Discussion of trans women (pretty much never trans men or enbies cause society doesn’t even know they exist most of the time) in women’s sports, isn’t and never was about the women’s sports themselves. It is a proxy argument for the greater societal discourse around trans rights and identities.
I might get this tattooed on my forehead.
You’ll probably run out of space midway. Ass cheeks are way superior for that.
Yeah, that’s why I hate it when trans people say: "I don’t care about sports. There are more important topics that we should focus on." Because what chuds are trying to do is basically taking the lead over the narrative. They are trying to play with society’s prejudices to establish false facts about trans people’s bodies in order to legitimize all kinds of discrimination. And sports are pretty much the easiest way for them to set a precendent that allows them to put their foot in the door.
If they can successfully convince the majority of the population that men’s and women’s bodies are fundamentally different and that hormones after puberty have basically no effect, they can, as you said, declare that trans women and men are never going to be "real/biological males/females", which allows them to take this whole argument further to other aspects of trans people’s lives like the whole bathroom hysteria, medical treatment, legal recognition, etc.
Yeah, they were able to do it because pretty much the entire media landscape went full "Der Stürmer" on trans people and let TERFs spread around their garbage while at the same time not letting trans people counter those accusations. Thus creating the impression that discriminating against trans people is just common sense, which lead to things like the HRT ban for trans teenagers and the failed GRA reform.
Imagine being a trans athelte and taking performance suppressing drugs and being good at a sport anyway. Clearly the power level is off the charts.
I can imagine being someone like myself who is inclined to suck ass at sports and resenting that. I wonder how much of it is projection on top of the normal transphobia we got from watching too many disney movies as kids.
This feels pretty uncomfy to read? The only relevant characteristic of gender is what someone tells you they are. -That is all.- There are no 'average bodies' or 'average differences'. That is exclusionary garbage.
Stop compromising with fucking bigots, gender is a spook anyways.
You can easily tell that this concern about trans people in sports being unfair because it gives the trans person an advantage is BS when you look at cases of trans boys wanting to compete with the boys, but being made to compete with girls instead.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/transgender-wrestler-competes-against-girls-forced-mack-beggs-texas-america-a8227601.html
This trans boy wrestler was forced to compete with the girls because that is the gender on his birth certificate. In spite of his own wishes that he wants to compete with the boys instead.
he was subject to a lawsuit by a group of parents attempting to block his participation.
Rather than trying to get the boy to compete with the boys (as he wants), they try to block him from competing at all. This is what it comes down to. They just don't want trans people to participate in society.
They were afraid of losing.
Nothing humiliates like losing to those you are bigoted against.
I've heard the take that sports should be grouped based on muscle mass instead of gender. Is this a good, bad, or irrelevant take?
You also need to consider lung capacity, lactic acid build up in muscles, or some freak mutations that could give you an edge over others, etc. So while it would be desirable to have everyone on the same level and let those with the better technique win, it just isn’t realistically enforceable because of the sheer amount of factors that need to be checked. Like if someone has 10% more lung volume than others, how do you group those athletes? Do you place them in a higher muscle group to balance it out or do you create new ones based on all those different factors? And what about sports that demand more endurance than strength? They would all need their own classification system which would be a organizational nightmare, especially when we go into team sports.
Thus grouping by testosterone levels (and in some sports weight) is probably the best compromize between fairness and practicability which is why it’s being used by pretty much all sports organizitaions. I just wish they would do it regardless of gender because currently if you’re a man, you’re not allowed to compete with women even if your testosterone levels are lower which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me and also puts intersex people in a weird spot.
Now, we know that some countries, like Russia, will go to any length to win medals, even recently they were caught in another doping scandal. If trans women had as dramatic an advantage as the Roganites claim, why hasn’t any country brought forward a trans woman who can blow out the competition?
The simplest answer, I think, is that trans women don’t have the insane advantage that reactionaries claim. Surely we would have seen it by now if it was a viable tactic.
