It’s not just combat sports. It’s basketball, ice hockey, soccer, and the list goes on. When a larger basketball player physically crashes into a smaller player, there are consequences, i.e. injuries. I coached middle school basketball for years and I saw it happen many times. If a biological male with the greater height and larger bones were allowed to run around the courts in a girls’ basketball match, the size imbalance would be larger, leading to a greater risk of more severe injuries.
I wish everyone understood that with regards to biology.
Are you claiming that your brain is not part of your biology? Are you under the impression that mental states have no objective reality?
Please note that, last I checked, the facts about biology were not on your side here. :mad:
Well yeah. BUT, if YOU want to see trans people do a sport, then you can do so.
In the meantime, dont push this trans agenda crap on people.
Para Olympians didnt expect regular sports teams to change for them, why should you?
Calm down, even Trump knows how important this is - he has a Secretary of Trans Sport in the cabinet.
Look at the size of the GUY! He already played for the male Australian Handball team and now he’s playing women’s handball. Six feet 2 inches 220 pounds!
In about ten years there won’t be any true women’s teams. The women’s teams will be only made up on transgender men who couldn’t compete in men’s leagues.
Another LOSER (this time on a bicycle) stealing first place from women who have worked their ass of training all their lives only to “lose” to a man.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/39158/transgender-player-dominating-womens-handball-amanda-prestigiacomo#disqus_thread
https://www.dailywire.com/news/37125/transgender-cyclist-celebrates-world-championship-hank-berrien?fbclid=IwAR1s9nw5cewS685bpnW8JfqaNbHtQOagjUk1S_UblZtwG19HWzx5ygL8bcw
Oh look, another person who didn’t read the articles I cited on the effect HRT has on the physique of athletes. Also, intentionally misgendering people is really shitty. Please don’t do it. Thanks.
Maybe the future of sport is to forget about gender, and create new divisions based on body-type, weight, height, oestrogen or testosterone levels, etc (whatever’s deemed appropriate per event). This will still inevitably end up with primarily female and male divisions, as they shake out, but wiill open it up to a lot more crossover, and especially be transgender-inclusive in as fair a way as can be expected.
I mean, I’ve been beating the “Woman(sports) != Woman(public persona)” drum for yonks, so I do not disagree. The male/female distinction in sports is a proxy, nothing more. A person’s gender is not what matters - what matters is their outward physical characteristics. What matters is things like testosterone, like percent body fat, like bone structure. Ultimately this is a very sensible tack to take - but I don’t predict us becoming that sensible any time soon.
I came here to bring up exactly this question - I’ve competed in strength sports, and I can’t think of any way to actually validate that somebody’s demonstrated “max” for their strength bracket is actually their max. Even in real life, you can surprise yourself with a successful max that you didn’t know you had in you.
I could pull 20% less than my max on a deadlift or squat, and it will still be a fuckton of weight, and it will still look like I exerted myself really hard (especially if I intentionally ham it up to look harder). And a 20% sandbag on where you should be is a HUGE gap, that you could drive several gold-medal-winning performances through.
The other options I can think of would be even worse than an honor system - you could either use immediate physical pain or injury (keep these two slowly closing walls apart with your leg strength or get smashed), or “strength verification” cash rewards large enough that they’re a bigger incentive than the top actually-winnable prize (please do this, me and all my powerlifting buddies will start qualifying for a bunch of sports for the strength prize money alone and then just never compete in them, and sports associations everywhere will go bankrupt).
It sort of reminds me of those chimpanzee strength studies, where they talk about the hard part being incentivizing the chimp to pull the dynamometer, because they just don’t see the point of it - so like that, but actively incentivized in the other direction.
What little evidence there isshows that in terms of both muscle mass and hemoglobin levels, male-to-female trans athletes on HRT for a year are equivalent to those in cis-gender females. This is the basis for the IOC’s policy.
Warning Issued
Warning Issued for a being a jerk.
Unacceptable for this forum. You are banned from this thread. Don’t post in it again.
Warning Issued
Warning Issued for a being a jerk
Your terminology is not acceptable in this forum. You are banned from this thread. Don’t post in it again.
Mod Hat On
I’ve been traveling. I’m back.
Cool it with the heated and provactive language. Whether you agree or not, there are respectful ways to describe transgender people and still get whatever point across you want to make.
If this continues I’ll lock this thread.
We don’t limit eligibility for wheelchair basketball to people who were paraplegics at birth. :dubious:
Perfect answer.
That awkward moment when a thread dies because one side of the argument falls afoul of the “don’t be a jerk” rule as a matter of course. (As it well should; transphobia is super jerkish. A1 modding. 
)
I see that notorious homophobe Martina Navratilova seems to differ from the general consensus of all the enlightened, open-minded Straight Dopers (“Smartest, Hippest!”) but then again, she probably doesn’t understand sports ethics and gender issues very well.
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Martina Navratilova retracted her statements after getting shown evidence by several others on Twitter, including academic researchers on the subject.
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Homosexuality is orthogonal to gender identity, her being gay has little to do with her knowledge of or support for trans people. In fact, contingents of cis lesbians and gay men have been known to be some of the most antagonistic people to trans rights since as early as Stonewall.