Have you ever been an athlete in a serious way? Honest question. If people who've competed or deeply cared about sports seem to all get hung up on this, maybe they're seeing something you're not?
Your two issues are issues because, even without any prejudice, there are physical differences that we have to handle and it's not easy to figure out how to be fair to all parties.
In the case we're talking about, for example, the trans women fractured a woman's skull. Broke her skull. Was the skull the problem here? Should it have been less breakable to match the rhetoric?
Sports fairness is basically a transphobe dogwhistle at this point. Major athletic organizations already have policies in place that say that trans women can’t compete unless x,y,z criteria are met which is typically a minimum number of years on HRT and T levels not more than something.
The issue is that there is a trade-off being made here. A trans woman athlete likely has a better bone structure than the average cis woman but not better than the most naturally gifted cis female athletes. Athletic orgs have largely decided that this is fine and it’s not a significant enough advantage to care about because the question for them was “how can trans women compete” not “if trans women can compete.”
But then it’s such an easy issue to drive a wedge on because you can get people riled up about whether trans women should be able to compete with a sprinkling of misinformation about what HRT does and dash of “so a man can just say he’s a woman and compete.”
Why is it so controversial to say that it's not fair for someone with a male body to compete against those with female bodies? I sympathize with trans women on most issues except this one. It's not fair to the young women who got up early every morning for years and put in the time practicing to lose this way. I would just quit and do something else. This doesn't bode well for women's sports.
Honestly though the question around sports fairness is less a problem raised by trans people and more just an existing issue exposed. Female and male bodies work differently on average but there are a good number of women more fit and physically capable than 99% of men - gender is not an independent variable in physical fitness but I do wonder if there's really much of a reason to keep insisting that the genders be separated into exclusive leagues.
Everyone should agree that it's fundamentally unfair for biological males to compete against biological females in most sports. But the problem is any strict rules against this will lead to discrimination in so many other areas, I'm basically willing to look the other way as it's such a rare occurrence anyways. How many trans athletes are there?
It's very sad that this is a political issue - it makes any reasonable solution impossible. Any restrictions that liberals might find practical and fair (like a ban on competing where muscles are involved) will inevitably be used by conservatives to justify bigotry and prejudice in a number of other areas (exclusion from public bathrooms, for example, or even restrictions based on race, nationality or sexuality).
Except nothing you said is true. Fallon Fox has not caused more head injuries than is statistically likely for MMA. There is no actual evidence of trans women having an oversized advantage in sports and when it has been tried to be studied has had mixed results at best. Additionally despite trans people being allowed to compete in the olympics for over a decade it has been basically non existent.
Things that seem “common sense” often are far more complicated then they seem on the surface.
Should trans people partake in youth sports? Maybe sorta, with restrictions it depends. Should adult trans women be allowed to partake in sports, probably yes after sufficient time on hormones as the limited data we have says it isn’t a significant advantage, or may be a disadvantage. That said we should study and learn.
This conversation is toxic because people who don’t understand the subject matter come in and say things they don’t understand and continually insult and degrade a vulnerable minority.
It is sport. The strong/fit win and the weak lose. It was never meant to be fair with respect to physical ability.
If we start from the premise that it is transphobic to say "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men." then it is pretty clear that "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are biological men." is also transphobic. Otherwise we could end online transphobia with a couple of sed scripts in a chrome extension.
Can you help me understand how it's fair for transitioned women to compete against men? I would expect this to be unfair in many sports because of natural biological differences. Not a troll, just looking for relevant facts to inform my world view.
The trans person's intent doesn't matter. What matters is that they are inserting themselves into female competition at an immense advantage. The fact of the matter is that if you allow biological men into female competition, females will never win anything. That is literally why there are sex separated sports. Females cannot compete with males at the highest level of sport, this is just a fact. I don't think we should be destroying the sports dreams of half the population to appease the trans people. It sucks for them, but quite frankly I don't care, because there is no better solution than to exclude them.
Banning trans women from competing in sports it telling them they aren't "real" women. The societal repercussions of that are much larger than the outcome of high school athletics (and this issue is almost always about high school athletics and below). I fundamentally don't understand arguments to the contrary.
