This issue is always framed in terms of trans women having an unfair advantage against cis women. But considering trans men even for a second shows how absurd the "compete with your birth gender" position is. Trans men will have a huge advantage against cis women because they're ingesting a performance enhancing drug: testosterone.
So what solution do you propose? Unless you're advocating for just banning trans athletes from competing in general, there's a lot more nuance here than "men want to compete against women".
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 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.
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.”
Agreed... And I am not arguing that trans women (who take hormones after the male puberty) don't have an advantage over non-trans women. Just that trans women are about identity and not biology.
Oh BTW, at the highest levels of competition like olympics, I suspect there's a brain/mind involvement to a very strong level. But that doesn't change your argument anyways.
> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?
Athletes who dope don't always dominate, but it still gives them an unfair advantage. Same as when males compete in women's events.
That said, in some women's sporting leagues these males are actually dominating - see https://shewon.org for a list of the many hundreds of women who have been denied their place on the podium by trans-identifying male athletes.
So trans women arent doing well vs other women because there are fewer of them competing, but also women arent doing well vs other men because there are fewer of them competing.
If your only issue is the potential that a person has based on their testosterone, then maybe we should have no gender division, but testosterone categories instead.
It seems it would make more sense than preventing both cis women and trans women from competing in a sport just because their hormone levels are too high (a trait we're apparently already directly pre selecting for)
I agree 100%. Unfortunately you severely undermine your argument by referring to transwomen as “men who can’t compete with other men and want to take home a few trophies.”
I am frankly irritated by identity politics but your approach of misgendering transgender athletes and asserting that anyone would go through all the pain and disruption of transitioning to another sex and getting permanent surgical modifications to their bodies because they are “Men who can’t compete with other men” comes across as disgusting and dehumanizing. As if transwomen are craven losers who have thought of this crazy scam to win in athletic competitions. You’re going to make people who agree with your main argument re: women needing their own leagues “back away slowly” because you’re spouting really disgusting misconceptions about trans people in the process.
IMHO it should be the same in sports. This would also make it easier conceptually to prevent trans women from competing with other women iff they have an unfair advantage, as the other category woul not be marked as men only.
There is no advantage that shows up in the data to show that trans athletes have an advantage in sports.
If there were we would see trans-athletes winning lots of medals. They don't. In fact there just aren't that many athletes. This is a giant nothing-burger.
There is another argument that says trans-athletes can be disadvantaged by having a skeletal structure which their hormone system can not properly power and this is actually hinders their athletic performance. Either way as I said, there aren't any trans athletes winning medals so I don't think we really have anything to be concerned about.
As for your concern about female sports I have my doubts about whether or not you are sincere but I'll pretend you are.
Perhaps it is easier for you to think of Female sports as "a protected category for people who do not have male levels of testosterone". This is what it effectively is anyway because of inter-sex humans. We monitor people's testosterone (whether that is right or wrong is another issue) and we decide if they are allowed compete in female sport. The exact same process can be applied to trans-athletes.
It's not as simple as "bio-born males". Sports federations set rules that trans women need to be taking androgen blockers, and have levels of testosterone below those of some cis women.
And by the time they've done that, their advantages are somewhere between slim and none. They usually fall within the ranges of other women -- and the top cis female athletes will always be at the extreme ends of the range anyway.
So it's a lot more complicated than just "men showing up at women's events", and surveys like this are heavily influenced by it being presented that way. That presentation has a lot less to do with people worrying about fairness to women in sport, and is mostly about harassing and marginalizing trans people. All trans people.
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.
But I don't believe that the laws being passed to "protect female athletics" are anything of the sort. They don't even try to fairly present the current state of knowledge about genetics, hormones, and the results of legitimate scientific tests of the results of medical transition.
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.
First of all, why is there male and female to begin with? Why dont we just have non-discriminatory competitions? If the answer is that no women can compete against the top male competitors. There is a biological difference between the sexes.
There's 2 good videos on this subject.
Joe Rogan on Fallon Fox. This is his domain of expertise and he clearly argues that there are sports in which trans shouldn't be able to compete against women.
Neil Degrasse Tyson interviewed Joanna Harper on the subject of trans people competing against women in sports.
It certainly seems like society needs to discuss this issue and make some hard decisions.
