Are you a TERF, Dangerosa? Because you certainly sound like one here. And I have trouble believing that hoards of high school boys are going to rush forward pretending to be female for the purpose getting on the volleyball team. Further, I think that the teen girl who has a chronic health condition shouldn’t be excluded from participating in sports, because frankly her life is going to be challenging enough. I think that the cis girls will manage.
Pretty sad attempt, octopus. I don’t think you’re capable of competing with mamamals. You should prob stick to the nautilus league.
mc
No, either play in the gender class you were born into or start your own league. There is a reason we have say wheelchair basketball. Its so persons who are in wheelchairs can have a sport they can compete in. Its funny because sometimes with wheelchair sports you sometimes have people who dont belong in a wheelchair wanting to compete. Well sorry…
If you want to change your gender thru drugs and surgery - fine. But dont expect others to accept you into their unique area.
We have special olympics, the para-olympics, and other sports for persons with disabilities. Do NOT put a persons CHOICE to change their gender into the same classification. Now if you want to start some sort of trans or non-binary league or sports group which doesnt recognize traditional gender- fine. Do it. Dont expect others to change for you.
Its happened before. Gays for years had the gay rodeo and the gay olympics which in both they combine the traditional aspects of the sport with the camp and humor of being gay. Now in gay sports they sometimes have the issue of non gays wanting to compete and they have sometimes disqualified straights. Thats ok. Its their group. their rules.
So start your own league.
I fully support your creating a system of your own which recognizes non-binary athletes. It would basically be a coed league like they already have.
My son has played hockey with girls and once the helmets and pads are all on you cant see what gender the kid is. You could do the same.
That’s correct. I dont know why Hillary and all the top feminists arent stepping in right now to put a stop to this before the trans lobby wins. If this goes further sooo many women will lose out on not just the chance to play a sport, but lose out on college scholarships under title 9.
Sorry, but women just cannot compete at the top levels with men. Yes, my son played with girls in hockey and at the younger ages often the girls dominate. But. at about age 14 they switch to girls only leagues because they just cant compete anymore. HERE is an article where the Australian top womens soccer team lost 11-0 against an age 15 boys team.
Feminists need to put a stop to this.
Hillary who?
LOL @ Hillary and the top feminists. What a great band name.
Perhaps these people have more important things to concern themselves with than gatekeeping high school sports teams.
FWIW, I’m completely agnostic about this entire issue. I don’t think there has been enough research in this arena to confidently conclude that a year of HRT is enough to remove all male advantage. However, if it’s not unfair for a cis woman endowed with genetically-conferred high muscle mass and bone density to compete against less endowed players, then I fail to see why we should give MtF folks an extra stink-eye, though I totally understand why someone with skin in the game would have some negative feelings about it. (And I don’t think it is fair to intimate that Dangerosa is a TERF, alice).
As much as I want to secure rights for folks outside the norm, the purpose of women’s leagues is to restrict competition so that roughly half of the population has a chance to compete and win.
MtF transgenders occupy a space where, despite being a small percentage of the population, they could shift the landscape of women’s leagues so that people who were born and remain female (a huge segment of the population) are unable to compete and win, particularly at the highest levels where only a handful of people in the entire world are competing.
As much as I want to treat MtF transgenders as simply ‘women’, it could bring about a situation where being born a female represents an insurmountable disadvantage. That’s not sitting well.
I think any research will be clouded by activists and persons who want to either suppress information or re-interpret it to their own views. So basically a researcher who comes to conclusions that upset the people pushing for trans rights - will probably face their wrath and be reluctant to publish them.
Sure - FtM transgender athletes are at a large disadvantage competing against cis-males. They can compete there if they want to, because they don’t have an inherent advantage. MtF athletes do have such an advantage - that’s the point.
Here I think you are just mistaken. Bracketed competition, like youth leagues and men’s and women’s leagues and Special Olympics, exist mostly because some groups are at an inherent disadvantage against other groups. If every competition was an open competition, adult cis-males would win everything. If there was no separate women’s tennis, there wouldn’t be a woman in the top 300.
