FYI: i’ve given blackhole a(t least a) 3 day ban; you no longer need to engage with them in this thread, as it will not be productive to do so. thanks
I think what so often gets missed in these conversations (and they’re conversations that happen a LOT in lots of social media spaces and off-line spaces) is that this discussion - about inclusion and access in high-end competitive sport - is absolutely having a negative impact on any trans person trying to engage in any sport and recreation at any level.
We know that sport, recreation, and exercise is a great protective factor for our health and wellbeing - and that trans and non-binary folks are engaging in those activities less often than our cis peers. The excessive attention on inclusion in sport (primarily conversations being had by laypeople, i might add) mean that those of us trying to play sport or exercise in our communities are hyper-aware of the discourse, are even more worried about what people might think of us - - and in some cases are experiencing heightened transphobia in our communities as a result.
Lots of sporting codes have introduced some great standards for trans inclusion that really work, and reflect the evidence base - and those decisions have been made by sports medicine experts and experts in those codes - and that’s whose opinion i really trust, not people making assumptions based on what they think about sex and gender.
Exactly this. I really want to do some rec sports just to meet friends and stay active. With they way things are currently with sports - absofuckinglutely not. And ffs I’ve passed pretty flawlessly for the past 8 years now (although the first few years were rough), and I’m still terrified of that shit.
It’s sad that I’m much more scared to be involved in sports now than I was 5 years ago
Yeah, I’ve been out 10 years and for a good five years at least being trans wasn’t even a factor in a lot of my decision making any more - that’s changed in the last 18 months with all the negative attention on us.
This article is also really good: https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-racing-discover-how-gender-transitions-alter-athletic-performance-including
It goes into detail on a real world athletics study (instead of studies on individual factors like muscle mass or grip strength that may not be representative at all of sport performance) in running that shows that after transitioning, trans women perform the same relative to their cis women peers as they did to their cis male peers prior to transitioning — i.e., same place in the distribution curve.
Key detail being “after transitioning”.
Someone who says that they identify as trans but doesn’t medically transition at all could still wreck competition. So sports competitions can’t just allow all trans people, but only those who have medically transitioned. Then they need to figure out how to draw the line when it comes to different hormone dosages, surgeries, etc…
And all major governing bodies do, including the Olympics which opened up to trans people years ago. Making this statement about the system shows you’re ignorant of the current state of sports governance.
To be clear, the report doesn’t claim it’s proven that trans women have no advantage in elite sports, but rather that the biomedical evidence is inconclusive and that the methodology of existing studies has been highly flawed.
It does go into some sociological factors which is good, and it draws attention to the fact that these studies are seemingly often conducted from a place of transphobia to begin with.
I suppose it’s hard to do science on it as it’s such a loaded topic, and the number of trans athletes is relatively small.
I wish English had a more obvious way to distinguish “no evidence X is” and “evidence X is not.” This type of confusion seems to come up a lot, especially about scientific reports where the language is very precise.
Right. I think that’s a very important distinction.
To take it a step further, I think it’s probably quite intuitive and obvious that if you’re born a male, go through puberty as a male, you will have a different body composition than a female. Even with hormone suppressors. They are claiming there is no evidence that this is an advantage.
Well it is, absolutely, depending on the sport. I don’t know that it could be proven that bone density, for instance, helps people perform better. But I know that some sports there is an advantage to being taller. And hormone suppressors aren’t going to reduce that advantage. So that alone is definitive proof that being born a male and going through puberty as a male is advantageous in certain sports (as male’s are taller on average, than females). I don’t know how you could argue that isn’t true.
Then do we ban cis women who are tall or have a high bone density from women’s sports? Do we allow trans women who don’t have these advantages? Why single out trans people? If you judge that certain advantages are too much, why ban all trans people specifically?
This is it, exactly.
Every time I’ve gone and looked into it, the research seems to indicate that trans women who’ve been on HRT for a year or two do retain some advantages due to testosterone-fueled puberty, but those advantages they may retain are well within the bounds of what’s expected between cis women. In other words, sure, maybe a trans woman is taller than she’d be had she not gone through T-puberty, but there are cis women who are also tall, and we’re not banning them on that basis. The same goes for any other advantages they (trans women) retain.
