this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Genuinely don't know how I feel about the "trans women in sports". On one hand, it is a valid concern for a recently transitioned player to compete in some events, but on the other, I can totally see younger girls see more women at i.e. the skatepark and it encourages them to give it a try too
Recreational sports should have no boundaries. When you get into professional sports, the topic becomes a lot more dicey.
I just don't get professional sports.
IMHO sports should only be for fun.
If you dont have professional sports, you end up with sports being dominated by rich kids, who can afford to not work and fully focus on the sports, while other athletes have to work full time still.
Sports are an entertainment for many people, and why should actors, musicians, comedians and other entertainers make a living, but athletes shouldn't, even though they have to put in the same effort and time?
Sports at the top level already are dominated by rich kids. Wealth is actually more likely to lead to athletic advantages than being a trans woman.
https://www.cces.ca/sites/default/files/content/docs/pdf/transgenderwomenathletesandelitesport-ascientificreview-e-final.pdf
Hmm, this link might be dead. Search for "Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport - Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport" and it should pop up.
More:
https://news.osu.edu/want-to-play-college-sports-a-wealthy-family-helps/
The Income Gap Is Becoming a Physical-Activity Divide https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/health/sports-physical-education-children.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
He's saying that athletes shouldn't exit at all, I think. Which might be an even worse take thb.
Especially when there's money on the line.
There's generally rules of the "have to be on HRT for X months" kind which is perfectly sensible: Your body doesn't change the second you come out, or decide to swallow pills.
Then, all the data we have says that middling athletes stay middling after transitioning, bad ones stay bad and great ones stay great, that's enough for fairness given that we don't disqualify Michael Phelps for being half fish. All those genetic advantages he has would carry over if he were to transition and he'd dominate the female league not because he transitioned but because he's a genetic freak.
If you think that people transition just to have an advantage I don't know what to tell you either. I'll believe it when I see Matt Walsh do it, on camera, under doctor's supervision. If that clown with all his hatred can't do it with ideological fuel then noone can.
Pills? There is HRT medicine which comes in pills?
Yes, I don't know about masc HRT specifically, but estrogen comes in many different forms - needles,gel and pills
T is injection / patch / gel only, no oral.
I’m not trans myself and don’t know anyone that is but from my background in powerlifting my guess is this is because basically any oral testosterone is brutal for the liver to break down and process
Ask any post menopausal woman. (estrogen pills)
Or teenage girl with acne. (anti androgen pills(sometimes))
Trans women take both.
Some T blockers, like spironolactone, can also come in pills, I believe.
Why wouldn't there be?
I fight people and have opinions!
Really depends on the sport. In non-professional fencing and HEMA, practice tends to be coed. Men and women tend to perform equivalently - really height is the biggest "biological advantage". More reach means more ability to hit an opponent before they hit you, and this goes the same for men and women. Sure, men can accelerate a bit faster and tend to be taller, women can plant their feet a little wider and tend to be more balanced and flexible - but these are just averages. Individual people vary wildly because biology doesn't give a shit about the categories we create to describe it. And strategy can make up for a lot of those things in ways that you really just can't with height discrepancies. We had to give our club's tallest member a shorter axe just to make up for the reach advantage when she fought people she stood a head above.
Dividing strictly based on AGAB is not an even playing field and I feel trans athletes only draw attention to what's already a significant problem in competitive sports. And once you get to a professional level, I understand there's more nuance, but a vast, vast majority of athletes are not professional and the issue is blown far out of proportion for them. Anyone pushing to enforce divisions in kids' sports via genital inspections has lost their goddamn minds.
Some people just like to inspect kids' genitals. Those are not the kind of people who should make these decisions, though.
i was in taekwondo as a kid. I was really good, imo. I competed at the national level and won several medals. But I still routinely got my ass handed to me on a silver platter by the women/girls I trained with whenever we'd spar.
