US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5823

On July 02 2026 00:26 dyhb wrote:
Sigh are we actually disputing that some college male athlete throwing above 80 mph would be an immediate Guinness World Book of Records if it was thrown by a woman? If you don’t try to paper over sex differences, this is a delicate case of inclusion weighed against fairness. If you start equivocating on the biology, you’re digging yourself a hole.

On July 02 2026 00:45 WombaT wrote:

It doesn’t quite translate, very different mechanical actions. You really don’t see any cricketers who can bowl high 70s thru low 80s in grass roots cricket who haven’t played internationally or been on the books of a professional English county.

For one thing the action is rather rough on the body, even though it’s considered ‘fast-medium’ and not genuine fast bowling. For a baseball pitcher it’s the rotator cuff, for the fast bowler it’s the back, or their leading leg, the latter of which has to load about 4x the bowler’s body weight in force upon it.

Rare is the pro fast bowler who can stay perpetually fit, it’s not a good action on the body. And they’re pros, who tune their bodies to do this, and have coaching and physios to help them.

Amateurs have none of this, so they don’t tend to even try to push the pace as their bodies simply can’t handle it.

They can bowl ‘military medium’ which is something of a pejorative when talking about the highest level, because it’s rarely useful unless the conditions aid swing, around 70-75MPH. Not much slower than the very quickest female quicks, but slower nonetheless.

Anyway, I know cricket better than baseball, indeed I personally know some internationals.

If you wanna bowl even high 70s thru low 80s you need either explosive twitch fibre power, or great technique. Ideally both. But if you’re doing that in your own time, someone will notice you and recruit you in some fashion. Because people who’ve never been formally attached to a cricket club bowling 80+ is mental, it doesn’t really tend to happen without playing, without coaching out the kinks etc.

If Jimmy had played high level high school and a bit of college baseball or whatever, an 85MPH fastball is not that unbelievable. It’s high insistence he just rocks up for a barbecue with his guido friends and starts pissing out 85MPH fastballs before switching to making Seinfeld references that stretches it.

On July 02 2026 00:56 WombaT wrote:

Perhaps I missed a post or two, I don’t think this was disputed by most here really?

On July 01 2026 21:26 Simberto wrote:


Rightwing people love talking about trans people in sports, because it is a huge trap.

Everyone with half a brain knows that they actually want for trans people not to exist, basically as an extension of their already lost war to have gay people not exist. But they don't say that, because that isn't a winner. If they talk about trans people in sport, they can make somewhat reasonable arguments, and the people who know that this is a slippery slope and don't want to give them even an inch look less reasonable for fighting this hard about such a weird topic.

It also means you get a discussion about a topic where you can appear somewhat reasonable and not like a generally insane asshole, which is a lot harder to do for most of the other rightwing talking points.

Don't want to talk about Trumps corruption? Start talking about trans people in sports. Don't want to talk about the Iran war? Trans people in sports. Don't want to talk about your president fucking teenagers? Trans people in sports. Don't want to talk about your corruption of anything that you claim to hold dear? Trans people in sports.

It is a giant distraction horn that hits so hard because it is really hard to ignore rightwing people when they do this because we all know where it ends if you don't stop them.

I think there are sword and shield issues in politics: some where you are very strong and attack on and others where you are weaker (if only by perception) you minimally defend and deflect elsewhere. And I think specifically trans women in women's sports is a shield issue. Because best believe, if you go on the attack with the much stronger claim that the difference between and male and female bodies are insufficient for anyone to have a coherent position in keeping women's sports separate that will stir up a drawn out fight. The Isaiah Martin defense of only attacking Trump and parrying non-sequiturs of 'transwomen in sports' can work with 'I was talking about the economy, why do you care so much?' but not if his own side does seem to care very very much and is actively arguing the strong claim rather than the minimal defense.

On July 01 2026 23:10 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Edit: nvm, it's JJR.

On July 02 2026 05:14 LightSpectra wrote:
I scrolled quickly through all the replies since I last logged in, but it still doesn't seem like anyone's given a good answer for why women are so wildly underrepresented in Chess, e-sports, etc. if it's not societal barriers.



