11 ms·
My two cents as a transfem athlete: The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
by callistocodes 6mo ago
My two cents as a transfem athlete:
The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level.
Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned.
There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man for the last event in case anyone might get upset, the staff changed it to say “woman” when I got there anyways, and then I lost to a woman twice my age.
- locknitpicker 6mo ago> The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s where iron curtain nations invested heavily on medical research and experiments on prospective athletes to try to get medals. It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_East_Germany As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights.
- turtlesdown11 6mo ago[flagged]
- yakshaving_jgt 6mo agoYou don't have to go back that far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_Russia
- lokar 6mo agoAnd china: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_China I don't believe either of them have really stopped.
- crote 6mo agoThat's cis women using doping. Considering how transphobic Russia is, the chance of them using any kind of "trans loophole" is zero.
- lstodd 6mo agoMore like 100% and has probably happened multiple times already.
- turtlesdown11 6mo agocitation for this claim?
- juneyyyyyy 6mo agoIf an unscrupulous regime wanted to get medals with that method they'd just give cis women testosterone during puberty. Nothing about the new trans-exclusionary standards would deter that. No XY chromosome no SRY gene. You're left with validating that someone's entire development was done in the absence of testosterone, which would--if even possible--require incredibly invasive and extensive testing.
- dmbche 6mo agoThat's a weird take. How bad do you imagine it going?
- mmooss 6mo ago> As far as I see, this issue is only tangentially related to transgender rights. It affects the rights of transgender people, so it is directly related to transgender rights. Also, I don't at all think that it's coincidence that people spreading hate about transgender people are the same ones so concerned about this particular issue? People spreading hate and prejudice always have <reasons>. > We all remember state-sponsored doping scandals from the 60s We all do? People born in the 1950s or earlier might remember, making them at least 65 years old. I've never heard of it from people of any age. In any case, it's hard to connect this 60 year old issue with today's decision.
- ahhhhnoooo 6mo ago> It's not hard to understand how badly this would turn out to be if the same sort of unscrupulous regime could just abuse this loophole to seek the same benefit. Surely this is something that can be addressed if it ever becomes a problem. Surely we don't need to write rules for scenarios that aren't causing issues...
- locknitpicker 6mo ago> Surely this is something that can be addressed if it ever becomes a problem. You're advocating to create pressure and incentives to commit this class of abuses, which have already been committed even at an industrial stage for decades, and your strategy is to ignore history and facts until the consequences of your actions catch up to you. And all this in exchange for which tradeoff? Even the fight against doping is far more proactive than what you are advocating.
- ahhhhnoooo 6mo agoTrans athletes at the Olympics are causing disruptions at an industrial scale? There's been exactly one trans woman in the Olympics, Laurel Hubbards, competing for New Zealand. She won zero medals. I'm advocating for "there is zero documented evidence this is a problem, the IOC should use their time and energy solving actual problems like doping."
- dpd_dpd 6mo agoAll three medallists in the women's 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics were male. This was highly controversial, as having three male athletes take gold, silver and bronze in what should have been a celebration of female athletic excellence wasn't exactly a desirable outcome. Although the headline of the linked article focuses on males with a transgender identity, the purpose of the IOC's new policy is to exclude all male physiological advantage from the female category, including cases like the above.
- ahhhhnoooo 6mo ago
- frumplestlatz 6mo ago> but would be sad to be banned. Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted.
- sintlpl 6mo ago[flagged]
- etherus 6mo agoIf you were required to compete with people of a gender you do not identify with, even when event organisers recognise you as more fitting among the other group, that's a ban. There are trans masc people. Requiring them to compete with women is unfair and disrespectful. Requiring trans fem people to do so is the same. The rules around gender identification in regulated sports require proof of medical treatment yada yada to accept that people are 'trans enough', which is itself discriminatory. Trans people are a lot less distinct and separate from everyone else than you'd be led to think.
- huntny 6mo ago[flagged]
- etherus 6mo agoIs this happening? I believe there are ~10 trans ncaa athletes. We're just hunting them. Why?
- frumplestlatz 6mo agoThe classification is based on sex, expressly due to the material differences between the sexes. It is not and has never been rooted in any sort of sociological concept of gender as an independent category from one’s sex.