And I think the idea of weight divisions as a promotional gimmick is kind of naïve. The All Japan judo championships is a no-weight-division tournament. It has been won by a non-heavyweight once in the last sixty years. Do you really think a flyweight boxer, however good, has a chance at the world heavyweight championship? Look at weightlifting, or powerlifting. Lightweight powerlifters can lift amazing amounts. None of them, however, is going to squat 1036 lbs. un-equipped. The world bench press record for men is 718 lbs. The world bench press record for women is 457.
The bottom line is, competing against cis-males, all other genders, however defined, are going to lose. Therefore the rules are set up so that members of other classes, like cis-women and lightweights and people with Down syndrome and kids and other types of folks who don’t have the inherent advantages of being cis-male and large and neurotypical can compete against each other. Whether or not transgender people. mostly MtF transgender people, should compete against those without the inherent advantage of having XY chromosomes, is the topic under discussion.
Sure, we could say let them all compete and let the chips fall where they may. The chips are going mostly to fall where MtF athletes beat cis-females.
Regards,
Shodan
Including any research that supports your position?
Totally agree. And that small percentage right now, could become a bigger percentage later on. Thats why this needs to be nipped in the bud right now.
Again, if trans people want to be in sports outside their birth gender, then they should start their own sports programs. Current examples are the gay rodeo and gay olympics.
(my bolding)
If MtF trans people are fully and completely women and should not be treated in any way different from biological women, then soon a couple of lawsuits will render any requierement like testosterone levels moot. If Suzie is a woman and has testicles that produce testosterone, why punish Suzie for that? If one accepts that “believe what they say they are” is the way to go, why not in sports? Why require any medical procedure?
Even if you’re sure they are saying “I’m a woman” just to win, who are you to deny their identity?
Biological women will be crowded out of any sort of competitive sport.
If you think it’s too crazy to think people will go to such levels to win medals, there’s this story of fake mentally retarded people winning an olympic gold medal.
I agree and I would like to add onto that about special olympics and the para olympics, I used to ski at Winter Park in Colorado where many skiers with special needs compete. Talking to one guy who had just one leg, he said the best he could do is maybe 75% of what a regular, 2 leg skier could do but he was ok with that. In the meantime adaptive skiing gave many people with disabilities (ex. blind, in a wheelchair, etc…) a chance to not just participate, but give them the chance to feel the joys and heartaches that come with competition.
BTW, wheelchair basketball has been known for having some pretty good fights.
No, I’m not. But my daughterish is non-binary, most of their friends are not cis, my best friends child just started hormones, so I have perhaps a different perception of how common it is than other people do. My daughterish’s college can fill a whole dorm floor with non-binary students - and the school has 2000 undergrads. They are on a floor with a bunch of female atheletes - and those young women worked hard to make the cut into a Div III school. I’ve also seen young women’s lives change due to success and sometimes just participation in athletics. I grew up on stories of Title IX and what it meant to the women just slightly older than I am. We need to acknowledge that this is a problem, not just tell cis-women to suck it up on behalf of some other oppressed class - again.
And yes not all transwomen have Y chromosomes, but many of them do. I was using that as shorthand for the long term oppression of those with penises against those without.
I get what you’re saying. Women have a long history of being pushed aside by men, including in sports. But, it’s not clear that this is one of those times. Many people in this thread (and irl) are acting like it’s a proven fact that trans women athletes are the same as men, and this is far from a proven fact. And if they are, is this really a problem? Less than 1% of the population is transgender, it’s not that big of a thing. And more importantly, as monstro points out, there are already cis women with bone and muscle mass comparable to men (and certainly higher than me and my friends) already competing and the sports world has not come to an end.
mc
I mean… sure, if everyone involved is incredibly stupid.
(Pro tip: if your concern only makes any sense at all if you set a condition that requires everyone involved to be impossibly dumb, it’s a worthless concern.)
