askchapo

Ban Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt for having an unnatural advantage.

It's obviously all concern trolling to justify transmisogyny.

If the problem with trans people competing is that the hormones give them an advantage, then we're discussing the wrong issue entirely. Why is it the women's category and not the x hormones above y level category? Because hormones are vastly varied by individual, and sex/gender only correlate to those hormone levels.

But trans women are going to be taller on average than cis women! they say. Oh, you mean we should be segregating the sport by height categories, not by sex/gender? So a 5'7" man and a 5'7" woman can compete against one another fairly and that's the end of it?

Nooo, they say, because something something lung capacity. Heart size. Bone density. And on and on they go, listing all kinds of physical characteristics by which the sexes generally but do not necessarily differ. And at each characteristic I ask the same question. So that's the one that matters, that's the category by which we should segregate sports, yes?

I've never heard a satisfying response to this line of questioning.

There are no trans athletes in the Olympics this year, I don't get why anyone's talking about it

essence of thought is doing a series on the history of this crap. turns out closeted trans men were winning in the womens division a century ago, and in categories where women won mixed competitions they would add gendered divisions and change things so e.g. target shooting scores can't be compared.

Early Transphobia & Sexism in Sports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueGw_L7FVYM

Olympic Transphobia & The Red Scare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg0xv-BCF98

and she has some stuff from a few years ago refuting all the modern panic, relating to some atheist schism.

if it were true that one can easily just transition and go play in the female league of a sport and immediately dominate, why aren't all of the worlds biggest and most successful athletes trans women? if experiencing a "male" puberty makes a trans woman inherently stronger than any cis woman out there, why has only one open trans woman competed in the olympics ever (where she unfortunately did not place in the top three)? if it were as easy as the right makes it sound, you'd think we'd dominate every category effortlessly but you just don't see that. the opposition to trans women in sports relies completely on a fantasy.

the only thing that makes sense in sports leagues is probably weight classes like in boxing. and only in sports where that actually matters. it's not a magic bullet, but it's the bare minimum. continuing to divide competition on the false basis of the western european rendering of gender is as physically dangerous as it is empirically nonsensical. trans women are being used as a wedge solely because the gendered splitting of sports is already ideologically centered in a way that hides from most peoples consciousness, and trans women specifically as opposed to enbies or trans men because of misogynistic objectification.

all competitive sports should be banned because competitive sports are dumb. Which is ~~admittedly a neanderthal take.~~ a correct and good take

So what's a better response besides, "who cares?"

Down with cis :3

Olympics famously bans people for having like high testosterone, specifically black and brown people. Its like old school racism and misogyny of course. Going by the whole oh "Man naturally strong, high testosterone woman weak low testosterone" is very ignorant and also pretty specifically discriminatory towards intersex folk too.

But yeah of course people might not even listen all the above stuff.

The bottomline is that its pretty much excluding people from sports or any other thing by some rigid eugenicist beliefs.

Other than all that I don't know. Anyone saying X sport used to be good until they allowed people who are gay or trans players is just trying be hateful. They want to target and push people to corners. Its not the sanctity of the game or whatever its plain hatred. When this gets to an international level it of course becomes exclusionary of any third world people as I mentioned above.

Its whites only with a different branding.

I hope someone adds to my comment, because I looked into the science part of this a while back and got no clearcut answer, and I'll explain why.

The key question is what is the point of anything. What is the point of a woman's division, and why do trans women threaten that point. Does it matter if trans women would do slightly better than if they competed as untransitioned men, even though trans women are less than 2% of women?

You can't really win with science against the pseudo-science, because it all depends on bigger societal questions for which there aren't objective metrics.

The main arguments they usually use is around trans athletes crowding out cis woman athletes. If an unremarkable male-presenting athlete can become the best woman in the world at a sport, then trans women would crowd out cis women from sport and maybe discourage cis women's participation in sport.

A common point is to imagine an epidemic of mediocre male athletes transitioning to women, where they then steal sponsorship money from cis women. This framing already presupposes a lot of things that are hard to dissect. Like why is it less legitimate for a trans woman to win, why is it stealing? If this is an issue, are there even enough trans women athletes to skew results that much? If it is okay, would it still be okay if every sport's record was held by a trans woman?

The IOC always had arbitrarily decided hormone ranges you needed to be within for at least a few years in order to compete. There hasn't been a transwoman who dominated in anything enough for anyone to have an undeniable argument around adjusting the IOC rules, but they'll pull up random trans people in random sports because there aren't that many trans people in sport.

In some measurements, trans woman lose basically all physical advantages, in others, they retain some advantage even if they aren't anywhere close to the ability they had while male-presenting. The main hypothesis they use is that male puberty is too big of an advantage in most sports even after transitioning later.

To make a definitive statement either way, you'd need to find enough athletes who transition as adults and compare performance percentiles, and maybe how far off the man vs woman records they are after transition. Or have a clearer case of an unremarkable male athlete becoming a remarkable woman athlete.

The most controversial case was that New Zealand weightlifter who used to weightlift as a male junior, quit for a few years, then came back competing as a woman at a pretty old age for weightlifting.

You can't really argue science because on the one hand she didn't win and dominate, and on the other she seems to have placed better as an old woman than as a man in the junior competition (I couldn't find exact records, but she only held the Jr Male New Zealand record, not the Commonwealth games overall Jr Male record).

It all comes down to values and judgment instead of "objectively all world records would be held by trans women" or "objectively every trans woman athlete would place the exact same on hormones that they did as a man".

ultimately I don't give a fuck about competitive sports so my analysis usually ends up being, all competitive sports should be banned because competitive sports are dumb. Which is admittedly a neanderthal take.

I think this is one of the takes that would fit well in that eugenics IQ bell curve meme.

But following this thread out of a similar interest.

First question is going to be, for Professional Sports, when has this happened?

"When has an openly transgender athlete permanently sat at the number 1 spot with such a wide margin that they were unchallengable, making 100's of millions of dollars in winnings and endorsements as well as being known as worldwide celebrity? I'll wait while you look that up."

The I'd wait to die of old age.

For non-professional sports, I'd default to "Why care?"

Why would having a girl on a boys basketball team be a problem? Can she play? Can she make the cut? Pretty sure in middle/high school sports most places only have so many spots to fill with potential players so there's tryouts and anybody who can't meet some minimum standard doesn't get picked.

Shit, why is it that in middle/high school the girls were only allowed to play softball instead of baseball. Not even saying that the girls needed to be allowed on the boys team, just why the fuck do the girls not get to play baseball, even if its just among the girls?

I'd imagine that the girl who wants to play on the football team as a linebacker, isn't going to be some 110 pound waif. And I've seem some pretty tiny waif-like dudes play as quarterbacks in high school games that usually got at least one broken bone a year every year they played and nobody denied them that constant abuse because they were too physically "effeminate" to take a hit.