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Perestroika posted:That touches on a relevant point: Sports, particularly at the higher levels, plain aren't fair. There are dozens if not hundreds of external and internal factors that will give one competitor an advantage over another. Wealth is a big obvious one, for a start. A wealthy athlete will have more time to devote to their training, with better facilities and trainers, and that's often reflected in the backgrounds of many top athletes. Physiological factors naturally also play into it, of course. Height, width, hypermobility, overall proportions, hormone levels, and so on can all make a major difference depending on your discipline. Michael Phelps is a common example in this case, as he's basically a walking set of ideal genetic factors for swimming fast. I'm quoting this post because it's an issue that doesn't get brought up often, in debates on this subject, and it deserves to be emphasized. Here's another issue that I just don't see mentioned very often: women's sports are almost always underfunded, underpromoted, neglected and ignored in comparison to men's sports. This core problem is absolutely not new, and makes it harder for women to get into sports, whether for recreation or as a profession. There are fewer opportunities, and the money isn't there. Making women's sports inclusive of trans women should bring a boost in the popularity of women's sports - more sponsors, more advertising opportunities, more money, more sports scholarships and therefore more opportunities for women and girls to compete. Trans women athletes are such a microscopic percentage of women athletes that the vast majority of these new beneficiaries will be cis women athletes. Why am I convinced that inclusive women's sports will boost the popularity (and money spent on) women's sports? Because the younger generations hold inclusivity as a virtue more than ever before. That's an ongoing culture change (in the USA at least, and I think in some other parts of the Americas and Europe? I'm not as sure about the cultures of nations beyond the Americas and Europe), and anyone who doesn't get onboard will see their profits decline as the older generations die off.
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Apr 6, 2022 18:51
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Jaxyon posted:I'd to point out 7 pages in not a single person has disputed my first post in the thread with any substance(data, studies, statistics) whatsoever including the person who posted frankly horrible things at people in their PMs before getting banned. Okay, I'll say it. Your original post is bad by D&D standards, not because it says YES, but because it has absolutely no information whatsoever, not even anything about the Olympic Games' current rules under which trans athletes may complete. Those rules used to require gonadectomy for trans women athletes, but not anymore. Now, the rules for trans women athletes require having spent a certain period of time living as a woman, and no more than a certain amount of testosterone in the body for a specific length of time prior to competition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_sports#Olympics In non-contact casual and youth sports, there may be no need for any qualifiers to the YES, because no one's physical safety is at undue risk. When considering casual or youth contact sports like rugby or possibly wrestling, there may be a need for qualifiers to the YES, simply because greater physical strength is an issue that could lead to accidental injury in these sports. The qualifiers may be something in regard to whether a trans girl or trans woman is on puberty blockers/female hormones, and for how long. Or they may just be something like boxing's weight classes, which aren't inherently sex-based but have a similar goal of "reduce the risk that someone who is bigger will badly injure someone else". This WebMD article is the best I have for a more nuanced perspective than just YES https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20210715/do-trans-women-athletes-have-advantages A notable quote from this article: "A number of states that have introduced bills to ban trans women in sports have said they're trying to save women’s sports. But in addition to these bans, they're also introducing legislation to try to limit the lives of trans people in other ways. They're showing their true colors." The article refers to an institution called Women's Sports Policy Working Group, whom I had never heard of before today. Here is their website: https://womenssportspolicy.org/ A quote from their website is, "Girls’/Women’s Competitive Sport Needs Safeguards and Trans Girls/Women Need to be Included with Appropriate Conditions." I don't know enough about this group to endorse them, but I do think their perspective is worth investigating.
