It’s an interesting concept to examine and people are free to join organizations that have sport as a learning or a social event and set the rules of the league appropriately to have some parity in competition. However, in competitive sport, even youth sport, humans are a dimorphic species and the variance between the sexes is too great for most competitive sports to have anything near proportionate representation in the upper echelons if there are no gender categories.
Your “solution” seems to be about putting people in their “proper place”.
Nowhere have I said anything like that.
FWIW:
Not school sports.
Did the OP restrict this to school sports? If so I missed that.
From. Above
Sorry I missed that.
Not sure the Olympics is “adult sports” either (lots of teens compete there).
Really weird restriction but ok. My mistake.
One issue, for me, is that the “barriers” (sorry about the term) for entry for Male to Female transition at sports are getting lower and lower.
If we fully accept that transwomen are women and that you don’t need hormones, surgery, clothes or anything and just self-identification to be a female, then, soon there will be not biological women in sports.
I don’t know what the answer is, though. You certainly want transgender athletes to participate in sports, but if the cost is the almost total erasure of biological women in sports, it’s at least very tricky.
Also, transgender men are screwed, they can’t compete in the women’s category, but realistically, they won’t be able to succeed in all but the lowest levels of male sports.
(I suck at terminology, sorry if I’m using any term that is incorrect)
This is scientifically incorrect. Basic biological science holds that testosterone is the male sex hormone and estrogen is the primary female sex hormone. You are playing a “gotcha” type of science by suggesting that just because men and women have both hormones (at least some variants of them, there are types of estrogen that men do not really have in a normal case) they are not biologically associated with the two specific biological sexes.
In gestation the early development of the human body is fairly sex neutral, but the DNA of the embryo being male or female will cause developments that lead to massive hormonal differences, which cause the development of primary and secondary sexual features. This process continues after birth and ramps up in puberty.
In males a typical estrogen level for a healthy adult male is around 10-40 pg/ml (pictograms per milliliter.) In an a health pre-menopausal adult female it is around 150 pg/ml in the 20s and 200s pg/ml in the 30s. Estrogen is the closer of the two hormones between the sexes. It should be noted that males lack the anatomy to direct produce estrogen (which is produced in the ovaries in women), males have a process called aromatization that can concert some testosterone to estrogen.
As we look to testosterone we see a far greater difference. The normal level of testosterone in an adult female is 15-70 ng/dL (nanogram / deciliter.) The normal level for an adult male can be upward of 1000 ng / dL.
I think in response to OP, any female in a High School setting with significantly higher testosterone levels than an average healthy teenage cis female, is likely to have an advantage in most athletic competitions, which could be a significant advantage.
We know from sports like powerlifting where testosterone supplementation, anabolic steroid use and etc is widespread, that in men, the higher you shift your testosterone the stronger you get, the better you recover etc. A famous lifting coach once was asked why people use steroids and his answer was “because they work.” They aren’t woo. Anabolic steroids drive hormonal changes that make you stronger and better at most sports.
A High School cis female who has significantly higher testosterone levels, knowing little more about the specifics, almost certainly has a significant physiological advantage over biologically average cis females. In fact this biological reality is why we have gender segregated sports, if by some quirk in human biology women had more manlike testosterone levels (but somehow maintained their ability to reproduce, i.e. assuming a generally different human biology than exists in our world), the performance difference between women and men would almost certainly be much, much narrower (there may still be some advantage to biological males due to other factors.)
As an illustrative point I reference Mark Henry, recently retired WWE wrestler who got his start as a powerlifter in the 1990s and was on the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team. He is among the most, if not the most, genetically gifted strong person in measured human history. He is also one of the few people in the strength sports who is widely believed to have never used PEDs of any kind.
As a High School senior in Texas in 1990 (and no lifter hits their genetic potential in HS, most don’t until their late 20s/early 30s)–raw / without using straps or equipment, Mark performed a competition squat of 832 lb, bench press of 525 lb, and a deadlift of 815 lb for a combined powerlifting total of 2033 lb. These numbers would remain world records if he were a woman, at any age, by over 200 lb in the squat and deadlift and by around 75 pounds in the bench press.
Women’s powerlifting is a much smaller sport than men’s powerlifting for a number of reasons, as a frame of reference many women’s records are held by a 30 something woman named April Marsh, who was born biologically female, but is widely known to be taking massive amounts of testosterone supplementation, anabolic steroids, HGH etc (she has developed severe male pattern baldness and other signs of serious abuse of performance enhancing drugs.) She’s the one who is still over 200lb behind Mark’s records in two of the lifts, and the next woman below her is quite a bit further behind Mark.
TLDR high test = advantage in sports, and any serious person will acknowledge this.
So what does that mean for High School athletics? Transmen, who likely want to compete in boys sports, would pose little competitive issue doing so, and would likely pose serious competitive issues if forced to compete in girls sports, as assigned females at birth who are taking hormone treatment that raises their testosterone level, they would almost certainly have an unfair advantage against cis females. Additionally, they almost certainly want to compete in the boys sports as they identify as male. Additionally, they are likely to still have disadvantages versus cis males, so they are not going to have any kind of advantage in the boys sports from their hormone treatment, if anything being born with female sexual anatomy they almost certainly will still have a disadvantage in boys sports.
