Forum: Author Hangout

He says, that makes it hard to suspend your real world belief and accept the fictional premise of women being equal to or superior to men in physical combat.

Either that or the heroine gets viewed as a man with tits.

Does she fight with large full naked breasts on display preventing men from concentrating on the fight?

A female navy seal/marine versus a male private

Rank is not an indicator of physical size or strength. A female navy seal sniper could still be a 110lb, 5'4" woman. Peak of physical ability for her age, certainly, but still a pretty fragile thing to even an untrained private who is 6'4" and weight 240lb.

She would have ways to overcome him, certainly, but going toe-to-toe in a "fair" fistfight wouldn't be one of them.

She would have ways to overcome him, certainly

As I said above, superior finesse and intelligence. But that's a much harder fight to write well.

I was assuming rank would give some indication of how much fighting training the two had.

Not necessarily. Every Marine trains to shoot a rifle, but we are talking about unarmed combat.

Hand to hand training beyond the very basic training every recruit gets in boot camp varies a great deal depending on MOS and what unit you are assigned to.

Talking about Marines, a private in a combat role in Force Recon likely has more hand to hand combat training then an officer in charge of a base's motor pool state side.

I suppose it depends on how you use the word fragile. I didn't mean that she wouldn't be physically capable or able to hold her own, but that a large enough guy could likely pick her up and break her.

No matter how much training you have, at a certain point size and mass do matter. This is why militaries usually train in martial arts that are about technique rather that raw physicality. There's always someone bigger than you.

No problem. My male private is 6'2" and 250 lb of solid muscle. Fast reflexes and a highly experienced professional in mixed martial arts.

So why is he a private? Shouldn't he be an instructor in unarmed hand-to-hand combat?

HM.

You are forgetting physics (leverage) and desire (to win the fight).

I have seen plenty of female soldiers absolutely decimate cocky soldiers, and it's an absolute joy to watch. Whilst I can't speak for other nations, females in the UK armed forces generally have to go above and beyond what is needed of them just to be seen to be on 'on-par' with their male equivalents.

Just . . . stop.

Male marine vs female marine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOdNwG61vGY

If someone wants to write that a woman in fiction can "decimate" a male, fine. If it's an entertaining story, why not enjoy it. I would. But stop with the BS real world stuff likes it's a routine, everyday thing.

Nope.

As I said, don't pretend your BS in the norm. If that were the case, women would have nothing to fear from men.

.001 percent of women getting the better of a man doesn't translated to: I told you so.

Enjoy the fiction, but at least make an attempt to live in reality.

She did not share that entitlement, and since she was in the running to be the Army (female) shot put champion, we left her to her own devices because we knew what was likely to happen.

Pixy, I appreciate your comments. It's always good to remember that average differences do not determine specific encounters. And, personally, I'd LOVE to read a story about a female shot put champion and what she might do. However, a lot of what I read suggests just average women going against average men with the suggestion that women are just as likely or more likely to win those encounters, on average. At least, that's the way it seems to me. Even at the elite vs. elite level, it's not an even match. But stories are often about the exceptions, and if authors would write them that way, it could make for some superior stories!

There's actually a really good example of this in dead tree fiction, and that's Laurell K Hamilton's character Anita Blake. She exercises regularly, a point that is made throughout the novels, has a moderate to high civilian knowledge of martial arts, and knows how to handle herself in a firefight.

Unfortunately she's also tiny and regularly going up against "professional bad guys" and various supernatural creatures who are simply better than human and don't give a damn how good your martial arts are.

How she can go about overcoming various opponents and when she realizes that discretion is the better part of valour is a major element of narration in the early novels.

It's basic physics. The more massive the object, the more difficult it is to change speed or course.

A stronger person with more muscle mass can apply more energy to changing speed or course.

You are forgetting physics (leverage) and desire (to win the fight).

I have seen plenty of female soldiers absolutely decimate cocky soldiers, and it's an absolute joy to watch.

Finesse and intelligence. Which is not how such fights tend to get written in modern fiction.

Especially since he changed the narrative from being one of women who served, to women in general

Except the OP is about fiction writers depicting women fighting and beating men brute strength against brute strength.

