Thoughts? What will this do to women’s sports?
It won’t do anything to women’s sports. May the best women win.
Well, womens with a male body will win over womens with a women body, because the male body is stronger. But I don’t think there will be too many of them to make a big splash.
Certainly there are advantages in some sports based on your birth sex, assuming your particular transition process allows those to persist. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a push, in the next decade or so, to add a separate category for transgender. Male, female, and trans (or maybe two trans categories, one for each transition direction). Depends on how many trans athletes actually qualify at the Olympic level, I suppose.
Seems like athletes should be competing based on their chromosomes, rather than their choice of sexual identity.
If not, then they midaswell just make all athletes complete together, regardless of sex.
Yeah given the documented strength and reflex differences per gender this is gonna be a tough one. I remember the heavily steroid-ed female Russian teams getting dinged. How is that different than a transgender woman → man on a regimen of heavy steroids/testosterones?
Yeah, as an athlete myself, this is hard to judge.
In college I competed in D III cross country. Firmly middle of the pack for guys, typically a 5th/ pusher. Yet, often, we would start our race about at the midpoint of the women’s race, so that often we shared the course. When we did I could match pace with the front of the pack for the women’s. My speed and times, as a thoroughly mid level runner, were competitive with all but the absolute best women’s times.
For most sports this would hold, I’m afraid. We’re going to have to figure out what is, and is not, allowable. Just like we did for Oscar Pistorius (murder charges aside). This is going to be messy.
Renee Richards didn’t exactly conquer the female tennis world, but she did win some matches and she was 42 when she was playing pro matches. Her success was clearly due to being born male. You’re not going to find female tennis players playing pro tournaments for the first time in their 40’s doing anything but losing in round 1.
So I can see that this is an issue. This isn’t about gender rights as much as it is about fairness of competition.
The thing about this to me is, for a transgender athlete, what exactly prevents them from racing with members of their genetically defined gender? I mean, what’s the problem with that? I guess it’s maybe some emotional aspect?
Sports have traditionally been separate because post-puberty males are better athletes than females in pretty much everything because of physiological differences. Females have better balance than males, but that is about the only measurable where females exceed males.
Males are better at everything else. Strength, mechanical advantages due to skeletal structure, oxygen consumption and efficiency, all favor males.
The closest competition between the sexes is among elite endurance athletes, like marathon runners. The best females are about 10 minutes behind the best males when it comes to a marathon. Females are better at converting glycogen to energy when glucose has run out, which only comes into play in extreme endurance situations.
This is a very slippery slope. If we are going to allow individuals to self identify and declare the gender of their choosing then it seems to me women’s sports as we have known them, are eventually going to be a thing of the past. At that point the only thing that makes sense to me is to eliminate gender in sports, but I don’t think that is a great solution.
Let’s be blunt here. Does anyone here have as strong of an objection with a female to male transgender athlete competing with their identified gender? Probably not, I know I wouldn’t for most situations (gymnastics being the probable exception). If a born woman athlete wants to compete with males, and to be honest to me they wouldn’t have to be even trans, I don’t really have much issue with that. Because the standards for competition are tougher. If a female sprinter can make it competing in mens events, I’d shrug and go along.
However going the other way would open up a bunch of issues. It’d be the like stories of the old East German gymnastics teams. Allowing male to female trans athletes to compete in womens events would squeeze out most top womens athletes for second tier mens competitors. You’re an elite sprinter, but your ability caps out somewhere in the 5-10 range? I can easily imagine that many might feel pressure to compete as trans, where they could compete for the top slot.
It’s the steroid impasse, but worse due to the politics of it.
Someone’s feelings will get hurt, and they’ll have support from a community. I guess it will need to be on a case by case basis, with a judge or panel deciding whether a subject person can compete on the women’s side. Preferably it could be done in private through an application / review / accept or reject process, so that only a portion of the cases are made into media storms rather than all of them. Agreed it will be messy.
Yeah, I can’t see it being fair to natural-born women.
It works in the opposite direction, but it’s a matter of biology. If they let transgender women compete with natural-born women, well, we might as well just have everyone compete together, men and women across the board, because that’s the basic end result anyway.
Not Olympics, but transgender athletics.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/27/517491492/17-year-old-transgender-boy-wins-texas-girls-wrestling-championship
I support people being able to make life choices, including gender transitions, but I don’t see why this is allowed. Anyone else who took a bunch of testosterone (clearly a performance enhancement) shouldn’t be allowed to compete, why is this different? You make your life choice, it closes some doors - that’s true of any major life-altering decision.
Because stupid Texas law is stupid.
“He wants to compete against boys,” Merritt says. But under Texas rules, boys can’t compete against girls, and students must compete as the gender marked on their birth certificate. That meant if Beggs wanted to wrestle, he had to do it in the girls’ league.
Ironically if there was going to be anything to change that law, it would be something stupid like this.
Understand I am not demeaning what he did by winning the girls league, merely that its something so minor that would cause a rule change. That people would be incapable of considering the situation fully without some case of a transgender boy winning a girls state championship, therefore ‘embarrass’ the state.
I think as soon as you start taking drugs that enhance your strength (like testosterone) you are basically done competing. Wrestle with the boys all you want in your backyard, but this girl to boy has a huge, illegal (or at least unethical) advantage over the other girls because of those drugs. That’s completely unfair. Actually, how do we know s(he) is not stronger than the boys because of this? S(he) might have more testosterone than the other boys now. Probably best just to call it what it is, an unfair drug advantage.
By the way, do we need a new pronoun for people who have transitioned? In this case, “he” is confusing because it doesn’t refer to “her” original gender. “She” is not respectful of their choice to transition. But I can’t think of anything besides s(he). Obviously in a social setting you would use their preferred gender pronoun, but when discussing this intellectually that’s hella confusing.
I accidentally substituted rule for law, which in retrospect is a completely different thing.
Given how they test for PEDs, this seems like a reasonably solvable thing. There often they use testosterone levels to check for steroids and the like, measuring the ratios. However for many athletes those ratios already peak far above what a ‘normal’ male has. So in many ways the cutoff is somewhat arbitrary.
Which you could set the same kind of threshold here. Determine a testosterone level that is ‘unfairly’ high. The bar would have to be high enough that it wouldn’t produce excess false positives, which means a level above what the normal range is. But it would be no more difficult than setting standards for PED testing, and probably could use the same levels as that.
Yep. He wanted to wrestle against boys, but was told he had to wrestle girls.
No one was happy about it. Not him nor the girls he wrestled.