Wednesday, October 09, 2024

More on trans athletes and DSD

One of the key questions regarding the participation of trans and "intersex" athletes, the latter being predominantly 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency, in women's sport is the question of what happens to the sport overall.  

A key issue here is that if you map out athletic performance by sex, what we'll find is that it takes far fewer "two sigma" athletes to find a "three sigma" athlete or "four sigma athlete" than it does to find a "five sigma" or "six sigma" athlete among a population of four sigma athletes.  To use a current example, if Olympic boxing does not reinstate sex testing--the famous "cheek swab" endorsed by Olympic athletes like Nancy Hogshead--national sports authorities are going to seek out trans and DSD males (XY) and make them into Olympic "womens'" boxers and such.

If--as is the case--a top high school male athlete (2 sigma) performs at about the same level as a top female Olympic athlete (say 3.6 sigma), we would have to find only about 17 top male high school athletes to find a D1 male athlete ability (3 sigma), and only about 100 top male high school athletes to get an athlete with Olympic male abilities.

The upshot of this is that as national sports authorities realize they can win by sorting through trans and DSD males to find top "female" Olympians, it won't likely take long before they find someone who's performing like a top college athlete (sort through 850 people) or Olympian (sort through 5000 people) among the DSD and trans males.  

Put bluntly, it doesn't take sorting through that many DSD or trans athletes to find someone who will box not like Imane Khelif versus Angela Carini, but rather Sugar Ray Leonard.  


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