In February 2020, the families of three cisgender girls filed a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools, the nonprofit Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and several boards of education in the state. The families were upset that transgender girls were competing against the cisgender girls in high school track leagues. They argued that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in high school sports and should be forced to play on boys’ teams.
Conservatives around the country have jumped on the question. Attorney General Merrick Garland was pressed on the issue during his confirmation hearing last month. State legislators around the country are pushing bills that would force trans girls to compete on boys’ teams. In describing the Connecticut case in the Wall Street Journal, opinion writer Abigail Shrier expressed a representative argument: when transgender girls compete on girls’ sports teams, she wrote, “[cisgender] girls can’t win.”
The opinion piece left out the fact that two days after the Connecticut lawsuit was filed by the cisgender girls’ families, one of those girls beat one of the transgender girls named in the lawsuit in a Connecticut state championship. It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth.
Policies permitting transgender athletes to play on teams that match their gender identity are not new. The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even qualify. California passed a law in 2013 that allows trans youth to compete on the team that matches their gender identity; there have been no issues. U SPORTS, Canada’s equivalent to the U.S.’s National Collegiate Athletic Association, has allowed transgender athletes to compete with the team that matches their identity for the past two years.
The notion of transgender girls having an unfair advantage comes from the idea that testosterone causes physical changes such as an increase in muscle mass. But transgender girls are not the only girls with high testosterone levels. An estimated 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which results in elevated testosterone levels. They are not banned from female sports. Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys. Plus, the athletic advantage conferred by testosterone is equivocal. As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity.
Claiming that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in sports also neglects the fact that these kids have the deck stacked against them in nearly every other way imaginable. They suffer from higher rates of bullying, anxiety and depression—all of which make it more difficult for them to train and compete. They also have higher rates of homelessness and poverty because of common experiences of family rejection. This is likely a major driver of why we see so few transgender athletes in collegiate sports and none in the Olympics.
On top of the notion of transgender athletic advantage being dubious, enforcing these bills would be bizarre and cruel. Idaho’s H.B. 500, which was signed into law but currently has a preliminary injunction against its enforcement, would essentially let people accuse students of lying about their sex. Those students would then need to “prove” their sex through means including an invasive genital exam or genetic testing. And what happens when a kid comes back with XY chromosomes but a vagina (as occurs with people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome)? Do they play on the boys’ team or the girls’ team? This is just one of several conditions that would make such sex policing impossible.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time people have tried to discredit the success of athletes from marginalized minorities based on half-baked claims of “science.” There is a long history of similarly painting Black athletes as “genetically superior” in an attempt to downplay the effects of their hard work and training.
Recently, some have even harkened back to eras of “separate but equal,” suggesting that transgender athletes should be forced into their own leagues. In addition to all the reasons why this is unnecessary that I’ve already explained, it is also unjust. As we’ve learned from women’s sports leagues, separate is not equal. Female athletes consistently have to deal with fewer accolades, less press coverage and lower pay. A transgender sports league would undoubtedly be plagued with the same issues.
Beyond the trauma of sex-verification exams, these bills would cause further emotional damage to transgender youth. While we haven’t seen an epidemic of transgender girls dominating sports leagues, we have seen high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide attempts. Research highlights that a major driver of these mental health problems is rejection of someone’s gender identity. Forcing trans youth to play on sports teams that don’t match their identity will worsen these disparities. It’s a classic form of transgender conversion therapy, a discredited practice of trying to force transgender people to be cisgender and gender-conforming.
Though this can be hard for cisgender people to understand, imagine someone told you that you were a different gender and then forced you to play on the sports team of that gender throughout all of your school years. You’d likely be miserable and confused.
As a child psychiatry fellow, I spend a lot of time with kids. They have many worries on their minds: bullying, sexual assault, divorcing parents, concerns they won’t get into college. What they’re not worried about is transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams.
