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Genuinely don't know how I feel about the "trans women in sports". On one hand, it is a valid concern for a recently transitioned player to compete in some events, but on the other, I can totally see younger girls see more women at i.e. the skatepark and it encourages them to give it a try too
Recreational sports should have no boundaries. When you get into professional sports, the topic becomes a lot more dicey.
Especially when there's money on the line.
I just don't get professional sports.
IMHO sports should only be for fun.
If you dont have professional sports, you end up with sports being dominated by rich kids, who can afford to not work and fully focus on the sports, while other athletes have to work full time still.
Sports are an entertainment for many people, and why should actors, musicians, comedians and other entertainers make a living, but athletes shouldn't, even though they have to put in the same effort and time?
Sports at the top level already are dominated by rich kids. Wealth is actually more likely to lead to athletic advantages than being a trans woman.
Hmm, this link might be dead. Search for "Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport - Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport" and it should pop up.
More:
https://news.osu.edu/want-to-play-college-sports-a-wealthy-family-helps/
The Income Gap Is Becoming a Physical-Activity Divide https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/health/sports-physical-education-children.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
There's generally rules of the "have to be on HRT for X months" kind which is perfectly sensible: Your body doesn't change the second you come out, or decide to swallow pills.
Then, all the data we have says that middling athletes stay middling after transitioning, bad ones stay bad and great ones stay great, that's enough for fairness given that we don't disqualify Michael Phelps for being half fish. All those genetic advantages he has would carry over if he were to transition and he'd dominate the female league not because he transitioned but because he's a genetic freak.
If you think that people transition just to have an advantage I don't know what to tell you either. I'll believe it when I see Matt Walsh do it, on camera, under doctor's supervision. If that clown with all his hatred can't do it with ideological fuel then noone can.
How about just using the rules the Olympics have been using for fifty years for competitive sports that they came up with after doing a proper study into the issue, which is if your fully transitioned for more than two years you can compete.
For sports where there isn’t a pro industry and people arn’t getting paid to compete, like in schools, just let people do whatever they present as. The point is to have fun, not ban people for maybe having a quarter of a percent advantage. If it was then games like basketball would need to have height and weight classes. The whole reason we allow, much less spend money funding, sports in schools, parks, and community centers is for exercise and fun, not just to cater to the adults betting money on the results.
I fight people and have opinions!
Really depends on the sport. In non-professional fencing and HEMA, practice tends to be coed. Men and women tend to perform equivalently - really height is the biggest "biological advantage". More reach means more ability to hit an opponent before they hit you, and this goes the same for men and women. Sure, men can accelerate a bit faster and tend to be taller, women can plant their feet a little wider and tend to be more balanced and flexible - but these are just averages. Individual people vary wildly because biology doesn't give a shit about the categories we create to describe it. And strategy can make up for a lot of those things in ways that you really just can't with height discrepancies. We had to give our club's tallest member a shorter axe just to make up for the reach advantage when she fought people she stood a head above.
Dividing strictly based on AGAB is not an even playing field and I feel trans athletes only draw attention to what's already a significant problem in competitive sports. And once you get to a professional level, I understand there's more nuance, but a vast, vast majority of athletes are not professional and the issue is blown far out of proportion for them. Anyone pushing to enforce divisions in kids' sports via genital inspections has lost their goddamn minds.
Some people just like to inspect kids' genitals. Those are not the kind of people who should make these decisions, though.
i was in taekwondo as a kid. I was really good, imo. I competed at the national level and won several medals. But I still routinely got my ass handed to me on a silver platter by the women/girls I trained with whenever we'd spar.
That sort of rhetoric always feels sexist to me. The implication is that trans women shouldn't compete since those with XY chromosomes have some sort of superpower that means they'll beat those with XX.
The quote "Trans women can compete in sports as long as they don't win." always stood out to me.
It's more about things like height, lung volume capacity and leg/arm length in certain sports. Not chromosomes.
so that's really what people should be grouped based on in these sports instead of gender.
Well it is more complicated than that. After puberty female bodies usually have more fat and less muscle mass, than similiarly trained male bodies. Also the metabolism and "energy management" of male bodies is more advantageous for most sports. Note of course that these are also spectrums, and women who train well outcompete men who don't.
So it does make sense to group athletes by gender too. But like somebody else said in this thread, there is no factual reason, why gender should be the only or the main grouping criteria.
Why would sex be the only genetic advantage we normalize for? Welsh people tend to be taller than Italians, should there be an Italians-only basketball league that bans Welsh folk?
It's not. Boxing has weight classes because a heavyweight would snap a featherweight in half and some people literally can't reach heavyweight without going overweight.
If it's such a big deal, why not separate by ability rather than sex? We already have weight classes in some sports. Make it so only people who exhibit a certain amount of strength or whatever is relevant to the sport can participate.
I think Utah's governor, a Republican, actually put it best.
https://governor.utah.gov/2022/03/24/gov-cox-why-im-vetoing-hb11/
The transgender sports participation issue is one of the most divisive of our time. Because there are logical and passionate arguments by many parties, finding compromise or common ground can be difficult. Sadly, there is very little room for nuance in this debate. But I hope you will permit me an opportunity to explain my reasons for vetoing HB11...
I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion. I also try to get proximate and I am learning so much from our transgender community. They are great kids who face enormous struggles. Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision: 75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56.
- 75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah.
- 4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah.
- 1 transgender student playing girls sports.
- 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality.
- 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide.
Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly.
Dexterity is my dump stat
Dread girl design is super cool!
Electric blue locks? Oh my yes please
Research on this topic has definitively shown that trans athletes do worse in female sports than cis athletes. So. Kind of a close question.
Do you have a source?
With absolutely no research just the one right wing woman swimmer who lost to a trans woman swimmer she "lost" by placing fifth to the fourth place trans woman.
So they both lost to three faster women.
Conservatives playing the victim so hard that they have to extra lose
No trans woman has won an Olympic medal in the women’s category. The closest thing has been Canadian soccer player Quinn, who won as part of the team, rather than solo.
(And they won because our women's team slaps. Get gud, world.)
Get gud, world.
Tbf, trans women are only a small percentage of all athletes in the women's category. So it's not so weird that none has won yet.
That sound like bullshit
Why does the rosette have a backwards 1?
why are the trans flag colours inverted except on the third panel?
Is there an advantage in being male when it comes to skateboarding?
use your massive schlong as a counterbalance for tricks
Is this comic a reference to something specific?
I do remember a recent thing where a woman skater went full-ass TERF after having placed lower than a trans woman in a competition and making the right wing noise cycle, conveniently leaving out that they placed something like fifth and sixth behind a child. Google is being extremely unhelpful right now in finding it, though, instead showing me article after article about a separate story where a trans woman won a skating competition, which frame it in the most horrible way possible by making repeated reference to the fact that a 13 year old got second place. Lots of mentions of her "beating a 13 year old" and not being apologetic about it.