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Transgender athletes face growing hostility: four tell their stories in their own words
(www.usatoday.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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If you're position is excluding trans women from sport because of vibes you're just a transphobe.
There is no rabid hoard of transwomen waiting to overrun sport and sweep the awards. Until recently this wasn't even an issue, the Olympics has allowed trans women to compete from like 2000. Where are the medals?
We're a tiny population who generally perform worse than natal women because our T is lower. Despite all the contrived "just asking questions" about skeleton size or whatever nonsense there is no clear picture of advantage. At any rate tall women aren't banned from sport. Even women with PCOS aren't banned from sport.
We don't have seperate leagues for people raised in stable households on good diets and yet that's got performance benefits that swamp anything from having a slightly higher forearm to middle finger ratio or whatever insane thing people bring up.
This whole thing is completely drummed up and is just an acceptable way for the general unease cis people feel about trans people to be voiced.
It is interesting that you bring up the fact that not many transwomen are winning medals. Would it be a problem if they were? If so, what percent of women's medals going to transwomen would make you decide that transwomen shouldn't be allowed in women's sports?
The point of all leagues/divisions/brackets is to foster community and competition. Consistent domination of any one group of people stifles that.
If people with green eyes started winning every single javelin competition it would be a reason to consider making a green eyed javelineer league assuming their was the numbers and interest to support it (otherwise you're just banning green eye'd javelineers de facto).
Fascinating! This is a take I think I've never come across. Am I right in assuming that you think there should be light-skinned and dark-skinned events in the Olympics then? There are many events that almost always go to dark-skinned individuals. The same thing holds for many professional sports.
This is a really interesting idea. I doubt it will happen, but if it did, I wonder if we would see the same people claiming that female athletes dont get paid enough claiming the same for white male athletes.
I have to say, I am quite surprised by your response. I really appreciate that! Thank you very much!
I don't really know enough about ethnicity and sporting performance. Crude divisions like melanin levels seems obviously flawed because I'm not sure what a Kenyan has in common with a Fijian in terms of athletic propensity.
Idk if like white marathon runners feel like they can't compete in their sport because of whatever advantages the people written about in that born to run book are supposed to have.
I've only heard claims about stuff like white people and swimming and sub Saharan African people and sprinting at the Olympic level and I've never bothered to look into them because that's basically irrelevant. Olympic athletes are a tiny minority, it's not what funds careers and it's not what most athletes do. Almost all athletics is on a much more local level where difference like this should they be real, again I've never fact checked this, don't manifest.
Like all sport is unfair, that's inherently the point of it. When I run a race I'm seeing how well my arthritic ruin of a body compares to spry athleaisure mums. We only divide stuff if it's preventing people from playing because of insurmountable (or the perception thereof, e.g. women's vs open chess) barriers.
Realitically wealth and support have much larger effects than any of the weird things I've seen highlighted, so it's all Pearl clutching at this point.
Well, just to give you an idea, in the NBA about 16% of players are white. In the NHL, about 90% are white. Both of these numbers get a bit more extreme if you count who actually spends time on the court.
I think most people are still willing to acknowledge that the advantage men have over women in sports in considerably greater than anything having to do with skin color. I know there are people that talk about how much greater the Williams sisters are than any man at tennis, but Serena herself says that not only are men much better at tennis, but that men's and women's tennis are two distinct sports and that she wouldn't score a single point against a professional male tennis player.
This all begs the question of why all the women's medals/success aren't going to transwomen. This is a good question, and it has an equally good answer. Biological men have, until recently, been excluded from biological women's leagues. Even still, transwomen are largely looked down on in society if they participate in and perform well in women's leagues. The more this changes, the more we will see them compete and dominate until, I predict, we hit a breaking point where even the trans community will, like yourself, begin advocating for a separate league for biological men who want to take hormone blockers. Whether or not it will require claims of identifying as a woman, I have no idea. I just think it will not be the case that we have 2 main divisions, effectively one for men and transwomen without a place for biological women to compete.
I don't advocate for a separate league for trans athletes, we have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for 20 years and there have been no medals awarded to trans people.
