Speaking both speculatively and practically; I’d expect a rule which stipulates some criteria for being “a woman” (which obviously is another hurdle as to what criteria they would be) would have to have been met for a specified amount of time.
Or would we set up separate heats for each event? A cis-male, cis-female, FtM, MtF grouping so everyone competes against peers of their sex?
The amount of money Kournikova made by being easy on the eyes and pretty pathetic on the Court illustrates, yeah, looks are pretty damn important to many viewers, unfortunately.
A male athlete who is good looking and does not perform to a high standard gets dismissed as a “pretty boy”, hell even guys who are handsome and successful are regularly endurethat*. Just ask David Beckham.
*Though TBF, I cannot imagine a good looking type like Becks, CR7 or Gotze as a DM. A hard man needs to look like a thug, like Keane or Mascherano.
Masche is not a hard man. He’s well known for stealing balls with precise cleanliness.
Hey OP, quick note, your thread title is malformed. It should be “should trans women be allowed to compete with cis women in sports”. Trans women are women. Full stop. There’s no “trans women vs women” any more than there’s “black women vs women” or “blonde women vs women”.
My position on this still mostly boils down to the maxim, “The categories were made for the man, not man for the categories”. Why do we use these (inherently arbitrary unless applied) categories? Well, it turns out, the use case of “man” and “woman” in sports is a bit different from the use case of “man” and “woman” in day-to-day life. In day-to-day life there’s not really a good reason to keep people from identifying however they want, because the deciding factor is…
Um…
…Shit, what meaningful deciding factor is there?
…Whereas in sports the whole reason we make the separation is pretty clear-cut - physical biological differences between people who are biologically male or female. So insofar as transgender individuals have the physical profile of the gender they don’t identify with (hormones, bone structure, etc.), it makes sense to differentiate. Not because they “aren’t men/women” (glares angrily at CelticKnot) but because the categories are simply different and used for different things. As someone else pointed out upthread, they’re looking into the hormone profile of Caster Semenya, a cis woman who just happens to have a lot of testosterone and certain intersex traits.
Not much, but it’s consistently reported that transwomen notice a major drop in muscle mass post-transition. There are some differences in bone mass density for transwomen as well.
Man, it’d be really really nice if the world worked like that. It doesn’t, but it’d be nice if it did. Gender dysphoria generally has its roots in brain structure - the brain is usually (insert caveats for genderfluid/agender/etc. people) built to be predominately male or female, and in cases of gender dysphoria, it’s got a structure that indicates a gender opposite the sex of the person effected. You can’t just write off gender like that.
What are you talking about? There’s extensive research showing that for trans individuals, transitioning is absolutely associated with improved mental health and better quality of life. Yes, the suicide rate is still higher than the background, but transitioning improves it significantly. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you probably caught the anti-LGBT misrepresentation of a certain swedish study - a misrepresentation that the author of the study firmly rejected and debunked.
Uh… No. XX and XY are the most common ways for human chromosomes to be built, but there are actually six known biological sexes:
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:
[ul]
[li]X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )[/li][li]XX – Most common form of female[/li][li]XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)[/li][li]XY – Most common form of male[/li][li]XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people[/li][li]XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births[/li][/ul]
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX. One study in Great Britain showed that 97 out of 100 people who were XYY had no idea. They thought they were a traditional male and had few signs otherwise.
Even today, we irrationally, and rather stupidly, think of someone as a “man” if they look masculine and as a “woman” if the look feminine. It’s entirely arbitrary and can lead to some significant misunderstandings of how the world actually works.
Like most things in biology, human sexes are really complicated and not nearly as black-and-white as many people would like them to be.
Good point. The rest of your post is great, too.
I voted “Depends,” and if you’d asked me 10 years ago, I’d have said no, but times change.
Here’s my explanation:
Men get more and better training all their lives, and retain height, and some musculature of their male bodies after transitioning. Yes, they lose some muscle mass, but if they are athletes, they can maintain a lot of their “male” musculature.
The training is not to be over estimated, too. A MtF transgendered person who played on a men’s college basketball team has a huge advantage over women in trying out for a spot on the WNBA.
But, this assumes that all people transition as adults, which used to be a fair assumption.
It no longer is. Some people transition as children, and take hormone shots at puberty, so the a MtF may never have developed male musculature, and have developed a fully feminine figure through a female puberty experience that has everything but periods. XY people who live as female from childhood play on girls’ sports teams, and don’t get the advantage of male sports training.
So I say it DEPENDS on when the person transitioned. People who transitioned as children or young teens should be allowed to compete. People who transitioned as adults, not so much. (That includes not letting FtM people compete with women).
I realize this leaves people who transitioned as adults with no arena to compete, but to be fair to the most people, I think it’s the way it needs to be. If we need a third group of competitors for people who transitioned as adults, maybe we need that. Would MtF and FtM people who transitioned as adults be well-matched as competitors? I don’t have any idea. Maybe we need four categories. This would give naturally intersexed people (who also currently have no place to compete) an arena as well.
Actually, there are also XXX females, but they are indistinguishable from XX females, so no one knows how common the phenomenon is. There are extrapolations based on occurrences of the other non-XX/XY chromosomes, but because XXX females present with no pathologies, it doesn’t come up unless someone who has it happens to be tested for some other reason. I know someone who found out she had it when she was tissue-typed because her brother needed a transplant of something (I forget what). She had had a totally normal puberty, normal sex life, and two normal pregnancies, with normal children, one boy, one girl. No issues in her mother’s pregnancy with her, either.