You keep trying to shift it to real world women who've beaten men not by strength against strength, but by superior finesse and intelligence. It's not the same thing and it does nothing to support the plausibility of the way physical combat between men and women is usually depicted in modern fiction.

As for mrherewriting, we have a saying, "Tell me you haven't served, without saying that you haven't served..."

Here's another saying, "Anyone can make up a story."

(And I didn't serve. Didn't need to. I had better options coming out of high school, unlike several of my older family members who didn't. Don't be bitter about that.)

Especially since he changed the narrative from being one of women who served, to women in general, in a vain desperate ploy to regain some semblance of being right.

Moving on, the narrative is about making women being as strong as men, the setting doesn't matter. (You changed the narrative. Pirates, as the OP referenced, aren't soldiers.) Taking a bottle to someone's face doesn't make a woman as strong as a man, it makes them resourceful. A man taking a bottle to a man's face is also resourceful.

Resourcefulness wasn't the topic.

For you to tell anyone that woman soldiers (your narrative) are on par physically with their male counterparts, or even more so, is just BS. It's bad BS. It's dissociation from reality.

Actually you are wrong on that point as well. The OP didn't mention Pirates, the synopsis they were using as an example did.

So they did mention pirates.

May I draw your attention to the bit they did write,

You know, the bit about 'combat' and 'taking up arms'. The sort of things you usually associate with, you know, soldiers...

And yet we have 'combat' sports.

I'm basing my opinion on reality and lived life experience, you are basing yours upon fantasy, sexism, male chauvinism and a large dose of ignorance.

Which to be fair, was blindingly obvious. Yet you think you know how the military exists/functions? Amusing.

Why is it that only keyboard veterans bring up their prior military service as a way to distract from the weakness of their arguments? (Functions? We never discussed how the military functions. Stop the strawman bullshit.)

tell me that you have never been in a proper fight without telling me you have never been in a proper fight... Fighting back takes aggression, doing so well, requires controlled aggression. That is a skill in itself.

Lol, "tell me you never..." is that how you like to "discredit" someone. I'm not a keyboard vet, so don't you worry about my past.

The will to do serious violence is what separates many people in a fight.

By the way you word your "tell me you never..." saying, I bet you get asked: "Tell me you're a bullshitter without telling me you're a bullshitter," often.

I think it's obvious now to all reading, that we have different opinions on this, so to avoid drawing the ire of Laz and having an otherwise perfectly good thread locked, I'm going slink back off into the shadows as you have, in the words of The Bard himself, hoisted yourself with your own petard.

It's apparent you don't understand the Bard's phrase, but you're hoping it makes you sound good by applying it here.

Slink off all you want, that's what bullshitters do.

in the words of The Bard himself, hoisted yourself with your own petard.

The saying "hoist with your own petard" predates Shakespeare.

A petard was a primitive explosive device used for breaching castle walls in the medieval era.

The poor fools who had the job of delivering the petard to the castle wall had a high mortality rate, not from enemy action, but due to premature detonation of the petard.

Look at the dropout rates for males applying for special forces. And yet some women make it through. If those women aren't as capable as their male peers, how on earth are they allowed to pass the selection process?

The gap between average male and average female physical capability is slimmer than you imagine.

Most of passing anything difficult is mental toughness. I never said women aren't mentally tough or that men were mentally tougher. If just any woman was allowed to take part in the selection process, it would be interesting to compare the dropout rates between the two genders.

Now, the physical standards are meant to be difficult, not impossible. They have a bare minimum that everyone needs to pass.

There is a huge disparity in physical strength, but not mental toughness.

Male recruits, ages 17 to 21, must complete the run with a time of 16:36 or less, and female recruits of the same age must finish in 19:42 or less, according to Smith. For men and women, ages 22 to 26, the minimum requirements are 17:30 and 20:36, respectively.

Not exactly the same.

But why the different requirements at all?
Later in actual combat the enemy won't differentiate for sex and/or age.

HM.

That's the silliness of modern equality rules. They want to fit the job to the people they want. They want women in the military (because feminists push for it) and they change the rules in order to satisfy the nags.

