The object level analysis is fine, but object level analysis would not predict that the interaction of sex reassignment surgery and womens sports leagues would be a visible fraction of all nightly news coverage for the last decade.
An important bit of context that often gets missed when discussing this question is that actual trans athletes competing in women's sports are very rare. Of the millions competing in organized sports in the US, the total number who are trans might be under 20 (see this statement from the NCAA president estimating "fewer than ten" in college sports, this article reporting that an anti-trans activist group was able to identify only five in K-12 sports, and this Wikipedia article, which identifies only a handful of trans athletes in professional US sports).
Because this phenomenon is so rare relative to how often it's discussed, I'm a lot more interested in the sociology of the question than the question itself. There was a recent post from Hanson arguing that the Left and Right in the US have become like children on a road trip annoying each other in deniable ways to provoke responses that they hope their parents will punish. I think the discrepancy between the scale of the issue and how often it comes up is mostly due to it being used in this way.
A high school coach who has to choose whether to allow a trans student to compete in female sports is faced with a difficult social dilemma. If they deny the request, then the student- who wants badly to be seen as female- will be disappointed and might face additional bullying; if they allow it, that will be unfair to the other female players. In some cases, other players may be willing to accept a bit of unfairness as an act of probably supererogatory kindness, but in cases where they are aren't, explaining to the student that they shouldn't compete without hurting their feelings will take a lot of tact on the part of the coach.
Elevating this to a national conversation isn't very tactful. People on the right can plausibly claim to only be concerned with fairness in sports, but presented so publicly, this looks to liberals like an attempt to bully trans people. They're annoyed, and may be provoked into responding in hard to defend ways like demanding unconditional trans participation in women's sports- which I think is often the point. It's a child in a car poking the air next to his sister and saying "I'm not touching you", hoping that she'll slap him and be punished.
I'm certain the OP didn't intend anything like that- LessWrong is, of course, a very high-decoupling place. But I'd argue that this is an issue best resolved by letting the very few people directly affected sort out the messy emotions involved among themselves, rather than through public analysis of the question on the object level.
A high school coach who has to choose whether to allow a trans student to compete in female sports is faced with a difficult social dilemma. If they deny the request, then the student- who wants badly to be seen as female- will be disappointed and might face additional bullying; if they allow it, that will be unfair to the other female players. In some cases, other players may be willing to accept a bit of unfairness as an act of probably supererogatory kindness, but in cases where they are aren't, explaining to the student that they shouldn't compete without hurting their feelings will take a lot of tact on the part of the coach.
One big part of the issue here is that sports doesn't have a single goal. At the top of top levels, winning is basically all that matters and you're trading players around, kicking off people who suck and doing basically everything you can to see who is best.
But most sports isn't at the top of top levels. A friend group's weekend pickup basketball game isn't likely to kick one of their friends out because he sucks unless it's so massively disproportionate that they're basically not even playing the game anymore. The YMCA soccer teams I was part of as a kid would field me for part of it despite obviously being a weaker player (in part because I was scared of getting hurt going after the ball cause all the kids just crowd around it).
With casual games like at schools, we typically even shame people who take it too serious and make fun of the behavior like this South Park episode. A quick search on why to play sports comes up with the Google AI recap of
People play sports to improve their physical and mental health by increasing fitness, strengthening bones, reducing stress, and releasing mood-boosting hormones. Sports also provide social benefits, such as developing teamwork, leadership, and communication skills, while building confidence, resilience, and a sense of purpose. Additionally, sports teach valuable life skills like time management and problem-solving, encourage healthy lifestyle habits, and offer a fun way to socialize and make friends.
Interestingly, none of these many reasons chosen by the AI overview is "racking up wins". After all, the majority of people doing sports will by basic logic not be in the top 1%, or top 10% or even top 49%. And almost every single person participating in school sports will not make it to professional. They simply can not get to the Top of the Top. And yet, they play anyway, so clearly there must be other reasons.
