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Legs will evolve to vestigial appendages. :)

1. Overwhelming support is irrelevant to the biology question - it's a sociological factoid that has zero bearing on any data that may confirm or disconfirm a significant difference in physiological capacity between trans and cis players. Thousands of athletes could support having trained poodles on stilts in the NBA -- that wouldn't be a compelling scientific case for poodle/human parity under the hoop. 2. "Minuscule advantage" assumes facts not in evidence and yet to be determined. It is sophistry. So are emotionally loaded phrases like the snarky "do-gooders." 3. There is no equivalence (or "similar in spirit") to the hideous stain of American slavery and subsequent Jim Crow regime to be found here. Millions of people will not find themselves in shackles, beaten, tortured, worked to early death, and hunted down by dogs, if it turns out that a few women with male skeletons and fast-twitch muscle fibers and lungs find themselves in a different league than they hoped for. These sorts of "similar" comments that bring in MLK and 400 years of brutal oppression are a bit insulting to people of color, IMHO. I welcome replies, but am basically done here.

I really wanted to click upvote more than once for that comment, Joigus. While I don't disagree with the many posts lauding teamwork and discipline and camaraderie, I live in a land of many couch potatoes who might do well to find some unity and rewarding discipline in the Using Your Own Legs as Transport Freestyle event. Instead we seem to have a nation of people passively waiting for electric cars, or whatever tech they think will fix everything.

Interesting related point in interesting article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/24/tokyo-olympic-sport-displacing-athletes David Goldblatt IOW: I'd rather see more people cycling to work than eating cheetos in front of the TV while they watch the Tour de France.

It's one of the things that grinds my gears. Another related one is the media's idea of "balance".Stuff like this "In todays show we will be talking about covid. On one hand, we will talk to Dr Bloggs- a professor of immunology and, by way of balance we will talk to Mr jones whose last job was at the back half of a pantomime horse prior to his sacking for incompetence." And then they give equal weight to the views of the failed horses' arse. (And you can guess which one agrees with the Republicans) It's a deliberate policy to undermine the importance of truth because, as someone pointed out "Reality has a well known Left wing bias".

No, you shouldn't stop, I agree. My POV was more that it might be useful to move on to how data might be gathered (this is a biology forum, my keen powers of observation disclosed to me this morning) that would address the question I have yet to see really answered here: if a man transforms into a woman, retaining deep lungs, heavy bones, and more fast-twitch explosive strength, will her new set of capacities be those of a very gifted woman (well and good) or will they be they be off the charts WRT to cis-women? Rather than just having the chat keep derailing as people strive to signal their goodness and empathy and progressive values, it would be nice to have some actual facts in hand to address the physiology part of the question. Not everyone who wants a straight answer to this has an Agenda. Sexual reassignment treatment/surgery is still a fairly new phenomenon on this planet, and curious people want to, for whatever reason, (sometimes it's just curiosity) have answers to such questions. If you traveled to another planet, where you had no stake whatsoever in their cultural beliefs, and were informed that some members of that society chopped off body parts and altered body chemistry in order to feel more truly themselves, I imagine that you would, without much guilt or deep self-reflection, want to know what was behind that practice. We can't any of us be that impartial, in this matter, because we live here on Earth and grew up with deeply acculturated assumptions about our bodies and what we do with them. I would wager that NOT ONE PERSON HERE, on first encountering the concept of sexual reassignment, before they had time to carefully compose their attitudes, was not knocked a bit off balance and perhaps even shocked. Acceptance of trans people will come when there's honest conversation about this and any question can be asked. JMO.