That's clear, but why different requirements for both genders by age groups? (17-21, 22-26)
Do they assume they must set higher requirements for the younger group because their fitness – while in the military – declines so fast that they wouldn't meet the requirements of the older group when they finally fall into this age group?

HM.

It's the opposite. The youngest age group has lower standards because they lack physical maturity.

The ACFT scoring can be found on this page:

https://www.army.mil/acft/

It's the opposite. The youngest age group has lower standards because they lack physical maturity.

Not according to the citation:

Male recruits, ages 17 to 21, must complete the run with a time of 16:36 or less, and female recruits of the same age must finish in 19:42 or less, according to Smith. For men and women, ages 22 to 26, the minimum requirements are 17:30 and 20:36, respectively.

16:36 for the younger men, 17:30 for the older men; age bonus for the older.

HM.

It depends on the type of event. Those requiring strength the older age groups are expected to so better.

The Army, for political purposes only, has different standards for men and women.

The Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT, has undergone a never-ending series of changes since it was first introduced in 2017, and now lawmakers could require the Army even further adopt changes to the fitness test of record or even revert to the test that the ACFT was supposed to replace.

The six-event test was meant to better gauge how prepared soldiers were to perform tasks in combat than the Army Physical Fitness Test, or APFT, which the ACFT replaced in October 2022, two years later than the Army originally expected. The initial version of the ACFT held male and female soldiers to the same physical fitness standards, regardless of age, but in 2019 initial testing showed that 84% of women who took the ACFT had failed it.

The following year, results from a field test showed that women were scoring up to 110 points lower on the ACFT on average than men. Female soldiers especially had trouble passing the leg tuck event, in which soldiers were required to pull their legs up to their elbows while on a pullup bar.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-combat-fitness-test-problems-congress/

I know you just cited this but I've to answer to someone.

Female soldiers especially had trouble passing the leg tuck event, in which soldiers were required to pull their legs up to their elbows while on a pullup bar.

Reading this the first question which pops up is:
How is this particular test related to combat fitness? In which real combat situation will the combatant need to use this "skill"?

The real problem with all those tests is: how close related are the exercises to combat fitness? I bet you can find some exercises where females have fewer problems than males. By carefully selecting the tests you can get the results you want to show.

To have different test standards for men and women is the sexist approach.
Either the soldier (regardless of gender) needs the physical fitness or not. The standard should reflect the necessary fitness level and this can't be gender specific!

BTW, I believe – even with fairer tests – fewer women than men will pass the tests for special units.
Nothing said about the pass/fail-ratio, it might be better for female applicants because of less self-delusion.

HM.

And those women's teams regularly get beaten by youth male teams. Women's college and professional teams normally practice against men - men who are unable to qualify for the men's teams.

You said it yourself: "the fifth tier of the men's game."
If women athletes could compete with men, there would be women playing in "men's leagues. They don't, because they can't compete in strength, speed or agility.

It's unlikely you'll ever see a woman president in your lifetime.

I believe that between the election in November 2024, and January 2025, POTUS Biden will resign, so that VP Harris may be proclaimed the "first woman President of the USA"...

Her choice of running mate - an unknown

Unknown on the national stage maybe. Tim Walz is the governor of Minnesota.

He didn't even get a mention in my newspaper's summary of potential running mates.

That makes him a surprise, but a sitting governor is hardly an unknown.

It's a complete myth that better training options explain the differences. There are structural differences in men's and women's bodies that prevent women from equal performance in sports.

Look at the issue of transgenders in sport. Men who can't compete as men, transition and dominate highly trained, professionally coached elite women athletes.

Women's bodies simply cannot be as strong, fast or quick as men's bodies when both are trained.

Can you post the examples of biological men who did not drasticly improve their performance when they decided to complete as women?

It's interesting that there is a direct comparison.
Bobbie Hirsh at Wayne State competed as a biological women on the women's fencing team as a freshmen. She won honorable mention all conference in the foil with a win record of 53%.
She became a man. With hormone treatements he competed last year on the men's team to wind up with a 26% win percentage.

