I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere…but as I type, SCOTUS is hearing oral arguments on two trans kids in sports cases.
Maybe they will finally decide whether sports are all that fucking important.
2 Likes
One of them is a statewide ban for literally 1 girl.
Are you referring to the people who want to play with their chosen gender, or the people opposing them? Or both?
I struggle to see where it matters for the most part outside of single athlete sports at the top tier of competition. Below that, who cares?
So you don’t think a male who transitioned to female would be a better basketball player? Given that average height is taller, more muscular, etc, you don’t think the player (and therefore the team) would have an advantage?
What happens if 100 trans athletes want to play? What happens to biological women who want to have a spot in the league, and now are pushed out?
You can deny them the opportunity to play in the league without denying their gender. Just say that the league is based on sex, not gender.
If you allow trans people to play with their chosen gender, then why have separate leagues at all? Just have a league where the best players compete, and leave it at that.
Is there some kind of devil’s compact we can make, where we make a girl play on the boys team, and in exchange MAGA agrees to not burn down the country for another year?
1 Like
There are already multiple trans boys playing on boys teams in California.
Tall and strong helps, but how good are their ball handling skills, positioning, etc. For low level sports, I don’t particularly care if one player is stronger than another. A lot of it gets washed out by the ability of the overall ability of the team. Also it honestly doesn’t matter.
I also question how much it matters if one person is trans vs. a couple of kids going through puberty early and hitting that growth spurt. I’ve played many a hockey game where there may have been a few comments, but only a limited effect of a nearly 6 ft tall 12 year old playing on a team against a bunch of pre-pubescent 10-12 year olds.
ETA: I’m not worried at all about the 0.01% of the population that is trans pushing huge numbers of women out of a league. It’s a tempest in a tea pot.
Played hockey for years with a girl on our team. She was better and a dirtier player than many of the other players on our team. When I was playing beer league hockey in Australia, several of the teams had women on them. I know in St. John’s there are at least a few girls/women playing on male minor hockey teams and on beer league teams. Skill level > size and strength.
I think you lose the majority of people with this comment (not on this board, but in the US). Sports has been separated for a reason.
I am not sure what the compromise position is on this, and it will be difficult to find one until inclusiveness is prioritized ahead of competitiveness, and that is not viable right now in the US. Not that people don’t want to be inclusive, they are just to damn competitive with everything.
In low level sports, whether your team wins or losses has virtually no effect on anything. It simply doesn’t matter. A blanket ban on trans athletes makes little to no sense. As I like to joke in my social curling league, the worst thing that happens if we lose the game is we get a free beer.
ETA: another thing to note is that family finances probably keeps 10-1000× more athletes off sports teams than trans athletes and most people don’t give a rat’s ass about that.
Not sure about this one. They take high school sports very seriously in the US. Its not the same in Canada.
Just seeing this now and in light of the GROK cp scandals and it seems pretty pertinent
It isn’t really about fairness. Maybe that argument resonates more generally, but the girl who brought the initial Idaho challenge was on puberty blockers and never went through a male puberty and cannot be argued to have a biological advantage.
And we are talking about something absurdly rare. After the Idaho girl withdrew from the case, we are left with 2 laws being challenged that affect 1 single person.
1 Like
The whole thing is just manufactured outrage to give the bigots something to rally around. It’s ludicrous to think that trans athletes affect sports more than just a tiny bit at the margins.
4 Likes
My heavily biased opinion: Outside of football, boys basketball, and (depending on region) soccer, the point of most youth sports is to get kids moving around and have them exercise in a fun way with their friends. A very small percentage of kids are going to be serious enough athletes to compete in D-I college programs. There are huge benefits to trans kids to allow them to participate and play with their friends, and such a small number of trans kids who want to do so that it has minimal impact on others to allow them to play. The fact that trans boys are able to compete on boys teams with reasonable success is a reminder that most youth athletes are not elite athletes, and the fact that the rules don’t make exceptions for trans girls on puberty blockers shows that the objections aren’t really about fairness.
At an elite level, a fairness argument is more compelling, but I think most people underestimate the impact that hormones have on the body. And while I think it’s totally reasonable for people who aren’t trans not to know a ton, sometimes the gap of what people do / don’t know surprises me. E.g., I’ve run into a ton of people who think that all trans women get breast implants and don’t realize that hormones cause breast growth.
During the first 3 years of transition, especially the 2nd and 3rd years, you lose a ton of muscle mass. Studies have found that trans women retain height and total strength advantages over cis women, but cis women have better strength / weight and VO2 max / weight ratios, which suggests that for some sports, trans women will retain an edge, and for others, cis women will have an edge. If you look at the most famous trans athlete, Lia Thomas, she was much slower her senior year of college, going from something like 13 seconds faster than Ledecky’s 500 record pre-transition to a comparable amount slower than the record. And the rules that she was competing under only required 1 year of hormones, she would have been slower still a year later.
If that is counter-intuitive, elite female athletes have testosterone levels that are 2-4 times higher than mine. If I gave myself supplemental T, and ignored the reasons why I don’t want those testosterone levels, I would be much stronger. Given enough time, it isn’t a priori clear which is more important, the boost from puberty vs the boost from several recent years of lower T.
2 Likes
Would we be better off having a competitive and non-competitive distinction in school aged sports? Could eliminate a lot of issues. Boys that want to be active, but just dont have the talent, can still play on a team. It might actually provide girls a better path to becoming elite as competing against a stronger overall pool means they will have better challenges available, and the whole question about where trans kids fit in goes away. I am sure this already exists in many places, but also will likely offend nearly everyone equally.
No argument for trans women being included in women’s sports should include Lia Thomas, unless it is a lessons learned on what is not the right policy. I see that you did mention the 1 year of hormones, so I think acknowledging that in some direction. I don’t see anyone on the fence on the issue buying in to any of the scientific measures when someone went from mediocre in the men’s cohort to #1 in the women’s cohort after changing cohorts.
The desire to be all inclusive, all the time, in every situation is just counterproductive to a lot of what the Democrats/left are pushing for. Outcomes are important, and they need to find ways to talk about them while not taking every argument against the outcome as an argument against the cause.
1 Like
There is already a crazy long thread on this over here, btw.
1 Like