But the question is, outside of MMA where claws might be too dangerous, who can this particular human compete with?
Well, OK, let’s look at another level of “not top shelf” athletes - minor league baseball. Minor league teams do have fans, and people do enjoy that level of play not because of the looks of the players but because the players and the spectators both like the game and enjoy participating (either as players or spectators).
(In my area, the minor leagues are seen as more accessible - many families simply can’t afford the cost of going to a major league game in person, but can afford to take the whole family to the minors. Which is yet another reason they’re appealing.)
So you don’t have to be an elite player to attract either an audience or a following. That’s basically a lot of women’s sports - the women aren’t going to turn in the same level of performance as the top men, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t players or that what they do isn’t a real sport or that they don’t have an audience that goes beyond “Hur, hur, watch der boobies bounce.” into actual appreciation of athletes performing athletically.
Which is interesting, because I’ve heard of a whole lot of cases just like this, with the kind of historical backing that gender-nonconformity has. Also these people generally display brain structure more similar to tigers than non-transtiger humans, and also lots of other physical traits that indicate some biological basis for their issues.
Seriously, these comparisons are really stupid and really baseless. If you have to make up a separate mental disorder where the occurrence rate is closer to n=1 than 1% and which shares virtually none of the qualities that mark gender dysphoria, maybe your argument is not very good.
(And even then, if calling the dude a tiger would significantly and demonstrably improve his mental health and quality of life, it’d still be really shitty to not just call him a tiger. Because the point of defining something as a mental illness is to try to make it better. And if the patient is handling a mental illness without suffering, then we can reasonably consider that illness treated.)
A lot of people, male and female, care a great deal about winter sports in which the body is too covered up to eyefuck it. People of the Alpine regions of Europe, as well as many of the moneyed upper-class in America and Europe, care a great deal about these sports. I dare say they carry more prestige than baseball or football are generally considered to by the people whose money keeps the engines of world productivity grinding along, so…what are we going to do exactly?
If you support gender division in sports, then you HAVE to ban people from crossing that division.
Its a simple fact that the male body does not function in exactly the same way and with the same abilities as the female body. Changing the wearer’s opinion, even superficial surgery, will not change this.
At the genetic level, a trans is still his/her birth gender, and that is what dictates the body’s abilities.
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Only with the application of massive levels of hormone substitution is this matter addressed at all, and the use of these hormones are already forbidden for athletes, as the injection of, for example, testosterone by a male athlete is already a forbidden performance-enhancing action.
In that case? Nothing needs to be done. There’s not a problem there.
Don’t get me wrong - I do understand that part of the appeal of athletics is seeing healthy (and usually young) human beings doing their thing. There is an atheistic appeal to all that. When a sport’s official women’s uniform is a bikini, though, I sort of question what is being sold to the viewer.
Transgender surgery is not what I’d call “superficial” and it’s more than just that, there’s also the change in hormone profile.
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Hormones for performance enhancement are banned. Hormones for a medical condition is a different matter.
It’s my understanding that, for example, post-testicle cancer surgery a male athlete is allowed to take testosterone to replicate a normal male hormone profile. It’s kind of essential, because without that hormone a man is not going to retain normal male strength (and may also be at risk of osteoporosis, as much of the estrogen that sustains men’s bones comes from breaking down testosterone). Likewise, the hormones and/or blockers transwomen take are to replicate a normal female profile.
The main question here is whether or not a transwoman who has gone through a male puberty retrains significant advantage in muscle mass post-transition, and if so, for how long. I think people make a lot of assumptions, but I haven’t seen much actual evidence either way.
So what actually are the categories that matter? No, seriously, what’s the “division” here? Think about your categories. What are they being used for, and do they make sense being used like that?
Also hormones are the primary drivers of physical sexual dimorphism - not genes. The genes inform the hormones, but if you assume that someone with XY chromosomes will look like a woman, you’re assuming their hormone expression will be normal. Which simply isn’t always the case.
