Wikipedia has a list of premature professional wrestlers deaths, look for the ones that died of heart attack before 50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_premature_professional... - the roid era really did a number, though of course, working through pain and injury with the help of pain killers and other drugs didn't help either.
Aside from the normal risks of injury there is the simple fact that many athletes would take the risk. I think it's morbid but top level athletes probably already deal with things that would make the normie sports fan queazy. They'd do it happily for the status and adrenaline
Yep but that's true of many sports. In fact most sports at high levels involve a heightened risk of life-changing injury. It's a difference of degree rather than type.
Not that that invalidates your criticism but it does require it to be formulated in a more nuanced way.
The biggest problem isn't that the highest-level athletes would waste away their bodies (that's a big problem, but not the biggest); it is that below them, there will be thousands if not millions of second- and third-level athletes doing the same. With much less control.
Imagine if every kid out there that wanted to be the next Ronaldo or Neymar (and could afford it) started taking steroids and EPO. That's a huge cost, and what did we gain exactly? A slightly lower number on some clock?
The argument that I’ve heard against this is that pro athlete training is already really dangerous - yet athletes are valuable enough that their handlers have some incentive to be reasonably cautious to not push things too far most of the time.
Of course, we also know of many many athletes that have been permanently injured during training, so it’s hard for me to know how true the above is.
This is very transparently a gross, cruel attempt to parody and belittle trans people, as is made clear by the people involved and the language:
“7 Tips on How To Come Out as Enhanced”
And the “believe the science” and “colonialist” bits are very much a conservative-doing-an-impression-of-a-liberal thing.
There’s worse if you read through their mission pages. I’m taken aback by the level of effort, honestly. It really astounds me how much money and effort there is behind ostracizing already marginalized people. It’s disgusting.
I know you got down-voted, but the whole website is definitely fishy. At first I was expecting it to be a campaign for selling "enhanced" supplements, but a high-effort satire to say "well, see how rediculous it is to let trans people compete in sports???" is plausible, sadly.
> It really astounds me how much money and effort there is behind ostracizing already marginalized people.
The males who compete in women's sports aren't being marginalized, in fact quite the opposite, they are dominating the competition and causing female athletes to be marginalized in their own sports. It's rank misogyny, centering male demands and desires way above any sense of fairness and safety for women.
If this website is indeed a parody aimed at the male intruders ruining women's sport, then I'm all for it. These cheating men and the sporting bodies that enable them deserve all the criticism they get.
Trans people represent a fraction-of-a-percent of people in the total population. They are not “dominating” anyone. Trans people are ruining sports the same way Jewish people control the banking sector: they don’t.
You also completely overlooked FtM trans people in your concern-trolling piece there.
Actually there have been hundreds of cases of trans-identifying males winning in women's sports, taking women's prizes and places on the podium. There's a list of these on https://shewon.org and it's not even a complete list yet.
These males are ruining sports for women athletes, as are the sporting bodies whose policies have enabled this. Some women have even quit the sports they've worked so hard to compete in, because of how unfair this situation is.
It sounds like they're casting atheletes who willingly take banned substances as a persecuted minority group that we need to stand united for, on par with the fight for LGBT rights or something. It's all super-defensive, like it was started by a few atheletes that got caught. The section called "Science is Real" tries to cast anti-doping as anti-science.
Watch one of those documentaries on Lance Armstrong. Getting blood transfusions in the back of a van doesn't look fun.
But I'm all for it. Why stop at substances? Use CRISPR to give a swimmer some webbed-feet.
It is an exercise in trolling. The president, Aron D’Souza, is a Peter Thiel buddy, and sounds like somebody who would find bullet points like "Inclusive Language" and "How to come out as enhanced" hilarious in this context.
I agree with the basic moral principle of this and think it's a fine idea in theory, but how are you going to get any of the best athletes to participate? The only realistic route to doing something like that is the LIV thing using Saudi Oil money to just flat-out pay ungodly money to the point you overcome the natural competitive spirit that tends to motivate athletes and they're willing to be blacklisted from the actual top leagues.
