True dat. After reading 1800 responses in this thread and having had many conversations on the topic, I get the impression there’s not going to be any easy solutions that everyone will be happy with.
I think if everyone is expected to change their deeply entrenched customs–not just women, but men too–then it won’t be a big deal to accommodate trans folks. But if all the custom-changing is shouldered by women and all the screaming and hollering is disproportionately targeted at women, then folks like JK Rowling will always have a point. And while that point might not seem to be a big deal to trans activists now, it will need to be reckoned with if their ideas have any chance of succeeding over the long haul.
Is anyone actually suggesting this?
Presumably, rules that apply to male-presenting transwomen entering woman-only spaces would also apply to female-presenting transmen entering man-only spaces, wouldn’t they?
I’m disappointed, @monstro, that in suggesting no one “on @Kimstu’s side” had validated your concerns, you didn’t take note of my earlier acknowledgement of a conflict between the right of transgender individuals to operate as their actual gender and the right of women to have comfortable spaces where they can readily identify people who don’t belong.
Unfortunately, I agree it seems like a lot of trans allies in this thread are just talking right past your actual point. If I may, it doesn’t help that @YWTF seems to be taking a harder-line stance against trans individuals, nor that we keep seeing the word “male” used to describe transwomen. That kind of thing tends to trigger defensiveness in trans allies, as does anything else that “others” trans individuals.
Anyway, I can’t deny it makes sense to ask people to use the facilities for the gender as which they present. The problem with that, as I see it, is that it glosses over the very real question of how the gatekeepers (or other users) determine which gender someone is presenting as.
Mostly in this thread we’ve discussed the extremes – a professed transwoman who is “burly” and “bearded” and otherwise super-masculine. I can totally get why you wouldn’t want someone like that in a woman-only space. But it’s far more common to see trans individuals with traits of both genders, and it may not always be clear that one is presenting exclusively as either male or female. Transition is a process, not a single event.
Third spaces would help solve this, though they’re not a panacea, and we don’t yet have third spaces everywhere. Even if we decided third spaces were the way to go, what should trans individuals do in the meantime?
Powers &8^]
First off, I’m sorry.
But as for your question, what should trans individuals do? The majority are likely using the facilities of their preferred gender without raising any eyebrows because they are using them respectfully. I have a transwoman coworker. I wouldn’t have a problem with her using the locker room with me because I know her personally and I trust her “womanness”. She lives as a woman. The trans folks I am concerned about are the ones who will feel particularly emboldened by the “anyone who says they are a woman is a woman” credo. These are folks who don’t present as women and have no plans to ever present as women. They don’t want to alter their biology. They want to retain their male presentation while hitching their wagon to women. These are folks who think “woman” has absolutely nothing to do with biology, dress, mannerisms, speech and don’t give a fuck that they are virtually indistinguishable from cismen by people who don’t know them. I don’t think women should have to suffer men-looking folks all up in their spaces without being the primary regulators of such spaces. So until we have third spaces everywhere, I think male-presenting transwomen need to either put up with negative reactions from women or they need to use facilities for men.
Folks in this thread keep telling me that “burly” transwomen are rare and insignificant, and while that may be true today, I don’t think that will always be true given current trends of young people hopping on the gender fluidity/nonbinary bandwagon. I’m not hating on these folks. They can identify however they want to identify for whatever reason they want. But I just don’t think we should give them every single thing they want. I think women’s sense of security in their own spaces outweighs warm fuzzy feelings someone experiences when their gender identity is validated.
Sorry for neglecting to mention you and thanks for trying to understand where I’m coming from.
I’m beyond fed up with tip toeing around issues that are impinging upon women’s rights and basic biology, so I’m using language that is plain, accurate, and precise. The biological class of people I’m talking about are male, even if that is not how they see themselves. Whether all penise-havers seeking to claim a place in women’s spaces are actually trans is undeterminable, but all, by definition, are male.
If biological fact is triggering, no one has to read my posts. Yes I’m taking a hardline on this. No I’m not sorry about it.
May I ask, is it the case that there is an explicit effort on the part of trans activists to normalize the acceptance of male-presenting individuals into women-only spaces? Or does the combination of a) the “anyone who says she is a woman, is a woman” motto, and b) the existence of male-presenting individuals who try to enter women-only spaces, lead you to conclude that activists are implicitly trying to normalize it?
Of course, we also have to consider ciswomen whom some people may identify as male-presenting, too. Gender expression – as opposed to identity – is more of a spectrum than a binary, and for people who fall somewhere in the middle, it can be hard for them to know where they’re going to be accepted and where they’re not.
Powers &8^]
Keep in mind, the word “male” can refer to either sex or gender. Using it unmodified when referring to individuals who are male in both aspects is probably fine, but when speaking of people whose sex may not match their gender, it is imprecise to use the term without some sort of qualifier.
Powers &8^]
And @Powers, just to underscore further why I’m fed up:
On one hand, I’m glad that a workgroup was convened to look at this issue and make recommendations based on the data at hand.
On the other hand, I’m angry and frustrated that a workgroup needs to even tell us what we should already know. Males are naturally bigger and stronger than females; they just are. Common sense should tell us that being on estrogen for a year could never wipe out the physical advantages that come with male puberty and decades of testosterone-driven muscle and skeletal development. Why would we need to see bunches of female athletes getting injured by trans competitors for us to know that basic biological sex differences exist and cannot be ignored?
The thing is, I don’t even think it’s likely these findings will result in trans women being barred from womens rugby. This is how worried I am that things are getting worse for women. I imagine that trans allies will just shrug this off as no big deal, but it is a big deal. It deserves to be talked about and it deserves to be fixed.