For some sports, you could definitely CONCEIVABLY do that. Many random dudes who aren't even professionals could break female records in, say, weightlifting, at least national records. Apparently the world deadlift record for women is around 310kg, or a bit less than 700 pounds. It is not hard to find a million dudes lifting more on YouTube.
The real reason is different. It's because no one wants to lie about it. No one wants to pretend to be trans just to win a sport. Doping is different. I'm not sure why people overlook the fact that people won't lie about their gender identity just to win a sport.
Yeah but like, if I get this right then op is talking about it regardless of HRT.
Also, HRT may cause muscle mass to plummet but it won't change the bones, so there will still be a very decent advantage in a few sports. Conceivably someone COULD do it, especially if they fudge around with what "counts" as undergoing HRT and what they are allowed to take. But people won't do it because who tf is gonna go through HRT and lie about being a trans woman for years just to win a sport. It's really dumb.
And my Olympic example had nothing to do with lying. I meant Russia or whoever hunting down a genuine trans woman athlete to have them compete.
I'm guessing they don't have to hunt them down, they're already normally competing. Except there's like 5 trans people in Russia who have actually transitioned and none of them is an elite athlete. That's another reason this isn't as significant as people make it out to be, it's not like there's billions of post transition trans people.
OP's position was on including Trans regardless of HRT - are you not engaging in the same exclusion by only focusing on whether or not post HRT are the same strength as cis?
Please consider that your argument must include pre-HRT trans women and men to be a complete thought. There is NO reason that we should separate people who are by definition women from women's sports, regardless of HRT status. Once someone tells you they are trans, that is it. Questioning or even engaging in a discussion around whether they are equal is tacitly claiming they are not women by virtue of them telling you they are. That is bigotry, straight up.
Identity is identity. HRT is a false flag and that seems to have gone over your head when you began to engage in the same exclusionary talk.
Very good post. The last paragraph is super fucking important for people to understand, the hesitation even in leftist spaces is weak and uncalled for - and extremely exclusionary.
Hear! hear!
Before I got educated and stopped being transphobic (as well as "centrist", etc), I definitely fell for this argument about sports. It's important to shut this shit down, like this excellent post does.
I agree with trans people picking whatever category they prefer but I disagree with getting rid of categories altogether and with the rhetoric around "fairness" not applying to sport. Trans women won't destroy women's sports but gender desegregation will, for most sports at least, and I don't see why we should want that.
but it certainly should not be based around any form of exclusion whatsoever to people who identify as part of the group
Yes, however I don't think that is incompatible with keeping the categories. Keep the categories and let people pick the one that best fits their identity.
The concept of fairness comes secondary to being inclusive/being nice/etc because seriously, it’s entertainment, who wins and who loses isn’t that important.
True, the reason I want the categories to stay is because of inclusion, unfortunately most popular sports are based around men's bodies, and doing away with the categories completely would be detrimental to inclusion in professional sports.
The only relevant character between Male and Female bodies is the gender identity they express. That can be as simple as saying a sentence "I am Female."
How the fuck does it make sense to segregate sports when there are no physical differences between Male and Female bodies??? Get out of here with that garbage.
that's like. literally not the case though.
like, i'm trans, i get what you're getting at. gender's all bullshit and arbitrary and fake anyway, so assigning gender to bodies is equally fake and arbitrary, and is therefore meaningless. i get it.
testosterone absolutely has an effect if it's present in your body during puberty, however. using "male" and "female" as shorthand for "had testosterone during puberty" and "not having testosterone during puberty" is pretty weird in light of gender being fake anyway, but in practical use, it's not tangibly different from just calling it "type 1" and "type 2" bodies or whatever. people with testosterone in their bodies will, on average, perform better than those without. there's a reason the division exists.
sure, dividing up sports based on less arbitrary metrics is probably ideal - a basketball league might care more about your height and ability to run for a long time, while a wrestling league might care more about your weight and raw strength or whatever. there's a reason boxing and other combat sports are divided up into weight classes, for instance. but like. fuckin no one wants to do all those measurements for an after-work league down at the rec center yknow?
absolutely, "but what about womens sports???" is just a bullshit distraction to give reactoids an excuse to go "ah, see, we deem trans people different in sports, why can't we deem them different in other regards too??", but that, uh, doesn't mean testosterone isn't real?
testosterone absolutely has an effect if it’s present in your body during puberty, however. using “male” and “female” as shorthand for “had testosterone during puberty” and “not having testosterone during puberty” is pretty weird in light of gender being fake anyway, but in practical use, it’s not tangibly different from just calling it “type 1” and “type 2” bodies or whatever.
