Women soccer, women basketball are two sports that for the most part struggle (when compare with male counterparts). So there will probably be 0 money to be made on a 3rd cat of gender.
Thinking out loud.
I wonder if a transgender man, could just use unlimited amounts of T to up his levels to someone else who has naturally high T levels. Would that be consider illegal? Why?
(rhetoric questions)
From WADA:
1 Like
No, sorry…it is still not a good example.
You don’t just suddenly declare “I’m actually a woman” change your kit and then start to compete as a woman. Please watch Dylan’s video which clearly lists what has to happen biologically for a trans woman to compete.
We have no idea how the required hormone treatment / t-suppression would have affected Jenner.
And on that note, I am bowing out of this particular part of the overall discussion
6 Likes
i think you mean she / her btw
2 Likes
This only supports the argument that Jenner is an excellent example.
That is, the IOC and other sports bodies acknowledge the profound difference between the sexes. So much to the extent that they mandate a transitioned athlete must undergo synthetic hormone therapy in an attempt to level the playing field. Thus, Jenner is a great example of why it simply is not fair (for M->F… I do not know of any examples of a F->M reaching elite competition in a traditional athletic event).
To the argument that ‘trans women aren’t doing it to win events’ I think that is a non-argument. I don’t care about the motivation of someone’s actions, only the outcomes. Why they want to transition is separate from the impact that has on other athletes.
If transgender women have a 8-40% advantage over cis women, it is unacceptable for cis women to have their space taken away from them in that way. Womens participation in sport is already lower than I personally would like, for a variety of reasons.
Imagine that you lined up to a race and everyone on the line knew someone had a motor in their bike that was going to give them… i dunno 5%, shit 1%, extra watts. That would be bullshit and they shouldn’t be allowed to compete. Doesn’t matter how small the advantage is, everyone worked hard to get to that start line and being told that you don’t have a chance because you’re not that person is just shitty.
Women get forced to race with lower category men constantly. Let transgender women do the same. Reset their category at the bottom and let them work their way up as a transgender, and their settle in a range were they are competing while not stealing competition from women.
3 Likes
I don’t think Jenner is a relevant example because he never competed against women, so I think all the Jenner talk isn’t moving the needle forward here. There’s enough trans athletes competing today using today’s standards (as faulted as they may be) and those are who we should be focusing on, they even had one on the podcast but can’t remember the name.
3 Likes
Does anyone know if there are studies bout trans women who have been on HRT for many years? Most of the studies cited in the video only looked at 1 year after which might not be enough time for the full extent of change.
To further complicate things, there is no ‘standard’. IWF (international weight lifting) has their standard. IAFF (track and field) has other standards that even vary by distance. It is all over the place. For weight lifting I believe the limit is to be under 240ng/dL for 1 year prior to competition. Thats at the low end of the male reference range. The reference range for women is 15-70ng/dL, so the IWF limit is still 3.5 times higher than the top of the female reference range.
To be fair, that is the counter-argument being made to those that are claiming men are going to start identifying as women in order to win events. It is not a primary argument being presented.
3 Likes
I saw it stated multiple times in this thread that ‘it is so miserable to transition that they wouldn’t do it for sporting reasons’. I don’t think their motivation should be considered at all, because it doesn’t effect the impact that it has on others.
2 Likes
The discussion often starts with a blanket statement like “transgender athletes have an unfair advantage”. There are many sports out there. Do transgender athletes have an advantages in competitive shooting? Curling? Chess? Gymnastics? Not that I know the answer for these sports, my point is that you probably can’t treat all of them the same. You might even have to look at individual disciplines. Women seem to become more competitive in ultra distance events, and there have been cases of women beating the entire field in e. g. transcontinental races.
Are there other ways to make the sport fair? For example, some sports (judo, boxing, weightlifting, …) have weight classes to make things fair and interesting. We have age classes in most sports I am aware of. Given that some (biological) women are excluded from competing if their (natural) testosterone levels are too high, I think we could think about using testosterone levels in lieu of weight classes in some sports. So these issues do not just impact transgender people.