And just to throw more fuel on the first - there are people who are genetically XX or XY and phenotypically the opposite. “XY females” whose bodies do not respond to testosterone who externally are indistinguishable from women (internally there are problems with gonads and no uterus), and “XX males” who, again, are entirely male in external appearance (as far as we know, sterile and tending to be short). XY women compete on women’s teams because the testosterone in their bodies gives them NO advantage. Full XX males (depending on the exact mechanism involved some of these cases are more clearly intersex) - which are seldom discovered unless they seek help in trying to have children - would need to compete on men’s teams because in muscle mass and strength they’re men.
I know it’s not a real sport, but American Ninja Warrior – where many of the obstacles are derived from climbing – has featured more female competitors in recent seasons, who compete on the exact same course as the men and do pretty well. While the show always lets the top 5 female qualifiers make the finals, there are usually at least a couple of woman who make it on their merits alone, and one who’s a genuine threat to take the top prize this year.
No, that’s not accurate. If trans women were women, full stop, there would be no differences in performance between trans women and ciswomen in sports, and there is.
Do you have a cite for studies that establish the long-term suicide rates of transitioned vs. non-transitioned transgender people so we can compare them? TIA.
Regards,
Shodan
Well other than XX, or XY, these “other sexes” are chromosomal disorders, basically mistakes of nature, with associated medical problems if I find a deformed elephant with two trunks and one leg, and all kinds of wonky chromosomes, or deformed genitalia, I’m not going to say I found a new type or species or sex of elephant, I just found a really screwed up elephant. Does not result in death is a pretty low bar isn’t it?
i don’t want to trun this thread into a “are trans women actually women?” one. However, for this thread it makes sense to make the difference even if one believes that trans women are as women a good ol’ run-of-the-mill one. If we’re discussing glove manufacture we cannot say “there are no four-fingered people and five-fingered people, only people.”
Some exceptions do not a rule make. If (trans)woman simply means a person identifying as women then XX women are out of competitive sports. Cater was a tragic case, but no completely unreasonable to suspect.
Klinefelter happens to men, it’s not a separate sex. Ditto for Turner in women. When you get into 1/20000 cases it’s the point of saying “humans don’t have one head” or “two arms”
No. It’s not irrational, it’s helpful. A dirty, smelly man asking for money in the street is a beggar/homeless unless another factor comes up (maybe he’s acting). The irrational thing is not changing your first impression. Without pre-judging we couldn’t interact with others.
It’s really not numerically complicated. More than 99% of the people who naturally look like men, are men, Ditto for women.
I don’t really get this they are women thing, I mean clearly they aren’t, I think they have every right to do to their body what they want but that doesn’t make them a woman in my eyes. I used to think that South Park episode was so over the top where the Dad just decides he is a dolphin and wants everybody to recognize that he is a dolphin, It used to seem silly but its a brave new world out there and I’ve read stories about people wanting to be recognized as being animals. Where does it end and how many new laws do we need to make to accommodate all this silliness?
I dunno. I mean, do we want to use chromosomes as the comprehensive basis of what qualifies as a man or a woman? Because if so, you don’t get to turn around and dismiss chromosome expression as “a disorder” when it provides a result you don’t like! If chromosomes are the basis for what is or is not a man/woman, then there are, in fact, millions of men who have breasts, vaginas, and extremely feminine characteristics. Rare, but by no means vanishingly so.
And of course, it’s a pretty iffy category, because you cannot tell someone’s chromosomes from looking at them. We simply do not make male/female distinctions in our head based on microbiology - or if you do, I’d rather not know how you get your DNA samples from your friends.
When you say “Klinefelter happens to men, it’s not a separate sex,” if your definition of “male” depends on chromosomes, your statement is clearly incoherent. It translates to “People with XXY chromosomes are people with XY chromosomes”. Clearly you are using some other criteria to override the criteria of chromosome expression. Maybe we should talk about that instead.
Edit: whoops, sorry, that wasn’t your statement. My bad.
I think you completely misunderstood what I was saying, because my whole point was that while defining gender by identity works quite well in most aspects, the category is lousy for sports and so we should reconsider it in that context.
And yeah sorry @pool, I misattributed that quote above. My bad.
This is what I argue as well. A human who has tiger fur surgically sewn onto his skin, and fitted with fangs, whiskers and claws isn’t a tiger, he’s just a very confused human.
People usually watch male sports for performance.
Sure, many also watch women’s sports for the same reason but then there’s the case of Sabina Altynbekova, the Kazakh volleyballer who got crazed hordes of fans for no reason other than her looks (she was an average volleyballer, performance-wise, at best.)
That’s an issue women’s sports have always faced - there’s a category of man who doesn’t give a flip about the sports or the play, all they care about it ogling the women. Which really sucks for those (both men and women) who actually do give a damn about the sport, the skills, and the play. Too often women’s sports are seen as disposable, not “serious” and so forth.
They have good fundamentals.
It doesn’t help that some leagues like the Lingerie Football League purposefully make a women’s sport as sexy and silly as possible.