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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts
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What sports would it work in? Do you think people will care about the best tennis player that weighs 140 pounds? The best 240 pound soccer players? The fastest 130 pound swimmer? No one wants to watch any of that. It barely works for boxing.
All that aside from the fact that you're still pretty much ruining competitive sports for most cis women by doing it. The reason there's a female "insert sport here" competitive league to begin with is so many women have a reason to compete and can win. A 150 pound trained male athlete will still wipe the floor with a 150 pound female athlete. It's far, far, from just a weight thing. The Williams sisters were the best female tennis players the world knew, and they went out and proved they couldn't beat a man that was ranked over 200th. The world champion austrailian female soccer team couldn't beat a boys highschool team. The fastest woman to ever run the 1500m did it in 3:49. A 5' 9" guy did it in 3:26.
Weight and size is only a little portion of physical differences.
If there's so many Trans athletes, why don't they just have a category of their own?
Because there aren't, and this whole thing is much ado about nothing.
But hey, it keeps the morons distracted and voting, so that's a plus.
Except that isn't true. Men are more stable due to hip width, their hearts move more blood, their arms and hands are larger/longer, and their lungs hold more air. None of that goes away.
It isn't that there's tons of trans athletes... It's that even at fairly low levels of sport there are currently more options available to people with disabilities to participate then there are of people of intersex and trans backgrounds. In a lot of cases tracking performances of trans athletes they aren't dominating. There's stories of transfem athletes who regularly sit around getting 15th place but after coming in first one time the entire sporting becomes hostile to trans people.
In civil rights discussions there's a concept of rights of participation. The concept being that being barred from social, political or recreational spheres creates outsized harms on the ability to make the advantageous connections others are given free access to and creates classes of segregation.
There's also a catch 22 situation. If someone opts to go through a trans puberty instead of a natal one there is no meaningful difference to speak of between the physicality of trans athletes and cis ones. If forced to stay inside their original sex segregated sport not only are trans people being being told in no uncertain terms that society does not accept their new status regardless of parity, they essentially become isolated inside the sporting body. Either you have someone whose body is feminine placed in a sport with only cis males to be compared to or you have a masculine body placed inside a group with all cis women and both will be framed out of being taken at all seriously inside the entire body of that sport. A lot of trans people can't participate in sport not because they aim to be picked for any of the social leg ups excellence in sport provides... But for any of the regular benefits of just participating.
It creates a fair sting to have a government force your choice of initial puberty that neither you or your doctors and parents thought was a good idea... and then sit back and watch the rest of society constantly punish and isolate you for going through that puberty by then treating you as a logistical social problem for the rest of your life.