Trans women are not "biologically male" and trans men aren't "biologically female". A trans man on T therapy becomes heavily muscular, experiences organ enlargement etc. Trans women get the opposite effect, my fucking q angle changed with musculature changes ffs. Yeah I probably have a Y chromosome although I've never been sequences, it isn't do much these days. The bodies we end up with are not identical to natal men/women but then no man or women is identical to another, even identical twins are different. We end up within the normal ranges of performance, yeah there are jacked trans women, there are also jacked cis women. I go to the gym 4 days a week and run 40 km a week and I can't even do a pullup lmao after 2 years of this. All aggregate studies to date find no evidence of advantage to trans women.
Unless there is evidence of trans domination in sports there is 0 reason to ban us. Besides, as treatments improve and early intervention becomes more normal there will be fewer and fewer differences, a process which is heavily hindered by discriminatory bullshit stoking hatred and fear.
This actually would have been true 5 years ago, but in 2020 Quinn became the first transwoman to get an okympic gold medal in a women's event. There are expected to be more this year.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. I took your green eye comment to mean that you would support a separate trans league in sports. I guess I just don't understand your point about the green eye thing then. If trans women begin to dominate women's sports you will be OK with it? and are you willing to have non-trans women to have no way to compete against solely each other? Is that a price you are willing to pay for the sake of inclusivity?
I understand your point about transwomen being biological women. Do you believe that there should be no words or way to refer to someone who has been born with xx or xy chromosomes? Is it just best to not have language to quickly and simply convey that?
I know I have a lot of questions, feel free to ignore them as you like, really, no problem whatsoever. I am curious where you feel like the line should be drawn though. For instance, if an NBA player says they are a woman should that be enough to join the WNBA or should they have to pass a lie detector test or is there some physical characteristics that should determine if they are allowed to be included?
I appreciate your time and this conversation. A good friend of mine was told that she had to wrestle against a trans girl athlete(17 years old, no hormone blockers) or be removed from the league. She chose not to be humiliated and pinned down by someone who clearly belonged in a different league and that basically ended her interest and future in the sport. Ever since then, this has been an especially interesting subject for me. It is hard to say how different her life may have been, scholarships and colleges, and such.
Noted re Quinn although they were one player on a team of otherwise cis women who won gold. It takes an extreme amount of misogyny to discount the efforts of their teammates. It also seems that the team didn't sweep, and only won gold in a kickoff so like hardly evidence of some inherent superiority of trans people at sport.
I could go through the team and find someone else with something unusual about them and you would have to accept that this trait could be just as responsible for the win.
As trans women do not dominate sport, nor do trans men, there is no evidence suggesting a need for separate leagues. As I noted in my example, sports is about community and competition. At this point excluding trans people is not warranted on a defense of competition and would harm community. Again as per the example because there are not enough trans people to form leagues and the social context means funding and interest would be inadequate to support athletes it would be a defacto ban on at least trans women. Trans men can probably hold their own in open classes which is no doubt where they probably want to compete.
If it becomes a problem then there are other options to explore beyond outright bans. Remember most athletes are not Olympians, they are school kids, uni students, community members. Most sport is done for very low stakes on local or regional scales, what sport is the 1 trans woman in a school year meant to play if she's banned?
This leads to biology language. Just refer to what you mean. Do you mean chromosomal sex? that is a strange thing to talk about as most people don't know theirs we can't see it, touch it, smell it whatever. Do you mean secondary sex characteristics? primary sex characteristics? do you mean people that have undergone a male or female puberty? Do you mean tall and short people? weak and strong people? people with hormones at a certain level? what is it that you're actually trying to talk about?
The problem becomes a lot more solvable if we start actually talking about it accurately. Maybe trans men can never get a win in javelin throwing, maybe trans women dominate. Ok so if that happens and we look at why and it turns out that idk elbow knobbliness is a huge factor then we can set up leagues binning people into ranges. Whatever is reasonable, we can go granular if needed, a trans man who took puberty blockers and transitioned might have no abnormal disadvantage and visa versa for a trans woman.
If you start trying to legislate based on arbitrary shit you're going to necessarily exclude some cis women, even if you don't think trans women are real women that should still bother you. Like racists targetting black women with accusations of being trans because they have more masculinised secondary sex characteristics, or women getting awards stripped from them because they were later diagnosed with some hormone abnormality.
