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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Here’s the short version (yes, this is incomplete because even writing this is a small essay. If somebody feels like adding context please do so), to answer your question on the background to their statement & position. The position is fairly common outside Lemmy at least.

    History, history, history… (very long story)

    2022: Israel was working on normalizing relations with the Arab countries. Things are relatively peaceful in the ME, albeit pretty shit for Arabs in Gaza & WB, not a warzone though. This succeeding would have been a threat to the Iranian network of terrorist organizations (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, groups in Syria such as the IRGC).

    Iran pushes forth October 7 to reignite tensions, training Hamas operatives & such.

    Hamas attacks Israel on Oct. 7 kicking off the war - other Iranian proxy groups soon join in. Initially there is no direct conflict between Israel & Iran.

    2024 april - IDF strikes the Iranian consulate in Syria to take senior officers in the Hezbollah chain of command and assassinates several others. Iran retaliates with missiles against with strikes against Israel proper.

    After that, tit for tat strikes in increasing magnitude and escalations which have culminated in the current situation. No, it was not surprising, this conflict was always fundamentally between Israel & Iran and has been slowly escalating for a long time.

















  • It’s targeting testosterone level, which varies by person and there are cis women with higher levels than some men.

    I’m going to stop you right there. Given changes that are slowly permeating both language and legal systems across the world, “man” or “woman” doesn’t really have anything to do with biology anymore, nor are terms like “cis” or “trans” really relevant to biology (more so a persons current legal/presenting gender compared to the one they were assigned at birth). As such they aren’t useful terms when discussing in the context of what biologically is normal with regards to hormone levels.

    The terms that do exist and are relevant (at least in English, my other native language doesn’t have separate words for sex and gender which can complicate medical discussions and also makes folks more attached to the biological definition -_-) are male, female and intersex. When looking at a healthy human female they won’t have anywhere near the testosterone levels of a healthy male - it’s a 5x order of magnitude between the upper female and lower male ranges, even when accounting for PCO/S - which isn’t necessarily unhealthy, but just that extra 10-20% outside the normal female range can be enough to start having effects such as growing facial hair in puberty. The gap - along with XY individuals with low testosterone and XX individuals with high testosterone are those who end up developing in an intersex manner, in one way or another (this is already during the fetal stage).

    Honestly I feel like we’re getting far from the original conversation here, but it’s part of what makes these topics so inherently difficult. Balancing between how sensitive some people can find the topic on a social level (particularly when having dealt with actual bad actors), the huge risk of misinterpretations/miscommunications and then the medical field dealing with the biological situation that ultimately is the basis of all this. Evaluating these topics is amongst the most difficult ethical dilemmas we have in the field - right up there with human euthanasia and I don’t think there can be a single “right” answer. You’re going to end up with different people being hurt wherever the balance is struck and that really, really sucks.


  • but if we need to protect women’s “fair” competition strongly for some reason, shouldn’t we also have leagues for all types of people?

    I think you’re being sarcastic here, but there is a trend in that direction, with paralympics and such. It all comes down to this. How is the protected class of athletes defined? If a space for female athletes is going to exist at all, there needs to be some definition, which inevitably is going to feel arbitrary to some. The one they’ve gone with excludes males and most intersex individuals - allowing a little wiggle room here for folks with XY who have no male testosterone production which medically speaking makes it into a “woman at birth with low androgens” competition since those people will usually have a female phenotype at birth.

    In the case of Imane - it may speculatively (after now reading a little about the circumstances and the “leaked” results) be a case of XY intersex with some kind of androgen dysfunction, either through reduced production via enzyme deficiency or partial insensitivity to testo. Being from a less developed country it’s quite possible that Imane wouldn’t even be aware of such a condition until it came to light due to the testing, and even if it was noticed earlier by Algerian medical professionals it may have been hidden from the patient due to how controversial intersex individuals are in traditionally muslim countries. This was the case for a long time even in the west, some countries even into the 2000’s - “in the best interest of the patient”. Quite tragic really.


  • You can though - at least to the extent that we in empirical science usually refer to “proving” or “disproving” (or rather, indicate or contraindicate a hypothesis). In this case it’d be studies/metastudies on injuries in different kinds of matchups (which can either show a statistically significant difference or not) or in performance of different athletes.

    The case you linked here is regarding football, not boxing, which simply makes it a question of performance rather than also safety (as it is with boxing or other combat sports). The key difference in judgement here is the same reason that there are weight classes - simply wouldn’t be safe (or fair for that matter) to match up a 120kg vs a 60 kg athlete - the latter might literally get killed.

    Performance wise, the most “fair” might be to sort athletes into leagues based on testosterone levels. It’s already known that higher testosterone levels tend to correlate with higher performance, so rather than imposing an arbitrary limit where only the athletes in the “sweet spot” just below the limit get to excel, grade them into brackets based on that. Women’s sports were established in the first place to give women a fair chance at competing, since male vs female competitions in the vast majority of cases end up very one sided.