Because of the blatant misogynism by the UK's Football Association, which banned women's football for a very long time and has nowadays subordinated it to the men's game, very few women play football in the UK.

I try to remember what happend back then when one Italian football club (AC Milan or Inter Milan) tried to hire a German female star player, I think it was Birgit Prinz, for their first male team.
The Italian football association forbade this, citing their rules (separate male and female teams). Milan threated to sue them and they finally caved in and made a deal with Milan: cancel the contract for some long disputed other things.
She got quite some money for the cancellation of the contract.

HM.

but that penalty she scored had power and speed putting most of the men's premier league to shame.

A wise man once said:

One extreme example in no way constitutes proof.

An outlier shows something is possible. It doesn't mean it's probable.

Wow. No self awareness whatsoever?

Or you push with your 'patriarchy is bad and keeping female football players down' even though you know it's bullshit.

Neither is good.

Like several England women, Chloe Kelly played for her school team, alongside and against boys, until she left school. She used to change before she got to the games and had to wait to get home to shower and change afterwards because she wasn't allowed to use the same changing rooms as the boys. She was the team's star player and top goalscorer.

Can you site your source of her playing for her school team against the boys and being a top player?

The closest I could find was her playing alongside her brothers in this article, otherwise she only ever played top level woman's soccer for her age group.

This article briefly mentions she played as a schoolgirl at Elthorne, but they had a girl's team, not a co-ed team.

It was a newspaper feature, probably the Daily Mail.

I see no mention of the Elthorne team being a girl's team, but that doesn't prove anything.

ETA The newspaper has long been recycled and I cannot find the article on-line. I've done a quick check on England team bios with no success. I'm currently wondering whether I got the wrong player. Chloe Kelly definitely scored that 89mph penalty, but Lauren Hemp was still playing against boys in her teens and there's a video of her running circles around them so it could have been her.

I found a depressing number of articles about the obstructions misogynist patriarchs put in the way of girls playing football with boys, but it's mostly after they turn twelve.

AJ

Elthorne has a girl's team. Here's a quote from the article: Mr Heffernan tipped Kelly, who has returned to the school to speak to students in assemblies and to the girls' football teams,

She didn't play with the high school boys. She played with her brothers in a private league where her brothers were told she wasn't allowed back to a particular tournament (maybe all tournaments?) because she was a girl.

Her brothers turned her into a beast who no doubt could beat the average male player who didn't have a future in clubs and big league teams.

She's a great player, but there is no need to pad her stats.

If you could find the article that states she played high school football on the boys team and was a standout player, that'd be great.

Piracy in the age of sail would be a rather Darwinian profession so it would have already weeded out the weaklings.
The women in the story mentioned by the OP were not super powerful, if anything they had been through circumstances that would leave them even weaker than the average.

Piracy in the age of sail would be a rather Darwinian profession so it would have already weeded out the weaklings.

True to an extent, but sailors in that age often suffered chronic under nourishment and a number of conditions such as scurvy tied to various vitamin deficiencies.

Ships in those days required more crew relative to the size of the ship and they could only carry so much fresh provisions.

If it's a trading ship, the more provisions they carry, the less merchandise they can carry.
If it's a pirate ship, the more provisions, the less loot they can carry away from a battle.
If it's a military ship, the more provisions they carry, the less munitions they can carry.

If it's a pirate ship, the more provisions, the less loot they can carry away from a battle.

Sort of true.
Pirates generally did not sail far away from their home ports to catch other ships though, pirates would base themselves near where they hunted for other ships to prey on.
Weeks of supplies rather than many months like trading ships going halfway around the world or military ships on long patrol.
As they use the supplies they gain cargo capacity, or even better they capture the ship rather than sink it.

Sword fighting is contest of physical strength. Women can't compete in it against men for the same reason that women don't play in the
NFl.

2 - Male author catering to female fantasies.

I suspect this happens quite often. And, the fantasy is out there. In a similar story to yours, I had a woman arguing with me about average size/strength differences between men and women. She made the claim that it was because little girls were taught not to eat as much because it wasn't lady-like. Huh? With the epidemic of childhood obesity? It was an online discussion and that was the point I chose to quit the discussion.

