Bill Burr summed it up well for me. I know he’s joking, but still:
Obviously dudes will not be getting sex changes just for the competitive advantage, but we have to admit that advantage exists.
Would weight categories rather than gender be workable? Or would tiny featherweight men still have a large advantage over similar size women?
They absolutely would. Just the existence of breast distorts the lean body mass ratio. And that’s assuming no other advantage.
You don’t just grow a muscle and then retain it forever - muscle must be maintained, and maintaining male-normal levels of muscle requires male hormones. Post-transition transwomen lost both muscle mass and strength. To put it another way: they do NOT retain male muscle mass or strength.
No Olympic or professional athlete is “average”. As an example: female basketball players at that level are almost all taller than the average woman (there are a couple exceptions, just as in men’s basketball), and most are taller than the “average man”. Margo Dydek, for example, is a ciswoman professional female basketball player and stands 7 feet 2 inches. The average transwoman is going to be shorter than that by a considerable margin. Even most cismen basketball players are shorter than Dydek.
I do not have that information. Maybe our board’s authority on such matters will drop by, maybe she won’t, that’s up to her. I don’t think it’s that long, but my gut feeling doesn’t count as data.
Which is why, in my post, I suggested a “significant interval”, exact length unknown to me, until these people can compete with ciswomen.
It may be, post-male-puberty, it’s not worth it for an athlete to transition because the “appropriate interval” might mean they can’t compete during their peak years. If being a world-class athlete take precedence over transitioning then that person might prefer to follow Kaitlyn Jenner’s path and do the athletics first, then transition (although in Ms. Jenner’s case transitioning in the early 1970’s would have carried hazards, risks, and penalties that are less likely today). There is no evidence that a person who has completed transition and lived as a transwomen for an extended period is going to blast away the ciswomen competition. To be fair, I don’t think there’s evidence against that position, either. There have been men who passed themselves off as women with various degrees of success, but so far as I know none of them were transgender people as we define the term.
As far as male-configured skeletons - there have been some women with androgen insensitivity syndrome/XY female disorders competing at the world/Olympic level. These women do not react to testosterone and thus develop externally as female but usually attain cismale height and tend to be narrow hipped, closer to the male norm than the female. Such athletes can make the grade to extent of qualifying for high level competition but none, so far as I know, have been top performers.
In other words, while height, hip configuration, and so forth are definitely factors in athletics they are not the only inputs into athletic performance.
Why do you doubt the effectiveness of testosterone blockers?
In any case - after “bottom surgery” a transwoman doesn’t need “testosterone blockers” because they will no longer have testes churning out that hormone. In fact, such a person will be deficient in hormone production and will have to take hormones for the rest of her life to prevent osteoporosis (which disorder will really impair one’s athletic ambitions). For transwomen, that’s typically estrogen.
While post-surgical transition the adrenal glands still produce testosterone it’s at a level comparable to ciswomen’s adrenal glands. Why do you assume that transwomen have higher testosterone than ciswomen? Do you have a cite to back that up? Because my information is to the contrary.
Er… post-transition treatment a transwoman is NOT going to have anywhere near male levels of testosterone, much less “raging” through her body.
I also am puzzled at your notion that somehow ciswomen athletes aren’t “aggressive” since, as you point out, aggression is a significant advantage in any competition. Successful female athletes tend to have higher testosterone levels than the average ciswomen (although still within what is considered normal for woman). (Highly successful ciswomen in any area tend to have higher testosterone, although it’s not certain if that is a cause or an effect, as success, winning, and such increase testosterone over an individual’s base level)
Women athletes have denser bones than the average ciswoman - it comes with the extreme physical training. And while they don’t have the ligament strength they DO have more flexible joints… which might account in no small part for some of the difference between men’s (emphasis on strength) and women’s (emphasis on flexibility) gymnastics. Of course, both male and female gymnasts have to be strong and flexible, but the emphasis for each category is different. That’s an example where a transwoman might be at a disadvantage due to a more masculine bone and ligament structure.
As I noted: they may have more problems with flexibility. Their muscle mass will diminish no matter how hard they train. Their center of gravity and balance will change. The “muscle memory” isn’t going to map exactly onto the new body configuration. There will have to be a period of re-learning.
Again, transwomen would not be competing against the average ciswoman. The women at the top of the sports competitions are all outliers to begin with.
Here are some other records.
Bench Press:
Men - 1070 lbs
Women - 600 lbs
Marathon:
Men - 2:02
Women - 2:17
Various Track and Field events
On the plus side, women are more pro-social than men. The genders have differences.
Has it been studied or proven if post-transition trans females are athletically similar to cis women?