For the majority of actual play, skill level matters mainly for keeping the game feeling like a game. A top 1% basketball player vs your average Joe is such a a wide gap that the average Joe might as well be sitting on a bleacher. A grandmaster chess player vs a novice is going to fall asleep from boredom. A challenger League of Legends team could probably end up 100/0 against a Bronze one. But as long as things are equal enough that the game can be maintained, most play doesn't need to be too concerned about skill level because the truth is that they suck, they will always suck, and they're playing for a different reason than just getting wins.
I don't know too much about Thai culture, but my understanding is that for a very long time, they've had the label of "ladyboy". If you ask a ladybody if they are a man or a woman, they will say they are a ladyboy.
I think this may come across as transphobic, but I've always thought this was a much more elegant solution than trying to figure out whether to apply the man or woman label to a trans individual.
The issue is that in countries with a binary as the norm, a large part of transgender identity is the desire to exist within the norm. A trans man doesn't get on testosterone because he wants to be regarded as a trans man, or some other third signifier like 'manlygirl', he gets on testosterone because he wants to be regarded as a man, like his father or brother.
The dysphoria, the main source of anguish that leads to the desire to transition in the first place, comes from category mismatch between how the world views the individual and how the individual views themselves.
Some group of people with gender dysphoria may be fine with your 'elegant solution', and find themselves comfortable being genderqueer or 'nonbinary', but a large majority will find it no solution at all.
3Yes, but this largely because trans man or trans woman doesn't exist within the norm right? I think the terms 'genderqueer' and 'nonbinary' are implicitly about being OUTSIDE the norm, whereas ladyboy is not, it's just another gender category, not a special 'my gender doesn't fit' category.
The dysphoria, the main source of anguish that leads to the desire to transition in the first place, comes from category mismatch between how the world views the individual and how the individual views themselves
I suspect that ladyboy's don't get this, precisely BECAUSE they are accepted in society as something like "man's body but women's gender".
I imagine that it's much HARDER to have this with the way we try to implement 'trans women are women' (compared to the Thai approach) without significant transhumanist tech we don't have yet. Significant aspects of what people see women as are missing from a trans woman's experience, such as being able to bear children (of course, infertile women frequently ALSO get a kind of gender dysphoria from not being able to reproduce, but this is just one of hundreds of little examples).
and yet there’s hordes red in the face arguing the definition of “woman” not realizing semantics are used to disguise contested premises.
Notice how a straightforward request for a definition of the term in question is now a clear tribal indicator? The body language on both sides when that question is asked shows that no one is missing the implication that people are trying to disguise contested premises.
Hordes argue until they're red in the face because everyone knows that they're fighting a battle over smuggled premises. Compare to the lack of interest in how to categorize intersex people (at least, prior to this trans stuff becoming a big deal).
1Weight is such an extreme determinative factor in combat sports that an untrained 250-pound couch potato could walk into any boxing gym and absolutely demolish a 100-pound opponent with decades of training.
You later link to a video of an early UFC match in which a much heavier person is beaten by a much lighter person when the lighter person kicks him in the face. But yes, that doesn't happen very often, especially when both are fighting in the same style.
Weight can be such an extreme determinative factor in combat sports that an untrained 250-pound couch potato could walk into any boxing gym and absolutely demolish a 100-pound opponent with decades of training.
I think this is kind of beside the point, but is this really true?
I buy that it conceptually could be the case for some small number of people, but I would have expected most 100-pound opponents with decades of training to beat untrained 250-lb couch potatoes (all it seems to take is one or two good punches against someone who doesn't know how to defend themself). Maybe I'm mistaken?
(PS - I laughed at the "Classic ostrich-and-egg problem" line!)
I've never boxed but I have a few years of Jiu Jitsu and even more of wrestling. A couch potato wouldn't beat a trained fighter, but a 250 pound man of stocky build, medium talent and maybe two or three years of training probably couldn't be knocked out by any 100 pound man in the world, and would probably win if he were lucky enough to land a good punch.
It is interesting that on trans women athletes we have some practical verification - they just don't get to win much even when allowed. One could speculate "till the cows come home" on just why that happens but their triumphs are limited to university sports, senior amateur cycling, and the like. (A trans man boxer, Patricio Manuel, also got a degree of success in the male leagues).