The reason we have those criteria isn’t because the olympic committee is transphobic. It isn’t because we need them to get more woke. It’s because the rule makes sense. Because “is this person a woman (in the context of sports)” is necessarily a very different question from “Is this person a woman (in the context of polite conversation)”. We’re looking at different categories with different dividing lines and different purposes; of course we’re going to end up with weird answers at the edge cases. My friend Zoe may identify as a woman, dress as a woman, and consider herself a woman, but if she tries to play sports as a woman, I’d cry foul, because she hasn’t started HRT yet, and while I’m very supportive of her she just has an unfair advantage with her male physiology. A disadvantage that goes away after HRT.
I dunno, maybe everyone is going to get way, way dumber on this in the way you predict. But how 'bout we don’t freak out until that actually happens? The current rules are entirely sensible, they’re entirely in line with our scientific understanding of how HRT affects people, and assuming that everyone at the olympics committee is suddenly going to catch the stupid virus (Filoviridae Trumpus), the idea that we need to head that off at the pass with a policy that is also pretty stupid is… well, do I have to say it?
If Brock Lesnar was on hormones for a year, he would no longer look like Brock Lesnar. He wouldn’t have a hundred pounds on the average woman. His muscle mass would shrink, his body fat percentage would rise, his bone mass would lower, and his overall physical prowess would end up considerably more in line with that of women.
A 2015 study into footraces showed that transwomen and women did not have significantly different times. To quote the Vice article I found this in:
“All the talk of advantage or disadvantage held by trans women misses the most important point,” says Harper, who published the first-ever performance study of transgender athletes in 2015. “The most crucial question to ask is this: should trans women and cisgender women compete in the same category? All available research says yes, assuming that trans women have been through an appropriate course of HRT [hormone replacement therapy]”. Fears of trans women taking over women’s sport simply doesn’t match up with the reality of the effects that transitioning and HRT have on an athlete’s body.
[…]
Many people underestimate or don’t realise how dramatically hormones affect the human body. As Joanna Harper explains, “Once a trans woman starts on antiandrogen drugs as part of HRT, then her testosterone levels quickly fall to female norms. This is followed by a rapid reduction in the percentage of red blood cells in the blood stream, again to female levels. The lower hematocrit levels have a dramatic effect on endurance sports such as running or cycling. The lower T levels also will cause muscle mass atrophy. The loss of strength is not as rapid, nor as complete, as the loss of endurance, but trans women will lose much of their strength advantage over cisgender women.”
That’s why the IOC allows transwomen to compete as women - their physiology changes drastically as a result of hormone therapy.
(It’s perhaps also worth noting that Brock Lesnar is a lousy example here, as he is almost certainly roided up to the fucking gills. I mean c’mon, look at him! Also he tested positive for drugs that are typically used in conjunction with steroids. So there’s that.)
By “trying very very hard”, do you include the various scientists who studied this and found that that “male advantage” doesn’t actually exist after a while on HRT? Y’know, the basis for the IOC’s decision? :rolleyes: Seriously, guys, this isn’t some “tiptoe around the trans folks so we don’t hurt their feelings” thing. This is a matter of actually examining the science and finding that trans women suffer a massive drop in muscle mass and endurance from taking HRT.
So, just to be clear - a person who clearly presented as male in every way walked into a women’s restroom, nobody said anything, there’s no basis to assume that the person in question was actually transgender, and… somehow this is a trans issue? 
Why yes - occasionally, men go into women’s restrooms. Occasionally, sexual predators go into women’s restrooms to assault women. Those predators typically are not transgender people. This is not a trans issue, and it’s ridiculous to paint it as such.
I’ll do you one better: “Hillary and the feminist tops”. 
I wonder how your side would interpret a finding that on average, MtF trans do have an athletic edge, but the edge is quite small. Like let’s say we have robust empirical model that predicts an average trans female to be 1.5% stronger than your average cis female player.
Is this enough of an advantage to justify a ban against trans folks in women’s sports?
Because I would be the first to say I don’t know what I would make of that finding. If research shows that trans females have twice the strength as cis females, on average, I could be convinced that a ban would not be the worse thing in the world. But a 2% difference doesn’t convince me of that…or anything else, for that matter.
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Translation: “Anything that doesn’t validate my preconceived notions is wrong and will be ignored.” I think this perspective is fundamentally at odds with the motto and goals of this site and should not be accepted at face value. That’s not how science works.