That's hard for people in the US to believe - it couldn't happen here.

I'm sorry. I've gotten lost. What couldn't happen here?

Women prevented from playing professionally in men's leagues

Ah, yes. Gotcha, and I agree. I'm in the USA also and that account struck me as strange, also.

when it comes to the question of whether women can, in general, compete with men,

I know the gender gap exists.
If you compare the best 10 men with the best 10 women then the gender gap is obvious. If you merge the lists, in most cases no woman is in the top ten.

The more realistic question is how is the performance of the top women compared to average males.
I bet the German female national football (aka soccer) team will outperform most third and any fourth level male team.

Same in England: the English female national team will quite certainly win against any team of the English National League like FC Halifax Town, Maidenhead United, Oxford City, Oldham Athletic, Southend United or York City.
The National League is the highest league that is semi-professional in the English football league system (although as of the 2022–23 season, all but three clubs are fully professional).

HM.

The more realistic question is how is the performance of the top women compared to average males.
I bet the German female national football (aka soccer) team will outperform most third and any fourth level male team.

"Just in the single year 2017, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie's 100 meters lifetime best of 10.78 was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys. (Yes, that's the right number of zeros.)" Comparing Athletic Performances: The Best Elite Women to Boys and Men

An Algerian biological male [citation needed] forced an Italian biological female to retire after just 46 seconds of their Olympic "women's" boxing match yesterday :-(

Sorry, do you have any evidence for this claim?

If you're going to point me towards the IBA, can you clarify what exactly the evidence is, because so far all the IBA has said is "The test that was administered was not a testosterone test" and "no, you can't see the results" - a refusal to share a) what was done and b) what the results were doesn't make their statement especially trustworthy.

Okay, so the results are "we found XY chromosomes", but that's still no information on what test was actually conducted or what protocol was followed for the test. The IBA is being pretty close-lipped on what they actually did, which (when you take into account things like the IBA being decertified by the IOC, and the test in question disqualifying Imane three days after she eliminated a Russian boxer from the tournament), unless they're actually publishing verifiable information it seems like untrustworthy hearsay.

Edit: Oh right, also you apparently didn't read the next line

> Roberts said there were "different strands involved in that" and therefore the body could not commit to referring to Khelif as "biologically male".

https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/articles/cye0ex43k63o

One theory, which hasn't been confirmed and probably won't because it pertains to private medical information, is that there's a case of DSD - https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/differences-in-sex-development/

> There are several causes of 46,XY DSD. One possible cause is androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), where the body "ignores" androgens or is insensitive to them.

> Sometimes a person's body does not respond at all or only partly responds to androgens.

> Complete insensitivity to androgens makes a person with XY chromosomes female. Partial insensitivity to androgens can mean that some people are male and others are female.

That said, you're making a specific claim here that Khelif is biologically a man. You've provided no evidence for that claim, citing a source which is questionable at best and additionally says explicitly the opposite of your claim. So I don't know what you're talking about, but it seems pretty rude of you to make up accusations like that and parrot utter garbage. You should want to be better than that.

Additionally, the olympics is generally going to be composed of the top fraction of a percent of athletes in their discipline. To some rough first approximation, every single athlete there is going to be genetically abnormal in some way, because to a rough first approximation, that's part of what it takes to get there. Are you going to find weird outliers in the Olympics? Yes! Is that disqualifying? Obviously it can't be, otherwise everybody in the olympics would be disqualified. The IOC seems confident that Khelif isn't doping and passes whatever bar they've defined for eligibility and frankly, while I don't trust the IOC very much, they certainly seem to know more about the situation than you do.

what sort of life will the intersex condition lead to

Actually, given:

Roberts said there were "different strands involved in that"

I think it more likely that Khelif is a chimera than that she is intersex.

Sorry, I didn't realise they were necessarily different.

They are distinct conditions.

https://www.webmd.com/sex/what-is-intersex
https://www.webmd.com/children/what-is-chimerism

Yes, it is possible to be both a chimera and intersex. But the statement of the chief executive of the IBA points more to chimerism than intersex.

