I am not arguing one way or the other for what’s preferable, I am just outlining what would happen if we took people’s gender at their word.

Because they won’t under the current rules. If you think many men wouldn’t call themselves women just so that they could win millions in sponsorship contract I’d have to say you’re delusional and all too gullible about how men can be trusted to not act to their advantage when it suits them.

So what you’re saying, essentially, is that because men can’t be trusted women should be humiliated and forced into an imaginary gender binary or be told they simply can’t compete. Furthermore, the threat posed by these hypothetical men is so great that any woman who doesn’t fit the exact binary society has decreed must be forbidden from competition, even if she has no competitive advantage?

Thats either the absolute most depressing utilitarian argument I’ve ever heard or a bullshit smokescreen for the rigid enforcement of gender roles. Honestly, I don’t care which.

I’m not sure why _anyone_ should be encouraged to devote their lives to sport. It seems such a terrible waste of talent and resources. But if they must, let it be paid for by those who derive some (incomprehensible to me) entertainment value from watching other people running up and down. Then if people wish to pay to watch sex-segregated running up and down, they would be free to do so, the rules could be set by those paying for it.

The main problem with the Olympics is that it is funded out of my taxes, in fact despite being far from a high earner I’m probably going to have to pay our highly regressive local taxes to fund the London games for the rest of my life, a fact I _deeply_ resent. Especially as many of those who pushed for the games (e.g. Seb Coe, former athlete and very rich guy) are making a huge amount of money out of them.

“All of which has nothing to do with the athlete… solution… let’s punish the athlete. Interesting… you obviously didn’t enjoy your gym class.”

No, I quite liked PE at school OK, and in retrospect am grateful I was forced to participate, at least at first. Unfortunately, because of the very same obsession with elite quasi-professional sports that the Olympics typifies, after the first couple of years our school gym teachers generally preferred to indulge their frustrated professional football ambitions by taking the ‘school team’ off for practice, telling the rest of us to just find something to do amongst ourselves (which meant sitting in McDonanlds for many, unsupervised 30-aside football games on concrete for the rest).
Our sports facilities also left a lot to be desired, playing tennis with table tennis bats, because the school only had one tennis racket, was a particular highlight. Yet millions of pounds are lavished on the elite glory-hunters!

The same attitude is demonstrated in the way Sunday football fields for ordinary people in London are being tarmaced over to make room for car parks for the Olympians, and the way massive amounts of money are being spent on the Olympics (and former Olympians like Seb Coe are getting rich out of the construction work involved) while my local swimming baths has been closed down. And don’t get me started on the absence of cycle lanes.

I don’t think not wanting to fund an event for the benefit of athletes, while the rest of us watch them on TV, and suggesting that instead we should spend the money on allowing non-obsessional athletes to enjoy some sport is ‘punishing’ anybody.

“Although you may not, a good portion of people enjoy sport, and not because it’s good for cardio-vascular health. (In fact if you tell the kids to play for their health you might quite effectively discourage them.) They like it because it’s fun, a good release of energy and competitive. A lot of people like competition and something like the Olympics is the natural manifestation of this.”

Yes, and those people don’t get to play sport as much as they otherwise could because of our obsession with pandering to the small number of full-timers. Competition on a casual basis is fine, it becomes ridiculous when it gets as institutionalised as it is with the Olympics. With market-funded sports one has to accept that many people are prepared to pay just to watch others play, even if I think that’s screwed up and a symptom of how technology has increased social divisons, I have to accept it. Though I’ve never understood the idea of ‘supporting’ football teams, which are just multi-national money-making machines staffed by highly-paid mercenaries.

The Olympics are not funded like that so I have stronger objections.

“And what in life is not pointless, in the grand scale? Truth is most of it is pointless, whether you’re an athlete, a bank teller, or a high powered executive, so why pick on the athlete?”

A bank teller provides a useful service, an athlete does not (excepting the peculiar entertainment value some get from watching it), Also a bank teller is paid for by those who use the service, athletes, here anyway, are to a large degree state subsidised.

Because they won’t under the current rules. If you think many men wouldn’t call themselves women just so that they could win millions in sponsorship contract I’d have to say you’re delusional and all too gullible about how men can be trusted to not act to their advantage when it suits them. Moreover, we aren’t even considering countries where individualism is not as much of a virtue and country officials would pressure males who could win against women but not against men to call themselves women.