- etherus 6mo ago
- Herring 6mo ago[flagged]
- erxam 6mo ago[flagged]
- huntny 6mo agoNo it's because in almost every sport, male sex development bestows significant performance advantages. This is easy to see even with a casual glance. Look at the world records for any sport with measurable and comparable metrics, like times for swimming, running, etc. The difference between the most elite female and male athletes is stark.
- erxam 6mo agoThe differences are marginal and mostly depend on the hormonal load present in each individual athlete. Males are not scrutinized anywhere near as closely, so they always get away with higher levels of anabolic steroids/hGH/rhEPO/random peptides than women would. Women are subject to constant, consistent testing, while male doping testing is basically an honor system (just don't be too obvious about it).
- qingcharles 6mo agoThis is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue. Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises. How do you ever come up with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting) Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.
- scoofy 6mo agoThe issue is that “woman’s sports” is itself intentionally discriminatory. That the issue of discrimination comes up is to be expected. The idea of competitive sports exists in a framework of discrimination means that you will always have unhappy people. The good news is that sports, for the most part, is mostly symbolic, and rarely affects ones livelihood.
- TimorousBestie 6mo agoUnfortunately pointless, mostly symbolic things attract the most hysterical reactions from people.
- junofan 6mo agoFive billion people followed the Paris Olympics. It’s actually kind of important.
- squigz 6mo agoHow do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way.
- aaron695 6mo ago[dead]
- lokar 6mo agoYou can tell the IOC does not care about fairness in competition: they focus on this, instead of the rampant cheating (eg doping) which they do nothing about.
- ordersofmag 6mo agoI'm pretty sure there are folks involved in doing drug testing for many sports so saying are doing nothing seems hyperbolic. Are there specific things you think the bodies in charge of drug testing should be doing but aren't? Genuinely curious.
- browningstreet 6mo agoOrganizations are large and not everyone works on the same things.
- mc32 6mo agoDoping is a problem which offers offenders unfair advantages -the IOC combats that and looks like they are looking at other unfair advantages as well. It's a cat-and-mouse game. As of yet there is no perfect doping detector (it can have false positives) but just because it's imperfect doesn't mean they should ignore the advantage it offers these offenders.
- michaelt 6mo agoCompetitive sport is unusual in that the whole thing is, in a sense, a search for outliers. Finding very rightmost person on the histogram of running speed or swimming ability or weightlifting strength. The very, very rare. The 7ft 6in guys. Then we put them on a podium, hand them a medal, and wrap them in a flag. In most other fields, outliers average out. The new subdivision of houses gets framed at the speed of the average carpenter on the team, not the fastest. We don’t send the fastest carpenter to represent the county, then the state, then the country to find out if she’s really the world number 1. In sport, though? Finding the people with the unnatural biological advantage is what it’s all about.
- jazzpush2 6mo agoWell, in your example, carpentry isn't about winning or being the best, it's about creating a house to sell (or flip, where you could actually frame a better argument about doing the worst possible job the fastest).
- citruscomputing 6mo agoWe have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women." Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed. (To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
- appreciatorBus 6mo ago[flagged]
- bit-anarchist 6mo agoBut that's not what they said.
- fourseventy 6mo ago[flagged]
- throw_a_grenade 6mo ago[flagged]
- aucisson_masque 6mo agoNo one cares at amateur levels but we are speaking of the Olympic. I'm all for transgender to do sport, have fun and even compete but Olympic games are about who is the best of the world. If you chose to identify as another sex, you can accept to give up on competing at the highest of the highest level. It's not like a big sacrifice.
- locopati 6mo agoat the highest levels are the most rigorous standards and testing. this is where it makes the most sense to allow trans athletes to. compete. trans women who have been on hormone replacement do not have an advantage over cis women. this is discrimination plain and simple and creates an atmosphere of misunderstanding, mistrust, and misinformation towards trans people (which incidentally also affects non-gender-conforming cis women).
- kube-system 6mo ago> If you chose to identify as another sex Literally nobody does this
- UncleMeat 6mo agoTons of groups rage at trans girls in high school sports, to the point of sending bomb threats. This wont stop at the olympics.
