Appeal to authority is a fallacious argument. You’re in Great Debates, where you are expected to make a reasoned case for the position you are advancing, not just cite some people who agree with you.
That is not a rational argument either. It’s like saying that because athletes using performance-enhancing drugs often lose their competitions, then doping is all well and good. And I’m sure politicians who buy votes and rig voting machines can lose win when paired against a strong enough opponent too, but that wouldn’t make the election fair.
If biological differences between males and females are now considered unimportant when it comes to women’s athletics, women have every right to be concerned about this. It shouldn’t require us to see whole bunches of women losing competitions against non-HRT treated transwomen before we flag this out as an issue.
It’s helpful to have you state what your position is. I don’t like making assumptions. Prior to this thread, I didn’t think there were that many people shrugging their shoulders at biological males competing against biological females for athletic scholarships, Olympic medals, and other honors. Now I see that I may be wrong about that.
Transgender activists are fighting for what? For people to disregard biological sex altogether? Really? I thought they were fighting for trans folk to have rights under the law. To be able to live as their identified gender in peace. If their goal is to completely overwrite how human beings categorize each other, then they’ve overplayed their hand. Without biological sex we don’t have reproduction.
And you didn’t even answer my question. I can’t tell if you think it’s inappropriate to refer to a stranger—whose gender identity is unknown—as a man or woman using biological sex cues. This is not a gotcha question.
We have–or, have had–several trans posters on these boards. I don’t know that any are left, and as far as I know, the ones that have left have all left because of the aggressive ignorance of folks around trans issues. One form this aggressive ignorance takes is bizarre hypotheticals that don’t resemble the reality of anyone’s experience.
It’d be keen if there were less talk of female-identifying folks who dress and groom facial hair like linebackers, less talk about how reproduction itself is on the table. It’d be keen if folks thought about whether their words were respectful.
I’d be keen on hearing from transgendered folks who feel some kind of way about a free-for-all definition of gender. My imagination may be totally wrong, but I imagine it’s gotta be hard for some people who have experienced dysphoria their whole lives to now be told that feeling dysphoria, no matter how super intense, doesn’t distinguish them in any meaningful way from the person who just wants to experiment as another gender. So it seems to me that transgendered folks who place a lot of emphasis on gender dysphoria as a justification for a sex/gender change are pushing a definition of gender that is vulnerable to gate-keeping (“If you say you don’t feel like Gender X in the absence of other apparent signs of Gender X, then I am probably going to have a hard time seeing you as Gender X.”)
I’d be keen on hearing from transgendered folks who hope that research supports the “gendered brain” concept based on the belief that it will lend credibility/validity/objectivity to transgenderism. Because it seems to me that folks who argue from this standpoint are pushing a definition of gender that is vulnerable to gate-keeping. (“If your neurology doesn’t ping as Gender X in the absence of other apparent signs of Gender X, then I am probably going to have a hard time seeing you Gender X.”)
“Hard time seeing you as Gender X” <> “You are a crazy, stupid, or inferior person.” It just means that someone is having a hard time perceiving you as the thing you are saying you are. The only other thing it could possibly indicate is that there’s a good possibility that person will have some unpleasant feelings about you if you should happen to read their thoughts and then yell at them for being so hateful.
…except that wasn’t an appeal to authority. You said some women disagreed with me, I said some women agree with me, and, unlike you, gave some examples of women and groups that did. That is an entirely reasonable thing to do in Great Debates. It wasn’t meant to “advance my case”: it was a simple rebuttal to something that you said.
It isn’t rational to argue that “trans women who have lived the majority of their lives enhanced with endogenous testosterone and lack female secondary sex characteristics that make females weaker and slower than males” is in any way relevant to why some “non-trans women to object to competing against trans women.” Why are they objecting? Performance enhancing drugs actually enhances performance. Being transgender does not. There is no comparison.
Is there a movement advocating for non-HRT treated transwomen to be able to compete against women in sports?
I did state what my position was. My position was "“is there a problem? What is it you think the problem actually is?” Transgender people are already competing with women for athletic scholarships, are allowed to compete for Olympic medals and other honors. Why is that wrong?
They are fighting for their lives actually.
Much more at the link.
I’m Maori/Samoan. I come from a marginalised community. The statistics (healthcare, crime, suicide, drugs) are really bad. But the statistics for the transgender community are even worse. Every metric. The are the subject of a massive rise of transphobic hate crimes in the UK (numbers already cited in this thread). They are having their rights stripped in America, they can’t even join the military anymore. They’ve been driven away from these boards.
