This issue actually cropped up years ago in Thailand in the sport of elephant polo. Maybe around the turn of the century, but not farther back than the 1990s. A team of transsexuals named the Screwless Tuskers wanted to compete in the women’s division. But it was argued that they still all had the upper-body strength of a man, so their request was denied.
No, I am not making any of this up.
In common use the two are often used to refer to the same thing,
(Though I hope everyone notes here that we are now just clarifying how best to refer to the fallacious reasoning you’ve used)
You use the same term that you are seeking to define as the definition itself.
When Baldrick was asked to come up with definition for “cat” he said “not a dog”. That’s better reasoning than yours and that should give you pause for thought.
I actually agree with this definition when framed in the context of self-identification. If someone says they are female, then they are female. It’s an essentially meaningless statement when someone says they identify as a gender. It’s the same if someone says they are Christian. That tells you nothing. You may assume that it means they meet some common definition of Christian, but that’s not necessarily the case. I’m sure that many of us know people who sincerely claim they are Christian, yet they don’t align with any known definition of Christian. We need to think of self-identified gender in the same way. If someone says they are a man, woman, male, female, then that’s what they are. But we need to realize that whatever that means is something personal to that person. When they say they identify as a gender, the definition of what that means may exist solely within that person. Any assumptions you make about a person who identifies as a gender is just your own personal biases and may have no bearing on the person claiming to be a certain gender.
The words themselves can have meanings in the general sense. It’s still useful to say things like “men are typically between 5’8” and 6’1" in height". That is talking about men in general and it’s basically true even if it’s based on “everyone who identifies as a man”. But not every man will meet that criteria. If a man is shorter or taller than that, they are still a man.
As has been pointed out, this is a hopelessly circular argument. You haven’t said what they identify as, because you say they identify as identifying as something. You are conflating “Female” with “Girl/woman” too, but never mind…
… I have a solution anyway.
Rather than having “Boys” and “Girls” sports, just divide sports up along two new categories:
Assigned Male At Birth
Assigned Female At Birth
It’s the fairest possible division, it protects the ability of “Assigned Female At Birth” people to participate in sports at elite levels, and no one has to participate in a category that disagrees with their gender identity.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. You agree, right?
Even if there were only one transgirl in existence in the entire United States, it still wouldn’t be fair or right to expect a cis girl to lose her chance to play high school sports for that one trans girl. Cis girls experience just as many or more benefits from playing high school sports that trans girls do. It’s not fair or right to prioritize the wants and needs of trans girls over the wants and needs of cis girls and the fact that there’s a small number of trans girls doesn’t change that.
If a tiny fraction of the population of your town were homeless, would it be OK to expect single males to give up their aprtments/houses for those homeless people to live in? Let’s say that there are the same number of homeless people in the town as there are transgirls who want to play girl’s sports in any particular town…so maybe one or two homeless people every 5 or more yrs. And everyone (homeless or not) can only live in this town for 4 years. Is it ok to have the expectation that a single male should give up his apartment for the homeless person since the homeless person would benefit from it? And there aren’t that many homeless people anyway, so while it’s not particularly fair to the guy who has to give up his apartment…it won’t happen all that often, so it is what it is? If that’s not OK, then cis girls losing their spot on the team to trans girls also shouldn’t be ok.
Seems like it would be simpler and more fair to rename boy’s team to the open team and the girl’s team to the female team. So it would be open soccer and female soccer, and open basketball and female basketball etc. The trans girls can play on the open team…probably on the JV team.
It’s even worse. You’d have to watch a 45km open-water cold-water swim and when Johanna crosses the line first, beating Will by 2 minutes, you still have to wait until everyone finishes and then measure the lactic acid, VO2 and such and then, WINNER!!
Sounds better than the Super Bowl wrapped in the Indy 500.
Who and how do you determine “non-fraudulent”?
Are there people who can objective assess the validity of someone’s self-identification? I mean, since "I don’t believe you’re a woman because of XYZ sounds really transphobic.
I assume that this is rhetorical, as it’s the old status quo.
The problem is, apart from trans women and men who may have started hormone therapy before puberty being implicitly banned, is also intersex. Plenty of people assigned female at birth may later turn out to have XY chromosomes, male levels of testosterone etc.
I think you’re pretty tremendously off base here, comparing letting transwomen (who may have an advantage over cis girls–and almost certainly have an advantage if they are not undergoing hormone therapy), to someone being forced to give up their property to a homeless person isn’t remotely comparing like to like.