We are banning them specifically because they gained that advantage by going through puberty as a gender they aren’t competing as. And none of those other women competitors had the ability to do that.
That is the difference. And I think that’s a fine reason to ban someone from competing (AT A HIGH LEVEL, NOT CHILDREN’S SPORTS).
And I’m saying that’s a bogus reason to ban trans women from women’s sports. If their advantage is no greater than that of the advantages between cis women, then including medically transitioned trans women in women’s sports does not un-level the playing field.
ETA: The way that we control for the testosterone-fueled changes a trans woman’s body undergoes in puberty is by requiring them to be on HRT (including T suppressors) for a long enough amount of time that those advantages become negligible and they can fairly compete with other athletes, not by outright banning them. It’s ridiculous and more than a little offensive to act like outright banning trans women from high level competition is the right thing to do.
Emphasis on medically transitioned.
Some people seem to think that lgbt activists want to make it so that any male athlete could just put on a wig, say “I’m trans now”, steal medals from women and then detransition the next day. (As depicted in that Futurama episode.)
Letting trans people who have medically transitioned for several years compete is a very different beast from letting anyone who claims to be trans compete.
Absolutely. It’s still a bit arbitrary, but at least there’s data and established history to back this up as a viable way for trans women to compete. It’s how we’ve been doing things in most major sports already, if they have any policy for trans athletes at all. It’s worked out fine, I have yet to see any example of a trans athlete that is blowing her competition out of the water, so to speak. All of their examples are heavily cherry picked and misrepresented to look poorly on the trans community, but at closer inspection are anything but that.
That said, there are still some problems. For one, focusing on T-levels ends up with people like Caster Semenya, a cis-woman with a condition that means she produces a bunch of testosterone, being barred from competing.
Should I be banned from women’s sports? I mean I’ve been through a male puberty which according to your criteria would seem to make it an immediate no, but I’m also 5’6 and for various reasons likely have a lower than average bone density. Would I be competing with an ‘unfair advantage’?
This just reinforces the idea that we should improve the education and support for trans kids at all levels, specially school and early stages, and allow hormone suppressors before they do any irreversible damage on trans kids and teenagers.
If they are able to make an earlier decision, their lives will be closer to what they need.
In what world is it a good idea to give hormone suppressors to literal children? It’s not a decision any child is capable of making.
Edit: Alright, you guys do have a point in that it’s reversible and safe. My bad.
It’s a good idea in a world where that child is aware of their gender identity (which many people develop far earlier than when puberty starts) and about to start going through irreversible changes. The betrayal of their body is a big part of why trans children have such high rates of suicide.
In any case though, if you’re worried about them being too young, why would you be making a stink about a medicine than exists to delay permanent changes in their body? We give it to cis children safely in the case of precocious puberty, it can be stopped and puberty will resume, and it stops a huge source of emotional pain for them.
Just because you don’t need it doesn’t mean that gender affirming care isn’t still healthcare.
this is just diet transphobia. it is very well established that these are safe and reversible, and as the other commenter notes there are a plethora of extremely good reasons to start early here (in part because they’re safe and reversible, but the changes associated with growing up either aren’t or are much more involved to reverse once you’ve gone through them)
Very awesome to see that you were open enough to learn and incorporate the new information! It’s a rare thing these days
Edit: This is from after they edited their comment, not in regards to the original content.
Sports is inherently unfair. Biological advantages are the basis for global competition. If the goal is fairness in sports then why is no consideration directed at any other kind of advantage until a trans woman is involved?
Uh… it is. We have considerations taken into account for age, weight, and skill level, at various levels of sports. Yes, obviously there are biological advantages in sports, and that is a big part of the sport. That’s precisely why we separate men and women, BECAUSE of those advantages.
So for you to say there is no consideration given to those advantages until trans woman are involved is just flatly wrong. That’s the basis of this entire conversation, the fact that we do take that into account already.
So why is the discussion not how we can further categorize people then? You know, to account for the biological advantages?
Its not fair to short women that only tall women can compete in sprinting on an international scale. There’s nothing they could ever do to compete on that level. It’s not physically possible for them. So why is the Olympics not dividided into height categories? Why not categories based on wingspan in swimming? Why not categories based on muscle to fat ratio in lifting? Why not categories based on leg length in cycling? Why don’t we categorize any sport that requires prolonged deep breathing into lung capacity? Why don’t we measure any relative advantage causes by these things and measure everyone accordingly?