Fundamentally, the problem here isn't with the sports organizations themselves. It's with the countries they're in. Steroid use is illegal in most of the world. If you achieve any level of success worth paying attention to, some legislature, law enforcement body, or both will come try to shut you down. Even the IFBB has to pretend to drug test, as obviously bullshit and easy to beat as it is. Are you only ever going to host games in Mexico?
The majority of top level athletes are doping and not getting caught. You're delusional if you believe otherwise. There are even approved medical doping practices in sports, where athletes are given legal consent to use steroids and PEDs. As an example, note the uptick in football (soccer) players being asthmatic? Why? Because the asthma medications increase performance on the field. It's everywhere! Those that believe athletes aren't cheating are only people not involved in sports and unaware of the realities it takes to achieve those levels of performance. If you're not doping, you're not winning, whether it's drug tested or not. There's literally drug test avoidance coaches all over. Entire industries for it. Common knowledge isn't the same as truth.
This seems hypocritical to me. I kind of get it as a way to level the playing field in one sense (though not, I expect, in many other senses). But their "inclusive language" guide is not internally consistent, and in fact breaks down in the first two paragraphs:
It kicks off saying "Being enhanced isn’t a preference or a lifestyle choice." - but it immediately proceeds to contradict that by emphasising choice: "When we talk about science and being enhanced, we’re not talking about preferences or choices or value judgments" and "Inclusive language is a way of acknowledging and respecting the complete control and autonomy people have over their bodies."
I am also skeptical it will "level" the playing field - at best it seems like it will "extend" it? Now athletic ability is the aggregate of natural ability and the ability to select & use drugs - but the genetic predispositions around these new areas won't be evenly distributed either! In addition it makes the gulf created by money even wider.
I think they're even more hypocritical in talking about "inclusivity" because allowing PEDs is the same thing as requiring them since no one who abstains will stand a chance against those who use them.
There's no way to be inclusive of those who want to use PEDs and those who would rather not destroy their health with them.
They lose the race and people will take that into account and try not to reproduce those results. It would balance out over time. There'd always be more than other sports, but sports doing bad things to their participants isn't unique. People are completely fine with the brain damage caused by sports like (US) football or boxing for example.
> People are completely fine with the brain damage caused by sports like (US) football
This is totally untrue.
Football is currently in decline, with the greatest drop in youth participation[1]. A major factor seems to be the NFL's inability to keep the stories of brain damage quiet. These things take time but I think there's a good chance the brain damage is going to kill football as a popular sport.
If the health-risks were the same (and they aren’t) I don’t think we’d be complaining as much. We don’t want to encourage people compromising their health like this; but it’s not the elite-athletes I’m worried about, but their millions of followers - think: kids doing high-school athletics - or people who are inspired by major sporting events to start doing exercise - it benefits no-one by implicitly encouraging everyone to do sports PEDs.
IMB4 anyone suggests that a Vyvanse prescription is equivalent to sports PEDs, despite both being significant risks to heart-health.
I understand the reasoning as to why the Olympics are "drug-free," but I have never really understood the other side of the argument.
Sports have improved in all sorts of ways. We have better training methods. We have better equipment. We have better medicine.
While I'm not sure I'd try it, I would love to see the limits of human ability with PEDs. I'd be willing to bet that some of those drugs would translate well to medicine for non-elite athletes.
It's the other way round; most PEDs _are_ medicine for regular people, abused by athletes. E.g., synthetic EPO is really useful if you just had chemotherapy for cancer and that killed off nearly all of your red blood cells.
Anyways, if you want competitions with doping, there are high-level bodybuilder competitions that don't test.
Not sure if serious or satire. But anyway, moral and legal issues aside this will never achieve mainstream success. Major sponsors and advertisers won't want to be associated with it due to the negative impact on their brand images. And modern sports only works as a business with that financial support. Can you imagine Adidas or Toyota putting their logo on this shitshow?
Pretty sure this is a hoax/satire/anti-trans argument.
So, going to just answer the anti trans piece.
There is no trans athletes dominating sport. Even us talking about it is because conservatives want to use it as a wedge issue.
For the mathematically inclined, slightly under 1% of the population are trans. When we see more than 1% of winners of athletic competitions being trans then we can talk about a problem. At the moment there just aren’t any trans athletes as the best in the world in their sport so it just isn’t an issue.
