Then it should be absolutely no problem for you to cite scientific studies backing this up. If it’s so obvious, it should be easy to prove! Right?
Right?
This is wrong. Not only is it wrong, it’s exactly backwards - I have not found a single paper endorsing this position, and the only literature review I could find has this to say:
Currently, there is no direct or consistent research suggesting transgender female individuals (or male individuals) have an athletic advantage at any stage of their transition (e.g. cross-sex hormones, gender-confirming surgery) and, therefore, competitive sport policies that place restrictions on transgender people need to be considered and potentially revised.
I’ve already cited one research paper upthread that shows that this is simply not true. So now we’ve got one peer reviewed paper and one peer-reviewed literature review refuting what you see as obvious, and you have cited… fucking nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. And you’re so sure of yourself!
Ha, see, it’s funny because you’re so painfully sure of your position, but you haven’t even done the most cursory research into the subject.
Here’s an obvious question - where are the transgender female athletes winning major sporting events? There are plenty of transwomen. Plenty of them participate in sporting events. If it’s so obvious that they’re at an advantage, where’s the transgender Serena Williams? Where’s the trans athlete who is not just winning events, but clearly far and away better than the competition?
In reality, we have people like Renee Richards, who went from a mediocre record as a man to an even more mediocre record as a woman. Given what others have said about how large the gender gap is in Tennis, you’d think that just shouldn’t happen, right? Or Fallon Fox - there was a lot of controversy there; why isn’t she absolutely dominating the UFC circuit? Well, one hint might be in the fact that her one recorded loss came from the only one of her opponents who went on to fight in the UFC - it turns out, she’s good, but not world class.
I mean, come on - if transwomen are really so much stronger, it should be fucking easy to find one utterly dominating her field, right?
Right?
:mad:
Y’know, you’d better hope you’re wrong, and that it is allowed - because you literally just did. Apophasis doesn’t change that. I, for one, hope that the out-and-out transphobic bigotry shown here isn’t tolerated here.
Renee Richards is a bad example. Richards became a pro at the age of 43 and was ranked as high as #20 in the world at the age of 46. That is extraordinarily old for a professional tennis player. There are no men or women over 40 that are ranked in the top 1000 players currently. As a man Richards had not even played professionally.
Fallon Fox is not a great example either. Fox debuted at the age of 35 and had a 5-1 record as an MMA competitor. In her last fight, when she was 39, she gave her opponent an orbital bone fracture.
Another prominent transgender athlete, Laurel Hubbard placed second in the world in weightlifting as a 39 year old. Hubbard had mediocre results at the national level in Australia competing as a man.
There is a transgender woman in Australia playing professional cricket in a womens league at the age of 62.
So first off, it seems a non-trivial part of this is based on age. Even if I were to grant that trans athletes can participate at a high level longer (for whatever reason), there is no sport where we segregate by age. It really doesn’t matter for overall performance.
Fallon Fox’s record is good, but the one person in her record she lost to was also the one person in her record to go on to UFC. It’s like a really good pitcher in the minor leagues who flops in the majors. And breaking orbital bones is not exactly rare in UFC. Again, it’s not like she’s Rhonda Rousey (a cis woman).
Laurel Hubbard’s results are impressive. But keep in mind - pre-transition, she set local records. She was always pretty damn good. And post-transition, her results do not show anything resembling dominance - and she’s not competing on an olympic level.
I mean, let’s pull back and remember what we’re looking for here. We’re not looking for “does pretty darn well”. If the hypothesis about post-transition trans women having a significant advantage is true, we’re looking for the female sports equivalent of Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt. Someone just legitimately way above the competition because of that leg up. So far, we haven’t even seen a transwoman who’d qualify for the hall of fame post-transition, let alone “best in the world”. And the actual scientific evidence all seems to point to this idea being dead wrong.
But at least you’re not declaring it total, “I-can’t-believe-this-is-a-debate” certainty. So that’s nice.
Also note that HRT doesn’t just “reduce testosterone levels”. The most common anti-androgens, especially Spironolactone in the US, prevents T from being used by the body to some degree. This is actually a major problem for some trans women, because unused T breaks down into DHT in the blood stream and whoops suddenly rapid-onset male patterned baldness as soon as you start HRT without co-prescribed DHT blockers.
If you measure a trans woman who’s been on HRT for some time’s testosterone levels, they’ll usually be around a cis woman’s, but they’re also taking a drug that prevents a fraction of that already low T from actually being used. On top of other effects potentially detrimental to athletics like Spiro being a dehydrating diuretic.
