Such as…?
If woman is a declared state of mind how can any sport favor women if anyone can be a woman?
It would be darkly amusing if an opinion like HughGoply’s managed to take down Title IX, at least regarding sports.
It might be a simple solution, but it’s also a very unpleasant one for most people, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As well as the aforementioned weight divisions, we also have separate divisions based on age and geographical region. Both because we want to see what the, say, fastest under-12 sprinter can do and also to give opportunities for all to compete.
And it’s the same with gender categories. Gender categories have worked extremely well in the sports that require them (which is the majority). The difficulty of drawing lines with the relatively small number of trans and intersex competitors should not be a reason to end all this success.
However, I just think it’s wrong to pretend there’s no issue and say trans-girls don’t have an unfair advantage right now due to gender transitioning being a developing science.
In the meantime, if trans-girls make up a significant proportion of winners it will ultimately kill women’s sport as surely as banning it would.
Long-distance cold-water swimming for one.
We don’t have a separate sporting category for people of Norwegian descent so it is not comparable. Things like weight and age do have separate categories in some sports, and we base these on objective criteria.
That’s the point. We don’t need to separate men and women.
If we didn’t have separate men’s and women’s events at the Olympics you could count the number of female winners on one hand. The overwhelming majority of events would have zero female competitors. The same thing would happen in school sports at the top levels. That is what you are advocating for?
What about sporting scholarships? Would you repeal the law reserving half of them for women, too?
This wouldn’t work, since men are stronger and faster than women of the same size.
Well it depends what we mean by objective.
Yes it’s an objective fact that this person weighs ~72kg. However it’s an arbitrary judgement that that person should therefore compete in a bracket that is “everyone less than 75kg” instead of a bracket “everyone 70 - 80kg”.
And that is the same kind of arbitrary judgement call that we may need to make, temporarily, to preserve women’s sport while we wait for the science of gender transitioning to advance. e.g. on proportion of non-XX cells, testosterone etc.
I’ve already said we should re-evaluate the sports we support. We could focus more on sports where women have advantages on average.
Women’s track as currently administered is a joke. It’s second-rate. Instead, let’s re-create track where there are races where women have can have advantages on average.
I’ve also already discussed separating sports and school.
On average.
Yes, that’s true. Sex categories are less arbitrary than weight or age, but there has to be a certain amount of arbitrariness when it comes to deciding how to classify people with intersex conditions for sporting purposes. But the goal of this should be to ensure fairness (and safety in contact sports). It’s obvious that allowing people to self-identify into a different category is going to strongly disadvantage those athletes born female, and the evidence suggests that a few years of hormone therapy is not enough to eliminate the physiological advantages of male puberty.
That is rather impractical since there are almost no sports where women have an advantage over men.
(Women do have advantages over men in, for example, surviving Coronavirus infection; but that is not a sport.)
On average, and also at the extremes where sporting competitions are won.
Irrelevant. The tails of the performance distribution are where the medals and big bucks are decided.
The male and female bell curves of performance overlap greatly. It may even be that average performance for females in some athletic endeavours is higher than the male.
but so what? The long-tailed nature of the male distribution means that the winners (and abject losers) will overwhelmingly be male. No-one is giving out medals for slightly-higher-than-average performance.
In a world where female sports do not exist you have close to zero females at the top end, incomes crash, prestige is negated.
It is perfectly valid to hold such a view but there is a tough sell ahead of you.
Because the contests are way too short.
It would be a set largely bereft of girls.
Getting rid of athletics from public schools in America seems unlikely nor have you offered any reason why such a thing is desirable. Most importantly, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the subject of the thread.
Yeah, I was wondering what this would mean for Title IX. I suppose if sports are open to all then it must be fair, right?
It’d work just fine. It’d exclude most girls from competing but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for some posters.
Imagine if we said basketball would be moved from the court to cold, open water and the game would last 12 hours with no breaks. Now who has the advantage?
We prioritize sports where power is valued over endurance, which is a sexist position.
I think we may be talking at cross purposes. My understanding of transgenderism is that - leaving aside intersex people and people with any one of a handful of extremely rare chromosomal conditions - male and female sexes are fixed biological categories. Gender, on the other hand, is fluid. So, male and female is fixed, but girl/woman and boy/man are not.
This means you can have a girl (gender) in a male (sex) body, going through male (sex) puberty and having their development guided by male (sex) hormones like testosterone, but this doesn’t invalidate her identity (gender) as a girl/woman, because gender identity is distinct from sex and is amenable to change.
That’s my understanding, at any rate. I’m far from an expert on this.
Now, it’s well known that the average teenage male has much more testosterone in his system than the average teenage female. Indeed, the average teenage male has much more testosterone in his system than a teenage female with higher than average testosterone. In your previous post, you said: “Some of these hormones are different on average in boys and girls”, but the word ‘different’ is doing quite a lot of work. According to this source ( Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance ) the average teenage male produces thirty times as much testosterone as females of any age. While the levels of some sex hormones are different on average in males and females, the difference, on average, is vast and insurmountable.
Now, I acknowledge your point that trans experiences were excluded from the studies from which these averages were derived, but if gender is distinct from biological sex, then there’s no reason to believe their inclusion would’ve influenced the results in either direction. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no evidence that - prior to treatment - the testosterone levels of a typical transgender girl are different to those of a typical cisgender boy.
Therefore, if a transgender girl is allowed to compete against cisgender girls then, all other things being equal, she would expect to win because of the higher amount of male sex hormones to which she was exposed during puberty. That’s why I don’t feel it’s fair to allow transgender girls to compete with cisgender girls.
In this example, the Norwegian girls would have an advantage, but it’s not the same type of advantage that transgender teenage girls have over cisgender teenage girls. To further the analogy, if the sport were basketball, and Norwegian girls were, on average, fourteen feet tall, then I’d imagine they would be excluded. There’d be no point competing against them.
I agree that these sports should certainly get more support than they currently do. However, the number of sports in which girls have an advantage is very small, and it excludes virtually all the most popular school sports (football, basketball, short and middle-distance running, all jumping and throwing events, nearly all gymnastic events, soccer, tennis, swimming, and many others). These sports are the ones which most people, including most transgender people, enjoy participating in. For this reason, I don’t think supporting the more niche activities in which women perform better would actually do anything to solve the main issue.
I don’t think Serena Williams or Naomi Osaka think tennis matches should be days long, and I don’t think Breanna Stewart thinks basketball games should last twenty hours, and I strongly suspect Shellyanne Fraser-Price is happy to continue running 100m races. What you are basically saying to thousands - hell, millions - of athletes born with what you think are the wrong chromosomes is “to hell with you, no elite sports for you. Only males need bother.” If there are no sex categories in sports, those women are all out of sports. They’re done. No female-born person can even BEGIN to play elite basketball, soccer, hockey, baseball, volleyball, or (insert sport here.) They would be blown off the field/court/ice/track. That’s just reality. But thanks to sex divisions in sports, they can play, and they can win, and in some cases they can become legends.
If what you’re saying is “the only sports should be the incredibly fringe long distance endurance ones that women currently match men in” then fine but those simply are not the sports 99.99% of women want to play. Tennis, track, soccer and basketball aren’t popular because they’re “supported,” they are supported because they are popular.
We just might discover otherwise after Tokyo 2021.