Look into how the special Olympics is measured such that anyone can compete. Anyone can, and their results take into consideration their relative handicaps and advantages.
Fairness in sports is not the point. Never has been. The point is “perfection of the human body”. How strong can can the strongest people possibly get? How fast can the fastest people possibly get? How high can the highest jump ever get?
Why is it currently impossible for 99.99% of cisgender women, no matter how much they train, to compete in a sporting event at an Olympic level? How is the inclusion of trans women fundamentally changing this process in any way?
You do realize trans women are women, right? You’re just tlaking about taking women out of women’s sports. Castor Semenya, several other black women have been told they are not woman enough to be treated as women. Do you think there’s any motivation behind that?
Is sports meant to be exclusionary? If so, who is women’s sports for? Upper middle class women from well off families? What about wealth disparity? If we add in wealth disparity the percentage of women who will ever be able to compete is even smaller. So what about poor women?
Why is the category for shooting divided by sex?
Why has there been significant discussion about excluding trans women from beauty competitions? Do you not understand the movement has nothing to do with fairness, and is just a conservative culture war talking point to spread hatred of trans women?
Do you not understand that by perpetuating this culture war talking point, you’re just proving conclusively that you do not see trans women as women and that you’re hypocritical for focusing solely on any advantage a trans woman has ignoring that every single olympic level athlete at this stage has massive biological advantages that already exclude 99.99% of women from ever competing at that level?
Trans women are women. We take hormones that destroy our muscle mass and cause significant physical impairment to our bodies. I’m not the incredible hulk, I’m not a massive testosterone machine, I have had GRS and I have no blood testosterone at all. I’ve been this way for nearly a decade. In any competition I would be utterly destroyed by even a teenage girl. Is it necessary to exclude me from participation? Am I not woman enough to compete, like Castor Semenya? Am I not who sports is for? Is sports only for cis boys and girls, is that the message you want to send to trans kids?
I’m going to say this, and you’re probably going to get pissed. I’m sure my post will get deleted, but if ya’ll can’t handle having conversations with people who don’t 100% align with your views, than we will never make progress.
You said ‘you do realize trans women are women, right’.
Yes. They are. I will treat them like a woman. I will acknowledge them to be a woman. I will use the pronouns they prefer, and think in 99% of scenarios, none of this should be problematic.
But they are not the SAME as all women. Yes, they are a woman. But they have a slightly different experience/body type than all of the other women, and that difference gives them an advantage over other women, that none of the other women get.
You’re completely correct that sports is about being the best. It’s about seeing what the human body can achieve at it’s maximum. And we’ve broadly separated those sports endeavors into two categories. Male and female (with the exception of some sports that we put additional restraints in, weight classes etc).
We realize that not everybody can be the best athlete in the world. That doesn’t mean we have a need to create 10,000 parameters and classes of sport for people to compete in so that everyone has an equal shot at being the best in the world. There are thousands of reasons why a man or a woman won’t ever have a chance at being the best in the world. And we are fine with all of them.
The difference is that we are fine with people not being the best woman they can be. We are not fine with people going through a fundamentally different body growth during puberty, that enables them to have an advantage that no other woman could possibly have, as they were not able to go through puberty as a male, as that’s not something that women can do.
It sucks for transgender women. I get it. I feel bad for them. I wish there was a better solution. You know what else sucks for transgender women? Being born a gender that they aren’t. Having to deal with society’s hatred toward them. There are a lot of things that suck for transgender women. But sticking to the parameters we’ve had in women’s sports at a competitive level is not hatred. It’s simply desiring to keep the playing field the same as it’s always been. Women, who grew up and went through puberty as women, competing in their sport.
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I think it’s really simple.
If you have an advantage because of something that occurs naturally in you, and you’ve gone through puberty as a woman, then it’s fine.
If you have an advantage because you went through puberty as a gender other than what you’re competing as, then it falls outside of the advantages we are willing to accept.
That’s all there is to it, really.
Okay, so you admit that sports isn’t fair and that fairness isn’t the point.