“If black people were people, full stop, there would be on differences in performance between black people and non-black people in sports, and there is.”
Not a great argument, IMHO.
Really, this is a quibble about phrasing more than any substantive argument - I think saying “trans women vs. women” has the nasty hidden implication that trans women aren’t really women, in the same way “black people vs people” would have the nasty hidden implication that black people aren’t really people. I’d like to avoid that kind of nasty hidden implication as much as possible - that’s why we use terms like “cis women” to begin with. Even if the OP didn’t intend it, there are a lot of people who talk just like this who do intend exactly that implication, and for the sake of the comfort of trans people, it’s best not to sound like them.
I don’t have that specific figure handy. What I do know is that a large-scale meta-analysis found that transgender individuals who transitioned had a substantially improved quality of life and mental health post-transition. Of particular interest: one factor examined is Gender Dysphoria. And guess what one of the key factors in the suicide rate of transgender individuals is - being accepted as the gender they identify as.
Dhenje cites similar studies here:
So not exactly what you’re looking for, but there’s a wealth of evidence supporting transitioning as the current gold standard of treatment for gender dysphoria.
Hey Budget Player Cadet, are you a straight cismale? In a hypothetical scenario where you are single and a sexy transwoman wanted to pursue a relationship with you, acts of coitus and all that would you go for it, why or why not?
Pansexual cismale, so not quite qualified to answer what you’re asking (for the record: girl dick is best dick, why is no-one talking about the mouthfeel?), but as always, ask yourself - what use is the category?
“Straight”, like “woman” is not a fact of nature given the way we use it, it’s a matter of subjective categorization. When I say “I am straight” it could mean several different things - “I only want to have sex with cisgendered members of the opposite sex”, “I only want to pursue romantic relationships with people who identify as the opposite gender”, “I’m only interested in sexual relationships with people I find attractive, and people I find attractive includes cis women (and attractive post-op transwomen as long as I don’t know they’re post-op)”, “I only want to have sex with people who don’t have penises”, “I only want to have sex with people who have never had penises”… I could probably keep going but you get my point. Again, it’s a matter of categories and how we define them. Some men who identify as “straight” will fuck transwomen (and some people would refuse to call them straight as a result - I’m not one of them but I can’t really judge them when dealing with such leaky generalizations).
Sexual attraction, like sports, has different criteria than just general existence. My sexual interest in someone may (or may not) be directly related to whether or not they have a penis, whether or not they can bear my children, or any number of other things that usually aren’t particularly relevant. And as a result, the use cases of our categories have to be different. We have to think about our categories in different ways.
If the category “women” contains a group that makes up 99.7% (straight women and gay women, and are unequivocally women) and 0.3% that is contains several groups then saying “it’s not black and white” makes the concept of “category” absolutely useless. All social categories have exceptions, but we don’t turn exception into the core. Glove makers produce right-left pairs of five-fingered gloves. Any other option is “special glove”, saying “all gloves are gloves” is true, but useless in practical terms; particularly if we’re talking about “tooling and molds for four-fingered gloves.”
Biologically, the difference between a woman a man-who-underwent-sex-change-operation is gigantically bigger than between black man and white man.
What is the category used for?
What is the point of classifying some things as “women” and some things as “not women”? What are we trying to accomplish?
Are we trying to separate people with high testosterone levels from people with low testosterone levels to give more people access to professional sports? Are we trying to check whether it’s a person we’d fuck, and we’re really into clitorises? Are we trying to build a system that separates people according to their gender for various social reasons like record-keeping and administrative purposes?
What is the category meant to accomplish?
