Transgender athletes back on the agenda

[David]

[Wokko]

Transgenders in women's sport will kill women's sport. It's absolutely �$%$ed in the head nonsense that a man who believes he's a woman will compete at the same physical level as real women. Too many of these men who wish they were woman seem to have a genuine hatred for biological women, I assume based on jealousy and are happy to stomp all over women's spaces.

Feminists are having to fight for women's rights again instead of finding imagined slights like 'manspreading', and they're having to fight against the loony LGBT activists who think that cutting off your penis and taking hormones makes you a woman.

[David]

As I've written a number of times in this thread, one's perspective on this is wholly down to whether or not you believe transgender women are women. In some ways, it's as simple as that: if you believe they are, then obviously their social issues (including exclusion from women's spaces) are relevant to the broader question of women's rights. If you believe they aren't, and you instead think that trans women are men masquerading as women, then you may be more inclined to see women as needing to be "defended" from the impact of transgender inclusion (importantly, there's also the more practical middle-ground approach of not necessarily wholly subscribing to trans activist claims about gender but nonetheless seeing inclusion in certain forms to be harmless and important for the sake of tolerance, dignity, etc.)

Frankly, I think it's pretty clear that transgender women are women in the same way that (to borrow from right-wing YouTuber Blaire White's analogy) adoptive parents are still parents. Social roles are not and never have been purely about biology, and those who are so determined to insist that they ought to be – whether they be radical feminists or Ben Shapiro–style right-wing "intellectuals" – are simply allowing their pet fundamentalist causes to get in the way of the basic everyday common sense decisions that are needed to maintain a functional society, while also fanning the flames of prejudice.

As for the claim that transgender women will kill women's sport, it rests on several assumptions: that there is a veritable army of elite transgender athletes who are waiting in the wings to excel in various sporting codes, that there will be enough of them to dominate their competitions and marginalise biological women and that this will have such a negative impact on biological women's participation in sport that their participation will decline. All three of these assumptions are false: 1) cases of transgender women either participating or seeking to participate in elite sporting competitions seem few and far between (as would be expected given that they make up 1% of the female population, hail from all ages, body types and socioeconomic backgrounds, and that hormone therapy plus related surgeries are likely to act as a barrier to maintaining the fitness levels required for professional sport); 2) even those who make it into professional competition won't necessarily dominate, and it's very naive to presume that this will automatically be the case (as I've said before, the notion that you could put me in a dress in the Australian Open and that I'd suddenly be able to compete against Serena Williams is ridiculous) – but if a few do excel, so what?; and 3) a significant number of biological women in sport and outside it are totally supportive of transgender women's participation, and even those who aren't are still for the most part going to be motivated to compete and aim for glory. Even if the first two premises weren't false and women's sport did end up like the trans-dominated nightmares that haunt Shapiro at night, you'd still get plenty of biological women driven to succeed, just like white guys still try to play basketball and football players of Jarryd Blair's height still try to make it at AFL level.

I understand that some people are genuinely worried about this (whereas others, like a certain poster on here who has openly voiced his contempt for women's sport in the past, are obviously just using it as a vehicle for their own bigotry). But it's just one big scaremongering beat-up, and one that far too much angst has already been devoted to given how little real-world harm (or even competitive success) has actually come of trans participation in women's sport.

[Skids]

Contempt of women's sport?!

Turn it up!

I love women's sport; netball, T ball, soccer, gymnastics etc and love watching them. Surfing, swimming track & field... awesome. On the other hand watching them try and play Aussie rules & Rugby is laughable, but good on them for having a go. My issue with these sports is the attempt to affiliate them with the elite men's comp. Collingwood Magpies AWFL team is cringeworthy as is the whole competition and the AFL's attempt to force it down our throats... but, I digress.

What I don't like (so called bigotry) is men (and they are men, no matter how eloquently you want to sugar coat it) competing against women. Neither do most sensible thinking people.

