Do you think she found it hard to be labeled a girl as a child?
The same difference in saying a step parent is not your biological parent, and saying they are not your real parent.
Yes, and while it’s sometimes relevant to bring that up, I would be suspicious of someone who insisted on referring to someone as “not a biological parent” in most conversations. Or who routinely referred to “biological parents” in general discussions.
i would guess they don’t really believe in adoption. (I do know some people who feel that way, and who don’t acknowledge that an adoptive parent is a real parent.)
According to her, no. They say that as a child they were a girl and that they became non-binary with puberty.
As of today, we segregate sports by sex because we recognize that adolescent males have a physiological advantage over adolescent females when it comes to athletic endeavors. In light of that recognition, it seems unfair to allow someone assigned male at birth to compete against cis girls prior to undergoing puberty blockers or some other hormonal treatment. I think this is preferable to a blanket ban on trans girl athletes.
I think allowing trans girls who have undergone some sort of hormone treatment for X amount of time before competing against cis girls would be a fair compromise. And then we can reassess the situation after a few years.
Would you also prevent an unusually talented girl from competing with the other girls, because it wasn’t fair?
I just feel that sports are inherently unfair. We are all dealt such very different bodies. I am writing from the perspective of the girl who was always picked last for the team, so from my perspective, it would have made exactly zero difference if the top girl was trans or not. I was at the bottom either way.
BUT, socially, it would have made a huge difference in whether I saw that trans girl as another girl, or as more different.
Good luck getting anyone to give a definition of “sex” that doesn’t throw up at least as many issues.
But you’d feel differently if you were the school’s record holding long jump champion - on your way to going to State and with a good chance at college recruitment and Caitlin Jenner joined the track team.
Yes, sports are inherently unfair, but back in the 1970s we said “the only way to get SOME fairness is to make sure we have teams for girls and women.” If we are just going to throw up our hands and say “well, sports aren’t fair” then why have women’s sports at all?
There’s definitely an issue here with people employing circular definitions and conflating sex and gender, but it’s doable. The vast majority of humans are unambiguously male or female.
Again, I would point out that if there ISN’T a difference between humans in sex, then no one can explain why we have sex segregated sports at all.
If someone is considered to be a valid member of a specific classification then their competing is fair. Are you in age group “x”? are you in weight range “y”. Such classifications are unambiguous.
The question is whether a biologically male person, that has undergone no medical treatment, is a valid member of the class “girl” for the purpose of sporting competition,. That is less clear.
But can you put yourself in the position of those who dedicate their life to sporting excellence? Those to whom the difference between gold, silver and bronze really matters?
Having been in something approaching that position myself as a schoolboy I would have felt robbed if I thought I was losing to people that did not belong in my competitive classification.
What if you were on your way to the tennis championships, and Serena Williams joined your team?
Also, are all that many girls actually recruited due to athletics? I know boys are… But I’ve been interviewing for a college for several years, and in that time I can think of 3 boys I interviewed who were also being looked at by a coach, and zero girls. My experience is too small to be meaningful, but I hear that argument all the time, and wonder how many people it actually applies to.
The problem wasn’t that girls had to compete with boys, though, the problem was that girls didn’t have a place to compete at all. Girls weren’t even allowed on the boys’ teams.
We might have set up a less competitive league in some other way, and still made sports available to girls. We chose to set up girls sports. Okay. That mostly works. But do we really lose access for cis girls to those teams if we allow trans girls on them? I just don’t think there are enough trans girl athletes for that to be a real problem.
The most realistic way to make it fair is to measure testosterone levels. At the high school level, to play in womens sports you should need a testosterone level of less than X (probably less than 100 from my twelve seconds of Google). Testosterone levels are easy to test for. People with testosterone levels less than 100 can play on whatever team they manage to make.
Maybe not. Can you put yourself in the position of a transgirl who isn’t even terribly good at sports but who wants to be able to be on a team with her peers?
I suspect there are a lot more of them than there are transgirls who are going to take the gold.
Help me here, if they were not born female then in what sense are they “trans”?
