As far as sports go, I’m not an expert on hormones and the various effects, so I’ll leave that to people with more knowledge.
Other than that, I really do not care – I’m pretty much live and let live. As long as you’re not an asshole, hey, whatever. There are cis people who are assholes too.
(And don’t worry about your hands, Ronald Reagan. I know it’s not quite the same thing, but if it makes you feel better, all of the people in my dad’s family have the same feet, including your’s truely. So maybe it’s the same with hands?)
I think the point of the whole “slide show” thing isn’t to say, “well only people who pass count” is more to show that playing Bathroom Police isn’t as easy as some people think it might be. That and it shows that there’s a good possibility that most of us have shared bathrooms with trans people before, without realizing it.
Well, sure. You’re not a cisgenderd female athlete who has trained very hard for her competition and finds out she’s going to lose to someone who’s 150% her size and strength.
“Those of you who are sick of us transgender people, what do you actually want us to do?”
Do your own thing. Be happy about it.
But for god’s sake, stop being so LOUD about it. You are exactly like the Vegans, only more so.
One’s gender identity, and one’s sexual orientation, is a personal thing.
NOT something to shove down the throat of everyone you perceive as different.
And no, do not misinterpret what I’m saying.
I’m not saying you need to be sneaky or secretive about it.
I’m saying Transgender is the same as being Gay, or Straight, or Bi, or Asexual.
It is a personal opinion of how to see Life. personal
Is there a set of minimum requirements that you believe must be met in order for a man, transitioning to a woman, to take part in the restricted category of “woman’s sport”
Can it just be a declaration or is surgery or some form of HRT required?
Yeah, Apart from the “loud” bit I think pretty much this. I really don’t care that much. Equality is crucial though and where it isn’t being practiced I think being “loud” about it is absolutely necessary.
I think somone’s sex, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion etc is really none of my business and I don’t need to know and wouldn’t think to ask other than in certain specific circumstances where it may come up and be relevant (not quite sure what they may be) If you choose to tell me then fine but don’t expect anything more than a shrug and an “OK”. I care about it as much as if you said you collect model trains.
A colleague and football team-mate of mine years back was out from the very off (at a time when it wasn’t as acceptable) and his partner was mentioned in passing and he said “NB, you’ve never made a big thing about me gay have you?” to which I replied “Colin, you keep llamas and race rally cars, being gay is by far the least interesting thing about you”
I think the current IOC rules, which mandate IIRC 1-2 years minimum on HRT, are reasonable. The key thing to remember is that as far as anyone can tell, the key advantages of masculine physique go away after extended bouts on HRT, and there’s little wrong with requiring this to level the playing field for professional adult athletes. I do believe that if there was no gatekeeping, we would see fairly brazen attempts to pass cismen off as transwomen in professional sports, but requiring HRT seems more than sufficient.
The issue of high school athletics is one I have not looked deeply into.
Why is it the transgender people you’re yelling at about this?
It seems to me that the people being most noticeably LOUD and obnoxious about gender identity are the anti-transgender people who are, for instance, throwing public hissy fits about all sorts of things that are none of their business, such as what bathroom transgender people use. They’re the ones trying to shove their views “down the throats” of other people who are just going about their business, including using the restroom of their choice.
If you don’t want so much public attention paid to transgender identity, then tell all the anti-transgender reactionaries to quit freaking out over it.
It is a tough one as not all advantages go away. A male physical frame developed during puberty and beyond won’t be going away.
What does that mean? As it stands we don’t have a big enough data set to know whether it does make a difference but certainly there are potential consequences regardless of the stance taken. The isolated cases thus far don’t make a convincing case either way but I’m not convinced that it won’t develop into a bigger and even more complicated issue, we have barely scratched the surface.
As for HRT, the Caster Semenya case will read out in April (I think) which directly challenges the requirements for any HRT at all. That may be a (literal) game-changer. It is entirely possible that it will find that HRT shouldn’t be required, what then?
I suppose it isn’t really my problem. I don’t have a dog in this fight as women’s sport is not something I pay a huge amount of attention to but the moment you decide to have a protected class of sport you have to manage those limits and it matters immensely to those who are part of that category. You have to deal with the grey areas that are developing. Weight, age and height are simple in comparison to sex and gender and bodily chemical levels.
If trans women and intersex athletes prove to not have any advantage over the “normal” range of female performance then it isn’t a problem Time will tell. I suspect however that the next 10-15 years will see more and more cases of trans women rising to the top of some women’s sporting categories and the upshot of this will be that you choose to do nothing about that and have no restrictions or further protected classes of sporting competition may be needed, neither option is consequence-free.
That’s a worrying thought to me because how would such categories be framed or perceived? Is there an implicit recognition within such categories that reinforce a concept of “real” womanhood?
Margo is a ciswoman who stands at 7 feet, 2 inches. She’s the tallest WNBA player ever by a wide margin.
Margo has a clear genetic advantage over most women… and also over most men. She’s a good 7 inches taller than the NBA average.
Should she be barred from competing because of her “unfair advantage”? If not, where is the line?
Of course this whole framing already grants that transwomen have “some” advantage in sports. Which, as I keep pointing out, we simply do not have evidence for. There is no discipline where transwomen make up a significant portion of the upper echelon. There are zero olympic transwomen. The best we have is individual transwomen who have seen some success in their discipline but are far from dominant and often lose to ciswomen. Existing studies point out that transwomen see a loss in muscle mass, bone density, and more during transition.
