Two things here.
1. Sex isn't nearly as objective as you're making it out to be. It's a bimodal spectrum of correlated traits; meaning there isn't a single marker you can choose to separate everyone into neat buckets that wouldn't misclassify some cis people (and jeez yall get mad when you get misgendered). [0]
2. None of this is even remotely new, Im not sure where you're getting that impression from. Germany had an entire institute dedicated to studying trans people at the turn of the 20th century [1]. I'd agree that for a variety of (usually discriminatory and religious) reasons it hasn't been well studied, but trans people certainly arent new.
Two limits with a large space of indeterminate in between sounds an awful lot like an analogue signal. A system that classifies as A, B, other: grab bag of unrelated conditions isn't particularly useful in a societal nor medical context (and why it isn't used anywhere). You can objectively measure certain karyotypes, measure how someone's body reacts to hormones (and what hormones they produce), how that makes them feel, what that body can then do reproductively, (almost like a spectrum of correlated traits) but not make nice neat boxes that fits in the reproduction section of the text book you had in the 6th grade. By that measure, gender is just as "objective". Ask a person what gender they are, exactly 1 measurement required boom you're done (and with better accuracy than trying to measure anything else to boot).
Your specific exposure to the public "debate" is recent, sure. But just because you hadn't heard of it before the heritage foundation spent millions of dollars to insure you did didn't mean it wasn't happening.
Humans can only produce two different types of gametes (sperm or egg), and never both in the same body. And it’s never a “spectrum” with “speg” or “sperg” variants.
This is full of false information about sex, it is most certainly NOT just a spectrum of traits that is one shallow dimension that you focused on for the benfit of your agenda and the least scientific approach.
You won't easily find support for that on hacker news =)
So, just to get the record straight this woman[0], md/phd, expert in gender and sex, is less right/qualified than you, unqualified programmer (who cites no sources for your claim) on a web forum?
Like yeah, Im aware HN (as a population) hates women, and GSM in general, but somehow im always surprised by how much yall do.
Haha, ok you can believe any "expert" you want if it makes you feel better. I have no idea who that is and I dont care. Try looking at the idea logically and within a body of science not out of context and cherry picked =)
You shouldn't believe me you should believe science. I'm not arguing any of that go read about it yourself.
How difficult is it to ask a simple question every morning? Or baring that, engage your kid. Could come to a compromise for defaulting to a gender neutral "they" for when you don't know how they're feeling in a given day. Upon which they could give you a reasonable clarification (or you know, just ask).
When your kid's demands are as simple as "hey support my identity, which requires nothing but thinking slightly more about the words you use" how could they not be frustrated when their parent can't even clear that low bar.
Worth noting that that paper not only surveyed exclusively parents but also recruited exclusively from transphobic websites (small wonder the parents found weren't particularly supportive). To the point where the conclusions had to be drastically rolled back and these failures in experimental design highlighted [0].
It's also the start and end of anyone replicating those results. This is very misleading and equivalent to linking the now debunked paper saying vaccines cause autism then telling readers to go look for more research.
A mistake that a lot of people make when talking about bigotry is assuming it begins and ends with loud angry people yelling slurs. Building a system that genders people based on their voice isn't "inconsiderate" it's just a transphobic thing to do. Systematic biases don't require malice from any individual working within them to perpetuate; but that doesn't make them any less real and doesn't mean that we shouldn't just accept that all tech should also support them.
Ignoring why the WSA chose 5nmol/L over something closer to the average cis woman's upper quartile (which is closer to 2 [45ng/dL as seen in [0]], not .6 as you're implying with the 7.5x figure), Im not sure what their reasoning is on that without more research.
Trans women don't tend to have testosterone levels that high anyway, and if they did their doctors would be worried about it. Obviously not a comprehensive study but, have the testosterone levels of a trans woman [0] (she's relatively normal, other than the fact she insists on debating strangers on the internet). That's ~.4 nmol/L (why sports and medicine use two different measures is also very confusing, unit conversion here [1]. Given the advantages testosterone gives in sports [3] I'd wager most women competing aren't hovering around the minimum levels (which is where most trans women are going to be by virtue of how anti-androgens work). Instead of unscientific blog spam, how about a study published by the National Collegiate Athletic Association [4].
Basically as the knowledge of the underlying science grows the idea of simple binary for fair sporting competition makes increasingly less sense, I wouldn't be surprised if elite institutions started to drift more toward "hormonal weight classes" (and so thinks these scientists [4])
[3] “[t]he available, albeit incomplete, evidence makes it highly likely that the sex difference in circulating testosterone of adults explains most, if not all, the sex differences in sporting performance.” https://sci-hub.tw/10.1210/er.2018-00020
Caster Semenya is not transgender and has not had testosterone blocking hormone therapy, which is what these regulations/debates are about.
