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

Great Debates
749

I’d like to point out that sex/gender isn’t the only division that can work despite not being exactly on any biological line. We routinely divide children’s sports by age bracket. But age is only a rough proxy of how kids grow. In particular, different kids hit puberty at different ages.

There was one boy in my elementary school who was post-pubescent, with a beard and everything. He was HUGE. (He was probably a really small guy, but he looked huge to me as a kid. He was taller than all the teachers, even.) Physically, he blew every other child in that school out of the water. He probably outweighed most kids in his class by a factor of 2.

But no one made him go to the junior high to play sports. He played sports with the other elementary school kids. And it was fine. One absurdly stronger kid did not ruin the competition for anyone else. (Elementary school kids don’t play tackle football or lift weights competitively. But we played kick ball and four square and other kid-level games with him.) The powers that be determined that the social benefits of letting him play with his peers were more important than his physique.

Trans girls aren’t, by and large, nearly as physically dominant compared to the other girls as he was compared to the other pre-pubescent elementary school kids.

750

What Novelty Bobble chooses to watch on her/his time off isn’t my concern. We’re talking about school sports in his thread, not professional sports or other adult athletics.

751

(“His” is a typo for “this” in this case, I’m guessing?) Yes, but it would be absurd to think that girl athletes on school teams are unaffected by the perception of intrinsic inferiority generally attached to girls’/women’s sports in society as a whole.

I repeat: If cisgender female athletes aren’t expected to be “emotionally harmed” by the existence of average performance differentials between male and female athletes in general, and the inevitable differences in status arising from that, then it’s not reasonable to expect them to be “emotionally harmed” by occasional competition with transgender female athletes.

Life isn’t fair, male physiology is typically larger and stronger than female physiology, get over it.

It really seems a bit patronizing and sexist to expect that cisgender girls must matter-of-factly accept all the ordinary consequences of that biological reality (including not only sex segregation of sports competition but also massive differential impacts on things like physical safety, sexual autonomy, etc.), but will melt down in frustrated trauma if it occasionally results in a transgender girl outperforming them at sports.

752

Of course it would be absurd, because biofemales are constantly shit on. I am unclear how allowing biomales to take their sports on competitive sports teams helps.

Sorry, biofemales. Screw you if you miss out on a scholarship. Gotta center biomales!

It’s funny though how the “life isn’t fair, get over it” is so disproportionately said to the half of the human population that developed along the lines of the sex that produces ova and bears young.

753

That is a very good summary, I cosign.

Not cosine, that would be a tangent.

ETA: I would add the caveat that I’m not a big fan of hyper-competitiveness in school sports at all. I’m all for school sports, but as fun games, with a little competition at the “X won the game this time” or “Y won the race” level, not start-of-athletics-career-at-age-8 Junior-Mirror-of-Adult-League kind of things.

754

Again, I assume the first “sports” is a typo for “spots”?

Transgender girls (can we not use the deliberately misgendering term “biomales”, please? The phrase “transgender girls” conveys all the relevant information about their gender identity and their biological sex at birth) get constantly shit on at least as much as cisgender girls.

Encouraging cisgender girls to turn against other girls who happen to be transgender, and to ostracize them as some kind of crypto-male infiltrators who are “taking their spots”, just provides misogynists more opportunities to shit on girls of all kinds. Solidarity on this issue is important for equity, for sportsmanship, and for feminism.

Again, please stop calling transgender girls “males”. There are non-offensive ways to explicitly state, if necessary, that transgender girls generally have male physiology (see what I just did there? that’s one of the ways).

The people who are “centering” the relatively tiny number of transgender girl athletes are not the defenders of trans rights, but the transphobes who are using fake feminism as a figleaf for their bigoted exclusion of transgender girls. They’re the ones making transgender girl athletes the center of controversy.

If it weren’t for these shit-stirring transphobes, girls’ athletics would be chugging along normally with both cisgender and transgender participants, and with the vast majority of events and scholarships continuing to be won by cisgender girls. But that wouldn’t stir enough shit, or something.

…that are girls and women, including transgender girls and women.

We women have lived through a lot of patriarchal “divide and conquer” strategies trying to persuade one group of us that another group of us was a threat undermining our status as women. I really think we shouldn’t fall for that bullshit again.

755

5 posts were merged into an existing topic: RangerLoops troll posts

756

Would you quote the part that you want me to look at? You linked that cite to show when these laws/guidances went into effect in those states? I don’t dispute that there are several states where transgirls are allowed to play on the girl’s team, but because it’s occurring doesn’t mean that aren’t any issues. If a cisgirl tries out for the team, but doesn’t make it and a transgirl does, that’s problematic imo. Does your cite show that that isn’t happening?

