Do trans girl athletes have an advantage? [Moderated title for clarity]

Great Debates
224

I got home from a weekend elsewhere. I saw that there were over 100 new posts in this thread. Because I consider this topic to be imporatant (and because I’m just not getting any reception on my tv tonight) I read them- all of them.

There’s a Simpsons episode with Martin Mull and George Carlin as hippies who own a juice company. Homer’s antics lead to a confrontation with the police. Homer gives an angry speech to the cops. He basically says ‘Go ahead and shoot!’. George Carlin points at Homer and says “This man does not represent us.”

Is that clear enough?

225

Nope.

226

It’s meant to be broad, it’s a generalization - as a general rule, women weren’t allowed to participate in popular sports - there were female MesoAmerican ballplayers, no doubt, but no representations of female chunkey players, women were banned from the original Olympics (and that includes attending if married), women didn’t play buzkashi, they didn’t joust…

I wasn’t saying there were no women playing sport historically. But the tendency was to have much more male-only sport than women/men separate sports. Overall, for the millennia-long span of history, so pointing to the last 200 years is a blip.

And note that I’m confining this to organized spectator sports, not casual games.

227

Not exactly eager to go back that far.

The question is, can we get the 50% of the population with no Y chromosomes to freely participate in sports without being dominated by participants with Y chromosomes?

Once a large enough population of transgender athletes is formed, every champion, every medalist, every record holder in just about every sport on the planet will be a person with a Y chromosome. This is because a “very good” athlete with a Y chromosome will dominate a “world class” athlete with no Y chromosome, and for every world class athlete in the world, there are thousands of very good athletes.

228

My point is that saying anything about “historically” involves arbitrary choices about which historically.

If the view is to only take the better parts of history i.e. the most recent ones, then obviously the argument becomes “there’s an arc of steadily more inclusivity - why should we stop that and ossify it at ‘Boys/Girls But Not Trans’ for current kids when they’re precisely where we need to continue increasing inclusivity ?”

I think you severely overestimate both the number of trans women, and their interest in sports.

229

From here.

PLAIN-LANGUAGE SUMMARY

We used data from national surveys to estimate the population size of transgender people in the United States. Estimates of the number of transgender adults significantly increased over the past decade, with a current best estimate of 390 per 100 000 adults. That is about 1 in every 250 adults, or almost 1 million Americans. These numbers may be more typical of younger adults than of the entire US population. We expect that future surveys will find higher numbers of transgender people and recommend that standardized questions be used, which will allow a more accurate population size estimate.

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So, some sporty fraction of 0.4 %, then…

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Exactly, or approx. 500,000 transwomen nationwide.

Let’s imagine for a moment 500,000 American men being openly and without prejudice allowed to compete in women’s sports. This is the male population of a city the size of San Jose (1m residents as of 2020). I’m using a city to illustrate this because they contain a cross section of society, not just athletic young men, the 500k includes old men, children, the infirm and those who hate sports.

Every male tennis pro in San Jose can join the Women’s tour. Every male sprinter in HS and College can compete in the Olympics as women. Every male basketball player can join the WNBA. Every male swimmer, golfer, whatever, they ALL get to freely and openly compete in women’s games.

They can do this for pay or fame, or for whatever reason, without prejudice, without scorn or complaint, because we all agree that it is just and right and kind to have this group of 500,000 people born with XY chromosomes compete under the Women’s moniker.

The San Jose State track team would own the women’s world records for the 100m, 200m, 400m, and 800m races, as those are the only ones I bothered to check, and two of those records are held by freshman. I guarantee that some young tennis pro will make hay on the WTA, golfers will crush the shorter distances on the women’s tour, the basketball players will dominate the WNBA.

It’s an ugly scenario for women’s sport.

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Why are you assuming 100% is the sporty fraction?
And it will be 0.4% of any population - talking about entire city populations as though there would be that concentration is a red herring.

For our purposes - if there’s a school sport meeting with an event with 10 runners, then 0.4% of them are going to be trans. That’s, very optimistically, 1, rounding up. Not “every medalist”. If there’s a school athletics meet with 1000 athletes, 4 of them will be trans. And that’s assuming 100% of the trans population gives a shit about sports, which is a ridiculous assumption to even make.

We’re not talking about the WNBA or the ATP tour. We’re talking about school track meets and school sports. In grade and high schools.

233

The best high schoolers could do that. Easily up to the 10K.
However, anyone who does that solely to rack up world records and then “goes back” would find:
1.The record would never be ratified.
2. The ridicule and scorn would be thunderous.
3. Any possible financial benefits would not be forthcoming.

The Olympics require two years of hormone treatments and a reduction to female levels in testing.

234

Only a fraction of those 500.000 are athletes on any level, let alone good enough to “dominate” in elite woman’s competitions.

