending up being statements of opinions with half hearted proofs, and I am very happy to have learned so much in this one! Very comprehensive and truly instructive, thank you for making this topic so understandable !
It’s very sad that you think you learned something from her rationalizing and pandering.
@@RAF71chingachgook shut up karen
Yes if your certain you are Wright then oh oh possibly an error has occurred
Life is not fair soon going to be hard for sports to be truly fair as spectators kinda know this already fans still like to watch it is entertaining
@@josephcunningham5482 - Who is "wright"? Are you referring to one of the Wright Brothers-- Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright? 🤔
Hi All, I can't be here when the video appears but I'll check in tonight!
I loved your video Sabine, I found it very informative and it certainly gives food for thought and further discussion. 🙂
It's unbelievable how such basic concepts (the difference between males and females when it comes to strength, endurance etc, and not only in terms of testosterone) are now "controversial". Great of you to talk about it, many don't have the courage and unscientific messages are allowed to go around and spread.
@@giulia885 Nice trolling, how helpful.
@Kaleigh O'Grady Well said
@@thesunreport who's trolling? You're the one who's insulting without even trying to come up with an argument.
An example of why this kind of videos are so important
Sabine, it is possible that the low testosterone scores for elite male athletes was a result of them coming off of their steroid cycle.
These kind of scores are often seen in athletes who are known to use steroids, Jon Jones is a good example. It is very unlikely that a man with levels of testosterone comparable to elite female athletes would be able to compete at an elite level with men… unless of course he’s just coming off a steroid cycle
... i'm not sure she actually critically examines every study she shows.
actually i'm rpetty sure she doesn't.
Just read the discussion of the paper. These levels were measured after an event, and extreme stress can deplete your testosterone levels apparently. Often this is recovered after a good night's sleep. This study was a spin-off from a study on the effects of doping, so roids have definitely been checked for :) The interesting part of this paper isn't necessarily about testosterone, but differences in lean body mass. They even conclude that using serum testosterone as a means to exclude certain women from competition is untenable, and that LBM is likely a much more important marker.
Yeah that was weird
@@sandrawiersma2512
Good on you, dude-ette!
@@sandrawiersma2512doping still takes place at extraordinarily high levels at the olympics and not usually in very specific and borderline undetectable way, very hard thing to control for even in a study of this magnitude
Arguments of some people that sport in general is unfair because for example some women are taller than others, therefore, they have advantage in playing basketball makes no sense. It's only natural and normal that within a sex category (male or female) obviously the people with the best physical attributes for a given sport will participate in it. Tall women will play basketball etc, short women might go into figure ice skating etc.The issue comes when we have a group of the best female athletes, both when it comes to a talent and innate physical attributes necessary to perform best in a given discipline, so we cannot actually find anyone better in the female category, and then comes someone whose only talent was being born male. All female basketball players will be tall and female, but one can be as tall and male. And this is what makes it unfair.
"All female basketball players will be tall and female, but one can be as tall and male" and what does it matter? In that case "male" means you have another power, being genetically stronger what is an advantage just like "a tall woman". So the Person would have simply two advantages, being a Woman that is tall and genetically stronger. It is not the Gender that is the problem, it is the genetically advantage the Transwoman has then. But that doesn't make her less of a Woman. Just a double strong Woman.
Therefore Sports should be devided by abilities and advantages, that take the biological sex obviously in account. But the Biological Sex has not to do with what Gender the Person is.
It just shouldn't be called Women Sports or Men Sports, if it excludes Transpeople. They should just say Sports or use Terms that refer to the Genetically Advantages and Abilities.
But thats "difficult" and "complicated" so people rather refer to it as Women and Men Sports, even if it excludes Men or Women with different Biological Advantages.
There are alot of Ciswomen that are Tall and just as strong as a man, that have the two advantages then. But then it would be fine?
As already said, Sports should be seperated by abilities, not gender.
I'm increasingly skeptical that science actually has much to say on this. It's a democratic, collective issue, not a facts-and-logic issue. All this discussion of HRT is a red herring. The point of female athletes is for women to have relatable individuals to look up to in the domain of sports and physical achievement. The same for male athletes. The majority of the female population is cis. It's only fair that they get a category that fits their general experience. Ideally there's simply a category for everyone. Who cares which is most prominent... the Special Olympics can be incredibly meaningful for the athletes who compete in it. And objectively it is just as "hard" as the regular Olympics, if not harder. Similarly for the hypothetical Trans Olympics.
We don't allow employers to join unions because we recognize it is not in the collective interests of the majority of the workers. But employers *are* employees, they work for the company too. And there are pro-labor employers out there, who identity with workers and would likely not negatively impact the union. There's no perfect dividing line. Yet unions generally don't open membership to employers. There's just bits of inflexibility in the world that you have to accept, because none of these institutions are perfect, and none by themselves safeguard the general welfare.
@@theshadowsroses Well, you can say that transwoman's gender is "woman", but her sex is still male. The division in sports has never been based on gender (self-identification) but on sex (physicality) because that's what matters in sports performance. I find it "fascinating" that although "gender community" has always been saying that sex and gender are two different things, now they seem to conflate the two when it benefits them.
@@ZawieHahis sex is still men.
It's pretty offensive towards women that just because a man says so, he is suddenly seen as a woman. It's denigrating and humiliating against real women.
And the women that support this misogyny are just women too eager to humiliate middle class workers by forcing us to accept men in the same bathrooms our daughters are.
This is probably the most honest and well researched take on this issue, thanks for taking the effort to clear things out
@OGSF exactly i wanna see some cyberpunk shit like adam smasher competing in the olympics
No completely solar panels can be placed in area like water canals that would help with algae growth without disturbing land also solar can work with distribution verses Transission and battery storage like Hopedale Australia has proven the concept while also showing how batteries have helped during g peak operation instead of starting up a peaked plant which is vastly expensive saving the customers money united Arab emeritus use solar for pumping gas at 5 cents a kilowatt hour and if no sun or wind for 3 days we'll we would have another more to worry about than energy
Sorry, but she's a professional LIAR:
TWO QUESTIONS THE SABINE HOFFSTEDER AND OTHER LIARS WILL REFUSE TO ANSWER
Firstly, if at some point in a physical endeavor, strength becomes a secondary factor to endurance, and women are supposedly able to cope better than men when it comes to physical endurance, why is it that even in extreme endurance events like the Navy Seals Hell Week and Ultra Marathon Runs that men still continue to show significantly higher levels of endurance than women? Why is it that only ONE woman Grace O’Rourke, has ever been recorded in all the history of Hell Week to endure its brutal and punishing physical regimen and practically ALL the most significant endurance records listed in the Guinness Book of World Records are held by men?
Secondly, if fairness is essentially a meaningless concept in competitive sporting events, what’s the point of even having rules that punish cheating or doing anything that gives one competitor an unfair advantage over another?
@@thebeatnumber long distance swimming records are all women
@@allijnera That was based on skewed data collected from the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim ( between the years 2009 and 2010).
The women in the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim were on average significantly YOUNGER than the men (33.7 versus 41.5 years)
In marathon swimming events where men and women are the same age, the men dominate.
I'm reminded of an analysis of world speed records. I believe the conclusion wasn't just that some athletes born since the 1900s are longer limbed and faster, but also that they have much better technology to assist their training and performance. The improvements in running footwear, performance monitoring, nutrition/hydration improvements, training and much more all play a part. It's not entirely accurate to say that the worlds' athletes are better/taller/faster now than 100 years ago, but that they are better trained, have better gear, and have been socially/financially selected for specific characteristics that push them into those fields as well as possibly being born with more/different advantages than their predecessors.
Is it "fair" that some nations are willing to spend more to select and enhance their athletes for certain events/sports than other nations can? That's an advantage that could be controlled for, yet we don't. They certainly have better outcomes most of the time. Look at China/Russia with gymnasts. You see nations recruiting people from around the world to compete in their sports, when those people could be representing their nations of birth if that country had similar resources to train/promote their athletes. Not unlike politicians who can spend/fund raise unlimited money vs those nations where campaigns are limited in from where and how much money they can spend, it makes a huge difference in the outcomes and representation of the general population.
Explain to me how that justifies men joining women's leagues. If sport's unfair so who cares anyways, then just get rid of women's leagues and disability leagues entirely, no?
Yes this sounds to me like a good reason to get rid of women's sports altogether. It's going to be unfair anyway so why do we need it?
yeah no this argument sounds dumb
Ladies and gentlemen this is a Nirvana fallacy.
"Because we can't filter all the contaminants out of the water we shouldn't filter any"
ps. If your ideology is blatantly embracing a fallacy as its Flagship argument you should probably reevaluate Your alliance.
@@alberteinstein8862 Your instincts are correct.
10:16 THIS! This is something I've been thinking a lot. Can we not do things to make this more fair? How come combat sports have not only gender division but also weight divisions that allow a much wider range of people to participate, while if I, for example, I'm not lucky enough to be at least 2m tall, my chances of becoming a professional basketball player are basically crashed.
@@RobustPhysics And yet, combat sports could do it better.
Firstly, there are many basketball players well under 2m, usually playmakers, Spud Webb even won the dunking competition at 1.7m. Of course height helps, but taller players are often also way clumsier and slow so it's a fairly fair trade off. Volleyball is actually the sport where height matters a lot more.
