Nah, too much science involved for Republicans.
But more to the point, they don’t want to acknowledge any kind of complexity in gender at all. Anything that isn’t simply Boys and Girls is anathema to them.
Caster Semenya. Which is tough, because they have set an ‘objective’ standard which tags her for cheating though she isn’t. However I believe she has some unique genetic condition that is the cause of her higher testosterone levels.
But Ive laid out my position before, and the long and short of it is, no, at high competitive levels I am not generally in favor of a trans woman competing against biological women. There is a distinct physical advantage. @Sharpe it is hard because it has become a wedge issue, but there is documented cases of trans women who have dominated high school track, etc. the problem is that the ideological push from the right makes actually finding these articles again virtually impossible.
And whether the athletic scholarships at play is the system that should be, it is the system that is. And recognizing that there is a difference between true competitive, and recreational sports is important here.
And while I agree that the notion that young boys would decide to become trans women simply for the sake of athletics is an absurd premise, and even if it does happen it would be in such small numbers as to be irrelevant.
The truth is that a trans kid is going to have a whole host of difficulties in their life, especially in high school. Gym class in particular I can see as being horrific. And I am empathetic to those struggles.
And to be clear, as noted, the current laws the GOP are pushing are counter productive and bigoted, aimed only at creating a wedge and problems. Their entire point is to cause harm to kids.
At this point, we need to explore why we have gendered competition to begin with.
The idea, as I read it, is that without gendered leagues women would be unable to compete at a high level, and would thus be disincentivized from even trying, so there would be basically no women in sports.
Does allowing trans women to compete as women endanger this? Would we get to a place where cis women are disincentivized from participating, and we end up with a men’s division and a trans women division, with cis women not competing anywhere? If we don’t think this would be the outcome, I’m hard pressed to justify disallowing trans women from competing in women’s leagues.
I think this summarizes it well. I know four-ish trans people, mostly male-to-female, but at an age where biological advantage has nothing to do with it. It seems incredibly hard to the point that if they go down that route, then I 100% believe them that it was the only healthy choice for their mental well-being.
Other side, there is simply no argument against male vs. female advantage in most athletics. The idea that people would try to abuse this specifically to win is laughable, but at the smaller scope then yes, someone who is a birth-male is going to be fantastically advantaged in strength or speed.
I think it comes down to “what are sports and athletics?” If it’s for higher reasons like character and effort and learning how to practice, then genderedness becomes secondary. If it’s for providing a fair playing field for the peak performers, it’s a problem.
High School sports in the US , at least some high school sports, would be considered competitive.
At what point does it become competitive?
As for an example of how extreme the gender difference is though- the Australian’s women national soccer team was getting trounced by a U-15 squad in Australia a few years ago, and their women’s team is pretty good.
That said, as I mentioned above- I believe HRT negates the advantages transwomen would have, as long as hormone levels are proper.
I disagree re: HRT, because you would have to set some arbitrary level of hormones or time. If someone has been male gendered to 25, for instance, and has built their body to a peak performance, then what would be the threshold for bringing them “back to fair?” I was 6’2" by 13, that gives me a height that would be in the upper fraction of a percent of women on the planet, regardless of how I proceeded from there.
Is there any evidence of a male athlete becoming a trans woman specifically to compete against girls or women in athletic competition and only motivated by that end?
None that I’ve ever heard. I think the real discussion is about people with rare conditions like Semanyova (sp?) who break the male/female paradigm. As someone mentioned, this is a solution in search of a problem.
Even if there was, would it matter? Aggregate changes to systems require aggregate impacts on the population. If you can’t prove a general harm, it’s hard to justify an general response.
I’m honestly surprised R’s aren’t trying to use transwomen as an excuse to dismantle Title IX. Keeping them out of women’s sports isn’t nearly so useful to their overall culture war as doing away with women’s sports entirely.
It would not, in my opinion.
But for Caitlyn Jenner to be right about this, her hypothesis requires that the question posed – that there are male athletes voluntarily selecting to be trans women specifically and only to compete against women or girls in athletic competition – have extant examples.
Which, as John_Doyle points out, appears very much to be a divisive solution in search of an actual problem.
Yes, but he was doing that for the proud people of Robonia. A land he didn’t make up.
At higher levels of competition, this is likely what would happen, if trans women are allowed to compete.
When you get to the national or international level, there are so many competitors and so few “top” slots, that the extremely small number of trans athletes actually WOULD likely become an issue. We’ve already seen this at the national level in a few sports, where trans women are dominant. I believe that the national record for New Zealand was recently held by a trans woman (but I think it may have been stripped of her afterwards).
The thing is, being a trans woman imbues a fairly dramatic advantage over cis women, one that effectively amounts to the use of performance enhancing drugs. Indeed, many performance enhancing drugs are specifically designed to mimic the effects of being 'more masculine" from a hormonal perspective.
If you were to allow trans women to compete at the top levels of competitive sports, it’s likely that even though trans women athletes constitute a vanishingly small percentage of overall female athletes, they would concentrate at the top levels of competition and cis female athletes would have no chance at all.
At lower levels of competition, this is likely not going to be an issue, because the number of trans athletes is so small that they wouldn’t constitute a significant percentage of the players.
Honestly, it seems like it would make more sense, from a purely competitive perspective, that trans women should compete against men. Indeed, in the case of the New Zealand weight lifter, she had previously competed against men before she transitioned. Of course, when competing against men, she wasn’t anything approaching a dominant force in the sport, and wasn’t anywhere close to a record holder. That’s kind of the issue… a mediocre male athlete will, generally, absolutely dominate female athletes in any sport that leverages physical strength.
It’s funny i guess that only one other person clicked the link before making their opinion known (though, to be fair, there’s not much there). But it’s worth i think pausing when a transgender m-t-f famous athlete rejects transgender m-t-f athletes competing; i mean, maybe not a long pause, but still.
It also gives me pause to see the eagerness with which transgender supporters are willing to toss women’s’ sports under the bus and/or support more or less abolishing them. The contradiction of simultaneously rejecting the reality of gender differences while supporting them on an individual level. I think it should ultimately come down to the athletes themselves, but i wonder if you had an anonymous poll of female competitors in a certain sport what those results would be, and i think both sides should be willing to back down a bit. It’s entirely possible such a poll would show widespread support of transgender athletes - but it might show a “silent” majority that would prefer not to play against mtf athletes, and supporters might have to accept that in some situation and some sports it might not be permitted. After all there’s a huge range of what on an individual level it means to be trans.
But if the answer is just abolish women’s sports, something went wrong in a person’s line of reasoning, and they need to go back and ponder why women’s sports exists at all. When the argument comes down to rejecting the reality of human sexual dimorphism, you made a wrong turn, even if you don’t like to admit it.
How are trans supporters trying to abolish women’s sports just by wanting to compete in them?
The USWNT has come out in full support of trans women competing as women.
If trans women start dominating competitions, then you can think about whether they have an advantage, but until it actually starts happening, it’s not reasonable to assume that they do.
Yowza. The reason women’s sports exist is because sports exist and they are extremely profitable and emotionally important to youths. I won’t argue that have full trans-admission would make women’s sports somewhat redundant, but I think that just illustrates why we’re trying to have at least two playing fields so everyone can enjoy.
It’s funny that you think this story wasn’t in the news from this morning, and thus there are multiple ways to have viewed Jenner’s interview and resulting analysis of it, long before it was ever posted here.
Fair enough! Though that’s a bit of an unprovable assertion (that everyone posting had already heard about it).
So just to walk the walk, why can’t there just be “sports”?