This is exactly the contention I think is incorrect. For this to happen, these men would have to be never be out in public in any way except presenting as women. They couldn’t let anyone know in private who might out them as male. It would not remotely be easy to do.
Throw in what we tend to do now, which involves at least some hormonal testing, and ideas such as requiring testosterone blockers for at least two years, and it seems even less likely that any men or boys would be willing to put up with it. Low testosterone in men is a medical issue that you get treated because it causes depression, after all.
It doesn’t feel good to try an transition if you don’t wind up feeling at least gender euphoria. If you don’t feel female, having your testosterone blocked feels bad, and having estrogen feels bad. Heck, having to pretend to be female can feel bad, creating the same dysphoria many trans people feel.
This isn’t like they can just cross dress for a bit. You’ve got to be pretty committed to actually transition. If a biological male does so successfully, I’m not sure they weren’t actually trans women in the first place.
I’m just highlighting the relative difference. Yes less than 1% of teen aged girls and young women are trans girls.
But elite level cis girl and young cis women athletes (no where near one out of one to two hundred girls are elite level athletes) who could possibly be competing against a trans girl at that level (so multiply by the number of trans girl athletes times those with elite level skills) and would lose due to some unfair disadvantage (which is theoretically possible but not firmly established as fact)? I’ll grant could happen but many many orders of magnitude less. The latter is small on a whole different level of small.
I guess that depends if we care if the top cisgirls have a chance for the top spot in results. Many of those cisgirls work very hard to finish in the top 3, but a typical cisboy can easily beat the top cisgirl. On a normal HS team, the top cisgirl will have a time in the mid-pack of the cisboys. At the state meet, the top cisgirl might finish behind the 30th cisboy. I agree that the mid-pack cisgirls aren’t really going to be affected if they drop a spot, but the top cisgirls are going to be affected at not being able to have a chance at the top spot. The obvious rebuttal is that some cisgirls are very fast and can come in and take the top spot from the other cisgirls, but the margin between a very fast cisgirl and a regular fast cisgirl is not really that big of a jump compared to a regular fast cisboy and a regular fast cisgirl, which would be the common comparison.
Right, it makes zero difference to the ordinary, mid-pack cisgirl. She has no shot of finishing first, even if she works her ass off to the exclusion of everything else. It only matters, even a little, to the top girls in each sport.
I’d guess that the number of “top girls in a sport” is comparable to the number of total transgirls. And most of those transgirls won’t be top athletes, they will also be mediocre athletes, even with whatever advantages they might have gotten from a male puberty.
Male puberty does not make you coordinated, or have good aim, or…
(Using “male” & “female” in this post to avoid tedious switching between [boys or men] and [girls or women]. No hostility is meant thereby.)
@BigT may have the real answer. The fake transfemale of whatever age isn’t really an issue, either in the pros or in the NCAA leadup to the pros. The benefits just won’t wash for substantially all athletically inclined bio-typical males.
As to the mini-debate between @puzzlegal & @DSeid about the relative harms, I’ll suggest that the relative headcounts of athletically inclined top end bio-typical females vs athletically inclined transfemales are broadly similar; the far larger majority of bio-typical female recreational athletes won’t be affected.
All the difference occurs at the very top and, by elimination vs roster / class size, at the very bottom.
But I will suggest that having a reservoir of “testosterone poisoned” transfemales available to swoop in and capture the top spots of bio-typical female sports will have a disproportionately chilling effect on those top level bio-typical female athletes. It’s similar to going to a competition where you know the refereeing is biased in favor of the other team. Your hoped-for victory can be snatched at any time for a bad reason beyond your control. I think the overall chilling effect will be much more far-reaching than the actual headcount of transfemales entering any given female sports program.
We finally, after 50 years of trying, are getting real traction on widespread female involvement in recreational, NCAA-level, semi-pro and even pro sports. That’s a wonderful thing. I’m NOT suggesting that allowing transfemales into that world will destroy it. I am suggesting there is more to consider than simply the interest of the individual transfemales wanting into that world.
