Let’s suppose they came up with perfect regulations such that the performance distribution of transitioned and non-transitioned female MMA fighters was precisely the same. Completely level playing field.
By definition this would mean that sometimes transitioned females would be pummeling and dominating non-transitioned females.
And I think there’s a large subset of people that are ok with trans women participating in sports as long as they never win.
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Thanks for making the effort of combing the thread for helpful posts. I have read them again and hope I also understood what they are getting at. I will try to address some of the points but I will probably not be able to before next week.
Quoted for an actual trans UPer’s take.
This is why 70% of the thread tolerating the worst 20% of the thread as “a little on the nose” while attacking the 10% as “histrionic” is so fucked up.
To me the concern isn’t the argument you’re making here, which is individual fairness, the concern is around retaining women’s sport as a viable competitive environment. LouisCyphre is making much the same point. If trans women become dominant in a sport, cis women would feel like they now had no space to compete in in which they were not disadvantaged. And while it may well be the case that people like Phelps and Ledecky have physiological advantages which are equally “unfair”, to some extent the perception that the competition is fair really does matter. Also, the dominance of some freak individual is easy to shrug off, but the dominance of a cohort of people might be more permanent. The feeling could be not that it’s prohibitively difficult to win right now, but that it’s permanently prohibitively difficult to win.
It might be that there is no problem with allowing trans women who went through puberty as a male to compete, that the advantages aren’t really significant enough to matter. But I think it’s prudent to proceed with caution because if it turns out the advantages are significant, things could get really ugly. It will end up with either having to retroactively rescind people’s competition wins and records, or with significant resentment towards trans competitors and setting back the cause of trans rights, or both. That’s my concern. The question of whether having to compete against Lia Thomas is any more “unfair” than having to compete against Katie Ledecky, as an isolated question, I don’t think is what matters.
What if allowing some unfairness in sports leads to more fairness overall for trans people by normalizing them in society?
This is just the new version of the Black Crime column or whatever the fuck it was in Breitbart where only AA crime was reported.
The Eye of Sauron that is the focused hatred of conservative media just happens to now be focused on transgender participation in women’s athletics. They’ll selectively attend to a few examples that periodically make it seem most like there might be a problem to solve with bigoted legislation that actively harms the most disadvantaged Americans, while casually ignoring what an honest review of facts readily portrays…
…there’s not a single sport, event or league on any competitive level where a majority of the best 1% of female athletes are transgender. Not one.
Ergo by supporting the “solution” of bigoted legislation you’re willfully accepting all the “unintended” & immensely harmful real world consequences for transgender people while solving precisely zero general problems in competitive sports.
A few more.
I was more patient and eloquent the first time around.
So was Clovis.
This might be off topic, but who says sports must be segregated by gender anyway? Why not just class athletes by talent, size, etc., instead of male/female?
Exactly. The case could be made that every elite athlete is genetically advantaged at least in some part to have become the superstar, champion, gold medal winner that they are
Just because Lia Thomas wouldn’t have near the success against male competition doesn’t mean she should be forced to identify and/or compete with them with the only alternative being to give up on her dreams and not get to compete at all
Missionaries: Should we go to the slums of Guatemala City where people really need our help? Nope, those people are already nominally Christian. Let’s go fuck with a tranquil Maya village instead.
If you are a female athlete and you have dedicated your life and identity to being good at some dumb sport of course you are going to be catching feelings when someone who was a born a male waffle crushes you. I can just picture the parents in the bleachers and all their bitter angry facebook posts.
Losing to a waffle in any competition is always difficult
So what? The “of course” here doesn’t mean anything if it’s just based on transphobia. In the 1940s you could have said “Of course you are going to be catching feelings when you daughter comes home with a black guy” and you would have been accurately describing 99% of white Americans. In the 1980s you could have said “Of course you are going to be catching feelings when your son comes out as gay” and you would have been accurately describing 99% of straight Americans.
Just because lots and lots of people believe that trans women playing sports are actually men cheating at sports doesn’t mean anything. The feelings are irrelevant here. The case for any kind of controls on sports participation need to be built from reason and fact. If the situation is actually different from pure transphobia, the that should be demonstrable. Note that saying “but of course, duh” is not a demonstration that the conclusion is correct.
I made a similar comment earlier in the thread. I think the concern with this would be that in some sports the very best women would be in a performance class against like 1000-1 male vs. female athletes. That may be “fair” in some sense but again this all comes back to what is really a subjective opinion of how to best structure a meaningful competition. It would kind of suck if the best women athletes decide they didn’t want to compete against men for the 4th division crown. Consider tennis - women’s tennis has been a very popular global sporting spectacle that basically wouldn’t exist at all if we just had tennis Division 1, Division 2, etc., etc. Serena Williams would be considered an interesting minor league athlete, not an all time sporting great. Would that be a better outcome because it’s more “fair”? I don’t know. It’s not obvious to me.
People care way too much about sports.
The idea of splitting competitions by gender is rooted in the fact that there are very fundamental differences between the physical capabilities of each gender.
There is a massive spread of body types among each gender that lead to outliers in each that have a competitive advantage over their peers.
Competition exists because success is an interesting result of genetics, natural talent/ability, hard work, and execution under pressure. Putting the best women in a competition with men would mean that some percentage of men in that “competition class” would always have a higher ceiling than the best woman if they could match work and dedication. And sure they could move up classes but it removes the potential for sustained dominance or greatness by any individual women which would make the sport way less fun to watch or compete in.