I'm sorry, but one can only believe it's cheating for trans women to compete in women's sports if one does not believe they are women. That is a bigoted opinion, and I beg of you all to revisit it.

(Also, if you don't know what intersex means, or how much of the population is estimated to be intersex without looking it up, please avoid commenting on this - your opinion is unwarranted and not needed).

This will only end badly. It will end with genital screenings and the resulting fallout from how poorly handled that will be.

It will end with a whole lotta people who THINK they're XX women or XY men learning that they're intersex from a sports test.

If you think that even one instance is too many, congrats, I bet you think voter ID fraud is plaguing American elections as well.

By the way, OSM is floating the idea of doing genetic testing for future participation, and some other sports organization are rallying to do the same.

Gender expression is just as incidental.

Statistically speaking, there is no one competing in high-level athletics who is pretending to be a different gender in order to win the sport. The only examples I've found are of misogynistic trolls, and even if they were serious, there's too few to matter.

Let's be clear: if you are an athlete or a fan of a sport, you should understand that there are people simply born with advantages in the sport. We don't cry about taller people who are better at basketball, or kids who grew up skating on Minnesota lakes being better at hockey.

Maybe this is because Weightlifting, at least in the US in 2021, had more progressively-minded people than Strongman does today. (I find this unlikely, since both sports are wildly niche and small)

More likely, I think it's an example of how bigoted far-right scapegoating has just become standard.

There was a little of this with Hubbard, but it was more mixed, with more respectful dialogue mixed in with the garbage.

This is near-total, and it's extremely disturbing.

That said, the discourse on this subject has been even worse than what floated around for Hubbard. The front page of the Google search for "World's Strongest Woman 2025" is 100% filled with media outlets that call Booker "a man," "a biological male," or "a man claiming to be a woman."

We can start with acknowledging a fact: she did break the rules.

OSM guidelines do say that an athlete is supposed to compete in the category corresponding to their sex "assigned at birth."

This is a bad rule for separate reasons, but Booker did violate it, and we do no favors by ignoring that.

Rot in Piss, James Clayton Dobson Jr.

I don't believe that there's a hell anymore, and for the sake of your eternity, your last hopes should have been that I'm right.

If any man in the name of any cause other than God was at the root of so many beaten, bloodied children, so much cruelty in the name of hateful traditionalism, he would be rightly reviled next alongside the most brutal of dictators.

Oh hell yeah! I can't wait to see it painted.

It's up to you to decide if that's worthwhile to you. I generally don't even ask the questions unless I'm decently sure the person can answer them. Rarely am I disappointed, and the only people offended are those whose opinions aren't worth my energy anyway.

If you begin employing this, you will find that you engage in far fewer pointless, angry debates.

If you begin employing this at family gatherings or your Internet forum of choice, and literally asking these questions, you will be told you are being condescending and disrespectful.

Five minutes of Wikipedia reading is enough to get the gist.

If someone can't do that, it doesn't make them stupid or bad, but it does tell me that they don't know enough of the basics on these subjects for us to have an intelligent conversation, or for them to have an opinion worth my time.

I don't need essays on these subjects. A short paragraph, a minute or two of summation - that's all.

Anyone who has done basic learning on these subjects and consumed research beyond the spirals of opinion content on every side designed to profit on your outrage should be able to do this.

I don't debate Israel with anyone who can't summarize the before/during/after of the Six-Day War without looking it up. I don't debate immigration with anyone who can't tell me what happened after Reagan signed IRCA in 1986 off the top of their head.

This goes for whether or not they share my views

This ironically applies very well regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum. If you consider yourself an intelligent person with well thought out beliefs and ethics, why do you engage with people you have good reason to believe haven't done their research?