I don’t advocate for a separate league for trans athletes, we have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for 20 years and there have been no medals awarded to trans people.
Trans women are not “biologically male” and trans men aren’t “biologically female”. A trans man on T therapy becomes heavily muscular, experiences organ enlargement etc. Trans women get the opposite effect, my fucking q angle changed with musculature changes ffs. Yeah I probably have a Y chromosome although I’ve never been sequences, it isn’t do much these days. The bodies we end up with are not identical to natal men/women but then no man or women is identical to another, even identical twins are different. We end up within the normal ranges of performance, yeah there are jacked trans women, there are also jacked cis women. I go to the gym 4 days a week and run 40 km a week and I can’t even do a pullup lmao after 2 years of this. All aggregate studies to date find no evidence of advantage to trans women.
Unless there is evidence of trans domination in sports there is 0 reason to ban us. Besides, as treatments improve and early intervention becomes more normal there will be fewer and fewer differences, a process which is heavily hindered by discriminatory bullshit stoking hatred and fear.
This actually would have been true 5 years ago, but in 2020 Quinn became the first transwoman to get an okympic gold medal in a women’s event. There are expected to be more this year.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. I took your green eye comment to mean that you would support a separate trans league in sports. I guess I just don’t understand your point about the green eye thing then. If trans women begin to dominate women’s sports you will be OK with it? and are you willing to have non-trans women to have no way to compete against solely each other? Is that a price you are willing to pay for the sake of inclusivity?
I understand your point about transwomen being biological women. Do you believe that there should be no words or way to refer to someone who has been born with xx or xy chromosomes? Is it just best to not have language to quickly and simply convey that?
I know I have a lot of questions, feel free to ignore them as you like, really, no problem whatsoever. I am curious where you feel like the line should be drawn though. For instance, if an NBA player says they are a woman should that be enough to join the WNBA or should they have to pass a lie detector test or is there some physical characteristics that should determine if they are allowed to be included?
I appreciate your time and this conversation. A good friend of mine was told that she had to wrestle against a trans girl athlete(17 years old, no hormone blockers) or be removed from the league. She chose not to be humiliated and pinned down by someone who clearly belonged in a different league and that basically ended her interest and future in the sport. Ever since then, this has been an especially interesting subject for me. It is hard to say how different her life may have been, scholarships and colleges, and such.
Noted re Quinn although they were one player on a team of otherwise cis women who won gold. It takes an extreme amount of misogyny to discount the efforts of their teammates. It also seems that the team didn’t sweep, and only won gold in a kickoff so like hardly evidence of some inherent superiority of trans people at sport.
I could go through the team and find someone else with something unusual about them and you would have to accept that this trait could be just as responsible for the win.
As trans women do not dominate sport, nor do trans men, there is no evidence suggesting a need for separate leagues. As I noted in my example, sports is about community and competition. At this point excluding trans people is not warranted on a defense of competition and would harm community. Again as per the example because there are not enough trans people to form leagues and the social context means funding and interest would be inadequate to support athletes it would be a defacto ban on at least trans women. Trans men can probably hold their own in open classes which is no doubt where they probably want to compete.
If it becomes a problem then there are other options to explore beyond outright bans. Remember most athletes are not Olympians, they are school kids, uni students, community members. Most sport is done for very low stakes on local or regional scales, what sport is the 1 trans woman in a school year meant to play if she’s banned?
This leads to biology language. Just refer to what you mean. Do you mean chromosomal sex? that is a strange thing to talk about as most people don’t know theirs we can’t see it, touch it, smell it whatever. Do you mean secondary sex characteristics? primary sex characteristics? do you mean people that have undergone a male or female puberty? Do you mean tall and short people? weak and strong people? people with hormones at a certain level? what is it that you’re actually trying to talk about?
The problem becomes a lot more solvable if we start actually talking about it accurately. Maybe trans men can never get a win in javelin throwing, maybe trans women dominate. Ok so if that happens and we look at why and it turns out that idk elbow knobbliness is a huge factor then we can set up leagues binning people into ranges. Whatever is reasonable, we can go granular if needed, a trans man who took puberty blockers and transitioned might have no abnormal disadvantage and visa versa for a trans woman.
If you start trying to legislate based on arbitrary shit you’re going to necessarily exclude some cis women, even if you don’t think trans women are real women that should still bother you. Like racists targetting black women with accusations of being trans because they have more masculinised secondary sex characteristics, or women getting awards stripped from them because they were later diagnosed with some hormone abnormality.
I never said that the team won because of Quinn. I simply pointed out that your claim of no trans person ever getting an olympic medal was verifiably false. I think in discussions like this, it is important to speak factually and to point out when facts are false, especially when they are being used to prove points. There is nothing misogynistic about wanting to deal with accurate information.
I get that the trans movement is very new, and many leagues have just recently begun allowing them. That is why I was speaking about a hypothetical future where more trans individuals are involved in sport. I think hypothetical considerations can help to pin down exact ideas and opinions.
So far as what I was referring to about the labeling, I was very clear that I was talking about xx and xy chromosomes. In other words, people born with the physical body that has the equipment that generally will be able able to provide eggs or sperm. I see no reason why there should not be language to describe these two types of individuals. Is it only for humans that you think there should be no language for this? Is it equally wrong, in your eyes, to refer to a penguin as being male or female?
I would love to get an answer to this question: Should anyone, simply because they want to, be allowed to play in women’s sports? If no, then who should get to choose who is allowed, or where should the line be drawn?