It really is time to stop looking at the issues in such a superficial dismissive way. I don’t pretend to understand all there needs to know about the issue. I still make mistakes. But I can’t sit on the sidelines on this.
I didn’t see your question there: I was too busy rolling my eyes at the ridiculous scenario you had invented for me to get outraged about. I used to do this all the time. I do it less now. I use more ambiguous language until I am clear on how a subject would prefer to be referred too. But this honestly is the least important issue on the table. Nobody was outraged when the OP accidentally misgendered someone earlier in the thread.
I stumbled upon this blog that examines transgendered women and sports in a (IMHO) fairly balanced way.
The take-home that I get from this piece: Both sides of the debate need more evidence before they dig in their heels anymore than they already have. But it isn’t unreasonable to have rules for who should considered be a woman athlete in some sports, given what is known.
One thing I learned from this blog is that Canada apparently does not have any sports regulations that gate-keep gender. I was skeptical about this so I did some research. It appears to be true.
Misogyny has driven women from this board too. I’ve stuck around for a looong time in spite of that and in spite of the racism too. Lost track of how many threads there have been dedicated to black intellectual inferiority and the unattractiveness of black women. But amazingly enough I’m still here, even as the dreaded TERF slur hangs ever so closely over my head as I challenge ideas that I disagree with. Maybe my skin is thicker than most.
Or maybe I believe that discussion and debate eradicates the same ignorance that oppresses. You can’t get that if people are afraid to probe subjects freely.
I haven’t used linebackers in any of my hypotheticals, but I did evoke Jason Momoa. Why? Because the question we’re discussing is when does it become reasonable for people to perceive someone as a man despite their gender identity? If we can’t get agreement at the masculine extreme (e.g linebackers), then that tells us that we’re unlikely to see eye to eye at any other point. This tack is not unheard in debates, and it’s not done maliciously.
But if it’s distracting or hurtful, I won’t do that anymore.
I don’t think it’s wrong when biological sex differences are taken into account. When they aren’t taken into account (e.g., no requirements for non-HRT) , then I don’t think it’s a fair contest to have biological males playing against females, particularly when strength and speed decide who wins. In some cases (like track and field), I’d argue prolonged HRT still might not even the playing field.
Emotional appeals like this are ineffective against African American women.
Its a straightforward question and the more you dodge it, the weaker your position looks to the world.
…I’m an indigenous man. My grandad, a member of the Mau, was murdered by New Zealand colonial forces in Samoa. Are you really wanting to play the grievance olympics? Because that is something that none of us are going to win.
It wasn’t an appeal to emotion. You really are getting your fallacies mixed up. The statistics for transgender people are dire. I’ve cited some. There are many others. The US government are rolling back their rights, they are stacking the courts to make those battles easier to win, they are denying transgender people the right to join the military. Transgender people are more likely to want to kill themselves, they are more likely to actually kill themselves, they are more likely to work as sex-workers on the street, fatal violence disproportionately affects transgender women of color. This isn’t an emotional argument. They are simply the facts.
But I didn’t dodge again. I literally answered your question (once you made that question clear.)
Only one of us is making irrelevant emotional appeals. I asked you a straightforward question about how you’d describe a male-presenting stranger and you immediately act like I’m throwing trans folk into an incinerator? Come on now. This kind of response might work on demographic groups who carry around oppressor guilt and somesuch, but this form of emotional manipulation doesn’t work on African American women. I’m just telling you so you can stop doing ineffective things in this debate. That you are Indigenous person is really and truly besides the point.
The statistics don’t have anything to do with the question I posed you about biological importance.
No you didn’t. I asked if it was inappropriate to call a unknown male a man and your answer was about what you do.
Yes. Rachel McKinnon, a world champion cyclist who is a transwoman, said that:
She’s just one person, but she’s a very prominent person in the areas of sports and trans rights, and I’ve seen others repeat her views that even “asking someone to take medication” is unfair.
Current British IOC rules allow transwomen significantly higher testosterone levels than cis women, and only require them to have taken supplements to reduce their testosterone for 12 months prior to competing.
In Britain there are transwomen competing in rugby and cricket after growing up as male, and rugby is a particular concern because it is a contact sport where muscle mass and bone density make a huge difference, not just to performance, but to likelihood of injury.