The big debate about the big wins is happening not about trans athletes (for lack of object), but about intersex ones, like Caster Semenya, or the allegedly intersex ones, like Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting.
The entirety of the "evidence" for the latter two being intersex at all (let alone "male") is the very definition of "fruit of the poisoned tree", coming from a disgraced former boxing association ("IBA") that is closely associated with the Russian regime to the point of banning Ukraine in 2022; its leader Umar Kremlev, some days before the scandal, reacted to the Olympic opening with "The 2024 Olympic Games are outright sodomy and the destruction of traditional values throughout the world and Thomas Bach is responsible for this" https://x.com/umarkremlev/status/1818633618371076546
In the case of Lin Yu-Ting, an actually trustworthy body, the Chinese Taipei Boxing Association, says that she has tested female.
And yet the anti-trans crowd is very invested in these two women being "male". I wonder why they would be.
This is kind of a sidenote and is not meant as an attack or criticism, but was GPT-5 used in the drafting of this post? I say this because I noticed a very heavy use of parentheses.
A very heavy use of parentheses is also common in certain other demographics. Like. Very common. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/adhdmeme/comments/u0w6q5/i_dont_do_this_except_i_totally_do/
I'm transparent about using LLMs as an editorial assistant (Claude 4.1 for this essay) but that last parenthetical just now came to me naturally, as I suspect almost all the ones in this essay did.
Interestingly enough, another reader asked me the same question on another essay but ended up citing a bunch of false positives: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/beware-the-moral-homophone/comment/120595749
I think those "spaces" debate definitely invoke why the division exhibits in the first place. For example when someone is worried about a trans person attacking someone in one bathroom or the other, they very clearly are invoking the fact that the bathrooms are segregated to reduce violence. In girls' sports, it's always about competition, body size, some sort of social benefit of promoting women, bathroom privacy. I just don't think you've diagnosed the right problem here. Like as soon as someone gets to the word "because" in their argument about trans rights, they talk about why that gender segregation exists.
Yeah, I agree about the "clearly invoking 'bathroom segregation [is intended to] reduce violence' ". I do think "they" are mistaken about that, however.
I had heard that the actual historical cause of bathroom segregation was originally an attempt to obstruct women's (at that time) attempt to do more things outside the home.
The story goes: various places made bathroom segregation laws (using the "reducing violence" justification as a maybe-true-if-actually-implemented-as-implied excuse), and then built only men's bathrooms, or a very disproportionate number of toilets in men's rooms as compared to toilets in women's rooms, or placed the women's rooms in much more inconvenient locations like on different floors. This regime ended years later with further laws requiring certain equalities in men's versus women's bathrooms, leaving behind the actual bathroom segregation as a historical artifact, rather than it today being a measure implemented for the purpose of addressing a known violence problem.
Non-sequitur: it's my estimate that more total violence results in the hypothetical where strict bathroom-matching-birth laws send trans folks into bathrooms in which they visibly do not belong, than in the hypothetical where t is is not the case. (Recall Social Dark Matter: the vast majority of trans folks do not stand out as such -- they look like their chosen gender.) Despite it (supposedly) slightly reducing violence targeting cisgender folks in exchange for an increase in violence targeting transgender folks, I worry this trade-off is acknowledged and considered acceptable.
In the absence of these laws, the standard advice I hear trans folks give each other is "use the bathroom that matches your appearance, even if that means using a dispreferred bathroom because you don't yet or can't look the part" "or you know, keep an eye out for the rare nonsegregated or single-occupancy bathroom".
I think in the case of gender labels, society used to have a pervasive and strict separation of the roles, rights and privileges of people based on gender. This worked fairly well because the genders differ in systematic ways.
If you add gender egalitarianism and transgender rights into that you might instead want a patchwork of divergent rules: in certain contexts gender might matter but in many you'd use a different feature set.
The problem is those new features/feature sets are going to be leaky, less legible, harder to measure, etc. Nothing is as good as a biological category like gender when it comes to legibility and ease of enforcement.
So what in fact happens when you discard simple categories is you get a morass of cheating, exploitation, grifting, corruption, etc. Simplicity is good; easy for people to understand, easy to enforce against transgressors, easy to spot corruption by the enforcers. Of course sometimes reality will change to a degree that the simple categories are no longer tenable and then the ensuing chaos is somewhat unavoidable.
