Look, it’s important that @scottagibson prove that he has a better pedantic understanding of the matter at hand than whomever he’s arguing with today, and if it takes 30 posts of being a condescending asshole to do that, so be it!
Hey back off! Do NOT tell people what to do. That’s not what we do here.
:) j/k okay?
Sorry. I just don’t understand what you think people who are discriminated against are supposed to do in the wake of Masterpiece; or what the Commission is supposed to do when someone files a complaint. You’ve made it clear you think what they’ve done is wrong. What should they have done?
You highlighted the wrong half. 🤔
It could be. Or it could be that the Court didn’t invalidate the Colorado anti-discrimination statue but Coloradans and the Commission should behave as if they did so as to avoid the Court actually doing so is a silly position, and my question — the one I’ve been asking from the beginning — is unanswerable.
This looked like the closest thing we have to a general LGBT thread…there is a similar discussion in an Olympics thread but it’s not in P&R.
The whole question of “should people be allowed to compete as the gender they identify as” seems like the wrong thing to be asking.
Let’s assume that having male and female divisions is the right approach. (If you think otherwise, that’s a different discussion that can be had elsewhere.) Given that, then you need some way to define which division a person belongs in.
Now, for any other categorization, we’d expect some kind of objective measure. The obvious example is age…the rules say the kid’s birth certificate determines age bracket (even if it’s rarely actually checked). Other categories, such as where you live, are also based on documentation (such as school records).
So this birth certificate thing seems pretty reasonable on its face. The question for me isn’t whether the rules should have a documentation requirement for gender…it should be like the other categories for competition, so yes…but whether that documentation requirement is available for everyone. And that’s not addressed at all in the article. Can a transgender youth in South Dakota get a modified birth certificate once he/she has undergone the hormone therapy or other physical changes that would make it appropriate to participate in a physical activity as their modified gender? I don’t know for sure, but I’d be shocked if it was feasible for a high school kid to go through that process, assuming it’s even possible at all.
My challenge to the people pushing these kinds of rules in the name of “fairness” is to make sure they apply that “fair” standard to all parts of the process. Setting birth certificate as a documentation requirement is only reasonable if you also have a workable process to make sure every kid can get that documentation.
I have some specific opinions about e.g. Olympics participation, because it’s pretty exclusive no matter what. Generally, 99% of the world’s population isn’t going to be able to compete at the highest level, so I don’t personally care too much drawing arbitrary lines about who can and can’t take part there. Like, there might be an injustice there, but it’s a small one that doesn’t affect many people.
This is totally different though, because this is general youth athletics. We tell young people (both implicitly and explicitly) that taking part in sports - not winning, but just taking part - is important and useful to their development, etc. So, the stakes are very much different here. If it’s something everybody should be able to do, then everybody should be able to do it (and without making them feel terrible about their bodies while doing so.)
Basically, this bit makes a lot of sense to me:
Going after transgender athletes is particularly cruel, LGBT advocates say, because participation in sports can have powerful positive effects for a vulnerable group of people who already face striking physical and mental health disparities.
“Participation in sport, I think, offers unparalleled physical, social, and emotional growth,” Hudson Taylor, executive director of the LGBT athletics organization Athlete Ally, told The Daily Beast. “Legislation like SB 49, which restricts access for trans athletes, is really denying the trans community those benefits of sport.”
This is an extremely sensitive and difficult topic matching the gross insensitivity of one side with the deliberate glossing over some real problems in the name of justice by the other.
In Texas where they forced a F->M athlete to compete vs other girls in wrestling, he completely dominated every and won state, which of course is the entire reason steroids are banned in athletics. Which fine, whatever, except that al the girls he beat lost their chance to win once this person was forced to compete against them. It’s similar to McEnroe’s infamous comment about Serena Williams only being “in the top 500” compared to men.
The problem is asymmetric though; F->M will not beat M athletes, but M->F will have huge advantages over F athletes otherwise.
The entire purpose of segregating makes and females in competitive sports, is because males generally have a generic advantage in many types of activities involving physical strength.
You can’t just ignore that for the sake of someone’s feelings.
If you want, you could eliminate segregation entirely, although the net result is going to be that you will push out virtually all female athletes.
But you can’t just allow someone with male physiology to participate in female sports. It’s unfair to other female competitors.
It’s definitely a complicated situation.
Because in one case above, we have a F->M trans athlete who ran roughshod over female competitors. Genetically female, but hormone changes give an advantage.
And you are broadly correct. Most sports favor one gender or another. There are exceptions, I’d say that many of the ski and snowboard events don’t have a huge gender advantage, but many do.
So how do you square this, and provide the fairest answer for all? The problem is that most solutions either end up disadvantaging either the trans athletes, or the field.
Personally I favor biological gender determinant or all compete in the more competitive (per sport) division. So a M->F wrestler would compete against males while a F->M gymnast would compete against women.
But I’m not aure that’s right either. Though it seems to me that the number of people who would be harmed is lowest that way. And it doesn’t prevent competing, it merely means that you may never be able to reach the top elite in a sport. And if the reality is a few athletes are told they can compete to be a mid tier competitor so that everyone else isn’t forced to deal with ‘your top level competition will be dominated by trans athletes from here on’, well, that seems the least bad answer.