But anyway, you can't really create a separate league for players 170-180cm, another for 180-190cm players, etc, whereas division by gender is very simple and also (in most sports) not something that can be overcome with training. A team of average sized male players would still destroy a female basketball team with everyone being 190cm+ for example. The differences are far bigger. The same actually comes into play in martial arts, as someone with about 80kg I have absolutely not chance against someone of roughly similar skill with 100kg, body mass just matters that much more in those sports
@@didrikmesicek4825 The fact that 1.7m is remarcably short for a basketball player tells you a lot about the role height plays.
We already do this by having different leagues ranging from hobby to professional, there are amateur and semi-pro leagues for virtually every sport including fighting.
But the sports that people watch are the best of the best, they want to see the top athletes competing and that's where the money is, the more you try to include athletes at lower levels, the less people will want to watch.
@@TheStatisticalPizza I'm talking more about physical divisions rather than skill ones.
Thank you for your objective and honest depiction of the science!
An important (in my opinion) question that hasn't been addressed here is the question of whether trans people might also have to deal with the disadvantage of having gone through gender dysphoria? I.e. are trans people statistically less fit than other people of their biological sex at the start of their transition?
"Sports have never been fair" It's a fantastic way to put it. Just look at the birth months of professional baseball players.
August 18.6 26.6%
September 17.8 21.1%
October 15.9 8.2%
Why would this be? What does their birth month have to do with ability?
These kids were as old as possible when they start school. In fact in many states if haven't turned five by a certain date you don't have to start school that year. This means children will be larger and have an advantage in sports for their age. This is an example of the Matthew effect where people with an advantage gain more advantages over time.
The month that you were born in contributes overwhelmingly to the possibility of you being a professional athlete. That's definitely not fair.
No it's not, the only reason women's sports exist is to let women compete against other women without men. Excluding males from competing is the entire reason women's sports exist. It's a terrible argument.
I learned this fact a few months ago and was so surprised. It perfectly shows how unfair sport is. People really underestimate the effect luck have on an outcome. So many people like to believe it’s all a 100% hard work.
Uhm...you do know that correlation doesn't imply causation, right?
@@juimymary9951 Absolutely, but everything we're talking about today is statistical. Taller basketball players are statistically more successful in basketball, but that doesn't erase the fact that Muggsy Bogues was successful and was only 5'3.
@@AiguilleVoodoo We all like to think that we deserve what we have because we work hard, and while working hard does contribute, there is so much luck in everything we do. Being born into a country where you can get an education, being born to a family that can afford to feed you good food, pay for college and on and on.
It's uncomfortable fact that working hard is only one factor in being successful in anything.
@Sabine, in the video, you presented percentage statistics for the effects of hormone therapy on trans men and trans women. But percentage increase vs. decreases aren't directly comparable. A 1% increase in body mass does not always correspond to the same amount of mass as a 1% decrease. The former can be smaller than the latter when starting from different body masses. This is important in comparing the statistics about the effects of hormone therapy on trans women and trans men. If the body changes happen after puberty, the trans women's changes are likely measured from a larger body mass than for the trans men. So a 1% decrease in body mass for trans women can on average be a larger amount of mass than a 1% increase in body mass for trans men.
In comparisons between countries with different population sizes, this kind of problem is handled by quoting changes per some fixed amount of people (e.g. percent per 100,000 of population). Might a similar comparison help somewhat here (e.g. percent per kilogram of body weight)? It may not change which of trans women and trans men experience the larger change, but it will make the gap appear smaller.
MANSPLAINING!
@@gerry4b shut up
Good point!
@@gerry4b you are not funny
@@gerry4b
a - this joke died half a decade ago
b - this isn't "mansplaining" at all, by the terms definition
When I saw the card, I can't say I wasn't concerned. This is something that hits close to home for me. After watching it I have to say this was extremely well done. Thank you for compiling all this data and presenting it as you did.
I was concerned too, but Sabine did an excellent job. Again.
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Same here.
And let's not forget why this topic is hot right now. Because American conservatives, who never cared for woman sports, are creating a moral panic around trans people.
We need to make a separate category for them. I have no bad feelings for trans people, to each their own. However, just because someone wants to become another sex identity does not mean you developed the same.
This video was an absolute blast. I love how dry your joke delivery is, you made me laugh so hard and presented a logical and well-supported argument at the same time. Keep on producing such amazing content!
Me too! She doesn’t change her demeanor or tone at all, then suddenly I realize she just told a joke! Great delivery 😂
I thought the random Meghan Trainor lyric would be the highlight of this video, but then there came: "Athletes are biological extremes. Fairness has never been the point of these competitions. They're really more like freak shows. Kind of like physics conferences, basically." 😆
This quote is so degrading to people who put in hard work and determination.
And also degrades the people who lose... As though winning is the only reason we have sports.
A tall lazy man always loses to a short hardworking one. The people who think trans people can compete don't even watch sports.
@@dansfrance188 There are no lazy tall athletes at elite level. They are competing with other motivated abnormally tall athletes. The short person has no place there no matter how hard he/she trains.
@@dansfrance188 a lazy female trans athlete also loses to the hardworking female cis athlete
@@dansfrance188 why do you think trans people can't compete? Does the transgender particle stop them from being able to pick up a ball or something?
@@66Kusmu Us women’s Olympic soccer champions lost to 15 and under boys. Same with the Australian women’s Olympic soccer team. They lost to 14 year old boys. Trans men have an unfair advantage on women when it comes to physical sports. That’s why you don’t have any examples of transitioned women to men in male sports.
"Fairness" is indeed a complex concept in sports. I have a condition that was at one time known as "Clumsy Child Syndrome," but despite the name, I did not grow out of it. It is more than just what typical people mean by being "clumsy," but is not the same level of physical impairment as would be seen in, for example, cerebral palsy. (At one point, it was thought to be on a spectrum with cerebral palsy.) I cannot compete "fairly" with typical people in sports. With very hard work, I might be able to get to the low end of normal in some specific sport, but if the people I'm competing against work just as hard or even quite a bit less hard, I will still lose. Whether you call it "fair competition" or "meaningful competition," the only way for me to have it would be if there were a Clumsy Child Syndrome version of Special Olympics. There isn't. For one thing, there aren't enough of us. "Competing with myself" is not an absurdity to me; it is the only meaningful participation in score-keeping sports I can have. I sometimes say that I am "the worst bowler you will ever meet with my own ball and shoes," and I get very excited if I can bowl my age, a feat which, obviously, keeps getting more challenging as I get older, but still involves a score even most casual bowlers would consider embarrassing. Interestingly, the one and only advantage my condition has given me is that I do not have very strong left/right hand dominance; I am fairly ambidextrous. But the rules of bowling say I cannot use this advantage, because it would be "unfair" to people who weren't born with ambidexterity. Funny how that works, huh? The ONE advantage I, a very disadvantaged bowler have, would be "unfair" to everyone else, but my clumsiness is not considered "unfair," just the way things are. I can't help but think, "Oh, NOW you care about fairness? Heads you win, tails I lose, THAT'S what's 'fair'?" See what I mean about fairness being complicated?
As a kid, used to play pickup sports with someone who definitely would have fallen into “clumsy child syndrome” (tripped a lot, odd way of running). I THINK he started taking a certain medication and ended up being one of the better athletes on high school sports teams (especially basketball.) Was an amazing transformation.
I was just a nerd. I sucked at all sports, though I wasn't as bad as they portray it in movies, I could actually hit a softball. I did actually play youth soccer, but I was a bench warmer. My coach would put me in a few minutes a game.
Fairnes does not exist. It's an illusion of perception, an abstraction like luck, success, money, and power. Nothing is really fair. It's just rules we invent to make sense of the world. Should we even be surprised those rules are biased to our beliefs and, in essence, also unfair? Luck, or random chance, is by far the most important factor for anyone's success, and yet successful people still attribute most of it to their hard work or talent. Most world records in runs were achieved with a tailwind. Most professional athletes are born in certain months, and becoming super rich is mostly achieved by already being richer than average to begin with. The entire discussion of fairness on inconsequential things like sports or art or what have you, is meaningless. Is it fair that most workplace accidents with power tools happen to left-handed people? Is it fair that the chances of achieving your dreams are basically 99% determined by where you were born? No. Of course not. Should we still strive to make it fair? Probably. Will we ever get there? Absolutely not.
@@FractalParadox
That said, what would you suggest for trans women athletes? Seems to me it’s “fair” to allow trans women athletes to compete if did not experience puberty as a male as a start while the issue is looked into more (the position taken by one of the sports institutions.) I’m curious if competition by weight class regardless of gender would be a solution.
@@FractalParadox The fact that something is an "abstraction" does not mean that it does not exist as something "real," even if it is intangible. For example, "success" means "achieving your goals." It doesn't in itself define what the goals are, and some goals people set for themselves are more achievable than others. People succeed at a wide variety of things every single day. In a similar way, just because some things are things that we realize we will never fully achieve does not mean they are not real, any more than an asymptotic value is unreal in math. It is real as something to be striven toward, even if it never becomes real as something already achieved. People who too readily say "Life will never be fair" sometimes use that as an excuse not to strive to make it any more fair than it already is. I think it's good to value fairness as a real concept, because it keeps us striving. It's also worth considering that maybe "unearned" is not always "unfair." It is what we do with unearned advantages that can determine whether a situation is fair. People of equally good will may not always agree on what's fair, but it's worthwhile to continue debating it, such as whether ambidexterity is any more "unfair" an advantage than other unearned qualities that increase performance in sports. I think in the course of that debate, some people might face the fact some of their own advantages are just as unearned as those they want to outlaw because they happen to be held by other people rather than by themselves.
