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?
It’s ok, you’re right although the subtext of the thing is “are trans women beating cis women at a statistically anomalous rate” and so individual medals are really the matter at hand is all I mean to point out. I also made no claim no trans women had won, rather that there is no flood of medalists. There’s like that weight lifting woman that went from high men’s rankings to flunking all her lifts after HRT for example. Which based on what we know of estrogen aromatisation and T effects on metabolism is what we’d expect really.
The trans “movement” is not new actually. you know that famous picture of the Nazi book burning? Guess what they were burning. We’ve been documented and treated in western medicine for at least 100 years. Other cultures have their own understandings of gender and analogous things go back to before we have records.
So if you want to talk about chromosomes talk about chromosomes but I have to ask why? I get the impression you’re largely ignorant of endocrinology. Please correct me if I’m wrong here, I only know what I had to learn plus a couple of textbooks casual reading. Chromosomes don’t determine shit. Genes in chromosomes may cause (and usually do) expression of certain proteins which may cause (and usually do) expression of certain hormones, which again usually cause tissue changes. Stuff like getting jacked doesn’t happen because Y chromosome, it happens because androgenic hormones like T and DHT bond with receptors in specific tissues causing metabolic changes. Cis women generally have higher T and DHT than trans women (because E and T aromatise into each other and T makes DHT, trans women usually take antagonists for T [an antagonist is a chemical that fits into a slot but not in the correct way to activate the slot. Blocking the activation by the intended hormone/drug]).
Normally none of this matters tremendously, unless you’re say on hormonal birth control, treating male pattern baldness, trans, have insensitivity disorders or whatever. Then all the wonderful and terrible subtly of what causes human sexual characteristic expression does matter. So if we’re concerned about muscle mass chromosomes don’t matter, as someone who was XY but completely insensitive to androgens (rare but hard to say how rare specifically since most people don’t get gene sequenced) is indistinguishable from a cis woman unless we examine the statistics of children she births if she does. Or for a trans woman who has undergone HRT for some period longer than the lifetime of muscle cells such that the muscles have all been replaced under normal female conditions chromosomes also don’t matter.
I am only trained in physics, I will not speculate on the inner lives of penguines. I am not sure of penguins are offered HRT, or how hormones in penguins and sexual expression work. I suggest you ask a domain expert if such a person exists. If we have a batch of penguines with various sex hormone interventions active and they are analogous to primate sex hormones then I would be comfortable endorsing nuanced and specific language. If there is anything applicable from physics I have learned it’s that the universe is staggeringly complex.
I am not an expert on all sport. I think things should be determined with sensitivity to their context and according to evidence. E.g. sports where muscle mass matters a lot should probably have hormone level monitoring for all participants for a couple of years prior to catch both unusual health conditions and cheating or something whereas other sports timelines and requirements may be different. I am not an expert, it would be utterly ridiculous for me to suggest definitive guidelines.
I was referring to the modern trans movement that is allowing people who were born with penises to compete in leagues that, until recently, were exclusively for people who were born with vaginas. That is a new movement. It is not something that the nazis were burning books about so far as I know.
It is clear that you have done some research into biology, it is impressive. It is surprising to me that microchimerism isn’t brought up more in these sorts of conversations. This is when someone is born with one or more organs that have different chromosomes than the majority of their body. For instance, an xx brain while the rest of their body is xy. This can go both ways, but it is more common for a human xx to have organs that are xy due to stem cells from their babies getting into the organs of the mother.
So far as penguins go, I actually do happen to know that penguins that are born with mismatching chromosomes are genetically able to lay eggs, and those with matching chromosomes are the ones that provide the sperm. This is opposite to how it is in humans. However, similarly to humans, the males(matching chromosomes) are generally larger and stronger than the females(mismatching). By the way, I don’t claim to know the inner worlds or experiences of the penguins when I say male/female, this is just a shorthand that is used in scientific literature to describe someone who produces eggs or sperm. It is common in linguistics for common concepts to be shortened over the evolution of the language.
I’ve enjoyed talking with you, and as a result of our conversation, I have just learned something interesting. It seems the Olympics have changed their rules dramatically in 2022 and made it so that trans women who have gone through male puberty are not allowed to compete as women, so it seems that for now there will likely not be any trans women winning any medals after all. Not because they are less capable, but just because they are vastly outnumbered. Lia Thomas(swimmer) has been beating the competition by entire body lengths, nearly unheard of in her sport, but since she went through male puberty, she will very likely not be allowed to compete.
Unrelated, but I have faith in your ability to eventually get that pull-up! I’m no coach, but I would like to pass on an idea that I’ve heard before that may or may not be of some benefit. Get yourself a chair under the bar so that you can get to chin up position with the bar just by standing, then kick the chair out of the way and try to resist the gravity as much as you can. You can see your progress over time in how long you can keep yourself up before being in a completely dangling position. It can be motivating to get to see your progress instead of just being stuck at exactly 0 pull-ups. I’m sure you got it in you!
