F>M transgender HS wrestler forced to wrestle girls & dominates - Would he be competitive vs boys

Assume for a second a woman was talented and strong enough to play in the NFL. Would the NFL allow her in the league? Why yes they would. It’s more or less a meritocracy. Why not just open up all leagues? If you can’t compete in a particular league play in a lower tier league. No gender discrimination of any sort.

There’s no way for Beggs to compete fairly, full stop. The steroids forbid it - the only amount of steroids that prevent your opponent from complaining you only won because you cheated is zero steroids.

Testosterone supplements != steroids

Here’s what you’re telling this young person, who has doubtlessly gone through a lot of grief and soul-searching and thought before coming to terms with who they are as a human being and an athlete;

You can either give up for the rest of your life the thing you love doing and presumably hope to make a career of, or you can spend your entire career denying your identity, pretending to be something you’re not, and spending every day of your life being completely miserable because of it.

Would you call that “fair”, in the absence of any evidence that transgender athletes have any sort of unfair advantage whatsoever over cisgender athletes in the same division/weight class?

Maybe Caitlyn Jenner managed to balance that duality. Not every trans person can. Maybe she was unusually strong-willed. Maybe she grew up in a different era where passing as cis was easier. That doesn’t mean that every trans person can manage that kind of endurance. People have been known to commit suicide because they don’t feel like they’re capable of freely expressing their gender identity. Is it worth it to you that people die to preserve your notion of “fairness”?

This whole issue isn’t about hormone supplements. It never was. It’s a red herring. The people who are forcing Beggs to compete in the women’s division would love for the conversation to be about hormones, because it plays into their agenda - force transgender people into the closet, out of the public eye, make the public view them as perverts and “cheaters” instead of as people who deserve to be treated the same as anyone else.

It’s the same treatment the right has spent the last century giving to women and gays and people of color - these people aren’t normal, they’re different from us, they can’t be allowed to integrate with us or they’ll ruin everything we hold dear. Colored athletes will have an advantage over white athletes because they were bred for physical labor. Women can’t be allowed into the workplace because they’ll use their sexual wiles to gain undue power. Gays can’t be allowed to openly exist because they’ll convert our children and spread disease. And so on, and so on.

Beggs wants to wrestle boys. Let him wrestle boys. Don’t force him to wrestle women and then bitch about how he has an unfair advantage.

Except for the steroids the body of that gender produces naturally, right?

Well the IOC has essentially promised they will … if and when the evidence supports such changes. Their guidelines reflect that

So yes, they will be changed if and when available scientific evidence and circumstances change such that is what is necessary for fairness in competition to be preserved. Right now their assessment of the evidence is that

This individual’s physiologic replacement doses of testosterone would not have given an unfair advantage to this young man in competition with other young men. His competing in the male tourney would have been fair to him and to the young women who he was forced to compete against as the Texas body went its own way, forcing unfairness into the competition.

Rules are dynamic entities. Right now the best evidence appears to be that women meeting those guidelines in section 2 have no unfair advantage in competition. Maybe new evidence will become evident and other criteria will need to be created. Changing the rules based on the available evidence guided by fairness makes sense. Making up rules based on fear that someday the rules could change to be unfair, or out of ignorance … does not.

Maybe the IOC is wrong. Could be. But if you believe they have interpreted the available evidence incorrectly then bring the evidence to the table. Arguing that that read of the evidence is wrong based on … nothing … can only be interpreted as phobic discrimination by any rational observer.

If that insults any special little snowflakes here, too effin bad.

I agree. The war against performance enhancing drugs has been raging for over thirty years.

It’s taken a long time for everyone to finally agree they can’t be tolerated in sports. It took over a decade to finally catch Lance Armstrong. Heck they just busted Maria Sharapova for mildronate, a heart medication.

Bending the rules against drugs for a few Trans people will never sit well. Any championships or records they win will be tainted.

I’ll be interested to see what changes come after the wrestling case. Hopefully they’ll get this guy in the men’s division where he belongs.

I’m just glad he didn’t hurt any of his female opponents. He’s stronger and has more muscle then they do. All thanks to the drugs.

Beggs has not been taking any performance-enhancing drugs.

Performance enhancing drugs are not the issue at hand here.

This is a red herring.

PRATT.

[duplicate post]

It seems like a lot of people in this thread are fundamentally misunderstanding what happened here.

BEGGS: I want to compete as a boy!
TEXAS: Yeah, no.
BEGGS: Please?
TEXAS: No. Anyway, you’ll just lose.
BEGGS: That’s fine. Can I go wrestle now?
TEXAS: No. Says “girl” right here on your birth certificate. So it must be true.
BEGGS: I’ll sue.
TEXAS: Still no.
BEGGS: Fine, I’ll wrestle on the girl’s team.
TEXAS: Hey, that’s not fair to the girls!