It appears from my point of view that the expected exploitation isn't happening (or is happening very rarely, far below the expected rate.)
I can't say I know of any such cases (trans or "trans" persons cheating, exploiting, grifting) first-hand, nor even second-hand without mass media having amplified the story.
Quite to the contrary, four of the five trans people I've met have been far more than average concerned with being prosocial. This cashes out in a few different ways. Least-healthily as experiencing difficulty asking for help or advocating for themselves, for fear of inconveniencing anyone else. Two as just being very trustworthy and moral. And one who is extraordinarily helpful, jumping in and assisting with any heavy manual labor (ex: moving residences) or home improvement tasks among this person's extended social circle, that come to this person's attention. (The fifth is in chronic pain from a spinal injury, a bit unpleasant of demeanor, but notably not cheating/exploiting/grifting.)
My mental model for why we don't observe the expected exploitation is that "not using a false trans label for antisocial personal gain" is mostly self-enforced by the risk that a potential transgressor would be susceptible to gender dysphoria (which, I'm guessing from very sparse data, about half of cisgender people are), and might inflict gender dysphoria upon themselves if engaging in unneeded gender transition. Similarly to honesty/morality self-enforced by guilt, as in Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants.
Also in my model: transition is mostly slow and/or expensive, so there are easier ways to cheat, if one was so inclined.
Let's say I weigh 250 pounds, but I show up to boxing weigh-in with negative 100 pounds of helium balloons strapped to my back. I end up in the same weight class as 150 pound men, even though I can punch like a 250 pound man. Is that fair?
If divisions are essentially arbitrary, when is it better to go through the effort to change them, and when is it better to just say, "no, sir, you can't weigh in with balloons on"?
It's an interesting question, but I think the author is not arguing to change the actual divisions in every case, just to skip contested labels and go directly to the definitions that underlie them when needed. [1]
Next time you get lured into a sticker debate, stop. Use a label only if its admission criteria are crystal clear and uncontested. Otherwise, assume the label is moving contraband premises. Seize the cargo and answer the real question hidden underneath.
Saying "weight measured without balloons" skips having to define "weight" if there isn't agreement. In sports, skip making everyone agree on the definition of "woman".
However, I agree that the question of when to change the division and when to keep it persists even agreeing on definitions. The man can continue to argue the competition should use weight with balloons. People can argue a competition among only cis-women is unfairly discriminatory against trans-women. But it's at least a bit simpler and clearer than trying to argue the same thing + the definition of words.
- ^
Similar to Taboo Your Words
If you're implying that this is what's happening with trans women in female sports, then this isn't accurate. There is no evidence showing that trans women outperform cisgender women by any significant margin. Based on https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10641525/ trans women get well within the expected ranges for cis women within around 3-4 years. Any remaining difference is far, far below the difference between a 150 and 250 pound boxer. (And, given how few trans women there are, if those few are in the upper 50% percentile (Which is far from universal for all trans people) what actual difference does it make? Also consider how many people take this as an excuse to harass and harm trans people outside of sports, and how the NCAA has a total of what, less than ten? trans women, total)
There is no evidence showing that trans women outperform cisgender women by any significant margin [...] trans women get well within the expected ranges for cis women within around 3-4 years.
A meta-analysis of 24 studies found that transwomen were still stronger and more muscular than ordinary women after 3 years of hormone therapy:
In transwomen, hormone therapy rapidly reduces Hgb [haemoglobin] to levels seen in cisgender women. In contrast, hormone therapy decreases strength, LBM [Lean Body Mass] and muscle area, yet values remain above that observed in cisgender women, even after 36 months. These findings suggest that strength may be well preserved in transwomen during the first 3 years of hormone therapy.
Also, it is hard to trust the article you linked as unbiased when it contains quotes like this:
The exclusion of trans individuals also insults the skill and athleticism of both cis and trans athletes.
Or this:
Finally, there is the problem of neither sex nor gender being true binaries. This makes it nearly impossible to make comparisons among these individuals when classified into superimposed categories.
