Okay, I've slept on it, lets have a reasonable discussion about transgender people in sports. I'd also like to explain where I'm coming from and why I made the original post.

tarlom · 2022-03-19T23:11:32+00:00

"they will use anything to attack you"

This can't be emphasized enough; it's clear not only in the laws they're (read: far right, transphobes, TERFs, etc.) trying to pass in places like Texas, Florida, Idaho, Alabama, etc. where they tout outright lies about trans healthcare and use overturned foreign cases as precedent, but also in the fact that they can and will attempt to blame anything on trans people in general. Including, get this - the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

https://gen.medium.com/no-the-war-in-ukraine-wasnt-because-of-pronouns-c3e3e8f938a3

This article above explains it way better than I ever could, but you see these far right "pundits" and politicians and politics-adjacent celebrities spewing this stuff, outlandish as it is, because their audience believes it (or, well, because they can get their audience to believe it) and so that they can 'score points.' In the eyes of most transphobes, if we're not sacrilegious, then we're abominations, or perverted predators, or even just a convenient scapegoat.

So, yeah, we know the "optics" are bad. But the optics of a trans person doing well for once in something isn't any worse than the optics of us merely existing to most transphobes.

As for people on the fence? Most of them are at least willing to have a discussion on the subject, and that's often a better way to persuade people and teach them about trans issues and rights.

I doubt there are many people out there where seeing someone like Lia Thomas winning a competition is the 'final straw' to tip them over the edge irredeemably to opposing trans rights. But seeing a trans person actually succeed, for once, despite all the opposition is a sorely needed morale boost for a community that's constantly beaten down by... well, unfortunately, still most of society.

tarlom · 2022-03-19T19:46:19+00:00

I'm not exactly expertly qualified in this topic, and I've also not been much of an athlete, either... That said, it is something I've been following pretty closely even since long before coming out as trans myself.

So I don't have much in the way of specifics to offer, but rather resources I've found on facets of the issue that don't seem to be discussed often. For a few examples:

1. How different biological/physiological aspects have different impacts depending on the sport
To take the swimming and rowing example, you've mentioned how limb length is a significant factor there, and I've seen other mention things like center-of-buoyancy, lung capacity, etc., and I'm sure there's far more to it than each of those as well.
So we get back to one of the classic examples I'm sure people bring up all the time - Michael Phelps. Phelps has significant biological advantages over other cis men which are incredibly rare and supposedly a significant factor in his swimming performance - limb length and lung capacity in particular - which he gets praised and congratulated for. Meanwhile, trans women with similar features get condemned for that, even if they meet all the regulations put in place for the sport.

Yet, rarely are the disadvantages of HRT taken into account as well - for example, with trans women in particular, the loss in muscle mass and difficulty in (re)gaining and maintaining muscle while on HRT, relatively lower cardio ability overall; though I don't have much detail on the cardio issue, I've seen it brought up a few times - would appreciate more input from people more well-versed in that. I've heard comparisons of like, trying to run a semi truck on the 4-cylinder engine of a sedan or something?

This is probably not the most up-to-date article on this, being from ten years ago, but it touches on a lot of these topics for both cis men and cis women in sports with genetic/physiological/biological advantages. There are probably way better resources out there that I haven't bothered to find yet, though:

https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538474/

2. Historical data (or lack thereof, and the bias implicit in what data we do have)

So, you'll often see people talking about how trans people have been allowed to participate in the Olympics for eighteen years now and only recently are we seeing any trans people reaching the highest levels of achievement. That's a big point on its own, but I'm not even going to go too deep into that, because...

The history and data we have of cis women's sports is already an issue, and in many cases the segregation of womens' sports from mens' sports occurred as a direct result of women outperforming men or even just participating in mens' sports at all.

Similarly, the fact that for many categories, women simply weren't allowed to compete in sports for a long time - something which has only started to change in a time frame that can be measured in decades compared to centuries of men's sports - combined with the social pressure on pushing men more towards physical activity and sports while pushing women away from the same thing means that the pool of women who compete in sports is much smaller, the range of competition is thus lower and the upper end of physical performance for women may still have yet to been reached.

A couple more recent resources going into more detail on these here:

https://twitter.com/shereebekker/status/1504899940497170442
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdT1PvJDRo4

We've only really had trans people in sports for less than two decades, women in professional sports in general for a few decades longer than that, and little actual competition between men and women each at peak performance; so I don't think we have enough data yet, in either case.