So you just think trans women should be excluded.
Someone who has a genetic mutation that makes their wingspan unnaturally wide has an advantage that no other woman can have. So, no, the only justification possible here is that trans women are not women and so therefore do not deserve to compete as women. And you’re okay with saying to young trans boys and girls, that they should give up on sports and athletics, because those things are only for cis boys and girls.
Whats wrong with having many categories of competition to make things fair? Or whats wrong with the methodology of the special Olympics, which uses a combined leader board with calculations for handicap and advantage?
There are actual solutions here, but instead you just want to exclude trans women. Just like Caster Semenya, you don’t think trans women are woman enough to be treated as such.
Right. And we’ve decided the advantages we are ok with accepting are those that women who have gone through puberty as a woman have. And advantages that fall outside of that are things we are not ok with.
Even if there were a “biological advantage” the only reason people started to pretend to care about women’s sports is because it’s a way to alienate trans people. If there were a good faith discussion being had, it wouldnt be so infuriating.
I hope that something good comes from all this in the end.
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Even if there is a “biological advantage”, sports have had “biological advantages” all the time. Some people are taller than others, or have longer legs than others. All of the reactionary people don’t care about fairness in sports because sports have never been fair.
I agree. But, for the sake of just exploring the thought process… IF the idea of trans women absolutely dominating cis women in sports were accurate (which does not seem to be the case), it would be something to discuss from a good faith perspective. Should we pivot to weight classes? Should there be a trans lady league? How do nonbinary folks fit in to this whole thing? Sports are inherently unfair, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room to talk about how we want sports to be.
It’s really exhausting when every aspect of your life as a trans person has become politicized, because there are differences between cis and trans people generally, and they are worth talking about. Maybe one day discussions can be had that aren’t simply thinly veiled transphobic talking points.
If we start to examine fairness in sports closer i think it all falls apart pretty quick. There are so much factors that can aid a competitor while drawing someone else back. Where someone was born, how they were raised, which trainers and equipment they have access to, what personal crisis happens to them, etc. all are things that are largely based on luck. Any rules that are made by the hosts of a given sports event are also somewhat arbitrary. That said, i do think there is an advantage for biological males in physical strength, even if it starts do diminish over time with HRT and even this study doesnt prove it otherwise, just states that previous studies were non conclusive.
Would scrapping gender splits in sports and base catagories on weight work?
I honestly do not know and don’t like sports in the slightest but it’s a question that has come up while discussing things with my kid.
Really doesn’t surprise me. Separation of sports by “men and women” is extremely binary. You can even see cis women with naturally high T levels compete in high level sports. Trans women aren’t even allowed to win without feeling like they lost. Bigots make them feel like they lost regardless.
I had a comment response to you that was deleted by the mods. I can’t remember what I said, but I know it wasn’t offensive in any way. How do I know this? I’m all for LGBTQ rights, including trans people. I think it’s absolutely awful what Florida and other states are doing to these people. I think it’s awful that children who are transgender are being ostracized from children’s sports leagues (which should be fun, not competitive). I’m a huge supporter of trans rights.
BUT - I disagreed with your comment. Because I believe there is a difference at competitive levels of sports. And that hormone suppressors and their effectiveness is not the only consideration here.
But apparently nobody is allowed to have an opinion on this topic that isn’t 100% on board with the global messaging of the trans community right now?
This is how you lose supporters, not gain them. I’m an ally. But allies can have disagreements, and should be able to voice them respectively.
In short, it’s fucking absurd that my comment was deleted solely because I don’t 100% agree with someone on something.
the problem with your comments here is people have repeatedly noted–and you have repeatedly ignored–how there is really no good faith interpretation of what is being done because the outrage is completely selective. the entirety of modern sports is “unfair” because to be even a replacement-level player at the upper echelons of sports you have to be genetically and athletically gifted in a way that your contemporaries are not. but it’s really only when trans people[1] allegedly have some sort of advantage that this “unfairness” is raised
or minorities with naturally high testosterone–are we seeing we seeing a pattern of targeting here? ↩︎
Just because people have ‘noted’ something, doesn’t mean that it is indeed a fact, that is not up for discussion. I am allowed to disagree with your ‘notes’ am I not?