I think we need to find sports that are competitive cross-gender and promote those more. Having the gender segregation to begin with isn’t very healthy for children or society, I don’t think. Being on the same cooperative team as people of both genders, while growing up, would be a big boon to society, but most of the sports that we play and encourage are easier to play with a male physique and so the gender split is introduced.
At the moment, I believe that the main ones are climbing and volleyball. I’m sure that there are other games that we could all play together.
No hormone treatment in the world will change bone structure. Men competing as women, no matter how long they have been taking hormones, will still have an advantage.
StraightTalk has the best idea. New classes for different groups so the playing field is somewhat even.
Except for the people who completely embrace the idea that one can fundamentally change one’s sex, a man who defeats a woman in a sporting contest will not be seen as a fair winner to most.
I know because a close relative lost her place on the medal stand in an archery competition to a man claiming to be a woman. That person was allowed to compete as a woman, but I do not know of any other person who believes the medal was won fair and square. Yes, that 70+ year old person had excellent skills, but also a strength and stamina that a 70+ year old woman would not. And archery is as much about strength and stamina as skill.
Don’t think there has been a large enough pool of people who are both transwomen AND high level athletes to study in a meaningful way.
What, exactly, do you think this “bone structure” will do? First it was all about muscle. Then it’s about bones.
The real fact is that we don’t know. There are a lot of assumptions.
Had that person had transition treatment?
If so, for how long?
No one is arguing that someone identifying as transgender who still retains functional testicles has an advantage in sports. The question I have is whether or not that advantage is lost after a period of time post final transition.
As one data point, New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who transitioned in her 30’s, has been dominant in international competition.
I think men have a significant advantage over women in volleyball, unless you mean mixing up team rosters so that both have men and women and are equally advantaged/disadvantaged.
I watched the snowboard halfpipe of the Winter Olympics for the first time this year, never having seen that event before. First I saw the female competitors. Goddamn, they’re good, I thought. I was astonished to see them flip and spin in the air and amazed that anyone could be that talented.
Then I saw the men’s event with Shaun White.
I quickly realized that the women, as good as they were, were simply nowhere close to the same level. The women had to muscle and grind out every tight curve and aerial flip. You could see them exerting the effort. And I don’t mean to take anything away from them, because they were badasses in their own right. But the men made it look effortless.
If this is how it is with a solo sport where only a single competitor performs at a time, I can’t even imagine how dire of a situation it would be if women and men were playing a contact team sport at Olympic levels. Or wrestling. Or boxing.
Hormones have an effect on the body. Hormones are connected to your gender (or your sexual characteristics, depending on how you want to define that word) but to act as if they just don’t exist is lunacy. And who would ultimately get the shaft in this situation? Women. They get it enough already, so I say keep their sports leagues separate.
The truth is that many elite athletes are statistical outliers anyway. They may have naturally larger frames and stronger muscles and female athletes may have naturally higher levels of testosterone yet we don’t ban athletes who are abnormally tall from playing basketball. My solution would be to get rid of the gender requirements and set androgen levels, just like they use weight classes. While I don’t have all the details (you would have to allow for cases like testicular feminization where the testosterone levels are high but there are no receptors) I can see sports being divided into “low androgen”. “moderate androgen” and “high androgen” classes and athletes would compete with those at similar levels.
Like.
I think the discussion here of what is right is a good discussion to have. But most sports are dependent on sports fans. I think, whether experts and thoughtful commentators come up with the truth or not, what will really happen will be what gives the appearance that the competition is fair, satisfying the fans.
Back in Thailand, there was at one time, I kid you not, an elephant-polo team comprised exclusively of post-op transsexual ladies. The team’s name was the Screwless Tuskers. They insisted on their right to compete in the ladies’ class, which caused an uproar among the other ladies’ teams, whose numbers were few. The argument was they may be ladies now, but they still had the upper-body strength of men. IIRC, the ruling was they had to stick to the men’s competition for that reason.
Well, we may have to limit transwomen competing in the women’s categories to those who transition before puberty
But in the case of transwomen vs. cismen the cismen are going to win every time because transwomen don’t have the hormones to maintain male levels of muscle and strength, assuming you require someone to have completed a transition prior to competition.
Maybe every country will need four teams instead of two.
Or: a move to only one team, and a rule that 50% of the players on the field at any given time were female at birth.
Yes, they should
To the argument “But then transwomen are going to dominate women’s sports” my reply is “And?”
Maybe my flippancy is driven by the terrible way international athletics is treating Caster Semenya (who is not trans, but gets the same shit anyway).
Then again, I’m not the hugest sports fan , so am pretty numb to sportspeople’s fee-fees.
I get that. But if pretty numb, why not all the way, and declare the current men’s team to just be “the team”, and new players of any type are welcome to compete for a spot?