Sport is not actually intrinsically fair. In female gymnastics, girls who tend to have smaller adult size are at an advantage. In basketball tall kids have a serious advantage. In football the stronger kids have an advantage. In baseball the kids with the best reaction speed and hand/eye coordination have an advantage. Plenty of track and field kids will work at their sport for 5 or 6 years and never be as gifted as some people who might excel with far less effort.
Sport rewards physical gifts over which we have limited control. We can do our best by training hard, practicing hard and doing our best, but we don’t all get to be Michael Jordan. There is no configuration in my life where I would ever be even 1/5th as good a basketball player as Michael Jordan. That “isn’t fair”, in the same sense that genetics and life isn’t fair. It’s not fair that I’ve had friends who had undiagnosed genetic heart defects, who tragically died in their 30s with no warning. It’s not fair that I have friends who have had genetic predispositions to serious cancers that ended up costing them their lives. I had a good friend when I was a young man who had cystic fibrosis–he’s been gone a long time now, and it wasn’t fair.
We aren’t gifted with equally capable bodies. Sport does very little to equalize this, in as much as most men will outperform most women, we have sex segregate sports (which I agree with.) In a few sports we have weight classes where size is too great an advantage. A small % of High School girls encountering another High Schooler who out performs them just isn’t a very big deal. In fact, if trans people did not exist at all, almost 100% of High School athletes would run into other High School athletes who outclass them. The small % that won’t have professional athlete level genetic gifts, and that is an extremely small portion of the population.
Like I said, I do think it’s important for a population like human females i.e. half our species, to have opportunities to play sport. If they were in an truly open league required to compete with men, most would have minimal opportunities to play. That’s why I think “black swan” situations like a transwoman athlete is probably not worth a moral panic over. As has been noted, it is likely they lose a decent portion of any advantage they have if they are undergoing hormone treatment.
I don’t disagree with what you’ve said but there are competing views on this that, if unresolved, may lead to obvious problems.
There is a view (and expressed right here in this thread) that someone should be considered female if they say they are. So no hormone treatment, surgery or evaluation needed. Therefore any potential advantages from male physiology is retained.
I don’t get the feeling that such a view is the majority but nor do I think it is fringe. So now we are in a position of either disregarding that view and make that judgement on what male advantages are going to be medically mitigated (very hard to do completely fairly and open to ongoing lawsuits I’m sure) or accepting that view and open up women’s sports to people who identify as women but in every other physiological sense are male.
The best possible outcome of the latter would be if the numbers involved are vanishingly small and they never rise to the position of winning competitions, medals, scholarships etc. but given the increasing numbers identifying as trans I think that is unlikely and I suspect the legal ramifications within sport have barely started.
It may well be that the only thing that makes sense is all sport to be “open” but as other have mentioned that means that biologically female athletes will have zero chance of any success in the highest levels of the highest profile sports.
It is a very difficult question and a lot of the response to it seems to be to kick the can down the road and hope it never starts to be a visible issue. That is one valid approach but I’m sceptical that it remains so.
I think all these arguments that “tall basketballers have an advantage” completely misses the point.
Obviously humans are born with different characteristics; that premise is basically integral to sport, as the playing field itself is (supposed to be) 100% fair. The differences between teams and players is mainly a measure of their mental and physical differences (plus of course strategy).
However, that doesn’t make it OK for Mike Trout to go play Little League baseball because “Hey, people be different”. We’re all comfortable with there being some restrictions for entry (OK, maybe not HughGoply).
So this rhetorical point is only convincing to people who already considered the physiological differences of male puberty being one of the first kinds of advantage and not one of the latter. i.e. people that already agreed with the conclusion.
True, but we need to appreciate that the central conceit in sport is that the variation in success is due to 3 things:
We also have historically had Men/Women Boy/Girl separations because the presence of XY vs XX chromosomes during physical development is far more important to overall results than the 3 items listed above… and the roughly 50% of the population with XX chromosomes deserve the benefits of athletics.
No it isn’t. The old status quo was “Girls” and “Boys” sport, and the problem as stated above is forcing trans people to compete in a gendered category they don’t match. My solution of redefining the categories solves that. If the issue is gender identity mismatch with sports categories, redefine the categories.
As to intersex athletes, there isn’t a division that easily solves that; approaching that on a case by case basis (which in the case of most people with intersex conditions really doesn’t affect much; very few of that small number presents any sort of question athletically, as with Caster Semenya) is the best approach.
Yeah none of that is new.