I honestly think unless you are trans yourself you really should not have an opinion about trans people.
Yes there are, see https://shewon.org for an increasingly long list of women who have been pushed off the podium by trans-identifying males competing as women.
No comment on the 600+ cases of males dominating in women's sports then? It's all right there on the page you scrolled all the way down to get to the non-athletic competitions.
That's 242 winning places which women lost to men in cycling, 117 in track and field, 65 in mountain biking, 43 in disc golf, 38 in swimming, 20 in powerlifting, and the rest in a wide variety of other sports.
197 first place podium spots that women athletes have lost to men, 177 second places lost, and 168 third places.
Do you still believe this is not a problem for female athletes, even after being shown data proving otherwise?
Do you know how many sports competitions are run every year?
Do you see how low level these competitions are?
How many are at the national level?
How many would you expect if there was no performance difference between trans women and women?
You would expect 1% of competitors to win 1% of competitions but the numbers you are showing are nowhere near there.
Also these are pathetically low level competitions to base an argument on, I want to reiterate that point. Most of these are just local disc golf competitions or masters golf tournaments. Is there a signal top tier Olympic competition represented in your list.
> You would expect 1% of competitors to win 1% of competitions but the numbers you are showing are nowhere near there.
Even just one of these men competing in a women's sporting event is a problem, in the same way that even one athlete doping is a problem. It's unfair and adversely affects every other competitor in the event. So while that website shows hundreds of women displaced from the winning spots, the overall impact is likely more in the thousands or even tens of thousands, depending on how many competitors were in each event.
The more fundamental principle is that women's sports exist to celebrate female athletic excellence, and for women to have spaces to compete fairly and safely against each other, at all levels of competition. Allowing males to compete entirely undermines this.
It’s not unfair because there doesn’t seem to be an advantage in the data to being a trans woman in sport.
When it shows in the data then we can talk about it.
The other stuff is the real issue for you I think. Maybe that is just something you’ll have to reflect on a little bit more.
Is it only celebrating women you like or people you relate to or is there room for trans woman in female sports. I think they should be included because it’s the human thing to do.
I think a lot of conservative types not long ago didn’t think women should even be playing sports, so it’s ironic that the sanctity of female sports is so important now.
There is a wealth of data that shows the male performance advantage in sports. The difference is so stark that even the most elite female athletes are at a disadvantage compared to teenage boys: https://boysvswomen.com
This male advantage remains even for those who choose to lower their testosterone levels; they retain strength and muscle mass above women, and their overall skeletal structure remains intact too: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503
One can also easily see the difference when comparing equivalent female and male competitions. For example, here's a graph of weights lifted in a decade of World Masters events, combining both W35 and M35 - it's very obvious which data point is the male competing in the women's event: https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/JrzQoA6fWKtYdm8auCMj6RKil0Y...
What all the data we have so far shows is that allowing males to compete in women's sports disadvantages women
and shatters their athletic opportunities.
> I think they should be included because it's the human thing to do.
Women are human too you know. Their needs matter as much as those of men, and more so in female-centered spaces. Women's sports don't exist to be a therapeutic setting for men who desire to be women. They're for female athletes, who deserve the same opportunity as male athletes to enjoy fair competition and have their athletic excellence celebrated.
> I think a lot of conservative types not long ago didn't think women should even be playing sports, so it's ironic that the sanctity of female sports is so important now.
It's important for female athletes regardless of what opinions conservatives may or may not have about this issue.
There is no advantage that shows up in the data to show that trans athletes have an advantage in sports.
If there were we would see trans-athletes winning lots of medals. They don't. In fact there just aren't that many athletes. This is a giant nothing-burger.
There is another argument that says trans-athletes can be disadvantaged by having a skeletal structure which their hormone system can not properly power and this is actually hinders their athletic performance. Either way as I said, there aren't any trans athletes winning medals so I don't think we really have anything to be concerned about.
As for your concern about female sports I have my doubts about whether or not you are sincere but I'll pretend you are.
Perhaps it is easier for you to think of Female sports as "a protected category for people who do not have male levels of testosterone". This is what it effectively is anyway because of inter-sex humans. We monitor people's testosterone (whether that is right or wrong is another issue) and we decide if they are allowed compete in female sport. The exact same process can be applied to trans-athletes.