Those who do are the leftist fools who wander around thinking the world is some sort of Alice in Wonderland theme park, where everybody gets along and we can all live in harmony, watching rainbows and unicorns frolic in strawberry fields forever.

[Wokko]

Being a 'Woman' is not an abstract or a feeling. To equate womanhood with being a eunuch on hormone therapy is an insult to women.

You say that trans people are such a small percentage of sports participants so therefore aren't a threat. Why is it that such a tiny percentage are smashing world records in every sport they are allowed to participate in.

[Wokko]

http://dlvr.it/R9NG6b

[stui magpie]

[David]

^ There are a few issues there.

1) If you put a 200 ranked male tennis player in a skirt and entered him into the WTA, it’s true that he would probably be in the top ten or so women’s players. Wouldn’t win every match against every opponent, but might well take out a few grand slam tournaments, sure. But this ignores the fact that hormone-replacement therapy erodes a considerable amount of that advantage, and indeed professional sporting codes tend to demand that transgender athletes maintain certain testosterone levels. Yes, there are other physical characteristics that can still confer an advantage. But that domination by our formerly 200th ranked transgender player now seems considerably less likely (and let’s not forget that even getting to a 200 ranking in men’s tennis is an extraordinary achievement – I know that because there are only 200 men in the world who are currently managing it!)

2) Let’s say that, nonetheless, this transgender player still wins a few titles. You say that her opponents would riot. But is that really true? Yes, some cis female athletes have voiced opposition to having to compete with transgender opponents. But many others would support her.

3) The thing about 30 genders is a myth pushed by a few weirdos on Tumblr and gleefully latched onto by the right. What’s true is that there are people who identify as nonbinary. I’m not sure what their views would be on this – it seems a less pressing issue, at any rate.

4) You say there’s no prejudice in a "biological" distinction between men’s and women’s sport, but what else can we call a push to block a certain category of women from competing? Surely it must be animated by a belief that trans women are impostors, and that the physical advantages they may possess are illegitimate. It’s understandable that a lot of people don’t think deeply about these issues and haven’t really considered what it means to be transgender. But I hope that that will change.

Lastly, I found this interesting article about transgender female tennis player Renée Richards, who sued and won the right to compete in 1975. She lost in the first round of the US open, though made it to the doubles final. As the article astutely notes, the slippery slope of transgender domination that people were warning about forty years ago never happened.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2018/03/30/tennissrenee-richards-first-transgender-woman-play-professional/

[stui magpie]

30 genders is a myth?

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/07/explained-the-33-gender-identities-recognised-by-the-2016-australian-sex-survey/

There was some discussion at work today about Gender in the sense of recording it in IT systems and the people who referred to the 30+ genders aren't right wing or weirdos


Then there's this

[David]

The Wikipedia article says that she was previously ranked 6th in the world in the men’s over-35 comp, so she was hardly new to the game. Plus, it’s not totally unusual for players to keep playing doubles at an elite level past 40 – Navratilova won her last grand slam doubles tournament at the age of 49.

I think the QUT survey is probably an example of well-meaning overreach on the part of an academic institution. I’m not aware of many people, even in the more radical fringes of the LGBTI community, who take terms like "demigender" seriously.

[stui magpie]

In her own words

[David]

Fair enough. That’s her opinion. Whether or not she was right that she would have been able to dominate the comp at 24 will never be known, and there are still valid questions as to whether that would be a bad thing to begin with.

[stui magpie]

As evidenced by my posts in this thread, I think it would be a bad thing.

Social constructs have their place, but so does biology.

[think positive]

i totally agree with her opinion, and applaud her for stating it,

She could add another couple of words life....aint fair, yet She has legally transitioned in every way She wanted, how about fair to the born female athletes who worked their arses off to get there.

you will never get it David because sport is not important to you, i can think of a way to put it thats youd get, as writing is not important to me.

[David]

^ WTF? I've spent 16 years of my life posting on a Collingwood forum (admittedly, much of it hanging out in the VPT ), played football, tennis and indoor soccer competitively, and you think sport isn't important to me?