For the record, I care deeply about sports. I think it is fundamental part of both our culture at large and the education of a lot of people. You can dig deep into my comment history on HN and see I regularly defend the importance of sports to the usually derogatory "sportsball" comments that are common in intellectual and technological communities like HN. I just don't think the outcome of specific games is important enough to justify further ostracizing a group of people who are already incredibly marginalized.
We are talking about body, not mind. Transgender women are women with a biological man body (otherwise we wouldn’t have this conversation.) So it is unfair for women with biological women body. The whole point of separating biological women of biological men in sports is to prevent that.
I may be a few years behind on terminology (?) but surely sports has everything to do with sex and nothing to do with gender?
No one cares what pronouns an athlete uses, how they dress, what roles and behaviours society traditionally assigns/expects of them and how they respond to those traditions. They care entirely about biological advantages and disadvantages.
So the division is based on — again unsure of the terms here but — “sex” not on “gender”.
And no sport is trans exclusionary as far as I know: the person in question in this article would be welcomed everywhere to compete against other biological males, and any biological female would be welcome to compete against others of their sex whatever they identify as (so long as they haven’t taken testosterone). I’m not sure I understand why this has become an issue.
Some people, not so much you, but people in general who are uncomfortable with the larger sexual identity issues prefer to focus on the woman's sport's angle because its comfortingly simple and avoids the things that make people uncomfortable.
Maya didn't have her contract renewed because she said things like the senior director of Credit Suisse was "a man who likes to express himself part of the week by wearing a dress"
Not for advocating for fairness in woman's sports.
To be clear as far as athletics. Trans people make up 0.5% of the population. The female->male portion is most apt to experience on average a measurable disadvantage while the male->female portion if they start hormones when it is medically advisable to do so wont experience the same clear average advantage as a male athlete who simply declared himself a female one day and switched teams.
> “For the Olympic level, the elite level, I'd say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study's lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women," he said, referring to cisgender, or nontransgender, women.
> For the first two years after starting hormones, the trans women in their review were able to do 10 percent more pushups and 6 percent more situps than their cisgender female counterparts. After two years, Roberts told NBC News, “they were fairly equivalent to the cisgender women.”
It's a tempest in a teapot. All things being equal you are likely to end up with a small percentage of woman's athletics being trans women and nothing else changes. This is especially true of school athletics which are after all supposed to be for the betterment of the student body as opposed to for objective success.
I feel like with this issue at some point we are bound to reach a breaking point. It's just a question of how far along things will go before we get there. People are more and more open about being transgender and there is more and more support for transgender individuals having the chance to live life as their correct gender. This is a great thing!
However, it presents a huge problem for women's athletics, particularly in sports where strength differences are a large determiner of performance differences. If, as it is said in some circles, a full .5% of the human population is transgender, we are going to continue to see huge increases in openly transgender people competing in sport. In sports where long term exposure to male hormones enhance performance, it's hard to see how life-long XX bodies will be able to compete. Which seems like a bad outcome since the whole point of the existence of women's sport is to allow women to have space to compete without facing insurmountable built-in disadvantages.
It may take a couple more decades but I don't see a stable equilibrium where MTF athletes are competing with cis-women in high level sport, especially if they made their transition during adulthood.
I would be fascinated to hear about different models for how this plays out. I've read the occasional news article about it but I'm not really very familiar with the thinking on the other side of this issue, particularly when it comes to the physical advantages trans women have over cis women in sport.
It is clear that you support trans rights and are at some point also conflicted about how that impacts the rights of biological women. I appreciate your post.
As a coach of two nationally ranked club teams (one boys the other girls) and father of three nationally ranked biological girls in their sport I am also conflicted. We have a family friend who is transitioning/transitioned to a woman and I want to be supportive of her.
For me it comes down to this.
There are no biological women competing as men at the world level and dominating a strength/speed (field) sport. At least none that I am aware of. However, I am aware of a handful of counter examples where biological men dominate (sometimes to the point of catastrophic injury) biological women.
