I thought you were saying that it’s having multiple levels of ability that was unworkable. Personally, I don’t see how throwing a broad level system like that open to all genders would be unworkable (for instance, volleyball and softball were both mixed here, when I was in HS), but that wasn’t the part I was responding to with the soccer example. My mistake.
From that, I would guess you went to a small school where it was difficult finding enough athletes to field a team in the first place. In those small schools, it doesn’t really matter if a boy plays on a girl’s team. Nothing to do with trans issues. The level of competition will be somewhat random and a random boy won’t necessarily be completely overpowering to the girl athletes.
For volleyball, my school had 3 teams, and that was typical of similar schools. There are, after all, only 6 people on a team. My sister was on the provincial volleyball team, and that was mixed, too. It wasn’t just a school thing. Softball was a club sport, not properly a school one, but the same thing there.
Those guys would have to have enough talent in a sport to compete against elite women AND have absolutely no self-respect. I think we are talking about manageable numbers.
All it would take is one to completely wreck the record books and put them out of reach, likely forever. A high schooler could do in most events.
Example:
1500 meters
High school boys (USA) 3:34.36
Mens’ world 3:26.00
Womens world 3:50.07
As did doping in the '80s and early '90s. Science caught up with those records. I have faith we will find non-intrusive ways to determine if someone is male or female according to the rules of the sport. Let us not try to pre-empt any possible transgression by implementing super strict, intrusive or demeaning tests now.
I think we are talking about different things. I am talking about honestly transgendered persons. People who rightfully believe in themselves as their preferred gender. There is an estimate of a potential transgendered population of 1 million Americans. Simply taking those people statistically, it’s 500,000 people born with XY chromosomes spanning of all walks of life, all ages, all colors, all creeds, all different personal interests and disinterests.
These legitimate transgendered people do not need to dispense with their self respect to play sports while identified as women. If they are openly and freely allowed to do so, the primary dynamic will be that there will be a small number of them at the lowest levels of competition, but increasing proportions of them the higher you go, with the highest levels dominated by transwomen. Not because of any fraud or ill intent, but because transwomen will be orders of magnitude more likely to be top level athletes than women with XX chromosomes.
I don’t think so. The estimated 500k transwomen would be of all ages, sporting ability, sporting interests and none. Just as the 500k male population of San Jose is.
From that current mixed ability population of San Jose we see male HS times being set that are world beating in female sport. I see no reason why a similar population of non-medicated transwomen would not throw up a similar spread of performances.
The discussion is about competition at school level but I didn’t think it was limited to just competetion within single schools.
To be honest, in a lot of schools that is exactly what happens now. Boys and girls are put in the teams that best match their talent. I don’t see that extending it to other ages is that hard.
I’d question whether your system of medical testing is as “seamless”.
A big deal. Doing well in sports can lead to sports scholarships - it is by no means automatic, and sports scholarships are highly competitive - but the dream is powerful (more powerful than the reality of sports scholarships). But just participation at a high level adds to your college applications and is looked on favorably. The difference between being on JV or Varsity can be the difference between getting into your top choice college and not getting in. Even when colleges don’t offer athletic scholarships (most private schools don’t), you can get preferential admission, and often preferential dorm assignments and class registration for being on a college team. A few Summers ago I met a young woman who was swimming for Harvard - obviously her grades and test scores were good enough for Harvard - but so where thousands of other applicants who didn’t make the cut. She’s in because she is a great swimmer.
There are other reasons as well. There are only a few spots on - say - the women’s volleyball team in a high school. Getting on the team grants status in a lot of high schools. Not making the cut means less status. Participating in sports is supposed to develop positive personality traits - if you can’t participate because you didn’t make the cut, you aren’t developing those traits. You have more time on your hands, which is correlated with getting into trouble. That’s a problem without trans-women - there just aren’t enough spots on most teams for everyone. If we fixed that base problem - so everyone who had the commitment to play could play and get the benefits of playing, I suspect there would be less outcry.
Thank you!
Yes, historically there’ve been a few spot here and there where girls could play sports. But I was a child before Title X, and my elementary school had afterschool sports for the boys, and my town had little league and peewee soccer and kiddy football and hockey. And nothing at all organized for girls. There were no girl’s sports except for neighborhood pick-up stuff (co ed) and a few gym classes.
Now we have a lot of sports for girls. And that’s great. There are lots of benefits to kids to be able to compete on a team sport. And suddenly we feel the need to protect cis girls – girls who weren’t allowed to play at all – from a tiny number of trans girls?
I’m not buying it.
I’m not talking about world records. The Olympics already has rules about transitioning, and they seem to work mostly fine. And if big-money and big-prestige sports organizations want to test athletes for testosterone, or whatever, that seems fine. I’m talking about elementary school sports. After school sports. Yes, even high school sports. Honestly, who cares what the “high school record” is?