Note that many schools attempting to regulate this are forcing transmen to still compete in women’s sports, which actually is likely one of the more “unfair” things to the non-trans athletes that is out there, and it is being caused by misguided conservative moral panic.
Transwomen are the more complicated matter, since we do know that if they are under hormone treatment, they will be at a serious disadvantage against cis boys, but they likely will retain some advantage over cis girls, specifically because at the ages involved in High School it is not likely they have been undergoing hormone treatment long enough to hit the IOC Olympic guidelines that allow for transwomen to compete in the Olympics. Is this a serious issue? To me it frankly isn’t. Transwomen who want to compete in girls sports are only a % of all trans people who are a very small % of people in general. I think someone going through rough personal times with their sexuality being allowed to compete in a sport isn’t the end of the world even if they do have some advantages.
I do think it’s a rougher situation though, while High School sports are small beer to many, for the families and kids involved in them they are a big deal. I actually think in some of the documented cases, transwomen have actually been willing to play on the boys team (especially because in many places, boys teams are somewhat of an “open” team, for example where I grew up there was no girl’s wrestling team, there was only a boy’s, and a couple girls actually did get on the team, I think this is still common in areas without big wrestling teams, in most places girls can try out for the boy’s basketball and football teams, although they will almost never make those teams), laws to prevent this for transwomen are ill considered. But the transwomen who are receiving hormone treatment and want to compete in girls sports? From a utilitarian standpoint I think the moderate advantage that person might have is outweighed by the serious emotional and social harm in being excluded from sport in the gender of their choice. The weighting of that would change past the High School level (i.e. college / olympic sport, where the competition is frankly much more important.)
But the women don’t get to the college/olympic sport – or PROFESSIONAL – level without going through the High School level. So for the sake of preventing emotional/social harm to the relatively tiny number of transwomen you are saying ‘go ahead, handicap the vastly larger number of ciswomen.’ How many girls will soldier on, knowing that they face unconquerable odds? Yeah, sorry girl, you just cannot win in High School, but play your heart out anyway, and maybe we’ll figure out some way of evening the playing field four years from now?
And isn’t that split pretty arbitrary? Weren’t the Williams sisters winning tournaments at the ripe old age of 14? That’s eighth grade usually. If they had been getting slaughtered each week in tournaments by 14 year old just barely transitioning transgirls…would they ever have gone on to have careers?
I can’t offhand think of another field of human endeavor where we are so willing to upend objective fairness for vaguely defined feelings. Why is it so oddly important to make females give up fair sports to accommodate this change?
Would it help if we just made it REALLY clear sports are segregated by sex, not gender? For instance, instead of “Boys” and “Girls” categories, we said “Male” and “Female?” “Open” and “Cisgirl”? I mean, that is the point sex categories in sports. To give females a chance at success.
HughGoply, the way you quoted a moderator sort of made it appear that it was you making the modnote, Please use the quote function if you’re going to cite a moderator instruction, or just otherwise make it really clear. I have placed that statement in quote tags for you in your post.
Thanks
RickJay
Moderator
I’m not sure, I think for me the total scope of the problem affects my judgement. If 50% of girls teams were transwomen I think I might have a different opinion than the 0.1% or so that is likely. Many school districts would go years without seeing a single trans athlete.
I would maybe counter by saying–High School kids had to play against Michael Jordan and Lebron James when they were in High School, or Steffi Graf and Serena Williams on the girls side. I would honestly guess a talent of high NBA caliber in High School, was probably much further ahead of his peers due to his genetic gifts than a typical trans athlete will hypothetically be.
Very small numbers of extreme outliers, usually aren’t a big problem.
OK ladies, I know you’re all having a blast playing soccer, and women’s soccer has a huge and growing audience. But, to solve the comparatively small issue of whether transwomen can compete in the same league, we’ve decided to outlaw gender segregated teams.
And…the bad news is…none of you have been picked for the new unisex team. Incidentally, no transwomen made the cut either.
The good news is, for those of you not afraid of hypothermia, drowning, or just having your heart stop, we have just the torture, I mean, sport, for you!
Right. The reality is that HS teams are made from a random assortment of kids who just happen to live in the district. Within a HS, there won’t be too many trans athletes to begin with, and there won’t be too many trans athletes who decide to forego medical transitioning. And it’s not like every boy can beat every girl. Even if a trans athlete doesn’t make any medical changes, they still might not have the skill to beat the top competitors on the team. And there’s always the chance that a family moves into the district with a child who competes at a national level. At any time a new kid can move into the district who takes the #1 spot on the team.
But where it starts to matter is when recruitment and money come into play. The kids who make it to the district and state championships will get to play in the tournaments where college scouts come to scope out potential recruits. Even if a HS has just 1-2 trans athletes, it’s more likely that those athletes will bubble to the top. The less medical transitioning a AMAB does, the closer to the top they will be. That will translate into more opportunities to advance with full scholarships and endorsement deals.
All the arguments against trans girls participating really come down to saying trans girls aren’t real girls.
But nobody is willing to say that. So they add the term biological. Or claim it’s about hormones.
There is no legitimate reason for cis girls to look at trans girls as anything different than other girls.
Cis girls complaining about trans girls “dominating” sports are no different from white people who complain about spiriting being “dominated” by black runners. Or short people who complain about basketball being “dominated” by tall people.
Sorry. I’m not too good with commands/tags.