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Apr 8, 2022 21:24
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empty whippet box posted:I think that we need to talk about how we talk about trans people here and a thread about that would be a lot more productive than a thread about trans athletes right now. Trans people deserve better than threads like this, where the people who hate them speak their ugly views loud and clear. It's great that those people are getting punished and I know that mods can't read threads 24/7 and simply aren't always on to take immediate action. But we can do better, and this website - specifically dnd - can be better at having these discussions than anywhere else on the internet if we can work it out. I want to second this general opinion. I won't be sending anything for an OP because I don't feel qualified to take on responsibility for that. I don't know any trans people in real life. Almost everything I know about trans people has come from reading stuff on the internet. This includes testimonies of people who have transitioned and are happier because of it (there are a lot of these), and testimonies of people who transitioned and were *unhappy* with it, and subsequently chose to detransition. Testimonies of detransitioning after going on hormones or having surgery are very rare, as far as I can tell. Some of the posts in this thread that are the most educational and insightful have to do with the experience of being trans, and don't really have a lot to do with women's sports. EDIT: I would also suggest that a D&D thread dedicated to trans issues have a sizeable team of moderators. Moderating a thread like that is going to be a hard, time-consuming job, and probably more than one or a couple people can reasonably be expected to do in their spare time. Victar fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 16:14
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Trollologist posted:That a 19 year old that just recently started the MTF journey maybe shouldn't compete in women's sports. Or maybe that if they do, they'll have an advantage in doing so. Middle. I'm 99% certain this is trolling, because it's posted by a person named "Trollologist" who just posted a lot of other inflammatory stuff in this thread, but on the off-chance that a lurker is actually thinking about this, I'll take a shot at replying to it. There's a important distinction between "competitive" sports - playing professionally, playing for money, playing for scholarships - and casual sports. To the best of my knowledge, ALL competitive sports either completely exclude trans women, or have strict requirements that trans women must adhere to before they can compete. I posted the Olympic guidelines for trans women athletes earlier (they're on Wikipedia). Other competitive/professional sports leagues have various requirements about testosterone levels or time spent living as a woman, stuff like that. No trans girl/woman can start playing in women's sports *competitively* on their first day of taking female hormones. It just isn't allowed when money is at stake. If anyone can find an exception to this then I guess post your evidence, but in such an unlikely case, know that you're posting an extreme outlier situation. Casual sports are another matter. A bowling league with friends, physical education class, an after-school sports club - there's really no need to care about testosterone levels in most situations when money isn't at stake. There's no reason why non-contact casual sports shouldn't be inclusive. Even if the included trans people have just recently started to take hormones. Casual sports are supposed to be about fun, fitness, friendship, and good sportsmanship, and there's already a naturally huge variance in the physical ability of ordinary cisgender casual sports players. The one exception that comes to my mind is contact casual sports like rugby or wrestling - there's no money involved, but given the risk of injury, perhaps some kind of strength test class or weight class guidelines might be useful. Such guidelines would also reduce risk of injury between cis women if one cis woman happens to be much physically stronger than another. Strength/weight class guidelines could prove particularly useful for casual school contact sports - parents do worry about their kids getting injured, and sometimes really terrible accidents do happen. Victar fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Apr 10, 2022 |
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Apr 10, 2022 01:26
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One notable observation I have come across is that there are no guidelines about natural testosterone levels in competitive men's sports. As long as the man isn't doping, no one cares if he naturally has a lot more testosterone than other men.
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Apr 10, 2022 02:16
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thehandtruck posted:Yeah. If anyone actually cared about any sports at all a solution could be to create divisions based on factors such as bone-density etc, if that's what chuds keep complaining about. Having a gender divide has always felt weird to me, and sometimes it exists in stuff like Chess which is pretty funny. Yet another solution is no divisions whatsoever, just one huge pool of participants. My first reaction to this was "Wait, what? Chess is segregated by gender?" After looking into it for all of thirty seconds - I'm not really that interested in chess - my conclusion is that chess is only partly segregated. Maybe chess used to be different, but today the biggest professional tournaments are open to both genders. It's just that very few women compete in these tournaments, and the ones who do almost never earn a high rank. Meanwhile, there are some smaller, women-only professional chess tournaments. This article is from 2018 but it does go in depth on the issue, with fascinating stories about high-level female chess players. https://www.si.com/more-sports/2018/12/17/lisa-lane-hou-yifan-womens-chess-gender-inequality-world-championships
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Apr 10, 2022 17:47
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When I browsed Caster Semenya's Wikipedia entry, I learned that is that she is an intersex woman. She was born without a womb, and instead of ovaries, she has internal testes that naturally give her much more testosterone that other women have. She tried to take testosterone suppressants in accordance with the Olympic guidelines, and couldn't stay on them because they made her feel really sick. She is unquestionably a woman; she was assigned female at birth, has lived her whole life as a woman, and identifies as a woman (a quote from her is "I am a woman and I am fast.") The Olympic guidelines are unfair to her, especially since other people who naturally have exceptional physical gifts get a pass, notably Phelps. The guidelines probably were made expressly to target her, with the side effect of setting an arbitrary requirement for trans women to compete. I have no idea what better Olympic guidelines would be, though. I'm not an expert in any of this stuff.
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Apr 11, 2022 05:07
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Fluffdaddy posted:The only combat sport that I know of that does not have weight Divisions is sumo. Unfortunately they also do not recognize women's sumo as legit, which is its own can of sexist worms. From what little I know of sumo, practicing it at a professional level is very hard on the body - the heavy weight of sumo wrestlers gives them all sorts of health problems and shortens their lives. Maybe it's for the best if sumo doesn't get any more popular among anyone, especially women.
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Apr 11, 2022 14:00
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