Yeah well that's why many people talk about the sex-gender distinction. Gender is a social thing, sex is biological. Of course sex too is a bit more nuanced but everything is.
sure, dividing up sports based on less arbitrary metrics is probably ideal - a basketball league might care more about your height and ability to run for a long time, while a wrestling league might care more about your weight and raw strength or whatever. but like. fuckin no one wants to do all those measurements for an after-work league down at the rec center yknow?
There is weight classes in some sports, but they gonna fix the issue completely for some sports.
I've asked some women athletes I know and they don't care about trans people picking their preferred categories but they do want the categories to be there because otherwise it's just not viable for most of them to compete. I think the outrage about trans women in women's sports is silly because, whatever, some of them win something every now and then, so what? It's not important.
I think the outrage about trans women in women’s sports is silly because, whatever, some of them win something every now and then, so what? It’s not important.
pretty much. the extent of the outrage is like, "omg one trans girl came 3rd in high school track and field once". yeah wow cool so you mean she didn't even win, it only happened one time, at only one out of thousands of high schools? who gives a shit then
Yeah like even if a trans woman, like, I dunno, breaks every record in a sport, who cares? It doesn't hurt women's sports. It would hurt if they literally couldn't compete any more, and that's not gonna happen.
It is literally the case.
Don't bring truscum garbage onto this site. **Someone is trans when they tell you they are. ** End of question.
Rubbing your hands and helping bigots differentiate between two different types of female bodies is nothing more than saying Trans Women aren't really Women. There is no 'test' you can make that isn't going to just be a way to oppress minorities.
don't think i said that people who aren't on hrt aren't trans, not even close. re-read the post.
testosterone has a tangible, measurable effect on athletic performance. that's all. pretending it doesn't is incredible naive. dividing up sports leagues based on performance seems pretty reasonable to me. we should probably find a better metric to divide up sports than gender lines in light of this, but outside of professional leagues that would have the resources to measure every competitor, i can't think of any good ways to do so.
How the fuck does it make sense to segregate sports when there are no physical differences between Male and Female bodies??
There literally are?
Literally coming into a trans support thread and dying on the hill of 'there are differences between men and women bodies'. Fuck off bigot.
? It is objectively true, you're talking about social gender but there is also biological sex. Like, even if you complegely ignore the average differences regarding a bunch of different features, there's the whole different chromosome thing, and the whole dicks and vaginas thing. Again, you're talking about social gender, and I am not.
Athletic scholarships are imo the institutional force behind the arguments against trans athletes. Now I understand going into the old problematic situation and making it recognize oppressed people, however we in America shouldn't have such a warrior culture around sports to begin with. Other countries don't combine amateur sports leagues and their academics, so why should we? It makes our colleges worse because it's where all the money goes, and athletes often ignore their schooling and are given an extremely easy time in school. Also whatever amateur athletes remain after turning down college for sports would get paid for doing so.
How does it work outside of America? I'm wondering because amateur athletes surely get degrees, but maybe not simultaneously. Unfortunately I can't imagine many athletic careers in America without the militaristic sports culture that I have said is probably harmful.
A good way to fuck over minorities in the current system.
Good idea in isolation, but it's currently a tool to those with less money and opportunity to access higher education.
"aren't you black and poor? then you should be good at sports" lol owned
Better than literally yanking one of the few lifelines to people under oppression.
Just don't have any gendered sports. Of all things, gender is a weird variable to distinguish in sports in the first place.
