I assume most of them, yes. What organized high school sports did you play? What non-Olympic sports have you watched in the past year? When was the last time you consumed non-contest sport content, like, say, watching an opinion show on ESPN or listening to sports talk radio?
The vast majority of SDMB posters didn’t play high school sports and don’t watch sports even casually beyond maybe the Olympics and the Super Bowl. A healthy majority actively hate sports and would love to see all sports just go away.
You’re excluding the middle here (and elsewhere). I never said to remove the competition. I said to remove the unhealthy obsession with competitive children’s sports.
AFAICT, it’s totally healthy and great for kids to play games with winners and losers. I’m much less convinced that it’s healthy and great for kids to engage in cutthroat competitions with scholarships and fame attached for the winners.
If there are kids engaged in the sports only for the cutthroat competition, I’d suggest we’re not serving those kids well. I’d further suggest that spectator sports fans may have priorities that don’t serve children well. Your fandom isn’t necessarily a reason why your opinion is more important, if it leads to deprioritizing the health and wellbeing of the children who play.
I’m very definitely not doing that. Which is why I’ve asked you what definition of “male” or “female” you are using when discussing biological sex as it relates to sport.
I’ve very specifically not imposed a single definition on you.
IMHO a clear distinction should be made between gender (how one identifies) and biological sex (what chromosomes and body parts one was born with). The terms used for gender should be used exclusively for gender, and those for biological sex should. be reserved for that, in order to avoid confusion. I would use woman, girl, man, boy, non-binary, cis, trans, and whatever other terms people use to describe their gender identity for discussing gender. For biological sex I would use male, female, and inter-sex for those individuals whose biological sex was not clear at birth.
How does this apply to sports? I think it means that we should be precise as to whether a team is a girls / women’s team vs. a female team. Sticking to the correct term would at least help minimize the confusion as to what is under discussion.
I haven’t been discussing biological sex as it relates to sport. I’ve been discussing the thread topic – whether trans girls have an advantage, and appropriate policies for trans girls and women in sport.
The problem is that if trans girls do have an advantage, the reason that advantage exists is because of their biological sex. I don’t see one can discuss one without including the other.
But “trans girls” – the big, big category that includes lots and lots of people, don’t have an advantage. An individual trans girl may or may not have an advantage. Why make a broad, sweeping policy when it may only be outliers that actually have any effect on fair competition or safety?
Whether that statement is correct or not is what’s up for debate. I don’t know if it is or not, but I propose that the best way to find out is to run the experiment, crunch the data, and then come to a conclusion based on what the data shows. Let trans girls play on the female teams. If we start seeing every event with a trans girl competing being dominated by the trans girls, then we’ll know they do have an inherent advantage. If we don’t see that, then we’ll know the opposite hypothesis is likely to be correct.
As one data point supporting the latter hypothesis, I would point to Laurel Hubbard’s performance in the weight lifting competition at the recent Olympics. It is just one data point, but in order to arrive at an accurate conclusion, I would support gathering enough data to make a determination by at least allowing the experiment to be run.
Me, personally? I discovered the joy of team sports as an adult, when i discovered sports i am competent at and separately leagues that are not about competition. I prefer not to list my sports because i try to maintain some on-line privacy. My positive experiences with competition are mostly around math, not sports. But i have enjoyed both teamwork in sports and competition, and i feel competent to draw on my personal experiences with teamwork and competition as one data point.
I also have suffered exclusion for traits i had little or no control over, something i suspect a lot of the “just toss the transgirls into the boy’s league” folks do not have much personal experience with.
If you are discussing “trans girls” then you are implicitly discussing biological sex as well, seeing as any potential remaining advantage stems directly from the degree to which they retain male physiological traits.
I’m not sure why it is quite so hard to get your own definition from you.
I haven’t made any references to biological sex that I can recall. I think this issue (trans girls and women in sports) should be treated case-by-case, which would mean biological sex as a broad category would be irrelevant.
Yes. Trans girls and women should, in general, be free to play sports, except in those specific instances in which the individuals involved would endanger fair competition or player safety. I think it’s likely those specific instances will be quite rare.
Because some groups do have inherent advantages which most of us would consider unfair. I mentioned age as such a class. Sure, it’s possible that the JV football team at my local high school (15 and 16 year olds) could beat a team of a bunch of couch potatoes in their 20s and 30s with an overweight middle aged 44 y/o guy like me playing QB. That doesn’t mean it would be fair if that JV team had to play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with the 44 y/o Tom Brady playing QB. The variability of skill in each age group doesn’t negate the fact that the best players in their 20s and 30s (and a tiny handful in their 40s) would have a huge and unfair advantage against even the best 15 and 16 year olds.
The question at hand is whether or not trans girls playing against cis girls falls into this category of reasoning or not.
That’s not workable. You will either have to test and sort people by some measure, or allow for complete self determination, that anyone applying for the girls team is allowed to play on the girls team.
Decisions have unintended consequences. If you want the trans girls on the cis girls teams, you know who is going to love that? Misogynists. They will be absolutely gleeful at a trans girl dominating the competition with cis girls. Be careful what you wish for.
For others, as I have said, the decades long trend has been to have more classes, more separation, so more students can have fair competitions. People here who cannot remember or realize this are hijacking the conversation. Sports are going to continue into the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.