Depending on the answer, it may absolutely make sense to include or exclude weird edge cases. Maybe it makes sense to consider Caster Semenya “not a woman” for the purposes of professional sports. Equally, maybe it makes sense to consider Shawn Stinson a man for the purpose of separating between men and women’s locker rooms, even though he doesn’t have a penis. Part of the problem is that we don’t consider these as two entirely different problems with two entirely different categories! Sports.Woman() and Bathroom.Woman() are different functions, in other words. We expect people to have these identifying tags, the “IsWoman” variable. But that’s not really how categories like this work. There’s no physical attribute that ascribes category membership to someone.
And of course, when it comes to categories, most of these fuzzy edge cases can be pretty harmless. Until they aren’t. It turns out that when we accept transgender kids, allow them to transition, and support them in their identity (y’know, if we accept the kid with XY chromosomes who insists they’re a woman to the point that they wants to cut their own dick off as a woman), the various mental health issues connected with gender dysphoria fade drastically. Acceptance of transwomen as women and transmen as men is, for many of them, very literally a matter of life or death. So faced with that, why shouldn’t we accept this shift in the category? What pressing concern is there that outweighs their mental well-being to such a degree, outside of specific niches like sports? The new category is not nonsensical - gender identity, while not necessarily fixed, isn’t something people choose and isn’t something that just turns on a dime, and there’s non-trivial evidence indicating that there’s a physical background for it within the brain’s structure.
Or, y’know, just read The Categories Were Made For The Man, Not Man For The Categories, because Scott Alexander is just better at this than I am. You’re the guy telling King Solomon, “No, really, you absolutely need to categorize whales as mammals instead of as fishes, even if that categorization is stupid to you and your government.”
Also, I didn’t want to say it, because it doesn’t seem to further the conversation (and I have the privilege of being on the outside looking in), but given events in ATMB I actually feel actively ashamed I didn’t say this earlier. So:
That’s really fucking gross. Like, seriously. Really not fucking okay. Congratulations, if any transwomen are in the audience of this thread (which I doubt, because you’d have to be one masochistic motherfucker to be trans and enter a thread like this), you just actively aggravated their dysphoria. I’d like to think this kind of thing is fundamentally not okay.
And it’s wrong, too.
I have this friend, let’s call her “Bubbles”. Bubbles is, in essentially all regards, completely indistinguishable from a woman. Her physical aptitude is very much within the realms of “normal female” or “below-average man” (because physical aptitude outside of the tails of the bell curve are pretty close to each other - I know plenty of women who could kick my flabby ass). She looks like a woman. She dresses like a woman. She’s married to a lesbian. She “acts like a woman”, to whatever approximation you want to round that cliche out to mean (she’s very stereotypically feminine, in other words). I’ve seen her naked on numerous occasions, I’ve heard her speak, and until she said it publicly, I had no idea that she was ever anything other than a cisgendered woman with XX chromosomes. If you didn’t know, neither would you.
So tell me. In what fucking universe is referring to Bubbles as “a man with their dick cut off” sensible, or indeed anything less than a huge, unreasonable, and incredibly shitty insult designed to be maximally hurtful to this person? Why would you do that? What’s wrong with you?
That’s not okay. That shouldn’t be okay.
Three things that occur to me.
one, I can’t see anywhere in the post you are referring to that uses the insensitive language you use above. If it were said by that poster it would help your point and our understanding if you quoted it.
two, The external features of a person are not the full representation of their biology.
three, is what they say true? Are the biological differences between transgender and non-transgender greater or lesser than that between the same gender of different racial groups?
I don’t know and can be convinced either way…do you know?
I’d say it’s pretty obvious that the biology differences between male/female are so much greater as to be in a completely different league than the biology differences between “races”. That it’s not even close and it’s ignoring reality to try to convince yourself otherwise.
And as I keep saying, “woman” is not a brute fact about biology. It’s a category - functionally arbitrary, based on how we define it. Categories can serve a purpose better or worse, but they cannot be objectively bad. We could define women as “people below 5 feet”. It’d just be a weird, counterintuitive, and rather pointless way to define the word, but it’s not somehow invalid. Kind of like how we can define “fish” as “finned thing that lives in the water” and it won’t fit modern taxonomy with regards to weird edge cases like whales but will make good sense if we want one specific department of the government to deal with finned things that live in the water, regardless of whether that thing is sharks, fish, or whales.