I never said that the team won because of Quinn. I simply pointed out that your claim of no trans person ever getting an olympic medal was verifiably false. I think in discussions like this, it is important to speak factually and to point out when facts are false, especially when they are being used to prove points. There is nothing misogynistic about wanting to deal with accurate information.
I get that the trans movement is very new, and many leagues have just recently begun allowing them. That is why I was speaking about a hypothetical future where more trans individuals are involved in sport. I think hypothetical considerations can help to pin down exact ideas and opinions.
So far as what I was referring to about the labeling, I was very clear that I was talking about xx and xy chromosomes. In other words, people born with the physical body that has the equipment that generally will be able able to provide eggs or sperm. I see no reason why there should not be language to describe these two types of individuals. Is it only for humans that you think there should be no language for this? Is it equally wrong, in your eyes, to refer to a penguin as being male or female?
I would love to get an answer to this question: Should anyone, simply because they want to, be allowed to play in women's sports? If no, then who should get to choose who is allowed, or where should the line be drawn?
It's ok, you're right although the subtext of the thing is "are trans women beating cis women at a statistically anomalous rate" and so individual medals are really the matter at hand is all I mean to point out. I also made no claim no trans women had won, rather that there is no flood of medalists. There's like that weight lifting woman that went from high men's rankings to flunking all her lifts after HRT for example. Which based on what we know of estrogen aromatisation and T effects on metabolism is what we'd expect really.
The trans "movement" is not new actually. you know that famous picture of the Nazi book burning? Guess what they were burning. We've been documented and treated in western medicine for at least 100 years. Other cultures have their own understandings of gender and analogous things go back to before we have records.
So if you want to talk about chromosomes talk about chromosomes but I have to ask why? I get the impression you're largely ignorant of endocrinology. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, I only know what I had to learn plus a couple of textbooks casual reading. Chromosomes don't determine shit. Genes in chromosomes may cause (and usually do) expression of certain proteins which may cause (and usually do) expression of certain hormones, which again usually cause tissue changes. Stuff like getting jacked doesn't happen because Y chromosome, it happens because androgenic hormones like T and DHT bond with receptors in specific tissues causing metabolic changes. Cis women generally have higher T and DHT than trans women (because E and T aromatise into each other and T makes DHT, trans women usually take antagonists for T [an antagonist is a chemical that fits into a slot but not in the correct way to activate the slot. Blocking the activation by the intended hormone/drug]).
Normally none of this matters tremendously, unless you're say on hormonal birth control, treating male pattern baldness, trans, have insensitivity disorders or whatever. Then all the wonderful and terrible subtly of what causes human sexual characteristic expression does matter. So if we're concerned about muscle mass chromosomes don't matter, as someone who was XY but completely insensitive to androgens (rare but hard to say how rare specifically since most people don't get gene sequenced) is indistinguishable from a cis woman unless we examine the statistics of children she births if she does. Or for a trans woman who has undergone HRT for some period longer than the lifetime of muscle cells such that the muscles have all been replaced under normal female conditions chromosomes also don't matter.
I am only trained in physics, I will not speculate on the inner lives of penguines. I am not sure of penguins are offered HRT, or how hormones in penguins and sexual expression work. I suggest you ask a domain expert if such a person exists. If we have a batch of penguines with various sex hormone interventions active and they are analogous to primate sex hormones then I would be comfortable endorsing nuanced and specific language. If there is anything applicable from physics I have learned it's that the universe is staggeringly complex.
I am not an expert on all sport. I think things should be determined with sensitivity to their context and according to evidence. E.g. sports where muscle mass matters a lot should probably have hormone level monitoring for all participants for a couple of years prior to catch both unusual health conditions and cheating or something whereas other sports timelines and requirements may be different. I am not an expert, it would be utterly ridiculous for me to suggest definitive guidelines.
I was referring to the modern trans movement that is allowing people who were born with penises to compete in leagues that, until recently, were exclusively for people who were born with vaginas. That is a new movement. It is not something that the nazis were burning books about so far as I know.
It is clear that you have done some research into biology, it is impressive. It is surprising to me that microchimerism isn't brought up more in these sorts of conversations. This is when someone is born with one or more organs that have different chromosomes than the majority of their body. For instance, an xx brain while the rest of their body is xy. This can go both ways, but it is more common for a human xx to have organs that are xy due to stem cells from their babies getting into the organs of the mother.