There’s no reason to assume that these advantages form a real, significant advantage. Hell, a male physical frame is actually a disadvantage for Rachel McKinnon, as her larger frame means significantly more drag while racing, and her muscles aren’t proportionately stronger to make up for it. And even in Weightlifting (when the field isn’t hopelessly weak, anyways) Laurel Hubbard is far from dominant.
The nice thing about this is that if it does “develop into a bigger and even more complicated issue” it will be no problem to update our understanding and address it at the time. But right now? There’s absolutely zero evidence of a problem. The best evidence people can come up with amounts to “Look, a transwoman won a competition” or “Listen to this low-grade MMA fighter complain about how her opponent was stronger than her” or “look at this picture of a tall transwoman isn’t it weeeeiiiiiird” (fucking really!). And given that what’s at stake here is basically the ability for transwomen to take part in professional sports at all… Shouldn’t we require some actual evidence of a problem before banning them?
I trust that the IOC will continue to base their recommendations on the best available science, and that we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
A couple honest hypotheticals on the sports situation for both sides:
What if it turned out trans women had a higher mean and “baseline”, but less variance? That is, in amateur or low-level brackets (such as regional, casual, high school, and/or collegiate levels, draw the line where you choose) trans women were clearly shown to be dominant, but at national or world-class levels their advantage as a class was (statistically) washed away by peak-performance genetically advantaged athletes from around the world and they were either less dominant or equally matched with cis women. Say trans womens’ builds (on average) gave them advantages over women who don’t have world-class full time training regiments, or over the average untrained women, but something about HRT or whatever other unknown factor is a significant dampener on growth potential compared to the truly upper echelon of cis women.
What if it turned out that trans women were dominant in some subset of sports, but cis women were clearly dominant in others? How big does that subset need to be before you consider it a “problem”? 20%? 50%? 80%? 1%? Would you selectively ban trans women from any sport they’re dominant in, even if it’s a small percentage of the overall selection?
At the risk of further hijack… Caster Semenya is not transgender. She was born a girl, and has been identified, and identified herself as, a girl and a woman every single day of her life. From what information has leaked out to my understanding, she is genetically a woman, was born with a woman’s genitalia, and has always been regarded as a woman until people started whining that she was really good at running 800 metres. Whatever unusually high levels of testosterone she has, it’s not a meaningful precedent, IMHO.
Never said she was. We don’t know anything much for sure seeing as the test results have never been released.
The point is, she has massively increased testosterone levels. The issues around the reduction of those naturally occurring levels are relevant for her and also for transgender athletes so the case will necessarily have wider implications beyond Semenya.
as I said, not my battle to have. I wouldn’t ban her and would never call for that. I don’t know where the line is., I honestly don’t. My pessimistic take on this is that it will get very, very messy and acrimonious before if ever gets settled, if it ever does.
OK, but is there a given standard for what an “acceptable” transition is? Is there a definition that is likely to stand up to challenges from both sides? Can you keep testes? Is any surgery needed? what type and how extreme? Would that not be as open to claims of human rights violation as Semenya’s case?
I don’t think there is an answer, certainly not one that will please everyone. As I say, we are just at the very start of trying to work this out.
Seeing as weightlifting is riddled with drug cheating I suspect it is probably the worst sport to look to to get a clear picture.
Wow, that is not a sentence I ever thought I’d see written. I admire your optimism.
Some of the people going around saying “it doesn’t exist” are pinning their transphobic stance on the notion that we’re talking about a biological built-in thing that science either has or hasn’t proven in the clinical laboratory. In other words, they’re taking the claims to medical documentation and running with that as the operant definition and saying it isn’t factually so.
I personally think that’s one of several risks to the whole “it’s officially real, it’s been seen in neurology laboratories” thing:
It runs the risk of painting some forms of gender variance as “outside the pattern”, if some body of research starts pinning down an official medical definition of transgender. At worst (although this probably isn’t likely), a test that could “show if a person is trans or not” like a specified pattern on EEG or MRI structural evidence, and if you don’t show up that way when you’re tested you’re dismissed as flinging bullshit, you don’t count, you’re not trans, etc. More likely is a growing emphasis on a batch of generalizations that are considered to be medically / invariably true of trans people, and those who don’t feel correctly described by them find that “transgender” is increasingly not a useful identity for themselves to use. More litmus-test attitudes, in other words.
As with gay and lesbian people, the underlying philosophy seems to be “They can’t blame us for being sinners who have chosen a lifestyle if we can show that we were in fact born this way, they’ll have to accept us!” Bullshit. At the risk of Godwinizing myself: the folks of the third reich believed that Jewish and Black and other groups of people were biologically inferior, definitely “born that way”, and it didn’t help one iota towards preventing hate or bias against them.
In general it’s stupid to embrace any theory unless you actually think it’s real. Embracing a theory on the grounds that if it’s “true”, well golly gee whiz look at what we can then go on to conclude, that’s intellectual dishonesty, and it detracts from a movement’s overall credibility.
Nope. I’m a cisgender man who, if he tried to play sports, would almost certainly lost to a man who is 150% my size and strength. But you don’t see me whining that bigger, stronger men then me shouldn’t be allowed to compete.
I can accept you as a transgender person. We could work together or be neighbors and I would try to use correct pronouns so not to offend you. I would look at your talents and skills like what can you fix/repair.
Why is it the transgender people you’re yelling at about this?