Excellent breakdown. Your analysis exposes the challenges here and the need for divisions in sports without going overboard. There are obvious differences, amateur vs pro, high school vs college, women vs men, weight classes in boxing and wrestling. Differences that are undeniable but within those divisions you are free to excel. I started racquetball league in "C" class, but after winning the league I had to move up to "B" league and then "A" were I was outclassed by about half my competition. Was this due to an unnatural advantage they had? No, they worked harder than me. Should I have been allowed to stay in "C" class where I had no competition and no one else had a chance to win? Why should someone who has worked hard, a lot of them most of their lives, to excel within their division be forced to compete with those that obviously don't belong in that class that?
Before I went on HRT I tried to see how many pushups I could do. My sedentary ass could do 10. Now I'm 6 months on T, and I could do 20. I'm still a sendentary ass obviously. But it kinda surprised me, cuz it had never been easy for me to do 20 pushups, even back in my weird gym bro phase
Bro I’m 24 pre Hrt (MtF) and I can only do 11💀
Why can't you do a pushup? I was 32 when I went to US Army basic training in Jan of 1982. I started training for my enlistment and was in much better shape than others were. I was 5'7" and weighed 130 lbs. At the end of USArmy Basic Training I was able to do 67 pushups in 2 minutes, 69 situps in 2 minutes and run 2 miles in 13.2 minutes. 20 years later, at age 50, I could equal the same scores. At age 34, I went to USArmy Parachute school. I saw Marines get run off. I saw men that were age 18 - 30 drop out of runs that were very challenging.
At parachute training school, 5 women got their wings. They weren't men transitioning to female. They were petite, small girls. There is no reason a man cannot do a pushup. If you are willing to train, you can do it. Your mind is your biggest enemy. I was never an athlete. In school, I was always the last one picked. I couldn't run fast, I couldn't throw a ball, and I couldn't get a basketball into the basket.
What happened? What was different at Airborne School?
I decided I was a winner. Nothing was going to stop me. Attitude is the key.
I just came here to flex on you specifically. I can casually do 20 push-ups no drugs after not doing it for weeks. To be fair I'm a short teen but still.
@@MD-kv9zo That's the dumbest way to flex I've ever seen in my life
@@tueanhtata5609 I didn't know a better way to state that I can do 20 push ups without doing it everyday.
Thank you so much calling the Olympics a freak show. You made my day :)
The same was said about a physics conference.🙂
Exceptionally intelligent people is not the normal and you can't raise IQ in anyway but dangerous drugs. You can lower IQ with poor nutrition, etc.
do you mean the special Olympics??
@@berniv7375 ..and so has Astrophysics...
@@georgeanthony4834 WTF is wrong with you?
11:35 That's just wrong. We did not segregate sports by sex because otherwise they'd be too predictable. A non-segregated sport would be no more predicable than a male sport, since women would simply fail to qualify. And we know this, because many "male" leagues are in fact "open". We segregated sports because we wanted women to practice them, and this requires that they have a change of winning. Not winning the Olympics necessarily, just winning at some level. And allowing transwomen to compete against women does defeat this goal. It's like allowing non disabled people in the Paralympics.
Huh? You're still see women compete when you see trans women compete. The goal is still met
@@lomiification Transwomen are men. But even if they were women it would be irrelevant, because the goal is to protect a physically disadvantaged group, hence the criterion has to be physical not psychological.
I like the picture at 10:42 because it makes it obvious that certain sports select for certain traits in their athletes. If going through puberty as a male and transitioning afterwards is an accepted feature of an athlete, it will be a trait some sports will select for. I imagine it will be an advantage in let's say boxing or rugby.
Maybe in the future there will be pictures like these with exclusively trans athletes because, as sabine said, sports isn't fair and some women are just born lucky to have long legs, great flexibility, or testis.
The fact that sport, like life, is not exactly fair, is not an argument for making it less fair. If it was then we would remove all categories: sex, age, disability etc. but nobody is arguing for that, so I don't see why anybody can make a special case for sex.
disabled athletes CAN compete… its just that due to (depending on disability) they may not qualify. same with age, you can be 60 and try to qualify all you want, your just probably wont make the cut. the trans in sports argument outright bans those competitors, preventing them from even qualifying.
@@dkolendo they are not banned from competing - they can compete in the open (male) category
@@jim23mac right, but the entire point of this argument is that women are banned from female categories, in case you missed it
@@dkolendo only if they take drugs or bring the sport into disrepute
@@dkolendo not women though, are they dominik
This made me nervous, seeing the topic, but you've earned my trust enough that I gave you a shot, and I think you've earned that trust again.
She doesn't take any stand and only presenting what is. I think she rarely doesn't if ever in any of her videos.
@@lylelaney8270 there is no such thing as not taking a stand -- you can't avoid making a choice
@@philipripper1522 unless she clearly said I agree or disagree or this is right or wrong then it's not.
@@lylelaney8270 That's still a stance. You think she doesn't editorialize? She'd correct you herself.
@@philipripper1522 If she does then she does. I'm pointing out unless she says it unambiguously then it's not a stance. That's all. It's unfair but it's still OK. It's wrong but it's acceptable. It didn't fit the current fact but it's still not contradictory. That's basically what she said. (Rephrasing)
4:35 - "And there was a significant overlap between them." Not seeing much overlap on those slides myself. Unless you mean 'significant' to mean 'it exists' rather than 'there's a lot of it.'
Re: 'Fairness' - The broader a net we cast to find a person fit for a certain task, the more 'extremely fit' our finds will be. If we search 10 people, we're unlikely to find anything extraordinary.
If we search a million, we're likely to find many. If we search a billion, we'll find the people absurdly fit for purpose. Thus it's worth thinking about the selection pool w.r.t 'representation.'
Trans people being a tiny minority, casting a net therein should yield mediocrity compared to the much larger selection pool of men/women in general.
Yet trans women excel. And trans men do not. I don't think there's a great mystery to be found here, or anything particularly difficult or complicated to parse.
Male puberty brings advantages that don't seem to go away, and the sex categories in sport were introduced precisely to work around this.
If, in the end, we find that the top spots are consistently taken by trans women, then the 'women's category' becomes one where the biological women play second fiddle to trans women.
I think it's a self-correcting problem in the end; Women will eventually object to losing to trans women.
Then the trans women will be kicked out of their league, or women will make a new one with requirements that keep trans women out of it.
As for your argumentum ad absurdum 'if we're going to make a category for trans people, why not for everything else as well?'
I'll note that this argument cuts against categorisation as a whole, not just against the idea of a trans category. And as both you and I know that we're not abolishing the whole categorisation system nor introducing infinitely many new ones until we hit the individual level, presenting this idea seems either pointless or at best misleading.
We could of course simplify the whole thing by just making a lot of 'leagues' anyone can compete within to rise to the 'league' above.
The 'top 100' league would be the top 100 people in the world. Top 200 would feature the 101st to the 200th, and so on. In some competitions we'd start finding women in the 500-1000's.
In others, we'd find them near or in the top 100. I don't know how much interest people would have in looking at the 500-1000's, so it seems likely to abolish 'female sports' in those areas.
Who knows, that kind of competition might bring out new and interesting things in our female athletes.
The Problem of the TOP 100 Leages is, that in most sport you will never find a woman in there, because of the huge differences between the sex in the "exceptional" people.
By significant she probably means statistically significant, meaning it is enough of an overlap to not be a statistical anomaly. So yes, significant as in it exists.
This is the red flag. I can't understand how natural T levels can overlap between healthy, athletic men and women without drugs. A man with a level of 300/DL is borderline hypogonadal. How many women on earth are walking around with that much testosterone? That's crazy
In sociology we think competition is mainly between peers (who's are seen as similars), because of comparability principle. When protagonists look not comparables, we not see it as a competition.
Sabine picked a one off study. The results are nonsense. We know that even low tesosterone males stil have 5 times (!!!) more testosterone than a high T female. Read LARGE DIVERGENCE IN TESTOSTERONE CONCENTRATIONS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN: FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR ELITE ATHLETES IN SEX-SPECIFIC COMPETITION IN SPORT, A NARRATIVE REVIEW if you want to know more.
I disagree Sabine. I think sports will eventually devolve into reality TV, but never truly go away
r u talking abt wwe
@@chrisangel6833 That’s actually a really good example
@@markus4925 She spends the second half of the video saying that it’s not just about physiology and they need to analyse fairness, competition, and entertainment. Did you not watch that far?
@@JM-us3fr Maybe they were too eager to voice their disappointment and couldn't continue watching.
Sports are ALREADY reality TV.
Hi Sabine
Appreciate the video and quite informative.
I must say though, I'm a bit lost with the conclusion, or it has gone over my head, but it appears you are arguing that segregating sports by sex is not benefical, "because athletes have so many differences (usain bolt legs, etc) that sex alone is insufficient"... however it occurs to me that if we removed sex as a category, or removed all categories, and women and men competed together, does that not mean we will never see women tennis players competing in finals? women soccer teams competing at high levels? women boxing, women any physical sport pretty much, because men will simply dominate in every field?
