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.
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 Doesn’t do that reinforce outdated ideas of gender?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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with you. Another way I think of this is - we can have an open discussion about trans rights but let’s be very careful to not form opinions or develop policy based on the imaginary world invented in the heads of conservatives. Let’s look at the real world. I can get my head wrapped around someone being scared that their daughter is going to be treated unfairly or even hurt if someone who is “Actually A Man” gets to compete with them in a contact sport. But is that really happening in the real world? To the extent that we need to worry about it? I am fine with with an informed debate on this, but that should include an examination of what actual sports bodies like the IOC are doing, what the actual science says, and what the actual needs and wants and perspectives of trans athletes are. Not what phantasm did conservative invent so they can punch down at trans people.
This is a hard issue to talk about. A deplorable friend of mine asked me about it today. I said, I didn’t give the entire issue much thought, since I don’t know anyone affected by it, but also that it doesn’t seem fair. And I think that’s only being honest. It doesn’t seem fair. I’m all for having a level playing field, but this seems like leveling the field to the point of tilting it.
Right. I feel like the people on the side Trans women competing in women’s divisions tend to wilfully ignore that there are basic and fundamental differences between body types of people who are born and develop with and without a Y Chromosome.
There are tons of variations in body types, hormone levels, etc among people born with XX Chromosomes that make them better or worse at certain sports. At basically every percentile of every sport, with very few exceptions to this, an XY person will perform better than an XX person. This gap is the basic reason for the gender split in sports.
No matter how much scientific study is put into it, it is a really difficult thing to set a fair line in all circumstances for an amount of hormone therapy that closes this gap when someone born XY transitions to being a woman.
There’s a lot of good information in this article/interview. I find it’s a pretty good synopsis, is fact based, and acknowledges the challenges. I definitely learned a lot reading it, because I don’t really know that much about the science and need to rely entirely on experts.