Transgender athletes can now compete in women's sports

I didn’t mean to contradict you, exactly, just wanted to add the analogy.

I think I’m a couple steps behind JSMill’s thoughts, which is that it’s weird that we are trying to save segregation in the first place.

1 Like

Isn’t the obvious reason the real reason? Race-segregating is purely nefarious. Segregating sports based on gender is to allow women, who are going to be at an inherent physical disadvantage on average, a place they can compete fairly, thus the physical-based defenses of the current system.

In fact I think the point was most well made when the alternative suggested was to just get rid of teams.

Say we conclude the social exclusion harm to trans women is so significant that we need combine all sports teams into just an unrestricted group. Now all the men have an inherent advantage and the women basically don’t get to play. Did we really solve the issue…?

There’s inherent physical disadvantage for some races as well as genders. I guess they aren’t as pronounced, though that depends on the sport.

There’s also many other genetic factors that make it so most people can’t really compete at any serious level of competition.

1 Like

I think that would be tough to show as a nature vs nurture thing. And any differences are going to be dwarfed by the gender difference.

Yeah this is the path of let’s make a really sophisticated sorting mechanism, which is the most fair outcome but would be difficult to do because it requires a lot of thought/analysis/etc. Plus the whole we realize these HS/college sports are given complete undue weight. They really don’t matter.

Really? You want me to bust that out?

2 Likes

Say we just let them play in the gender of their choice. Appreciate that it matters absolutely nothing to almost everybody, but matters a lot to them and leave it at that? Instead of analyzing it to death with hypotheticals?

I think it’s safe to say it matters a lot to the cis women who would be competing against trans women. The whole sports not mattering is my view of things.

So go the other way. Say that teams are required to be separated by genitals. Now you have trans men competing on the womens team because of their genitals, but the trans men are taking testosterone. Still not fair.

Can we stop talking about fair, and talk about what’s right?

What’s right is to treat people like they matter, like they belong with the rest of the people on the planet. I’m glad for this EO.

3 Likes

No, I don’t think we can. Gender-sports only exist for the sake of fairness.

If they aren’t ‘fair’ (whatever that means) then they should not exist at all.

I can buy the “it’s not very unfair” argument.

1 Like

Like I said, seems like the problem with the game itself, and not the player. Do short people complain about not being able to get basketball scholarships?

How many of these cases will there be to even warrant a systemic concern?

The number of trans people = small
The number of people who see sports as an important part of their life = small

The intersection = very small.

If a girl does lose a scholarship for this particular scenario, how is it different than her being in the same school with someone who’s just genetically superior? You know girls come in all sizes too right?

2 Likes

Twitter banned Trump, so now there’s nothing else to talk about.

2 Likes

Nitpick: 99.99% of the time no kid is choosing to do that at age 5. Their parents may be choosing to subject the kid to that kind of stuff, though.

More simply, 99.9% of people don’t want to go to great lengths to win, but the winners are the ones who do.

1 Like

Underlying this concern is an unspoken belief that trans women aren’t “really” women. Well, maybe not “unspoken” as much as “really don’t want to admit that the belief is actually there”.

And I think any cis guy thinking this will be funny to do on some lark will very quickly realize it’s a bad idea, for reasons already mentioned.

Right, you shame the fuck out of them for being asshats and send the message that such behavior is not acceptable and will not be tolerated.

Or … wait, is that cancel culture because the people preaching “personal responsibility” who think everyone else is a snowflake got their feelings hurt because they didn’t get to have their way and have to suffer consequences for their actions?

This.
We may want gender to be binary, but we now know that is not the case. Gender is bi-modal, but the middle ground is pretty murky. They’ve identified the genomic evidence where some individuals that present genitalia as female do in fact have extraordinary amounts of testosterone. It’s a simple genetic mutation. Those women are going to have physical advantages in strength sports.

Where ever, and how ever, we decide to split the spectrum into two parts, there will be issues of fairness. I don’t see any way way to avoid that. “Let the individual choose” is as good as anything.

I disagree and this comes back to original point, It is not fair to the other cis female athletes.

To be clear, I welcome this and believe it is the greater good, but it is not completely fair. I do not have a good solution, but saying noone cares is just not true and ignores why most people participate in sport

The same way it’s not fair for short people that tall people get to play in the same league?

Women’s sports were created out of a vacuum, it can be amended as well.