I saw a website which compared 16year old school boy athletes against Olympic level adult women and by direct comparison the school boys would have gotten gold/silver/bronze in almost all categories when compared against adult women?
So essentially, my question is, by removing categories as suggested, are we not simply erasing women's chance for competing at top levels? Is that an end result we want to achieve?
Thanks
erasing women's chance for competing at top levels? Is that an end result we want to achieve? -YEs. Obviously.
That wasn't her point. She said that while gender makes sense as a categorization, not every difference does. So the question of trans people in sports is one of interesting competition, not whether there's a difference. Trans women have been allowed to compete with cis women in the olympics since 2003, but they're not dominating the playing field. It seems pretty clear that despite the differences between trans and cis women, there's interesting competition there.
@@kirablagoev8534 While it's true that transgender athletes have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2003, none openly did so until 2020. Two did that year and one qualified as an alternate. The one who was an alternate did so in freestyle BMX. Not sure how much advantage being born male brings to that sport. This was also the first year it was an Olympic event. Of the other two, one was competing and contending for a medal at an age that is extremely rare for Olympians in her sport, weightlifting. She had trouble at the Olympics, but was ranked 7th in the world even as an older competitor. The other trans woman athlete at the 2020 games received a gold medal. Yes, while technically true that trans women are not dominating the playing field, it is still early days and the data we have seems to indicate that it is possible, if not likely.
@@kirablagoev8534 the incidences of men with identity issues beating women off the podium are increasing in number. I notice men's sports are not at all affected by this issue.
@@noschoolitscool7191 do you really have to be this transphobic? it's gross
We're going through some of this in our sport, powerlifting, with a heavy component of strength (and as a result, testosterone plays a large role in performance). We think the international governing body will only be forced to take a position if and when a trans athlete wins their weight class at the world level. I really appreciated your comments on fairness in general amid the genetic differences in the human population as a whole. In sport, we never see clones facing off against each other. Thanks for the video!
@@rudolphschmitler725 Yeah, and she didn't complete a single lift... I think that's proof enough that being AMAB doesn't automatically make you better 🤷
@@sianmilne4879 If you think that proves something, you really need to go back to high school biology class. The science is overwhelming. Average male athletes utterly dominate world-class females 1st time out. There are dozens of examples of this and more every day. Educate yourself.
@@mattrondeau7466 if you didn't get the point that was made, you're not the genius you think you are.
@@revspikejonez There was no point made there. If you think men do not have an inherent (and overwhelming) physical advantage over women (I can't believe that this is even a conversation. This world is insane), then show me one example of a woman competing with men at a high level in any sport. NCAA, Olympics, NFL, etc. Go ahead. I'll wait.
@revspikejonez to his point, with 0.4%-0.7% representation in general population that weight lifter almost managed to get to the finals. If this truly doesn't make a difference, wouldn't we see trans men represented in men sports?
Where exactly do they allow people to have surgical and hormonal transition before puberty? Here in the US as far as I know you're not allowed to do any of that before age 16 even with parental consent, and most people, especially XX people, will be well on their way through puberty before then.
Depends on state, but many states permit prescription of hormonal gender affirming care under 18.
This is the most level headed assesment of this situation ive ever seen
Kudos to you for taking on such a “third rail” topic, and doing it so well. I absolutely love your analysis of current professional sports and the prediction for its future. I have always felt the same way, professional sports is basically a six-sigma freak show. Some people find it entertaining, some people find it kind of pointless.
Pointless, yes. But entertaining? Yes that too.
All professional pursuits are pointless, as is life itself. That doesn't mean one can't find meaning on a personal and group level doing pointless things
@@DavidHRyall I don't think they mean like it is for nothing, it's that some people don't care for it. Like, I don't care to watch sports but it's mostly because I end up wanting to play the sport rather than cheer on gladiators.
Taking on a third rail topic to mouth the pieties of 99% of our elites is not really so third rail.
It's akin to publicly opining one's on board with defund the police.
@Shnizza pie sports aren't just a whose the born the strongest competition. The level's of ridiculous dedication and love for the craft is what's incredible. You watch them to learn and figure them out to try and perfect it, to push yourself. Just like you do anything you want to excel at. You learn from the masters.
11:20 "Kind of like physics conferences". I'm dying.😂😂😂😂
A was already laughing with "all the right junk in all the right places." Sabine is the best!
😂 i thought I was the only one that found it so funny
when she said "all sports are freak shows" i thought that's going to be a tough statement to keep socially acceptable... but Sabine did it 😁
Yeah, I think Sabine is absolutely hilarious in an effortless way. I love her videos.
@@KristopherNoronha
"when she said "all sports are freak shows" i thought that's going to be a tough statement to keep socially acceptable"
Same here. I thought: 'No, Sabina, you can't say that!'. And then, when she said: "Kind of like physics conferences", I thought: 'Right, that self-deprecating remark is going to save you from all that horrible kick back that was coming'.
Sabine slays each time ..
Of course some people have athletic advantages over others. The goal of sport is to see who is best. Categories exist to allow similar types of people to compete against each other, to make it fair. Fairness is a goal of sport. That is why we have so many different events. This allows the opportunity for those with many different body types and skill sets, to participate in sport. I think you are incorrect to say you could never be an athlete. Have you ever trained enough to find out what your athletic abilities are? It is motivation which is a major factor in ability, however whatever sport you competed in it is highly likely a man (who also trained for that sport) of same age and size would beat you.
I love Sabines sense of humour. Like when she said an extremely popular, multi billion dollar industry will go away because of ethics. haha.
It's not about industry it's about human nature. We always compete. It's what makes life fun.
Yes, but look at Stricly Come Dancing. We COULD watch the very best dancers, but we don't. We watch a bunch of celebs competing to dance, not so well, but there's going to be a winner. Athletics could go this way.
She is german afterall. They aren't particularly popular for their humour
@@rogerstone3068 I doubt it. The Olympic games started over 2700 years ago and it is still around. Humans are competitive by nature, that is what evolution has created in order to survive. We are still competitive in modern society in an economic way as men want money and power because that attracts a mate and a woman wants beauty and charm. There are outliers, but this is rather a rule for the vast majority. Simple evolutionary biology. People want to see the extremes of what a human body can do, so there will always be competitive physical sports at the highest limits because that is also a way we can say our team (tribe) is better than your team (tribe).
@@joeiborowski9763 "It is still around" makes it seem like it has been practiced continuously for 2700 years, whereas the reality is that the modern Olympics were rather spontaneously created about 130 years ago.
As an aside, I've noticed that people who say something is categorically "simple evolutionary biology" are often the least suited to explain evolutionary biology to others.
In regards to genetics engineering ending professional sports, I think a few points have been missed. One such point is that we don't always know what constitutes a genetic advantage. It is especially true for complex sports. Who would have guessed that one of the best football (soccer) players of all time would be a short man with growth problems as a kid? Even in more simple events, it can be hard to know. In the early 2000's it was generally accepted (and backed by research) that the ideal body for the 100m dash was a fairly short and very muscular to achieve the best compromise between top speed and acceleration. Fast forward a few years and the fastest sprinter of all times is 6ft5. I think that in most sports, genetic engineering won't provide as much of an advantage as we think.
Another point, and perhaps the most important, is that professional sport has only one main driver : money. As long as people remain interested, there is a financial incentive. The numerous doping scandals have never stopped people from watching the olympics, so I don't see why genetic engineering would.
I guess my conclusion is that I don't see professional sport disappearing anytime soon.
Thank you, this conclusion to the video really seemed like a huge slippery slope.
Basing "advantage" on who can do more push-ups or whatever stupid one-dimensional metric gets used is bad-faith "science," as well. It's creating a predetermined conclusion and backforming procedures to find the measurements that will most likely reach that conclusion.
The point isnt whether genetic engineering is too much of advantage.The point is countries will try to create super-sport babies to win the Olympics, that's why it incentivises too many ethical problems therefore will or should get ridden of if the time comes
@@exosproudmamabear558 Maybe it should, but if anything I would say its going to be the other way around - countries are more likely to use it as another race and the competition will be partially moved from a stadium into the lab.
@@notyetidentified9720 She just thought the best case scenario, bless her heart, but yeah the world doesn't really go a sociologically and politically good place despite technology moving faster than ever. This discrepancy going to give unwanted results one way or another, so your scenario is more likely to happen than hers.
At 10:20 “the most important factor isn’t your sex it’s your age…” - well that may be the case within the same sex category but definitely not between the sexes. Also I may have missed it, but didn’t hear a good explanation for why trans men in male sports has not been an issue (I.e. because there barely are any that will be competitive in vast majority of categories).
She totally strawmanned the anti-trans position. Everyone knows Lia Thomas is a narcissist with a bone to pick with his brother. Women's collegiate swimming was destroyed by a male sibling rivalry.
I don't think "fairness" is even relevant to this discussion. There are teams for handicapped athletes; but no provision is made for "normal" athletes to compete with them. Nobody argues that this would be "fair". Why should physically superior trans women be allowed to intrude on an event for biological women without their genetic advantages? If you could get enough trans women and spectators to make an event, I don't think anyone would try to stop it- but don"t match them up head to head with bio-women and talk about "Fair".
I guess fairness becomes an argument when you start from the position that trans women are women and therefore qualify for women's competitions by default. Fairness would then be the reason to exclude them. But I basically agree with your view that they should compete in their own category.