It does suck but i think this is a use case for Utilitarianism if there ever was one. The problem is testosterone and in the case of the F->M wrester that person had a substantial improvement in performance for cis-F despite still competing with a F body type.
One way is to make the category male or female actually relate to testosterone levels…(ie s the only thing that sorts between male and female categories of sports at the secondary and collegiate levels is not sex but natural (or adjusted) testosterone) but then that’s super annoying for high schools to regulate (everyone in sports will have to get tested, a giant expense and pain). And basically unnecessary since the problems are almost entirely on the F side of sports; F->M are likely to be at a disadvantage at most M sports leagues, and i can’t think of one where they would be have advantages over males tbh, but there may well be one, but anyway if they still want to compete in M sports, more power to them.
The “real” answer, which is super crappy but basically is the only answer - i mean it’s probably as close to objective as this can be, imo - is to prevent both M->F or F->M trans people competing in female sports. Basically all trans people are going to have to compete in male sports. There are probably a few possible exceptions, such as M->F transition before puberty.
Testosterone levels can vary wildly amongst women who have not transitioned. If we’re going to start doing something only only average individuals can compete, well then we might need to start removing people with unusual arcs in their feet, that are unfairly too tall, with thicker or lighter bones… this is not a path we want to go down. And once you target testosterone, why not any other dozens of hormones?
Yea, i don’t like it either and there are tons of problem
However even women who have “high” levels of testosterone, from what i understand (IANAD) is substantially lower than men, and even “low-T” men tend to have 2x-3x the testosterone of even high-T women. It would be - from what i understand - extremely rare to have a women cross over between a female range to a male range (ie, if you took a blood test without knowing the gender but only the age, you could with 99.99% certainty determine the gender by the level of testosterone alone).
But, again, i may be wrong about this. I don’t like that solution - it has a certain appeal though, because it removes “sex organs” from the definition of male and female, which in this case is used solely to determine which catagory one would compete in sports. And so is less barbed use of the categories than would ordinarily bother trans people. In other (much shorter) words, it might be seen as more politically correct.
Oh, and as to why testosterone, it is the performance hormone. All other hormones are kind of irrelevant by proportion. All those guys in high school and college wanting to compete at the “next level” and sneaking steroids are boosting their testosterone, because anabolic steroids are testosterone. That why steroids are so controversial, since if you allow men/boys to use them in sports it all but would force everyone to take steroids just to keep up. All those non-collegiate body builders, all those WWE goofballs, all the Facebook gym-rat pseudo-celebrities, they’re all heavily using performance enhancing steroids.
Yeah, it a matter of biology for the most part. Men have higher muscle and bone density, so forcing women to compete against one is extremely unfair. By a similar token a biological woman transitioning to a man is probably taking a ton of steroids/hormones or similar substances, which again, is an unfair advantage.
The solution is probably that trans athletes should have to compete against men, regardless of gender. Anything else is going to grossly be unfair to cis-women. The only other solution is everyone competes together and we never see women in any sort of competition.
This sounds like a fair solution to me. It’s easily implemented too.
I doubt many of them will agree, since they’ll probably get their ass kicked, but it’s a simple solution.
The only other option is to give trans folks their own events and then the biologically male ones will clean house. There isn’t any ideal situation, but I’d trend towards keeping it fair for the most amount of people possible.
Don’t many sports also stratify by weight?
It seems if you’re using gender as a proxy for all the advantages men have over women - height, hormones, bone density, muscle mass, etc - you might do better at creating enjoyable tournaments stratifying along those lines. You’d probably still end up cleaving along gender lines, but extreme outliers (like trans competitors) might end up in a different grouping.
How practical that is, is another question.
Using weight would still give the edge to men in most things.
Basically men are designed by nature to be stronger, especially when it comes to upper body strength, but just in general.
Edit TLDR version: Men have more lean muscle inherently, so even at the same weight they’ll almost always be stronger than a woman of equal mass. Which is why trans women beat the hell out of cis-female athletes and it’s a problem. An average male athlete will generally out perform the best women, biologically a trans woman is a man and carries those advantages in lean muscle mass and bone density over and wipes the floor with people.
If I say anything publicly, people will contact my employer and try and get me sacked so I’m in the crowd cheering for the Emperors in his New Clothes, pretending all is fine. I can’t be remotely critical as I’m on the Pride Committee at work.
But, this is with some justification I add, you can see by the names he cc’d in this, the top hit on tweitter is from the alt right regions. If you dig deeper the main posts on this come from likes lf Graham Linehan and the radfem community and I didn’t link those as they are openly transphobic and bigoted. After years in and around radfem communities I’ve come to the conclusion I’m more in favour of trans rights than before. The hate in many cases is palpable and unjustified.
But the Emperors New Clothes is apt. Just look. If you can’t speak up you are betraying feminist principles and birth women’s rights. There are already a number of world records that will never, ever, be held again by humans born with XX genes.
But we are in a weird place where even intersectional progressives can’t say a thing in favour of aggressive, powerful, white humans born with XY genes.
I really don’t know what the solution is that is acceptable to all.
Agreed; you would have to use more than weight. And it’s probably more practical just to use chromosomes.