People are making too much of a deal about this. There are maybe 20 people world wide where any of this is actually relevant. The people “protecting” woman’s sport are “catching” more people assigned female at birth than trans women. Suggesting that those people have a different agenda than their stated purposes.

235

It seems to me that in the long term, the only viable solution is to rename the leagues as “The X league” and “The Y league”. If any of your chromosomes are Y, you must join the Y league, otherwise, you can join the X league.

I think this is somewhat in line with what RickJay is proposing, but avoids the issue of what someone was assigned at birth. Just check the chromosomes.

Then, the league you join has nothing to do with whether society or you think you’re a boy or girl. It would be objective.

One thing I don’t know is how this would impact people who have rare chromosomes, such as XXY or XYY.

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The example given didn’t assume that they were, just like 100% of the male population of San Jose is not sporty.

This would be true for an evenly-spread population of trans women and as it probably relates to school sports on an individual basis. However, once you start moving past individual schools into counties, regional, national etc. that may change as the numbers of talented, sport-focused, un-medicated trans-women would necessarily be funnelled into those competitions.

237

When money is involved, the matter becomes much more complicated. There will be massive incentives for someone to play in a league where they can make the most money. But at the HS level, that’s not really a factor. Almost always a HS athlete playing on a team is doing it mainly for personal satisfaction. But even in HS, there can still be financial reasons like scholarships that may complicate things.

But in HS, the teams are structured in a way that would actually allow trans athletes to play no matter the amount of transitioning they’ve undergone without being too unbalancing. One factor is that schools are broken up into divisions based on their size, where 1A is a school with a few hundred students going up to 5A or 6A with thousands of students. And sports may have different levels based on ability, like Varsity, Junior Varsity, JVA, JVB, etc. And of course, trans girls may have varying degrees of medical transitioning to gender-typical performance. For the purposes of this post, I’ll use these terms:

P0 - Minimal latent AMAB performance. The trans girl has been on hormone therapy for multiple years and has hormones within typical AFAB ranges.
P1 - Some latent performance. The trans girl has been on hormone therapy for a short time or has hormones slightly out of typical AFAB ranges
P2 - AMAB performance. The trans girl has AMAB-typical hormone levels

The way I see this working is that the less amount of latent AMAB ability, the more competitive team the athlete can join. So a P0 can join the varsity team, but a P2 would be on the lowest level JV team. Since the varsity has the most competitive athletes, a trans girl should have gender-typical performance to be non-disruptive. It may seem odd that the P2 person would be on the low-level JV team, by my thinking there is that the JV players are going to have a wider range of abilities and will be more casual about sport. A AMAB playing in the girls JV team won’t really be a big deal since the JV teams are more about fun than competition.

But I also think that there might need to be handicapping based on the P0-P2 abilities. A P0 wouldn’t have any handicapping, but a P2 would be handicapped by having limits on how long they can play in the game, may have time added in a race, etc.

A system like this should allow all trans girl athletes to play sports. It recognizes that boys/girls sports are divided based around AMAB/AFAB differences and that trans girls will have varying amounts of medical transitioning which will affect performance. This will allow them to play without having their AMAB strengths be overpowering, disruptive, or controversial.

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That’s a lot of medical information for a school to be handling and quite a complicated system to put in place.
Plus I think you will get case after case of people saying that they don’t see why they need to have medical intervention in order to play at the highest level (and I have a lot of sympathy with that view)

A more simple solution would be to have all sports as “open” with teams organised according to level of ability. Everyone gets to play against people of the relevant ability, no-one is excluded.

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But that would be an unworkable solution in the real world. Theoretically it could work, but the chances of it actually being implemented are extremely low. There would be very little support in the community for sports to be designed like that. The system I proposed is more complicated, but this issue is complicated. We need to find a system which allows the current sports complex to exist as-is and allow trans girls to integrate seamlessly. Solutions which require the complete restructuring of sports as we know it aren’t likely to be feasible.

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As noted, if you consider the 500,000 males in San Jose, some of those men are infants, some are octogenarians, some hate sports, some are terrible at all sports, some are too ill to compete in any sport. Let’s only look at who remains, and let’s check just one sport for an idea of how dominant this group would be in women’s athletics.

Take the 100m dash. The population of SJ men who would be competitive in world class women’s running would be every high caliber male sprinter from San Jose high schools over the last 10 years. Not just the current best 18 year old sprinter, but the 27 year old who was just as good when he was 18, and has spent the last 9 years getting faster and faster rather than taking an office job because he had no future in sprinting.

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If the number given is 500,000, it definitely does.

Since that’s the topic of this thread, I don’t need to consider other levels.

242

That’s more-or-less exactly how sports like soccer are organized.

243

I don’t understand what you mean. How is soccer organized around ability rather than gender? Schools have boys and girls soccer teams and they compete against other teams of the same gender. There is an ability separation with varsity and JV teams, but those are still gender divided.