Paralympic male athletes like winning against women too

A pregnant woman over 35 is termed a geriatric mother. I wonder how many women over 35 are competing at the games.

We’ve seen appalling treatment of Naomi Osaka this week who has been accused of faking her mental health concerns and in the next page we get this. The commentators who are quick to jump on the ‘unfairness’ of a woman who refuses to do a press conference but can’t comment on this? We see you.

I wonder how old were the females this person was racing against.

In the Sept 2020 Italian Paralympic trials:

400m W T12 be results: two other athletes, YOB 1999 and 2002.

100m W T12 results: three other athletes, YOB 1995, 1968 and 2005.

The thing with sport is that if it's not fair, it's completely pointless. That's why drugs are banned, so that competitors don't have an unfair advantage. Having transwomen compete against women makes it absolutely pointless for women to train and compete in sport.

The sheer hypocrisy is mind blowing. Trans athletes, to be validated in their gender identity , must be allowed to compete in a sex category where they have an overwhelming advantage over other competitors. However, when they are at a disadvantage in the male category, there is no longer any need for these trans athletes to have their gender identity validated. Their gender identity is obviously only important when it gives them an unbeatable advantage

Also what's with all the third person talk? Is it a translation thing?

Yes, translation from Newspeak into English.

Allowing trans women to complete fairly in women's sport is complex in the same way that the motion of the planets was complex when they tried to make it work with Earth at the centre.

Sports authorities will go down a never ending path of adding nuances and special cases and exceptions and tests and checks and balances and tweaking to try to make it work but new problems and flaws will keep popping up because it's all based on a fundamental error.

Agree with the OP. Egregious.

But (not the point).... I couldn't help chuckle at the verb used in the article about the blind discus athlete...

The Paralympian, who has competed nationally and internationally for three different countries — Australia, Japan and Canada — in three different sports — goalball, powerlifting and Para athletics — said he has been eyeing 2020 for a while as the year to talk more openly about his true self.

Sorry.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.outsports.com/platform/amp/2020/11/9/21555550/ness-murby-trans-come-out-paralympic-canada-track-athletics-discus

Another plot twist. Now this Canadian Paralympian, who identifies as a trans man, has qualified in the blind discus. No prizes for guessing which category they'll be competing in!

What should we rename the women's category? Miscellaneous? Everything but the Kitchen Sink?

It will take at least 10 more years of research to fully understand the effect of hormone therapy, Harper says. In some sports trans women will need a handicap, she suggests, but how much handicap isn't yet clear.

10 years of more research funding? Nice one.

Also what's with all the third person talk? Is it a translation thing?

Even one male who beats one female in a sport competition is one too many. If only 100 women are allowed to rank - and say the transwoman is ranked below 99 of the women, it's still not fair. I care more about that one women at 100th spot than I do about the man who would steal it.

Tbh i really couldn't give half a shit about how many seconds slower a male person might be now then before. No males in female sports, EVER. It's really not complex. It's really not hard. Just no.

She is now 47, and recognises that this is her last chance to compete at the Paralympics, but she wants to keep running whether she gets to Tokyo or not.

This is what stood out for me.

This is at least interesting from the trans academic doing the research into advantage in sport

"Hormone therapy won't turn trans women into cis women but the goal, in terms of sports, is to mitigate the advantages that trans women gain by virtue of going through male puberty, to the point where you can have meaningful competition between trans women and cis women."

One of the first times I've seen an acknowledgment that there is currently an advantage that needs to be mitigated.

Has anyone seen anything where it shows the ages of the people in the races that VP won the medals in?

Six months after starting treatment [Valentina] had lost about 11 seconds in the 400m and 2.5 seconds in the 200m.

I imagine most male athletes competing against female athletes would run slower. (a) because they don't have to go as fast to win and (b) because it's useful to them to make some pretence that it's fair.

At 41 this person was regularly winning titles in their proper category.

About 3 years later they transitioned and their times plummeted.

Since then they have begin to compete in the female category where, despite losing so much speed, they are still running much faster than women.

Makes it blindingly clear how much faster males are than females, and how irrelevant the results are of cross-sex hormones on males.

I wonder how old were the females this person was racing against.

Sorry, going off topic, but that other BBC article reads like promotion for her group. The tone isn’t very BBC either (my emphasis):

As the group grew, a smattering of petty Facebook groups were set up to bitch about Kate and dissect screengrabs of her personal posts. Occasionally her name has cropped up on gossip forums like Tattle Life and she's felt the sting of having her appearance, and parenting, ripped into by strangers.

I defended my brother who's three years older than me! Until four years ago, if you'd talked to Fabrizio (the name Petrillo was given at birth), Fabrizio would have given you the idea he was sexist. He was a tough guy who'd speak dismissively of women and then be a woman in his private space

Truly stunning and brave.

Six months after starting treatment [Valentina] had lost about 11 seconds in the 400m and 2.5 seconds in the 200m.

What is often missing from these stories is what their training regimen was before the performance loss was recorded. Did they train at all? Or did the transition take precedence?

And what is also missing is an acknowledgement of the age-related fall in performance, which depending on discipline and individual athlete can fall off a cliff at a certain point in time. So transition, for which the median time is indeed mid-forties to mid-fifties, also happens to coincide with quite a natural drop in performance for many male athletes.

So if a 25 year old male transgender athlete was competing against 25 year old female athletes, what performance gap would we see there instead?

The known cases seem to involve mediocre male athletes past their prime competing against much younger female athletes. The former would not be competitive against male athletes in their prime, but they're still good enough to be competitive against female athletes in their prime. So the performance gap these stories tend to mention is not as big as it would be compared to a male in his prime, but the fact it still exists at all is proof of the considerable male advantage.

That this doesn't seem unfair in any way to the BBC ... well I don't understand how they can't see it.