You Can't Make This Up! Algorithms Suggested for Evening the Gender Playing Field

October 31st, 2019 10:00 AM

One clearly does not need to be in the concussion protocol to demonstrate how utterly foggy their minds are about things that matter. Take Christie Aschwanden, a writer for Wired, whose grasp of the controversy surrounding transgenders in sports defies explanation. She raves about the success of males in women's sports and promotes a handicap system that would use an algorithm to account for physiological, social and socioeconomic considerations to even the playing field among genders.

Aschwanden starts out her bizarre post by announcing that "Transgender athletes are having a moment. At all levels of sport, they’re stepping onto the podium and into the headlines." No kidding, Sherlock!

The performances of men dominating women's sports "are inherently praiseworthy—shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort," Aschwanden says.

No, there's nothing "praiseworthy" about males Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood breaking 15 state records in Connecticut girls' high school track and field or male Rachel McKinnon winning world championships in cycling or male U. of Montana runner June Eastwood (seen in center of photo above) winning the Big Sky Conference Female Athlete of The Week in Cross Country. This is what men do when they masquerade under the guise of femininity ― a reality Aschwanden can't get her arms around. She writes:

"Nowhere are the debates around transgender rights as stark as they are in sports, where the temptation to draw a hard biological line has run up against the limits of what science can offer. The outcome, at least so far, is an inconsistent mix of rules that leaves almost nothing resolved."

No. This is a matter of Aschwanden running up against the not-so-hard line of reason.

Alison Heather, a physiologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, tries to help steer Aschwanden back onto the rails ... but only briefly. She says that, though men's athletic performances generally decline as their testosterone is blocked, males maintain bigger bone structure, greater lung capacity, larger heart size and muscle memory: "an ability to regain muscle mass after a period of detraining—by increasing the number of nuclei in muscles, and these added nuclei don’t go away. So transgender women have a heightened ability to build strength even after they transition."

Then Aschwanden takes us into the Twilight Zone. She suggests a solution for these issues that can only be described as "interstellar."

Heather and far-out-there colleagues published an essay in the Journal of Medical Ethics devising "a handicap system that uses an algorithm to account for physiological parameters such as testosterone, hemoglobin levels, height, and endurance capacity, as well as social factors like gender identity and socioeconomic status.

“Such an algorithm would be analogous to the divisions in the Paralympics, and may also include paralympians. Instead of two divisions, male and female, there would be multiple ones and 'athletes would be placed into a division which best mitigates unfair physical and social parameters.' The algorithm would need to be sport-specific, and Heather and her colleagues acknowledge that producing it would be a difficult task."

This is the stuff that passes for writing in scholarly journals? And it's the solution for women getting "erased" by psychologically confused males? You can't make this stuff up!