The rugby player Kelly Morgan does admit that ‘transgender women may have an advantage in terms of size and strength.“I do feel guilty, but what can you do?” she says. “I don’t go out to hurt anybody. I just want to play rugby.”’ And I get that, she sounds like a nice person who just wants to play her sport. It’s lovely that her team-mates accept her but I wonder about the teams they compete against - their views don’t seem to have been asked for in any interview I’ve seen.
But Kelly does have the advantage of being born and socialised as male - she played for East Wales as a teenager, as a male player, and that opportunity would not have been open to her as a woman. She has experience and training that were open to her growing up as a boy and young man that were not available to her if she’d grown up as a girl and young woman, so it’s not purely about her physiology, though that counts too. Rugby is really violent.
And there are non-contact forms of rugby.
This article makes a very fair and reasoned argument for restricting transwomen to non-contact rugby until there’s more medical evidence that says anything either way.
Rugby referees in amateur leagues have problems with the current regulations because they’re not even allowed to ask for proof that a trans player meets the regulations, and that does seem ripe for abuse.
TBH this is one area where quite a few trans people have doubts about allowing trans people to compete, depending on the sport and the regulations. Current regulations do give people who were born male an advantage in most sports.
TBH, when men are on average taller, stronger, with greater muscle mass, and have a different bone structure, plus early socialisation that helps encourage sports, it really is odd that quite a lot of people are denying that there are major differences. Pointing out the occasional very tall woman means nothing since some men are also outliers, and there’d be nothing preventing a tall man who was also an outlier in terms of height and strength competing against average women, if he took low levels of hormones for twelve months.
When it comes to long term or professional sports, transwomen do not have to deal with monthly menstruation and the problems that causes many women; bleeding and feeling pain for several days a month really shouldn’t be disregarded as a factor in performance - I mean, if a male competitor in a sport had a condition that made him bleed and feel pain for seven days a month he’d probably be considered disabled. And they will never have to take time out of their sporting events due to pregnancy.
An unplanned pregnancy for a 21-year-old male rugby player whose partner is pregnant means he might try to arrange games so that he can be with his partner for the birth. For a female rugby player, it means a year or so not playing because the sport is so high-contact. Kelly Morgan is in her thirties and will be competing against women who are in the age range where they have to choose between competing and pregnancy, something she will never have to face as a prospect.
Those are biological realities that no amount of gender identity can combat.
And there’s a small number of sports (floor-based gymnastics mainly) where transmen might have an advantage against cis-men too, so it goes both ways - there just haven’t been enough transmen trying to compete against cis-men for that to have been regulated yet.
And appealing to your “African American womeness” isn’t going to work on this indigenous man.
Is it any less of a point than the fact you bought up you are an African American woman?
You still haven’t answered my question on that one yet.
And the statistics have everything to do with why ludicrous hypotheticals about Jason Momoa’s twin brother do nothing but minimize what it is we are discussing. The stakes are so much higher than this.
…for context here is the entire quote and the original article:
One competitor isn’t a movement, and in context I can see her point.
Cite please.
I can’t help but shrug my shoulders at this. I’m a kiwi. I know how violent rugby is. But what is your actual issue here? Some vague hand-waving about “experience” and “what the opponents might think” isn’t really a lot to hang your hat on here. That article was a puff-piece: a few pull-quotes from a few interviews to tell an interesting story about a local player. Just for your interest: that article has been co-opted by a lot of gender critical “think pieces” that make those pull-quotes seem scarier than they actually are.
That article is paywalled to me so I can’t tell if it makes a fair and reasoned argument or not.
Cite please.
Cite please.
I don’t get this “early socialisation that helps encourage sports” thing. Everyone is encouraged to do sport here. Rugby, netball, soccer, cricket, there is early socialisation that encourages everyone into sport. What significant difference do you think it makes after someone has transitioned?
There are also things that cis-women don’t have to deal with that trans-women have to deal with all the time.
Not every female rugby player is going to get pregnant for a whole host of reasons. This isn’t a reason to deny trans-women the right to play sport.
BanquetBear, the stats you throw out are undoubtedly alarming and nobody should ever be killed for their gender.
But SO many more cis-women are killed for their gender in every country in the world that it pisses me off when I see those stats that are still lower - usually far, far lower - than for cis-women.
Possibly I misread when you said that transpeople are fighting for their lives. They definitely are - depending on where you live, it can almost be fatal.