I know some trans athletes who are extremely average in their fields, and the focus on a few high performers
If we can look at the data and say that transitioning and playing against women doesn't result in a relative performance increase vs the average athlete in the field, that's a strong argument that it's not unfair to let trans athletes compete against women. If we look at the data and see that "men who perform at the 60th percentile level among men perform after their transition at the 80th percentile among women" that's an indicator there remains an unfair advantage and our medical technology for transition needs to improve before trans athletes can fairly compete against women.
The purpose of female leagues is to allow women can participate in sports. If all sports were unisex, then pretty much all competitive athletes at every level would be men, denying women access to an important part of culture and social life. This is pretty exactly what you advocate doing to trans women, who could not possibly compete against cis men.
Trans women are rare, and transition dramatically reduces muscle mass and other attributes related to performance. In fact, trans women typically have a lower testosterone level than cis women due to hormone treatments. There's absolutely no reason to believe that allowing trans women to participate in sports would prevent cis women from being able to compete. Trans women have been allowed to participate in women's Olympics events since the early 2000s, and not a single one has won a gold medal. You use the term "biological males" to refer to two completely different sets of people, which is dishonest and despicable.
Actually there have been hundreds of cases of trans-identifying males winning in women's sports, taking women's prizes and places on the podium. There's a list of these on https://shewon.org and it's not even a complete list yet.
These males are ruining sports for women athletes, as are the sporting bodies whose policies have enabled this. Some women have even quit the sports they've worked so hard to compete in, because of how unfair this situation is.
Perhaps I am way of base here. But it seems to me like MTF athletes simply should not be allowed in sports where testosterone would be considered doping (or some other criterion to determine whether having been biologically male is a significant advantage).
My proposal would clearly suck for MTF athletes. They'd be forced to either drop from competitions, or compete in the men's league. An MTF athlete competing in a men's league is likely to experience disphoria. It will also probably attract people saying "Look they are still a man, they are even in the mens league!". Both of these would be very hard to handle for MTF athletes. Probably causing many of them to drop from professional competition.
I hope this would be addressed partially by not having a "mens league" but an "open league" and a "womens league".
But otherwise, I think this is acceptable fallout to keep athletic competition fair. Yes, this policy will harm MTF athletes, and that is simply unfair. But the alternate policy is even more unfair. It might not harm individual MTF athletes, but it harms the acceptance of trans people in wider society a lot. Moreover, it harms athletes in general a lot.
In the end, I feel the following harsh sentiment. If you are truly MTF, then transitioning is probably more important than keeping your profession. It really sucks to force people to give up their profession when they are already going through a tough time. But I don't see any other way.
I don't disagree with their plight but it does raise the question of where transgender athletes should compete.
Male-to-female athletes likely have an advantage over female athletes but a disadvantage over similarly aged males that aren't undergoing hormone treatments.
Female-to-male athletes are probably different again, probably less severe than the former case though but still creating an advantage over natural females and still at a disadvantage to male athletes.
No one likes to advocate for a special category but I think it might be the best option from a fairness perspective even if it's at odds with modern thinking on gender identity.
I seriously don't understand why are you defending that trans-women don't have a physical advantage against women?
The article is about post-puberty trans women dominating the first places. High-performance athletes train hard, but also have an innate biological advantage that gives them that slight edge to reach the podium. Post-puberty trans women had their innate biological advantage growing male, and hormone replacement can lessen, but not fully revert that.
Because the fittest people with an expressed SRY gene (aka "biologically male") are generally 10-15% better at sports than those without it (aka "biologically female") so if you allow SRY-expressing MtF transgender people to compete in the female category against non-SRY cisgender female people (rather than only letting them competing in the male category), and there are enough of them at top levels, no cisgender woman will ever win anything.
Also, this incentivizes male athletes that can't win medals but are close to take hormone replacement theory solely so they can compete in the much easier female category and win medals, which runs in the same arguments against doping.
On the other hand, if you don't, then MtF transgender people are not likely to win anything, since hormone replacement therapy reduces performance (but not enough to match non-SRY people).
So what solution do you propose? Unless you're advocating for just banning trans athletes from competing in general, there's a lot more nuance here than "men want to compete against women".
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