It’s not that I want things to be this way, but eliminating women-only sports does have a certain logic and is the natural consequence of deciding everyone gets to self-identify gender. Some girl not getting to be a sports star is not necessarily any worse than a boy who is merely average but is still better than her at the sport also not getting to be a sports star.
I find it very discouraging that conversations about transgender people so often devolve into a discussion of fairness in sports, if not safety in bathrooms. It’s as though trans women are really just trying to pull something over on the rest of us.
As one of the Offenderati, I really wish there was some way I could get an alert every time a trans thread popped up.
I’m not sure I can say anything that hasn’t already been covered.
The human brain is sexually dimorphic. If I could somehow swap out your stria terminalis, you’d feel like the other gender. I know of no such research showing a part of the brain responsible for what race you identify as. I also know of no reputable biologist who believes the term race to be a scientifically valid concept.
Just this week at Goodwill (I LOVE Goodwill!) I bought a book titled The Transsexual Empire. The author says that transsexuals completely buy into gender stereotypes, that transwomen are tools of the patriarchy ('It is not enough for them to control women. They must become women!), and so forth.
Some transwomen certainly do conform to stereotypes. Some members of any group will match the stereotype. Then there are those transwomen who enjoy fencing, motorcycles, and have advanced degrees in engineering.
No one has said that at all and sports came up because most people remember Bruce Jenner the Olympic athlete. It’s discouraging that you’re trying to turn that into a segue to the Victimhood Olympics.
Huh?
I feel transgender is real while I have a hard time accepting transrace (or whatever you want to call it).
Men and women are obviously physically different. And it goes beyond the obvious. There’s strong evidence that male brains and female brains are different. So it’s easy to accept the idea that a person can have a female brain in a male body or vice versa.
There’s no equivalent evidence to back up the notion that there are black brains and white brains. So I have a hard time accepting the claim that a person can have a black brain in a white body or vice versa.
You have to keep in mind though that these brain differences between males and females have more to do with the “typical” male and “typical” female brain and does not mean that you can correctly sort a batch of brains with 100% accuracy unless you define it to be so. That is to say, you could put the “ones more like this” in a pile and the “ones more like that” in another pile and define one as male and one as female, but their owners may not have agreed with your categorization back when they were alive. It would be more accurate to describe tendencies of the brains of males/females, than to consider them two separate categories with no overlap.
Also, the differences seem to show up more post-adolescence, so separating the inherent biological qualities of the brain from those potentially influenced by environmental factors is no small thing either.
The transgender half of this thread is *about *Caitlyn Jenner, who once played top-level sports. It’s rather central to the discussion, although I’d be the first to say that it need not be any major part of the more general dialogue.
It’s also about gender being a state of mind, so the specific issue of a completely physiological male declaring himself to be a woman does raise issues about gender separation in sports.
Not that there seems to be any answer besides repeating angrier and angrier statements of semantic guidelines.
I think it’s a mistake to argue that if a difference is biologically built-in, that means everyone will have to accept it, and the people who manifest that difference, as natural and OK and deserving of equal treatment. It sure the fuck hasn’t worked that way for schizophrenics, nor for black people, both of whom have been subjected to differential social treatment that assumes (or assumed) that yes their differences are innate, biologically built-in.
I also think it’s bad philosophy and does not constitute dialog-in-good-faith when people select their position on something not based on the “something” itself but on what they anticipate will be the immediate practical outcome of that position. ANALOGY: people arguing about getting rid of the US Senate filibuster and basing their argument solely on which party is currently dominant in the Senate (hence their eyes on the short-term practical outcome).
Anyway, I don’t know if Caitlyn Jenner’s transgender experience was more rooted in biological difference than Rachael Dolezal’s transrace thingie, but even if it were, that to me doesn’t make an “all-in-the-mind” difference somehow less real or less worthy of being accorded respectful treatment.
The hostility towards Rachael Dolezal (in my opinion) is largely based on how she, as a transrace white-to-black person (if you don’t mind me coining some terms here), displaced potential black leaders who would otherwise have occupied her position. She is seen as benefitting from her transition (in ways other than personal fulfillment via being able to present as the race she considers herself to be). I think some people even think her entire reason for positioning herself as black was to obtain that position (I myself do not think so).
There are whites (let’s just use the simple term) in NAACP and other organizations that focus on issues of non-whites (ditto).
Do you think she would have been given that leadership position as a stated white woman?
I don’t know why people keep saying this. It’s infuriating, sorry.
The hostility comes from the fact that this woman is a liar. Everything that comes out of her mouth is a lie. Her lies have made it easier for mainstream America to roll their eyes at black people.
If she were just a white person talking about her feelings, few would be giving her any grief because you can’t argue over feelings. But facts are facts. If she can’t get basic the facts right, why should people give her professed feeelings any respect?