Those (controversial) sports sex verification tests are based on sex hormone levels, not on having a penis, though for sure they used to check such things in the past, along with chromosomal testing. Nobody is really satisfied with such tests because you always have a few percent of women with high testosterone and men with low testosterone.
BTW I agree with the comments that if someone is harassing people in the locker room then that is already a problem by itself, regardless of whether anyone involved is transgender.
They know who is trans and who isn’t. They don’t need a hormone test (or genital check) to tell them that.
Hormone levels just determine whether a trans woman is eligible to play.
It makes the thread a bit jarring, to be sure, even as a cisgender woman.
Male could mean gender identity, penis-having, or genetic. If you set aside gender identity, then is Laverne Cox “male”? To my knowledge she does not say if she had bottom surgery, but her genetic code is XY.
I use her as an example because she’s quite famously transgender, but there are a lot of examples. Hell, there have been trans individuals in this thread, but I’m not sure they are still participating.
If you set aside gender identity, Laverne Cox would be male with or without bottom surgery. Even if she has had bottom surgery, the tissue remaining is still penile tissue, just inverted to simulate a vagina. Her internal organ structures still reflect male physiology, and her sex chromosomes are as male as any other male.
I believe the question being addressed is one of extent. To what extent do those latent developmental advantages affect performance, injury risk, etc.? And are those effects greater than the range of natural variation in cisgender individuals?
Those are still open questions, I believe, at least among the scientific community. Especially so since the answer varies depending on the individual in question, including both the processes he or she has gone through and the person’s inborn traits.
And there are other questions, too, like what solution causes the least harm? Is it dangerous to force transwomen to compete against cisgender men? Where do transmen go? Do they have any chance of competing against anyone? Should we have transgender-only divisions? Is that practical or fair?
Powers &8^]
The extent is significant. If common sense isn’t enough to tell you that a male that has been “doped” on endogenous testosterone for 20+ years has a physical advantage that is impossible for 1 year of estrogen therapy to negate, there is science that shows this:
Hormones are just one part of it. Males and females are built very differently because their bodies are made to do different things. Widened pelvises for housing uteruses designed to gestate offspring makes women slower than men. Trans women do not have this feature, even when they take estrogen from a young age.
They aren’t open questions; they are just questions that trans allies haven’t bothered seeking answers to. The criteria set up by sports authorities was not based on any empirical evidence. Just like a lot of policies being tried right now (like housing female inmates with trans women), there seems to be little data supporting these decisions.
I hate to put it this way, but compared to males, its not inaccurate to say females are physically handicapped in many ways. Forcing women and girls to compete against trans women is much like forcing disabled players to compete against the non-disabled. Any decision to make the Paralympics inclusive to non-disabled athletes should not being made until after a rigorous study is done to show it doesn’t lead to unfairness or increased risk of injury. It bothers me that this kind of study wasn’t done for women’s sports.
There is nothing barring trans women from competing against men. Same for trans men. My thought on this is just like my thoughts on locker rooms. It makes no sense for the weakest and most vunerable group (females)to lose access to sporting opportunities that provides them the most protection and fairness. What makes Rachel McKinnon entitled to play against women?
I would go farther and say that trans athletes should not have a competitive advantage. It’s not just injuries that should be looked at, but also the competitive nature of the sport. For example, in a sport like tennis, there is little risk of injury from an opponent. But there is a huge disparity in ability between men and women. To be fair, a person switching sports from one gender to another should be ranked relatively the same in both sports. So if the #200 male tennis player switches to the women’s side, they should be competitively ranked around #200 among the women. But if instead the #200 previously male player is the dominate #1 player on the women’s side, that would indicate a huge unfair advantage. Even if the #1 male player switched to women they might still be #1, but their level of play should be at the level of the top women rather than top men.
I agree. Even if a player want from #200 among men to say #4 in the women’s ranking, that’s within the female range but they still clearly have an unfair advantage.
But it’s really shocking that transgender athletes have been allowed to compete in contact sports without any care for whether that’s safe. Like MMA fighter Fox Fallon:
It would only be practical for the most popular sports, I should think. But I don’t see any other fair solution. Transgender athletes who haven’t taken hormones could be allowed to compete as their birth sex, but that would mean delaying medical transition which would probably be unpopular.
I’m afraid you’ve completely missed what I was trying to say.
You’ve answered the question “Does 1 year of hormone therapy completely reverse a lifetime of endogenous hormones?”, but not “how much of a competitive advantage do transwomen have over ciswomen?”
They aren’t open questions; they are just questions that trans allies haven’t bothered seeking answers to.
Then you won’t mind showing sources that demonstrate a clear scientific consensus on the question I posed above (rather than on the question you think I asked).
There is nothing barring trans women from competing against men.
Except their ability to be successful doing so. The link you posted does say there was a marked decline in muscle mass in transwomen.
Powers &8^]
@Powers, take a look at this video. It’s not exactly a clip, but it’s watchable and gives a even-handed treatment of the issue.
I don’t know what to say if you remain skeptical after reading the study I cited and watched this video.
A trans woman doesn’t have to take estrogen. If they want to maximize their competitiveness against men, they can choose not to take it.
Other athletes have to make this kind of calculation too. If you’re taking erythropotietin for a health condition, you can’t expect to play because its a banned substance. So it’s either continue to take the drug and sit out a year, or not take it and play.
This is off topic, but it would be interesting to have a no restrictions category for sports - allow whatever drugs people are willing to risk taking, any possible technological improvements to equipment, and amputees can use extra long legs and whatever else might help them. The only rule would be all power must come from the athlete; motordoping would still be banned.