There was a short story in Omni magazine about a future Olympics. The cold war was still very much a thing the author assumed would be active in the future. There were wrestlers with scales, swimmers with blowholes and fins, 10 foot basketball players, and on it went. The head of the Soviet side kept lodging complaints of genetic engineering with the Olympics committee as did his American counterpart. Naturally, both sides were denying the dead obvious. In the end, all the complaints were upheld and all the medals went to athletes from places like Togo or Nauru that lacked the technology for genetic engineering.
That sounds really cool. If you find the title I'd love to read it.
I believe I found it: "The Mickey Mouse Olympics" by Tom Sullivan.
My first reaction before watching: holy shit, Sabine has balls talking about this subject... Figuratively speaking of course
She always strikes me as the sort of woman who has a collection of balls ;-)
I didn't know Sabine was.
Well, you never know! ;)
Um, thumbs up. I think? :)
@@ff-qf1th True that 😁
Really interesting video.
On the subject of endurance in sports, my favorite sport to watch is actually women’s tennis. Men’s tennis has a much higher focus on hitting the ball so hard and fast that the opponent is unable to respond to it. Women’s tennis has a much higher emphasis on using strategic angles to force your opponent to run more than you do.
Tennis is not an endurance sport.
@@cyberpsybin While not being classified as an endurance sport, with the scoring system allowing for long matches, it's a sport containing elements of endurance.
@@FriedEgg101 but its not in anyway an endurance sport, the scoring system is irrelevant as you could just have each player scoring aces
its a rally sport
And when Serena and Venus Williams tried to play doubles against the lowest rated pro men's teams, they got smoked.
As good as Serena and Venus are at women's tennis, they still couldn't beat the lowest ranked men's.
Serena would not beat Nadal, Federer or Djokovic in an honest head to head match.
So I don't want to see Trans-Women playing in women's sporting events with an unfair advantage.
If Nadal, Federer or Djokovic decided to trans years ago, Serena would have a lot less tennis titles to her name.
@@cyberpsybin Yes it is. The Williams sisters were defeated by a rank 200 man.
Sabine. Thank you for your sincere research. I appreciate that you on the one hand show empiric data and on the other hand take the ethical aspects into account. Perfect mix.
No total infiltration with propaganda language like "CIS"...it is called "normal"
That ending really had me laughing. Video summary: Here's a detailed breakdown of all the nuanced factors affecting this issue. Conclusion: Screw the whole thing, competitive sports are dumb anyway.
Couldn't agree more. What a waste of time watching sports.
This sounds like the opinion of a nerd who can't walk a flight of stairs without feeling winded.
@@canaldoxerxes Discrimination!
It creates a kind of meta-problem though. If the experts/informed people don't care about sports, why should people who _do_ care trust or pay mind to the experts?
@@WWLinkMasterX let's not forget that Sabine isn't an expert in sports. She's an expert in physics.
This is just kinda her personal opinion - and a very simplistic one at that: "nothing matters so no one should care about anything".
I mean... this does sound like the nerd who got a turbo-wedgie during P.E., and now is salty about sports.
There IS fairness in sports competitions I think. It's just that in this case fairness isn't to make sure that the game is fair... It's to make sure that product is entertaining. Ultimately sports are entertainment, and entertainment is about making money. "Should this be allowed?" kinda isn't as important as "Will people watch this?" when it comes to this discussion.
But wouldn’t you say that in the quest for sports to garner profits, it engenders the usage of unfair practices and selectivity bias, effectively elimination almost any notion of fairness? While I agree with you that the game has always been “in it for the money,” I don’t think fairness in competitive sports can truly be quantified simply because of this fact.
Most athletes do not see themselves as entertainers.
Nah you’re reaching at this point looool entertainment is only ever generated in sports when it follows a set of rules, no one likes seeing cis woman get beat up by trans woman and that is a fact!
Imagine if a few select men had a legal reason to spend all their youths openly taking steroids , who tf would think it’s fair to compete against them? This problem is not about genetics advantage, but about a biological one
Olympic sports are not making money at all, nobody paying money to watch most of these sports. That's why a lot of olympic athletes still need to get another job lol.
You're not allowed to be on roids or hormones to compete. Unless you got testes you need to take hormones to sustain your muscle mass, which, is against the rules.
This is fantastic. I've been starting to question the underlying ideology of modern competitive sports for some time now. As a martial artist myself, I've watch how the sports I love has been changed and molded by competitive forces.
Competition is an invaluable way to stress test whatever it is that you're working on, and there's no better way to root out and expose your weaknesses. But the second "winning" becomes the whole point, the rules you originally created for practical reasons start to take center stage and shape the nature of the game itself - and strange strategies develop. This is why people butt-scoot in jiu-jitsu, and why punching your opponent in the skull with a closed fist is a "good" strategy in MMA even though it would break your hand without the gloves.
Boxing* not mma
@@xxportalxx. MMA since 1997. lol
"Ground and pound" alone would be a completely different game without gloves/wraps.
And nobody would ever have knocked out Cabbage without gloves. 😄
@@BrassicaRappa interesting, didn't realize those little gloves they wear where that protective. It certainly changed the whole sport in boxing when the gloves where introduced, made it a hell of a lot more dangerous overall.
@@xxportalxx. oh yeah, totally. Once your hands are wrapped properly it doesn't take that much padding to let you punch *way* harder.
Competition is not what has been a hindrance to combat sports, rather particular rule sets are what has created phenomenon such as butt scooting in jujitsu, or closed hand strikes and MMA.
"Well sports is not fair, so we can be unfair here as well" is the worst cop out ever.
Imagine if anyone said "Some people are poor. But we're not going to attempt to do anything about it, because life is unfair, sorry!"
I understand your frustrations, but tbf, very little people who have a problem with trans athletes also happen to have a problem with the well-known unfair bits of their favorite sports. You must agree that’s a double standard, yes?
@@phamdung3884 How about we turn the tables? I'm not tall, so I could never be a basketball player. I'm also kinda bad at sports, so I'll never be a professional athlete. Or a astronaut. Or a billionaire.
Some people were born in the wrong body, so they can never be professional athletes. It's okay if they want to do sports recreationally or in "Sunday league"/amateur competitions, that's fine! And this way, it's much less discomfort, and less controversial, for everyone, especially regarding women's sports.
@@DudeWatIsThis eh… maybe? I don’t necessarily disagree with your suggestion on how we could go about it as I dislike the concept of elite sports (the kind people watch on TV) since it’s so detached from fitness reality. I’m just asking whether you think it’s a double standard towards trans athletes that *THIS* is the aspect of “fairness” we’re focusing so much on.
Side note: while I respect a bandaid solution in the mean time we figure out a *real* one, I also doubt that half of the people currently against trans athletes actually want to build a better system. Granted, just allowing people to announce their gender willy-nilly like Canada’s lifting did was a pretty bad bandaid.
@@phamdung3884 I don't believe it's a double standard. It's had arguably the highest impact regarding results, besides using performance-enhancing drugs. It was sudden, it was impactful and it is recent, so it is talked about.
If you're trying to dig for latent transphobia, you won't find it here. Just because I'm in favour of social progress, it doesn't mean I'm not equally critical of it as I am about other political or social views. Nobody should get a pass for BS. Not even those in our side.
I don't think we're doing the community any service by defending this issue. I do enjoy elite sports extensively. And I find this to be unnecessary. It's like putting lemon in the conservatives' wounds. Why would you give them legitimate reasons to hate other people?
@@phamdung3884 Okay so RUclips just deleted my 3-paragraph response. Thanks, RUclips!
"professional athletics will not exist because it creates too much incentive for unetchical behaviour"... Who is going to tell Sabine about politics? 😅
Jokes aside, good video. One thing I think could have been useful to talk about is the "real life" data of how trans athletes perform. I am not sure if there is data on that, but if on average trans athletes dont win more medals proportionally than cis athletes that also reflects onnwhether they have an advantage or not.
As far as I know, there hasn't been a single olympic medal won by a trans athlete so far.
@@mina_en_suiza There arent many trans athletes competing in the olympics.
You can tell by a quick google that when biological males - no matter how they identify - compete in female sport, they tend to win regardless of their testosterone levels and the time that they have spent transitioning. This is purely due to the fact that males develop with testosterone and those effects cannot be reversed with oestrogen (if they choose to take it): the muscles and bone structure, even lung and heart capacity.
This is a problem. The whole idea of sex segregated sports was exclusively for female benefit, as a way for women to compete against other biological women and have the chance to win. You can see this by the fact that biologically female athletes, regardless of how they identify, have never won a competition in the men's category. I don't even know if any have entered. But biologically male athletes regularly win in female sports. Now that the women's sports category has become "not man" instead of "female", women are losing out on not only winning in competitions, but qualifying in the first place. This is especially difficult for young women and girls who are doing sport - now they not only have to beat the other competitors, but they also have to beat someone who is going/gone through male puberty and the sporting advantages that it brings. I could see myself just giving up at that point, and many unfortunately do now. It stops being fun when it becomes a vanity project for someone else.