This sort of muddying the waters ("everything is a spectrum, we can't compare groups") is not something you expect people to do when the winds of evidence are blowing in their favor.
Nevertheless, the paper does not claim that hormone therapy eliminates differences in strength. They stick to the obviously true claim that "many of the sex differences are reduced". From the conclusion:
While sex differences do develop following puberty, many of the sex differences are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy. Finally, if it is found that trans individuals have advantages in certain athletic events or sports; in those cases, there will still be a question of whether this should be considered unfair, or accepted as another instance of naturally occurring variability seen in athletes already participating in these events.
Based on https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10641525/ trans women get well within the expected ranges for cis women within around 3-4 years.
Yes Requires the Possibility of No. Do you think that such a study would be published if it happened to come to the opposite conclusion?
And, given how few trans women there are
Well, there does seem to be no shortage of trans girls at any rate, so these issues are only going to become more salient.
There are tons of groups with significant motivation to publish just about anything detrimental to transgender people, so yes, it would've been published.
Well, there does seem to be no shortage of trans girls at any rate
Transgender people, total, between both transmasc and transfem individuals, make up around 0.5% of the population of the US. Hardly abundant. And again, the number of trans people in high level sports is in the double digit numbers.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/transgender-population-by-state
There are tons of groups with significant motivation to publish just about anything detrimental to transgender people
In the academia? Come on now. If those people post their stuff on Substack, or even in some bottom-tier journal, nobody else would notice or care.
Well, there does seem to be no shortage of trans girls at any rate
Transgender people, total, between both transmasc and transfem individuals, make up around 0.5% of the population of the US.
Among youth aged 13 to 17 in the U.S., 3.3% (about 724,000 youth) identify as transgender, according to the first Google link - https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/ In any case, when we're talking about at least hundreds of thousands, "no shortage" seems like a reasonable description.
And again, the number of trans people in high level sports is in the double digit numbers.
So far.
1Hard to say.
I personally wouldn't think twice about reporting whatever data I found. I suspect I'd be blindsided by the backlash (which I'm inferring would exist, from your comment) for publishing true findings, but then think in hindsight that I ought to have foreseen it.
But then, I'm pretty inept at social status games. I can entertain the notion that most people in such a situation would either not publish, or worse, fudge the data.
Let’s say you’re a zoo architect tasked with designing an enclosure for ostriches, and let’s also say that you have no idea what an ostrich is (roll with me here). The potentially six-figure question staring you down is whether to install a ceiling.
The dumb solution is to ask “Are ostriches birds?” then, surmising that birds typically fly, construct an elaborate aviary complete with netting and elevated perches.
The non-dumb solution is to instead ask “Can ostriches fly?” then skip the ceiling entirely, give these 320-pound land-bound speed demons the open sky life they actually need, and pocket the cost differential.
Your boss is not having it, however. When you inform him of your decision to eschew the ceiling enclosure, he gets beet-red and apoplectic, repeating like a mantra “But they’re birds! BIRDS!” and insists that ostriches belong in the aviary with the finches and parrots. I mean, he’s taxonomically correct (the best kind of correct) that ostriches are indeed birds, but it’s also apparent that he’s using the “bird” sticker as a fallacious shortcut to sneak in all sorts of nonsensical assumptions.
Designing an ostrich pen based purely on the “bird” label (and all the smuggled premises that label drags along) would be a disaster. The zookeeper’s real concern isn’t taxonomic purity but practical reality: How much space do they need? What kind of ground surface? What food? What climate? In the real world, ostriches end up housed with zebras and gazelles despite their “bird” sticker, because what matters is substance (the animal’s needs), not the label slapped on the cage.
Does this whole scenario sound farcical to you? I agree! And yet it’s exactly how the transgender discourse has been playing out.
The ostrich story is a perfect encapsulation of what I termed the Sticker Shortcut Fallacy. To recap, the fallacy is the habit of slapping connotation-heavy labels onto contested premises in order to shortcut real debate. It involves three moves:
If this sounds manipulative, that’s because it is. In a second piece, I explained why this tactic is fallacious reasoning, showing how it mixes up composition and division fallacies while relying on slippery semantics. Even though I had very specific contentious examples in mind, I chose to obviate them to avoid a distraction. That bloodless approach was probably a mistake in retrospect because it avoided providing something tangible for readers to chew on. Let’s fix that now, let’s savor blood.