In many combat sports like MT, BJJ, and MMA opinions are quite strong, and possibly rightly so when there is a risk of bodily harm. Some BJJ comps have put together rules where a trans person can enter their chosen division, as long as competitors agree to compete with them. That seems to be a common middle-ground, but still results in some people refusing and blocking that person from competing with their own gender. Some have just redefined the men's categories to "open" and lumped trans people into that category.
Frankly, what I would love to see is a fully funded study, and a commitment from sporting bodies to both follow that guidance AND to commit to future funding to repeat experiments.
How about just using the rules the Olympics have been using for fifty years for competitive sports that they came up with after doing a proper study into the issue, which is if your fully transitioned for more than two years you can compete.
For sports where there isn’t a pro industry and people arn’t getting paid to compete, like in schools, just let people do whatever they present as. The point is to have fun, not ban people for maybe having a quarter of a percent advantage. If it was then games like basketball would need to have height and weight classes. The whole reason we allow, much less spend money funding, sports in schools, parks, and community centers is for exercise and fun, not just to cater to the adults betting money on the results.
Why would sex be the only genetic advantage we normalize for? Welsh people tend to be taller than Italians, should there be an Italians-only basketball league that bans Welsh folk?
It's not. Boxing has weight classes because a heavyweight would snap a featherweight in half and some people literally can't reach heavyweight without going overweight.
kind of invalidates the whole "they have a biological advantage" argument then, doesn't it?
How?
by deciding arbitrarily that some biological advantages are just an inherent part of sports but others need to be regulated
How are they arbitrary decisions? The reason boxing has weight restrictions is because the heavier weight guy might actually kill the lighter weight guy, there's a clear health risk behind that decision. Same actually goes for a lot of fighting sports. And when it comes to sports like Tennis results have shown than men have a clear biological advantage over women, which is why women get separate tennis tournaments. And as a counter-example marathon running (at least to my knowledge) doesn't have male and female marathons, because there's no clear biological advantage for either sex.
Biological regulations tend to happen when there's either a health risk or an systemic advantage. If Usain Bolt has some magical leg muscles that make him one of the greatest (if not the greatest) sprinter of all time then that does not need regulating because that's just him, it's his natural talent. But if everyone can juice their body to make such magical leg muscles, then that needs to be regulated because it would give an unfair advantage against other people who wouldn't juice themselves.
And to take your Welsh vs Italians comparison to a more realistic example, world dwarf games exist and it contains basketball. There actually is a basketball tournament specifically for extremely short people. You thought the height thing would be silly, but it's actually a thing.
there is a clear health risk in all combat sports, but two big dudes are allowed to beat parkinson's disease into one another as are two small dudes. whether to draw a line at all and where to draw the line are arbitrary, even if you like the decision.
not only is marathon running divided by gender, but shrieking transphobes threw a fit about a trans woman "beating 14,000 real women" in the new york marathon when she actually came in at about the 6,000th place
chess is divided by gender. are you willing to defend the position that cis women can't think? if so, how do you defend the stripping of titles from trans men that were earned when they competed as women?
in the case of the dwarf olympics the difference is you're banning a characteristic of an individual athlete that gives an advantage, not categorically banning all athletes who could potentially have that characteristic.
In that case all societal lines are also arbitrary because it's not like there's some magical science that dictates with pure objectivity where the line is supposed to be. However there is still intent behind the weight classes, so I wouldn't call it arbitrary in the sense that they're drawn on a whim.
I didn't know that. I just know that my female friend can and has joined marathons that also have men running. As for the transphobe shrieking, fuck those guys.
I specifically left out chess because it doesn't have anything to do with physical abilities. Chess is divided by gender because some men are too much of an asshole to act civil around women. That's all. Also, I love how you try to put words in my mouth. Fuck you for that.
At no point did I say I'm against trans people competing. I just don't think there's enough empirical evidence to draw any conclusions and the whole process of transitioning has a lot of nuances that impact performance. I'm not saying anyone should get banned on a potential characteristic, but I will say that if for instance it becomes apparent that trans-women end up consistently out-competing biological women then there should be a line drawn unless women themselves are okay with this.
