The International Cricket Council has become the latest sports body to ban transgender players from the elite women’s game if they have gone through male puberty.

The ICC said it had taken the decision, following an extensive scientific review and nine-month consultation, to “protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players”.

It joins rugby union, swimming, cycling, athletics and rugby league, who have all gone down a similar path in recent years after citing concerns over fairness or safety.

  • fosforus
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    1 year ago

    I think it’s simpler. Have two categories: one for the weaker gender, one that is open for anybody. First category is needed only for sports and hobbies where there are differences between the groups, and the decision whether it matters can be derived statistically. If there’s only one category and a significant majority of the top players are from a single gender group, they need a second category.

    Then again, I’m not sure what this means if we applied this logic to other things. For instance, 73% of NBA players were black, 0.4% asian in 2021, but that doesn’t seem like something that needs fixing.

    • GreenM@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m not sure i follow. So you basically suggest to keep male and female categories but rename them? Or do you suggest to devide female category to stronger and weaker ?

      • fosforus
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        1 year ago

        Default to one category, separate if statistics show that one gender group is significantly stronger. Some sports have already established that knowledge, so they can have 2 categories as is. Male and female are fine names.

        So status quo more or less, but underlining that gender groups have differences in some things. That seems to be unclear to some people.

        • GreenM@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Well that;s how we got male and female categories. But now we got in between who are apparently weaker than males but can often easily top females. Obvious decision would be to go for certain win.
          There are obviously people who misuse it unjustly to get to the top. Where is the line to become weaker? Would you lower rewards for weaker category to motivate folks to move to stronger one, wouldn’t that make females left at the tail all the time ?

          • fosforus
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            1 year ago

            But now we got in between who are apparently weaker than males but can often easily top females.

            They have the burden of proof to irrefutably show that they are on the same level as the women. I don’t know and don’t have to know how they can do that. If they cannot do that, they go to the default category or come up with something else to do with their life.

            • GreenM@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              In priciple i agree but … i can imagine that it’s pretty simple to just give weak performance on the test day then win every competition ever after but just sightly ahead of females.