From an athletic performance standpoint, I don’t see how it makes a difference between a someone faking being trans and someone sincerely being trans. A sincere trans person may choose to not undergo any medical transitioning or procedures, so they may have the same athletic ability regardless of how they identify. I think it’s still meaningful to have the gender sports be for people who are sincere in their gender identity, but it’s not necessarily the case that someone who identifies as a gender will take steps to biologically match the hormonal and body profile typical to that gender. So in terms of thinking how gender specific sports can incorporate trans athletes, the assumption should be that the trans athlete may be undergoing any range of medical transitioning from none at all to everything possible.
Self-identification is not accepted in any top-level professional sport.
Probably similar conditions will be set for lower levels of sport as well.
e.g.
International Olympic Committee
Transmen (FTM):
shall be permitted to compete in the male category of International Competitions upon production of a sex recognition certificate or other form of identification of sex confirming that he is recognized in law as a male (passport, identity card, etc.) and provided that he is otherwise eligible to compete in accordance with the Rules and Regulations.
Transwomen (MTF):
requires documentation of surgery and notification to IAAF
consultation with a panel of medical experts
endocrine assessment
Full list here:
The good news is that International Quidditch Association allows people to self-identify as any gender they like!
There isn’t. My original point, which @BigT has convinced me was bogus, was that fake transwomen in large numbers could overrun the upper reaches of many/most of the high profile women’s sports that have scholarships and lead to (semi-) pro careers. And that the fakers would far outnumber the real transwomen. Which would be a perverse outcome for a well-intentioned move by the Biden administration.
That just leaves the sincere transwomen. You’re right that they may be anywhere from utterly male except mentally to as hormonally transformed to femaleness as current tech permits. So the performance advantages may still remain, most especially for those at the former end of the transformation spectrum.
If they are a small enough number in toto, then we can deal with this at a more personal balance-of-benefits level rather than with “what if everybody did this?” type thinking. At which point the benefits from allowing the transfolks to compete in the gender they identify with becomes the more compelling interest.
I want to dig into this a little more. If several states already have no requirements (I’m assuming arguendo that this is true), we should have some data already. Rather than cherry-pick the data, let’s look at it overall.
In order to look at it, we need some specifics.
-Which states already have no requirements?
-For how long have they had no requirements?
-Over a period of several years, what percentage of girls’ statewide high school sports champions were cis, and what percentage were trans?
-How does that compare to percentages of competitors?
-How often are the top two slots both transgirls?
There may be other relevant stats; I’m not trying to engage in a “victory through impossible cite demand” tactic here. But if we’re supposed to believe that a swarm of testosterone-poisoned transgirls are going to swoop into girls sports and render cisgirls irrelevant, it’d be nice to base this terrifying prediction on something besides a lawsuit from a disaffected family or two.
I don’t see any kind of medical requirements standing up to non-discrimination lawsuits from the EO and similar legislation. That’s influencing how I view the situation. It seems explicitly discriminatory to have the requirements to participate in women’s sports have as a condition meeting biological standards equivalent to genetically XX athletes.That seems like an unfair burden to apply to genetically XY athletes. Even if sports have these requirements now, the EO and other non-discriminatory actions seem like they will mean that such requirements will not be upheld in the future.
So I see this leading to a future where there needs to different classes or categories of women sport to account for these vastly different athletic abilities. Similar to how wrestling went from everyone in one category to weight classes, women’s sports may go from one category to categories based on ability. Right now it seems we are stuck in the mentality of having trans athletes compete in the existing categories, but that is going to be problematic in the same way as weight differences are in wrestling. If most wrestlers are within a small weight range, then classes aren’t necessary (e.g. everyone about 150 pounds). But then if a 300 pound wrestler comes along, it doesn’t make sense to just have that person compete with the other 150 pound wrestlers. And the other side of having a 300 pound person wrestling 150 pound people is that the bigger wrestler is not experiencing the satisfaction of true competition. So I see this as trying to figure out how we have women competing together when one group of women are statistically in the range of genetically XX people, while another group of women is several standard deviations higher in athletic ability. Just throwing them all together to fight it out doesn’t seem like a good solution for either group.