I'm not against people transitioning, I'm also not against them competing, but if they do start outperforming women (and to be clear, I am explicitly stating that there's not enough empirical evidence to say if they will or not) then I'm against them. The whole idea of womens leagues is for women to have an compete without having to deal with an obvious disadvantage (or sexism as the case with Chess). If transwomen end up being statistically better than biological women, then that puts biological women at an obvious disadvantage. If transwomen don't have any statistical edge then let them compete. So far it's not clear and if women don't have an issue with them competing then neither do I.
...I mean when you put it that way, it would be kinda funny if there was one
he
That sort of rhetoric always feels sexist to me. The implication is that trans women shouldn't compete since those with XX chromosomes have some sort of superpower that means they'll beat those with XX.
The quote "Trans women can compete in sports as long as they don't win." always stood out to me.
It's more about things like height, lung volume capacity and leg/arm length in certain sports. Not chromosomes.
so that's really what people should be grouped based on in these sports instead of gender.
Well it is more complicated than that. After puberty female bodies usually have more fat and less muscle mass, than similiarly trained male bodies. Also the metabolism and "energy management" of male bodies is more advantageous for most sports. Note of course that these are also spectrums, and women who train well outcompete men who don't.
So it does make sense to group athletes by gender too. But like somebody else said in this thread, there is no factual reason, why gender should be the only or the main grouping criteria.
all the things u list are still just individual factors, thst can be indicidually measured. gender does not play a role for them. make leagues based on these factors and not gender.
So how do you want to do it? I cannot see it as particularly inviting that athletes are grouped by body fat ratio, or needing an extensive medical analysis on how their metabolism performs.
Why not at the pro level?
I did sports semi professionally at some point. The people in my club who did so professionally were already fucked bad enough, with the anti doping agents having to know where they were at all times.
Imagine on top having very sensitive information from your medical records public. Imagine you are dropped out of the most prestigous top athlete bracket, because your body fat ratio increased half a percent too much after you had an injury.
Also imagine at say the swimming world cup there isnt just 2 dozen different competitions already seperated into men and women, but with another 4 subsections. These things also mean that the attention to the sports have to be spread among more people and outside of the popular sports that will drop many people out of attention and money spent on the sport.
Isn't that already a thing for sports with weight classes? Having fairer matches makes things more interesting in all divisions.
You don't even need more divisions. Just more precise ways of making them.
And a body that has significantly more testosterone, which helps with sports where raw strength is an advantage, like cycling, sprinting and swimming.
A healthy man's testosterone will vary around 8~29 nmol/L (nanomoles per litre), while a woman will have 0~2 nmol/L.
It's not that clear-cut as cis women with abnormally high testosterone levels are overrepresented in top level sports, to the point where competitions that tried to define the men's and women's groups based on testosterone levels end up with cis people on the wrong side of the line. Also, hrt for trans people is usually stronger than the natural hormone levels of a cis person of the same gender as it's meant to change their body rather than just maintain it, so the attributes that are more dependent on hormones typically overshoot.
What do you mean by this? My T levels have been in the average female range for more than five years now. I don’t even take blockers, estrogen + progesterone take care of it on their own.
I also never had male range T levels, they were always somewhere halfway between the two.
I mean I can see why some people feel like they are at a biological disadvantage here
I think Utah's governor, a Republican, actually put it best.
https://governor.utah.gov/2022/03/24/gov-cox-why-im-vetoing-hb11/
If it's such a big deal, why not separate by ability rather than sex? We already have weight classes in some sports. Make it so only people who exhibit a certain amount of strength or whatever is relevant to the sport can participate.
Because not all of us want to see an end to female professional sports. From athletics to contact sports to solo and team sports if we separate by ability this will guarantee women get even less space to compete at the highest levels.
But you can still be at the highest level in whatever category you're in. Just like when you separate by sex.
Everybody's talking about trans women in sport yet nobody's talking about transmen, which would close this topic once for all.