Just recently two trans women cyclists took first and second place in a woman's cycling race. The third place was biologically female. You can tell by looking at them on the podium that they had obvious advantages: they had drastically bigger muscles and skeletal structure than the woman who won third place. One of them had only recently announced that they identified as trans and did not even wait long enough for their testosterone levels to go down, but nobody at the race organisation seemed to care. It was obvious they would win to anyone looking, so that means two biologically female competitors were not given a place in the competition meant for female athletes, and that two biologically female competitors were not able to place at the end. This is done despite biology, not because of it. But speaking about this is considered an issue because it goes against what people - especially biologically male people - are saying. It is not transphobic to point this out, it is misogynistic to not talk about it. There is a reason that there are sex categories in sport, and as humans are physically incapable of changing sex, they should be stuck to in the interests of fairness for *all* participants, not just the ones with the trans identities.
Personally, I think there should be a third category that anyone can compete in regardless of sex. We know realistically that it would be dominated by anyone who has gone through male puberty, but that can be the one that we pretend is fair based on gender ideology rather than sex, not turn to old-fashioned ideas about women being "not-men" and the throwaway category for everyone else instead of a section of sports on its own. Women deserve better than that - that's not transphobia, that's just the truth. It's insulting to the women who spend their lives dedicated to their sport to lose to a male however they identify. It doesn't do women's sport justice that this is being fought over when there is no issue with this in men's sport for obvious reasons. It doesn't do women's sport justice that the women and athletes who speak about this are ignored and criticised as "right-wing" and "transphobic" (for what it's worth, I'm a scary disabled lesbian communist who has done work in both disability rights activism and feminist activism). When the people (women) who are affected most by this are saying that they don't like it but are overlooked in favour of the people (men) who run the sports governing bodies and don't have to compete (and can profit off of the perceived goodwill it brings), there's something going wrong. Even if every single female athlete (and the plenty of male ones, too) who has criticised this hates each individual trans person...well that's a lot of people, maybe we should ask them why and not assume we know their reasoning. We all know what assuming does.
@@rosehipowl I had biological sex with your dad and he seemed to like how it identified so you must have a skill issue or smth
@@rosehipowl The real travesty is all of the women who never stood a chance because they were born lacking talent.
Sports are not and have never been fair, this is just the next installment of unfairness.
I'm glad she mentioned the fact that competitive athletes have a variety of physiological advantages over the rest of us. That's why they became athletes and why they win.
Yes, born advantages. Not surgery or drug advantages...
@@AntonAdelsonWhat you say is objectively false. There are countless men who take anabolic stereoids so they can outperform their peers
@@mmmmmmkatata Which is against the rules and gets them banned from competitions. Exactly! Thank you for supporting my point!
@@AntonAdelson I've just realized that you're trying to say trans women are getting an unfair advantage from taking hormones, which is not true. They're LOSING some of the advantage that they were born with, but not enough to become on par with cis women. It's the opposite of something like doping. Therefore, any advantage that they have is a born advantage.
I have to disagree with you. Being a former athlete and nation coach in both men and women's sports you've put too much too much value on genetics. The greater component is epigenetics, in other words environmental expression. Bolt as an example, defied the physics, but you have to understand the physics of sprinting to understand thar. Steve Prefontaine is another example, too short, but became a world class middle long distance runner. Cultures that live at higher elevations develop larger lung capacity, not because of genes, but because of environment. Then why is it some coaches produce more elite athletes than others? Why do some coaches bring home more championships than others. This is not a simple topic, it is very complex. As for the transgender competition goes, you can throw all the studies etc out there you want, but the reality is a trans women can't compete against men, and women cannot compete against trans women. I have coach both elite men and women, but I have yet to coach an elite woman athlete that could compete against elite men. Trust me I would love to be the coach who did it. Did you see the USA national women's soccer team play against a U15 boys team? Women got killed by these boys. I have done the battle of the sexes as a coach, U13 girls vs U13 boys. both at the state level. My girls team beat the boys 3 -0. I knew this would be the results, before stepping on the field, why? 1) Girls were well into puberty and where bigger than the boys as the boys hadn't hit puberty yet. 2) the girls had it mentally together more than the boys. Had we did this with u15 girls and against u15 boys, we would not have stood a chance. The is evidence based science that Sabine, who is awesome, misses the boat on this one!!
I think the big point to consider here is the question of, "what is a woman?" If you accept the statement, "trans women are women", then going through a male puberty is just part of the natural variation of women. Logically, this means that denying trans women the ability to compete in women's sports while allowing natural variations in cis women means denying that trans women are women. It's simple logic; "if A then B" immediately implies "if not B then not A". The fairness argument is just a smokescreen for denying that trans women are women, and it's why conservatives have paid more attention to women's sports in the last couple of years than any mainstream media platform did for the two decades before that.
Trans women are not women and therefore should be playing in men’s sports. It’s really that simple.
What is unambiguous is that there are no (that i am aware of) cases of trans men beating out the male counterparts in elite sports (there are numerous trans athletes competing at that level). if there is a need to continue to marginalise woman, then there should be a separate category for trans athletes and their female counterparts ie two potential winners(even with different times ) and separate records. But for this aspect of the gender debate, I think you should be allowed to live your life your way and how you choose, without harassment.
Schuyler Bailar, a trans man, swam in NCAA Division I for Harvard and scored in the top 15%.
You can live your life, but like the first admendment, you do not have the right to control other's lives. If a trans person takes a slot on a roster, they are effectively harming an otherwise legit person the ability to compete in their respective category. Tell me that a system should be forced to allow someone with Tourettes, to attend lectures and disrupt others. Sounds fair, but life is not fair. But we should not force behavior that disrupts the rest of society. This is why gay men should not be Boy Scout leaders.
@@hydrogenfluoride2382 Top 15% is far below top 1% in terms of performance. There is a magnitude of difference between top 10% and top 1%.
High level sporting events are pretty much a freak show. Everyone puts in similar amounts of effort and so more than skill or training it's luck and genetics that determine who gets to sit at the top. With genetic engineering increasingly becoming reality, there are definitely ethical considerations to be had for professional sports. What meaning does athletics hold if it comes down to research and money? Do we run the risk of turning people into objects built for a specific purpose, instead of being free to determine their own course in life?
Nope. People put in unequal effort, have unequal genetics, and are born into unequal circumstances. The determiner of who's at the top is the combination of all of those. Try harder.
@@Ormaaj Everyone can control the effort they put in, and to some degree can change their circumstances. Genetics is pretty much immutable for the duration of their lives, and becomes the limiting factor for any aspiring athlete. To be a top level athlete you have to be an extreme in every category, so everyone at that level are maximizing effort and circumstance, but cannot maximize thier genetics. It's why so many are tempted to use doping, which raises an athletes potential beyond what thier genetics says are possible. For most people, they can try as hard as they want, they will never sit at the top.
@@Darth_Insidious Yes that's more like it. :)
I'd even qualify the effort thing. People feel like they have autonomy over effort. Some think their control is unlimited, and many overestimate. This is maybe less apparent in athletics but certainly applies to academics and certain demanding fields.
"I tried to try!" ~Bart Simpson
@Sava Ok (posted this above, reposting here as relevant).
sports are not really in the same category as athletics. athletic performance is highly linear, so the parameters that end up governing become highly sensitive to initial conditions such as genetics. with sports you dont need to be the best athlete to be effective, look at Lionel Messi in soccer/football or many basketballers also can be in this category such as James Harden, Luka Doncic etc where skill becomes more important. its true height plays a big role in basketball, but not for every position which is important too, because height is generally more correlated with less coordination and in basketball 3 pointers incentivise better coordination, so you get players that are guards that arent that tall (when i say not that tall theyre still around 6ft, bigger than general population avg) like Steph Curry, Patty Mills etc etc. Sport also has the nonlinear variable of making space via passing the ball. So for all these reasons sports wont go away, but genetics will probably make its way into sport too as if it hasnt already. In basketball young players with some talent sometimes turn to hormones to try to get more growth. In the 2021-2022 NBA season, the average basketball player was 6’6″ tall this is 2 inches heigher than it was in 1955. However the curve seems to be rounding off to flatten here as the discoordination factor seems to set in after about 6"6. But if tampering with genetics could get rid of that then thats a whole other ballgame.
This are things we gonna have to consider in the future. Just live the momment 😎😎😎
Your point about entertainment value in sports is an important one, and I hadn’t seen it mentioned before in discussions regarding the topic at hand.
I would argue that many female athletic competitions with the status quo (i.e., involving cis-females only) have plenty of entertainment value (and get as much coverage and "air-time" as their male equivalents). Some examples: gymnastics, swimming, track, downhill skiing, and, especially, in the U.S., soccer. As is, they are anything but boring.
Where athletic competitions could become "boring" is when the same competitor wins time and again to the point where it is an a priori foregone conclusion. And, when, in female sports, such an outcome is due to measurable phenotypical advantages of a trans-female athlete (the conclusions in the studies and meta-analyses you cited), then we have the "perfect storm" for creating a boring competition: predictable outcome due to uniquely and grossly obvious advantage.
Further, in sports that are already "co-ed" (target shooting and equestrian events, for example), fans do not find them boring because they lack any predictable outcome based on sex.
Ultimately, however, this may end up being a tempest in a teapot because of the very small number of circumstances where it will be an issue in real life.
Was it boring when Usain Bolt won basically every race he attended for like 8 years straight?
@@tapiir For races where I really believed he was going to win, yeah, the race, itself, as a competition was fairly boring and, after he crossed the finish line first, the experience was underwhelming.
