Do you find the word “heterosexual” to not be useful? That’s all cisgender is. Trangender is to cisgender as homosexual is to heterosexual.
Cis- is also already the opposite of trans- in other situations (such as chemistry), just like hetero- is the opposite of homo-. So it just makes sense to use.
Would you rather people say nontransgendered and nonhomosexual?
In the interests of equal opportunity, people with masculine anatomies should not be permitted to compete in women’s sports. Sexual reassignment does not remove the advantages conferred by that anatomy.
When we meet Vulcans, they should not be allowed to compete in the Olympics against humans on the basis of direct competition. Their anatomical advantages would be disruptive. I can say this confidently, even though the first encounter is some hundreds of years in the future.
It’s not a hill I want to die on…
Just sounds weird and unneccessary to my ears …
I’m seeing more an analogy to “fiction” and “non-fiction” than to anything else.
What’s wrong with simply transexual, if that additional information is required and female / male?
As has already been mentioned - maybe the “Cis” is a prefix to add additional information in a discussion on such matters where accuracy and shades of meaning is important - that part I can agree with and get behind,
Otherwise, it’s simply jarring to my ears - not that my ears are neccessarily an argument for or against any particular word - if they were the word “check” for a convertible payment instrument would have been banned long ago.
Well I did take high school bio - but I can’t recall ever having come across the term “cis”
As to the second part - what’s wrong with leaving gender / sex as the default - and differentiating / describing from there (at least in casual discussions)
That’s how I feel about this entire thread.
I asked a friend of mine who is much more up-to-date than I am on transsexual issues, and he said that it is a topic that no one can “win.” It’s argued both ways even among the transsexual community.
I’ve stated my opinions the best I can, and, really, haven’t got much else to say here.
(Okay, yes, I do sometimes wish that the Olympics were competed in naked, the way the ancients did it.)
It is unlikely that medical science can create a transgendered individual with a physiology equal to what that individual’s physiology would have been had their genes been those of their new gender. Nor is there any way to measure that.
Chemical manipulation of genetically-driven native physiology has been frowned upon by sports bodies in general. (The reasons are unclear to me, and I support any and all performance-enhancing drugs for adults, but that’s a different topic.)
There is no mechanism by which to decide if the chemical manipulations involved in sex reassignment confer an unfair advantage over native physiology when sex is reassigned, and more significantly, there is no mechanism by which to police the chemicals involved.
As long as sports holds to the notion that we shouldn’t alter native physiology with external chemicals, it should bar the transgendered from participation in sports that are categorized according to sex.
Once sports bodies get rid of the ridiculous notion that I should not be allowed to dink around chemically (or, down the road, genetically) with my own physiology in pursuit of sports triumphs, then the transgendered should be allowed to compete with their newly chosen sex. Over the long haul we’ll get past the breathless anecdotes such as the lead in Una Persson’s article and get enough data to see how closely modern science can superimpose an alternate gender with its concomitant physiologic limitations.
I’d like to see more empirical evidence, with things like control groups and measurements and comparisons, before making a decision. Is there greater bone density, muscle mass, oxygen uptake than the typical genetic female athlete?
I realize that transgender females are a very small group, so it’s probably difficult to harness a large enough population to make conclusive comparisons, although it doesn’t entirely preclude some sort of quantitative analysis.
It would be nice to be inclusive, but not at the expense of marginalizing those women who never had the physical advantages conferred merely by being a genetic male.
If hormones - and only hormones - were the entire cause of the differences, then we should see transgender males competing successfully against non transgender males in very physical sports where strength and speed are required. Maybe there are successful examples of that, but it’s just not as obvious.
While hormones are extremely influential, I’m not convinced they are the entire effect of a Y chromosome. Then again, I’m obviously no scientist, although I try to have some sort of disciplined thinking. The Y chromosome doesn’t only determine maleness and male fertility, I would imagine, but it must interact with, and influence, other genes, yes?
Obviously the genes on the Y interact with other genes, or they’d do very little (most genes work in combination). However, the Y-specific genes are expressed almost exclusively in the testes, and their effect on the rest of the body (like the muscles, bones and vascular system) acts pretty much exclusively through hormones. It’s like a relay race: the Y makes the gonad male through gene action, and the gonad makes the rest of the body male through hormone secretion.
As I said before, the sex of the embryo is determined by the hormones produced by the gonads, and to make an anatomically normal male the only place where you need the Y chromosome is in the gonads themselves. The entire rest of the body can be XX and the differences with a completely XY individual will be almost undetectable. This makes perfect sense, since the Y-specific genes are almost completely silent (inactive) outside the testis even in normal males; there’s nothing for them to be doing anyway. The pseudoautosomal genes, however (the ones shared with the X), are required for normal function of many cell types, so those parts of the Y are active elsewhere; they just have noting to do with maleness.
Surely the problem is resolved by not segregating events by gender (or any other discriminant)? If the purpose is to compete to ‘be the best’ then you should compete against the entire competition. Splitting events into male and (implied inferior) female or able-bodied and (implied inferior) Paralympic categories only reinforces a number of stereotypes.
Do we have dyslexic spelling bees? Downs-syndrome chess? Dwarf high jump? I trust you are offended, but why not so much (if at all) by women’s track?
We do separate out able-bodied men by weight division for boxing and wrestling and judo and weightlifting and so on. So that’s something, anyway.
And some sports/events separate by age as well. For adults, not children. The NYC marathon has age group awards, professional bowlers and golfers have entirely separate tours only open to those over 50 and amateur bowlers and golfers have events only open to those over 50. The amateur bowlers are sometimes divided into groups so that 50-54 year olds compete within that group and 55-59 year olds are a separate group. So separating by group other than gender is not unknown.
Clearly, you have little experience of competitive shooting. Upper body strength is very important. I’d be astonished to find that carefully controlled studies consistently show no capability bias based on sex-based physical aspects.
It seems unfair to me to allow people like Renee Richards compete as women, but I haven’t studied the data. The answer should be based on good science. Lacking good science, IMHO the default answer should be “no” but apparently my opinion is overruled by IOC, etc. I hope they had a good basis for their decisions and not just political bias. Regardless, that seems to be the current situation, so the onus is on those who would change it. I’m certainly not up to the challenge!
In any case, I don’t think we have any (or at least, many) cases of very successful transgendered athletes. Perhaps that answers the question.
That’s my position. Don’t fix a non-problem, especially if it introduces more problems.
For those who are proposing that men who self-identify as women should NOT be allowed to compete as women, how do you propose to test who qualifies as a woman?
Is it genitalia? If yes, what about post-op transexuals?
Is it DNA? If yes, aren’t there several rare people with XXY, XYY, and such, so how do we deal with them?
(I may have missed this being addressed earlier in the thread, but I didn’t see any mention on DNA in the 4 pages thus far)
As Una Persson has said, this doesn’t seem to be a problem at this point in time, so no reason to go out of our way to find a solution.
However, it is interesting to speculate about how to resolve this issue if and when it starts getting abused by men who want to win trophies.
I’d start with the obvious – simply ask what their natal gender was. If there are contested issues, DNA could resolve them. In cases of polyploidy (I think that’s the right word) I’d have to move them to men’s competition, i.e., the more difficult competition.