AIBU to think it was never that complicated to define a woman.

[Abisequer]

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has ruled that eligibility for the women’s category of Olympic events will now be limited to biological females, starting from the LA 2028 Games.

AIBU to think the category ‘women’ was never complicated and the obfuscation by certain governing bodies has compromised fairness in sport for women.

Examples of obfuscation include claims that genital checking would be needed or that biological men with lowered testosterone would be on an even playing field with biological women.

AIBU to think it was never complicated to define a woman and a cheek swab is all it takes.

Article

For the hard of thinking : there are two steps to this testing process. The SRY test is the screen.

if positive the athlete is then tested to see if they’re androgen sensitive.

Honestly, the hubris of posters coming here to scold when they haven’t even read the ruling.

I think it comes down to the recycling of these flawed arguments. They are still rattling around and just get repeated.

It, of course, relies on the fact that he is well known as one of the greats and it then relies on the fact that no one can probably remember the names of the men who have beaten his times since.

But it also shows that there are no new arguments. Just the same debunked ones cycling back around.

It is enlightening of itself though.

You know what is also fucking hilarious.... that you said that people wouldn't read it, yet.... clearly we already have.

Ok last post. I'm not 'hard of thinking' I just don't think people should be getting their information from youtubers, internet 'personalities' or people who are making a living from culture wars.

And for people who 'just want a debate' some of you are very twitchy if people disagree with you - but hey that's the way of the world.

This article covers why 'sex testing' is harmful to women - and covers why it was discontinued in the 1990's (because it caused harm to women!).

https://sportandrightsalliance.org/olympics-sex-testing-harms-all-women-and-girls/

But you are the one getting your information from unreliable sources 🫠🫠🫠

Safeguarding the women's competition from men is obviously advantageous to women. Only someone not actually on the side of women would disagree.

Once again, why do you want men in women's sports? Men have their own sports.

I think you will find that many of us will fully endorse the advice to read widely and to read deeply on any topic.

In fact, I am very happy to provide people with some starting points to branch out from. The studies and papers on this archive thread linked below all have other studies referenced to also read making it easy to find the reading list.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5142027-save-female-sports-evidence-thread?page=1

These are the studies that formed expert opinion from all sides.

Have you read them?

Within each sex class individuals will have bodies that mean they are built to have potential to excel at a sport. Simone Biles almost certainly the GOAT gymnast would never be a swimmer for example. Coaches look at body composition when establishing if a child is going to have potential. Looking at parents is also an indicator.

Nothing however can match the sheer determination, grit and hard work that makes these individuals great. They take what they have and max it out. Hard work beats talent when talent first work.

The cheats such as Caster Semenya take their sex based advantage and cheat to win. He wouldn’t stand a chance in the correct sex class. He wouldn’t have needed to do half the training those women did to win.

Regarding 'simple cheek swab'. When have I ever not acknowledged that a small group of athletes will need to have further testing? Would you like to find a post where I have ever denied that?

And this - "Also it may be useful to ask yourselves what other aspects of women's sports e.g. sexual assault, rape, they ever post about, as to whether they really care about women."

That above is simple distractive tactics. It is also emotionally manipulative by seeking to shame others who disagree with you.

The cheats such as Caster Semenya take their sex based advantage and cheat to win. He wouldn’t stand a chance in the correct sex class

I posted on a thread previously that based on his 800m PB, he wouldn’t even be at national class level in England at school boy age group.

Who says sex testing is harmful to women?

It’s not the athletes, is it? Must be the menz again.

I just read that article. It doesn’t say why it was harmful to women. There’s a link to another article that equally doesn’t say why it was harmful to women.

I suspect it was considered harmful because it kept finding men who claimed they were women and they didn’t like it, and the voting authorities sided with them, unsurprisingly.

At the time, women still supported the testing to continue. But were overruled. Quelle surprise 🙄

"I'm not 'hard of thinking' I just don't think people should be getting their information from youtubers, internet 'personalities' or people who are making a living from culture wars."

And what part of the link with all the studies indicates that the people on this thread are not getting their information directly from the studies and the academic papers? What an absurd accusation.

"This article covers why 'sex testing' is harmful to women - and covers why it was discontinued in the 1990's (because it caused harm to women!)."

At the time it was discontinued, every single female athlete was tested. The only 'women' that were negatively impacted were those who were male people with the differences of sex development that had male pubertal advantages. You really seem ill informed on this topic.

Oh snap!

I was just about to do another post asking that poster to explain what were the 'harms' ....

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/mar/26/why-olympics-u-turned-gender-rules-sex-testing

i know it’s the guardian, but Sean Ingle has been fantastic in his reporting. It states that over 1000 female athletes surveyed wanted sex testing.

It’s true there’s various gender-woo academics saying it’s bad, but they’re not the ones affected, are they?

Why is it “harmful” to correctly identify who belongs in a protected category? How else would you do it?

Is it 'harmful' to junior athletes to keep seniors out of their competitions? Is it 'harmful' for paralympians to keep able bodied people out of their sports?

No, of course not. Quite the opposite.

So why would it be harmful for women to keep men out of their sports?

Just plonking this here too.

IS INCLUSIVE ALWAYS ‘INCLUSIVE’

A good explainer from Jon Pike.

https://x.com/sportseenuk/status/1978358073887502530?s=46

Jon points out that there is no pressure at all on Paralympic Events to make them inclusive to able bodied people and people would be rightly uncomfortable with pressure to include able bodied people who have limited their abilities in Paralympic events.