Legislators need to work on the issues that truly impact young people and women’s sports—lower pay to female athletes, less media coverage for women’s sports and cultural environments that lead to high dropout rates for diverse athletes—instead of manufacturing problems and “solutions” that hurt the kids we are supposed to be protecting.
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Separate male and female teams is the problem in the first place. It just reinforces the gender binary and makes life more difficult for trans, non binary and intersex people.
Exactly, switch over to leagues based on whatever benchmark makes sense for your sport and call it a day
The types of benchmarking needed to measure an individual athletes potential to ensure they aren’t sandbagging would be too costly to implement at anything but the highest levels of athletics.
It is an incredibly complex solution to a non problem.
Let trans athletes compete with cis athletes.
There simply aren’t enough trans athletes for this to be a problem worth considering at a systemic level. At an individual level, if someone lacks the level of self awareness to enter an event where they consistently beat cis women(like if they were an accomplished cis athlete just a few months into transition), then there can be an individual ruling on that person.
Don’t fall for the conservative trap, their hyperbole is engineered (in part) to produce untenable “solutions” from progressives.
It is a problem systematically already, we're seeing women be pushed from top ranks bit-by-bit. In Chicago, trans women won gold and silver for a biking event. This is going to continue to happen, especially if what trans people are saying is true and there are many more trans people who will be coming out and living how they want.
Trans athletes can compete with biologically-aligned people of the opposite sex in trans-only events, which should be a thing for each sport. This is by far the easiest, most rational decision that doesn't stomp on biological women. Trans men take testosterone, and trans women take estrogen. Let them either compete in the men's division or against each other.
What, exactly, is "untenable" about opening a division for them?
What are biological people? Are there non-biological people?
You're right, I worded that strangely. Changed it to biologically-alligned for clarity.
My loose understanding is that a lot of men's divisions are actually open, while it's women's divisions that are strictly confined to women. For some sports though, there's such a strong sex gap that very few women are realistically competitive with men. Ensuring a division where competitively play is the entire purpose of having women's divisions in the first place.
This obviously depends a lot of the individual sport though. Muscle mass and strength are a lot more pivotal in something like weightlifting or American football than in archery.
Agreed. Another factor is that women's divisions exist in many cases not because men have a competitive advantage, but because the competitions are so male-dominated in terms of culture and number of competitors that women's divisions make the competition more accessible to women. eg, chess. Men aren't better at chess than women, and the men's division is actually open, so the women's division exists because chess has a male-dominated culture and women feel safer being able to compete against only other women.
What are you talking about?
Separate teams are the only thing that lets biological women have any possibility to compete
Biological men are stronger faster and more resistant, this is a fact
Now downvote me to hell and then ask an admin delete my comment for being transphobic
no, they mostly exist to protect cis male egos from the "devastation" of not only competing against, but very possibly being beaten by, women (feel free to look up some of the endless list of examples where a women beat a man/some men, not even in anything physical, so even stuff like chess, so the men proceeded to change the rules, to make sure they could never be hurt like that again, the poor snowflakes)
no it isn't fact, it's a circumstance that has arisen from the discrimination and segregation of women from sports, not some natural or biological fact. Also there are millions and millions of women out there that could easily wipe the floor with any man at literally any sport you test them at, they're just never given a chance, because see aforementioned reason.
So you know you're a wilfully ignorant transphobe, you just can't help yourself but declare it to the world because you simply can't keep all that hate pent up inside your turd of a brain..
Won't see me complaining about the trash taking itself out.. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Wut
Can you name one from all these millions?
I am not even going to reply to the rest of your comment since it doesn't really say anything worth debating
This is a such a terrible take that you are either unhinged from reality or a right-wing troll.
Lol?
We have the whole human history of sports which is very well documented, going against what you are saying.
Did you actual read the studies? Because that is patently false and ignores hormonal effects on the human body. Please actually read and educate yourself on the science. Endocrinology is not something taught in high school biology.
Hey I've seen this line of thinking before!
Just so you understand what logic you are using. Would you tell a commenter like this they need to challenge their beliefs?
