Hello everyone,

I’m interested in gathering thoughts and perspectives, particularly from the trans community, regarding trans women’s participation in women’s sports. This is a topic that often sparks debate, and I want to understand the various viewpoints better.

My question is: What are your opinions on biologically male trans individuals competing in women’s sports? Do you think there should be separate categories for trans athletes, or should they compete in accordance with their gender identity? I am looking for thoughtful, respectful discussions, as my intention is not to discriminate but to understand the complexities of this issue better.

Thank you for sharing your insights!

37 points
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Much ado about nothing. The biggest freak-outs about this tend to be by people who weren’t even particularly good to begin with. Like Taylor Silverman, the skater who lost to a trans woman… And multiple children as young as ten.

If you want to talk about hormone levels and time spent transitioning, there’s a conversation to be had, but the right isn’t having it. For example, the movie Lady Ballers was supposed to be a documentary that proved men could dominate women’s sports by pretending to be transgender, but everybody involved eventually backed out after discovering the effort it would take to actually transition, even for the purpose of showing up the so-called woke left.

During a recent episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, cast member and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro — whose previous credits include spending nearly 45 minutes throwing a tantrum over the Barbie movie’s existence — said that they originally intended to make as a documentary. But then they found out that (gasp!) a group of bigoted cis men in bad wigs can’t simply participate in women’s sports.

“As it turns out, most ladies’ leagues don’t allow any actual men, and [the actors] weren’t willing to go the full distance in terms of what it would require, the actual hormone treatments, to actually play in ladies’ leagues,” Shapiro admitted during an interview with Boering about the film

Of course, those conversations about testosterone levels will also unfairly target black women, who have been targeted in the past by the same shrill white women using almost the exact same tactics as we see today.

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2 points

Thank you for that excellent bit of data

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28 points

This question is loaded. Trans women are not really biologically male, depending on the time transition happened there will be varying degrees of masculinised secondary sex characteristics but things such as fat distribution, muscle mass, organ size changes etc are going to look much more “standard” female than male.

AFAB women aren’t excluded from sport if they’re unusually tall, or have PCOS, or some other hormone variation that leads to an advantage. Women with PCOS will have an advantage in sport involving strength because they have much higher levels of testosterone (some grow patchy beards ffs) but nobody makes a fuss over that.

All sport is inherently unfair, we try and set limits of degree of unfairness. There is no evidence that trans women have more advantages than all the usual variations in women we allow competition among without issue. The Olympics has allowed trans competitors since 2004, where are all the trans gold medalists? where are all the trans women winning everything? Have you seen the differences in male and female records for most sports? If trans women are meaningfully similar to men then the average trans women would just demolish many sports. This doesn’t happen, only a few people have attracted attention for success and that’s in an environment of media controversy with actively trying to seek them out.

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4 points

One caveat about the Olympics is, you can’t just choose to compete there yourself as an athlete, even if you are world class. You have to be part, and chosen by, a national organisation. So even if the Olympics allow trans athletes, as long as most countries don’t, there won’t be trans athletes any time soon. I agree on the rest, I just don’t think the Olympics will be a forerunner in terms of trans representation.

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3 points
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It would only take one country to field a team of trans women for prestige (quietly of course) if there was a clear advantage. Countries have engaged in various other schemes to supposedly improve performance previously.

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21 points

If we ban trans women who’ve been on estrogen for two+ years bared on genetics, then we should also ban athletes with genetic advantages like Michael Phelps. I’m not in favor of banning people

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18 points

biologically male trans individuals

The preferred term is either “assigned male at birth”, or simply “trans woman”.

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-11 points
Removed by mod
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-14 points

This is so aggravating. You knew the intent and you know what they mean yet you still find the need to correct.

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12 points

Oh no, I gave information to someone asking for information, without taking any offense or getting upset. I’m such a monster.

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15 points

Trans women who are using gender-affirming hormones are not “biologically male”. It takes about two years on hormones for their performance to equalise with cis women. The only advantage that remains is greater speed, due to the greater height gained from undergoing a male puberty. There are plenty of tall cis women, especially in sport, so this doesn’t really count as an unfair advantage. And, of course, trans kids who were lucky enough to get puberty blockers in time will fall in the same height range as their chosen gender.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s an easy question. It isn’t, and it’s not unreasonable for cis women athletes to be concerned. But the proportion of athletes who are trans is tiny and the proportion who are champions in their sport is even tinier. I do think that hormonal transition is a pre-requisite (because otherwise they would be “biologically male” with respect to the physical characteristics which matter in sport) but I don’t think anyone should be getting their knickers in a twist beyond that, and they should definitely not be using it as an opportunity to be cruel.

Most of the ‘discourse’ is pure transmisogyny, based on lies and fantasy demons. Most top professional athletes are biologically extraordinary, that’s why they are at the top.

I don’t have much time to hunt out sources but this is a decent thread from my bookmarks.

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3 points

The only advantage that remains is greater speed, due to the greater height gained from undergoing a male puberty.

Solution: puberty blockers

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7 points

Requires: time travel

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2 points

Safety not guaranteed.

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1 point

For those fortunate enough to have had access to them young enough. I don’t think we should ban trans people from sport unless they did.

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2 points

To be clear, I only brought this up in case anyone runs into an upset person complaining about some combination of the existence of trans minors or trans athletes

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1 point

We should ban cis women from sports because they have an unfair advantage. Predictive models might say trans women are better, but when you look at real world data, that’s not true.

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