Trans athletes make great gains, yet resentment still flares
but I don't think they'd appreciate seeing their identity compared to someone pretending to be a dog.
yea, I think that there are potentially analogs that help and some that don't - I'm not sure we could ever really land on an 'equivalency' that's absolutely valid, but surely some are more illustratively constructive than this
I find this concept of 'fairness' interesting.
Is 'fairness' strictly a matter of physiology - even restricting it to human beings of the same size?
I'm 6'6" 220 lbs. I'm in decent shape. But there are a *lot* of 6'6", 220 lb NFLers who are absolute monsters. So, do we talk about 40 times? Do we talk about verticals? Do we talk about age? Do we talk about body fat percentages? Or is it merely enough to say: Both are Men and Both are Same Size, Therefore Equal.
That seems mightily reductive if we're talking 'fairness'
Another example.
I coach high school basketball. We are a pretty good team and have been for a few years. This year, we are 30-6 and looking at a top 2 seed at the provincial tournament. But we are a high school team - not a Prep team.
When we play a Prep team, we play much stronger players. One of the players we play against is the #1 or #2 ranked high school basketball player of the class of 2023 (Elijah Fisher - the other top 2 is LeBron James, Jr). He's had university offers since he was in middle school. He's on a team with other players who are going to NCAA Div-I schools.
Those scores in our games are typically of the 90-50 finish.
Those games aren't "fair" even though we have 13-15 players, same age, same gender, not quite the same size (they are bigger overall).
The concept of "fair" being championed here is more complex and I wonder if it's the right criterion. We still play the game. The outcome will always be the same. It certainly doesn't 'feel' like a 'fair' game.
So it leads me to believe that maybe there's something else here. As I've said before, I don't know what the answer is, but 'fair' doesn't strike me as the actual issue. Or maybe it is 'fairness' and we're actually okay with more arbitrariness re: fairness than we actually understand.