Rex Kerr
1 min readApr 16, 2023

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This is much better supported than Dan's very-low-evidence story, but you're missing a critical piece of information: what number of trans women competed in women's events, and what fraction of women who competed won a world title?

If you have a rare thing and another rare thing and a single instance of a doubly-rare thing, unless you have numbers it's hard to know what to think at all.

If, for instance, 1/3000 competitors were trans women but over the period in question there were only 180 world titles, we might think that this is consistent with (though it wouldn't demonstrate that) trans women having an advantage under the parameters set by the sports they are allowed to compete in. Alternatively, if 1/180 competitors were trans women but there were 3000 world titles, we might suspect that trans women actually had a disadvantage.

I haven't been able to find numbers myself, so I have no insight to add here, but if one wants to use evidence to support a position, this is a really important consideration.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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