That’s an interesting thought. Are there not enough spots on the collection of teams in a typical school to accommodate all the students who want to compete? That’s a problem that should be solved, and I really don’t see how shunting some trans kids from this team try-out to that team try-out makes any difference. If there are fewer spots than kids (in total, not for any particular sport) than some kids are getting screwed. I don’t see any reason why it’s “more fair” to screw all the trans girls (who, let’s be frank, have more other stuff going against them than the average kid) than it is to screw any other subset of kids.
As I said above, when I was a girl, ALL girls, at least in my town, got screwed with regards to access to sports. Let’s try to make sports more available, rather than squabbling over excluding this kid or that kid.
One thing about the Olympics is that they have hormone and medical requirements for trans athletes. If athletes at the HS don’t have such requirements, then it’s likely that some trans girls will have undergone no medical transitioning and will essentially have bodies typical of AMAB athletes. If HS trans girls are required to have similar medical requirements to the Olympics, lots of performance-related objections go away. But as I understand it, the push is for HS athletes to play with the gender they self-identify with rather than have to meet any medical requirements.
Yes, many high school students are too young to undergo medical transition, even if they want to. My point is that for the vast majority of high school athletes, the point is to compete, and to be on a team. The point isn’t that they are going to be setting world records, or even state records.
For high-stakes athletic events, like the Olympics, like professional sports, it makes sense to spend a lot of resources worrying about which drugs and which hormones and which biological features are allowed in various divisions.
High school is not really high-stakes. Not for the enormous majority of kids involved in high school sports. Elementary school even less so. School sports are about working hard at something, and getting better, and about teamwork, and setting priorities, and … Yes, of course every athlete would like to win. But the vast majority won’t win. And we tend to think their participation was worthwhile even so.
And when I was in school the options for girls who wanted to compete were ludicrously limited. Some rich kids did gymnastics. The school had a girls’ lacrosse team, and some girls’ swimming. We didn’t even have track teams for the girls.
Now we do. That’s a whole lot more fair than it used to be. And you know what, it will still be fair (to the extent that any sport is “fair”) if trans girls get to compete with the other girls.
Though surprisingly, not enough. My son played baseball through a well funded private “park and rec” league. They had the support of the city, but it wasn’t run through the city. The girls had park and rec softball - which was a disaster that didn’t even give out team t-shirts. Basketball was similar. So was soccer. In every case, the boys league was just far superior to what the girls were offered, in fields, coaches, equipment. And yes, you needed to register your girls early - spots filled - with the boys they’d just make more teams.
And I suspect this is why you get some pushback on trans girls. We fought hard for our sports, and we still haven’t gotten equity (see the women’s NCAA basketball gym compared to the men’s). There still aren’t enough resources for cis girls who want to play.
And that’s a fine thing to protest. But demonizing the handful of trans girls who want to play really doesn’t make it better.
However part of the point might be to go to a good University and/or get a scholarship, and Dangerosa has clarified for me that this is common.
Also records might not mean much for you or I but for a young woman busting her guts even just the school record would probably mean a lot. Heck even just winning an event would mean a lot.
Now, I’d agree that the number of trans girls is small, and the issue has been blown way out of proportion for political reasons. But that doesn’t mean there’s no problem and no knock on effects from just having a blanket allowance for all trans girls.
I wonder if it’s possible to make a prediction against something measurable.
Something like this (assuming the rules are not changed to restrict trans girls):
By 2030, X% of the records for girls’ youth individual track and field events will be held by trans girls.
What do we think X will be?
It sounds like you’re arguing that since girls were discriminated against in the past and things were even more unfair back then, they should shut up and stop complaining about unfairness now. The ‘I put up with crap so kids today should too’ argument. Trans people have never been excluded from sports; in the past they would have been competing according to their birth sex - for example Caitlyn Jenner famously won an Olympic medal.
The current rules were brought in too close to the 2016 Olympics to make a difference, and the 2020 Olympics haven’t yet taken place, so actually they have never been tested.
But even if they do turn out to work fine, many transgender high school kids will not be on hormones at all. And high school age boys routinely break women’s Olympic records. One good trans athlete could potentially set state records that no born female can ever touch.
I am not a physician or coach just a guy. I think common sense would tell you that a person that starts out as a male is going to have an advantage competing against females. It is biology.
I don’t really have any strong feelings about school records, but I think they’re a convenient way to look at the differences between the performance of boys and girls in similar categories. I checked the records for Arkansas boys and girls track & field events where they have the top 20 record holders for most of the events. For the most part, the #1 record holder in the girl’s events would not make the top twenty in the boy’s events.
I’ll concede that just looking at the record holders in boy’s and girl’s categories is flawed. We’re looking at the top athletes in the state and maybe you can’t make any conclusions about athletes in general based on that. The #10 girl’s record holder in the 200 meters dash might actually outrun every boy in her school district for all I know. And there are so few trans girl athletes right now I’m not sure anyone can come to any concrete conclusions about what effect if any they’ll have on girl’s athletics.
I think there’s a legitimate concern about what this might mean for cis-girls in athletics. But there’s also a lot of bad faith arguments by bigots who just want to make life difficult for transgender people.