Your stance relies on your gut feeling and bias, not historical or biological understanding. I won't spend my time linking studies you won't read, seems like a lot of others have done that already. But the reason you keep getting told you are wrong is because you are literally ignorant of the facts. Not because everyone else is virtue signaling or being more PC like a white nationalist would say.
You should think more critically about your beliefs.
What facts am I ignoring? Link em and I will read them
I think your comment applies to yourself better than to me so here are the links I suggest you to visit:
Marathon world records
200m dash world records
Powerlifting world records
What you will notice if you pay attention is that across history there has never been a moment in which the female record was better than the male one, that is a fact you can very easily verify yourself
This is what my stance relies on, not gut feeling or bias
Those links are missing the point of this thread. We aren't talking about men's world records, we are talking about trans women playing sports.
I'm just gonna link to the last time I talked about this issue.
TL:DR No one is saying testosterone doesn't have an effect. When trans women have been on hormones for two years there is no statistical difference between trans and cis women. Trans women suppress testosterone via medication, which leads to lower levels than the average cis woman.
You are missing the point.
Here is the point he was arguing:
Well, you can look at objective metrics across different racial categories (to the extent that those are even meaningful to begin with, which is incredibly debatable), and you'll some minor trends and statistical noise but nothing super meaningful. And even within those trends, there'll still be so much variation that the predictive power will be very weak.
Whereas males having significantly more muscle mass than females, largely mediated through sex hormones, isn't really something that can be denied if you value objective data at all. If you choose one random cis man and one random cis woman, the man will have more muscular mass and strength than the woman the vast majority of cases, and this has meaningful effects on performance in some sports. You can't really say similar things across racial categories (which, again, do not really have meaningful biological definitions to begin with).
Cringe
And they didn't say we shouldn't have any teams, they said teams not be divided by sex.
Sexual dimorphism is a real thing and the reason they are split in the first place.
i mean, no, that's ahistorical. historically, the reason they are "split" is because men didn't let women do sports for a really long time, and when women began pushing for their own sports, men didn't want them to be the same thing. it wasn't some dispassionate analysis of sexual dimorphism, it was rooted in the culture of misogyny of the time, and backed by deeply held pseudo-scientific beliefs about the fragility of women. they thought that sport, like higher education, literally caused infertility, and used that as a justification to restrict women from those pursuits.
The US women's soccer team, the best female soccer team in the world, has played exhibition games against high school boys and lost badly. The Canadian women's hockey team, the best women's ice hockey team in the world, practices against high school boys, and loses.
There is no rule against women joining the NBA, or NHL, or MLS, women just aren't capable of competing with men at the top levels of sport.
oop! maybe look up the context for that one. in short, it was a scrimmage, and as part of a structured practice routine that the US national women's soccer team participates in as part of a youth soccer training program. not exactly representative of a competitive game, same for the women's hockey team.
that being said, its basically a non sequitur. i'm not denying that physical differences exist, they absolutely do, but the idea that these physical differences are the primary reason our sports are structured the way they are isn't historically accurate. there were potent social forces at work, including social forces which prevented women from participating in sports at all.
in any case, the fact that in some sports, some professional women athletes lost to some high school boy athletes in games that explicitly do not count for competition does not, to me, have some larger implications on the field of women's sports more generally. the unquestioning acceptance of reports on these practice games for fun with children as some kind of proof that female athletes just can't perform as well as men reveals, to me, a tendency towards confirmation bias. tell me, do you know if any prominent men's soccer teams have ever lost to children during a practice match? i certainly don't. exhibition matches aren't newsworthy events. the fact that these ones were has much more to do with validating the ancient belief that men are just better than it does with genuine interest in a demonstration of friendly sport for high school kids.
So they lost on purpose? My goodness, they would not do that, the ridicule is too huge.
And the segregation of sports is the only reason we have paid professional female athletes today. Get rid of sports segregation and only have open leagues (which the "men's" leagues are already), and you will have basically zero professional female athletes left.