Now, I did like to watch Usain Bolt compete, but for a different, potentially exciting, and unpredictable outcome: would he set another world record. That is something I’d pay good money to see! Remember the 1973 (?) Belmont Stakes. Everybody "knew" Secretariat was going to win. But winning by 31 lengths? Uncanny. The most exciting horse race I ever saw!
@@mattp422 I believe the Belmont Stakes were a bit before my time but I'll take your word for it!
@@tapiir You can find it on You Tube. It is unbelievable!
It's so few trans women in sports that will never be an issue, like she said too, it's not only sex that determines it, it's many other genetic varibles like height, body desnity etc. and enviroment like where you grew up, if you rich, if you got a good trainer etc. And it really varies on what type of sport it is too. I also see people who think we should ban trans people from sports AND take away puberty blockers when puberty blockers and hormone therapy early solves the problem because then they are just the same as cis women then like the video said. It also helps if you are accepted as a girl and get to be on a girl team. And the unfortunate truth is that usually boy's sports team take it to the extreme and do it moslty for competition, so they get better training. Which also is another partically social thing that makes them get better edge. So truly best soution in mind is to be trans supportive and let trans people be accepted in society and have puberty blockers (it's been used for a long time on other things so it's not a new thing but of course it can be studied more but like girls get birth control and stuff which is more side effects so like it's not controversial) have case by case rules based on sports and also maybe still have the same 2 year rule. At least that's what the science leads me to think, and she had a point that it's actually dangerous stuff they rather should focus on.
Answer: no, of course not. Anyone who refuses to recognize the difference between a man's body and a woman's is out of touch with reality. It has nothing to do with sexual preferences or identification. It has to do with athletic classification, so body types matter more than psychological makeup.
Surely, a scientific approach would be to look at actual sporting results. For example: men's record for javelin is 98.5 m and women's is 72.3. A pretty clear advantage for males.
You're asking for too much.
*Cisgender men's record; *cisgender women's record
I suspect for transgender women who compete professionally, those on HRT anyway would achieve records between those two figures.
@@ishmamahmed9306 I agree with your assumption, which reflects that transwomen athletes have an advantage over biological women. This means they should not be allowed to compete in the same category/for the same prizes.
@@ishmamahmed9306*Men's records
*Women's records
The sexes are not 'cis' or 'trans'.
You keep saying transwomen have always competed, so what are these athletes and what are their times?
But this is compounded by societal advantages. There are way more males participating in most sports than female. If you want an accurate evaluation of potential performance you need to look at more general measurements.
This is an excellent presentation! BTW, I took a deeper dive into other topics that caused me to watch some of your earlier videos from 4 years ago. Your production quality has really improved. Congratulations on your great work!
Taking into account all the relevant differences (as far as is practically feasible) is exactly what happens in most sailing (except one-design racing). A complicated handicap system is put in place and the last ship to cross the line could indeed easily be the winner, conceivably by a large margin. Even that system isn't completely fair due to different economic circumstances for each team and the use of as yet unregulated emergent technology...
Sports is supposed to be good because it teaches "Sportsmanship". But all we have now is disputes, arguing, business, lawsuits, hatred, nationalism, sexism and money, money, money.
I appreciate this clear and study based analysis of such a sensitive topic!
now, I dislike this depiction of the donation. Nothing personal, but youtube or social media come up with new marketing strategies all the time.
@@jollyjokress3852 I’m pretty sure this goes to supporting the creator, at least most of it 🥰 it’s the thought and support that counts I suppose.
@@gillifish Right. Some people are clearly failing at even trying to take responsibility for their own lives, if petty or even total non-issues seem worth trying to try start an argument over.
For those who are relatively mentally healthy, I recommend Mark Manson's work, including his recent RUclips vids.
Else: Growth Mindset, Dr Tracey Marks, Uncommon Knowledge UK, Psych2Go, Practical Psychology.
If it wasn't for two truly terrifying concerns for humanity at this time, this would be unquestionably the best time to be alive in human history.
A more direct question is the utility of knowing anyone's donor status and level.
The visibility of the donor status and level is a form of distinction and validation.
Other onlookers may, theoretically, feel respect, envy, or intimidation, relative to the "donor."
That appears intended to engender a sense of competition among people. It's a bit of marketing psychology.
Did it work? Does it mean anything to anyone here? Is anyone rushing out to top that donation? Anyone made to feel self-conscious about not donating at any level?
@@jollyjokress3852 First I've seen this.
This was very informative and encourages good faith discussion. I just wasn’t clear on one part. Doesn’t the question of fairness logic completely reason away the need for separate women’s leagues? I get that long legs, big feet, whatever biological features are all advantages that would be very tedious to dispute. Following this logic, why not have every sport just be like an open? In this way, men are the “freaks of nature” and women will likely not have much representation because they simply are not capable of achieving such feats because they truthfully speaking are just “weaker” in this way. (Please take all of this neutrally without assuming I meant any slight to either trans/ciswomen) Yet we have women’s leagues anyway. Predictable outcomes could be a way of explaining why we make the exception for dividing sex. Women competing with men’s “freakish” biological advantages is what causes this predictable outcome, no? These are the same features that give trans women an edge, so doesn’t that still leave that point kind of moot? I’m definitely not trying to criticize, I don’t have a good answer. It feels unfair to both groups of people with no clear resolution. Thanks for making this video.
That's a really good point. It opens up some really difficult questions. Beyond just men and women, if it's not fair for separate women's leagues, what about weight classes in boxing? Being bigger or smaller is in large part genetic, right? And going the other way, should we have draw length classes in archery? A longer arm is a natural advantage, and as far as I know it's entirely genetic luck, I never heard of any exercise regime to make your arms longer.
She talks a bit about this from 11:40 on. It's hard to figure out the best way to divide a population to ensure fairness - I like the idea of talking about "meaningful competition" instead of fair competition. I think the main takeaway I learned from this video is that trans people are still under-represented in sports, so it's probably worth waiting around for a while and seeing if it ever becomes a problem for cis women to meaningfully compete.
@@stephenwatson2964 I mean... exactly in the case of Lia Thomas, it already is questionable, whether it's even possible "for cis women to meaningfully compete". From what I have understood, she already makes it impossible for a cis-female to reach first place.
@@notlisztening9821 Considering that Lia placed first in only one event, with second place being less than two seconds behind her and Katie Ledecky having a best time in that event over nine seconds better than Lia's, I don't see how you can argue that it's 'impossible' for a cis woman to reach first place while competing with Lia. Indeed, in the 100 freestyle, Lia placed dead last, and in the 200 freestyle placed only 5th, behind four cis women. Is that really indicative of 'not possible to meaningfully compete'? I would say not.
she made the dumbest video I ever seen about this topic, should have continued talking about physics. She missed entirely the point when simple forget the fact that a big feet or big legs isn't all that benefit compared as born male. This is obviously when you compare the overall performance of trans athletes and the consistent record breaking they are making in the women sports. The conclusion is pointless and don't solve anything. That's why scholars nowadays are so mocked, she is a f scientists who should think logically but instead she goes bonker diving in her thoughts.
Sabine! What I like about you is that you’re not afraid to come to the conclusion “It’s complicated. I don’t have a definitive answer”. This attitude is missing from society today. Thank you for being brave enough to offer information we can use to try to understand the issue rather than stuffing a pre-packaged “answer” down our throats.
True although in this case it's less complicated I think. If someone is on steroids for 20 years and stops for a day to enter a tournament then that person will have a unfair advantage. Regardless of all the gender ideology that's going around, this is in issue of biology and chemicals.
Or people should stop being hypocrites and demand for complete freedom on sports. So no gender division, no restrictions on doping and no restrictions electro mechanical body modifications.
@@BboyKeny Did you actually watch the video ? Your comment seems to indicate you did not.
@@philippenachtergal6077 I wasn't responding to the video, just giving my opinion.
@@BboyKeny Then I suggest you do watch it. It will save you from saying stupid things.
I don’t think it is complicated. Those born female take part in female events and those born male take part in male events. Very simple. And yes, I did watch the video.
Shades of Harrison Bergeron (the Kurt Vonnegut story, not the awful movie) which shows “fairness” legally carried to its ridiculous extreme.
Thanks for the info. And thanks, too, for all the interesting comments people added.
In my opinion, we are not going to solve the issue by committing the fallacy of equivocation on the word "fair." It is indeed a fact that there are a ton of physiological variations from athlete to athlete, and no one expects all athletes to be clones. Limiting variations within athletes of the same biological gender can be overcome with technique, effort, discipline, diet, training, dedication, focus, and intensity. That's why upsets happen all the time in sports, and what makes watching sports enjoyable. That is "fair" the way we have defined it through the end of the 20th century--not just in sports, but in every aspect of life.
Now we have trans athletes like Lia Thomas, who make the mental/emotional/psychological transition to female, and Lia wins all kinds of meets with biological females and sets all kinds of records. If we are going to formulate a view based on numbers, let's include those numbers. It's not "fair" in the same sense that it was before.
14:35 "And as long as athletes can make a lot of money from having a genetic advantage, someone's going to breed children who'll bring in that money. This is why I suspect a century from now professional athletics will not exist anymore. It creates too many incentive for unethical behavior." Clearly based on your opinion, not on science. First, athletic competition certainly involves a lot of money, but it's not all about the money. Artists, architects, physicians, psychiatrists, engineers, scientists, etc. make money, but they are also in it for the fulfillment, meaning, and purpose it provides. Second, every single pursuit in life has plenty of incentives for unethical behavior. Incentives for unethical behavior has not brought an end to politics, religions, art, commerce, etc. for thousands of years. I"m truly sorry that something had jaded your view of professional sports.
