Not just any swimming, but some amateur or extracurricular school event!
The Onion has been on a hot streak lately.
Edit: from May but still true lol
You realize that most trans women undergoing HRT have less testosterone in their systems than many of their cisgender competitors, right? Women naturally have some testosterone in their body; if they have PCOS, then they have a lot (in comparison to other cis women). Trans women on HRT take medicine to block testosterone, so while their body might generate the most of all, the amount bioavailable to them after the medicine neutralizes it is less than non-PCOS cis women have. If the sports debate was about testosterone providing an unfair advantage, then we would ban cis women with PCOS from competing, but we don’t.
In the case of teenagers, it’s even simpler - contrary to propaganda, very very few doctors are willing to put a minor on HRT. Instead, they simply give them puberty blockers to delay the onset of puberty until they’re over 18 and can decide for themselves whether to go on HRT or not. So, a 17yo trans girl is developmentally equivalent to a 10yo boy - her muscles are massively under developed compared to any of her cis competitors.
So whether adult or teen, a trans woman winning at sports is not someone with an unfair advantage; rather, it’s someone with a massive disadvantage managing to win despite her handicap.
It’s not a problem because it’s not happening to any meaningful degree. Trans women continue to be under, not overrepresented in high end sports, because there isn’t a meaningful advantage after a couple of years of HRT. Please provide examples of this problem you claim exists.
alongside with giving the real woman
if that trans man woman
Oh, just go fuck all the way off, bigot.
Is current testosterone the only consideration? Or could having higher testosterone earlier, even though you’re on par with peers now, give you a musculoskeletal advantage?
Bro I’m weak as shit after 1.5 years on HRT. All the musculoskeletal advantage I have is kinda wide shoulders for a girl.
It was genuinely funny how i couldn’t do pushups or open jars easily anymore.
You have one of the longer comments under this post -
Are you familiar with the lifter from this comment? Hoping for an educated debate, as it’s outside my knowledge area.
If we’re considering testosterone to be a PED, perhaps we should ban everyone from sports…
On a more serious note: why not advocate for putting people into “testosterone-level groups”, similar to how boxing, etc, do it with weight classes? Rather than just excluding trans women from competing.
I also feel I have to ask: how do you feel about your niece losing in competitions to cis women who have biological advantages, such as higher (natural) testosterone levels, longer limbs, bigger hands, smaller busts, etc?
There is more to it than just “current testosterone levels” because (like you mention in your question at the end) biological birth sex as a male would likely afford the person with a larger frame, muscles/skeletal structure, bigger hands, longer legs, etc.
And to answer your question: no I wouldn’t have a problem with cis women competing with each other. Obviously, natural differences exist and set people apart. But sport and competition is predicated on a foundation of fair play, personal excellence, and mutual respect among participants.
Any artificial advantage or thumb on the scale, for whatever reason, undermines the integrity of the competition, devalues the effort of athletes, and erodes the spirit of the game.
Naturally occurring differences like extra testosterone, height, or flexibility might be advantages but they aren’t unfair because they are inherent to the individual’s unique physiology and not externally imposed or artificially enhanced. That’s the line we’ve drawn for sport and competition for centuries.
So no, that wouldn’t bother me at all.
So there is no problem then, since by your own word naturally occurring differences aren’t unfair. Trans women who transition even put themselves at a disadvantage compared to pretransition.
Oh and trans women are real women, just like any other woman. They are not second class women, or “kinda women but really not”, they are 100% women. Same goes for trans men. And the whole “biologically male/female” strawmen has never been true but still evolved into this transphobic talking point to justify hate.
Just a note, there’s some studies that have shown that a massive proportion of high tier female athletes actually have chromeosone issues that would put them into the intersex category.
My niece is a competitive swimmer. If a trans woman kept her from winning the competitions she’s trained so hard for, getting up at 4am for practice, spending weekends training or at meets, etc, thats absolute horse shit.
So if that trans woman also worked hard, got up at 4am for practice, and also spent weekends training and going to meets, she doesn’t deserve to win after her own hard work?