As you observe, almost all field sports have different brackets for men and women and as you also observe, sometimes different rules and equipment. My sport is one such sport. Women wear much less safety equipment as a result of the observation that that women are not generating projectiles with speeds in the 160km/h range. In my sport, men are required to wear specific heart protection to guard against fatal projectile injury. Women cannot wear this protection.
This is no joke or exaggeration. it would be reckless to allow biological men to compete with and against biological women with the women's rules and equipment. I will not support allowing biological men to compete against the women's teams I coach nor would I add a biological man to my women's roster.
I know you feel that trans-only or cis-only leagues would be clunky and I do believe at the moment it would be hard for trans-athletes to find places to play as there are comparatively few of them. However, this also casts a spotlight on the problem. There are relatively few biological men competing as women but we already see that there are situations where they dominate to the point of setting international records and causing catastrophic injuries.
Keeping sports fair and competitive for biological women unfortunately needs to come at the expense of supporting biological men who want to participate as women. Hopefully trans-athletes can carve out a niche that supports fair, competitive, and safe play in a widely supported and accessible way but playing at the expense of biological women is not the answer.
I hope that does not make me a transphobe, I don't feel like I am or that I am not supportive but my feelings on women's sports are settled.
What they're trying to get at is that a MtF trans person is still biologically male, no matter what, therefore has an unfair advantage and should not be considered to be on the same level as biological women.
The simple solution I think is that sports should be sex based, not gender based.
The challenge is that trans women are women who used to have comparatively vast quantities of testosterone in their bodies, giving them dramatically higher bone density along with all of the other side effects of testosterone on the body.
When they transition fully, the estrogen has a side-effect of preserving the bone density they had previously. Specifically, this gives them a massive advantage in combat sports like MMA. I won't get into the other musculoskeletal aspects that happen.
It's a vexing problem, because I don't like the idea of trans women not being treated like women. It sucks to think about that. It also sucks for non-trans women who are getting their skulls fractured in fights.
The reality is that fans of non trans female athletes aren't going to accept this. When a tiny percentage of the population is trans, and suddenly trans women start winning at the highest levels of female sports at an insanely disproportionate amount, it clearly indicates that being trans provides a massive advantage in female sports. I haven't found any cases of trans men dominating in male sports.
I'm pro trans rights, and also know that my view on this is deeply unpopular in the trans community. I'm not sure what the answer is for this. Sometimes, reality doesn't mesh with our ideals.
> We could have a serious discussion about why women's sports exist at all, rather than just the open class. And that would bring up questions of just what makes women women -- it goes far beyond what's between their legs and even in their endocrine systems.
Right, for pro-level sports, you could have all sorts of metrics to qualify people into different competitive categories, regardless of sex. Formula 1 vehicles all have to meet extremely tight regulations, and motorsports in general could be an analogy of how to draw boundaries on metrics to elevate fairness.
And I agree that overall, this "issue" catching publicity (because of how it is presented, and the sorts of reactions it can provoke in people) seems designed to draw negative attention to trans folk. I want to say "aren't there way more important topics to be worried about?" but that's not for me to decide. Trans athletes aren't going to sit around and accept being marginalized when they want to compete like other athletes.
I didn't sign up to discuss this, but I'm very careful with people that have only started claiming to care about women's sports after this became a culture war issue. There are a lot of armchair takes that are obviously misinformed about the mechanics of HRT, and a lot of ignoring that most contact sports are already grouped into weight classes exactly because gender is a bad discriminator.
I would be in favor of sporting bodies deciding these things on a discipline-by-discipline basis, but at this point christian conservative think tanks (like the ADF) became involved and it has all just turned into such a shitshow that I don't trust anyone in these bodies to be impartial anymore either.
If you're interested in a nuanced discussion, may I recommend Mia Mulder[1]? I promise, it's not a straight up arguing for one side exclusively video essay.
Your two issues are issues because, even without any prejudice, there are physical differences that we have to handle and it's not easy to figure out how to be fair to all parties.
In the case we're talking about, for example, the trans women fractured a woman's skull. Broke her skull. Was the skull the problem here? Should it have been less breakable to match the rhetoric?
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