To cite one sport - out of many - teenaged boys’ teams of age 15 or under (only partway through puberty) have consistently defeated much older adult women, age 20-35, (such as the U.S. or Swiss national women’s team) in soccer by lopsided scores. It suggests something biological at play, given that the USWNT and Swiss teams are about as highly-trained and well-practiced a women’s team in the world that there is.
Those are cis-boys, of course, not transgender athletes, but again, it does suggest physical differences that may not entirely go away with hormone treatment - considering they are only 15 or under, not 17-19.
How will a cis woman compete against a trans woman? The same way she would compete against anyone else. What did you have in mind, that she ought to kick her opponent in whatever is left of the balls ?
There are a lot of unstated assumptions here. Like that trans women are just men who arbitrarily choose to take female hormones and live as women. They aren’t. They are people who, despite having been assigned to the “male” category at birth, have a profound sense of being female. That typically manifests not just in the brain, but in other ways. I know a lot of trans women. They have a range of body types, like any other group of people. But you know, they average smaller than a similar group of men. They average less athletic than a similar group of men, too.
There are a lot of people in the world. Will there be a few trans women who are unusually strong and athletic, even after hormone therapy? Yes. Might some of them become elite athletes? Yes. Will cis women be crowded out of all the top positions in sports? No. Because it’s a teeny tiny number of trans women who are also elite athletes. And let’s be honest, those trans women aren’t going to get the same encouragement and positive social feedback about it in middle school as cis women are, unless they are competing as boys, rather than as girls.
The US states that let trans girls compete with the other field at school have not had an issue with cis girls being denied an opportunity. Have there been one or two high profile trans girl athletes? Yes. And the bigots are ALL OVER THEM to prove how evil it is to let people live their lives. But it’s not actually an issue, and it’s not going to be. The really contentious issues in sports and gender have been cis women who had slightly more “male” bodies. Women, cis women who lived their whole lives as women, have discovered they that genetic quirks (like a Y chromosome) because of the testing done to elite athletes. Because in the real world, neither sex nor gender is a nice clean binary. But even so, it’s mostly ordinary cis woman winning pretty much all the prizes. No, not every single one. But there’s still plenty of room for cis women to compete.
And the dirty secret that no one who cares about sports likes to admit is that it’s not just about grit, even about sex-adjusted grit. Every single world-class athlete in a power/strength/endurance dominated sport is a genetic freak. American football players and basketball players, at the professional level, some even look like normal humans. They look freakishly big. (In different ways, because the sports favor different bodies.)
Expanding in that last paragraph, “all elite athletes are genetic freaks”, I was listening to an article about the men who broke the 2 hour marathon record, and the development of the shoes (and feeding regimen) that made it possible.
Scientists decided that it was probably physiologically possible for a human to break the 2 hour marathon several years ago. And some of the sneaker companies wanted to work on developing the shoes, and were looking for runners to work with. But they identified several genetic features that would be required. They needed people with excellent efficiency is using oxygen, and i forget what the other traits were, but they were things they could test for. And they started looking at elite runners for ones who had that genetic potential. And among elite runners, only about 2% were worth them even considering as mascots.
Those people are genetic freaks. Now, they also need a lot of grit, and time, and training. But most women, and most men, never have a chance to be elite athletes no matter what they do, because they don’t have the ideal genes for any particular sport. Does a trans woman have a slightly higher chance of being able to excel? Well, not most of them, because there’s a reason they are trans women. But yes, some do. So the numbers I’d expect are sometime like 1% of girls are trans, 0.1% of serious female athletes are trans, and that 0.1% represent perhaps 2% of elite female athletes.
And how do the other women compete against them? The same way they compete against the women with more red blood cells, and with better VO2, and who were born producing more anabolic steroids even though they are XX-gened women. Sometimes those women will have some other useful genetic quirk, like extraordinary reflexes. And all of them need a lot of grit.
The same things they would do to elevate their game against cisgender athletes.
Until such time as there develops a statistically significant competitive issue for cisgender athletes, no changes need to be theorized. There are millions of cisgender athletes living in municipalities that allow transgender athletes to compete, plenty of opportunity for any theoretical issues to arise in practice.
Never said it was, just that it’s very important (but not the only thing) in shot put.
Actually if done correctly, it’s whole body, with an emphasis on legs and arms. Much less upper body strength than you might think. And less strength than you might think- it’s really about being able to couple that strength with explosiveness and speed and the right technique.
But even at that, the XX/XY biological strength difference still makes a HUGE difference. The reason I bring it up is because it’s something that men and women compete in, but where there’s a stark difference in performance based on biologically based strengh, and that no amount of technique is going to overcome.
Because of the importance of androgens in so many sports, i suspect that most women’s sports are dominated by cis women who happen to produce unusually large amounts of androgens. And that that will continue to be true whether or not trans women (with measured, limited androgens) are allowed to compete.