I have a slightly different take on the topic, which is that (a) it’s a genuinely tough question, and (b) reasonable people can disagree where best to draw the line, there probably isn’t a perfect answer, but, importantly (c) the reason this issue gets talked about so much is not because of reasonable people debating where to draw a tricky line, it’s because of asshole conservatives pouncing on one of the few “wedge” issues they still have, now that gay marriage is mostly normalized.
So if Joe thinks that we should allow everyone to play on the HS team based on how they self-identify, valuing trans kids feelings over competitive integrity, that’s reasonable. And if Jill thinks that teams-by-gender should be teams-by-chromosome, making the opposite choice, that’s reasonable. And if Sean thinks that we should do away with separate leagues entirely, that’s reasonable… as long as they’re all coming to those decisions while respecting the basic humanity of trans kids, and doing their level, honest best to draw a tricky line in a tricky situation.
The only thing that is truly unreasonable is the assholes who are trying to use this issue as a proxy for dehumanizing trans people by tearing at the seams of one of the very rare situations where “just let everyone live as the gender they identify as” doesn’t work 100% smoothly.
“trans” means that the brain and body don’t match, or are on “opposite sides” of the sex binary. It’s the same use of the word as in biochem, where trans fatty acids have hydrogens on the opposite side of a double bond, and cis fatty acids have hydrogen atoms on the same side. The word has nothing to do with changing.
Another important classification of unsaturated fatty acids considers the cis – trans isomerism, the spatial arrangement of the C–C single bonds adjacent to the double bonds. Most unsaturated fatty acids that occur in nature have those bonds in the cis (“same side”) configuration. Partial hydrogenation of cis fats can turn some of their fatty acids into trans (“opposite sides”) variety.
(I first learned the word “cis” when taking an organic chemistry class, and when I ran across it in the sexuality sense, I correctly guessed the meaning.)
Many times sports athletes are segregated in order to yes, make things more fair, despite your protestations of this.
Little League in my youth, ran from 9 to 12 years old. Earlier than that, you played T Ball. Later than that, you graduated to Junior Babe Ruth, a field with full 90 feet bases. Since my youth, typically the 9-10 year olds now play some sort of coach pitch ball, and the 11 and 12 year olds the kids pitch. Because very few 9 and 10 year olds really could play well against the 11 and 12 year olds. So they were further segregated so they could experience success at the level of their natural ability.
Women’s sports are justified in such a manner. Women will never be able to compete physically with men in aggregate, any more than a man can outrace Secretariat on foot past a certain distance. It’s not possible, so we set up divisions where more people have a realistic chance at success. Yes, there will still be some who are poor players at that level. My town had a high school basketball team, some of us wanted to continue to play ball, so we set up a team through our church. It’s a lesser level, but we still got to play. Yes, there will continue to be poor players at any level of any game.
Personally, yes, I think there needs to be a different measurement for who’s eligible to play girls/womens sports other than self chosen gender. A 15 year old doesn’t get to play Little League baseball because they feel 12.
No. Because that girl is winning because she is unusually talented, whereas the trans girl may well be less talented, but is winning because she has a Y chromosome.
An example to show the difference:
Who do you think is more talented? Venus Williams or the number 203 ranked men’s player? Who do you think would win in a match?
I’m kind of bouncing around like a pinball with this. The ‘average girl’ high school athlete competing in track is going to have the same “there’s no way I’m winning this race, unless X trips and breaks her leg on the way to the starting blocks” for the following opposing runners:
the local county champ in your race
a 17 year old Florence Griffith
a transgirl runner who was one of the better runners on the boys track team last year, and who is not taking any hormones
a cis girl who has been taking testosterone for the last 5 years
a 20 year old D1 college sprinter pretending to be a high schooler for gags
a cis girl riding a motorcycle (who might even win with a broken leg)
Some of these are clearly fair, some are clearly unfair, but they are all instances where the average athlete is destined to lose the race. Somewhere in this list there has to be a line where you separate the “you race the person in the next lane, and don’t complain” from the “this is not a fair competition”.
I do have to admit, this issue is a very rare one for the typical athlete, akin to being in a race with the county champion. Where it does crop up is for the county champion runner herself who is hoping for a scholarship, or to run in college, but who is NOT actually the champion because of a couple of other runners who happen to have Y chromosomes.
And for that to be the case with a transwoman the body must be male…correct?