I don’t think trans women are men pretending to be women. I think the great majority sincerely believe they are women. But that doesn’t change the fact they have male bodies. Female sports were created for people with female bodies, who have a physical disadvantage compared to people with male bodies, even when the latter take hormone suppressors (for most sports, anyway). It all adds up to less opportunities for people with female bodies, and more for those with male bodies - further hurting an already disfavoured group.
Would you need to this kind of data to believe men are significantly more likely to injure women?
If you think transwomen are entitled to play against women, then why aren’t men equally entitled?
because trans women are women, but men aren’t.
Well yes, of course injuries happen all the time. That can’t avoided without fundamentally changing the sport. However, governing bodies have a duty of care to be on the lookout for areas where serious injury can be minimised and certainly to proactively identify practices that plausibly lead to greater numbers of injuries.
Here’s an interesting response (not very neatly formatted) to the criticisms of world rugby’s proposals.
I find the thinking persuasive and for me at least it meets the threshold of reasonableness. That is, it is looking in the right areas to find out if this is a potential problem and if the balance of evidence at the moment points a certain way why would they not make recommendations accordingly?
Neither the study nor the evidence behind it is perfect or immutable but I think they’d be failing in their duty if they ignored the subject.
So I’m currently on the side of the World Rugby as they have made a more convincing case to me, I’m perfectly open to better evidence and studies from the other side. The perfect answer for me would be that there is no risk of increased injury and everyone can play in whatever team they like. But precisely because I’d like that to be the case I should be very wary of confirmation bias in the evidence I have in support of that.
If the numbers of transitioning people hold out, and if the need for any biological gatekeeping is dropped (as is being suggested by some) and if various national rugby authorities ignore the advice, then we may well see a large enough population of biological male players in otherwise biological female areas. Enough, certainly to start testing in practice what the studies seem to suggest.
Were I making recommendations myself I’d be erring on the side of caution until a solid opposition case is made. Does that go against full inclusion? yes it does. No-one said it would be easy.
And just a side-note to BB, note that absolutely no “gotcha” happened as a result of Babale answering that question clearly.
That’s all fair, but I have two problems to point out.
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You say you are erring on the side of caution, but in this case that means punishing people for being dangerous when you do not yet have evidence that they are actually more dangerous than a biological woman of similar build would be (and that’s before we even get to the even more complex subject of intersex people, and women who were raised as female from age 0 who find out that due to a mutation they didn’t know about until now sporting authorities now consider them biologically male). Shouldn’t erring on the side of caution mean that we treat people as innocent until proven guilty?
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How are we meant to gather the data to prove this out one way or the other if we ban trans people from sports?
That doesn’t answer the question. Why split sports by sex if men and women are not physically different in any way? It would be just like splitting them by race, which is bad. So according to gender theory we should make all sports unisex.
That’s a pretty victim oriented take. We already have age and sex segregated leagues and teams. Older age groups aren’t “guilty” of anything.
So what? If you’re for the exclusion of men but not transwomen, then you are being arbitrarily discriminatory. How is that fair?
If I said men should be excluded from women’s sports because they have undue advantage and pose a safety risk to women, a men’s rights activist could easily pose the same arguments you have. They could, just as you have, demand to see evidence that men are significantly stronger and faster when weight and height are controlled. They could, just as you have, compare their exclusion to apartheid and homophobia. They could, just as you have, use mantra-like appeals in lieu of science and common sense. They would, just as you are, be wholly unpersuasive.
Two points that wreck your position:
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Excluding men but not transwomen despite them being biological indistinguishable to one another is as much discriminatory as excluding all males. Your stance only differs from mine as a matter of degree, not kind.
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“Transwomen are women” is mindless rhetoric that doesn’t address the question of them playing against female athletes. Consider the fact that women who take testosterone are indisputably women, and yet, they are indisputably ineligible to compete in women’s sports. So even if TWAW is true, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong to treat them just like we treat doped women.
Time to close this thread down.
It is far too heated and has far too many reports for one IMHO thread.
Mod instructions have been ignored and no one wants it moved to the Pit.