You know what we don’t need in PE classes, the teacher telling two team captains to pick their team, leading to an inevitable popularity contest, and almost always a traumatized last-picked student who even if not publicly laughed at, is almost always tacitly recognized as the loser of the class, all done in front of the whole class!
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While I’m not horrible at sports, I did go through a bunch of this. Made up for it in math class problems at the board though 
So - you got to be hated from both sides…
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I guess. I don’t think the whole publicly seen in school stuff is that bad though, it’s part of life to see yourself competing in a group. I definitely worked harder in class if I thought my results would be public.
Disagree. I was picked last several times in HS. No lessons were learned, other than starting to think how ugly and skinny I was. I’m sure it didn’t help with the whole being gay situation either.
This is something PE teachers can easily eradicate, by just assigning the teams themselves.
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Yeah I mean more in academics than sports. Looking back it’s insane how much importance is put on sports when in reality it’s about as important as band.
But anyway, to get back on topic, I can see MH’s point how similarly traumatic the situation would be if someone isn’t allowed to compete with their own gender, when the entire sporting structure is built around gender. The benefit to these people, who are already at great risk of depression and suicide, far outweighs the fringe trolling satisfaction or fringe benefit someone trying to game the system would receive.
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I don’t know that that is super clear. For example if you’re an average 16 year old trans woman you’re probably at a biological advantage to the average cis woman you’d be competing against. How is that fair to the whole group of cis women? Especially since the entire point of women’s sports being separate is a place to compete on a more level playing field. Men’s sports is the realm of unrestricted.
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Yes, women’s sports were designed to create a level playing field, but now we know that that is not an adequate way to segregate. We can learn from our mistake and redesign the system, and not ask minority groups to just accept it as a way of life.
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I guess it depends on one’s definition of adequate, it seems to work alright for the most part.
I think the issue of asking minority groups to accept it as a way of life is that the simple fix of including them causes more harm than the harm it relieves, since their inclusion impacts each of the other women competing while just helping that one person.
We could always completely redo the sorting mechanism into something more complex, but that would be very challenging and sports are already given far more importance than they deserve as it is.
The “advantage” of having been forced to go through the start of the wrong puberty before correcting it with treatment is both fleeting and relatively minor compared to the natural difference in skill level between women in sports.
Obviously you weren’t keen for the hormones, but if your ability to lift 300 lb determined whether or not you got scholarship money you might enjoy the advantage.
I’m going to leave it here. You trivialize the damage that is done to the mental health of trans children by comparing it to meaningless things like college scholarships, like any one is willingly going to fake being in the wrong gender for 8 years so they can play on a woman’s sports team in college.
I haven’t brought up the notion of people faking trans, I’m focused on the harm to cis women.
This has always been my viewpoint. I just use whichever restroom is available, first checking my gender’s designated one and then using the other if the first was full. Not always in every situation - I’ve not done it at work (yet) or in somewhere like an airport where security might be overzealous, but when you need a bathroom, you need it. Several times, people of my gender were in line for their designated one and noticed me come out and went, “eff it” and went in - nobody’s once said a thing about it.
I find it odd that we have gender-segregated sports but not race-segregated sports.
I don’t know where we’ll go with this, but it’s already weird to say some people have a “right” to be part of a segregation category.
do you appear male or female? As a cis male, I would not be comfortable being caught in a shared ladies room.
Women can get away with it, happens all the time at stadiums, guys can’t
I appear male. Always attempt the men’s room first, and if it looks like it’s about to open up I’ll wait for a minute.
To be clear-- I’ve meant to leave it as an open question. I really don’t know what will happen, and I don’t think anybody knows.
I absolutely agree with the executive order, in part because it can be amended 10 years from now if it causes problems.
Ah, but that also is a more narrow view that what I was arguing against. NormalDan was talking about sports in general.