Really depends. For people that never went through puberty of their birth sex there’s effectively no difference in terms of strength.
After adulthood it’s definitely debatable, after a few years of treatment physical capabilities mostly align but not entirely, and while unlikely it would kinda suck for the rest if someone did win olympic gold bc of anatomy differences or something (plus countries with a history of cheating potentially could abuse it by sending an athlete that is not actually on HRT). I also don’t think the ability to compete in high level sports is anywhere near a fundamental human right.
However it would also suck for the transwoman in question having to choose between high level competition in the sport they likely poured their life into and transitioning (as there is no way a transwoman on HRT could ever compete at the highest level vs males in sports unless it’s something where cis women can, too).
Personally I’d argue for pro sports requiring proof of consistent HRT for x amount of time (based on studies of at what point physical capabilitues are equal for the vast majority) should be sufficient. If against all odds we end up with a disproportionate amount of transwomen winning competitions (we won’t) rules could still be changed.
At an amateur level it makes very little sense to restrict transfems, the difference isn’t great after a while on HRT and so much of the point of amateur sports is usually on a social level that if you restrict transpeople from playing/competing with their own gender, you will often remove a large reason for wanting to do that sport in the first place.
Are trans women keeping her from winning competitions? Last I heard they aren’t dominating anything.
getting up at 4am for practice, spending weekends training or at meets, etc
Nice job on the appeal to emotion too. It isn’t like trans people still have to put in the work to do well and have their own challenges to overcome. They have to compensate greatly.
To be clear about my opinion on trans people in sports (because we always ignore transmen here), I am waiting for sports and exercise scientists to do more research and make more conclusions. The science is too nebulous on it. Women’s medicine is centuries behind, and trans medicine even further.
1 out of how many? Should we discount feats of atheletes like Lebron James or Michael Phelps?
And to be clear once again, I want more information and data and science behind this. Is this win an anomaly? Due to some biological advantage Thomas has? Is it because they were born male or is there something else? What is the overall data looking for competition?
And once again we’re talking about high level competition which needs it’s own set of rules. For lower division or tiers I don’t think it matters that much.
Man, I wish we lived in a world where everyone could celebrate with Lia and her struggles weren’t trivialized by an adolescent understanding of the world instigated by toxic conservative ideology.
Brave to transition. Brave to compete. Brave to win despite no one wanting her to.
As someone who is constantly cast as the underdog, who has to overcome that narrative, Lias story is my story and I’m happy for her.
When climbing started to become a televised sport, they changed the entire format to support televised timings. When they have athletes who are way taller or way shorter, the routes etter needs to take that into account for the setting for the comp.
Honestly, I think the sports and or rulesets could take a pass and see if there’s anything they can do to find a middle ground that can suit trans-athletes and cis-gendered athletes more equally.
That’s said - I’m not very competitive of me, so my opinions Wil always be biased. While I think competitions push the sports I also have seen firsthand the toxicity and negativity high level sports bring. So basically, I think inclusivity and sportsmanship is more important that integrity of the competitive nature.
I’ve heard the same argument from ‘whataboutist’ rightoids from Reddit when they started bitching about Lia Thomas and people blaming Katey Ledecky, a cis woman, for being trans. Also, this same group loves to bitch about Fallon Fox forget about Patricio Manuel, complain about Nyla Rose and twist the story about Mack Beggs.
If your niece loses then maybe you should teach her to lose gratefully rather than just jumping to blame someone else for her shortcomings no matter their gender, height, weight, natural talents, hormone levels, zodiac sign, etcetera
I don’t know any of those names except Katey ledecky.
My niece is a great sport and competes mostly against herself and works on beating her times. I don’t even know how she’d feel about something like that. She’s a great kid and she’d probably grin and bear it.
But I think it’d be horse shit if she had to. We separated men and women’s sports for a reason. We dont let 20 year olds compete in little league. We don’t let Olympians use performance enhancing drugs. Competition and sport needs some bounds for fair play.