A friend had a cousin who competed internationally in shot put in the 1990s. He said that all the top competitors were illegally taking androgens supplements except for one, and everyone knew it. And you could tell just from their records, because that guy, on average, did a little better at the most prestigious events. And every other player did worse, because they had to be off their drugs long enough to get a clean blood test.
I can’t imagine that’s less true today in strength-dominated sports like shot put.
At the Cocodona 250 (one of the top ultramarathons in the US) this week, Rachel Entrekin finished first overall, setting a new course record by almost 3 hours.
This assertion is made repeatedly, that trans women are at an advantage. Can anyone demonstrate that this is actually true? Physiological studies I believe have mixed results. More to the point, can anyone show an actual pattern of trans women dominating cis women in a high level sporting competition? Or, for that matter, a single example? All of the examples I’m aware of, the trans woman was at a high level, but did not (or only rarely) actually won.
This was my understanding as well, and why, in my opinion, it is not possible to have a non-political discussion on the topic. Because the premise is simply wrong, and it is wrong is for political reasons.
This is such a strange thing to be worried about. How will short women compete against taller women in basketball? How will women with little arms compete against women with longer arms in swimming? How will girls without professional trainers compete against girls with professional trainers in gymnastics? How will high school kids whose parents can’t drive them to tournaments every weekend compete against those whose parents have the resources for travelball?
Almost every other unearned advantage is held by the overwhelming majorities of champions in every sport. Why aren’t we talking about those? Instead we’re talking about trans athletes, who don’t hold any of the championship spots in any sport AFAIK, much less holding almost all of the top spots. Why is it the trans athletes we have yet another thread about?
I suspect that PED use is common in most elite-level male sports. We’ve already seen it in cycling, American football, baseball, hockey, soccer/football, bodybuilding, and track & field.
But yeah, it would be uniquely helpful in a strengh-centric sport like shotput or discus.
Because competitive sports isn’t about giving everyone an equal shot regardless of their innate talents, background, willingness to work hard, having early training, etc. It’s about determining on the field who performs better during any given event. With one exception, hich is men vs. women. As noted in multiple posts in this thread, with few exceptions like the already mentioned ultramarathon, in the vast majority of sports men have a massive advantage over women. The advantage is large enough that at the top levels women would not able to compete in an open competition that includes men. That’s why there are no women who compete in the NFL, NBA, MLB, etc.
The question then becomes specifically about women’s sports at the top level. And what is the question? Whether or not trans women maintain the advantage that men have over women after they transition. That’s a legitimate question. It could very well be that the answer is no, they don’t. IMHO, however, arguing that any number of other traits that put most people at a disadvantage compared to the elite athlete doesn’t really have any bearing on the matter. The question should strictly be whether or not trans-women competing against cis-women at the top levels have a competitive advantage due to being trans.
ETA: And secondarily, there’s room to debate exactly at what point a sporting competition becomes top level. Is it only professional leagues? Division I NCAA? Varsity high school? At any level below that, whatever the cutoff is, IMHO the issue of transgender women competing with cis women disappears.
So do tall people over short people in basketball, or long-armed people over short-armed people in swimming. Again, this is a known thing, and is much more common of an advantage, and skews sports far more, than trans athletes. You’re just repeating what’s already been said without addressing my question of why we’re dealing with the vanishingly rare advantage instead of the one that actually determines who wins the top spots.
Because we, as a society, have determined that the people who are disadvantaged due to having short arms (or starting training later in life, or being too big, or too small, or not agile enough, or whatever else) aren’t disadvantaged in a way that merits giving them the opportunity to compete in a short arm league, a too small league, a too slow league, etc*. We have, as a society, determined that the disadvantage of being a woman does merit having people with that particular disadvantage getting to compete in their own elite leagues.
*. Or at least not having top level / elite competitions for people with any of those numerous disadvantages. Which is why the debate is about elite leagues, and not the neighborhood recreational league.
ETA: The closest non-gender analogy I can think of is weight classes in combat sports. And sure enough, there is controversy on that issue as well WRT to cutting weight to compete in a different weight class. In other words, there is a legitimate debate to be had on whether or not trans women have a competitive advantage over cis women, in the same way that there is a legitimate debate in boxing over whether or not a lightweight who has “transitioned” to featherweight (by cutting weight with diuretics or some such thing) is at an unfair advantage over someone whose natural weight is featherweight.
Thus far, it very much is the answer. And yet people keep asking the question over and over without any new evidence to counter the answer we already have, apparently because they don’t like that answer. That doesn’t mean the question is unsettled.
It’s the same rationale that drives some people to keep asking whether vaccines cause autism long after the question has been studied to death.
We also have weight classes in all martial arts and weightlifting events, rowing has light and heavyweights, there are Clydesdale and Athena divisions for running, triathalon, and biking events.
The World Basketball League (long gone) had height limitations.