I'd wager most women competing aren't hovering around the minimum levels (which is where most trans women are going to be by virtue of how anti-androgens work). Instead of unscientific blog spam
Again, Semenya is not transgender[1] and her T hormones are not hovering around the minimum levels, which is the entire reason for the ongoing debate. The "unscientific blog spam" was referencing the IAAF study of competing athletes[2]
not .6 as you're implying with the 7.5x figure ...
which indeed showed the average T level for 1332 female athletes was 0.67. 5 / 0.67 = 7.46
So, first off, that number is not the average, it's the median. Quoting from Table2 "Data are presented as median (25th percentile–75th percentile]." The paper isn't on nonfree testosterone in general, but in the opening statement the implication is the tail is rather long
"Among the 1332 female observations,
44 showed an fT concentration >29.4pmol/L.17 Twenty-four
female athletes showed a T concentration >3.08nmol/L which
has been calculated to represent the 99th percentile in a previous
normative study in elite female athletes."
The performance advantages they measured, in the events inwhich there were any, are explicitly linked to fT not non free testosterone and even then aren't being presented as causative.
"Our study design cannot provide evidence for causality
between androgen levels and athletic performance, but can indicate associations between androgen concentrations and athletic
performance. Thus, we deliberately decided not to exclude
performances achieved by females with biological hyperandrogenism and males with biological hypoandrogenism whatever
the cause of their condition (oral contraceptives, polycystic
ovaries syndrome, disorder of sex development, doping, overtraining). As a consequence, the calculated mean fT value in
the present study is higher than the 8.06pmol/L median value
previously reported in a similar female population."
They certainly don't appear to be arguing that hyperandrogenism in women should be a disqualifying condition. Especially in running events like the ones Semenya competed in since the performance gains appear most significantly in the throwing events.
"Our hypothesis is that ...androgens exert their
ergogenic effects on some sportswomen through better visuospatial neural activation."
We live in a world where google exists, hell where scihub exists. It's extremely suspicious to show up in a forum "asking questions" when these resources exist. Getting told to "fuck off" in this context is basically being told to RTFM. You can look in my comment history to find just how easy it was to compile some sources to discredit the idea that trans women in sports is some unknown taboo.
If we spent just a fraction of the effort making spaces safer for marginalized groups as we do debating bad faith actors the internet would be a much better place in my opinion.
I think the two questions being considered are largely a matter of public opinion. You can use something of sci hub etc to justify your opinion, or try to change someone’s mind (esp in this example with the trans athletes). But unless others have already held this discussion somewhere google won’t help you gauge what people think.
(Obviously these particular topics have been done to death, but someone has to hold this discussion for the first time on a given platform).
I do actually agree that most people that most people making a fuss about these questions online are doing so in bad faith or “mostly bad faith”. But I still do think both questions are nuanced, and I think a lot of bystanders might benefit from intelligent responses to these questions from the progressive side, but maybe at some point it’s too exhausting.
The exhausting angle is real. I think there's some inheritant bad faith (even if unintentional) in asking sensitive questions to a forumn with no validations on identity or expertise. Your odds of finding someone that knows these things deeply that doesn't also have an emotional connection to them are relatively low (there aren't a lot of phds in sports medicine floating around HN for example). So instead it becomes up to someone directly effected to provide such responses and that's just a lot; save the sensitive questions for the experts or come with direct quotes from published sources.
Nobody said it’s an unknown taboo. The issue is that they have an incredible biological advantage. We should absolutely not focus on making social spaces “safer” (a misnomer, because regular adult conversations simply do not jeopardize safety), we should focus more on making people anti-fragile.
So that's the stance "the liberties of the intolerant should be limited only insofar as they demonstrably limit the liberties of others" most of the major social networks take and it falls short in that it's hard to draw that line. (also the ideas of constitutional safe guards applying to private entities is a whole other can of worms; id argue the speech the government can limit should be a subset of what any given private moderator might choose to)
Two examples:
what im going to call the "im not touching you" type of harassment -- that is posting things clearly designed to hurt and wouldn't make sense in context unless designed for harassment. The platonic example here is the image macro that's the trans flag with the words "Your parents will burry you with the name they gave you". Cuel to the extreme, but doesn't technically call for violence against the given person, or the protected group at large so twitter and facebook, etc happily leave it up (and people wanting to be assholes hyper optimized pretty quick; ive seen the macro posted by multiple people in multiple places).