- LenaRyouna 6mo agoIsn't the solution simple? People have the freedom to think themselves to be whatever they are, but for established rules, they can either choose to comply or not participate. Just because a person identifies them as x, doesn't automatically mean other people have to be forced to accept them the same way. Just have a separate section for trans people in high school, separate for biological women etc. The whole point of women's sports is arbitrary, and just as much as people should respect the freedom of a person to identify themselves as whatever they want to, the same people should respect the arbitrary rules of women's sports. The issue is the people who want the world to be forced to accommodate them without consent.
- testbjjl 6mo agoHonest question, you say you compete for fun, but what about the folks you beat who are competing for the sake of competition, which is a little different than fun? I am generally open minded at least in comparison to folks I encounter but I can’t square this one in my head. I am just one person with a single opinion but would like to better understand where I am wrong on this topic.
- whattheheckheck 6mo agoHonest question, you say you're generally open minded in comparison with people you encounter but have you considered you're generally not?
- testbjjl 6mo agoYes, so I ask questions to increase my understanding? Is that a bad thing?
- whattheheckheck 6mo agoAsk chat gpt how to increase your understanding using Blooms revised taxonomy of learning using college level textbooks and primary source information with Amazon purchase search links. And follow up every side with a steel man, good faith critical thinking summary with deep, cross cutting questions that strike at the heart of the arguments. Additionally follow up with which demographics and political class does each position serve. Also ask for examples of bad faith comments and questions to help identify them to not waste your time engaging. You can also ask to explain all of that output to a 6th grade reading level if it helps Asking wishy washy middle of the road questions instead of just asking directly is a political choice to reduce the chance of criticism and to help manipulate the convo in your psychological favor instead of seeking a wide array of information like a normal person that has access to literally to every single philosopher that ever existed writings
- testbjjl 6mo agoIf the rules changed mid competition and I lost a race to someone who had been competing on a men’s varsity team and then shortly after competed on the women’s team, it would be very hard for me to just shrug and say they beat me fair and square. That reaction is not unreasonable. It may not justify sweeping laws, but it absolutely justifies having an honest conversation about fairness.
- egberts1 6mo ago400 transfems at Olympic events is rare?
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo agofirst of all, you need a source for 400. 2nd of all 400/11000 athletes is 3%. that's roughly inline with population statistics in the 15-25 demographic
- Jensson 6mo ago> 2nd of all 400/11000 athletes is 3%. that's roughly inline with population statistics in the 15-25 demographic No its not 3% for the world, for USA maybe but most countries barely have any trans people at all.
- sevenseacat 6mo agobarely any openly trans people, maybe, because it's highly illegal
- turtlesdown11 6mo agoHere's a helpful map of cultures with transgendered subsets that are accepted in society. Cultures on every continent have a deep historical record of transgendered folks. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/content/two-spirits_map-html/ https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/content/two-spirits_map-...
- AlecSchueler 6mo ago> There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, There might also be a similar advantage for AFAB women who have unusually higher testosterone. I don't get why they don't just do hormone brackets like they do with weight in boxing, and do away with gender based divisions entirely.
- razakel 6mo agoEndocrinology wouldn't be an entire specialism of medicine if things were that simple.
- 0xy 6mo agoThis is completely misinformed. Biological women and biological men at identical testosterone levels do not have the same grip strength or endurance attributes, because their bodies are fundamentally different particularly in bone size and muscular composition. The average MTF and the average female have wildly different hand sizes, among many other physical differences.
- AlecSchueler 6mo agoHow many "average women" are competing at the Olympics? > particularly in bone size and muscular composition. So group them by that where it's relevant. That doesn't change the fundamental argument I was making.
- 0xy 6mo agoSeems like a waste of time when biological gender explains these differences aptly. There's also dozens of variables.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- moi2388 6mo agoDisproportionate to how rare perhaps, but not disproportionate to how loud. Furthermore I’d argue rarity is not really an argument here. A new doping could also initially be rare; it would still provide an unfair advantage. Anecdotal evidence also is meaningless. I might lose a sprinting race to a trained woman, but that doesn’t mean male sprinters aren’t inherently better than female sprinters. They obviously and clearly are. In any case, I’d personally have no issue with this in friendly matches. Also I think olympically speaking this would be a perfect case for the paralympics, who have experience with (arbitrarily) adjusting competitions for varying levels of bodily differences.