I agree that discussions about trans rights seem to permit a lot more open disparagement of trans people than would be generally considered acceptable in discussions of, say, gay rights or racism or sexism.
? Why “by all means let them try” if they are transgender boys, but not if they are transgender girls? If “sports are separated by biological sex, not gender identity”, then why should only transgender boys get to bypass that rule?
In one breath, you’re saying that people must compete only against other people who have the same biological sex as they do. In the next breath, you’re saying that it’s okay for some individuals not to abide by that rule as long as we can reasonably expect them to lose against the people they want to compete against, but not if we might reasonably expect them to win.
I don’t think that double standard is ethically defensible. If biological sex is a fair criterion for segregating people in different sports competition classes, then the same criterion should be applied to everybody.
I am not aware of any jurisdiction or league in which it’s forbidden for people to question somebody’s sincerity in making a strategic declaration of transgender identity that is completely unsupported by anything else in their life.
If, for example, a group of teenage boy hockey players who have always presented and identified as male in all aspects of their lives suddenly declare as a group that they identify as female, just in time to claim a team spot in the girls’ hockey league, I think it’s very unlikely that they wouldn’t be emphatically called out as deliberate fakers. I don’t think their coaches or friends or teachers or families would be deterred from calling out the con due to fear of being “accused of transphobia”.
If you know of a real-life situation where this has actually happened, then feel free to cite it.
Regardless of whether she’s intentionally cheating or just severely lacking in self-awareness, the end result is the same. Unfairness. Her motivations make no difference to the women competing against her.
My larger point is that social pressure in ineffective in ensuring fair play; we know this from eons of experience. You can’t leave it up to individual athletes to know when they should or shouldn’t play because they are way too self-interested, so we need rules to help us make these determinations.
I have no idea why we can’t just stick with rules that say women’s sports should only be played with people identified as female at birth and aren’t doping. Yes, this rule isn’t perfect because some small fraction of females are actually intersex, but it’s easier to come up with policies to handle these kind of exceptions than it is to make women’s sports inclusive to estrogenized males. Because then we get into the messiness of devising policies aimed at excluding the 6’6 Ludwigs (whose unfair advantage is blatant), while still keeping the 5’8 Ludwigs eligible (even though they too also have male-associated advantage…its just not as cloying to the eye).
I’m glad you agree that Ludwig isn’t “the right kind of woman” to be playing women’s basketball, but if you’re not advocating any policy changes to prevent more Ludwigs, then you might as well be in favor of this.
The point of separating boys from girls is so that girls have a chance. If a girl can make the football team, well, good for her.
What we think of as “men’s” sports are actually not restricted to males. Women are eligible to compete for professional football, basketball and the like. The reason that we don’t see women in the big leagues is because women are far weaker and slower than men in the vast majority of sports; they are not able to make the cut.
That’s why female-exclusive sports are so damn important for female athletes; it’s really their only chance at glory on the field or on the court.
It’s kind of depressing that this isn’t more obvious to people.
I think, as I said, that it depends on the situation. AFAICT, social pressure is indeed pretty effective in preventing the kind of “Chicks for a Day: How Our Dudes Trounced the Girls’ League While Trolling All the Woke Losers” hypothetical scenario that some people have been suggesting as a potential problem in women’s athletics.
When it comes to individuals who genuinely identify and live as female and thus want to play sports as female, though, that’s a different situation. I repeat that I’m not claiming that imbalances caused by average physical differences between transgender and cisgender female athletes can’t be a valid cause for concern. But those imbalances are not the same thing as the deliberate strategic insincerity of the “Chicks for a Day” troll-type scenarios.
Then we don’t in fact have a rule that “sports are separated by biological sex”: we have a rule that only women’s sports are separated by biological sex. We don’t in fact have men’s teams and women’s teams: we have open teams and women’s teams.
Fine by me, but then we shouldn’t disguise that by implying otherwise.
I can tell you earnestly believe this, but you have no reason to do so. I mean, it was only a few months ago when this rapper trolled everyone by identifying as a woman while breaking the British women’s deadlift record. It was obvious he was making a pointed political statement, but he did it knowing that there might be backlash against him.
And then there’s the Danish person who got a legal sex change despite presenting like your average bloke on the street (I posted the clip of him earlier in this thread). The likelihood is high the person is just a provocateur trying to play with the system, but do I know this for a fact? No I don’t. It’s that uncertainty that edgelord teenagers would find enticing to exploit, and if you doubt this, you haven’t met enough teenagers.
Most people should understand this already. I hate to put it like that, but you’re showing a lot of ignorance on this subject by asking the questions you’re asking.
Oh, come on. He posted a video of himself doing a deadlift. He did not join an official league or compete in an official event as a woman. To suggest that this is in any way a serious threat to the competitiveness of cisgender women in actual women’s athletics seems very silly.
So I just came across this CNN article.
Pretend you’re someone who had minimal schooling and were raised by people equally lacking in education. Your health literacy is about 1st grade level. Your ignorance puts you in league with the same folks who think women pee out of their vaginas.