So far as penguins go, I actually do happen to know that penguins that are born with mismatching chromosomes are genetically able to lay eggs, and those with matching chromosomes are the ones that provide the sperm. This is opposite to how it is in humans. However, similarly to humans, the males(matching chromosomes) are generally larger and stronger than the females(mismatching). By the way, I don't claim to know the inner worlds or experiences of the penguins when I say male/female, this is just a shorthand that is used in scientific literature to describe someone who produces eggs or sperm. It is common in linguistics for common concepts to be shortened over the evolution of the language.
I've enjoyed talking with you, and as a result of our conversation, I have just learned something interesting. It seems the Olympics have changed their rules dramatically in 2022 and made it so that trans women who have gone through male puberty are not allowed to compete as women, so it seems that for now there will likely not be any trans women winning any medals after all. Not because they are less capable, but just because they are vastly outnumbered. Lia Thomas(swimmer) has been beating the competition by entire body lengths, nearly unheard of in her sport, but since she went through male puberty, she will very likely not be allowed to compete.
Unrelated, but I have faith in your ability to eventually get that pull-up! I'm no coach, but I would like to pass on an idea that I've heard before that may or may not be of some benefit. Get yourself a chair under the bar so that you can get to chin up position with the bar just by standing, then kick the chair out of the way and try to resist the gravity as much as you can. You can see your progress over time in how long you can keep yourself up before being in a completely dangling position. It can be motivating to get to see your progress instead of just being stuck at exactly 0 pull-ups. I'm sure you got it in you!
For honesty's sake I have not enjoyed talking with you, I have consumed about 2 L of port and missed a night's sleep coping with the stress.
Alright, well, I suppose that should be our sign to call it quits. I hope every good thing imaginable will happen to you. I honestly believe that life for trans people is going to continue on this recent upward trend for quite some time.
All that port isn't helping your upper body strength, I imagine! Willpower is a muscle that runs through everything you do. Exercise it! (Or don't.. it's your life after all, live how you want to!)
Never forget how incredible, undoubtedly amazing you are!
Don't patronise me. My lived experience is trans tolerance massively backsliding since the 2000s.
I never had anyone ban me from sport for example. People like you are part of the problem, I don't get the luxury of stepping out of debates for the freedoms of people like me because the audience will simply see an echo chamber reenforcing their ignorant biasies.
you are not a friend, you are not an ally, you are a political obsticle.
Sounds lonely. Sorry they tricked you into this mindset. I hope you find a way out. There's are lots of us nice people out there, I'm sorry they took us away from you.
"They"?
For fucks sake look at yourself, own your damned opinions. you want trans people to face more barriers to a full and happy life, you lend your voice to a crowd that chants for our extermination, you want policies that would leave trans women at least unable to compete. Your friend felt she couldn't wrestle because of some silly policy at a school that didn't require HRT? No trans woman on HRT would be able to compete with men. you wonder how her life might be different? what scholarships she might have got? you want that fate for all of us, whether it's your intention or not.
You are cruel and discriminatory, thoughtless in your callous disregard launching your uninformed opinions into the public arena at a time that's rather fraught. you have the privilege to do so and you use it cruelly and recklessly. No different to those men "just asking questions" about abortion rights, or gender pay gaps. No different from carnists sealioning about food intolerances or desert islands to distract from factory farming.
You are hurting people with your privilege. You can either take a look inside yourself and reflect, wonder why your behaviour doesn't line up with the good and sensitive person you hold yourself to be. Or you can dismiss the pain you're causing as oversensitive internet nutters being extremists and blithely continue.
It's your choice, you've made a heroic change on at least one issue standing up for the vulnerable in the face of ridicule and the knowledge that you were raised to be party yo great harm. Do you have the courage for another? m
I don't want policies that exclude you. I want policies that work for everyone. I don't want your extermination. I want everyone to live in peace however they were born.
Yeah, she didn't want to wrestle against someone who went through male puberty, someone who had been dating a girl a year prior in a straight relationship. Someone who got into the league on a single condition. They checked a box. I don't blame her for not wanting that, and it isn't fair that she had to make that decision. It's not. The fact that you can't admit that is absolute proof that you are unable to consider the entire situation and the real world. What happened to her was a result of an over-compensating faculty that was acting completely out of fear. They made a mistake.