The following is probably a well known, scientifically based story, about a time when the Earth suffered an almighty blow. It is lengthy, very lengthy, and at the same time detailed, very detailed. I actually followed it by the audio reproduction, which I recommend to others. As I said, very detailed and descriptive, and for an amateur novice such as myself, some of it quite revealing. Hope all take the time to listen and/or read..... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died?itm_content=footer-recirc The Day the Dinosaurs Died: By Douglas Preston March 29, 2019 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: a small extract: On August 5, 2013, I received an e-mail from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via e-mail, if possible.” He gave me his cell-phone number and a time to call. I called, and he told me that he had discovered a site like the one I’d imagined in my novel, which contained, among other things, direct victims of the catastrophe. At first, I was skeptical. DePalma was a scientific nobody, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, and he said that he had found the site with no institutional backing and no collaborators. I thought that he was likely exaggerating, or that he might even be crazy. (Paleontology has more than its share of unusual people.) But I was intrigued enough to get on a plane to North Dakota to see for myself. DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek geological formation, which outcrops in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and contains some of the most storied dinosaur beds in the world. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. The land teemed with life and the conditions were excellent for fossilization, with seasonal floods and meandering rivers that rapidly buried dead animals and plants. Dinosaur hunters first discovered these rich fossil beds in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T. rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. It was also home to triceratops and duckbills. The Hell Creek Formation spanned the Cretaceous and the Paleogene periods, and paleontologists had known for at least half a century that an extinction had occurred then, because dinosaurs were found below, but never above, the KT layer. This was true not only in Hell Creek but all over the world. For many years, scientists believed that the KT extinction was no great mystery: over millions of years, volcanism, climate change, and other events gradually killed off many forms of life. But, in the late nineteen-seventies, a young geologist named Walter Alvarez and his father, Luis Alvarez, a nuclear physicist, discovered that the KT layer was laced with unusually high amounts of the rare metal iridium, which, they hypothesized, was from the dusty remains of an asteroid impact. In an article in Science, published in 1980, they proposed that this impact was so large that it triggered the mass extinction, and that the KT layer was the debris from that event. Most paleontologists rejected the idea that a sudden, random encounter with space junk had drastically altered the evolution of life on Earth. But as the years passed the evidence mounted, until, in a 1991 paper, the smoking gun was announced: the discovery of an impact crater buried under thousands of feet of sediment in the Yucatán peninsula, of exactly the right age, and of the right size and geochemistry, to have caused a worldwide cataclysm. The crater and the asteroid were named Chicxulub, after a small Mayan town near the epicenter. One of the authors of the 1991 paper, David Kring, was so frightened by what he learned of the impact’s destructive nature that he became a leading voice in calling for a system to identify and neutralize threatening asteroids. “There’s no uncertainty to this statement: the Earth will be hit by a Chicxulub-size asteroid again, unless we deflect it,” he told me. “Even a three-hundred-metre rock would end world agriculture.” In 2010, forty-one researchers in many scientific disciplines announced, in a landmark Science article, that the issue should be considered settled: a huge asteroid impact caused the extinction. But opposition to the idea remains passionate. The main competing hypothesis is that the colossal “Deccan” volcanic eruptions, in what would become India, spewed enough sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause a climatic shift. The eruptions, which began before the KT impact and continued after it, were among the biggest in Earth’s history, lasting hundreds of thousands of years, and burying half a million square miles of the Earth’s surface a mile deep in lava. The three-­metre gap below the KT layer, proponents argued, was evidence that the mass extinction was well under way by the time of the asteroid strike. In 2004, DePalma, at the time a twenty-­two-year-old paleontology undergraduate, began excavating a small site in the Hell Creek Formation. The site had once been a pond, and the deposit consisted of very thin layers of sediment. Normally, one geological layer might represent thousands or millions of years. But DePalma was able to show that each layer in the deposit had been laid down in a single big rainstorm. “We could see when there were buds on the trees,” he told me. “We could see when the cypresses were dropping their needles in the fall. We could experience this in real time.” Peering at the layers was like flipping through a paleo-history book that chronicled decades of ecology in its silty pages. DePalma’s adviser, the late Larry Martin, urged him to find a similar site, but one that had layers closer to the KT boundary. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Again, I advise listening to the "pleasing" audio of this lengthy story. A story that impressed me as a non scientist novice, on the beauty and logic of science and the scientific method. The story may be well known today [the article is from 2019] but the detailed description of the before time,the effects and after time are awe inspiring.

