Women's Cycling Champion is a Man

I debated putting this in sports, but it seems to be more appropriate for a social issues and current events thread.

Quote:

Rachel McKinnon, a Canadian-born philosophy professor, just beat every women (sic) aged 35-39 at this year’s Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) Masters Track Cycling World Championships ... despite being a biological male.

Note that in the photo accompanying the article, McKinnon does not appear to be presenting himself as a female, and the text makes it clear that he's operating with testosterone:

Quote:

But while pro-LGBT groups such as PinkNews are celebrating the news as a milestone for “equality,” critics argue that letting men who merely declare “womanhood” compete with actual women puts the latter at an unfair disadvantage. McKinnon spent part of his Sunday disputing the point on Twitter, arguing that “there's no relationship, in any gender, between endogenous testosterone and performance.”

So all those radio ads have been lying to me?:D

My take? This is going to be a thorny issue for sports and society. I don't doubt that elite male athletes can defeat elite female athletes in virtually every sport. You may think that few men would compete in a women's event; to a large degree that depends on the money involved. Women's tennis players make as much as men; some guy ranked 700th in the world on the men's side would probably vault easily into the top position on the women's tour. Especially if it doesn't require you to do any surgical changes or have hormone treatments.

To me, the whole point of having women and men compete separately is so that the women can experience the joy of winning or at least having a chance to win.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2P1BDmZ