If I were an electoral candidate I wouldn't be talking about trans people in sports other than "I support it, now let's talk about the Iran War, Epstein files, and smoldering wreck of an economy." But since I'm nothing but a humble participant in the TL.net US Politics Mega-thread, I don't see any reason why not to prod all the irrationalities behind arbitrarily banning minorities from sports leagues.

On July 02 2026 05:14 LightSpectra wrote:
I scrolled quickly through all the replies since I last logged in, but it still doesn't seem like anyone's given a good answer for why women are so wildly underrepresented in Chess, e-sports, etc. if it's not societal barriers.

On July 02 2026 05:14 LightSpectra wrote:


If I were an electoral candidate I wouldn't be talking about trans people in sports other than "I support it, now let's talk about the Iran War, Epstein files, and smoldering wreck of an economy." But since I'm nothing but a humble participant in the TL.net US Politics Mega-thread, I don't see any reason why not to prod all the irrationalities behind arbitrarily banning minorities from sports leagues.

On July 02 2026 05:14 LightSpectra wrote:
I scrolled quickly through all the replies since I last logged in, but it still doesn't seem like anyone's given a good answer for why women are so wildly underrepresented in Chess, e-sports, etc. if it's not societal barriers.

On July 02 2026 08:30 Liquid`Drone wrote:
At the same time, like Falling's volleyball example, handball is a sport where in Norway, it's way more popular with women than with men, and our women's national team is the best in the world, while the men's national team is decent, but no more. Match them against each other and the men would completely destroy the women, no question about it.

On July 02 2026 06:25 Falling wrote:
Sure. And here we are. But I contend 'I don't care that much' doesn't hold much water, if you still want to impose the policy but just don't want to talk about it. And I think it is a losing issue because the difference between male and female bodies are neither irrational nor arbitrary. Dismissing the differences is pretty irrational. And especially in physical contact sports, it's obviously not good.

On July 02 2026 09:33 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I honestly really don't care about trans women in sports. A vast majority of trans women don't really care about competing in sports, they just want to live their lives without being attacked or harassed for being who they are, and the focus on sports is, largely, used as a cudgel to attack them in a way that is more acceptable, because more people will agree that it's unreasonable that someone who is biologically male can compete in women's sports than that it's unreasonable that people can choose to identify as another gender than the sex they were assigned at birth.

But I think the best way to drop that point of attack is actually to just go like, yeah. If you were born male and you experienced a male puberty and you as a consequence have certain biological advantages - then maybe you can't compete in professional women's sports. I mean, I think you can just evaluate on a case to case basis whether the person in question had any real advantage, but I feel like, for example, Lia Thomas should not be allowed to compete as a woman. It sucks for her and there's no resentment from me towards her when I say this - I just think she's likely to have gotten certain benefits (like being 1.85 tall) from undergoing male puberty which have translated to other advantages later on. But like, there are so few of these situations that this can all be done on a case to case basis, and I have 0 issues with trans women competing on an amateur level.

Like Simberto alluded to, I almost feel like this is, to some leftists, an equivalent of gun rights to NRA. Oppose even sensible restrictions because those sensible restrictions are a slippery slope to removing the right to bear arms be trans. But I think in both instances, this is unreasonable - especially because we're talking about like, a literal handful of people. I also think it'd be good if gun nuts went like 'well obviously we should have background checks before people get to buy guns'. Way more than 99% of trans people currently exist without being professional athletes, this isn't a big deal. And honestly - while I'm uncertain on just to what degree biological differences steming from undergoing a male puberty will continue to manifest later in life after you undergo hormonal therapy - (and this is why I'm saying, let's this decision to some medically qualified panel of experts on a case to case basis) - you seem to be arguing that the reason why men are better than women at sports (not involving trans people into this) is societal rather than biological in nature. This, I believe is absolutely bonkers nonsense, even when accepting - as always - that societal factors are also factors.

On July 02 2026 10:42 KwarK wrote:

If a sporting org already has rules against hormone disorder competitors competing as women then logically it wouldn’t need a specific trans policy. Whereas if it had a trans exclusion policy it would still need a second policy for the genetic outliers. It stands to reason that trans women aren’t the issue, competitors with bone density/strength/musculature outside normal bounds are the issue.