This poor kid is in a Catch-22, and is getting blamed for it.

Actually, testosterone is a steroid. It just happens to be one that humans produce naturally, like estradiol and cholesterol. It’s not a steroid in the sense that the term was presumably being used - meaning synthesized anabolic-androgenic steroids designed to improve athletic performance - but factually it is a steroid.

Whether one’s opponent claims one cheated is irrelevant. What matters is whether something actually provides a competitive advantage, and there is no evidence that Beggs would gain an advantage from hormone replacement therapy while competing against boys.

Now I will go back to watching Una be an awesome advocate for logic and reason in the treatment of trans athletes. But seriously, maybe you need to make a sticky on this because it’s obviously frustrating for you to have to explain the same things over and over.

Can you admit that is not what is happening here?

He is not taking testosterone as a performance enhancing drug any more than ANY CHILD going through puberty is using their own naturally produced testosterone as a performance enhancing drug.

Nothing is being enhanced.

A missing hormone is being replaced, to its normal level, for a boy.

This is semantic nitpicking. One way or another - whatever one may call it - the testosterone gave Beggs an advantage over the girls who were competing in the tournament. Call it enhancement, call it replacement - the results showed.

And yes, it’s not Beggs’ fault - he/her asked to compete in the boy’s tournament and was denied - but it was long overdue for society to address the issue of “Should people get to be whomever they want to be?”

That says it all- you see it as a choice (“who they want to be”) vs who they are.

Yes, people get to be who they actually are. It was the fault of Texas to deny him in the first place. He used what option was left for him, after being put in an impossible position.

[quote=“Really_Not_All_That_Bright, post:110, topic:780809”]

It seems like a lot of people in this thread are fundamentally misunderstanding what happened here.

BEGGS: I want to compete as a boy!
TEXAS: Yeah, no.
BEGGS: Please?
TEXAS: No. Anyway, you’ll just lose.
BEGGS: That’s fine. Can I go wrestle now?
TEXAS: No. Says “girl” right here on your birth certificate. So it must be true.
BEGGS: I’ll sue.
TEXAS: Still no.
BEGGS: Fine, I’ll wrestle on the girl’s team.
TEXAS: Hey, that’s not fair to the girls!

This poor kid is in a Catch-22, and is getting blamed for it.

[QUOTE]

The “final solution” according to some it either:

  • Ban us from competing at all, in any sport, or
  • Segregate us into a “negro leagues,” as some have termed it, for only transgender persons.

Meanwhile, the IOC and other major sporting bodies…don’t see the problem.

Thank you very much for the compliment. It is frustrating, in large part because I tend to hold the SDMB and the people on it to a much higher standard than the comments sections of local newspapers, or Facebook. Sadly, many of the same behaviors (not reading the topic, speaking out with passion on subjects one is ignorant of, concern trolling, etc.) seem to have increased to levels that I would have never thought.

You have it framed perfectly, and it’s been evidenced in this thread: at the heart of much (but not all) of the opposition is that core of “these people are nuts, and playing dress-up and trying to game the system.” And so long as that subset believes that, they will never support people like Mr. Beggs.

What injuries did you have that would have healed more quickly with anabolic steroids? Or are you under the impression that cortisol steroids are banned in sports?

Are all perceptions of self equally valid and just though? I don’t have an issue with people who change the way they look based on self perception to a point. But what about stuff like people who are anorexic because they perceive themselves fat? Should society not have an opinion or look for something to fix the wiring or chemical balance in the brain for something that causes harm to the body?

With transgenderism if the choice is suicide or severe depression or treatment I think it’s better to be treated imo and I think society shouldn’t bully or be cruel. But would it be better if there were a magic pill that would change the perception?

It’s not a matter of perception, it’s a matter of who they are.

it’s not something to be “cured”.

It is a matter of perception. Italics notwithstanding. You mean to tell me all body dysmorphic disorders shouldn’t be treated at the perception level? You mean to tell me that a sex change operation and additional treatment causes no harm to a body? Obviously, some brain wiring is involved with this as it’s the brain doing the perception. Why is it taboo to suggest that treating the brain could be an option in 50-100 years?

What makes a biological entity what it is? The physical construct of that entity. Now I’m not saying don’t do the transition if that’s what you want. But if a choice were available what would people choose? My guess is some would choose to treat the brain some other parts of the body. And there is nothing wrong with discussing that.

Why this and not homosexuality? Or religious or non-religious tendencies? Or unwanted political opinions? Or anything else going on with someone’s personality or identity? Why is some sort of magical pill appropriate for transgenderism but not for any of these things?

Maybe some transgender people would choose this, just as maybe some gay people would choose to not be gay. But this seems as firmly in the realm of science fiction as for any of these other categories, and thus as irrelevant to the issue in the real world.