What I’m getting at is that there are a lot of really complex interlocking things going on with the endocrine system in transition, and boiling it down to any simple assertion is overly reductive.
(Note that post bottom surgery, due to the removal of the testes, androgen blockers usually aren’t prescribed anymore and T is naturally in line with cis women’s levels, so this note is somewhat limited to trans women without surgical intervention).
You’d be wrong, IMO. At a high level of competition, the slighest advantage will make the difference. Look for instance at the scrutinity over swimmers’ swimsuits. If a fraction of athletes have a 2% avantage eventually winners will come from this category.
Either there is something about being trans gendered that allows one to compete at a high level for longer or the fact that they are competitive at such an advanced age means they would have been even better had they started young. The second option seems more likely. I bet if Richards had transistioned in prime tennis playing years she would have dominated women’s tennis.
Then don’t cite Richards. Cite the young transgender athlete currently using that small edge to dominate the competition.
Or better yet, drop that line of argument, and just cite actual scientific research that disputes the literature review and study I already posted showing no evidence of differences, and we can have a nice chat about scientific evidence, rather than “Oh yeah, well maybe these mediocre athletes have an unfair advantage because they’re trans”.
No one has to “prove” anything and nobody has to cite some damn paper either. Its just common sense.
Look, if you have it in your head that your a different gender and want to change - ok. But dont expect the world to go along with it. Start your own athletic class or something the way other “special” athletes did.
A better metric would be to look at the proportion of transgender winners relative to their representation in the population (given various criteria for qualification to compete). I doubt that there will be useful statistics on that for many years yet.
In “winners” we are by definition looking at extreme cases, not the advantage for the average person. That would include trans women who have an unusually low physiological response to any stipulated hormone treatment. Should that response be viewed as a natural advantage in the same way as Serena Williams has a natural advantage over other women?
Ultimately, I think this question will be subsumed into broader questions as advancing biotech allows choice and modification of many kinds at all stages of physical development. Direct genetic modification might seem like an obvious “cheat”, but how about if you can optimize which of the millions of sperm combine with which of many eggs? Many more “natural” children might be at the extreme tail of the current distribution of the genetic lottery in prowess.
There are no easy answers to how this all might fit into our current sports ethos, but perhaps acknowledging that this is part of an imminent much broader problem might be a good idea. It’s not just transgender people who are exposing fundamental problems and contradictions in a sports ethos that seeks to carve out distinct classes of people where membership of the class is defined by some criterion other than explicit ability, but where membership of the class is highly correlated with that ability; and then competing to find the extreme outliers and calling them “winners”.
Look at the joke of modern professional cycling. What’s the most reliable way to find the cheats?
I keep thinking about this through the lens of my high school track career. I was a shotputter and discus thrower, and passable- my best put was about 48’ (a hair less actually), with an average around 46’.
Women shotputters used a lighter shot (4 kg/8.8 lb) than the boys(12 lb). And despite that, they put consistently shorter than the boys- the typical throws were in the 30s and 40s; A 50’ put would be somewhere in the ballpark of what a 60’ put looks like in high school boys’ meets- crazy good- college prospect good. But 50’ puts were routine in the boys’ meets among the serious contenders- you were unlikely to ever get first place if you couldn’t put over 50 feet.
I’m imagining one of those goons coming out as transgender and launching a 70’ put or something absurd like that with the 4 kg shot. (70’ put in women’s shotput is not record breaking, but is Olympic gold medal caliber), and probably not unreachable by a very good high school boy shotputter with a shot that weighs 2/3 of what he’s used to.
Strength brackets would sort that out- even if the goon was transgender, they’d still be in the same strength bracket that they were in as a boy. One downside(?) I can see is that female outliers might not be quite as dominant in their particular bracket as they are against regular women.
Weight classes work fine, because weight is easy to measure objectively, and then it becomes a question of how efficiently you use your available weight.
But how do you envision a “strength bracket” would work? How do you measure strength in an objective way that doesn’t depend on an athlete’s effort level? And it seems too close to the ability that the sport is measuring. I mean, you can’t have a competition to find the person who can throw furthest where the class of competitors is circularly determined by how far you can throw.
Just start your own “trans” sports leagues. We already have the para olympics that occur right after the regular ones. Trans athletes could do the same.
Actually come to think of it in years to come I see a growing need for a seperate sports group for persons with artificial limbs. In the last Olympics there was a man they called “Blade runner” who was disqualified from running.
Maybe all those people that you don’t wish to see can be shunted off to some side sports channel you wont have to subscribe to-wouldn’t that be convenient.
