Transgender athletes can now compete in women's sports

You mean relative to other women? Because of course they do. Testosterone is a critical building block for muscles, and one’s physical prowess in sport is benefited by having higher T than competitors and all the average folks who can’t compete.

I’m trying to find anywhere online that indicates that these elite female athletes (IAAF claims “7 per 1000 elite female athletes have high T levels” which seems to me quite low, but then, what is “high”?) have T levels anywhere near the Average Joseph’s T level.
So, what is high? Outside the “normal range” that tops at 75ng/dL? Above the low end of males, at about 200ng/dL?

So what you’re saying is that elite trans female athletes aren’t special.

Well, they’re special, but they … fall within a bell curve.

I would think larger, if you lump together those with no hormone therapy, those who recently started hormone therapy, and those on hormone therapy a long time.

I read a few days ago in an article I am too lazy to dig up, that the NCAA and the IOC did have a hormone therapy requirement for trans women to compete in women’s sports. For the NCAA, a women’s team would have to be classified as mixed gender if they had a student not meet the qualifications until they did qualify. That seemed reasonable to me, but would certainly like to understand MH’s point of view.

I read that too. For NCAA, they had to have been on testosterone suppression treatment for one calendar year. IOC takes it further that transgender women must have maintained testosterone levels below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to their first competition.

If they don’t take tax dollars, that rule is fine. If they take tax dollars, then they accept the restrictions that come with it. One of those restrictions is that you can’t discriminate based on protected classes, of which gender identity is one.

No one says that deaf people shouldn’t be accommodated if they choose not to get a cochlear implant. There are many reasons that a trans person may not be able to take HRT or choose not to. It may not be safe for them to do so medically, they may not be able to afford the medication, or they may just not want to do it. All that doesn’t make them not trans. It doesn’t make them not women (or men, or however they identify).

You’ll hear transphobes talk about things like ‘biological sex’, but that is nonsense and rejected by real biologists. Trans women brain scans, even those that aren’t on hormones, show structures that are quite similar to cis women brains vs cis men brains.. There is no such thing as biological sex. There is a gender assigned at birth on the basis of genitals (which isn’t always a match with people’s chromosomes — there are people with 2X chromosomes born with a penis and people with a Y chromosome born with a vagina.

We have to move past this idea that 100% of the time men have penises and women have vaginas. That works as an approximation, but there are women with penises and men with vaginas, whether they are transgender, intersex, hermaphroditic, or any other issues. There are also people that aren’t a binary gender at all.

Just because the approximation works for 99% of the world, doesn’t make it scientific fact — in fact, the 1% proves it is actually not fact. The only gender that really matters is what the person IS, and the only way to know that for certain is to listen to them and have these discussions.

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Does that only apply to trans-women? Would a cis-woman who was above that threshold in the last 12 months be able to compete? I’m not sure how likely that would be, but hypothetically, would she?

I can’t find the exact language online, but from articles ranging from NBC, Guardian, ESPN, it seems to be guidelines specifically for transgender athletes.

https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1091417/ioc-guidelines-transgender-tokyo-2020

However, they still test athletes to make sure they aren’t doping. Mariya Savinova beat Caster Semenya for gold, but tested positive for steroids (oxandrolone, specifically) so her medal was revoked.

Here’s the ACTUAL guideline from 2015 (google linked 2004 website as source. This one is the PDF):

The lack of a biological alignment across many factors makes a lot of sense, in that 100% correlation does not exist between ‘biological sex’ and and the internal structure of other organs and body chemistry that can also influence how a person might feel about their true gender. I’d be interested if you have more studies an the topic.

I don’t think I am transphobic, but I realize I am ignorant in this area as well. I think the risk of women’s sports being compromised by trans women is very low even without some testing rules. I just don’t know how to counter the fairness argument without some sort of guardrail - it is so ingrained into the structure of sports.

Yes, they are within a bell curve, so they are not special. You might even call them Normal

The studies are sparse and sometime contradictory – transgender medicine is not well studied. For example, sometimes trans women shrink 1-2" after 12-24 months on HRT. Why? There is speculation that the tendons in the hip area tighten and subtlely change posture and it less to a less tall standing height, but no one knows for sure.

Fairness is just a loaded term here. Is it unfair that a 4’9" 17 year old isn’t going to make her high school volleyball team due to the genetic lottery? Is it unfair that the guy that can bulk up easily and run fast ends up being the star RB? At the levels we are talking about, that are protected by the President’s XO, I just don’t think ‘fairness’ matters as much as the mental health and non-discrimination policies.

And at the elite levels, where the XO doesn’t apply, most of the women’s leagues do not have policies against allowing trans women to play, and they still don’t have any.

All these times I’ve dropped an R, and I’m still waiting for the first person to N just one of them.

People are arguing fair and standard deviations.
How about looking at it from this perspective. You can tell someone you know (family member, member of your community) that they can’t play a sport because someone else on the team thinks it’s unfair. Or you can tell the rest of the team to suck it up buttercup and be sports…man like. I’m not going to be the person to send that one kid home because ‘other people think it’s not fair’. Are you? Personally I’m always happy to remind people of the lesson on the fair.

This isn’t math. This is about not excluding someone because they’re different than you. And for non-transgender, it’s not about the transgender folks; it’s about how we treat them.

Then that’s an excellent reason to move the conversation to “right” Because sports aren’t fair. We all get a different genetic package at birth. We all have different opportunities for training, encouragement, etc. Sports are grossly unfair almost any way you cut it.

