There have been a few cases of high-level athletes losing a limb, and getting a prosthesis, and continuing to compete at a high level. Right now, this is allowed, and those athletes are generally celebrated as inspirational role models for overcoming their challenges. But prosthetics are always getting better, and someday we’ll get to a point where a prosthetic limb is better than an organic one. At what point do we stop celebrating amputee athletes, and start prohibiting them?
And more to the point: Why is it that absolutely nobody discusses that question, and everyone is discussing the trans question?
I think the difference is that nobody becomes an amputee on purpose. They are celebrated as overcoming an injury that happened to them out of the blue. And it’s bad PR to criticize an amputee. Transgender athletes, on the other hand, are seen as having voluntarily seeking out surgery.
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, just saying that that’s the difference in perception.
The answer remains: because the “men in girls’ sports” (note phrasing) issue is entirely manufactured as a right-wing wedge issue to gain acceptance for a much wider range of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation. This is after the “bathroom” issue failed to get sufficient traction to do so, but the sports issue allows nice middle-class folk who naturally would be against the persecution of a vulnerable minority to pretend this is all about “fairness”, even though the way it’s been used clearly shows that this is utter bullshit.
That’s why. And we can thank Christopher Rufo, who also gave us the CRT hysteria as a means of allowing the whitewashing of American history, as the main instigator of this pogrom.
A reminder that nobody “becomes trans” on purpose either.
And amputees don’t need to get fancy sports prosthetics. They choose to get them in order to gain an advantage, while trans people don’t take hormones and get surgery for that purpose.
As soon as prostheses are superior to natural limbs the temptation to amputate to get them will instantly appear. Just as as soon as a new performance enhancing drug is invented, suddenly the desire to use it appears.
Now given all the practical downsides to amputation, I imagine there will be rather few athletes willing to go down that road. Like not enough to worry about.
But of course the same thing can be said of living a trans-gender life, hormone treatments, surgery, etc. Assuming somebody is just faking gender dysphoria for athletic advantage, all those adaptations are difficult to do, and have significant downsides. So vanishingly few cishet male athletes actually go down that road. To within a rounding error that number is, and will continue to be, zero. Anyone who’s doing the process is an actual gender dysphoric. And even then there are just about zero of them at the athletic level where it matters.
This is related. A former student of mine, who is trans, finished in the top 20 in the state cross country meet (well it’s DC, so not strictly a state meet). Thing is, the kid is a trans male. Is it going to be fine for trans males to compete as males but not for trans females to compete as females?
For whatever reason, transmen seem largely absent from the national discourse on transgender people. (Calling the Republican talking points discourse might be overly generous here.) For sports in particular, nobody really cares because a transman, or transboy if we’re talking about kids, isn’t going to have any advatange over the other boys.
Trans men will have different issues. A trans man who is not on HRT will generally not be able to compete with cis men due to a much lower level of athletic ability. A trans man on HRT will likely not be allowed to compete in elite events due to their HRT drugs being on the list of banned substances.
If we looked at the athletic ability of these groups, my guess is that we’d see a statistical distribution where transgender people where athletically between cis men and women, like this:
Trans men would generally have higher ability than cis women and less then cis men. Trans women would generally have lower ability than cis men and higher than cis women. This is assuming they are on normal levels of HRT.
At the core of the issue is whether trans women should be allowed to compete at whatever athletic ability they have when on normal HRT, even if it’s higher than cis women. Or if trans women should be subject to more stringent requirements that lower their athletic ability to be more in line with cis women. The answer is not the same for all sports. It doesn’t matter a lot in a 5K fun run, but it does matter a lot in something like the Olympics.
The thread does require us to accept the proposition that there is any validity to the premise that the participation of trans athletes poses a legitimate issue in sporting competitions, while excluding (see also Mod note) discussion of any political aspects of this proposition. We are thus left with an inherently biased discussion from the start.
If you have a problem with the poster, the Pit is the place for that.
[Also moderating]
Disputing that proposition can be done in a non-political way, and is perfectly valid for this thread. Saying “Trans people in sports are not a problem” is fine. Saying, for instance, “Trans people in sports are not a problem, and Republicans only say that it is a problem because they’re stupid” would not be fine.
The promise “non-political” in the thread title is dishonest, because the entire thing was politicized out the wazoo in the first place. Claiming one can make it “non-political” is disingenuous. The only reason anyone is talking about it is the politics of hate. Perpetuating it like this directly plays into the schemes of the haters.
