In reply to: Swimming World: NCAA needs to deal with the Lia Thomas posted by G.K.Chesterton
Compete against men and women, if there are any in the latter category, of approximately-equivalent ability.
This is how club track works in the UK, where I live. Runners are classified on ability. Nobody cares if they are men, women or something in-between. And all the athletes seem to respect each other.
Unfortunately, the NCAA doesn’t seem to have a construct that works at the current time, surely partly due to an inadequate number of talented transitioning athletes to create a competitive classification.
Having Lia compete against biological women doesn’t hold water and is grossly unfair: it’s insulting and a disregard to the tremendous work the biological women put into the sports they compete in. The biological women deserve every opportunity to win the laurels they compete for.
Maybe a time penalty could be an answer. In track, men’s recruiting times are something like 14-15% faster than women’s. I’m not familiar with swimming, but perhaps it’s directionally similar.
The problem is that Lia has lost some ability/time to the previous year before she had hormone treatments; so you can't use her previous times (as a male) as a male as a starting point. That is, if the women's world record is 30 seconds slower than the men's, it's not fair to add all of that 30 seconds difference to her time as a female swimmer since she is swimming slower as a female.
Neutral observers also realize that she has advantages as a transgender competitor (height, body structures); so some equalizing time offset is needed. The question is what should it be.
Perhaps, your hint at letting them compete, but not for championships is necessary. I know I would be pilloried for my opinion that a transgender person is male or female and choosing to live their life as a member of the other sex, and there are limitations they have to deal with. Perhaps I'll change with more knowledge or the grace of God.
Duckworth-Lewis (or maybe it was Duckworth-Lewis who figured out cricket), then somebody can figure this out.
Take a look at Lia’s page under the women’s swimming roster tab on the Penn athletics website. Still looks like a dude!
There is practically no information that compares times for a transgender female versus those times were as a male before treatments. Nor are we sure whether her times will get slower the longer she is taking treatments. I'm sure many will vociferously claim that Lia is a female and should be allowed to compete without a penalty.
As to your cricket analogy, the Duckworth-Lewis-Sterne method is used to set a winning target number of runs scored when weather conditions limit the number of balls the team batting second will face. Teams play fairly conservatively in their first overs (sets of 6 balls) to avoid making out and then play riskier shots and score at a higher rate later on. So just averaging the rate team 1 scored runs is not a fair way of setting a target in this case.
...was born a male. I wonder how this goes down with all the other female contestants. The previous title holder was gracious.
“Jeopardy!” champion Amy Schneider made history again on Friday, becoming the highest-earning female contestant in the game show's nearly 57-year run.
The engineering manager's 18th consecutive win brought her total earnings to $706,800, bumping her above Larissa Kelly to become the show's top-earning female player.
unless possessing the Y chromosome gives us an advantage of more intelligence! If so, female contestants should be given a $10,000 head start. I realize that being born male had nothing to do with her success, and the previous leading female money-winner was gracious and fair.
As a side note, GAMES magazine had a discussion over 10 years ago why leading chess players were almost all male. Beside usual reasons (chess itself wasn't interesting and young women are too life-oriented to spend a large amount of time on games), a female professor noted that the very high-end and low-end of the IQ spectrum were over-represented by males. Perhaps IQ testing covers traditional male supposed strengths.