The classification has always been based on sociological conceptions and is still based on such after this change. There have always been outliers who are sociologically women, but don't have the biological makeup most women have.
That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.
I'm claiming that there were always women with outlier biology which is not at all easy to classify and not obvious at a glance.
People caring about this issue in sports now and changing the objective admission criteria to exclude them is a political phenomenon more than anything else.
The categories were created at a time when “sex” and “gender” were universally considered synonymous, but they were created for the purpose of sex segregation — were they not?
This issue genuinely confuses me — and I don’t seem alone in that. Re-defining words does not redefine categories or change the underlying motivation for creating categories in the first place.
I'm not trying to define away biology here. Although "sex" is surprisingly hard to nail down.
Rather, I'm arguing the underlying motivation for creating these categories was and is a sociological one. Why carve out womens sports, as opposed to short peoples sports, low testosterone sports (or other categories which would be similarly disadvantaged)?
The only reason people pay attention to sex here is sociological, i.e. because of gender. This implies that the admissions criteria do not automatically have to follow these strict biological lines -- and I see little reason to enforce them this strictly now. Why exclude trans people and why make yourself a headache trying to classify e.g. intersex people?
More of an aside: a society which fully accepted trans women as women would think looking at the biological markers you're looking at is complete nonsense. Suggesting trans women should be banned would be as ludicrous as suggesting all women with a specific gene which might increase your chances of winning should be banned.
We carved out women’s sports because otherwise there would be no biological women in competitive sports, and that was considered to be a significant enough exclusion of half the human population as to warrant such direct intercession.
Whether or not a similar case can be made for other categories does not have bearing on the case for sex categorization. Such claims can and should stand on their own merits.
You've posted this several times, and I think it represents a pretty narrow understanding of humans.
Like, gender clearly and obviously exists. Why do women wear make up and skirts, while men typically dont? Is there a biological need to do those things? Is that universal across all cultures?
Of course we have social norms for men and women. That set of norms is what gender is. Denying the idea that society expects different behaviors from men and women is frankly a pretty absurd take.
There's no such thing as gender separate from sex. There's the recognition of one's immutable, inherent, sex, and tacking social expectations on top of it, but never that one could choose, or "feel". Always derived, never a choice. And when people allowed cross-dressing, it was always clear it was fake, pretending, never true. But they allowed people to have their personal delusions.
The origin of this use of "gender" itself is due to the prudishness of English upper classes in pronouncing the word "sex", so they repurposed "gender" which is just the French word "genre" meaning "kind" or "category". Much more acceptable in polite company than something that can allude to a sexual act, fornication.
The "tacking social expectations on top" is the part that is gender!
There's no biological foundation for wearing a sari, hijab, miniskirt, etc. Those are social expectations for women, or part of the role women fill in society.
It's a wholly different concept than biological sex. My penis does not make it impossible to wear eyeliner. But society has a social expectation that I do not. It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic.
You might believe gender is immutable. I'm not going to argue that with you. But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
> It's not a sex characteristic, it's a gender characteristic.
They're one and the same.
> But denying the idea that humans have both characteristics derived from biology (sex) and from societal expectations (gender) is simply objectively incorrect.
I don't deny the existence of social expectations (you severely misread what I wrote), but those expectations were deriving from the recognition of the objective truth of one's sex. They were never a matter of one's "internal feelings", they were an extension of one's sex.
You seem to be partly arguing from a position of ignorance.
The trans-ness some people experience is extremely general and durable, far more consistent with the explanation that they innately are their gender somehow[^1], than with choice or psychosis. Some people feel pressured by this to, despite all the societal dis-incentives, medically transition. They then are not only their gender in behavior and reported experience, but also physically (with the exception of some hard-to-change stuff such as fertility).