I don't make policy, believe it or not. I am just a random person. I get that you are having a tough time, but it's not my fault. You can make fake accusations all you want, but that won't do anything to change the fact that I've done nothing to hurt you or any other trans person. You can make up situations in your head all you want, but that doesn't make it any more real. It's not going to help you or anyone one else to create monsters out of everyone who isn't exactly like you. That's bigotry, and it is disgusting. It is appalling that you do not know better, although it is possible that it is not your fault, and you've simply been tricked. If that's the case, then I hope you find a way out of this mindset. The world is so much bigger than you.
On your point about factory farming. I've been vegan for years due to factory farms. I stand up for my beliefs with my actions. I don't even use soap that isn't vegan. You can create a false world if you like, but I suspect you will be much happier in the real one.
Anyway, I've said my piece you suck on this issue, I hope you cool off and reflect. You're clearly someone who is willing to change their mind and be empathic and thoughtful.
I think you should reread my comment. I am highlighting how your veganism shows you are better than this.
I've not been shown any way in which I'm wrong. Just a bunch of pre-packaged senseless ranting about how I support people who chant for your extermination. I understand that you have probably talked to people that are how you are describing me. They have nothing to do with me though. This is an issue of you mistakenly lumping a bunch of people together because that is what you are used to doing or something.
If there are people who want trans people out of sport because trans people are icky and they want us to die, and you want trans people out of sport because you don't understand hormones and want simple blanket rules that result in exclusion, you support their political goals. They will use you, because that is how they work.
you are not being discriminated against, you have spent longer arguing with me than you have reading about endocrinology or studies on trans performance at sports. That's lazy and shitty behaviour. Educate yourself ffs.
Nope. I don't want trans people out of sports. You made that up. I repeatedly said that I don't want to exclude trans people from sports or to take away any rights from anyone, that's just something you came up with because you need to simplify things or something. No big deal. If you are curious about my stance for real, you can go look through my comments. I guess it is just a bit tricky to understand that there are people who exist outside of the boxes you've been conditioned to think everyone has to exist in.
On a related note, this is what it looks like when someone is thoughtful and explaining trans issues without just assuming that everyone different from themself has to be evil or whatever(most likely you have some fundamental religion in your past that you haven't managed to completely shake yet).
https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/10165165
I hope it helps, although I suspect your issue has a bit more to do with self-reflection(this is often the case when someone is senslessly attacking people and making up other people's POVs), not something that you can fix simply by seeing examples of someone a bit more mature. At any rate, nice chat, good luck, stay warm.
God you're insufferable. I doubt you've even looked at my profile lmfao
You are right, I hadn't. I'm not in the habit of doing that, I just tend to reply to comments. I gotta admit that i dont see the humor in not looking at people's profiles, but I'm glad you got such a good laugh out of it.
Great that you are a vegan!
you suck!!!!
you're a condescending asshole to everyone then
They're awful. But online comments aren't about the hardline conservatives, they're about people who might see dissent to reactionary views and start asking questions.
Ugh I fucking hate it though. "Debate me, debate me no I won't do independent research that challenges my biases debate me now or I'll voice a stance against you undefended". They're vegan and I think a woman too, so you fucking know they'd be exhausted if someone started doing this to them about either of those things.
Alas, that's the problem. Empathy is often too weak, intersectional solidarity is necessary. Until every cage and every chain is broken we're just all damned to this pointless struggle, gaining privilege and then terrified that the next struggle will take what little we won.
This is actually a really good point. There’s no much natural variation in body types and hormone levels.
If this is all drummed up, then why do transgender athletes have such a problem with competing in the all-comers category instead of the women's category, which is reserved for XX born females who have all of the disadvantages you describe above since birth?
The same fucking reason why people resented segregation you idiot.
You are not this stupid, this is entirely bad faith. Just say "I find trans women gross and I don't give a shit about trans men" instead of pretending you have anything principled to say.
Except skin color does not affect athletic performance whereas sex does. There is a huge difference in segregation and this topic.
Please provide evidence that trans women's performance in athletics competitions is favourably outside of the expected range for cis women.