I've written just now to Dr Budgett, of the IOC and I'll say here if I get a reply. It is, ofc, essential that women athletes and advocates who are affected by the 'framework' drawn up in the next 2 months are properly consulted.
But I will also try hard to get my say...🧵
Reason: Lots of people are saying nice things about the @WorldRugby work. That's to their (RW's) credit, but I'll claim some small influence on the method they used. I'm asking to explain that method to the IOC, against the 'balancing' metaphor that is easy but inappropriate...
For policy geeks: when you are targeting three incommensurable values (S,F, and I) you can't use a synchronic approach. You need a step by step (diachronic) one. You need to establish priority relations: what trumps what.
My rough view is that safety trumps fairness trumps...
inclusion.
But, if you're not sick of it, (and even if you are) the argument is here⬇️ I think it can act as guidance to IFs. I might be wrong, and I'm open to objections.
But, like @Scienceofsport and @FondOfBeetles I'm persistent.
LH thanks the IOC for its 'courage and moral leadership'🧵
I see things differently. Courage would reside in the IOC sticking with fair sport and the principle in the 2015 statement I've quoted elsewhere.
The stance they have taken does not show that sport is an activity...
1/ ...'open to all.' It was not open to #RovielDetenamo, who wanted to live *her* life authentically and as she is: a competitive female weight lifter. But she was excluded from the female weightlifting competition.
2/ The language of inclusion and authenticity and openness is denied to #RovielDetenamo. This does not show moral courage, but something else: ignoring the science, backtracking on principles of fairness, in search of some sort of (inauthentic) political credibility
@FondOfBeetles reference to 'sliders' draws my attention to this paper by Yannis Pitsiladis.
In particular, look at the figures (1) and (2) which, in my view, misrepresent the argument. Pitsiladis constructs a 'slider' with safety at one end and inclusion at the other...
But ask yourself: what is the common metric that can vary along this sliding scale scale? (I'll put the figure in the next tweet)
fahttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17461391.2021.1938692
Here, we are getting close to the nub of the issue, and imho, the Pitsiladis et al paper gets it wrong. This is where the balancing metaphor gets you, and it is incoherent because there is no shared metric.
Because we’ve discussed it here before, I hope @RogerPielkeJr will not mind me saying a few words about his statement that the argument about the fairness of LH in the female category is “100% a subjective argument”🧵
1/ First, note that no one really makes the statement he’s denying. Certainly, I don’t say: LH’s inclusion is unfair *and that’s 100% an objective fact about the world* (It’s not clear to me what a 62% objective argument would look like, either).
2/ Instead, I think, and say, that LH’s possession of male advantage is a fact about the world, and I think and say that the point of the female category is to exclude male advantage.
On 'pies' and 'spaces' (They’re connected) #MoralMaze @AdamWagner1 argues that ‘rights are not like pies’. To spell things out, boringly, his point is that rights are not a zero-sum game, that it is possible to increase one right or set of rights without reducing ...
1/
another right or set of rights.
I think that he is correct, about some rights, and his example of equal marriage is a pretty good example.
But I think he is wrong about other rights, and especially about the rights in question.
2/
Consider the pie metaphor. It’s supposed to be powerful because it conveys the idea that we are talking about big, abstract, social rules, roles and institutions, not something as simple as a pie.
As simple, material and *spatially constrained* as a chunk of pie. 3/
Nonetheless... (thread) @AyoCaesar foregrounds Non-Domination. (ND) She points to the fact that there is only one trans competitor in Tokyo (ignoring the alternate, and the 9 (?) para-athletes... 1/
What does ND show about trans-inclusion into women's sport (TI)? Some candidate answers:
A) ND shows that TI is fair
B) ND shows that TI doesn't matter...
I'll take these in turn
2/
A) is a category error. Whether a contest is fair or not is independent of the results of that contest. Fairness (in sport) is a matter of procedures, not outcomes. To see this, consider the difference with a criminal trial. There's a fact of the matter that the trial ...3/
1) The rights that women have fought for and won are collective rights, and in a lot of cases they are sex-based rights.
2) Sex -based rights are grounded in and justified by the fact of sexed bodies. Sexed bodies do not always count for grounding rights, - eg. for the right to vote they are irrelevant - but sometimes they do.