And if you don't care about women's teams losing to teenagers, how about the time a low ranked male tennis player destroyed Venus and Serena Williams back to back, because they confidently stated they could beat any man ranked outside the top 200? And losing that was a blow to their reputations, they did not lose on purpose, they truly tried to win.
if you can't conceive of the difference between a practice game and a game for competition, especially in the context of an explicitly educational goal, you can have fun with that. the idea that the segregation of sports is the only reason we have professional women athletes is a hilarious misunderstanding of why people like sports, and why women's sports have been growing in popularity for decades. the idea that single games in single sports indicate anything substantive about "women's sports" as a concept is silly.
you can live in your bubble of ignorance all you like, and insist that centuries old appeals to the superiority of the male body mean much at all to a modern context. the reality is, these stories about women losing matches? they aren't relevant. i could not give a single shit. ranking people on numbered lists is not the only appeal of sports for audiences or athletes. Serena Williams is still a popular and well liked athlete, and you didn't even give that dude's name, so whatever reputational damage seems to have both not affected her rise to prominence, and not boosted her opponents reputation, so like, who fucking cares?
why do you know so much about this? what relevance does being able to tell people all the times women lost matches in sporting events have to your daily life? to what end are you telling people these things? the reality is, you don't value women's sports, so you've scoured the internet for justifications for that belief. but people who do find value in these things don't look at things the same way. weird ass comparisons trying to judge the objective winner by category mean fuckall to me, i like watching cool people do cool shit with their cool bodies, and the fact that you can't conceive of people being interested in the physical skill of people that don't look like you is firmly a you problem.
Only because a women's division exists where she can shine. In the open division she would not be good enough to gain any fame, and be just as forgotten as Karsten Braasch.
Because people like you keep arguing that women can compete in the open leagues, and we only have women's leagues to segregate them from the men. This is not true, women are perfectly free to join the NBA and compete against them men, but at that level of competition they would just lose.
I value women's sports far more than you do, because I understand their need to exist. Without them female athletes would not win in the majority of sports.
hypothetically, because we don't live in a world where women's sports don't exist.
i'm not arguing that women can compete in open leagues, im disputing the assertion that women's leagues only exist to segregate them from men. no. there are quite a few reasons women's sports exist in the form they do today, and a pretty big reason was sexism. ignoring the long history of female exclusion from sports leaves you blind to the modern realities of sexism and misogyny in sports.
hypothetically, because we don't live in a world where women's sports don't exist.
you can confidently assert that women wouldn't have a place in sports if we did things differently all you want, but... uh, we don't do things differently, have never done things differently, and if it were up to you will never do things differently. women's sports and men's sports are segregated, and have been since women started to do sports. there was never a time when women and men did sports together, and it was later decided that women just couldn't compete. the assumption was that they couldn't, even before women started to have professional sports, and honestly before we even had a solid scientific understanding of human sexual dimorphism. the idea that women's sports came out some rational notion of fairness is wrong. its simply not what the historical arguments against having women in sports ever were.
Once again, women are allowed in the "men's" leagues. You can damn well bet if any woman was competitive they would be drafted into those leagues. They are not, because the difference between men and women in sports is the equivalent of several years worth of high dose steroids.
Women's sports exist to give them a professional platform where they can be competitive and entertaining, because in the open leagues they would just get crushed in most sports.
Let's make a bet. We combine men and women's sports. There will eventually be no women in sports, because, even though the top ranking women can beat some, or even most, men, they cannot beat the top men.
If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't see such a wide gap in points/speed/weights/whatever between top men and women in their respective sport.
There may still be trans people in said sport (though I doubt it, but maybe), but there will definitely be no women.
Let's say this does happen. Then what do we do for women in sports, who are now, by default, completely excluded?
I'm sorry, but its ridiculous and a very obvious ploy to accuse my thoughts as sexism. Its not sexist to understand biological reality. Wishing it weren't the case doesn't do anything, nor does simply pretending biological differences don't exsist. You can make a statement out loud as much as you'd like, but it doesn't make it true.