But the same goes for being female. And although it must be shit hiding yourself, for every place it’s hard to be trans, rape and domestic murder rates against women are high too (for countries where stats are reliable - I’d discount countries like Sudan and Saudi Arabia for both metrics).
…the stats I posted earlier were the likelihood of transgender people to commit suicide and included relative rates to cis-people. Those stats were not still lower - usually far, far lower, than for cis-women. This isn’t just about getting killed for their gender. Its a much bigger topic than that.
Yep.
Trans-women are women. Rape and domestic murder rates for all women are at epidemic levels. Yeah, we need to do something about it. In the real world I am trying to do something about it.
But unless those rapes and domestic murders are at the hands of transgender women then I don’t see how it relates to this particular debate.
In the context you’ve proposed, it actually looks worse. “Findings of a study by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute suggest the impact of hormone treatment on the leg strength of women who have transitioned from being male is almost negligible.”
That makes it sound like hormone treatment doesn’t have the impact people claim it does, like transwomen continue to be stronger.
Under the current IOC guidelines, issued in November 2015, athletes who transition from male to female can compete in the women’s category without requiring surgery to remove their testes provided their total testosterone level in serum is kept below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months.
Those guidelines, used by most sports federations to draw up their transgender policies, have proved controversial, given that women’s testosterone levels tend to range between 0.12 and 1.79 nmol/l, while men’s are typically between 7.7 to 29.4 nmol/l.
So transwomen can have levels of 10 nanomoles, while most women range between 0.12 and 1.79 nanomoles. That is a large difference.
I only quoted from pieces that were fairly positive about her playing. My point is what I said - talking about having major experience and training from competing in a major male team as a boy and being socialised for that to be normal is not “vague handwaving.”
Sorry - I don’t pay for it so didn’t realise it wasn’t free elsewhere, but it was basically very positive about including transwomen in sports and concerned about transpeople being excluded, and also concerned about injuries. The key point was that encouraging non-contact rugby might be a good compromise for amateur sports in the meantime, and I think that’s probably a good idea.
The British IOC cites I gave above. The only requirement is some testosterone reduction for 12 months. It disregards the previous twenty years or so of testosterone, bone structure and density, average height compared to women, lots of things. I have seen people say those factors don’t count, so I must assume they think women just aren’t trying hard enough or something.
Also, if you had the slightest bit of knowledge about this issue, you wouldn’t need to keep saying “cite please.” You were talking about transwomen in sport, so surely you’ve actually read something about it?
NZ does seem to be particularly good for encouraging women in sport, but when working towards paid work, it’s still men’s team sports that pay the most, or pay at all. How much do women on national teams earn in rugby in NZ, as opposed to men?
And in almost all countries, women are not socialised towards sport in the same way as men are. Please do not ask me for another cite for something that you know is true.
I assume we’re still talking medical issues, since I was talking about bleeding for several days a month. Transwomen have to deal with hormones that makes them… Like women, except for periods.
Transwomen have to take hormonal medications every day. That’s the reality of life for women taking the contraceptive pill, too.
Not every female rugby player is going to get pregnant, but it’s not exactly rare, and a hell of lot more female rugby players get pregnant than male rugby players do. We were talking about a team where most of the women are in their late twenties to early thirties, the key time for women to try to get pregnant. Yeah, some of the women will choose not to get pregnant or try for it - there’s never a completely level playing ground - but this is different.
I’d say that no male rugby player has ever had to take a year out for pregnancy. I’d also say that none have ever had to sit out for a month or two due to a miscarriage or abortion due to abdominal surgery. And they won’t have to deal with period pains, or spend their teens - the main time athletes start their careers - with a pad and tampon in their athletic wear and worry about bleeding through while being watched by everyone they know.
Kelly, who, like I said, does seem like a really lovely person, could have biological children into her fifties and beyond and won’t have to carry them. Maybe she would love to be the one who was pregnant, but her biology doesn’t allow that. If she had an unwise relationship in her early career and got her GF who was also a rugby player pregnant, she (Kelly) could have carried on playing, but the GF would have had to stop playing for a couple of weeks even if she had an abortion as early as possible, due to the blood loss.
Biology does matter.
So there are physical realities that make a difference in sport, which is mostly physical. We might not want those differences to exist, but they do.
Because women are affected by gender violence more than anyone else.
