Thread by @Scienceofsport

You’ll look long and hard, and still fail, to find a debunking of something as poor and weak as this one. Simply saying the opposite thing preceded by FACT (in caps) doesn’t qualify as a debunking of anything. Except maybe intelligent insight.

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1357062147239538689

Very brief responses to each. The first one is sloganeering and non-scientific. For the sporting argument, it relies on a common but flawed overlap argument because of "a range of physical characteristics” in women, which is obvious, but irrelevant

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1357062150322352131

“They overlap because of a wide range” is irrelevant. Comparison should be typical M vs typical F, or elite vs elite, performance-matched vs performance-matched. Not a manipulated comparison between extremely good F and relatively mediocre M, to conclude “They’re the same”!

For instance, if you found a lightweight boxer who could beat a heavyweight (and there will be many), would you conclude that heavyweights don’t have an advantage? Of course not. All you’ve done is find a really mediocre heavyweight and a very good lightweight. Overlap is obvious

The trouble with overlap arguments is that if you build your position on this obvious phenomenon, you may as well get rid of categories altogether, because “hey, ranges, am I right? Katie Ledecky swims faster than me. She should just race Phelps”. Let humans go in one category.

Next, “FACT 2”, which is the weakest of the lot. This is pure gaslighting. Their athletic ability will vary, obviously. It’s irrelevant though. As is the fact that women will beat trans athletes. This says nothing about advantage, which is measured relative to self, not others

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1357062153413529601

To illustrate, if I gave you a bicycle with a motor in it, and it gave you 100W extra, and you still did NOT win the Tour de France, would you tell me that you had no advantage? Similarly, if an athlete takes EPO to finish 30th, was she competing fairly, with no advantage?

In both these instances, all you’ve shown is that the base level of the athlete with an advantage is low enough that the advantage doesn’t affect others. One could, I suppose, argue that this should be allowed for some other trade-offs. I’d disagree. This, by the way is also the

...reason we won’t see a “tsunami” of trans athletes dominating women’s sport - the base level of athletes still needs to be high enough such that the athlete is better than 99% of women after conversion. But that’s not the point - there’s no acceptable level. It is unfair at n=1

And the reason it’s unfair is because the policy that tries to reduce male advantage (from androgens during development) does NOT achieve its purpose. A large part of initial advantages remain. The initial advantage is huge in *matched* athletes, which is why women’s sport exists

It exists as a closed category because of advantages in pretty much every variable relevant to sporting performance, so the only question that matters is whether lowering T removes it enough (that is, “all”) to allow a person to enter the new cat. All evidence says “no”

There are limitations to that evidence, yes. And people should engage & discuss those, figure out what they mean, their implications. But it’s intellectually lazy to say “no evidence”. Besides, no evidence should result in exclusion by default, because the W category is protected