Would you be able to read this article and come away knowing whether you had a cervix that could one day become cancerous? Since the words female or woman appear zero times in the entire article, just how would you know which people comprise “individuals with a cervix”?
Among other things, acceptance of gender ideology means denying women access to clear and actionable health information. This has public health implications. This isn’t a joke. I’m hating all of this.
One question to ask is, is there ever a time when someone is definitely not a woman? Because if I read the prevailing winds correctly there are many whose definition of “woman” can mean just about anything. This is something I find absurd. I don’t think a person declaring themselves female is enough to be female.
Really? If the goal is to ensure that readers with first-grade-level health literacy know whether or not they have a cervix, then I don’t see any reason at all not to provide that information in the article by including statements like “Most women have a cervix. A woman who is transgender or who has had a total hysterectomy does not have a cervix. Transgender men also have cervixes.”
That’s giving women access to clear and actionable health information, and I don’t consider it detrimental to transgender rights in any way.
Of course, that particular information would be superfluous for readers who already know that most women have cervixes, and as you noted about a different subject, most people should understand this already. But saying that this is elementary information that people in general should already be aware of is not the same thing as advocating for it to be “denied”.
I don’t think anyone has to pretend to have minimal schooling. I am gonna guess there are plenty of educated folks (possessing a high school diploma) who don’t know what a cervix is and don’t know that members of only one sex class possess one.
I had a pap smear a few months ago and the gynecologist described my cervix in terms that I’d never heard before. So I went to google. That’s when it dawned on me that I didn’t really know what a cervix was. I knew it was a girly thing, so I do get points for that. But that’s not because I’m smart. If I were smart, I would have known what a cervix is!
So yeah, that article sucks for not providing useful information.
As someone dealing with breast cancer, I can’t help but wonder how an article about breast cancer written in the same style would read. “Individuals with breasts need to be screened” doesn’t make sense, since all humans have breasts but not all of them need to be screened. My primary care physician prompted me to get a mammogram not because I’m an individual with breasts who is in their 40s. She prompted me because I’m a female in her 40s who is awash in the hormones that can potentially promote breast cancer.
In your example, these women have made it to 25 and has never seen a gynecologist, or even a family doctor who said hey, you need to see a woman’s doctor? And these women are reading CNN looking for health advice?
I don’t even think it’s on par with someone not realizing that urine comes out the urethra and not the vagina. It means she has never seen a doctor of any kind who suggested that female bodies have different testing and exams that are necessary.
So, in those cases, yes, I suppose the women have been denied important medical information. I’m not sure CNN is to blame.
However, if we’re assuming that the target audience doesn’t know that most women have cervixes, I would bet that the same audience is also unaware that most men have breasts. So that statement would not mislead them into thinking that men in general need routine breast screening.
I agree; however, the way you’ve put it does sound hypocritical. Either it’s wrong to try to play in the opposite sex league or it isn’t.
I keep bringing up the bad actor situations, but that’s because who will try try to block trans rights. For example, if the parents and coaches are transophobes, then they will block all trans athletes even if they are sincere. There are lots of people who would encourage bad actors to derail trans rights.
Or if a school has the lacrosse team cut for Title IX budget reasons, the boys from that team may state they are girls during the term of the field hockey season.
I don’t think we should leave it up to the coach or school administrators to determine if someone is woman enough to be on the team. I want clearly defined requirements so that those decisions aren’t based on the opinions and whims of potentially biased individuals.
I sincerely think that the issue of trans athletes in sport has a solution which would be generally seen as fair. Sports often have restrictions based on things like age, weight, school size, etc. Having a few more regulations surrounding trans athletes seems like it should be workable and be fair for everyone. For example:
- Womens and mens teams are primarily (??%) made up of genetically consistent athletes (XX for women and XY for men)
- Teams are allowed to have a limited number (?%) of non-genetically consistent athletes (e.g. XY player on a XX team), but these players have to have gender identified appropriately with the team for at least 2(?) years prior (e,.g. no switching at the beginning of field hockey season).
- In team sports, the max amount of playtime a non-genetically consistent athlete gets is inversely proportional to how their testosterone level differs from the average player. Basically, the more testosterone, the less that athlete can play. So a XY athlete with max testosterone on an XX team would only be able to play in the game for a short time.
- In individual sports, … I’m not sure how to handle this. Lots of issues unique to each sport, but I’m sure some rules can be figured out.
Anyway, having a set of rules like that would create a level playing field and and ensure that trans athletes would be able to compete in a way that would generally be seen as fair. And the trans athlete’s ability to join the team wouldn’t be at the whim of a biased school administrator making the decision if they had the right gender.
“Women should begin regular screenings for cervical cancer at age 25.” If we were living in saner times, this would’ve been the first line of this article.
Talking about disembodied cervices is confusing because it presumes the reader even knows what a cervix is. And individuals with a cervix…how do you get a cervix? Do you pick one up at the dealership? The grocery store? Like why is it framed as though cervixes just happen to people? We would never say “individuals with legs”, would we?
I don’t know if its just my perception, but it seems like female erasure Is only escalating at this point.