It’s wrong to ban trans women from women’s sports, because trans women are women.
But they have the muscles of a male and usually beat all women-since-birth in competitions.
Yeah, Ik I’m gonna get downvoted to oblivion and I’m gonna get called TERF but that’s the reason it’s controversial in the first place
I’m trans and I actually agree with you. I don’t know the solution to make things fair, but I wouldn’t want to use a strong biological advantage over someone else.
I see it like if I’d been born with some identifiable and categorised physical advantage then I shouldn’t be competing against people without that advantage.
It’s debatable how big the difference is, however, and whether it’s a gap easily closed or not. My thoughts are that there could be an open category where anyone could compete on the understanding that there may be severe biological differences. There’s no easy solution :(
Edit: thinking about it, sporting competitions are more sex-catagorised than gender-categorised. I don’t think someone identifying as female with no physical/medical alterations from a biological male form should compete with biological females and I don’t think that should be controversial since the gender isn’t what people care about there. It’s the physical characteristics. In some sports that might provide an advantage, in some a disadvantage, but I do this it’s important to discuss! At that point, however, you’d be better ignoring gender and sex entirely and only categorising sports like ‘feather weight’ or ‘strong muscular development’ or something
I mean… some cis women are born thicker and taller than others which might be an advantage over other women, biologically. Yet, nobody disqualifies those women from competing. It just means everyone else has to be twice as competitive and work around their physical limits. Sports are largely about overcoming one’s performance limits. Like, a shorter basketball player can still play basketball and be really good at it, it’s all about how they train, what they focus on and how they play. And it’s about how good they are at dealing with the space around them and controlling their body. This was always the case, always in the history of sports. Being a stronger athlete was never a problem before, and now suddenly it is? It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s just an excuse for bad athletes who don’t wanna git gud to demand special treatment. I’m speaking as a cis woman who’s bigger than most other women around me. Not my fault that I can accidentally throw other chicks to the bleachers without even being aware of them, and I’m still a woman no matter how other people see me. So yeah, this whole discourse affects me too, because trans people being targeted also targets any person who was born intersex or just different.
What’s your idea of what a trans woman’s body looks like, exactly? Like, do you think a trans woman is just “a man in a dress”? Because that’s just straight up inaccurate in every way. HRT changes trans people’s bodies and how those bodies work. That’s why we say “trans women are women and trans men are men”. Like, would you think making someone with the body of Buck Angel compete in women’s competitions would be fair? Google Buck Angel, look at him and then come back at me.
Given a long enough time on the right hormones, and most (not all) of that advantage disappears. “While absolute lean mass remains higher in trans women, relative percentage lean mass and fat mass (and muscle strength corrected for lean mass), hemoglobin, and VO2 peak corrected for weight was no different to cisgender women. After 2 years of GAHT, no advantage was observed for physical performance measured by running time or in trans women. By 4 years, there was no advantage in sit-ups. While push-up performance declined in trans women, a statistical advantage remained relative to cisgender women.”
There’s also a large band of ability within people. Michael Phelps has a genetic advantage, but his accomplishments are still celebrated.
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/clinem/dgad414/7223439?login=false
Here is my question though, and if you have any info I’d love to see it. Do performance enhancing drugs interact in men and women the same way? I ask since not all enhancing drugs are banned.
If yes, how do these interact with tans people? Would a trans woman be able to get more positive effects from the drugs?