Story: a top girl gymnast hit puberty, and grew large breasts. She’s spent most of her life focussed on being a gymnast, and now she can’t do it, because her body is the wrong shape. She’s under 18, and her parents won’t approve of her having her boobs cut off. All that training, all that work, down the drain.

I read this on some other chat site, and googling to find a reference, I found a few ads for cosmetic surgeons who specialize in removing healthy breast tissue to improve athletic performance.

Some people are short, have slower reflexes, worse vision, less testosterone… Some people have parents who can pay for training, whereas others need to work as kids to keep food on the table. None of that is fair.

I feel like the rules for sports ought to vary depending on the sport and its goal. Honestly, if someone wants to start a league of large-busted female jello wrestlers, I think that should be legal. And I think big-money professional sports should have fairly wide latitude to impose whatever rules they want. But elementary, middle, and high school sports are a different beast. They should provide access to all children. And that means the transgirls should get to play on the teams that other girls get to play on, even though many of them are too young to medically transition.

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Fairness is just a loaded term here. Is it unfair that a 4’9" 17 year old isn’t going to make her high school volleyball team due to the genetic lottery? Is it unfair that the guy that can bulk up easily and run fast ends up being the star RB? At the levels we are talking about, that are protected by the President’s XO, I just don’t think ‘fairness’ matters as much as the mental health and non-discrimination policies.

And at the elite levels, where the XO doesn’t apply, most of the women’s leagues do not have policies against allowing trans women to play, and they still don’t have any.

Agree completely that mental health is more important than fairness (or anything sports related). I don’t see that argument lasting very long with people who care a lot about sports, since they tend to be mentally unhealthy at any serious level, but I’d support it as well.

It seems to me that you are simplifying things a bit.

There is a shared experience of womanhood, which is comprised of many individual subjective experiences. Trans women certainly participate in that experience along with all women. One way to identify whether a person participates in this shared experience is to ask them.

But womanhood is also a set of physical “tendencies”, many of which are apparent because the human species is sexually dimorphic. Different individuals participate in those tendencies to different degrees. Many trans women do not participate in those tendencies until they start to physically transition with medical help. I’m not sure anybody ever fully participates in all of these tendencies.

But these tendencies do influence and help shape the shared experience. In particular they do seem to shape the shared experience of women’s sports.

I’m not entirely sure exactly how they shape it. Elite men athletes are better than elite women athletes. I’m not sure why, or if anybody knows exactly why. But i do think this is a reality that must be addressed.

For example, I remember reading that a particular sports organization decided that testosterone levels would be decisive in whether a person could compete in women’s sports. In that case, part of participating in women’s sports is training without the advantage of higher testosterone levels.

In this is true then some women are barred from women’s sports without drugs to lower their testosterone levels. This should not be an argument that they are not women. They can still largely participate in womanhood. But they are excluded from this aspect of it, which can cause a lot of hurt (that i’m sure i don’t fully appreciate.)

This leads to your argument that the needs of trans girls are the most urgent, and trump everything else. I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. But I was only a mediocre athlete. I enjoyed competitive sports but they never gave my life any meaning beyond the camaraderie involved. And I wonder if that keeps me from fully appreciating the cost to the meaning of women’s sports.

It may also be that testosterone should not be the decisive difference between men’s and women’s sports. Testosterone is just one advantage among many. Then we must argue over the meaning of sports. And to some degree we are creating that meaning through that argument, but it is creativity that must be constrained by reality in the sense that we cannot ignore these particular physical tendencies of women.

In summary, then, I do not think it is unreasonable for women athletes, particularly elite ones, to worry about fairness in the game. It is not automatically transphobic (although it can be). And it is a really hard issue.

A good analogy may be the debate over whether Oscar Pistorius could compete with his artificial legs. That debate was appropriate, but also required a great deal of sensitivity. The need for sensitivity here is even greater. Nobody tried to argue that Pistorius was not really human, or a man, because his bionic legs might give him an unfair advantage in running. Unfortunately, people are trying to argue that trans women are not really women because they might, on average, have a competitive advantage over other women.

The issue is we have an existing way of segregation that touches on a very sensitive topic. This is a very recent way of segregating, and imo, not too late to revise or amend, given what we know now.

Will people feel robbed if we segregated based on strength, or height, or weight, or endurance? If not, why? Will this feeling of being robbed only be relevant for the transition period (i.e. I could’ve gotten the scholarship if I played against people of all heights, but now I can only play amongst those that are over 6’, there’s no way I get that scholarship now)?

When you get to the professional leagues – honestly, that’s up to them, and if they want to set a limit on testosterone (as long it’s not applied only to AMAB women) then that’s their business.

But for HS/college sports covered by the XO, I think “fairness” should take a back seat to non-discrimination.

Again, this entire conversation is awkward because the concept of “women’s sports” requires something like a “biological sex”, and it is about explicitly discriminating against people based on “biological sex”.

Basically, women’s sports comes down to “we don’t want to have to compete with men because of their bodies and their hormones”.
And a lot of the trans experiences comes down to “I’m a woman trapped inside of a man’s body with man’s hormones.”

It’s not that transgender women are a problem. It’s that the concept of “women’s sports” is sexist, and the inclusion of transgender women highlights that fact.

I agree with you about basically everything else here. And hopefully the practical/political/emotional consequences of giving trans-women the freedom to partake in sports with their own gender is relatively small.