The non-issue of transgender persons in sports was covered by me in a 12,000-word research article with about 40 citations.
Any alleged difference in competitiveness, after a transsexual woman has been on full hormone treatment for 2 years or more, comes down to height, or maybe overall size. As in yes, a 6’5" transsexual woman will have a natural basketball advantage over 5’11 cisgender female peers.
Hormone therapy causes tremendous changes to our bodies, which I have previously detailed with citations. It changes our blood chemistry, hematocrit, changes in fat distribution and type, changes in balance and spatial reasoning, etc. Because the effects of hormones are so profound, many transsexual women find that not only can they not compete against men, but they struggle with the stamina to compete against cisgender women. I have posted about my incredible strength and stamina loss, which took me from being a competitive fencer against cisgender men, to being *barely *able to keep up with cisgender women.
The only “problem” which I can see, other than simple height, is in the case of transgender women or girls who have NOT gone through sufficient hormone therapy. The IOC’s guidelines on this matter, which have been copied and adopted in many sporting organizations world wide, are pretty sensible and there have been no problems of note since they were passed more than 10 years ago.
My cousin’s husband is half Ethiopian Jew, and half Sephardic (actually, Sephardic with probably a healthy dose of Mizraic), and as dark-skinned as most American blacks, but with sort of Caucasian features. People in the US call him “black.” He pretty much just thinks of himself as Jewish, and will say “Jewish,” or “Israeli,” if asked his ethnicity (he has US citizenship now, but he also still has Israeli citizenship, according to Israel). People in Israel don’t call him by the term they would use for US blacks people, or Africans, though, because to them, he looks like just another dark-skinned Israeli.
No, but you’d be surprised at how many of them think they do. I know women who won’t leave the house without a certain minimal amount of make-up. Also, I know a couple of MTF women who don’t feel they have to wear make-up and dresses all the time, but they like to, because they feel like they’re making up for lost time.
Me, I have DD cups, but you’d be surprised how often I get called “Sir” when my hair is short, just because I never wear make-up, and I don’t tend to mear skirts unless it’s for some kind of occasion.
I have wondered if at least some TS people might possibly be people with chimera syndrome, something that happens when two blastocysts fuse, so a person actually has two different sets of DNA, depending on where you take the sample. No one knows just how common it is, since it gets found only in cases where people are looking for tissue matches for transplants, paternity, or typing DNA for the military, or forensics, so the sample of people who are tested in the first place is small, and then, the sample of people who get sampled in different places, like a cheek swab and a hip bone, so that the different sets of DNA are discovered, is totally serendipitous.
What’s even less well-known is how many people have female DNA in some places and male DNA in others. It just makes me think, I wonder what has more influence on the developing brain, the actual DNA of the neurons, or the hormones produced by gonads? Because someone with chimera syndrome could literally have XY gonads, and XX brain neurons. If cranial sexual dimorphism is a product of DNA, then chimera syndrome could explain a female brain in a male body (and the other way around).
Some transwomen are even lesbians, and one I know is a radical lesbian feminist.
Well, it is true, but it is also a little like Mrs. Lincoln complaining that the costumes in Our American Cousin weren’t very good.
Yeah. And why Bruce-now-Caitlyn Jenner is getting about as much respect as one can expect from the public at this time. The press could have been a lot more vicious, and while the usual nasty quarters have come through, on the whole, people have been fairly decent; I think it’s because she laid her cards on the table, as soon, and as forthrightly, as she could.
Which is the question I have pushed to the extreme, fully realizing it may border on absurdist. If, as in Jenner’s case, we are to accept that she was really a woman in 1976, and we’re supposed to respect that and take it at face value… what do we do when someone with Jenner/1976’s physiognomy insists on competing as a woman?
If chromosomal identification is out the window, and there is no absolute test of a person’s gender self-identification, and all forms of dispute and debate are considered phobic and demeaning… how do we prevent this hulking, hairy, bemuscled, be-wanged “woman” from strolling away with the medal? Or don’t we?
Actually, I think there’s a good chance she would have. Dolezal was the head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington - a city with a very small black population. So if Dolezal had told the truth and presented herself as a white person who supported civil rights and who had black family members, she might well have been elected President of the local chapter.
Like hell they are!
Find the transgender athlete policies of the organization governing the sport and apply them. To repeat, ad nauseam, this is not that hard.
Not all organizations have such policies at this time and some have policies that are considered discriminatory.
Why exactly are we not to consider what fair policies should be?
At the risk of sounding racist, I am confused by the above. I thought that forensic anthropologist could determine someone’s race/ancestry based on on features of thier skeleton. Is this not the case? am I a victim of schlock television? Or are there skeletal features that determine racial characteristics?