That could be - thanks
Boxing as a sport has built in weight classes specifically to ensure a competitive environment. There’s no reason women can’t compete against men in any weight class. I suspect a women with a fighting weight of 120 would not fare well against men in her class.
Do you have a cite for that? Thanks.
Did you mean to have the word “not” in this sentence? It seems at odds with the content of the rest of your post.
I don’t think women would be competitive in boxing against men of the same weight. There’s no rule against women competing against men, but I think most of them realize they wouldn’t get very far.
No. There’s not a lot of medical research on trans people. And it’s not getting better. I watched a Tom Scott video recently about a training hospital. They have a bunch of realistic mannequins simulating patients. That includes a trans man. They wanted to get a trans woman, too, but the company that makes them is owned by a US entity, and they didn’t make transgender mannequins any more. Because God forbid medical personnel get training on how to care for those people.
Thanks for the clarification. I misinterpreted part of your earlier post:
…as implying, “there’s no reason women can’t be competitive against men in any weight class.”
Also, that’s why i said, “probably”. But people always come into threads like this talking as if trans women are just men in skirts, not, you know, women. And i want to ask, "have you met any trans women? They are feminine.
I’ve seen a lot of people transition socially, mostly MtF, but some FtM. There are only two who surprised me. In most cases, I recognized something about their gender when they were still in the closet. And both of those women who surprised me were people I didn’t know very well, and now strike me as very feminine.
Yes, there are a couple of highly publicized cases of athletes who still seemed physically pretty male after transitioning. And i know a person (married to a close friend of mine; i attended the wedding) who gave up living publicly as a women after trying for a while, because they were tall and square jawed were never going to “pass”, and it was just socially weird and awkward to try. But these people are the minority of trans women. And trans women are already a pretty small minority.
But mostly, i think they are women, and if their masculine features give them an edge in sports (and a huge disadvantage in most other parts of life) that’s not somehow “unfair”. At least, not if you aren’t worried that it’s unfair that a very tall person has an advantage in basketball, or a person with high natural levels of testosterone has an advantage in weight lifting.
Or, rather, it is unfair, but absolutely everything about the top levels of sports is inherently unfair.
It’s not necessarily true that transgender people will conform to society’s view of that gender. There are a lot of trans women who don’t necessarily meet society’s definition of being feminine. Lots of trans women have full beards, traditionally masculine haircuts, wear masculine clothes, etc. And lots of transgender people don’t undergo any sort of medical transitioning procedures. They identify as that gender and keep the body that they have regardless of whether it matches society’s view of that gender.
When thinking about trans women in sports, it’s not all that relevant to think about your coworker transitioning and then getting into sports. It’s more relevant to consider a competitive athlete transitioning and how they would perform. So rather than your coworker transitioning and getting into sports, the more relevant situation would be like someone like Caitlyn Jenner transitioning
in '76 and competing in the women’s decathalon.
I don’t doubt that your transgender friends may not seem like athletes, but that’s because they are not athletes. Athletes will go through great lengths to optimize their bodies for their sport. Cis women who are into competitive sports will train for hours a day and have a muscular body. They’ll have large shoulders, arms, and legs that aren’t typically what would be described as feminine. They train to get as strong as they can without regards to whether or not it makes them look less feminine. There are cis women bodybuilders who have very muscular bodies which would be more typical of male bodybuilder (lookup “women ped bodybuilder”). Cis women athletes spend hours in the gym training for bodies which win matches, not bodies which look feminine. That’s likely to be true for transgender athletes as well. Their competitive drive will have them training get bodies which help them compete at their highest level. None of this means that transgender athletes need to be blocked from sports, but it does mean that the topic of transgender athletes needs to be viewed from the perspective of norms of athletes rather than the general population. Considering what an office worker would do is not the same thing as what an athlete would do.
Hah-- I almost didn’t post because you had been saying what I was thinking so clearly yourself! Sometimes I think it is helpful for two people to express an idea in different words, in hopes that one of them will get through to others.
Or maybe I just like the sound of my own voice.
One of my favorite colleagues likes to tell her students, it’s not a problem until it’s a problem.
She might be talking about whether kids can chew gum in class, or talk during a math lesson, or take a baseball out to recess. She tries really hard not to make life worse for the students on the off chance something might become a problem. But when it is a problem, she is ready to act.
You say we don’t have enough data to make a decision. I disagree: we have enough data about what is happening now to make a decision for what is happening now. We will not write our decisions etched on the side of Stone Mountain. If circumstances change in the future, we can change our decisions in the future.
Right now, trans athletes are not in any way disrupting sports. Taking action to prevent a nonexistent problem serves only to make life worse for the handful of trans athletes currently participating in sports. Let’s not do that.
And those people are already barred from high level women’s sports. And that’s not especially controversial.
It’s not that they don’t seem like athletes. In fact, some are athletes. (Not high-level professional athletes, but people who participate in sports and to whom sports participation is important.) It’s that they seem like women.
I think the people so rabidly against trans women in women’s sports have a mental image of large drag queens like RuPaul, who is 6’4". That’s a big dude. (I checked to be respectful: Google tells me that RuPaul identifies as a man in his everyday life, but when he dons his drag persona he’s quite comfortable with female pronouns.)
This is the money quote. To me, this is a compelling argument.
As opposed to this, which I find off-putting. I don’t think anybody is going to be won over by an argument along these lines. This exact same argument could equally apply to abolishing women’s sports altogether and just forcing them to compete in the men’s leagues.