People like sports. For whatever reason, humans have always gotten a big kick out of watching other humans slug it out. Athletic competition has been a cultural mainstay since our cave-dwelling days. But for the spectacle to be interesting, there needs to be some measure of competitive balancing. Watching a heavyweight boxer pummel a league of toddlers might lose its entertainment value after the sixth brain hemorrhage.
But there’s a tension of sorts: if your talent pool is your Dunbar tribe of 150 and you just want to know who’s the best spear thrower, there’s no real downside to open competition. Such a community is small enough that participation is within reach of a meaningful number of people.
But scale up to millions of people, and unrestricted competition becomes a problem. You end up with freakishly gifted elites dominating the field while everyone else withers on the vine with zero chance of winning anything. Interest dies, participation plummets, and the sport collapses.
The solution here is leagues. While you might not necessarily be the absolute best spear thrower in the whole entire world, you certainly can have a chance to be the best within an arbitrarily defined demographic.
But how you demarcate the leagues is also in tension. The obvious answer seems simple: rank everyone by skill and group them accordingly. Put the top 10 spear throwers in Division A, ranks 11-20 in Division B, and so on down the line. The problem is that we want competitors to be more or less evenly matched, but we can’t know if they’re evenly matched unless they already competed in even matches. Classic ostrich-and-egg problem.
You could theoretically conduct tryout matches but every rational actor has a massive incentive to sandbag their own performance. Why reveal your true power level during assessment when you could intentionally underperform, get placed in a weaker division, then trounce everyone when it finally matters?
Even if you solve the competitor’s dilemma, you still have an assessment paradox. If you somehow make your screening accurate enough to force people’s best effort, you’ve basically already run the competition. Why bother with the actual tournament if you’ve already determined the results? But if your screening is too weak or easily gamed, you end up with mismatched divisions where ringers demolish genuine novices. What you need is Goldilocks fudge factors:
There’s no perfect solution because the whole point of spectacle is to avoid prescient analytical precision.
The ur-example that reasonably satisfies all three factors is weight-class divisions. Weight can be such an extreme determinative factor in combat sports that an untrained 250-pound couch potato could walk into any boxing gym and absolutely demolish a 100-pound opponent with decades of training. In pure striking exchanges, technique has little bearing when you’re getting ragdolled by someone several times your mass.
At the same time, weight isn’t so determinative that you’d expect every 150lbs combatant to perform identically. There’s still plenty of room for training, skill, strategy, and fighting style to matter enormously. And best of all, weight is objectively measurable, making it very difficult to game (obviously severe weight cutting is still a thing).
Every effective league division follows these same principles: find an attribute that’s predictive enough to create fair competition, objective enough to resist manipulation, but not so deterministic that outcomes become foregone conclusions.
We see this across the field. Little League lets kids compete by screening on age rather than forcing eight-year-olds to face grown adults. Minor leagues create opportunities for decent adults who can’t quite hack it against professionals, using severe salary incentives to eliminate sandbagging. Paralympic classifications account for different physical disabilities.
And, of course, sex-based divisions also follow this pattern because males in general have an overwhelming athletic advantage over females, with the other advantage being administrative simplicity in ascertaining sex (Or at least, it used to be — more on that later).
Why perseverate so much over sports? The point here is to emphasize that league divisions don’t appear arbitrarily out of thin air. Their purpose is as a means to an end, and they’re not the end itself.
League divisions can come and go depending on what you want to prioritize. For example, the early UFC tournaments (1993-1996) actually had no weight restrictions whatsoever — anyone could fight anyone regardless of size. Initially it was an absurd bloody spectacle with karate masters trying to land precise strikes against boxers or boxers getting taken down and having no idea how to defend submissions. Very quickly, people figured out that certain martial arts (namely Brazilian jiu-jitsu) were far more effective than others in unrestricted combat. And while it served as a fascinating real life experiment, UFC eventually got too predictable once people figured out the meta-game. Weight classes were then introduced not just for safety and regulatory compliance, but also to keep it interesting.