How do you feel about the inclusion of transitioned athletes subject to various handicapping methods designed to even the playing field?
For example, I'm fairly certain that a ~13lb post cut weight disadvantages would entirely negate any potential advantage for 2+ year transitioned athletes in MMA.
Similarly, in Power Lifting applying something like a modified Wilkes Coefficient could allow us to maximize inclusion while also maintaining an eye towards fairness.
@@yessum15 Great idea - let males compete with females, and tip the scales exactly enough for the males to always come second or worse.
We'll need some data to devise the scales, but what are the next 5 - 10 years of women sports in the grand scheme of things...
I especially like your ~13lbs disadvantage for MMA.
Why not 12, or 14 lbs?
Some may say we'd need some experimentation to determine the exactly right number.
Which could lead to women (the female and the male variety!) getting beaten unfairly in the process - but what kind of a woman wouldn't be happy to take a few punches in the name of inclusion.
Then only the group sports will remain "unbalanced" - but who cares about football, anyway.
@@jeronimo196 *_"Tip the scales enough for males to always come in second place"_*
Not necessarily. But this seems more like an emotional outburst on your part rather than a sincere retelling of what I said.
The goal would be to tip the scales enough to compensate for an unfair advantage to either competitor in order to establish an approximately level playing field.
This is always the goal.
*_"We'll ruin the next 5 years of women's sports collecting data"_*
Unlikely. This sounds like hyperbole. Truth is, there are so few athletes for whom this rare condition applies that virtually any decision we take will have a negligible effect on women's sports overall.
That said, this is really nothing new. Rules are constantly being tweaked by various athletic federations and venues giving certain athletes better or worse advantages at any given time.
So long as we approach the adjustments conservatively, and examine the data we already have, we can minimize the disruption.
*_"~13lbs disadvantage. Why not 12 or 14?"_*
I guess you don't understand what the tilde (~) symbol means, huh? Just look it up and perhaps you'll understand why this comment is a bit silly.
*_"What kind of woman wouldn't be happy to take punches in the name of inclusion?"_*
So I think this statement makes it clear you don't understand how MMA works at all.
No one is actually required to take a fight with anyone. Your manager pitches you fights which you either reject or accept.
Now, given that among the tens of thousands of MMA fighters that have ever competed, there have only ever been 2 that fall into the category we're discussing, it is basically impossible that any woman would ever be in a position to have to "take punches for the sake of inclusion."
Women get to select their fights and given that the vast majority of participants are female, the only women who would ever fight a transitioned competitor are the ones who would go out of their way to track one down and single her out.
We know this because this is literally what is happening right now with the single transitioned competitor currently active.
So yeah, this sounds like panicky hyperbole.
Tbh, given the current level of data from both transitioned fighters and fighters known to use illegal substances I think we probably already have enough information to make a pretty good guess.
A ~13lb handicap, maintaining proper T levels, with the currently required minimum time post transition, guarantees no advantage to the transitioned fighter. The only question left to ask is whether a _smaller_ handicap is more appropriate. However, there is no chance that a larger one would be required.
So as you can see, no female fighter would be incurring any additional risk using this system.
*_"Then only group sports would remain unbalanced"_*
You've failed to provide any support for this claim. Why would group sports be immune to handicapping?
In any case, it's important to note that maximizing inclusion doesn't necessarily mean that every sport is going to work out. The idea is just that you try your best to do it with as many sports as you actually can. That's what the word "maximizing" means. It seems odd to have to explain this.
*Conclusion:*
As you can see most of what you said seems like a knee-jerk emotional response rather than a well thought out criticism. You also seem pretty unfamiliar with and disinterested in the actual subject matter.
My recommendation would be to probably just let this conversation pass you, rather than get yourself angry about something you aren't really interested in.
@@yessum15 Perhaps if I start using less sarcasm, I'll seem more dispassionate, and therefore smarter...
"The goal would be to tip the scales enough to compensate for an unfair advantage to either competitor in order to establish an approximately level playing field.
This is always the goal."
What would be the suggested methodology, to decide what constitutes "enough"?
"Rules are constantly being tweaked by various athletic federations and venues giving certain athletes better or worse advantages at any given time."
What happens, when the trans-woman version of Usain Bolt appears and beats all previous records - do we tweak the rules again? How do we know we haven't tweaked the rules so much, that even trans-Bolt cannot win?
Over-fitting the data until trans-athletes can only place second (or worse) seems an obvious danger to me.
"Truth is, there are so few athletes for whom this rare condition applies that virtually any decision we take will have a negligible effect on women's sports overall."
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@@jeronimo196 Sorry, busy with important stuff. Here's your response:
*_"What would the suggested methodology be?"_*
I've already explained it. Please re-read the previous comments.
*_"What happens when the T version of Usain Bolt comes along?"_*
We already know the mean, mode, and range of margins of victory for women who win gold, as well as the theoretical upper limit. If a transitioned athletes deviates from this range significantly this would be a legitimate reason to change the handicap.
Because the truth is, the odds that a transitioned athlete demonstrating a level of dominance outside of this range is doing so not because of an advantage related to the transition process but rather because of Usain Bolt like natural talent are astronomical.
You are taking two incredibly low probabilities and multiplying them to produce an even less likely scenario.
Then using that essentially non-existent scenario to justify scrapping an idea that would work the rest of the time.
Yes, I suppose if the first transitioned athlete also happened to be a werewolf the system would also fail.
*_"We could only have somewhat adequate data until the number is large enough to have a negligible effect on women's sports"_*
You misunderstood this point. My point was to say transitioned athletes are such a rare phenomenon that overall this question is pretty unimportant.
So anyone who begins with the claim that any strategy "will ruin all of women's sports" is being silly.
Given that your responses with riddled with this energy and with statements like this, the first and most important thing to remember is: settle down.
*_"To quote Randy Dewey..."_*
Yeah Ramsey Dewey says a lot of weird things. I've turned down fights. Guys I've trained with have turned down fights. UFC fighters have turned down fights. WBC boxers have turned down fights. Amateurs who went on to compete in Golden Gloves have turned down fights.
This happens pretty frequently. I doubt that the stigma associated with being a transitioned fighter is going to make it _harder_ to turn a person down.
*_"I understand enough to know the rule book should use an equal sign"_*
Did you think you were reading a rule book right now? And let's be honest, 1lb isn't going to be the difference. You're already allowed 0.5lb deviation anyway. The important part is what range you settle on.
*_"I'd be worried about the transitioned athlete incurring additional risk"_*
Different kind of risk. It's pretty common for fighters to fight oversized opponents. This is a well known phenomenon and the nature of the risk is well understood.
So even in a situation where we were trading one risk for another yet the total size of the risk remained the same, we would _still_ be better off. Because we are trading a less understood and more difficult to counter risk, for a well understood one with long established mitigation strategies.
However, realistically people who have enough experience in the sport would be quite good at making this determination within a range likely to reduce total risk, which while not perfect, is significantly better.
Also, let's be honest: No you're not.
*_"Maximizing means optimizing for a certain parameter. If you're optimizing for this, you're not optimizing for that."_*
Indeed. That's why maximum strength Benadryl has killed so many. When will the madness end?! Lol
Come on, stop being silly. Obviously maximizing within the parameters establish by a ranked priority list is a thing.
*_"Group sports are vastly more complex"_*
Yes, but fortunately group sports also have a vastly wider acceptable margin of error.
Unlike something like the 100 meter dash, a game like football or basketball often experiments with making dramatic rule changes that will have a great deal of unknown effects with far less than conclusive research.
Because there are so many unknown variables the fans are pretty used to this sort of thing.
No one actually knew what would happen when we banned dunks, changing the charging rules, changing the rules of the drafting system, etc.
There was literally almost no data to support these dramatic changes that all had a much larger impact than any rule about transitioned athletes ever could. And yet they were all implemented on the basis of enhancing fairness, with a wide variety of actual results.
So yeah there's actually significantly more room for experimentation here.
*_"Ad hominem"_*
I don't think you know how to properly use that phrase. In any case we can agree to disagree on this point.
*_"I'll decide when my fun/annoyance reaches the point of bailing out"_*
Translation: "I'm actually not very confident in the validity of my point and feel discomfort being challenged, therefore I reserve the right to frame my imminent retreat as snobbery."
Cool man, whatever works for you. Just glad I could inject some reason into your thinly veiled prejudice.
*Conclusion:*
It appears that your entire objection boils down to: "It cannot be done perfectly, therefore it is entirely unacceptable.
My experience has been that is typically the disingenuous sentiment expressed by people who want society to continue to act in accordance with their personal bigotry but do not care to be openly associated with such a regressive attitude.
It is the "[blank] people will never achieve full equality so we should segregate them" position of the disingenuous moderate.
It seems pretty clear that many sports can accommodate this ridiculously small number of outlier individuals and risk mitigation strategies are plentiful.
We should bring together the experts and proceed carefully along trying them with a clear priority list of maximizing safety, fairness, and inclusion. With full knowledge that frankly, we've taken far greater risks before.