krooslove posted:

This thread never improved.

abigserve posted:

Trans women are women so they should be allowed to compete in women's sports. What a truly astounding conclusion

Some people have a biological advantage in sport and that's just the way it fuckin goes. You don't see anyone pushing to ban Serena Williams from playing tennis just because she can hit a tennis ball far harder than the other women do you? Maybe you do, who fuckin knows

Victar posted:

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 a sport *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.

CommieGIR posted:

Its the same, tired story: Nearly all gender divisions in sports is about "We can't have A GIRL showing up our top male athletes/chess players/shooters/etc."

Its almost entirely misogyny wrapped up in statistical gamesmanship about "Natural advantages"

VitalSigns posted:

PT6A posted:

Here's a question: are there are biological conditions/traits that a man could have, that would be judged to give such an advantage in a sport that they are simply banned from competition in the issue of fairness? If such a condition were found, such that men with the condition were 1700 times over-represented in a certain competition, would that be unfair?

PT6A posted:

Yeah, for what it's worth: Caster Semenya holds no world records, in any event. This woman, who is apparently simply too good to be allowed, has been bested by another woman in every event she contests.

I don't think you can reasonably call that an advantage that is so overpowering that it simply cannot be allowed. She is very good as what she does, and as a result she is extremely difficult to defeat. Well, that's elite sport for you!

moonmazed posted:

you're getting bogged down in numbers that don't actually matter at all

Jaxyon posted:

Also I'd like to add, while the discussion of Caster Semenya's treatment does touch on some issues that crossover with transgender athletes, she is not transgender. I feel it's important to add that because sex and gender issues are frequently confused, as are intersex and transgender issues.

A big flaming stink posted:

like do we really have to pretend any more that the IAAF isnt explicitly trying to enforce white supremacy by banning caster semenya? its so loving obvious.

Timeless Appeal posted:

I think that the gender binary has indeed disproportionately impacted cis-Black women in diminishment of their gender. A lot of our standards of beauty and the expectations of what a woman should be are interwoven with whiteness and recent Western cultural trends.

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

Unless I’m misunderstanding what is being said, why can’t it be both?

It’s just a perfect example of how arbitrary rules are made by elites in a thing that can never be “fair” (sports) as a means to discriminate the already disenfranchised.

It’s personally my shortcut example to determine if someone is a piece of poo poo racist and transphobe, especially those that consider themselves on the liberal end of the spectrum.

VitalSigns posted:

I guess that depends on whether one of the IAAF officials making the rules saying that there's so much inbreeding in 'developing countries' that they have to keep a closer eye on sex disorders is a "total assault" or not but there's clearly more than just hatred of intersex or trans people going on here



Like I don't know what a "total assault" is but saying there's so much inbreeding outside of Europe that you gotta look out is pretty drat bad imo

E: the government of South Africa has also objected to how racist the IAAF and IOC are being, and I feel like the African National Congress probably has more experience with this kind of thing than white goons idk, I'm gonna lean a little on their side I hope that's okay

Dog King posted:

If by non-transitioning you mean not engaging in hormone therapy, yes. They'd annihilate, but like I've been saying that's a problem with having gender divisions.

Dog King posted:

There plenty of anthropometrics you could use for elite running. They'd differ between marathon running and sprinting.

General:
- Ratio of leg length to overall height
- Q-angle or other measure of pelvic mechanical advantage (this is the one that differs most between men and women)

Sprinting:
- Height
- Fast twitch muscle fiber mass

Marathon:
- Somatype (higher points for ecto)
- Slow twitch muscle fiber mass

It would have some divisions that had more men or more women but none of them would exclusively be men or women. You could also have more divisions this way, allowing more people to compete meaningfully, like they do in combat sports because of weight divisions.

Colonel Cool posted:

I suppose what I'm trying to do in this thread is form an opinion about the topic that I'm not an expert on. I'm not asking questions like "what should we do in sports if trans women turn out to have a noticeable advantage?" rhetorically, I want to have an answer to that question, for carrying outside of this thread to other people I talk to elsewhere.

But I'm sorry, I shouldn't have implied that there's no value in having entirely theoretical discussions about topics that aren't going to be as impactful in the real world. They can be interesting subjects too, and I didn't mean to sound like I was trying to say they shouldn't be discussed at all.