There’s generally not anything they can do to elevate or step up their game. If there was, they would already be doing it in order to be more competitive and successful in their sport. They’re not just competing against transgender athletes. They are competing against everyone else. The person who’s currently #100 wants to get to #1 regardless of who is above them, transgender or not.
If transgender athletes have such an advantage over the rest of the competitors that this is a legitimate question, then that becomes an issue that the sports organization will likely address. Like with the Richard’s situation of a 40-year-old amateur getting to #20 after transitioning. I feel it’s unlikely that situation would be well tolerated. Her athletic advantage is very likely from her XY genetics rather than she trains harder than the other athlete. A cis-woman who peaked as a amateur couldn’t realistically do anything to get to #20. That imbalance would be viewed as the transgender athlete having an unfair advantage. Rather than the expectation being that the other athletes will have to step up their game, the likely outcome is that the rules for transgender athletes would be changed so that their athletic advantage was reduced so their ability was more in line with the other athletes in the sport.
Interesting, and I thank you for the information but, in the end, “came to believe” indicates that it is just her opinion. I still maintain that the analytics don’t indicate that a transgendered woman is “just a man who now looks like a woman”, which often seems to be the underlying agenda here.
I feel that an important part of this is being overlooked.
A claim of unfairness is a moral argument. Absent morality, there is no reason you couldn’t have a profoundly unfair sport. (In fact, such have existed throughout history. A simple mention of the Colosseum should be sufficient to establish this among the learned people here.)
Having established we are in the moral arena, I put forth the following claim: discrimination against minorities is also profoundly unfair. If someone wishes to advocate for such discrimination, they must make a case for why their issue is more unfair than that.
That’s why the talk about whether trans women dominate the sport is relevant. That’s why the talk about how top athletes are all genetic freaks is relevant. That’s why delineating different levels of competition is relevant.
For @EllisDee’s concern: this argument has already been made and accepted when it comes to men’s sports versus women’s sports. And the argument is that men will dominate women in competitive sports. By keeping things separate, women are given a chance to compete that they would otherwise not have. This same argument is also behind weight classes.
This argument does not work here, though. We don’t have data to support that domination. We have what is at most a small statistical difference. One that is smaller than the variations we do allow in female athletes.
So if we decide that this particular line of unfairness is morally sufficient to discriminate, we would have to discriminate not just between trans and cis women athletes, but also these other differences that make things “unfair.”
Is it possible the data will change? Sure. That’s where the “it’s not a problem until it’s a problem” argument comes in.
I hope that, by explicitly acknowledging that this is a moral question, I have provided a framework that all of the other arguments hang upon. And thus one can see just how strong the full argument for trans inclusion in sports actually is versus the intuition that it must be unfair.
We don’t actually know one way or the other, I would imagine. There just isn’t a large enough data set.
What I’m saying is to avoid an argument that goes something like: “Even if they do have an unfair advantage, it doesn’t matter because there aren’t that many of them.” I’m saying that is definitely not a winning argument.
EDIT: Reading back, I don’t think this was my point then, but is pretty much the entire extent of my point now. (Very small, very minor point.) I had honestly forgotten about this conversation.
I’m not sure that you can make this claim when it comes to sports. It’s probably true within the trans community in general, but that’s because most trans people were not elite athletes before they transitioned. Just like most people aren’t elite athletes, most trans people were just regular people doing regular things. After transitioning and being on HRT, it’s not all unexpected that the athletic ability of trans women is in line with cisgender women. It’s unlikely that a non athlete would become an elite athlete after transitioning. But that’s not necessarily what elite sports are concerned with when it comes to trans athletes. If a competitive athlete transitions, sports are concerned that their abilities will not just be a slight statistical difference with ciswomen in general. The sports are concerned that there will be a large difference with cisgender athletes and the transgender athlete will perform at a level closer to their pre-transitioned ability rather than the level typical of cisgender athletes. The situations they are concerned with are more about an NBA player transitioning and wanting to play on the WNBA rather than an office worker who’s never played basketball wanting to play in the WNBA after transitioning.
The situation with Renee Richards is an example of this. After transitioning she had a dramatic rise to a level that’s virtually impossible for a 40-year-old ciswoman. To be able to go from amateur to ranking into the 20’s when she was 40+ is the type of problem that sports struggle to figure out a solution. Most ciswomen tennis players struggle to maintain their ranking into their 30’s, including former #1 players. Even right now, former #1 Venus Williams is struggling to make a comeback. She’s ranked in the 450s and can barely make it past the first round of a tournament. With Richards, it’s true that she was within the range of the ciswomen at the top of tennis, but her ability to rise from an amateur to that level at her age was not within the range of ciswomen. That huge jump was not a small statistical difference in ability.
With regards to the number of transgender athletes, it is curious as to why there are so few of them. There are millions of elite athletes, yet it seems relatively rare that they transition compared to the general population. It’s understandable why they might not transition while they are competing, but it doesn’t seem like too many transition after they retire. It is curious that there aren’t more people like Jenner who transitioned after retirement. Perhaps there are and we just don’t hear about them, but it seems like being transgender is not as common among elite athletes as it is in the general population. If that’s the case, it would explain why there are so few of them actively playing in competitive sports.
…the evidence to show this just isn’t there. It just isn’t. Because if it was, then you wouldn’t have had to leap to this:
As your most “evidenced” example.
You’ve cherry-picked a single person that retired in 1981. That’s just completely rediculous.
Well, I mean, many of them can’t compete any more. Because that’s the way the world has moved. I think instead of worrying about how to exclude trans women from sports, we instead focus our effort on making sports more inclusive. And that includes making trans-affirming care more accessible for trans kids. Then some of the things that concern you would no longer be a problem.