Bathrooms and changing rooms, I don’t see why there’s any need for discrimination, period.
Sports, though, I’m not sure what to think. It does seem to subvert the whole point of at least some women’s sports by allowing trans women who have had the benefits of male levels of testosterone in puberty to compete. The IOC had testosterone limits set, but it seems that’s going away as the best method of determining eligibility.
My bias would be toward inclusion for as many people as possible, but then isn’t the reductio ad absurdum that there’s no distinction between women and men in sports, and women lose to men in every sport where there’s an advantage to be had with a larger frame and bigger muscles (which is most of them)?
If any of you have sources for good essays or arguments, I’m looking to do the work of reading and better understanding the best current thinking on the topic.
Sports are inherently unfair. Playing against an opponent that has various genetic advantages despite being the same gender and weight can still result in me getting my ass kicked every time (figuratively or literally, depending on the sport) or me winning every contest against similar opponents. I know women that could beat me in any athletic endeavor and men I’ve bested over and over because of my particular capabilities.
Handicapping is probably the only way I can think of to even the playing field for the majority of single or double adversary sports. Team sports reduce the individual advantage and bring team coordination to the fore IMO.
Regardless, the Nebraska and Oklahoma governors can just fuck off.
i’ve long assumed that if enforced equally most of these laws would prevent parents from bringing their children into bathrooms. but i also know that selective enforcement is the secret sauce
i didn’t realize about the shelters though. does anyone know why? ( i guess i could go google… hrm. )
eta:
right?!
if i had had proper nutrition as a child i could have been a contender. why do we allow certain people these advantages? i propose we do a blood test to determine who has had the advantage of three square a day during their childhood years, and outlaw them from sports entirely.
can anyone point me to essays on why this is a bad idea?
But enforcing this won’t fall just on trans people. It will also impact cis people who don’t meet someone’s ideal for what someone of that gender should look, sound, and act like. And those will mostly be cis women. At the heart of transphobia is always misogyny.
So if a woman is bigger, stronger or faster than a man, is she not a woman, or is he not a man? Or, in conservative “logic,” both?
Yep - and it seems like this has been the biggest impact of the anti-trans bathroom laws. Because there are far, far more cis women who don’t fit that conservative notion of what women should be like than there are out trans women. It’s not necessarily an “accident” or “side-effect,” either - it’s policing femininity, which applies to everyone.
Just… stop. Stop. Trans women ARE women. Stop acting like they’re not. The idea that they have some advantage over cis women is just flat out bullshit.
I assume we’re eliminating club sports and banning private schools from competition in schools sports first, then? Because both of those are much stronger sources of systemic unfairness in sports.
On an individual level, we should also probably define objective limits for advantageous diversity, too. If you can run faster than 4.8 s in the 40 yd dash, you can’t compete in football. If you are taller than 6’2 you can’t play basketball. If you have a vertical leap greater then 24.5”, then you can’t play volleyball.
Is that where we’re going? Because all of that logically precedes restricting participation of trans people from sports.
Reminder that the greatest gymnast of all time is a women… You put Simone Biles up against ANY other person, regardless of gender, and she would destroy them all…
But sure… men have a natural advantage as if sports don’t involve training, determination, and skill, among other things that aren’t “natural”…
But that’s confusing the issue at hand, as the goal of this executive order is to push an ideology of the gender binary on Nebraskans. Gender is not as simple as what’s in your pants or the type of hormones you have… That’s just the actual science.
TBH the point of sports ought to be to share joy in the unique extremes of talent that humans develop when doing these EXTREMELY ARBITRARILY VALUED feats designed to showcase various human skillcaps for fun and money…
By which I mean to say what we value and how and why is something we can control thus sports can become whatever we want 'em to be.
I’m not going to reply to any specific people because there have been too many comments flying around. I’m just going to bring up Caster Semenya. She was assigned female at birth. She identifies as a woman, and she always has. She has a condition which is probably within the large umbrella of intersex conditions but she has always identified as female. And she has naturally, for her, occurring higher than typical for a cis-woman testosterone levels. And she has been fighting for years to be allowed to compete. At one point, the international track and field organization tried to require her to take testosterone suppressing drugs, which were medically unnecessary for her, in order to be allowed to compete. Can anyone ever imagine any sports body treating a man this way? No, because it’s bullshit and it’s all about control.
You mentioned in a now hidden post that you mentioned the IOC to indicate you were talking about high-level, elite athletes.
Thinking about inclusion, I think it would be better if women like Rapinoe and others were able to compete for and be eligible for inclusion in the currently male leagues where their less-successful counterparts make at least 4x as much money as them…
If trans women are so good at sports, why are there so few of them, worldwide?
I’ll save you the time. Because assholes keep treating them like second-class citizens, alienating and persecuting them constantly, whether they can play sports or not. People don’t even want them to play chess.
I don’t want any systematic unfairness in anything, including sports. I’ve already mentioned my bias towards inclusion. Anything less elite than world-record performance territory, I don’t see any reason whatsoever to discriminate against trans participants, and of course myriad reasons why all people should be included and encouraged.
At the elite level, I don’t think I’ve learned enough to have an opinion on what, if any, restrictions there should be on competitors. In some way, elite athletes aren’t regular people. These are weirdos who, when polled, say they’d trade something like 5-10 years of lifespan to win a gold medal, if they had the chance. As athletes supported by their countries’ sporting associations, they’re already living in a highly-restricted regime (e.g. random drug testing even during training in the off-season). Doping is banned, so clearly hormones like testosterone do confer some sort of advantage in many cases at the pinnacle of performance. Thus it seems like it could be fair to set limits on something like hormone levels — even if naturally-occurring — to provide a robust, competitive, and fair field.
A blanket “trans women are women” doesn’t help much because I already know that’s true.
as if sports don’t involve training, determination, and skill, among other things that aren’t “natural”…