If we did apply that standard you could probably eliminate most women in professional sports. Also, how’d you feel about prisoners like rapists choosing to be women to get into a woman’s prison?

Interesting straw man you brought up there with the prison thing, but I’ll get to that.

I doubt you’d eliminate women from professional sports by simply accepting women who identify as women to be…women. Why? Because men aren’t exactly tripping over each other to pose as women so they can win medals. I can think of one example in which there might have been a man who posed as a woman in order to medal during the Olympics, and even then it was an ambiguous situation during an unusual time with someone who didn’t medal. What you’re essentially saying is that women ought to be subjected to blood tests and gynecological examinations in order to prove their womanhood to protect them from an imagined threat. You’re reducing the definition of a woman to a vagina and a pair of X chromosomes. You’re essentially telling trans and intersex people that they’re not welcome in higher level competition, even if their particular situations don’t confer any competitive advantage. You’re explicitly telling women that if they want to compete they need to prove their gender, for their own good. You’re deciding to force something as fluid and varied as gender into a binary. In the name of protecting women you’re saying that they need to put up with invasions for privacy and the walking back of gender roles and definitions. You’re raising a big middle finger to the trans, queer, intersex, and gender rebel communities. And why? To prevent a theoretical problem.

As for the prisons, you’ve brought up an interesting point (even if you didn’t mean to). There actually is a pretty big problem in the prison system right now when it comes to trans individuals. But, sadly, it doesn’t conform to your fantasy narrative. The problem isn’t predatory men pretending to be women so they can rape to their heart’s content (as if a single man with an agenda like that would last long in a women’s maximum security setting anyway). The problem is the gender police forcing trans and intersex individuals into situations where they must either hide their identity or be preyed upon.

But hey, I’m sure the motives of (male) prison officials (like Olympic committees) are pure. I’m sure they just want to protect those weak, vulnerable, utterly defenseless women. I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with enforcing gender norms or the hatred/disgust they have for people different from them. I’m sure none of these regulations are motivated by a desire to keep people who challenge dominant worldviews out of the public eye and thus reduce cognitive dissonance. I’m sure women who don’t conform to traditional beauty standards won’t be accused of being men in order to humiliate them or put them off their game or just generally terrorize them. Because we’re past that. We’ve ascended to a higher level. Everything is good now. Nothing to see here, move along, and don’t forget to drop trou on the way past that man in the suit over there to confirm your gender. Its for your own good, really…

If we did apply that standard you could probably eliminate most women in professional sports. Also, how’d you feel about prisoners like rapists choosing to be women to get into a woman’s prison?

Not only has it happened, there have been athletes whose medals have been stripped decades after being awarded because an unrelated incident showed the athlete was intersex.

I think you might have misunderstood what I was saying. There has never been a man who pretended to be a woman in order to gain a competitive advantage at the Olympics. Never, not one. There have been women who have been stripped of medals because their chromosomes or genitals don’t conform to the standard binary conception of gender. But these weren’t people who were being dishonest or attempting to gain an unfair competitive advantage, they were just women who happened to not fit an arbitrary standard of what a woman is.

Developing a protocol for figuring out what constitutes a woman pretty much guarantees that another woman, at some point in the future, will have to go through the same bullshit and lose her medals because she didn’t fit the standard outlined in the protocol. Moreover, it will subject all women (in particular those who don’t conform to conventional beauty standards) to invasive exams in order to prove they’re women. I think thats obscene. It is especially obscene given that the protocol is being developed (and inflicted upon women) in order to police a problem that has never happened. Men don’t pretend to be women to gain a competitive advantage, it simply isn’t a concern that justifies the invasion of privacy that ANY protocol for determining gender (outside of the individual in question’s assertion) would mean.

tl;dr: A woman is a person who considers themselves to be a woman, a man is a person who considers themselves to be a man. The end.

Not only has it happened, there have been athletes whose medals have been stripped decades after being awarded because an unrelated incident showed the athlete was intersex.

Probably. There have been cases where people who were chimeras (cells from 2 different zygotes) could be declared either male or female depending on which body part you are taking the DNA from.