It means the body appeared to be male when the baby was born and the birth certificate was filled out.
The odds are that a lot of trans people are at least partially intersex, but mostly not in ways that were obvious when the birth certificate was filled out.
Maybe it would have been better to say that trans people were assigned a sex at birth that doesn’t match their gender identity. But then you get into a lot of words.
I really like this list. I think it helps look at the question from various perspectives.
I wouldn’t describe these people are trans though, and they appeared to be female at birth:
That’s more accurate, because trans people don’t necessarily have any observable brain differences.
Do you have a cite for this assertion? How broadly are you defining “intersex” to get to this claim?
How are you defining “talented”? Because if Mr 203 would win, then he’s obviously better at tennis by the only objective measure. Do you mean Williams is aesthetically better?
Or just more of an outlier from a particular cohort? Because that’s not the usual definition of “talented”
Never mind…
Are you saying that trans girls just feel they are female and are not in fact female? I’ve read this a few times and it seems to me that’s what you are saying.
We’ve touched on this issue a little bit, but one consideration is that cisgirls in HS will have had a more difficult time being an athlete due to a variety of factors they experience while growing up compared to a cisboy. For example:
These factors may not necessarily affect a trans girl depending on when she comes out. If she presented as a cisboy until her teen years, then likely issues like these were not a major factor for her. She was able to achieve excellence in sport easier than her cisgirl teammates. So not only does she have the benefit of male biology relating to performance, but her path to achieving her ability came easier. This can also affect the feeling of unfairness if a trans girl plays on the girls team since the cisgirls had to work much harder to get where they are.
This seems like a facile point ignoring the physiological differences between adolescent males and females. If you just want to abolish boy’s and girl’s sports in favor of sports just say so.
The reason we divide sports into various categories is to make things a bit more competitive. After all, most spectators and athletes aren’t interested in a competition where the outcome is all but a forgone conclusion. Maybe try thinking of it from the perspective of the girls who are closer to the top whose positions might be affected by competing against trans girls.
I’m defining it pretty broadly. I suspect that being transgender is often the result of having a brain that developed at least partially along the lines more common to the other sex.
I don’t have a good cite, although it’s something a lot of trans people believe. I did once read a rat study where researchers were able to reliably rear rats that exhibited “homosexual” behavior by messing with the hormones the fetal rats were exposed to at day “x” (which isn’t the same time that the gonads sexually differentiate.) Not that homosexuality is the same as gender identity, but I suspect both are influenced by fetal hormones in some key window.
That is what a transgirl is, according to my understanding of what the word “female” means. “Female” is a biological state of being the sex that typically produces ova and, in humans, bears young. Perhaps you are using a different sense of that term.
The thread, though, is rather clearly about the differences between the two biological sexes.
So, let’s agree that it probably doesn’t matter one way or the other for the vast majority of cis girls, who aren’t going to be on the medal stand either way. (In team sports, it may HELP the cis girls if they have an especially strong player on their team, for whatever reason.)
I realize that it’s hard to balance the aspirations of a group of athletically gifted young women who hope to win gold with the aspirations of a group of misfit young women who have a lot working against them and are prone to mental health disorders, like suicide. I do agree that at the top levels, sports should favor the athletes. But something should be available to the misfits, too – especially if they ARE also decent athletes. And most school sports aren’t the top levels. Honestly, most school sports are pretty mediocre. And as someone to whom it was glaringly obvious that sports aren’t fair, I find it hard to be impressed by an argument that this one little addition of “unfairness” is going to upset the apple cart.
I’d be delighted if we had more unisex sports, with leagues separated by ability. I also think there’s a place for girls and boys sports, and for kids and adult sports, and for leagues defined by churches or schools or geography. But the cutoff between what’s a “boy” and what’s a “girl” is not really clear cut. Where we draw the line is basically arbitrary. I’m arguing for an arbitrary line that is allows trans girls to play with the girls. I’d like to see actual, and not hypothetical, harm before outlawing that.
My understanding is that they feel like girls/women. This is their gender identity, which is distinct from their biological sex. I don’t think it’s possible to “feel” male or female. It’d be a bit like feeling blue-eyed or green-eyed.
It doesn’t work. I played softball. There was mixed (co-ed), mens and womens. The co-ed was the least serious, “just for fun.”
The rules were that you had to have equal number of each gender. Also that if you walked a male player, the next female player gets a walk too. Even if that were more serious, it’s all going to sort out the same anyway. If the women on your team are top level for women, why do they want to play with a bunch of men that are lousy players? You’ll have a top co-ed league, with the best men and the best women, and so on down the line. If you make it gender optional, it’s just going to be all men. Because a man can still dominate if women are playing even at the lowest level, and why do the women want to play under those circumstances?
Part of the reason co-ed is less serious is the physical differences. An all male league can afford to get a little rough. Likewise an all female league. In a team sport, a trans woman comes barrelling towards home plate, towards a catcher that she outweighs by 100 pounds, a lot of it muscle. But, like you always say, sports are unfair.
Drive? Desire? Something like that. Something that makes someone want to be a woman. You can say I have the same, that I want to be a man. Something that everyone has.
I know of no physical differences in the bodies of trans women (who are not undergoing hormone therapy) and cis males. I think they should compete with males in sports, because that matches best the reasons for segregating the genders in the first place.
Part of the conflict comes from the fact that they feel uncomfortable being mislabeled. We use the terms man/woman, male/female to mean both sex and gender. If someone identifies as a woman, they feel uncomfortable being referred to as male/man even if it’s just with regards to sex. I’m sure all of us can relate even if it’s not for gender reasons. For example, if you traveled to the Irish office for a work trip and saw the cafeteria was divided in half where one half was Catholic and the other half was Protestant, you might feel uncomfortable having to pick one or the other if those aren’t your religious identifications. It’s fine if you’re Catholic or Protestant, but if you’re Baptist, atheist, Jewish, etc. you might not want to sit in the section which is not your religion. It can be the same with gender. If someone feels they are a woman, they may feel uncomfortable playing on a team labeled “men” even though biologically they may essentially be the same as the other athletes on the men’s team.
It seems we have two options, one is the under 5 nmol/L testosterone league and the open league, and the other is only an open league. Having half of the school getting their blood regularly tested seems like a hardship so most likely this ends in the only open league and anyone who is good enough makes the team.
At the high school level this means that you wouldn’t need a men’s and women’s volleyball coach so you could add more divisions instead of just varsity/JV you would possibly have 1-5 levels. The biggest problem I see is that it will consistently prove to athletic women they aren’t as good as boys. That may do more to harm a generation of girls then the monthly blood tests.
A Yogi Berra quote is that baseball was 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.
While there are probably advantages of having a “male body”, the mental part of a trans girl is the same as the other female athletes.
Leaving aside the questionable premise of that statement, how does that manifest itself in athletic competition?
So you are saying that the reason cis women aren’t competitive with men in sports that I will grant have a huge mental component (like golf) is that they are weak minded?