So while chimera is the best explanation for the mixed chromosomes, I think intersex probably applies too.

If you read the webMD links I cited, both conditions are rare, single digit percentages of the overall population.

Most of the causes of intersex are unrelated to chimerism, so I would expect that a single individual with both chimerism and intersex to be exceedingly rare.

There is nothing here to point to Khelif being intersex other than your subjective evaluation of her appearance/physique.

> failing a couple of testosterone tests.

While we don't know what tests they were, we do know the IBA has said they weren't testosterone tests. If you're going to rely on untrustworthy evidence, you could at least have the good grace to learn what your untrustworthy evidence says instead of making shit up from whole cloth.

You're saying that there are multiple indications of Khelif being intersex, including your subjective evaluation of her appearance, peers calling her a man, and unsubstantiated newspaper claims of a failed testosterone test; is that last point a reference to something other than the IBA disqualifying her?

...are there literally any details, like who conducted the tests, or when they were conducted, or what exactly the tests were, or what the results were in more detail than 'failed'?

Because if not, I kind of struggle to see how you can hold that up as evidence of anything, even if you're trying to handwave it as "unsubstantiated".

While we don't know what tests they were, we do know the IBA has said they weren't testosterone tests.

The quote you posted up thread (the different strands comment) strongly implies some sort of DNA/chromosome test.

You know, I gotta be honest, I don't really care what it strongly implies? I feel like if the IBA had definitive proof of something, they'd actually say what it was - they'd be clear about what tests they conducted, how they were conducted, and what the results were. The fact that they're not being clear about those things and instead just strongly implying things indicates to me that actually they don't have anything and they were looking for an excuse to DQ some boxers, and now people like AJ are spreading lies based on it. And I think that's garbage.

I'm quoting available sources in search of the truth.

a) You haven't quoted a single source, I've had to dig them up by googling fragments of your sentences on my own

b) literally the very first claim I responded to, where you asserted "An Algerian biological male" was proven to be false by the source you were quoting so maybe you want to do a better job of reading something before you start quoting it on the internet.

Fair enough. Someone with XY chromosomes isn't a biological male. I think differently so we'll have to disagree.

I will note that someone with chimerism could have both XY and XX chromosomes without being intersex.

It could also result from contamination of the sample and/or the test.

I wonder if the statement will mention that Khelif was disqualified three days after defeating the otherwise-undefeated Russian boxer Amineva, who recovered her undefeated record after Khelif was disqualified [1]? Maybe it'll also cover why the IBA was banned from running Olympic tournaments after years of concerns about corrupt judging and ties to organized crime and drug trafficking, with one of the presidents on the US Sanctions list [2]?

Make sure you take those concerns about the source into account in your relentless search for truth.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/olympics-2024-khelif-russia-boxing-b53b1edda21139d14a572bd35ca440e6

[2]: https://apnews.com/article/63ec2033a9ce41518287747e06e048fb

I'm astonished at your trans-positive outlook of "If somebody looks like a man and talks like a man, they're a man"! I think it's being misapplied here, but that's a fairly progressive attitude for you to take and I think that pretty soon you'll be able to get to the point of supporting people's gender identity even before they have the gender-affirming care to modify their appearance in addition to their behavior.

IOC has a long history of coverups, but considering that exactly one source has alleged Khelif failed the tests and that source is distinctly not trustworthy, I'm going to go with "Khelif's long history of competing" over "Some random asshole on the internet.

You're relying on a test by a decertified organization that hasn't published details and doesn't make the claim you're asserting.

So if she has a female birth certificate and you've given up on insisting that she's trans, what exactly is the problem? She's a woman, competing in women's boxing - where else would you expect her to be competing, given that she's a woman and she's boxing?

I don't know what your paper is and honestly I'm pretty tired of trying to dig up your sources, but i would argue the IOC has already done plenty of questioning the validity of statements made by the IBA on account of decertifying them as a foundation trusted to run Olympic games, and saying "yeah, they sent us a letter, the entire situation should have never occurred" seems fine?