Interesting. I've known a number of people who cheated, but I didn't realize they also didn't masturbate.

That is a good summary and there is nothing in the paper to suggest anything of that sort and the link provided by op seems to be a random forum post that appears rather incoherent to me. Fundamentally non-neutralizing antibodies can increase protection (as the paper pointed out), which as a whole is a good thing, and from skimming the lit some papers suggest that they may provide more robustness against variants. Moreover, while it is true that ADE relies on non-neutralizing antbodies, it is not that they automatically cause it. The effects seems to be highly dependent on the virus and I think has been reported in HIV, Ebola and Dengue, but not in coronavirus infections for example. The single most important bit however is that any vaccine-related ADE would be detected in phase III trials, as they would manifest as vaccinated folks would then have a worse response to COVID-19 than unvaccinated folks. During the rollout we have even more and better data than pretty much any other vaccine and still there is no trace of it. So, no the paper does not indicate anything OP is suggesting, as others already pointed out.

Sorry, it's one of those subjects that winds me up.

OK. Thank you for the reply, though I could have done without the scathing sarcasm. I was interested in your comments and wanted to be sure I understood your thinking. Perhaps I'll take a remedial reading comprehension course.

I don't think anyone is suggesting we simply ban transgender female athlete's from competing in the female category, just because it doesn't seem fair. I'm certainly not advocating this even if the shape analogy gave this perspective. Its very clear that the situation is not simple, since it seems medical studies and evidence is currently limited. What I would like to see is that there is conclusive evidence to support in favour either argument. Once this is determined and accepted then the system either can remain as is or amended / expanded so as not to negatively discriminate against anyone It appears to me that we are all not being honestly objective, and we are allowing our opinions and feelings to be vented in our posts. I don't think this is a negative thing and I don't think it is suggesting any transphobia. It's not morally wrong to discuss gender identities, sexual differences, biological differences... in this way. But there is a distinction between these that should be recognised and not muddying the waters in regards to this thread. Can we all agree that there are biological differences between male and female? Because this should be the focus, since the question is do those biological differences equate to potential performance differences in sports? If they do, then are those differences significant enough to warrant an investigation into the advantage/disadvantages in potential performance... and would this have an adverse effect on the current system or would it make no difference? Sexual identity should be irrelevant to this study, since I can proclaim that I want to be identified as a woman and then compete against women in sports. This would be no different than me proclaiming I want to be identified as a child and then compete against children. What we need is hard scientific evidence to determine whether or not transgender women have a clear unfair advantage over cis-gender women in potential performance. Not opinions based on beliefs or culture.

Dogs doesn’t have sweat glands on their tongues just on their feet pads. That is why panting is the main form of loosing heat for them. They are also able to sense the minimally better physical circumstances in front of the fan, which helps to redistribute the exhaled moist and heat from around the dog and help a little the surface evaporation of the feet pads.

I didn't know that! Maybe they don't think it's as over as Kenney thinks it is. Speaking of which, US visitors and asylum-seekers, don't count on our infamous socialized health care if you're crossing into Alberta.

Hint : Measure in June, then in December, then consider a triangle.... Hint 2: Hipparchus did it first, albeit sloppily.

Well, no. That is incorrect. I share @beecee 's hesitancy to say too much, since that would be providing an answer in the Homework section. beeceee gave a nice clue - that also references why your post is incorrect - when he noted the lower case 'b' and 'c'. They are used to indicate something rather specific and it isn't that Proxima Centauri is a double star.

That’s what we’re stuck with, at the moment. It’s not my insistence, per se. Society either does this, or excludes the triangle from participation. Thank for saving me from having to post this. (and technically I dehumanized all humans, which is kinda the point of the analogy. reduced emotional/ideological baggage)

Give that lateral epicondylitis a chance to heal.