The problem with my comment is that I disagree with you. Nothing else. I’m not being disrespectful. I’m not being hateful. I love transgender people, same as everyone else. I believe the laws targeting transgender people are fucking awful.
But I do disagree with you in terms of how we should setup our sports leagues at the highest levels. And because I disagree with you, I should be silenced?
I’m not IGNORING what you and others have noted. I’m DISAGREEING.
Just because people have ‘noted’ something, doesn’t mean that it is indeed a fact, that is not up for discussion. I am allowed to disagree with your ‘notes’ am I not?
but like… it is. you can “disagree” but you’re essentially disagreeing with reality here, not with me and others for noting the reality of the situation. we simply do not live in the world where there’s a principled defense or application of this position by the people you’re sticking up for–the ire here is with trans people (and minorities) and the interest in fairness is not real. even in your understanding of reality you admit this is overwhelmingly done in bad faith and without consistency!
I’m not going to try to defend Republicans, because I disagree with them on basically everything.
But I’m not disagreeing about reality, I’m disagreeing about opinion.
Here is my opinion. If you have an advantage in a sport due to something genetically natural about you, and you went through puberty as the same gender as the sport your competing in. I’m fine with that.
If you have an advantage in a sport and went through puberty as a different gender than the class your competing in, I’m not ok with that.
There is no fact or no fact there. It’s an opinion. One that I’m entitled to have. And one that you need to be able to hear, without the need to silence me or delete my comments. Because people should be allowed to have a different opinion then you.
We can argue about the merits of our opinion, but you can’t say I’m not congruent with reality, or however else you want to try to downplay my opinion.
I dont know enough about hormones and biochemistry to have a valid opinion on trans sports, but i’m 100% sure that the vast majority of criticism and debate is in bad faith by transphobes who never gave a damn about women’s sport before
The vast majority of debate from Republicans who want to ban transgender people from anything, yes. I agree.
But there are plenty of liberal minded, LGBTQ supporting individuals who recognize that at the highest level of sports, being more a male and going through puberty as a male, is likely to give you advantages over female competitors. And at the highest level of sports, it seems fair to control for that.
If we are talking about children playing sports with no real consequence. Everyone should play. I’d say only at the collegiate, olympic and professional levels should we be concerned about fairness.
It’s not binary. There are absolutely physical differences between men and women. To deny this is to deny reality. You can go ahead and make the argument that if T levels are suppressed or kept even, that those advantages go away. But to claim that the separation of men and women, in quotes, is binary (which I don’t really know what you mean when you say that), is foolish. There ARE differences. Just because the most athletic of women are more athletic than middle of the road men, doesn’t mean there aren’t differences. The ranges of the two have much different floors and ceilings. There is simply an overlap between those ranges.
What about cis women who are taller than average cis women? Do they not have a biological advantage in, say, sprinting?
Is there some reason that that biological advantage isn’t important, but any biological advantage a trans woman has is? Is there some reason that categorically banning trans women makes any sense it all, with no consideration to actually measure any advantages an individual trans athlete has?
Some consistency would be nice. How are we going to define what a cisgender woman is in specific biological terms? Are you no longer a cisgender woman if your lung capacity is too large? What about if your wingspan is too wide? Are you still a cis woman, if you have a mutation that gives you significantly wider wingspan than an average cis woman? Why are those advantages a-ok on cis women but immediately a problem on trans women?
If we’re going to control for “biological advantages” then it’d be nice if we actually did that at all. Instead we’re just talking about categorically banning trans women. Gee, I wonder why that could be? Couldn’t have anything to do with the global conservative movement pushing transphobic narratives and attempting to have trans women ejected from all women’s spaces and legally forced to live around and as men, could it?
Firstly, certain groups have over politicized this topic in order to punch down on a minority group they dislike. Those people are ass holes, and I’m not defending that behavior. However, unfortunately, their base argument does actually have some marret, even if they are complete ass holes about it.
There is consistency, to use your terminology cis gender women can compete with cis gender women & cis gender men compete against cis gender men. Transgender folk are somewhere around 1% (or less) of the over all population, they are the extreme outliers that don’t fit this consistent & highly effective (in terms of athletics) categorization of men’s & women’s sports. Another group, roughly the same size with an unknown advantage/disadvantage that are excluded from this classification are amputees/augmented humans.