He poses the question why female events have been singled out to allow a group of male people who have limited their abilities to access the protected events for female athletes.

here is more

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE / PHELPS GAMBIT / PHELPS ARGUMENT

Here is another explanation of why the Phelps Gambit is weak.

https://x.com/Scienceofsport/status/1820462042765001041

Ross Tucker

5 August 2024

Yeah, poor old Phelps became the poster child for this illogical argument that his advantages are the same as those of males. I'll try to explain why this is such poor thinking. First, Phelps' advantages are not category-crossing. That is, there is no category for short arms, and there is no category for small feet, or high lactate producers etc. So we have decided, for better or worse, not to create a category for people without Attribute X. And thus, when a person has X, they shouldn't be excluded, so there's no basis to disqualify Phelps.

Now, one could have a debate over whether we SHOULD think about creating a category for small feet or short arms. If we did this, then Phelps' supposed advantages would become 'outside of category', and we'd say that he's not allowed to swim in the protected category, right?

But we don't need to do this, because the advantages that he has are tiny compared to what male advantage does to performance. Phelps wins by 0.5%. Males win by 12% (compared to females). By scale, then, these advantages are orders of magnitude different.

It's also a massive oversimplification to say that Phelps won because his arms are long or that he produces less lactate. They're daft, incorrect attributions anyway. And finally, females also have some of these advantages - there are women who produce less lactate, or have long arms.

They don't make up for the absence of male advantage. So they're totally different situations. Fundamentally, what sport is trying to reward are those exceptional individuals within categories. We actually celebrate these advantages, they make sport what it is, no?

But we need to rule out some other advantages - size/mass in boxing, age in all sport - because otherwise the things that do NOT matter overwhelm the things that do. Phelps physiology matters - it's why he wins gold medals. Katie Ledecky, though, also has physiology that deserves gold.
It's just she doesn't have male advantage as well. And that's the point - "as well". They are equally great swimmers, but within their categories. The only way around this is to say that we should create a category because Advantage X is so large it also overwhelms the result.

But it doesn't - as mentioned, by scale, what Phelps has over males is tiny compared to what males have over females. Put another way - the fastest swimmer with small feet or shorter arms (whatever that means) is not beaten by thousands of longer armed, bigger footed swimmers!

So I hope I've not laboured that or explained it clumsily. To sum up, Phelps is a bad counter point. So is height in basketball (there's no "short people NBA, only 180cm or under" category).

Rather think age, weight and disability class, and ask if the attribute, X, devalues the things we actually want to reward, or whether it's part of it. Phelps' advantages are part of the excellence. Male advantage is not - being male is NOT a talent, and as such, shouldn't be part of the mix. What Phelps has, those are different.

Exactly. What is this benefit to women?

The benefits are all exclusively to men. I can see men's displeasure in experiencing boundaries to using women and their events, but in all honesty it's about in about the same way a shop lifter finds security and being challenged a displeasing boundary. Something wrong to others is being stopped,and that 'harms' nobody.

Unless this is affiliation with the more wild Christian American Right kind of 'harm' where the argument is that it 'harms' the greater good (men) and society as a whole when women aren't made to serve and stay in their box. Which is .... interesting.

In the same way it's interesting that the actual harms to women and their sports - which were real harms - aren't being mentioned or cared about.

It seems silly for the TRA’s to argue that a cheek swab is “harmful” when you consider the process of urine drug testing, where the tester needs to actually visualise the urine coming from the urethra.

Elite sport has its indignities, and now access to a protected category requires testing.

If athletes don’t want this, they can opt out of testing. But for women who have had testers peering near their labia minora waiting for urine a cheek swab will be non-event.

Policing women's bodies in reality it is policing male bodies

Harmful to women in reality it means upsetting and restricting to men.

Didn't 82% of the female athletes support sex testing back in the day? To keep the men away?

It seems extraordinarily silly for the TRAs to argue that sex testing is harmful when there was nothing to stop men from entering the women's boxing/wrestling competitions in the last Olympics.

Whether you believe men actually did enter the women's competition, or not - it is indisputable that they had the opportunity to.

Yes, indeed it was 82%.

82% of women were ignored completely to focus on the needs of a group of male athletes.

I seem to recall that the IOC didn't consult any female athletics bodies before ditching the testing either. Just asked a handful of men on cross sex hormones whether their performance had deteriorated.

They knew who the women were too...

This type of damage comes from the type of parents who are binary-sex-obsessed though. We had a thread here this week who posted that their 6yr old son had asked for some shoes in Clarks (ballet flats) and she'd told him they were for girls only. Other posters agreed that boys needed to learn that some things were for girls and he had to deal with that and all this 'men in dresses' stuff was ridiculous.

But where do you think these emotions in trans kids comes from? If a boy loves shoes (or hobbies, clothes, music, toiletries, colours, TV shows, hairstyles, artists etc etc) that are considered 'for girls', then it's no surprise that instead of thinking 'I'm a boy who loves pink unicorn skirts' he things 'Maybe I'm actually a girl because I have a boy body but my mum is telling me all the thinks I like are things that only girls are allowed to like'.

I have no idea why people who are anti-trans are also pushing 'gender norms' when this seems like it would have the exact opposite effect?