And no matter how we slice the category “women”, we end up with weird edge cases.
[ul]
[li]Chromosomes? Okay, how about Sarah Gronert, who identifies as female, lives her life as a woman, is incredibly attractive by conventional female standards, and just so happens to have XY chromosomes?[/li]
[li]Has a vagina? Well, we’re either excluding Sarah Gronert if surgery doesn’t count, or including Bubbles if it does, and either way it’s more than a little weird that Buck Angel and Shawn Stinson, two burly, muscular, hairy men who you’d never mistake for women, are apparently women. [/li]
[li]Testosterone profile? We end up with rather huge and clunky edge cases, particularly women with any number of syndromes that cause high testosterone (PCOS comes to mind) and men with any number of syndromes that cause low testosterone (Klinefelter for example)[/li]
[li]Identifies as a woman? You end up with some women who have penises, or who outwardly appear male despite their best efforts, and run into the (rare to the point where it virtually doesn’t exist) problem of some people being insincere in their claimed identity.[/li]
[/ul]
None of these are perfect categories, because there’s no such thing as a perfect category. They can merely be better or worse at achieving the goals we want. And what is the purpose of these categories? Depending on what we’re trying to do, that purpose can be totally different. As said above, the categories of Woman (with regards to sports) and Woman (with regards to reproduction) are actually best seen as different categories due to the fact that their goals are different. There’s absolutely no reason someone who is a man in the reproductive sense couldn’t be a woman in the sports sense - again, see Sarah Gronert, who competes as a woman despite having XY chromosomes and no womb.
For sports, I see little problem going by testosterone level, as that’s more or less what matters in that case - but we should recognize that that’s for sports, so that we don’t misapply our category and end up calling grandpa “grandma” simply because old people have really low testosterone.
For general day-to-day stuff - or to put it another way, the category Woman (with regards to what pronouns should I use when talking about them) - I personally favor the identification category, for three big reasons:
[ol]
[li]It doesn’t shave off the complexities of human biology, and instead acknowledges that certain weird edge cases can very well remain weird edge cases[/li][li]It’s inherently intuitive, at least to me personally - calling Bailey Jay “he” or Buck Angel “she” seems totally counterintuitive, by comparison[/li][li]It helps mitigate harm towards people with gender dysphoria, for whom being treated and accepted as the gender they identify with is a major predictor of their mental health and quality of life.[/li][/ol]
I feel like that last point is really, really, REALLY important.
Quite frankly I really don’t give a damn, it’s completely irrelevant to the question at play here. It’s probably true, but it really doesn’t matter.
Truth *always *matters.
And in any case, to that exact point to which you now say “it’s probably true” you said…
So how can you respond in that way and *not *think that the truth matters?
I also note you don’t address my point about the language actually used in the original post and your incorrect restating of it.
I put it first in my post as I thought it was the most important thing. Would you care to address it?
The amazon river is 6,992 kilometers long. Let’s talk about that. It’s true, it really does matter, it’s totally not a gigantic red herring that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about, it totally isn’t made irrelevant by things already said, I swear!
:rolleyes:
How 'bout you address the rest of my post?
I think your priorities are fucked, because if you think the most important thing about my post was that I took a dehumanizing slur and adding color to the language, then that’s your problem. You’re right, Aji didn’t say “cut off your dick”. And David Duke doesn’t say “nigger” any more. All that does is hide the nastiness of what’s being said behind a patina of civility that fails to acknowledge how fucking awful what’s said is. But if it matters to you: fine, they weren’t vulgar, they were merely dehumanizing and transphobic.
Now would you like to actually talk about things that matter?