mathematics wrote:
timbasile wrote:
B_Doughtie wrote:
Has anyone in the sport ever competed in an AG that they biological aren't? Like has a 40 year old ever asked/demand that regardless of the birth certification, they identify as a 26 year old? Is that next?
These are two separate things. Age is based on a verifiable date on a calendar. As much as someone would like to identify as someone younger than them, you cannot change nor dispute the day of your birth.
Gender and even sex are different. They can be messy. And while most of us fall into one of two identifiable and self-identified categories and have done so since birth, there are those who either do not fit into either category or identify as a category different than how they were initially labeled at birth. This applies to both sex and gender.
I won't dispute that trying create categories for sporting competition is an easy task - but at least we can agree that age is different than sex and gender?
I'll take the bait.
Age is a spectrum in the same way that gender is a spectrum and sex is a fixture. Sex can be defined by the genes and biology inside of your body and cannot be changed. Gender can be defined as the actualization of those genes and biology into a real-world output that usually aligns in a predictable way with biological sex, but in the case of a transgender person it does not. Something unique to them has caused their lived experience to be that of a person who's gender is not congruent with their biological sex, be it hardship, trauma, happiness, or anything else, and it is not our place to tell them what gender they are.
Biological age can be defined by the length of time genes and biology have been inside of your body and cannot be changed. Racing age can be defined as the actualization of those genes and biology into a real-world output that usually aligns in a predictable way with biological age, but in the case of a non-linear-aged person it does not. Something unique to them has caused their lived experience to be that of a person who's age is not congruent with their time based age, be it hardship, trauma, happiness, or anything else, and it is not our place to tell them how old they are.
I'm being facetious but people obviously do 'age' at different rates over the same timespan, and that has never been a valid reason to include them in a different competitive age group.
On the age front, you can't measure this in any objective other way but the date on your birth certificate. If you want to develop a telemere based measurement, fine - but these biological age based markers are all influenced by exercise, which might defeat whatever classification you'd be trying to achieve anyway.
Sex isn't as clear-cut as you make it sound. I know we were all taught about XX and XY in school but its far more complicated than that. So what about XXY? Or those with androgen insensitivity syndrome - those who are XY but cannot process testosterone and therefore outwardly appear and be labelled at birth as female? Obviously we're not going to do DNA tests before every turkey trot.
My point is that sex and gender are both far from clear cut, no matter how you slice it. Age, on the other hand, is a very clear and objective measurement.