Yes, seriously. The purpose of girl’s sports isn’t to provide gender identity affirmation for transgirls. I don’t think that the confirmation of the gender identity of transgirls is the burden of cis-girls to carry by ceding their spot on the girl’s team to transgirls. Confirmation of gender identity can come from several different avenues, I think that transgirls should use those other avenues to confirm their identity instead of trying to do so via girl’s sports.

757

Why? Are transgirls supposed to be considered only “provisionally” girls? Their “girl” status should be rescinded as far as team membership is concerned if there’s a cisgirl who wanted to get on the team but didn’t make the cut?

ISTM that if transgirls are girls, who happen to be as a group larger and stronger than other girls because of their physiology, then it’s not “problematic” if they sometimes beat out cisgirls for a spot on the team. Any more than it’s problematic if an older and stronger cisgirl beats out a younger one, or a taller one beats out a shorter one.

It would definitely be problematic if transgirls’ team membership was conditional on their not displacing any cisgirls, though. If they’re allowed on the team because they’re girls, then they shouldn’t be relegated to a kind of second-class girl status where cisgirls are guaranteed precedence over them.

No, the point is whether it’s an allowable function of girls’ sports to undermine the gender identity of transgirls. If you kick them off the team just for their transgender identity, that’s active discrimination, not just “not providing gender identity affirmation”.

Similarly, not requiring all the straight members of the team to wear rainbow Pride badges doesn’t mean that it’s okay to kick the lesbian members off the team. Unfairly undermining people by exclusionary discrimination against them is a much more serious matter than merely not “affirming” them.

Eschewing unjust discrimination is a burden that it’s everybody’s duty to help carry. If somebody from a previously ostracized minority group out-competes you for a spot on the team, you have not been cheated out of “your” spot just because you would have got it if your competitor had continued to be ostracized.

Heh, I remember exactly the same sort of argument directed against same-sex couples wanting to get married. “They have all sorts of ways to affirm their relationships instead of trying to change the nature of marriage.”

Nope. Same-sex couples are couples and therefore are as entitled to marry as any other couples. Transgender girls are girls and therefore are as entitled to play girls’ sports as any other girls.

Now, if the issue is that there are way too many transgirl athletes creating essentially a two-tier girls’ sports structure that’s seriously impacting cisgender girls’ access to playing sports in general, then we need to talk about creating separate divisions based on that ability differential. Just as we already do in many sports for age and/or weight categories.

But unless and until that’s happening, the default, as puzzlegal said, should be to “create the best environment for the most kids by drawing that line to include trans girls with the girls, and trans boys with the boys”.

758

How does feeling feminine reduce a person’s athletic ability? I don’t dispute that they have sincere beliefs that they’re transgendered, but that belief doesn’t have an impact on their physiology. The advantages that male athletes have over female athletes doesn’t come from a belief that they’re boys, it comes from their male body. A trans girl’s sincere belief that they’re trans doesn’t have an impact on their athletic ability.

759

I’ve explained what I view the problem to be, feel free to reread my posts. You and others think that as long as the number of transgirls on the girl’s team remains below an arbitrary number that there isn’t any problem…and that’s where I disagree. I think that there is a problem at any number. A cis-girl’s opportunity to play high-school sports is going to a transgirl when that transgirl could play on the open team. Several people have stated that they would only see this as a problem if, for instance, 50% or more of the girl’s team is made up of transgirls, but those same people also say that transgirls need to play on the girl’s team to confirm their gender identity. When that 50% threshold is reached, is it then OK to deny those transgirls the confirmation of their gender identity via girl’s sports by not allowing them to play on the girl’s team? How is it possible to confirm the gender identity of transgirls on the girl’s team by saying, “there are too many of you on this team, this team should be majority cis-girl?”

If one holds the opinion that it’s possible to not deny transgirls the confirmation of their gender identity by limiting the number of transgirls who can play on the girl’s team when the number of transgirls on the team is at, or close to, 50%, then it’s also possible to do so when there is only one transgirl on the team.

760

They’d still be playing on a girls’ team, just on a different squad of the girls’ team.

Same way that some high school varsity teams dominated by the older and stronger upperclass (junior and senior) players have corresponding junior varsity teams limited to freshman and sophomore players. Sometimes the varsity and JV squads swap out players based more on ability than age, which could be done between the mostly-transgender and mostly-cisgender squads on a girls’ team too.