“Girls” *did" just implicitly mean “assigned female at birth” as most people are ignorant of the fact that there is any gray area in terms of sex and gender. In the popular understanding a doctor just looks if you have a foo-foo or a pee-pee and decides that you’re 100% girl or boy based on that. It’s binary, and simple. And sporting events are only now grappling with the fact that things actually are not that simple.
And saying we should deal with intersex on a case by case basis…yes that’s exactly the kind of issue this thread is about. Whether and where to draw the line is a thorny issue.
The thread is about trans athletes. Intersex isn’t trans.
I don’t think intersex, non-typical genetic types, etc. need any sort of special consideration. They will just be the normal statistical variations that come from AFAB and AMAB designations which we have been using all along. It’s not like every women’s sport is dominated by intersex athletes. There’s no reason to say that someone needs to switch gender teams because their genetics don’t match their birth sex.
However, I don’t think AFAB and AMAB should be the deciding factors alone. Instead, I think they should be the basis on which we think of men’s and women’s sport. It’s clear that the intent of the gender divisions in sport was based around AFAB and AMAB distinctions. As far as I know, there are no competitive sports where the gender division is based simply on personal gender identification rather than birth sex. And this is even reflected in the sports which have consideration for trans athletes. They will have hormone requirements which pertain to trans athletes, which is a recognition that the gender division in sport is based around the statistical norms of AFAB and AMAB competitors rather than personal gender identification. At the HS level, it is probably fine to say that the trans athlete needs to be on hormone therapy with the aim to have testosterone and estrogen within norms of the other AFAB or AMAB athletes they compete against. HS athletes are going to be a random assortment of abilities and many of the girls will be able to beat many of the boys anyway because of this random assortment of abilities at the school. If a trans girl is on hormone therapy, her performance will likely be gender typical with the other AFAB competitors. Sure she may have advantages in certain areas, but all athletes have strengths and weaknesses. At the amateur HS level, it’s not going to matter a whole lot either way.
Post HS, it does start to matter. Small differences in ability can make someone a champion. I still think trans athletes can compete in the gender they desire at the college and pro level, but there would need to be a lot more consideration of how to make that work.
Oh wow I didn’t notice, thanks!
Or perhaps that’s what I meant by this kind of issue? i.e. that it’s easy to say we can deal with intersex on a case-by-case basis, but we could say the same thing about transgender athletes. The actual details are the difficult part.
Historically-historically, we just didn’t let women play…
This is a pretty broad statement, there’s evidence of women playing sports in Ancient Greece, Ancient China, in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, also in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and even 18th and 19th century Europe. The 1900 Olympics had women’s events.
I don’t really know the context of your statement, but as put forth it is not accurate. There are certainly narrow contexts of history where it would be closer to the truth. For example the modern public education system that educates children from around age 5 or 6 up through age 16-18 has a history of being somewhat universal for about 110-120 years, before that it did exist albeit not universally in the West. In the context of those systems it would be true to say that in the United States, prior to Title IX, the scope and quality of athletic programs offered to girls was in general much worse, and participation rates much lower than male sports, and both have improved markedly since Title IX implementation. I can’t speak to other countries but considering there have been women’s Olympics for 120 years I imagine most countries even many decades ago had some significant levels of female athletic activity.
(Quote snipped for brevity)
That list illustrates one of the ways in which sport, as in sport in general, is fair, though, or at least attempts to be at the amateur level. Whatever your body type, there will probably be a sport suitable for you to compete in at high school level, if you actually want to.
Disabilities certainly make that more difficult, which is why things like wheelchair basketball also exist. Wheelchair basketball is no good for someone who has no arms or cannot use their arms well, but there are other sports (soccer, for example).
Not every sport will be suited to every single person, genetically, but that doesn’t mean that “sport” in general can’t accommodate everyone.
In high school, and in local leagues that are not school-based but for school-aged children, there are also usually multiple levels of teams, at least for the most popular sports. So that’s another way that sports do attempt to be fair.
Sport at the amateur level has multiple aims - fitness, socialisation, exceeding personal goals, and, sometimes, using it to get a scholarship or simply have a plus point on your college application. In all of those, the chance to win against your peers - ie, against other teams of under-tens, or wheelchair basketball players, or high school girl - is usually part of the game. It feels so much better to win than just to play, even if the playing is also rewarding.
By including transgirls, those who haven’t been taking hormones since before puberty or not long after, in girls’ sports, the girls have less chance of winning. That means they have less fun, and sport becomes less enjoyable.
There need to be ways for trans girls to compete, but completely ignoring the needs of cis girls isn’t the way.