The whole discussion reminds me of Oscar Pistorius who wanted to compete with able-bodied athletes. Clearly, not having two fully functional legs is a disadvantage, but his prostheses are an advantage. How do you weigh them? IMHO we should err on the side of letting people compete. In the end, Pistorius was “only” world class if compared with his able-bodied peers, but he wasn’t able to win any events if memory serves.
1 Like
In some of the cases, the athletes had e. g. XXY chromosomes, i. e. even in the strict biological classification, they did not fit into the male-female scheme. But there had been cases of biological women (i. e. they had XX chromosomes) with unnaturally high testosterone levels who had been excluded.
So perhaps we need to revisit participation rules also for this reason. IMHO I find it unfair that people with XX chromosomes are excluded just because their physiology gives them an advantage. Isn’t that what sports is about? Physiology gives athletes an advantage over average people when competing.
I mean… The motivation is not a problem right now, but in the future it might be…
You can make an argument, that if the person transitioning, is not sure about it, but doing it will make her competitive in a sport, that might tip the balance in favor of doing it and participate in the sport.
Laurel didn’t just randomly picked to be back to lifting. She knew she would dominate the sport. She was already somewhat competitive as a man, maybe not Olympic level, but competitive. So why not… Otherwise why would she left the sport so many years ago…
The Jenner argument is that Jenner is a woman and competed (and dominated) men. There are currently no trans women competing in elite male athletics. Nor are any of the current M-> F transgender athletes competing in female fields athletes who once dominated (or competed at the top level) male sports.
The transgender argument is that you are born a gender (ie Jenner is and always was a woman) but that your mis-assigned a gender. That is, you were born a woman, but the doctor said you were male and everyone around you said you were male so you identified as male, until you realized you are a woman.
Getting plastic surgery and HRT doesn’t make a woman any more of a woman and does not change a man into a women. It just makes you look like what society thinks a woman looks like. Perhaps the HRT makes you feel like it too?
If Jenner is a woman, then Jenner was a woman who dominated men at the highest level of competition. The idea that Jenner competing in her true field (woman’s field) is fair, seems preposterous. The reason for this is that Jenners biological sex at birth (and currently despite HRT) is male. Biological sex does not have to be the same as the gender you identify with.
You’re self-identified gender, even in the presence of HRT, etc, does not make it fair play to compete against the opposite biological sex. This is the main argument against M->F transgender competing against biological sex women.
The case of F->M is a mute point for athletics due to obvious biological differences between the sexes.
This does not say there aren’t women who are physically superior to men. There certainly are. If you overlay the distribution of physical strength / athleticism of males and females, the mean of males > mean of females. The outliers for males will be far beyond that of females (see Coggan power charts for example).
My point is, there is nothing you can do to make it fair. There is a trade off between fairness and inclusivity (at least with respect to their obscure example [an extreme minority of athletes/ people in general are trans]). It’s not fair, but it might be the morally right thing to do. Personally, I don’t know.
2 Likes
It doesn’t matter to the sport though. Transgender women have an advantage in lifting. That is fact. Their motivation for becoming transgender women doesn’t matter as far as that advantage is concerned.
Let them compete with people that they don’t have a natural advantage over. Don’t make it a waste of time to even try for half the population to even try so that they feel included.
1 Like
Are we really trying to say that organised sport (and much more so, sport organisers & organisations) serve a very narrow purpose (to put it softly)?
(full dscl: haven’t watch the vid)
Ultimately, what we are seeing is a paradigm shift in our understanding of ourselves and the world. This is part of the early stage, and therefore it is controversial and hard to wrap our heads around. I don’t doubt that, with time, we will be better able understand what is happening and what has happened.
In that vein, I am for inclusiveness over fairness. Fairness really doesn’t exist, after all. Socioeconomic, geopolitical and « accepted » generic factors already preclude entire countries from fair competition in many sports. If we base our assumptions and ideas going forward on the dogma of the past, we will never truly advance as a species. But, if we open up the pathways to see where this leads, I’m sure we will arrive a better point in sports and human history than we are now.
7 Likes
This is a great point in favor of inclusion.
But to achieve fairness we would have to dismantle the whole social construct governing most countries. And we know that could take centuries
1 Like