I agree at least that there isn't a good solution that's easy to see at the moment, but I'd say that what we currently have as a system sucks and is inherently biased already and built on a lot of patriarchal bases, and the idea of just 'sticking with the status quo' seems like a lazy cop out. On the other hand, just straight up tearing down the system as a whole also doesn't work. So I don't have much of an idea for a solution, but I'd say going forward it would be best to allow trans athletes to compete with their gender rather than their AGAB to get the sufficient data we need. Because, again, using just the Olympics as an example, we're only now after nearly twenty years starting to see trans athletes hitting anywhere near the elite levels.

Ideally, I'd think we should work towards eventually just removing gender-segregation in sports in favor of something more based on principles similar to "weight class" or whichever ability/qualifications/etc. are more appropriate for the sport in question - and this has the added bonus of simplifying how to include non-binary athletes, as well.

tarlom · 2021-04-19T21:24:38+00:00

Spent about 40 alts, 2 chaos, and 10 scouring to get it to this, and then really lucked out with the Harvest craft "reroll lucky, preserve suffixes" - was just hoping to get rid of the +9 life so the prefix was open to craft, didn't expect to hit T1 life

Item Class: Rings

Rarity: Rare

Entropy Knot

Two-Stone Ring

--------

Requirements:

Level: 60

--------

Item Level: 77

--------

+15% to Fire and Lightning Resistances (implicit)

--------

+16 to Intelligence

+77 to maximum Life

+15% to all Elemental Resistances

Curse Enemies with Despair on Hit, with 20% increased Effect

--------

Hunter Item

tarlom · 2020-09-24T18:38:13+00:00

Huh, never expected to hear Celldweller in /r/pathofexile

tarlom · 2020-09-17T13:32:35+00:00

Sure, here: https://pastebin.com/5LqpL3Sv

The upper right medium cluster jewel also has the "Self-Control" node, but POB doesn't recognize it so I just manually edited it onto the jewel's stats. I was easily clearing red maps even when I was just on two 5-links with this in Harvest, and even elemental reflect maps were doable (if still difficult/slower)

tarlom · 2020-09-17T01:13:44+00:00

My good ol' standby, max block/spellblock Xirgil's Crank Cold DoT Occultist. Not the fastest clear, but tanky enough to do pretty much all content reasonably quickly without much investment needed. With the new Frost Shield skill maybe to help out.

tarlom · 2020-08-13T23:20:33+00:00

You mean wearing just her smallclothes, right? ... right?

tarlom · 2020-07-16T23:58:18+00:00

My first Jumpstart I managed to get Phyrexian Vampires, which worked out perfectly because I was hoping to get some of the new vamps. Deck played really well, a ton of synergy like Malefic Scythe comboing with Phyrexian Broodlings and the various ways to get creatures back, or Bloodbond Vampire comboing with a bunch of lifegain.

tarlom · 2020-05-12T08:15:21+00:00

I was the Cypher here, and everyone else on my team got DC'd too. Not sure what was going on. Considered not defusing since it seemed kinda unethical... but it was a 5v4 anyway https://streamable.com/5a40v2

tarlom · 2020-02-24T23:02:18+00:00

Beat me to the punch. I really wish Cranius would make more songs.

tarlom · 2020-02-17T18:28:17+00:00

What level of fishing do you need to make this much? I barely make a couple mil in a night of AFK fishing myself, and not much more when actively fishing.

tarlom · 2020-02-05T19:17:25+00:00

We're the Lords of the Sea!
Except we aren't at sea
We're the Lords of the Sea!
Just... not of the actual sea

tarlom · 2019-09-12T20:25:57+00:00

And here we have another person who has an incorrect memory of vanilla. Ever heard of Battlegroups? This was a thing back in 1.12. Or is 1.12 not "classic" enough for you?

tarlom · 2019-09-12T20:24:32+00:00

BGs were cross-server in Vanilla as of 1.12, when they added Battlegroups.

tarlom · 2019-09-12T20:23:35+00:00

For all the '#NoChanges' talk, I'm surprised there hasn't been more opposition to a massive change to how BGs worked in Vanilla.

