Sorry but I’m not sure she’s acting in good faith here. She won a men’s race only a month ago.
Quite possibly. For the record I’m not disagreeing with the decision but it’s a proper minefield all the same.
I don’t think the reasoning is that important. There might be somebody who transitions to win, doesn’t really matter to me, that’s not on my radar as I suspect that number to be vanishingly small as you say. But spending 18 years (as an example) building an athletic body (from a huge birth advantage) and then transitioning gives an advantage in early 20s that can’t be waved away to ensure equality. Like most things, I don’t see it as being fraught with difficulty. Have separate events for trans athletes. Some might consider that discrimination, I call it the concept of a level playing field. Look (no pun intended) at all the categories in the Para Olympics. A blind sprinter is never competing against somebody in a wheel chair.
No of course not. But we need to always bear in mind, through this debate, that transgender people competing in sports is not the common experience of people transitioning.
No but it’s very much the experience of female athletes who’ve trained for days / weeks / months / years only to be thwarted by somebody with an unassailable genetic advantage.
That’s very sad for them. But we should remember it’s very uncommon, and the vast, vast majority of transgender people aren’t thinking ‘Brilliant. That’s me transitioned. Now I think I’ll go dominate women’s weightlifting’.
But the law allows it to happen. Can we agree it’s a shit law?
Gender is a social construct. Biological sex is not. Aside for intersex people, you are either born male or female and that should be how these athletes should be organised in competitive sports.
It’s a sensitive subject, but the answers are simple if people want it to be. Same with toilets. If you can piss standing up at a urinal (or could if you were able to stand as obviously many people can’t) , then use the mens toilet. If you can’t, then use the womens toilet.
You can argue though with an uneducated person’s understanding of biology. This is a complex situation and anyone who thinks the solution is “simple” is a fool, or at least plays one on the internet.
There is a LOT that is still unanswered about this situation and I understand how situations like this make people uneasy, but that does no mean that one’s gut reaction, often based on a science they dont (refuse to) understand, is valid.
What we know is that if a person experiences elevations in testosterone over a period of time, once they return to a hormonal baseline they can have a muscle building advantage over people who never experienced that periodic increase. However, that does not extend well to fully transitioned athletes who have stabilized after a period of feminzing therapy. The evidence is limited, but most of it suggests that people who trans women eventually settle at the same relatively level of competitiveness as they had when competing as male. All the famous cases where these trans women are held up as having a significant advantage really cherry pick the information.
I’m not sure it is right to simply say that the absence of evidence of their competitive advantage should allow them to compete. this is what the current IOC guidance is based on, and while its goal is admirable, a focus on inclusion, Im not sure that is where the burden of proof should lie. However, mine is a conclusion based on not knowing what the fair outcome is when the science is uncertain, as opposed to basing a conclusion on an invented certainty (with demonstrated inaccuracies) of how the science works.
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The problem is you are “asiding” a far greater percentage of the population that you appreciate and thus relying a biological rule that is far more a guideline than a law.
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Good job neither of us fall into that category. If I could be arsed, I’d dig out my high school end of year photo. You’d see that all the tallest and largest people were boys. The smaller and slimmer were girls. There’s your advantage and it doesn’t take education to see the blatant truth. But I’m sure there are studies that prove primary level biology to be wrong.
Well said.
I would think that in a lot of sports anyone who was born(biologically) male would have a significant advantage over those born (biologically) female.Isn’t that why at a certain age boys and girls can no longer play on the same teams in many team sports.
If we were to take running or swimming 100 meters how many men in the history of those sports have been faster than the fastest woman ever in those 2 cases.Would we be in the thousands of male sprinters who were faster than the fastest woman ever.Is it the same for swimming 100 meters?
Are we talking about the actual sporting competition or just assigning the winners based on who is the tallest?
This issue has 3 separate questions:
- What do we know of the science
- Based on what we know, what is the correct policy
- What do we do, who do we focus on protecting, when questions are not able to be confidently answered?
There are a wide range of reasonable positions for the latter 2 questions and I will rarely have issue with someone who sees those differently from me. However, a lot of the time in my experience, a lot of these disagreements are based on a lack of understanding in the science. Unfortunately, it is often based on a refusal to refine one’s understanding of the issue even after enthusiastically participating in these conversations over and over again over a period of years. Not intuitively understanding something that is so profoundly different than your own lived experience is very natural. Spending time trying to understand something that goes against things our eyes tell us is self evident and still struggling is also understandable. In many ways understanding issues of Gender nonconformity/non-binary is much like getting your head around quantum physics. Traditional physics passes the eye test. Quantum physics not only makes no sense, but argues against your lived experiences. What I find interesting, and would ask you to question why it is so, that you enthusiastically take the time to try to get a layman’s understanding of QP, but are content to retain the same simplistic understanding of biological sex and gender you had 4 years ago.
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Yes, but trans women who undergo transition are not men so the analogy is not a helpful one.
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i don’t really understand the response,can you explain?
Your post is comparing the self-evident differences between cis men and cis women. You seem to be assuming that trans females are analogous to cis boy/men. They are not. The process of transition does change them. How much is not clear, but the current IOC position that no presumption of competitive advantage over cis women is closer to what the evidence shows than is the assumption they retain the advantage they would have had as a cis man.
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No, I’m “asiding” between 0.018% and 1.7% of the population. I appreciate that’s a very low number. Particularly when applied to the realistic number of sports people for whom it would ever actually come up as any kind of issue.
Bloody hell, I’m agreeing with Boris but I’ll caveat that by saying top level sport. The performance edge just makes a mockery of drug testing designed to ensure that someone isn’t gaining an advantage through some special supplements.
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