Watch that Youtube. By no means has she dominated swimming.
There is a problem with a lack of a standard to determine if someone would have an unfair advantage. That won’t be easy, the Olympics have been dealing with this since the 60s and tightening the restrictions along the way. It’s simple to say a transgender girl has no physical advantage and should be allowed to play but how is a transgender girl defined? To some people it does not include any physical differences.
I remember when Rene Richards began to play professional tennis again as a woman and fight to do that. She claimed at the time she had no physical advantage over the other women, even pointing out that she was suffering bone and muscle loss as a result of the hormone treatments she needed. Now, many years later she feels differently:
The big problem is not a man deciding to become a woman to be a more successful athlete, the problem is young athletic men who feel they are actual women and want to treat their gender dysphoria through reassignment surgery. It could be simply unfair for someone who had reached maximum physical development as a man to then compete against genetic women. It doesn’t have to be unfair in every case to be a problem, but in sports when just one person with an unfair advantage is allowed to compete then it will be unfair to many other competitors, possibly all of them.
…Lia Thomas does not, in any conceivable way, dominate her sport.
Should we have male and female divisions in sports at all?
Than that is consistent with my supposition that this “trans athlete dominance” is not a real concern in any broad, meaningful sense. I am happy to be corrected.
And yet there’s plenty of unfair advantages that are allowed, so why specifically single out trans athletes?
There’s arguments to be made both ways. One is that there shouldn’t be, and competitions should be based on skill categories, weight class, age, handicaps, or other measurable criteria. Laudable perhaps, but since so many sports are male-centric anyway, it may not be possible to adequately sort people into those different categories and still make it a fair game. The other argument is that women are generally underrepresented in sports (for reasons I just mentioned), and separate women’s categories are just more effective at encouraging participation.
To me, sports are not an affirmation of gender identity, and should not be treated as such. They are about physical prowess, and about mental characteristics that are universals. If there is a restricted category, it makes no sense for it to be basedd on anything but physical characteristics, so it should not be described as for “women”, who can have bodies that span the entire physical spectrum.
In advocating for trans rights, we note that it’s important to realize that (for example) certain medical services are for people with vaginas, and that this does not map to the gender identity “woman”.
To me, it’s wrong and inconsistent to turn around and suggest that a restricted sports category, which is clearly about physical characteristics, should ignore physical characteristics and remain mapped to the gender identity “women”. What about trans women who choose not to take hormones at all? Are they somehow lesser women because they do not fit this restricted sports category? What about non-binary people?
I think the fundamental problem lies with treating any restricted sports category as though it’s an affirmation (or denial) of gender identity.
Competing in sports are one of the things we can do to make our time before the grave more bearable and we should try to include as many people as possible in that. The way men’s and women’s sports are designed assumes a gender/sex binary which isn’t true, but is close to true for 95%+ of the population. If we just abolished gender-segregated sports it would mean for a whole host of sports women just would not be able to be among the best at it (likely the only people at the top of the sport would be cis men). And we can come up with solutions that include intersex, nonbinary, trans etc. people as possible while minimizing the impact in cis women. The NCAA rules for Lia Thomas (which were basically that she had to have been on the hormone blockers and all that for a certain amount of time before she could compete in the female category) were basically on the right track, and we might refine them as we learn more about when the advantages of trans women over cis women become small enough (or nonexistent) that the competition can be relatively fair. There might not be easy answers but there are answers that don’t involve just blowing up men’s and women’s sports.
Of course sports are already a massive genetic lottery, it just happens in our society that there is so much more attached to gender than to how high you can jump.
I didn’t say they should be “blown up”. I said they should not be called men’s and women’s sports, and should not be treated as affirmation or denial of gender identity.
I think in any case the current system of “men’s” & “women’s” restricted categories in sport is going to be completely undermined within a few generations by biotech that allows us all much greater technical control over our bodies. It will be orders of magnitude more significant that doping. To me it aligns with trans rights to anticipate this and change the labeling of the system now so that it’s not treated as mapping to gender identity.
Could you explain what you mean?
Isn’t this statement one (or more) of the myths debunked in the ACLU article?
No. Nobody would dispute that a trans woman who has not undergone any hormone treatment would be at a massive advantage. That’s simply the difference in level between “men’s” and “women’s” sports. What’s at issue is how much difference hormone-mediated transitioning makes, and the timing.
Men (and women) who have abnormal but naturally high levels of testosterone, a different ratio of slow/fast twitch muscles, being excessively tall, having really long arms/legs, ability to build muscle very fast. Basically anybody who won the genetic lottery as far as their sport goes. Think Michael Phelps, Lance Armstrong (even before doping), Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Babe Ruth. In their sports they’re like the 10 year old football player that’s 6’-2" and 200 lbs. That’s way more lopsided than the trans kid who just wants to keep playing tennis.
But that wrongly assumes that all that matters are the genetic outliers at the absolute peak of the sport. Winning still matters at a much lower level in a high school or college sports meet, where extreme genetic outliers are not usually present, but where there is a very significant physiological difference between cis male and cis female bodies.
And if you accept this and follow it to its logical conclusion, it’s an argument that it’s fine to abolish separate competitions for men and women altogether, because cis female genetic outliers can still win against mediocre cis males.
Yes, it is.
They’re also about socializing with your peers, enjoying your body and having fun…when we exclude trans athletes because we’re concerned only about performance, we’re also excluding them from all the other aspects.
I think so too.
This…
…and this.
The fact of retained traits, strength, muscle mass, height etc, that are still present and still produce significant advantages even when certain medical requirements are enforced.
Those are the studies that are being done across various sports and the balance of evidence seems to suggest that unfair advantage is retained.
I think many sports, particularly contact sports, take a much more conservative view and try to avoid the harms happening in the first place. Given the current balance of evidence, any contact sport that didn’t act to limit transgender women participation would be leaving itself wide open to legal action if/when people are injured.
Either you are in favour of categorised sport or you are not. Either choice is perfectly valid but neither are without consequence.
If there is no categorisation by biological sex then people will succeed purely on the basic of natural genetic variation. That will mean that no biological female will ever reach elite level (in pretty much any athletic endeavour you care to mention) It definitely solves the problem of transgender athletes though, at the expense of relegating women athletes to a permanent lower division and of course it means that transgender people will not be guaranteed to compete only against people of their chosen gender.
Now if you do categorise, then you have the problem of how you categorise. On what basis do you do that? Do groups have the right to create their own personal categorisation based on physical traits? If so, what gatekeeping is required for that? medical intervention? if so, of what type?
The most recent numbers in the USA alone suggests 1.4 million people identify as trans.
Lets assume an even split. That is not a negligible number of people and certainly it is a population large enough to contain talented and dedicated athletes.
As for averages? a fairly average male club athlete runs times that would set world records and win Olympic medals. The difference is simply that huge.
Funny you should mention that but in the paralympics there are medical boards that need to decide what categories people are allowed to compete in. Personally I don’t find the classification by biological sex criteria as being substantially different.
That’s less than half a percent. So in DrDeth’s “field of 100”, there’s only slightly-less-than-even odds that one trans athlete is even there.