On the flipside, we could conjure up hypotheticals that demonstrate their obsolescence. Imagine cybernetic skeleton replacements become fashionable, allowing users to replace their entire skeletal system with lighter, stronger materials. A participant now weighs much less but can hit exponentially harder. The previously reliable purpose behind weight classifications suddenly evaporates because weight is no longer as predictive of performance. Insisting ‘but he’s really below 150 pounds!‘ is technically correct (the best kind) but still nonsensical — you’re mistaking the sticker for the thing itself.
The moment you lose sight of why a categorization exists, you become vulnerable to defending arbitrary lines in the sand while the world shifts beneath your feet. Categories are tools, not sacred principles — and tools are useless if they no longer serve their purpose.
Sports organizations adopted sex-segregation because it satisfyingly balanced multiple factors: predictive enough (clear athletic advantages between categories), objective enough (historically simple to determine), and not so deterministic (meaningful competition within categories). But maybe that’s no longer the case?
Regardless of whether you think trans is fake or whatever, it’s just undeniably true that cross-sex hormones and gonad removals are much more prevalent nowadays. We’ve always had overlapping “boundaries” across the spectrum of male and female athletic performance — after all, elite female athletes can outcompete plenty of males — but the distinctions are increasingly blurred. The sharp bimodal distribution we once had is becoming a flatter, more spread-out curve as increasing numbers of people occupy the previously sparse intermediate performance zones.
What does that mean for sex segregation in sports? This brings us back to the central point of this entire essay: it depends entirely on what purpose sex-segregation served in the first place. You cannot have a coherent opinion on how divisions should be drawn unless you can clearly articulate the underlying principles that justify those divisions in the first place!
It’s important to remember there is no universally “correct” answer, just like there is no universally “correct” weight class. Different sports organizations might reasonably prioritize different goals: some might want to prioritize preventing male athletic advantage from overshadowing female athleticism, others will favor administrative simplicity, others will want to elevate subjective identity over all else, some might emphasize revenue generation and fan engagement, and others might just say fuck it all and finally become the first horoscope league.
This isn’t an essay only about sports. I went into detail to showcase that sports league divisions (or any other categories) aren’t divinely etched by the heavens on obsidian tablets; we literally make them up because they happen to be useful! The real tragedy is watching people defend categorical boundaries whose purpose they can’t explain, like our zoo boss insisting ostriches belong in aviaries (“BIRDS!”).
When it comes to sex segregation of any kind, the lack of curiosity on why the segregation exists in the first place is astounding to me. Should transwomen be allowed to go into women’s bathrooms? I don’t know, why are there separate bathrooms in the first place? Should transmen inmates be housed in men’s prisons? I don’t know, why are there separate prisons in the first place? Should transwhoever go into this bucket or the other bucket? I don’t know, what’s with the buckets? None of these disputes are resolved by a dictionary.
Label smuggling thrives because it’s cognitively cheaper. Humans are pattern-recognition machines; labels are handy shortcuts, reducing complex issues into easily digestible narratives. But humans are also lazy machines. We’re eager to outsource cognitive labor to emotionally charged words.
The reason the sticker shortcut fallacy is so prevalent is that it’s really effective at distracting people. The idiocy of debating the birdishness of ostriches as a guise to decide whether to build an aviary should be apparent, and yet there’s hordes red in the face arguing the definition of “woman” not realizing semantics are used to disguise contested premises.
For some, the confusion is intentional: there’s a conclusion they’re ultimately after, but it’s easier to smuggle via connotation rather than draw attention by openly declaring it at the customs checkpoint.
Remember, labels simplify communication only when shared definitions exist. Absent consensus, labels actively distort and mislead. Insisting on labels rather than attributes is prima facie evidence of malicious intent — someone trying to force a concession they can’t earn openly and honestly.
Next time you get lured into a sticker debate, stop. Use a label only if its admission criteria are crystal clear and uncontested. Otherwise, assume the label is moving contraband premises. Seize the cargo and answer the real question hidden underneath.