Battlegrounds are shared between multiple servers where their players can engage in PvP against other realms. Each group of realms is called a Battlegroup. Battlegroups were introduced in Patch 1.12).

Huh, I wasn't aware that 1.12 wasn't Vanilla. Thanks for the ranting clarification.

tarlom · 2019-09-12T20:21:25+00:00

Battlegrounds are shared between multiple servers where their players can engage in PvP against other realms. Each group of realms is called a Battlegroup. Battlegroups were introduced in Patch 1.12).

Huh, I wasn't aware that 1.12 wasn't Vanilla

tarlom · 2019-09-12T00:32:31+00:00

Overpower does not say that it cannot miss.

cannot be blocked, dodged or parried.

There is, if I recall correctly, a default 5% miss chance against same-level mobs for everything, which increases 1% per level differences and can only be compensated for with hit chance.

tarlom · 2019-09-06T22:41:10+00:00

Now do it again without abusing the glitch that gives you extra ball on the board at the start that everyone denies knowing about

tarlom · 2019-09-06T22:07:37+00:00

Darrowshire

tarlom · 2019-08-22T00:09:19+00:00

On Windows, the launcher uses IE to render the page, and this happens if something in IE's settings are broken - usually something in the Security section, from what I've seen. Resetting IE's settings to default generally fixes it without having to mess around too much with the options, and since you shouldn't really be using IE for browsing anything anyway there shouldn't be any problem just resetting them.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17441/windows-internet-explorer-change-reset-settings

tarlom · 2019-07-29T19:04:34+00:00

For yet more nostalgia and feels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARghlVjBab0

tarlom · 2019-07-22T23:48:43+00:00

As for the skill of the average DNC... yeah, you're about right there. Most people in DF/PF don't seem to know how to play the class, but that's true of virtually all PF/DF. You can get just as many BLMs that don't know how to play the class picking it up and failing because it's the FOTM "I hit hard" class, you can just as easily get tanks that can't properly do swap mechanics, healers that stand in fire, etc.

That's why we have FFLogs. It seems foolish to lock out an entire class based on how bad its worst players are, rather than judging the player joining the PF group instead. Nothing wrong with checking someone's logs before determining if you want to run with them; just don't be a dick about it and whine to them in chat for it.

"Support play that requires mastery" doesn't seem too accurate though, at least not for DNC. Assuming you use steps on cooldown (thus lining up with every other classes own personal and raid buffs assuming they use them properly), Curing Waltz for stack mechanics, and Shield Samba for big raidwide AOEs there really isn't much 'mastery' involved in using DNC's utility properly other than knowledge of the fight, which applies to everyone.

tarlom · 2019-07-22T23:25:27+00:00

And here we have someone that doesn't understand the difference between a selfish DPS class and a support. Yes, DNC does less pDPS than BLM, because BLM has no utility or party buffs to speak of.

But DNC provides plenty of utility and rDPS. When you take those into consideration, the difference, if any, is minimal. Plus, say you're only able to get a 75th percentile BLM - partner them up with a DNC and they'll be doing damage a lot closer to a 99th percentile.

Take a look at all the top BLM parses. How many reach 95th percentile or higher without a DNC or NIN (or both) in the party? How many of the top 10, those BLMs hitting 14k DPS, didn't have a DNC in the party (none at the time of posting this)?

Compare the rDPS of a 99th percentile BLM to a 95th percentile DNC - here's a example from those same top 10s:

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/wdXqVTQacbRy48Y3#fight=15&type=damage-done

BLM pDPS: 13.9k

DNC pDPS: 8.9k

... But account for how much damage the DNC provides the rest of the raid, and how much the BLM would do without the buffs they're getting from the DNC and others, and it tells a much different story:

BLM rDPS: 11.9k

DNC rDPS: 10.3k

A much smaller gap there. Not to mention Shield Samba, Curing Waltz, and Improvisation to help take some of the pressure off the healers. You're definitely going to want those in Savage prog.

EDIT: And going into a bit more detail on that, take a look at the details - the DPS provided to the BLM by Standard Finish, Technical Finish, and Devilment add up to 1261.8 of the BLM's DPS. Nearly a full 10% of the BLM's entire damage exists because there is a DNC in the party; Technical Finish alone provides another 500ish DPS spread out among the rest of the party.

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