Ensuring a level playing field is crucial, acknowledging natural talents and physical differences, while drawing a line at artificial or external enhancements that could skew competition. It’s about maintaining the spirit of fairness and respect in sport, so everyone has the opportunity to compete and excel based on their natural abilities and dedication.
Should we just abolish women’s sport then and have only open competition?
Ah yes, being male means that you are always better at all sports than female sportspeople. The mark of maleness is so strong that even after you are no longer male, the maleness lingers and makes you powerful enough to have an unfair advantage and beat all the women. /s
No transperson kept your niece from winning, did they? It’s a boogeyman waved before you to justify making people feel excluded from society because they challenge gender norms.
If a transwoman ever beats my daughter at sport…I’ll be proud of the team for being inclusive. If a transwoman outperforms my daughter and obtains a scholarship ahead of her…I’ll ask why scholarships have to pay for her education.
Society is at fault here, not transwomen.
That’s easy. We just declare “woman” has no solid meaning, it is just whoever says they are a woman. Then we will declare there are zero biological differences between the sexes, some women are just stronger than you. Get gud, scrub. Go against any of these declarations, you are the bigot.
This is the weakest of the arguments for trans rights. There’s a reason they want everyone to focus on it.
We shouldn’t be allowing them to frame the conversation around the one area where identifying as whatever you want actually affects other people.
It actually doesn’t. Studies show that trans women perform on par with cis women in athletics. This wishy-washy attitude essentially amounts to “you can only participate if you lose”
Can you link such studies, because I don’t understand how that could possibly be true
Here’s an NPR article interviewing a known geneticist and talking about Trans Athletes. Their general consensus is that there is a lack of data to make an assertion one way or the other for if trans athletes have an edge. And that’s without taking into account the vast differences between each individual trans person and where they’re at genetically/hormonally. Trans athletes aren’t a monolith that are all the same, they can have fundamentally different circumstances and genetics between each person.
Honestly any automatic ban of trans-athletes is stupid. Michael Phelps has a natural genetic advantage when it comes to swimming, but no one of note is coming for his gold medals or saying he can’t compete.
https://www.cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review
There’s not a huge amount of data about this yet, and the true patterns will become more apparent as we have more data, but the data we do have suggests no inherit advantage over cisgender female athletes.
Please try not to use your own understanding of a subject as a measure of its possibility…its an unreliable metric.
i think the controversy really started when Fallon Fox started breaking people’s skulls in MMA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallon_Fox
as a side effect they’ll have that unfair advantage
Most trans women have no such thing and in the rare case they do people treat them as if they are cheaters. Cheating implies malicious intent.
the one area where identifying as whatever you want actually affects other people.
Except, it doesn’t, so you’re literally taking the bigots’ side here.
Then let’s stop dividing all sports by sex or gender and see how it all shakes out.
These people also never consider that they’re measuring the wrong thing. If they’re taking the position that the effects of testosterone from birth in trans M-to-F kids gives them an unfair advantage due to bone density and muscle mass, then they’re failing to take into account that there are a number of natural health conditions that produce elevated testosterone levels in women as well.
I’m not saying this to be funny, but women with stubble especially around the chin often have elevated T levels, often due to PCOS. There truly are some women who are “built like a man” and they’re not trans - at least certainly not in the way we use the term today. They’re natural, their bodies just work differently.
Banning trans kids isn’t going to level the playing field in the way they say they want to. Measuring things that testosterone affects like bone density would.
Most sports are dominated by people with genetic gifts. But having a little extra testosterone from a genetic quirk is a completely different thing than having extra testosterone because you were born with testes.
Yet the end result is the same, an advantage over those that don’t have it. Why is one fair and one unfair?
Sport is arbitrary rules we decide. Some trans athletes are going to be better at some sports, not because of their trans status but because they work hard and train lots. It is just as unfair to exclude them in case another trans athlete has a genetic advantage, that most research says they don’t have.
Do you have evidence that a cis woman with high testosterone remotely experiences the amount of testosterone produced by testes?
It is one thing to have a quirk of the same organs, it’s another to be born with a different organ that effectively produces performance enhancing hormones.
But fine, then ban cis-women with unnaturally high testosterone.