Edit: I'd also like to observe here that you're tacitly saying an individual can have genitalia of one form while being a different genter without it indicating mental illness. I'm confident you'll modify your rhetoric about trans individuals in the future now that your search for truth has brought you here - perhaps an apology is in order to any trans individuals you may have offended by falsly calling them mentally ill.

You know, I think you're right. I could have sworn I saw you call trans people "mentally ill" but I went and checked the threads I've been involved in and it was two other individuals, one in here and one in the drawn-out conversation about JK Rowling - for all that I disagree with you on basically everything, I misremembered that and it's not fair of me to accuse you of it. I'm sorry about that, and I'll try to be better about it in the future.

Of course! I can't very well argue in good faith if I'm not willing to admit when I'm wrong about something.

but i would argue the IOC has already done plenty of questioning the validity of statements made by the IBA

The IOC has it's own credibility problems.

I didn't understand that. Does that mean the subject has XY chromosomes plus chromosomes of some other configuration?

I take two things from the "different strands" comment assuming it's accurate.

1. Whatever testing was done was some form of DNA testing.
2. It strongly implies that they found two different DNA strands.

2 could result from poor testing protocol leading to a contaminated sample, but it could also result from the subject being tested being a chimera.

Identical twins result when a single fertilized divides into two separate embryos.

A chimera is the reverse. Fraternal twins merge into a single embryo.

Roberts said there were "different strands involved in that" and therefore the body could not commit to referring to Khelif as "biologically male".

So, intersex, possibly a chimera (merged twins). Interesting.

Or the IBA is making shit up because they wanted a reason to disqualify some specific boxers from a tournament. I wouldn't put a lot of stock into what Roberts says except to note that even Roberts isn't trying to make the bullshit claim that AJ is.

This

Both of them are women, and no evidence has been shown otherwise, please stop insulting them.

There's a theory that they have XY chromosomes, but no actual evidence. You're well aware of that, you're just being shitty. Please stop.

"The IOC didn't contest them" is the same argument as "Khelif and Ting didn't appeal the results and therefore have accepted them", and it's a bad one. Please stop being shitty. You're taking hearsay arguments from an unreliable source and holding them up as fact.

In your relentless search for truth, here - I found some reading for you: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/

> Patients: A 46,XY mother who developed as a normal woman underwent spontaneous puberty, reached menarche, menstruated regularly, experienced two unassisted pregnancies, and gave birth to a 46,XY daughter with complete gonadal dysgenesis.

It's not Khelif or Ting, but of course they're not going to get pregnant right now, they're in the middle of their professional boxing careers. Please stop being shitty.

If the chromosome test had found 46 chromosomes for either Khelif or Ting, it would surely have been reported. In any case, disqualifying them would still have been the moral thing to do.

I don't think that would be newsworthy: normally humans have 46 chromosomes. The 46th is the sex determining one.

> The IOC didn't contest the results because the science is irrefutable.

Back to making shit up. You have no insight into a) the IOC's motivations or b) what the specifics of the test are, so there's no way for you to say "the science is irrefutable".

> where the judge dismisses the two dozen bodies in the basement as evidence because the police didn't get a warrant first.

That's because there's no evidence the police didn't plant two dozen bodies in the basement - if they flouted the proper procedure to get evidence, a bunch of other things suddenly need to be called into question. Just like this scenario, in fact. Strange how that works.

> I believe biological women should have the right to fight their peers, not get beaten up by biological men. I guess you believe differently.

This is an incoherent position as soon as you examine it even a little bit. What is a peer? If testosterone levels is an advantage, then what about women who naturally have a higher level of testosterone than their opponent? We're not mass-screening fighters to class them based on t levels. What about other genetic advantages? I can't help but notice you're not getting upset when somebody fights a person who's three inches shorter than them, or has a shorter reach than them. Nobody's upset that the tallest people in 3v3 Basketball are failing to remove themselves based on "clear genetic advantages", it's only the women that have been falsely accused of being men where you're really invested in some incoherent idea of competitive integrity.

