You’ve come into this thread swinging at trans people before spending time to read up on the issue. So, maybe no, you arent as fucking ready to listen as you think you are.
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“Fairness for their kids”
Yeah. The fainess issue here is some high level athlete who might come 4th instead of 3rd at a meet because someone swam better than them. Not a bunch of kids being bullied out of sport all over america. Fuck off with this shit.
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There’s more than one way for an XY person to come out with a female body plan, to look plainly female, to have typical female hormone levels, and to otherwise never have the slightest idea that she had anything intersex about her until a karyotype assay. Seems pretty rude to force such people to compete with males. Not only that, if the standard is going to be genetic analysis as a prerequisite for participation in sports, that’s going to open up a whole lot of paternity cans of worms.
So. By “letting the sports issue go”
What are you suggesting?
All trans kids, already socially excluded and bullied at higher rates, just stop playing sport all over the world?
How about putting up with trans and intersex kids having their genitals discussed by adults at sports day? That’s cool with you?
Trans people just walk past the sports issue being used to dead name and misgender athletes while painting them as the bad guys?
Yeah. Maybe. Let’s just let this one go.
ok, i don’t have kids, but i think this scenario is not the reason 99% of kids are in sports. Winning races, looking forward to olympic trials or even scholarships. scholarships are literally a money issue, if college was cheap enough it wouldn’t be a problem. if scholarship money was more available it wouldn’t be a problem, so it’s really just a medals issue.
and since i don’t have kids, consider this a stupid hypothetical. but it seems to me that at some very near future prosthetic tech is going to make amputees better at sports. say replace their feet with a prosthetic that allows them to be the fastest runner, or the fastest swimmer, or a crazy good mountain climber. this is going to happen. in the pure medal count way, the hypothetical kid who might be robbed of a medal is in a time crunch against technology.
but as a parent in sports, you would hopefully not use this as an opportunity to keep kids with amputated limbs out of school sports, or your kid’s division or whatever. because that would be inhumane and arbitrarily segregate kids who should be teammates.
the trans in sports issue is the same for me. let them be on varsity teams and compete in the meets together. let the ncaa decide how many medals they want to award.
This isn’t hypothetical.
i meant my hypothetical kids. dude, of course i know about pistorius. (that was such an amazing thread on the old forums.)
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I don’t think this is entirely true. Combat sports is a prime example where a recently transitioned woman who is still disproportionately stronger than her opponent can severely injure or even kill her opponent in the ring.
Problem is if you bring up this rare exception that cuts a hole in a broad position, one side thinks you’re transphobic and the other uses it as a springboard for spreading conspiracy theories to further stigmatize trans people.
It’s really a lose-lose position to have in a highly polarized society no matter how you word it.
But this digs deeper. If gender really is a spectrum rather than a binary choice, then should sports be divided by biological sex? Doesn’t do that reinforce outdated ideas of gender? Wouldn’t it be more fair and representative of the nature of gender to test human biochemistry to define who fits in what category? Should those categories even exist? If so, what should they called? I honestly have no idea how any of this would work but it is something that will inevitably come up at some point in my lifetime as a culture war issue once people are done with the whole bathroom thing. People who are LBGT activists should be prepared for this inevitable attack against them.
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i would be horrified of a big kid beating down on smaller kids in some type of MMA/martial arts tournament anyway. it would not have to be a trans issue before i’d probably think about pulling kids out of that sport.
You are attempting to oversimplify the issue.
Going by the loosest definition of intersex, I would qualify.
Do I get to tell you to fuck off now?
There’s nothing fair about youth sports. The biggest, fastest, strongest kids win. Those who go through puberty first crush. Gladwell is a hack, but he saw that for hockey, early birthdays were hugely over represented in professional players. This is because bigger kids got advanced at younger ages.
What is the point of this post?
That the platonic ideal of fairness is unachievable. We make compromises on fairness all the time.
I agree. Which is why labeling anyone who doesn’t agree with your position as being equivalent to the worst people imaginable is the unreasonable position.
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Why? All you need to do is karyotype and nothing further.
Because, as I explained just up from the part you quoted, karyotype is a poor system.
Ok, then we’ll address the edge cases, but if someone is clear xx or xy then end of story. A lot of things happen to a lot of people to prevent them from being competitive athletes. Hemophiliac? No wrestling for you. I don’t think we need to reconfigure society to meet the dreams of trans athletes, nor do we need to make engineering exams easier to accommodate dumb people, even if they self identify as smart.
In my mind strong trans supporters are in many ways anti liberal. It lets people elevate gender identity as a priority over other aspects of society. Being a Mormon or fundamentalist Christian seems a lot more essential to who a person is than whether they are male or female, but we limit (sometimes unsuccessfully) their ability to reconfigure society in line with their conception of the good.
Most people in the world are trying to get by, have some wins, and not be crushed by reality. If some people want to identify as a different gender, that’s fine, but if they’re asking for anything beyond minimal accommodation I have other priorities.
You might have to ELI5 this. If this was done (which I agree is impractical), then instead of men’s and women’s you would have these two divisions
- Has no Y chromosome
- Has a Y chromosome (i.e., at least one)
There might be some edge cases that don’t fit, so the definition of Y chromosome might be a bit tricky. But those would be the edge cases of the edge cases.
Gender identity is a deeply essential part of who someone is. And no, they’re not trying to reorder society. They’re trying to be recognized for who they are.
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