In modern society, women have been more than welcome to compete in men's sports. How they compete with one another is a reality check to anyone who won't deny the truth. For example, the Chicago marathon world record holders has a max difference of a full 13 minutes between top male and female category runners. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_winners_of_the_Chicago_Marathon
Can women compete in the men's division of running for the Chicago marathon? Absolutely. But why would they when there is absolutely zero chance of them placing? To put it into even more perspective, the top woman runner would have placed 21st had she run in the men's division. So, Zero. Chance. of placing at all.
You can see women slowly being pushed out by trans women athletes in real time now, in biking, again in Chicago, where trans women athletes placed silver and gold. It's only going to take one more joining in to push biological women out of placing in the competition for good, and then women will be back to why we created women's division in the first place.
Females rarely take up F1 racing because of how hard it is on your body. During a race a driver is exposed to up to five times gravity pushing down on them, making it harder to breathe, pump blood around their body and move their arms and legs. Oh, and to top it all off, they are sitting in a position which means that the feet are raised up in line with the chest. So to pretend we're all just too scared of men to join in is very disingenuous. The reality is, due to how severe the sport is on the body, women just won't match up to men when it comes to racing. There was a recent change in effect where every team will have a female racer... of course, racing in a women's division, because they'd be obliterated in the regular division.
I'm not fighting you. Plain and simple. There's no ploy here. Learn to be a human being and talk about things.
I'm not fighting. I've used no personal attacks. You've accused my rational as coming from a sexist mindset, which is a fighting tactic, but I won't do that back because I don't want to fight, I want to have a discussion where we make the best arguments we can and see which ones hold up. Calling out a tactic isn't fighting you, it's bringing awareness to what's happening and why. If you were offended by the word "ploy," I apologize, but it seems a bit hypocritical since you accused me of sexism.
Saying all that, do you have any pushback against what I've laid out? From where I stand, I feel like the arguments I've made are rational and sound.
When would a woman have any chance in a marathon or anything related? This looks like a proposal from someone who never watched any sport event
Motorsport like F1 leans very heavily on strength and endurance. You also need to weigh I think at least 80 kg? That's already rare for a woman to reach as weight.
It's one of the most physical demanding sports you can do.
the idea that the only solution to the gender based segregation of sports is to make a single sports category for every person is disingenuous. weight classes in wrestling exist. there are plenty of ways to organize sports that don't collapse the diversity of the human condition into a single ranked competitive event, and there are plenty of people who currently engage in co-ed sports for recreational purposes that like it just fine. there is a small minority of athletes that compete for the highest possible performance, but the vast vast majority of people who do sports are just regular folks, and don't need arbitrary gender barriers to have a good time.
the rules set out to make competition at the highest levels of sport possible are not by default the best way for regular human people to do sport for their own pleasure. things that could be exclusionary in a ranked competition are not so in the context of average human performance, or even below average human performance. the Paralympics is a fantastic event that showcases the physical talents of people with disabilities. the specific events are tailored to the limitations of the athletes, and it's great! its great that even people who have more physical limitations than the average have a space to push their bodies to their personal limits, and it showcases how arbitrary those limitations actually are. the diversity of disability is vast. some of these athletes bodies look very different from their competitors, and that comes with specific physical limitations that are unique to that person. they still do sports.
i think we forget sometimes how utterly arbitrary sports are as an activity. its a game, for fun. anything, literally any set of arbitrary rules that involve physical movement can constitute a sport. and while we can insist that in our most special extra serious sports only certain kinds of people get to play, that doesn't mean those restrictions are any less arbitrary, or that they have to be that way. and if you're playing a fun game, and somebody who doesn't have the same kind of body wants to play the fun game with you, saying that because the way their body works it won't be fair is still not a proper justification for their exclusion, because we can change the rules whenever we want to.
Yes, weight classes in wrestling exsist, and we still have women's division, because women and men in the same weight class would still have the outcome of men placing top outcomes in those weight classes.
