What about 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.
