TheFuzz
Member
The male/female sports distinction ought to be dissolved anyway.
This is one of the stupidest ideas I've read on this forum.
The male/female sports distinction ought to be dissolved anyway.
No, while there are clear cases on way or the other that show exceptional cis males or females. without eliminating male/female leagues, and letting everyone compete together (like some poster suggests), you have to deal with averages. On average males do have physical advantages.
Puberty, and when/if they do HRT are variables outside of those averages. A 4'9"-5'3" born male is extremely rare compared to born female
Again I ask:
And Im asking from a general overall perspective. Not ever person who transition is 4'9", and has been on HRT for 5 years (or before puberty).
Im fine with the IOC guideline, but not everyone can/does meet that who may want to compete (especially at a High School level) so where do they fit in?
If you've read the research on this subject, it's clear that someone that is male to female trans has an unfair advantage in athletics due to inherent physical developments prior to transition.
Yes, it does matter when the transition took place, but in my eyes it's a losing game trying to make an ultimate determination and as a result, any participation of theirs will always be unfair to some degree.
I have much less of a problem with it in traditional sports like track and field as opposed to the situation with Fallon Fox in MMA, but I'm still against that advantage and I think you can logically come to that conclusion while still supporting trans people.
Do they have to resign themselves to never competing in sports as a result of their situation? I would personally never want to compete athletically when I know I have some kind of unfair advantage because that is not true competition, but that's my own personal stance.
I feel for them, but there's no good solution.
Maybe she has an advantage? But it doesn't seem to be bigger than the advantage from other naturally tall/better built girls. Hell, it doesn't seem to be bigger than the advantage from other not as tall girls; individual variance here is more important, and what are you gonna do against individual genetical variance? That is, by definition, unfair.
She is not cleaning up -which is what you said-. She has had some success in the 200m race, but that advantage got erased as she moved to state wide competition, where she is performing on female level. On female level on Alaska.
Unless your standards for "cleaning up" is third place. In which case, lol.
So what do you want? That she performs as an _average_ girl? If you look at her record, she is indistinguishable from other girls that perform well.
At the high school level is more complex because not everyone starts treatment at the same time, the school may not want to enter a dispute on who is or not trans, who is under treatment, etc. Of course, it is still also complex if you take out transgirls from the competition, since different girls will have different rates of growth, height, weight, muscle mass. Individual variance is p great even without trans people in the equation, but somehow you don't see the parents in the news complaining against taller girls.
Which is why the school ain't entering that discussion and is just saying "if she is registered as female, she can compete as female". There are legal ramifications they don't want to enter which do not apply to the olympics committee.
In time, as there's growing acceptance of trans people, more girls will start transition earlier, and thus advantages like height, bone structure, etc, will be reduced. There may be some corner cases, at the high school level, but again, it is not what we are seeing here.
It's not like we have 100 million misplaced transgendered athletes. There's only a handful of times this has ever been and will ever be an "issue." Tell the parents to suck it up and treat this as a learning moment for their children.
Do the people who bring up the bone structure argument want to argue that cis women who have large bone structures also shouldn't compete? Or are we just lumping all girls into one pile here?
This is one of the stupidest ideas I've read on this forum.
I'm sorry but it's exactly how it DOESN'T work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system
If you have XY chromosomes, your sex is male. If you have XX chromosomes, your sex is male. sex is a biological trait.
We are not entitled to k know anyone's biological sex. Are you advocating athletic programs force these people to disclose which set of genitals they were born with?
And the higher frequency... You're not going to see millions of new competitive transgendered athletes entering the arena every year. This is a non issue except for a few small pockets of people who just need to deal.
LMFAO..
this Octavianus guy refuses to acknowledge basic science.
It might not be best to hold the conversation here as its a little hectic and off topic in this thread. If you want to PM me I can answer some thing to the best of my ability. I would however, recommend asking the off topic thread. Not only am I'm actually pretty bad at explaining things even though I'm trans, but different people have different ideas on different things and it would be best to ask trans topic to get multiple opinions.Right now just anything really, as someone who has very little knowledge but try's to keep an open mind on issues I may not understand it's difficult to even know where to start.
Things like proper terminology would probably be a good start other then calling a transgender individual by the gender they associate with, I slip sometimes I won't lie about that but it's something I try to correct myself on when I do.
Problem is I spent most of my youth on a reservation so there is a lot to these issues that are honestly foreign to me,I'd like to try and change that.
Wrong.Look at the Olympics. They don't allow it as it is considered an unfair competitive advantage.
This is one of the stupidest ideas I've read on this forum.
I think you should look at the fairness of what is going on. I don't blame the parents...
Look at the Olympics. They don't allow it as it is considered an unfair competitive advantage.
Not really sure this should be an issue in high school sports. Cmon. It's mostly time for kids to be having fun, learning and competing with respect.
I hope you can one day get over it.
Yeah, for the kids winning state level events sports aren't "fun and games."Except College Athletic Scholarships are a thing.
Sorry buddy, but you're just plain wrong here. Females and males are very different, and merging the two would be disastrous for female athletes. It's not sexist to acknowledge that when it comes to sport, men are usually built more for it and will have a natural advantage.
Obviously this doesn't apply to absolutely all sports. Motor racing, for example, should never have gender leagues.
What kind of sample size do you have for that? Seems hard to believe this situation is common enough to say confidently one way or the other.An mtf competing in athletics with cis girls is not going to have an advantage whatsoever. If anything, they might have a disadvantage due to many factors that hrt brings including increased difficulty focusing and general fatigue among other effects. Mtf athletes don't typically dominate in women's spaces, as some would assume.