We currently have separate competition for amputees from non amputees, the Paralympics exist & is lauded as a good thing. Outside of the political oppression issues, this model makes far more sense for trans athletes then simply allowing them to compete with the gender they identify with.
Splitting competition into male/female makes sense, because sexual dimorphism is a reality for our species. In nearly every sport, women are highly disadvantaged against men. Statistically the physical divergence between the sexes is vastly larger then the divergence within the sexes. This is consistent, despite your argument to the contrary.
I’m all for trans people being treated with respect, but respect goes both ways & part of that respect is the admission that a trans woman is not the same as a woman, and a trans man is not the same as a man. These are 4 different & distinct categories of people (hence the desire to relabel two of those groups with the ‘cis’ moniker), and ignoring that reality causes more problems then it will ever fix. It is not transphobic to prefer dating cis gender people, nor is it transphobic to believe that men & women’s sports should be for men & women respectively. Both of these CAN be transphobic if your being a hateful dick about it, but it’s not inherently so in holding those opinions.
Even in this comment there’s a distinct lack of recognition of the extent that hormones, and testosterone specifically, are responsible for dimorphism. People commonly think that the list of secondary sex traits is much shorter than it is and underestimate the effects of hormone therapy.
The Olympics have allowed trans athletes to compete as their gender identity since 2004 and yet trans women have not done well. One trans person has ever medaled. It was in a team sport by somebody who didn’t have male puberty. There has been one trans woman competing in weight lifting, she didn’t complete her lifts.
As far as I’m aware, the only sport where we have specifically studied athletic performance is distance running (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307766116_Race_Times_for_Transgender_Athletes), where no advantage was found.
I’m also not sure I agree on what you personally define as transphobic. If you consistently other trans people and refer to them as separate from the rest of their gender, that’s transphobic. For dating, there are a number of reasons why you may not want to date somebody. Genital preferences are a real thing and are absolutely a good reason not to date somebody. There are plenty of artifacts of being trans that are reasons to exclude somebody from who you date, but if the only reason you won’t date somebody is that they’re trans, that would still be transphobic.
It’s not transphobic. You’re overusing that word, and you’re hurting OUR cause.
It is not transphobic to recognize an actual difference. It is not transphobic to want to find solutions that work well for everybody. And it is not transphobic to recognize that people born a male, who go through puberty a male, develop a body different than that of a female. And those differences absolutely can make a difference in sports. This is 100% a fact. Hormone suppression aside, men are taller, on average. Men weigh more, on average. Men are stronger, on average. These are facts, indisputable. Stating as much is not transphobic.
The reason you’ve probably only had 1 transgender person when an olympic medal is because there aren’t a lot of transgender people, and winning an olympic medal is fucking hard.
Can you point to data that supports your point or is this just a gut feeling you have that you assume to be factual? I know for myself that my strength and endurance are nothing like what they were before estrogen. Science overall seems to agree. You are just dead set on your opinion and refuse to change your mind.
Can I point to data that men are taller than women? Stronger than women? Yes… yes I can. Or you can just google it. It’s a pretty easily verifiable fact.
So in this you’ve explicitly acknowledged that the accepted terminology is that trans men and cis men are both men, but have ignored that and created a dichotomy between “men” and trans men anyway by ignoring the word cisgender. Why is that?
At the end of this I linked an extract of a positive letter that United States Utah governor Spencer Cox wrote. It grounds the conversation back to Earth in a fantastic way. Bear in mind, he’s specifically referring to student athletes in this discussion. So this is tangential to OP’s discussion, but the underlying premise is near identical from my understanding.
https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/2d4b3581-fa4e-42d3-b2e2-cdb63c237c5c.png
That’s the thing that I find particularly bad. Elite sports, sure there’s transphobia aplenty but I get why people take it seriously at least. But kids’ sports? Come on, people. Let the kids have fun without demanding you fucking inspect their genitals or whatever they are doing now. People take kids’ sports way too seriously, I think it’s really harmful.
I’m glad some people see that, like Spencer Cox.
Lmao I could have told ya, I can barely do knee pushups since starting estrogen and spiro