To return to my reply to Falling’s rugby safety concern, if a participant is making the game unsafe it really doesn’t matter what sex they were assigned at birth. Trans status isn’t relevant, they wouldn’t feel somehow safer if assured that the person hospitalizing them was cis female and produced in a Chinese lab.

We can see this in action with a lot of the trans sporting hysteria being incorrectly directed at cis women. There can be literally no trans women in a tournament and JK Rowling will still lose her mind over their participation. At a certain point you have to recognize that this really isn’t about fairness or safety etc., even if they’re excluded they’ll still be blamed. You can’t satisfy the transphobes on this issue.

On July 02 2026 16:09 Acrofales wrote:
I'm glad you and lightspectra have seemingly dropped your arguments for coed sports and have realized

In the Netherlands, I fairly regularly come across women who are taller than me. I am 1m80, and it really isn't just 1 in 100 Dutch women who are taller than me. However, in Spain it's really pretty rare. So a worldwide "giant" cutoff would block more Dutch sporters than Spanish sporters from competing in the women's league, while setting a reasonable level for the Dutch would admit the kind of dangerous giants that we tried to exclude for the Spanish.

but we want top sport to be about exceptional performance.

A Serena Williams, competing at Wimbledon again this year, would probably be shunted to the men's category. In fact, most of the top contenders are outside the 1 percentile, almost by definition. The "top contenders" within that 1 percentile would necessarily hit the ball slower and reach less high than the current top contenders. And if we determined rules that didn't exclude them, that'd no doubt lead to the problem of "people with XX chromosomes" no longer being able to compete at the top level: because while Serena Williams is an absolute outlier for a "person with XX chromosomes", she's middling if you compare her to "people with XY chromosomes".

On July 02 2026 17:05 ETisME wrote:
The easiest solution is just to do hormones check and only biological women and men at birth can join the respective event.
Call them the CIS male and CIS female tournaments. Not discrimination, it is as is.
They can start their own tournament and sport events.

On July 02 2026 16:09 Acrofales wrote:


That's a totally fair counterpoint. The thing is that setting up such a fairness cutoff is always going to be necessarily inaccurate. I'm glad you and lightspectra have seemingly dropped your arguments for coed sports and have realized that there should be a separate league for "women" where people with a bone mass density of < 2 + Show Spoiler +, a muscle mass percentage of under 38% and under 177 cm tall can compete. Depending on the exact sport the league can raise or lower some of these, remove some or add others, but let's take this as a starting point. These are roughly the p99 values for "women" according to google, so does what you want it to do: excludes the 1 percentile of "freakishly" tall, "freakishly" strong or "freakishly" compact participants.

However, these are global averages. How do you account for the fact that tallness varies wildly among different populations. In the Netherlands, I fairly regularly come across women who are taller than me. I am 1m80, and it really isn't just 1 in 100 Dutch women who are taller than me. However, in Spain it's really pretty rare. So a worldwide "giant" cutoff would block more Dutch sporters than Spanish sporters from competing in the women's league, while setting a reasonable level for the Dutch would admit the kind of dangerous giants that we tried to exclude for the Spanish.

Meanwhile in muscle mass, training plays an important part. Does that mean people who reach the limit should stop their power training? Seems logical, but we want top sport to be about exceptional performance. We want to see the genetic freaks compete: if all the genetic freaks get dunked into the "men" category and "women" are, by the limits put on the category, not genetic freaks, that gets less interesting commercially. Even less than it already is. A Serena Williams, competing at Wimbledon again this year, would probably be shunted to the men's category. In fact, most of the top contenders are outside the 1 percentile, almost by definition. The "top contenders" within that 1 percentile would necessarily hit the ball slower and reach less high than the current top contenders. And if we determined rules that didn't exclude them, that'd no doubt lead to the problem of "people with XX chromosomes" no longer being able to compete at the top level: because while Serena Williams is an absolute outlier for a "person with XX chromosomes", she's middling if you compare her to "people with XY chromosomes".