Is this based on what’s actually happened in states that (again, arguendo) have no requirements? Or is it based on a chain of glorious logic unsullied by mere facts?
I feel bad belaboring, well even having to belabor the point, but it is an extremely important one I think.
We have a very good sense of the numbers of transgirls - somewhere between 0.5 to 1% of all girls and young women, possibly higher given that the number of individuals born male who have some period of trans-identification that does not persist into pubertal ages is significant. Having those children to young adults excluded from sports participation as the gender of identity we know is a significant harm, excluding these children from early ages into young adulthood from the known health benefits for physical and emotional well-being of sports participation.
I don’t think we are disagreeing on that at all.
The disagreement is over how many harmed cisgirl athletes are both at an elite enough level that a possible transgirl advantage might be of impact, and then how many of them would actually be in that circumstance, if any at all.
The what ifs of NO restriction at any level of competition is a red herring. An Executive Order that states: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports …” and that states the goal is “to fully enforce Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation” does simply NOT mean no gatekeeping is allowed. The Executive Order doesn’t even change any laws. It merely instructs the agency heads to review current “agency actions” visavis Title VII and other laws that provide protections from categorical discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.
For elite levels of competition guidelines are, and should be “that someone who identifies as a gender will take steps to biologically match the hormonal and body profile typical to that gender.” AND for adults who have previously completed puberty as males, there may be (maybe even likely is) some residual advantage (taller if nothing else) to having completed puberty as a male that persists even after transition. (@DemonTree provided some citations that demonstrate in fact how murky that data is, with the BMJ article showing in adults no persistence of strength advantage and some in a 1.5 mile run, and another of their citations concluded that in these adults who fully completed puberty as males “the effect of lowering testosterone is powerful enough” that few would be impacted even at the most elite levels.)
So what fraction of cisgirls are elite athletes? And what fraction of those elite cisgirl athletes even might ever be harmed by a competition against a cisgirl who meets the criteria for competition at those elite levels.
The first question of course is a matter of definition. If “elite” means the top 1% of all cisgirls all ages, then the number is as large as the number of transgirls. (And then the number who could potentially be harmed by competition against a transgirl with an unfair competitive advantage that much smaller, if it exists at those levels of “elite” at those ages at all … which we have zero evidence for.) I think of “elite” as a more … elite group. The competing at state championship level group. That is much smaller than 1% of all cisgirls, and much much smaller than the number transgirls who would get impacted by categorical exclusions. And of those elite cisgirl athletes, again, only the fraction of them would face elite level competition against a transgirl with advantages that even might make the difference between winning and losing.
The known numbers of transgirls who ARE harmed by categorical exclusions is pretty established. Whether of not there would be ANY cisgirl athletes harmed to ANY degree by implementing non-categorical rules is unknown, minimally the realm of what if speculations as something that might be possible and cannot be ruled out.
I’ve not found too much yet, and not sure I have enough GoogleFu to do much better, but here is the guidance in Connecticut and the claimed impact of their minimal gatekeeping.
So dealing with two transgirl athletes across the whole state who together won 15 out of all girls state indoor or outdoor championship races since 2017. And the possibility that they had an unfair advantage which gave them the wins.
The lawsuit in Connecticut stems from the victory of transgender athletes who took 1st and 2nd place in the state open finals 100 meter dash. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference doesn’t require transgender athletes to have undergone any hormone treatments as it allows any athlete to compete in the gender they identify with.
Maybe if we’re talking about the state finals. It doesn’t sound so bad when we’re talking about girls who are coming in 12th or 13th place but what about those closer to the top but not quite there? It’s very possible that cis girls who would have come in 4th or 5th place in competition will now come in 6th or 7th place when competing against trans girls.