If testosterone levels is an advantage, then what about women who naturally have a higher level of testosterone than their opponent? We're not mass-screening fighters to class them based on t levels. What about other genetic advantages? I can't help but notice you're not getting upset when somebody fights a person who's three inches shorter than them, or has a shorter reach than them. Nobody's upset that the tallest people in 3v3 Basketball are failing to remove themselves based on "clear genetic advantages"

I do not believe that the two Olympic boxers at issue are biological men. I do not believe that they should be disqualified based on the information that is currently publicly available.

That said:

Do you believe that men have an unfair advantage over women when it comes to sports?

If the answer is no, why have separate women's sports at all?

The very existence of women's sports as a separate competitive category is predicated on the idea that in sports men have an unfair competitive advantage over women.

> Do you believe that men have an unfair advantage over women when it comes to sports?

I will decline to answer this question because I think you're phrasing it in an imprecise way - specifically, you're bringing up "unfair advantage" and in this sort of conversation, I think that term is pretty significant.

If you'll permit me to broaden your question a bit, I'll rephrase it as "Do men and women develop differently, and does that difference result in a difference in physical performance". And assuming you agree with that rephrasing, I can say that yes - men and women do tend to, on average, develop differently and that difference tends to, on average, result in a difference in physical performance. But that's just talking about averages - you can have two bell curves with peaks at different places, and there can still be plenty of overlap. If you're at the far end of the bell curve, you've got an advantage over people in the middle. Is that advantage unfair? If you didn't dope to get it, I don't know that fairness is really a meaningful metric to measure here. Is somebody having a different body more or less unfair than, I dunno, somebody having been coached since they were three? Somebody having a well rounded diet their entire life, instead of being nutritionally deprived as a child? Somebody suffering an injury due to training, and having it affect their performance? At some point you have to run what you brung, as the phrase goes. So sure, we can break people up based on what bell curve they fall into, but disqualifying somebody because being at the far end of it is unfair to the people closer to the middle is incoherent when the entire point is to find people at the far end of it.

If you didn't dope to get it, I don't know that fairness is really a meaningful metric to measure here.

If your position is using drugs to gain an advantage is unfair, you must oppose trans people participating in sports except in their biological sex. They have to use drugs to lower their testosterone levels and raise estrogen levels.

Lowering testosterone levels it the bare minimum to qualify a man to participate in women's NCAA sports.
It doesn't remove the massive advantage men have post-puberty. You can see the effects of puberty by looking at track & field world records. Boys and girls records are essentially the same until age 13. Then the boys' and men's records diverge significantly, especially in the strength and endurance events.

The participation of trans individuals in competitive sports is a different question that's completely irrelevant here and I'm not particularly interested in having that discussion right now, sorry.

Is that advantage unfair?

Yes.

The entire reason women's sports exist as a separate category is that it is considered unfair to force women to compete against men.

When the US Congress wrote Title IX covering sex discrimination in education they explicitly included provisions allowing sex segregated sports precisely because it was considered unfair to force women to compete in sports against men.

Saying that biological men should be allowed to compete in women's sport because there is no unfair advantage is necessarily saying that women's sports shouldn't exist at all. It completely destroys the justification for exempting sex segregation in sports from anti-discrimination laws.

I feel like you stopped reading after the sentence you quoted and especially completely ignored the last sentence of my comment, but okay sure go off.

And even according to the IBA, neither Ting nor Khelif failed a testosterone test, so the relevance here is pretty opaque to me.

That said, at this point you've ignored multiple pieces of scientific evidence that refute your position, so not only are you full of shit, you're also not debating in good faith. Again: Please stop being shitty. Please stop spreading shitty lies. Please stop arguing in bad faith. I had the good grace to apologize when I made a mistake, you should have the good grace to at least respond to evidence instead of making the same specious arguments over and over again.

They were born with vaginas. There are a lot of people - most who aren't trans - who have various ambiguities regarding sex - somewhere between 2 and 3 % of us are born with portions or pieces of genitelia internal to us, and we are unaware of it. There are many many medical issues that can get in the way of the sexual development of the fetus, and result in some ambiguity. Please research to topic - wikipedia is good. Most of them are completely unaware of it.

I was going to say, I am not sure about the escape part, but there were a number of female pirate captains.