What do you guys think of Fallon Fox, the transgender MMA fighter? It's a bit different than this case, since it's actual professional competitive sports and fighting as opposed to just running. Here's a video of her fighting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av9MJCBvhp4
GAF whats your thoughts on this (interesting discussion btw. Thx to the sensible replies on both sides)
A 52 year old individual going back to play college ball with after transitioning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DppKZAJDrDQ
http://espn.go.com/espnw/athletes-l...ege-basketball-player-enjoying-best-year-life
Can and are hormone replacement therapy drugs tested in athletic sports? Can someone just skip some days of pill taking to gain an advantage and are they testing for that?
This isn't something that I think is going to be logically tackled for a while I think. We have to have trangender acceptance before we can, as a society, tackle issues of how transgender people differ physically from cisgender people. It's so hard to have that conversation at a point when a transgender person is fighting to be able to identify as their gender, that attenpting to separate that from issues involving how their physical sex affects their body I feel isn't going to really go anywhere, at least not in a constructive way.
Could it be considered fair and would the public be able to balance three divisions of sports soppurting in this way?
So being a woman is a handicap?
Yeah, for the kids winning state level events sports aren't "fun and games."
I get that's it's not fair that someone won due to a biological advantage no one else had, but how far do you take that reasoning? If there's a kid significantly taller than all of their peers in a small town should they be banned from playing basketball since they'll hog the spotlight? Should a huge kid be told they can't be a lineman because the skinny kids deserve a chance? Stars in every sport rely on biological advantages.
It does seem weird to think that if transgender women kept competing that they'd probably be shut out from setting world records and stuff like that, but is being born a woman in a man's body any less likely than being born with Michael Phelp's physique?
Having people compete with their biological sex seems like the best solution here but as someone who doesn't really care about sports it's interesting seeing a bunch of people freak out over the fairness of the situation.
Does bone structure not matter in sports? I see a lot of hormone talks, but there is more to sports surely.
The bolded is exactly my view.
Shaq dominates men as a man, and if he transitioned, he'd dominate women as a woman.
If we want sports to be more fair, we need to create new divisions within the existing gender divisions. Until that happens, I'd say trans women are just very fortunate women if they have an edge in athletic competition.
people just want to have a little bit of transphobia and couching it in "but science!" for a completely artificially constructed human activity.
Does bone structure not matter in sports? I see a lot of hormone talks, but there is more to sports surely.
Hormones affect a whole bunch of things, muscle, bone, fat mass, oxphos, inflammation. The list is probably endless...
This idea I've seen people bring up about basing competitions on testosterone levels is ludicrous. It's not like if one person has 1unit of testosterone, and the next person has 1.5 units that the 1.5 is automatically stronger, faster and better at sports.
Firstly you have to take into account that hormones work on a threshold level. A slight increase over normal (and with many hormones they fluctuate massively over the day, and likely massively over seasons too) won't do a lot. It's when you really pump yourself to a non-physiological level that it has a huge effect.
Then you need to think about all the potential polymorphisms in the receptors or the genes that control the receptor levels that people have. It's not like everyone has the same amount of the androgen receptor (AR). This will have a huge effect on the level of testosterone in the body, maybe those with high testosterone are mildly resistant to it, so it's higher to compensate for that.
There's also polymorphisms and individual differences in the genes that the AR and estrogen receptors (ER) regulate. Some may be more sensitive or less sensitive altering the potency of the hormone.
Finally you need to consider the environment that each and every person has developed in. There may be certain levels of DNA methylation for genes that regulate or are regulated by the AR/ER. There could be chromatin modifications to the same or opposite effect.
It's so incredibly complex, and no where as simple as "higher testosterone and lower oestrogen result in a better athlete." While my specialty is in endocrinology, I don't focus on sex hormones, and certainly never done any research on male to female or vice versa transitions, but from experience I know that ER and AR agonists have huge effects on animals, people and cells. I don't know if it removes competitive advantages at all, but I suspect it almost completely alters physiology, especially in teenagers and younger people in transitions. This may be different with fully developed adults, but again, I don't know.
Edit: It's also worth pointing out that SHE DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING COME FIRST.
To the bolded, she did many times in the 200, Thats worth pointing out
No, because we're talking about averages.Do the people who bring up the bone structure argument want to argue that cis women who have large bone structures also shouldn't compete? Or are we just lumping all girls into one pile here?
Even If Shaq were to transition he'd lose about 30% of his muscle mass and potentially even a couple of inches. His performance levels would go down to match a cisgender woman.
Are we going to start testing every woman just in case she has naturally high testosterone?
Or, possibly, people have a misunderstanding of how transitioning works.
It does nobody any good to picture those who lack knowledge as transphobic. I came in to this topic misinformed about the science, and leave a more educated person. Painting people who lack uncommon knowledge as hateful is going to do nothing but cause them to get frustrated.
"Genetics are unfair. Some men are born tall, some short. Others strong. Why should this be any different?"
I'm failing to understand this equivalence. Of course being a male does not inherently stronger, faster or taller than any/every female, but does that nullify the statement that males generally have these physiological advantages over women? Isn't this why we have gender segregation in competitive sports?
I'm not seeing the logic in this argument.
The point is that those differences tend to be within the normal variance for AFAB women, so if they somehow present an "unfair advantage" in and of themselves, then shouldn't you also ban AFAB women who possess those traits?