There is plenty of data which shows the sex-based performance gap is so large that, even when impaired by long-term testosterone suppression, male athletes still have a significant performance advantage over female athletes. Please read the review I linked in my previous comment.
I also linked you data which shows that males have won hundreds of medals in women's competitions, and provided you a case study in the form of a very illustrative graph showing the performance of trans-identifying male weightlifter Laurel Hubbard in the World Masters, compared to both female and male cohorts, which places him solidly in the latter despite competing against the former - for which he 'won' a gold medal.
> Perhaps it is easier for you to think of female sports as "a protected category for people who do not have male levels of testosterone".
No, it's a protected category for female athletes, despite some sporting bodies undermining this in recent years. Testosterone suppression does not unbuild a male, nor does it convert his male body to a female body. All you end up with is a somewhat weakened male, yet one who still retains significant advantage from his testosterone-driven male development.
A female athlete who doped with androgens for years wouldn't be allowed to compete in women's sports even if she's ceased doping, for obvious reasons. Yet somehow it's considered acceptable for male athletes who've had the effects of testosterone in utero, post-natally and throughout puberty to do so, as long as they start androgen suppression as adults - or, for some competitions, do nothing more than 'identify as female'. This double standard makes no sense whatsoever, is clearly unfair, and is an insult to women.
Then why aren’t the Olympics being won by trans women. They are not.
Why isn’t the NCAA dominated by trans women ? Because it turns out it’s a giant nothing burger.
Like I said, you would expect 1% of the winners to be trans women but actually only one trans women ever has won a medal.
One person ever. And they were part of a soccer team so they are probably just over 1% of the women who won soccer medals that year, let alone every person who won an Olympic medal that year let alone that has ever won an Olympic medal.
Your argument is just trans phobia and I understand you can be scared of things but don’t allow that to ostracize a (small) group of people who just want to fit in.
No athletes from Cambodia have ever won an Olympic medal. So would it be fair for any Cambodian man to compete in women's sports? No, it wouldn't. It would obviously be unfair. Just as it is when any male competes in women's sport.
Does every athlete who dopes win a medal or a spot on the podium? No, but it's still cheating, still an unfair advantage. Again, just as it is when any male competes in women's sport.
Female athletes aren't the only group to have protected competitive categories. For example, dwarf basketball leagues exist, where all players have to be below a certain height. Would it be fair for a player who is actually 6'6" tall to 'identify as short' and enter their competitions? No, of course not. It's as nonsensical and unfair as males 'identifying as female' to compete against female athletes.
Please take the time to read the resources I linked so you can actually understand the argument.
> Your argument is just transphobia and I understand you can be scared of things but don't allow that to ostracize a (small) group of people who just want to fit in.
That small group of people is men who very selfishly desire to compete in women's sports, regardless of how unfair this is on female athletes.
You're only looking at this from the male perspective, and are apparently unwilling to respect or understand women's boundaries. I suspect this is why you're not seeing the problem.
I suggest watching this video, it's pretty good - https://youtu.be/HQLweuRSD9M (Why I'm Against Anti-Doping) - made by Clarence Kennedy, an enhanced vegan olympic weight-lifter that puts up insane numbers.
I've been enhanced myself for something like 15 years now and I gotta say, it's always funny to me how blind people are to the fact that athletes are going to take stuff, period.
I talked with my semi-pro baseball player friend about this. What if there were no restrictions about steroids?
He told me about his friend’s roommate who used steroids. 99% of the time he was nice, but steroids gave him major temper issues.
So I don’t think the only question is whether we can optimize athletic ability. The question is what the cost of doing that is. The cost not just to athletes but to those around them.
The Olympic Games Committee is corrupt to the core. That's what the website is referring to, though I agree it's a bit inconsequential as an argument against their anti-doping policies.
I wish they would talk about the real corruption of the IPCC and other international sports organizations which basically exist to take bribes from host countries. There's a reason big sporting events often take place in dictatorships.
(or maybe they do, I didn't browse super thoroughly)
A future where there is an incentive to juice up athletes as much as possible is a recipe for disaster.