That’s very different from telling transgender girls that they have to go play on teams mostly populated by boys. Making separate subdivisions of girls’ athletics to accommodate larger numbers of players with bigger ability differentials is not the same thing as just offloading some girls onto boys’ athletics.

761

You are right that biological females are dealt a genetic hand that predisposes them to be at an athletic disadvantage compared to biological males.

To try and counter that, a segregated competition has been set up that was intended to protect that competition from those inherent disparities. The reason for doing so are obvious and even though it cannot protect people from all disparities it seems a fair place to draw the line.

If those inherent disparities are real (and they are) and fair/safe competition cannot be guaranteed without that segregation (it can’t) then those people within that segregated competition have a valid reason to expect that those borders continue be policed.
They already have to deal with people (like me admittedly) who often pay them less attention on the basis of relative athletic performance.
If it is proposed that fully biologically males can now circumvent that segregation then I can understand the concern about that, that surely must seem unfair. The females are already a few pawns down and being asked to accept another player with three queens on the board and extra time on the clock.

If that is not what people are proposing then the conversation shifts to the rules by which people are allowed to compete within that category. Those discussions necessarily must include the degree to which biological males retain those physiological advantage and therefore we cannot avoid talking about surgeries, hormones and other medical interventions, however unpalatable that may be.

I’m not suggesting that anyone chucks in that line of medical and physiological questioning casually over cocktails and nibbles with a transwoman, just after the weather and how nice the hummus is, but nor should relevant, hard biological realities be ignored in the relevant forum.

We shouldn’t sacrifice necessary clarity and imagine it is politeness. I think that is pretty patronising as it assumes those affected by the subject are unable to handle such discussions or to divine intent.

762

So, you’re saying that a single trans-girl taking the spot of a cisgirl on any high school team in the US would be too much? If that’s what you think, I think you and I have an unbridgeable gap on our positions.

I’m not those people, but if a school had enough transgirls to make up a whole team, they they could have an open team. Most schools aren’t big enough to have that many teams. In any case, this is no doubt an exaggeration by those people, because the vast majority of high school teams where transgirls can play with cisgirls seem to have close to zero actual transgirls outcompeting. I am confident in this estimate because if it were a problem, then right wing sources that cater to transphobes would be all over those stories.

763

How is calling a biological male a biological male “misgendering”? “Biological male” is unambiguously a reference to biology - sex - not gender. It is an accurate term and specifically relevant here. I misgendered no one and will continue using that term. It is clear, it’s true, and does not misgender. Furthermore, no, I cannot substitute “transgender girls” because I meant biological males, which includes cis boys.

Pretending transgirls aren’t biologically male is just not a serious position.

Oddly, in the other thread about trans rights right now this is being specifically discussed, and there was agreement “biological female/male” ISN’T misgendering, which is why I specifically chose the term. It’s bizarre how much of trans rights advocacy isn’t based on, well, any sort of logical construction of ideas, but on just changing, on a month to month basis, what words people are allowed to use. Here I guess it’s a day to day change.

764

You have cause and effect backwards. It’s not that “believing they are female” makes them less good at sports. It’s that it’s highly likely that the same underlying cause of them not feeling at home in their skins, and believing they were misassigned to the wrong gender at birth has OTHER impacts on them, and that some of those impacts, in many cases, result in being less fit at sports – just like cist girls are less fit at sports than cis boys.

765

Cis girls are not less fit at sports as cis boys because of some emotional or psychological effect of being told they are less capable. How insulting that is to female athletes, my goodness.

766

It’s not great terminology because most trans girls believe that they have some aspects of female biology. Una, the transwoman who used to post here, for instance, said that she was born partially intersex. A common belief among transgender people is that their brain was sexualized differently from their genitalia in-utero.

Male and female are a spectrum. Even though most of us fall into one of the two modes, there’s a spectrum, and trangender people are far more likely to have fallen away from the modes biologically than cisgender people.

767

Huh. I said nothing about it being emotional or psychological. You read that into my statement. And yes, that is insulting, and I don’t believe it is true.

I’m going to say it again, trans girls are not just boys wearing skirts whom we are being polite to by pretending they are girls. Trans girls are feminine in important ways. Ways that aren’t completely understood. But it is insulting to assume it’s not based on any biological underpinning.

768

Intersex conditions are a different thing.

Trans girls are biologically male. We are having a discussion where that point is specifically relevant. Here we go again with vocabulary being okay one month and prohibited the next.

But as I’ve asked before, if “male” is an unacceptable adjective for some reason when describing the physiology of trans girls, and so I switched to “biologically male” but that adjective is unacceptable, by all means tell me what adjective describing that state is acceptable.