Guest post: The distinction between disproportionate advantage and category advantage

Apr 10th, 2023 | By Ophelia Benson
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Sackbut on We need to be asking “fair to whom?”

I think here again the distinction between “disproportionate advantage” and “category advantage”, as described by Jon Pike in his recent paper, become important. We don’t look at individual adults to see if they are within the skill capabilities of children before deciding whether these particular adults are allowed to participate in children’s sports, we have separate categories for children based on the idea that children have abilities and needs different from adults, and beyond that we don’t test any further. Age grouping is a category advantage. Sex grouping is also a category advantage.

NPR recently interviewed an endocrinologist (why not a sports physiologist?) who basically shrugged his shoulders and said “We simply don’t know” regarding trans athletes having an advantage against “cis” athletes, again missing the point. We do know that men have significant advantages against women, and we have sex grouping in sports partly (partly!!!) for that reason. It isn’t “trans versus cis”, but “men versus women”. They are arguing that men should be allowed to compete in the women’s division, but only those extra-special men who claim to be women, not other men. Some people are explicitly arguing that all sex divisions should go away, but most do not seem to realize that’s what they are arguing, ultimately.

One Response to “Guest post: The distinction between disproportionate advantage and category advantage”

#1
Sackbut
April 10, 2023 at 6:57 pm

Thanks for making this a guest post.

Pike uses the term “competition advantage” for those characteristics that help athletes win but are not placed in separate categories: Phelps’ webbing, height, weight (in sports without weight groups), handedness, and so on. He notes:

Our current understanding of sport rests on both category advantages and competition advantages. If there were no category advantages, sport would be a free-for all, and the winners would tend to be able-bodied men in their late twenties (mutatis mutandis). If there were no competition advantages and categories controlled for every advantage, there would be no competition at all, merely 8 billion categories, one for every human. From this, it might seem that the argument over trans inclusion is simply a matter of conventional agreement about what we should count as a category advantage and what we should count as a competition advantage. And, as the two extremes show, we could in theory eliminate all category advantages or all competition advantages, so the decisions that we make are, in one sense, a matter of convention. We can decide whether we consider an advantage to be a category advantage or a competition advantage.

I think this is very sensible framing.

Pike mentioned that there are proposals for doing away with lightweight rowing, and actual proposals for doing away with sex divisions, something that to me seems implied by the rhetoric of “trans inclusion”. Both of these would convert a category advantage to a competition advantage.