Second being the idea of stochastic terrorism. Painting a group as an unchecked evil means you don't have to tell anyone specifically they should commit violence, but, it's hard to be surprised if they come to that conclusion. See the shootings in Charleston or Christchurch.
The idea of stochastic terrorism covers all passionate political rhetoric. See the Reagan assasination attempt and the congressional baseball shooting.
Tones of statements fall under that header. It can be Trump supporters tallking about election fraud, nazis talking about "race based IQ distributions" or transphobes talking about "bathroom predators"; there's no shortage of these kind of bad faith low effort "arguements". There are mountains of high quality sources you can use to argue against the claims but it takes many times the work than just showing up to "just ask questions" as bigots are want to do.
Having a 0 tolerance policy for these kinds of people makes your space safer for maginalized communities and ends up with better debates/discussions over all since, as i alluded to, these arguments aren't actually in good faith or rooted in any sort of data.
No interest in wading into the specifics of these topics obviously. But, it occurs to me that deciding which topics are troll topics and which ones aren’t confers a lot of power.
I have actually seen people banned from communities when coming armed with pretty detailed data and thorough argumentation. I wonder if there’s a principled way to separate low-effort trolls from those simply willing to argue the unpopular side of a controversial topic.
I don't moderate anything anymore, but I generally have an n strikes policy when debating with someone.
If I spend [not insignificant amount of time/mental energy] with you just to disprove something inane, and you do that to me n times, I won't argue with you anymore, even if the n+1th time happens to not be completely baseless. At that point it's either explicitly on purpose, or implicitly linked with a bias that makes them susceptible to bullshit that confirms said bias.
I don't know if there's any ab initio way of knowing if someone's spouting nonsense on purpose or not, so character patterns are hard to scale. But that's why moderation online is harder and faster than in real life, because you don't have a 1on1 interaction in the same way. It's up to netizens to behave and think before speaking.
You have to always remember it comes down to scale. The fact that making the claims is always less work than debunking them already has the balance of power way off into the claimant end. So anyone moderating anything is going to turn to heuristics; you can see which topics tend to attract people acting in bad faith and at the very least have extra standards on. I'll go back to trans people since Ive personally got the most experience debunking bigotry in that arena, what are the odds that some random user on an unrelated forum has independently researched something that's going to completely flip established science on its head? It's fairly low, and allowing argument just creates a false debate. To use examples I would hope get everyone on board, think flat earthers. There's no version of that discussion that doesn't end with "here are all the data suggesting a round earth + things you can literally do yourself with a bit of math and a car" vs "that's just what the <insert boogieman that's a thin metaphor for marginalized group> want you to think". Since you know how it ends, just ban it to start.
Hell you can see the consequences of not holding a firm line on these sorts of things in this thread. There are people literally "just asking questions" about "men in women's sports" as an example of the "terrible reddit censorship"; as if it's not transparently obvious what they're doing.
So you have to ask yourself, even if you could reliably id anyone who wanted to argue in good faith (i'd argue this is considerably harder than you'd think though that's more of a gut feeling /shrug), if their goals are "convince the world that <race, gender, nationality, sexuality> is causing harm" what is the value of giving that a platform even if you're willing to expend the emotional energy to debunk it (over and over and over and over because even if you have some kind of metric, your users don't and if allowed someone always feeds the trolls).
Your examples are very revealing of a larger problem.
Not only are these viewpoints, which you claim can only be argued in bad faith, supported by empirical evidence, but the people who dare to support them publicly are risking social and financial ruin. If "unsafe" and "marginalized" do not describe their situation, then the words have no meaning.
As a minority from one of the groups at the unflattering end of the crime rate distributions, it is my lived experience that the type of censorship you are advocating for is what makes me feel unsafe.
Inconvenient empirical truths about my community can not be discussed in the sort of polite and caring settings where the seeds of real solutions that don't ignore reality could germinate.
Instead, they can only be discussed in rude and hateful settings.
Especially since, a year later, the answer seems to be "selling how to build a Twitter following" self help videos. [0]
This is just someone who desperately needs to justify why he retired early (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you've got the cash and wish to live that sort of lifestyle, but there's no need to wrap it all up in some pseudo-psychology about motivation) .
2. None of this is even remotely new, Im not sure where you're getting that impression from. Germany had an entire institute dedicated to studying trans people at the turn of the 20th century [1]. I'd agree that for a variety of (usually discriminatory and religious) reasons it hasn't been well studied, but trans people certainly arent new.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/24702897188036...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...