Dog King posted:

No you're good, I hadn't posted it in the thread before because it's doesn't matter for the point I'm making. Here are the two most recent reviews of I know of:

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503/

quote:

Before her own transition in 2004, Harper expected that her 10,000-meter race time might increase by "a minute or two" as her testosterone level dropped and she slowed. But in less than a year, Harper was running a full 5 minutes slower than her personal best. "It just blew me away, and it very much piqued my interest as a scientist."

In 2005, Harper realized her experience wasn't unique after reading an article in Runner's World about another transgender female runner who had also become significantly slower. But when Harper searched for studies about the physiology of transitioning, she found none. So on nights and weekends, she began to moonlight on a research project.

Harper searched for transgender female distance runners willing to share race times from before and after their transitions. The transgender population, even now, tends to be "small and secretive," Harper says, and it took 7 years of contacting athletes through Yahoo and Facebook groups to collect data from eight runners. All the women had undergone hormone therapy to bring their testosterone levels in line with typical female levels. In Harper's study, titled simply "Race Times for Transgender Athletes" and published in 2015 in the little-known Journal of Sporting Cultures and Identities, she showed that all but one person ran substantially slower after transitioning.

Harper also calculated each subject's age grade, a common metric in track and field and distance running that reflects an athlete's performance compared with the fastest known time by someone of the same age and sex. Harper showed that the athletes' age grades before and after hormone therapy remained nearly the same. That is, the women were as competitive with their age- and sex-matched peers as they had been when competing against men. They weren't, in other words, likely to dominate women's races. "No one had previously looked at actual performance of transgender athletes pre- and posttransition," Vilain says.

Harper has since shown similar results for a transgender rower, a cyclist, and a sprinter. Together, the findings make a case that previous exposure to male levels of testosterone does not confer an enduring athletic advantage.

Miss Broccoli posted:

I want to ask why you feel the need to continue to refer to transgender women as biological men. Particularly after being (indirectly) called on it. In addition to this you seem to ignore all the evidence pointed your way about how in a huge, majority even, number of sports trans people don't have meaningfully unfair advantages that are impossible for their cis counterparts to achieve.

Do you have an ulterior motive here? It seems that you just don't like trans women in particular. It seems that you choose not to engage with any evidence to the contrary and want to hyperfocus down in on anything that will give you a foothold for why trans women in particular should not be allowed. Why are you doing this.

Are transgender women women, just like cisgender women are, brake for moose?

Miss Broccoli posted:

Are transgender women women, just like cisgender women are, brake for moose?

Colonel Cool posted:

Checking the post under it...

PT6A posted:

And after that, to explain why such a physical advantage is not tolerable in competition while essentially all other physical advantages are.

As someone who was born with a disability, let me disabuse everyone of the notion that sports ever is, was, or will be a level playing field. It's not, and the idea that it is or should be is based around a very specific idea of what a "normal" person is.

jarofpiss posted:

Cease to Hope posted:

Hawkperson posted:

I’m curious to know if there is an elite trans athlete/competitor who has been excluded from competition. There’s no doubt it happens passively and indirectly. But it seems to me like the people who are actually being currently and directly affected by policies trying to address trans people are 1) elite cis women such as Caster Semenya and 2) non- elite trans kids who just want to play some sportsball. The only trans adult athlete I can think of in this category is the trans man who can’t get a boxing match. Is there anyone else?

Hawkperson posted:

Yeah, that’s who I was thinking of too. It’s just strange to me that we spend all these words discussing the nuances of elite trans women in sport when it seems like that is largely a solved problem, and the real actual current real-life problems are about elite trans men, elite cis women, and trans children.

Hawkperson posted:

Do you have an example of guidelines constantly changing in elite sport? My vague understanding from reading this thread is that guidelines for trans participants in elite sports were largely hashed out in the 80s/90s and have mostly stayed the same. Not that these guidelines aren’t unscientific or in need of scrutiny (see: the rules harming Caster Semenya)

Total agreement that elite trans athletes have to endure way too much poo poo. Just largely doesn’t currently seem to be related to official guidelines in their sports.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

This thread just seems like a honeypot because there is nothing to debate or discuss, minus the current state of affairs. Trans women and men should be able to compete as their identified gender. period full stop no exclusions.