Here are the ads running in Michigan.
If she applied for a grant stating she was African-American when she knew she wasn’t, that’s fraud.
I saw them too. Wonder how much difficulty the Republicans had finding a detransitioner who was willing to appear in an advert for them?
The trouble is that if the Republicans are opposed to this stuff, the Democrats will just double down and support it even more. Or at least that’s my impression of how US politics works.
That’s what the GOP is counting on.
My, but it’s been quiet around here lately.
Interesting article about Caster Semenya losing her appeal to the IOC, which is different but related to the issue of trans athletes:
This bit is particularly relevent:
Many people who support Semenya use the argument that elite sports are often about genetic outliers dominating. Usain Bolt had really long legs and Michael Phelps had really long arms, so why can’t Semenya have really high testosterone?
That’s a bad analogy. Sports organizations don’t classify athletes by arm or leg length, but they do classify athletes by sex. If they didn’t, women wouldn’t have a chance to excel at the very top levels of sport as men’s world record are consistently 10-12% better than women’s world records in sports like track and swimming. In tennis, even a great like Serena Williams admits she couldn’t get a game off a top male pro like Andy Murray. If sports organizations didn’t classify by sex, there would be almost zero female Olympians save for sports like maybe equestrian.
There is no human right to compete in a particular category of professional sports. Sports governing bodies exclude certain types of people from certain categories of sports all the time. In boxing, a 210-pound boxer can’t fight as a flyweight (112 lb max) as the flyweight would have little realistic chance of winning.
To say that an XY human can’t compete in the women’s category of professional sports unless they lower their testosterone below 5 nmol/L — a figure that is still 7.5 times the value of the average woman competing at the 2011 and 2013 track and field World Championships and a figure that not a single healthy woman born with XX chromosomes, ovaries, and producing estrogen at puberty can reach — isn’t a huge human rights travesty. It’s a protection of women’s sports.
Also illustrating the different impression using different language can give, actual New York Times headline:
Female track athletes with naturally elevated levels of testosterone must decrease the hormone to participate in certain races at major competitions like the Olympics, the highest court in international sports said Wednesday in a landmark ruling amid the pitched debate over who can compete in women’s events.
vs a more accurate and complete version:
Intersex track athletes with XY chromosomes and naturally elevated levels of testosterone must decrease the hormone to participate in certain races versus women at major competitions like the Olympics, the highest court in international sports said Wednesday in a landmark ruling amid the pitched debate over who can compete in women’s events.
I was one of those people who felt Semenya was wronged. I still think she’s being wronged. The conflict between her anatomy and her chromosomes indicates that her body is not and has not been influenced by testosterone in a manner proportionate to the amount of testosterone her body produces.
Do I think she is entitled to compete against women? No, I don’t think her human rights are being violated by excluding her. But I think an exception can be made for her, given that she was assigned female at birth, she has always lived as female/girl/woman, and she has androgen insensitivity.
As I understand it, we can only assume her anatomy (genitalia) was ambiguous at birth. We don’t know if it is now. People with her condition (5ARD, which is exclusive to males) often grow up to show identifiably male genitalia once puberty starts.
And it is not testosterone that is impacted by 5ARD; it’s DHT.
It really isn’t clear to me how CS isn’t simply a case of a male being mistaken for female. She may identify as female, but she is male according to biological criteria.
“Troubled Blood” only just came out. But suffice to say she seemingly stays on-brand
Umm, isn’t that the same argument being made for why cis-women should have their own leagues/divisions rather than facing men in a unisex group? That they have some sort of right to play professional sports?
No it’s not the same argument. The rationale for sex-segregated sports is similar to the rationale for weight classes in boxing. Competing heavy weights against feather weights means we’d never see shorter, smaller-framed champions. We’d also see a lot of small-framed boxers getting injured and even killed. So we segregate based on weight to ensure smaller athletes can play and not be injured when they do play.
Including transwomen in female sports actively contradicts this rationale. It privileges the “heavy weights” by enabling them the option to self-identify into the lighter class (while still remaining capable of competing against their true peers) and it disadvantages the “feather weights” by making it harder for them to be champions and play without injuring themselves.
How does that argument work for athletics? No-one’s punching their opponents on the field. They just won’t be able to keep up. So it’s just the “making it harder for them to compete” argument i.e. they have a right to some sort of handicapped playing field.
You’re right, they won’t be able to keep up. If we eliminated sex-segregated sports, women and girls would get their asses handed to them by men and boys. Half the human race would be cut off from the massive rewards that come with sports, even while their tax dollars are spent funding these rewards. Rather reminiscent of how black people were excluded from public universities, but Uncle Sam had no qualms using their taxes for these universities.
Does this prospect not strike you as a bit…unfair and sad? I mean, I’m one of the most apathetic people I know when it comes to sports, but despite this I can figure the world would be worse off without champions like Serena Willams. She has shown sporty girls that a career in professional athletics is not just reserved for men. That’s huge.
Wouldn’t this be the same thing as doing away with any kind of differentiation in athletics? It would be like having one one sport called “Track” and everyone competes–men, women, girls, boys, all ages, disabled, etc. But if we did that, then it would just be XY men who would be competitive and everyone else would be far behind.
We generally don’t worry about things like weight and age divisions even though they are creating a handicapped environment for lighter and younger athletes, but their purpose is the same as creating men and women’s divisions. Without these divisions, the people with the optimum athletic ability would dominate, which means that every sport would just be a bunch of 20-year-old, genetically XY men competing.
Sure. Just like the exclusion of Caster was unfair and sad…
Well, yes.
I’m not saying I’m against differentiated leagues. I’m saying there’s no logical difference between “cis-women have a right to compete in a league where they can be champions” and “trans-women have a right to compete in a league where they can be champions” or “intersex people have a right to compete in a league where they can be champions” as a bare argument. And no emotional difference, for me, either.
Exactly. My son had the right to compete in soccer against other kids 7-8 years old, without having to worry about a bunch of 20-something men joining to dominate the league. I would have the right to compete in an over-50 league or an over-60 league without 20-something men joining to dominate the league.
Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? Or the fear of it, at any rate.
Caster is not excluded. She has the ability to lower her testosterone to compete against females or compete against men.
Only in this Brave New World would people with more access opportunities than the average person be portrayed as the ones being cheated out of something.
“You’re not excluded. You just have to change who you are”. Yeah, right.
In sport, where such things as age, skill, weight and gender matter a great deal in order to maintain as fair an even playing field as possible, athletes who do not qualify for a given category, do not get to compete in it. That may not seem fair but it is actually the most fair compromise there is. Which is not to say it’s perfect. It just can’t be said to be especially or particularly biased against trans people.