We usually handle such general, durable "personal delusions" by accepting them. If I studied some math for years, can do said math and am employed at my local university doing mathematics, I am a mathematician. I do not have delusions of being a mathematician. If I move to, say Germany, and after years speak the language, have children there, participate in the local culture, and have a citicenship I am now German. Only the most backward people would say I have delusions of being German. Although, this cultural rigidity of course exists, I do not see it as desirable. An advanced society should accept and accomodate its outliers instead of steamrolling over them and making them suffer.
[^1]: Afaik currently a neuroscientific explanation is not forthcoming
> And those people are given the escape hatch of "transness" which is a lie politely allowed by society which gives people the delusion of trying to be what they cannot ever be.
I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie if there are people whose mental makeup is better suited to a gender expression not corresponding to their sex, who then inhabit that different role in everyday life.
I frankly don't get your assertion that this cannot happen, as there exist people for whom this is reality right now (in part because they are simply not easily identifyable as trans).
> young people are mutilating themselves and crippling themselves irreversibly by using hormones
My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention. Where is the problem here? People do cosmetic surgeries for similar, if not more vain, reasons.
> when doctors try to treat these people correctly, according to their true nature (sex), trans activists have attacked the doctors calling it "misgendering"
Trying to ignore the reality that ones body is different in medical contexts would be indeed harmful. If this kind of activism exists, I do not condone it. I imagine that treating a trans person does not boil down to treating them like a cis person of their sex however, as hormone replacement causes a bunch of differences.
> I'm arguing that it ought not to be a polite lie
A lie is defined in terms of it not being the truth, not in terms of effects on someone. Those effects are entirely irrelevant.
> My understanding is that the worst side-effect of using hormones is infertility, while surgery comes with more risks.
Men getting oestrogens are getting osteoporosis in their 20's and 30's.
> Anyway, it's about trading off mental anguish against possible complications of medical intervention.
It's not even doing that in most cases, because the self-loathing that caused people to look for the "transness" escape hatch turns out to have outside causes and won't go away.
This helping the vulnerable framing is naive at best. This is about an American ad company consolidating their power over what people can do with devices they bought and are reliant on daily.
Helping the vulnerable should not involve that. If your only idea on how to help the vulnerable involves that, think of better ideas.
At some point we need to start wondering if it's not just naivete but intellectual dishonesty. The same American corporations that claim to be imposing draconian control measures to "protect the vulnerable" are, at the same time, exploiting those very same vulnerable people to the best of their ability. Take Google, they have no problem showing ads for scams in Youtube and Google Ads. There is mounting evidence that their recommendation algorithms for Youtube, shorts, etc. negatively affect mental health, especially youngest ones. But it makes them money, and they've zero interest in preventing that or changing it.
And it's not just Google, it's the m.o. of all large corporations. Another example is Epic Games, they advertise how they will fight in court against big companies like Google and Apple to defend their users. Yet they've gotten fined repeatedly for amounts in the millions, for predatory micro-transactions, and misleading minors into spending money without the consent of their parents.
Time and time again it is proven that everything these companies do, it's always for the benefit of their bottom line, and consideration for their users does not even factor into their considerations. This is no different, they want to push it because it will give them more control or make them money, and it either won't protect anyone, or that's just an unintended side effect but a good way to market it.
And the devs are responsible for finding a good technical solution under these constraints. If they can't, for communicating their constraints to the rest of the team so a better tradeoff can be found.
What's the mistake here? Shouldn't an incident report start with this and then continue with an analysis of the process, without too much "internal perspective"?
In my mind, the internal perspective might be useful to jot down when doing the analysis, but is too noisy to be useful to disseminate.
So I know it's a little bananas to answer this with a link to material the length of a novel, but my feeling is that the real spirit of a postmortem is best carried across by:
> The constant zooming-out is key here: it’s not enough to find out why things broke, but find out why “why things broke”. In theory you’re supposed to keep doing it: if someone skips a step because of managerial pressure, you ask why the manager was pressuring them in the first place. If the manager was worried about production quotas, find out how the quotas were decided. You just keep going and going and going.
