EDIT: whoa, their argument is against all LGBT players. I thought it was just about Transgendered females. No idea where they got the idea that a Lesbian would have an unfair advantage over a heterosexual female. Take the below commentary on the advantage that transgendered females have over typical females with that in mind.
Xiado said:
What the fuck does being transgender have to do with not being able to play a video game against players of their identified gender?
At first I thought this was ridiculously silly that they were distinguishing gender as if it were a physical sport. Just like you. But when I saw your post I suddenly remembered, males are known to have evolved an advantage in reaction time that is not overcome with practice (even comparing athletes).
Article comparing Olympic Sprinters' reaction times. [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026141] Interestingly enough, they started with a hypothesis that they had to retract (that changing the jump-start threshold would make the reaction times similar, instead they found that men still had the advantage by a fair margin).
Compilation of studies in a Clemson course regarding reaction time. [http://biae.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/lab/110/reaction.htm] The segment on differences by sex are below.
"Gender. At the risk of being politically incorrect, in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006). The last study is remarkable because it included over 7400 subjects. Bellis (1933) reported that mean time to press a key in response to a light was 220 msec for males and 260 msec for females; for sound the difference was 190 msec (males) to 200 msec (females). In comparison, Engel (1972) reported a reaction time to sound of 227 msec (male) to 242 msec (female). However, things may be changing--Silverman (2006) reported evidence that the male advantage in visual reaction time is getting smaller (especially outside the US), possibly because more women are participating in driving and fast-action sports. Spierer et al. (2010) reported that when male soccer players were compared with female lacrosse players, males were able to respond faster to both visual and auditory stimuli. They said that the male advantage was greatest when using visual stimuli. Botwinick and Thompson (1966) found that almost all of the male-female difference was accounted for by the lag between the presentation of the stimulus and the beginning of muscle contraction. Muscle contraction times were the same for males and females. In a surprising finding, Szinnai et al. (2005) found that gradual dehydration (loss of 2.6% of body weight over a 7-day period) caused females to have lengthened choice reaction time, but males to have shortened choice reaction times. Adam et al. (1999) reported that males use a more complex strategy than females. Barral and Debu (2004) found that while men were faster than women at aiming at a target, the women were more accurate. Bayless et al. (2012) found that when a choice reaction time task was made more challenging for rats by weak stimuli and distraction, male rats tended to "jump the gun" and make premature responses, but female rats were more likely to miss valid stimuli. Note that this study used rats, not humans. Jevas and Yan (2001) reported that age-related deterioration in reaction time was the same in men and women. "
So... I'm astounded to learn that men do actually have an advantage in certain types of games.
If league of legends requires rapid reaction times then they actually weren't necessarily wrong to claim this as an unfair advantage to have in a women's tournament. I've never played the game so I don't know how necessary reaction time is. Looks like a top-down RTS style game so I wouldn't think it'd matter that much but at a professional level? Maybe. I'm not the one to know. The primary question is how much of an advantage is reaction time (e.g. how do male teams fare against female teams at upper levels of competition)?
Wow, I learn something new every day. I was absolutely planning to come out of the gate ridiculing them for their decision but it appears that their caving to pressures was potentially at the expense of a level playing field. Maybe there are too few transgendered individuals playing it to make a difference? What's more is that actual skill can vary so much as to easily make the faster reaction time less important against a more skilled player.
We're in a delicate position where we (society) want transgendered individuals to be treated like the gender they identify as and with all the respect that demands while also knowing that they can never truly be physically the other gender unless science advances drastically beyond hormonal supplementation and surgical alterations. It's potentially unfair to ignore that they are different and intellectually dishonest. But I understand the conflict of interests in that we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or make anyone feel like something is wrong with them. But in all honesty, they represent a third or fourth gender/sex combination rather than one of the traditional binary representation.