The issue isn't the mostly regular people just sporting around for fun, the issue is that sports plays a big role in how a person's life might turn out. To be winning these competitions means money, scholarships, endorsements, careers. To be at that level, kids today start getting pretty serious in middle school, and definitely serious in high school, due to the scholarship/school acceptance possibilities for universities, universities scout from high schools, and pro leagues scout from universities, and careers are made there. These are big deals and big opportunities, so to say "its just fun." Is downplaying the serious of it. That's not even getting into the severe dangers that can happen to women physically by going against a man in team sports. Even sports like soccer can be dangerous in that way, far more than what we deal acceptable.
Disabilities in humans are still an outlier, which is why we have a whole seperate competitive field for them to play in. It wouldn't be fair to match them with those without disabilities.
So why, if the trans population is exploding, don't we have divisions specifically for all trans people? Have a trans division, have them play each other, which would allow women, men and trans people the competitive ability to place in their respective categories.
Anything humans do, if you break it down enought, can become arbitrary. That's not a reason to push people out of sports, and again, sports at these levels arent for fun, for the players, its a lifelong persuit that tales a ton of effort and sacrifice. Billions of dollars, scholarships, careers.
There are ways to include trans people in sports without pushing out biological women, so why must the changes we make push towards that inevitability? Why do biological women have to be trampled on to make room for others when it very clearly doesn't have to be like that?
explicitly my argument is speaking about the way we construct sports as an activity, not sports as industry. the people for whom sports defines one's life path are firmly the minority of people who do sports. and like, the laws we're talking about aren't affecting trans people's ability to do professional sports in most cases, because those professional organizations aren't under the jurisdiction of anti-trans state laws, they're almost exclusively impacting children playing sports in school or for regional competitions. if you aren't interested in engaging with the argument as it exists, and with the people who are primarily affected by laws that prevent trans children from doing sports with their peers, i'm not interested in talking further on the matter.
because the trans population is not "exploding". that's the current moral panic going around, but the visibility of trans people in media, especially right wing media, vastly overestimates how many trans people there are. there are more trans people who are out, but its still like less than 2% of the population. of that population that are athletes, even less, and there are close to no trans athletes competing at the high level you insist this conversation must primarily address. segregating trans people into their own divisions would mean trans people don't get to play, because there aren't enough people who are trans and doing sports to make that happen. your solution is to marginalize trans people out of the sports everybody else plays, and that sucks.
the only way you've proposed to "include" trans people in sports marginalizes them and prevents them participating with their peers, all in service of a a fear that changing the rules to be more inclusive would push out "biological women" in some hypothetical future you think is inevitable. but the reality is, there is no actual proof that allowing trans people to participate as they see fit would actually lead to the outcome you're describing, because in many cases, they have been participating and have not been sweeping the competition.
in any case, nobody who advocates for restructuring sports away from the gender binary sees women being pushed out of sports as a desirable or even achievable outcome. the idea that we would change the rules towards a policy which does such a thing and not continue changing the rules until we arrive at a more equitable and inclusive outcome is a fantasy, almost entirely sustained by right wing reactionaries fear mongering about social change. nobody actually seriously considering the inequities of modern sports is blind to the physical differences between men and women's bodies, and they, again, are not proposing a flattening of sporting events into a single category containing all people, just a diversity of categories representing the diversity of the human condition, and allowing people with similar bodies to compete against each other without strict delineations of gender. unless you genuinely believe that all male athletes can outperform all female athletes in all sports, which is a vast overestimation of human sexual dimorphism, there is room for co-ed competition that accommodates people according to their individual skill and strength, rather than according to whether or not they have the right genitals.
"But think of the children!" They will cry. "Boys might touch girls!"
They always seem to be thinking about children...
I hate this new ridiculous argument, trying to tie in worrying about children's experiences to pedophilia, as if even thinking about them and how best to support/safeguard them is pedophilic in nature. 🙄 it's very easy to see through.