There are different procedures folks can use to capture bits of this to different degrees, but I think this write-up illustrates well both how exhausting it is to do this right and what the value can be. Even if your goal is to get to Action Items, this kind of understanding of your event is what should generate them.
If a person doesn't understand the value, I would imagine they would write something very close to TFA's
> when something goes wrong [...] they explain why they made the decision, and then explain the contextual factors that influenced that, and then explain why those contextual factors existed, and then explain why it would have been unreasonable to expect them to anticipate the downstream effect of those factors, and by the end you have some fat five paragraphs that contains maybe one sentence worth of information and reads like a legal defense brief written by someone who knows they are guilty.
Well, there are so many more lower hanging fruits that LLMs can actually replace before they get to developers -- basically every middle manager, and a significant chunk of all white collar jobs.
I'm not convinced software developers will be replaced - probably less will be needed and the exact work will be transformed a bit, but an expert human still has to be in the loop, otherwise all you get is a bunch of nonsense.
Nonetheless, it may very well transform society and we will have to adapt to it.
Not all software development will be automated immediatly. But I've noticed that many skills I've built are lessened in worth with every model release.
Having a lot of specifics about a programming environment memorized for example used to be the difference between building something in a few hours and a week, but now is pretty unimportant. Same with being able to do some quick data wrangling on the command line. LLMs are also good at parsing a lot of code or even binary format quickly and explaining how it works. That used to be a skill. Knowing a toolbox of technologies to use is needed less. Et cetera.
They haven't come for the meat of what makes a good engineer yet. For example, the systems-level interfacing with external needs and solving those pragmatically is still hard. But the tide is rising.
The capitalists and industrialists have waited for centuries to get rid of paid labor. Imagine the profits once the cost of human work gets out of the loop!
Of course the question that is left unanswered is how the economy will work there's no one left with purchasing power. But I guess the answer to this is, the same way it works now in any developing country without much of a middle class.
I don’t see middle managers taking the initial brunt unless they truly are just pushing papers around. At companies of sufficient size, they do play a role of separation between C suite and the grunts. To me, certain low-performing grunts will be the first out. Then a team reorg to rebalance. Then some middle managers will be out as fewer of them can handle multiple teams.
> probably less will be needed and the exact work will be transformed a bit
My guess is the opposite: they'll throw 5–10x more work at developers and expect 10x more output, while the marginal cost is basically just a Claude subscription per dev.
>I'm not convinced software developers will be replaced
Most of us will probably need to shift to security. While you can probably build AI specifically to make things more secure, that implies it could also attack things as well, so it ends up being a cat-and-mouse game that adjusts to what options are available.
But you only $200/month for the productivity of what used to cost monthly salary for 10 software engineers. Doesn't this democratize software construction?
The resources to learn how to construct software are already free. However learning requires effort, which made learning to build software an opportunity to climb the ladder and build a better life through skill.
This is democratization.
Now the skill needed to build software is starting to approach zero. However as you say you can throw money at an AI corporation to get some amount of software built. So the differentiator is capital, which can buy software rather cheaply. The dependency on skill is lessened greatly and software is becoming worthless, so another avenue to escape poverty through skill closes.
You might be right but it's common to see that take as short sighted since there is zero evidence it's ever happened before. The common example is the loom. The loom didn't democritize cloth making, it put all the weavers out of business. But it did democritize everything that needed cloth because cloth became cheap. 1000s more jobs were created by making cloth cheap. In a similar way, 1000s of different jobs might be created by making software creation cheap, but just like cloth makers, software makers have no purpose when making software is easy.
That the criteria for admission are altered now to exclude some of them is motivated by anti-trans politics. Usually such rule changes are made when it becomes obvious that the old rules cause outcomes which go against the spirit of the sport. You cannot argue this here in good faith. There are not a lot of trans women competing and none have even won anything afaik.
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