Transwomen are women in many respects, they just got there a different way; for sports I don’t think the current rules are right because the way transwomen became women is different to other women.
I also disagree with the dogmatism of the term “transwomen are women” because the world doesn’t work that way and it’s used to shout down people who have any sort of disagreement - even if the person disagreeing is a transwoman (not me, some people I know, please do not go straight to “cite please”).
FWIW I’ve been a trans advocate since I was about 17 (24 years ago) and am fully in favour of trans people being treated by their gender in most areas that we come across in daily life, like work, using the pronouns they want (or expecting people to try to use the right pronouns and not getting pissed off if they make a genuine mistake), getting access to surgery and hormonal treatment, wear whatever clothes you like including school uniform, quite a lot of things. I have actually marched in the trans section of London Pride with friends a couple of times (I’m gay). I am not an enemy of transpeople.
For crime stats I think it’s useful to separate the stats - partly because otherwise it would be impossible to tell whether transwomen are being targeted more. If crime stats truly treated treated transwomen as women then they’d be a tiny blip in the number of women sexually assaulted and killed. Some transwomen are targeted because they are women but many of them are targeted because they’re trans and for those purposes it’s useful to separate the stats.
So not the “current British IOC rules” but the current IOC guidelines. That have been in place for the last four years.
What problems have been identified in the last four years using these guidelines?
Can you quantify how large a difference this is? And “most” and “levels tend to range” are two different measures. Are there reasons why the levels tend to range at these levels, and what makes the difference?
It is if you can’t quantify how it makes a difference. It is if you don’t offset that experience and training with the life experiences of a typical transgender woman.
Did the article quantify that opinion at all? Are there more injuries? More people hurt? Is there an objective reason why we should stop doing what we are doing now (letting trans-women play contact sports) to banning them from doing so?
Another paywalled article. How many referees have been “driven from the pitch?” Who warned referees not to challenge bearded or heavily muscled players appearing for women’s teams and in what context? (I can read the opening paragraph but nothing beyond that)
This isn’t a cite that “current regulations do give people who were born male an advantage in most sports”, assuming you meant, in context, that “people who were born male” are actually “transgender women” who participated in women’s sports. Is that what you meant or did you mean something else?
I’ve been careful to cite statements that I deem to be controversial in this thread because this particular topic is rife with disinformation and propaganda. And your cites kinda bear that out. With all due respect I don’t trust your interpretation of the numbers. Are you an authority on testosterone?
I don’t pretend to be an expert here, I’ve never claimed to be an expert, and asking you for a cite to back up your claims doesn’t mean that “I haven’t read anything about the subject.” I did google for “current British IOC rules allow transwomen significantly higher testosterone levels than cis women” but because this had little to do with the current British IOC rules nothing came up. So I tried to do my due diligence. You just got the basic facts wrong in the first place.
At the formative stages (that you seem to be talking about) the funding is pretty much even. But at the stage that players are getting paid money trans-women (who can compete at the elite level where you would expect to get paid) would get paid the same amount that women would get paid.
I don’t know this to be true.
So cite?
Its a shame we don’t have any transgender people left on these forums to provide an alternative view on this. But the reality of life for transwomen are much more than having to take a hormonal medication every day. I haven’t limited this discussion to just “medical issues.” I see no reason why we should.
How is it different?
We aren’t talking about male rugby players though.
Transwomen are women.
This is just getting a bit creepy now.
People have been complaining about me wanting to “police thoughts.”
But its the constant policing of women’s bodies that are more worrying and problematic to me. The amount of thought you’ve put into this is icking me out. Just leave her alone already.
Except when it doesn’t.
Of course they exist. How much that bothers you though is entirely over to you.
The current rules differ from country to country, from sport to sport, from code to code. Which “current rules” in specific do you not think are right?
The world “works the way” we try and make it work. It isn’t just dogmatism. You’ve used the term “biological male” and the term “male rugby player” and I don’t have a clue if you are talking about non-transgender biological male rugby players or if you are talking about transgender women. You are needlessly confusing the issue and you aren’t the only one.
But you don’t think they should play full-contact rugby. And you spend a lot of time thinking about how much they do or don’t bleed into their athletic wear. And you don’t like the dogmatism of the term “transwomen are women” because “the world doesn’t work that way”.
I’m not gonna call you “an enemy of transpeople.” You did walk in the trans section of London Pride with friends a couple of times after all. But can you really call yourself an ally?