Trans women athletes rule
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This community is not a place to debate the participation of trans women in sports.
Here’s a digestible video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flSS1tjoxf0
Long story short the entire subject is being pushed by right wing lobby organizations to get people riled up about trans people and secure votes for the right. That’s it. Do not fall for their bullshit.
I haven’t watched John Oliver’s video on the subject yet but if I recall correctly, trans athletes don’t even tend to place first in their own divisions. So the whole idea of them being “roided up naturally” is just plain silly. It’s all just a right wing fantasy built to divide the left and supercharge conservatives on election days.
Ayup. Pretty famously there’s a swimmer that became a conservative activist named Riley Gaines. She was radicalised because she tied for fifth place with a trans woman named Lia Thomas in the NCAA. I think she was mainly just salty because she had to hold the sixth place trophy while Lia held the fifth place one during the photoshoot afterwards. Lia did go on to come first in a different event at the same meet (Edit: that Riley didn’t even compete in), but that just goes to show that she had a favoured event that she was best at, like almost all swimmers.
For what it’s worth, Riley said that the reason she was radicalised was, and I quote from wikipedia:
In 2023, Gaines said that Thomas shared locker room space with her while still intact with “male genitalia”.
Which is just inane. It’s not like someone with a vagina can’t sexually assault someone else with a vagina, having a penis doesn’t make that easier.
Yeah, it’s pretty fucked up rhetoric that feels like it’s making people less safe in two ways: it builds the impression that people with vaginas don’t assault people, and it treats penises (and the people who have them) as inherently dangerous. Bioessentialism is gross on so many levels
Not to mention if these fuckers weren’t making it so goddamn difficult to get GA surgery, then maybe she wouldn’t have had to have been hanging dong in the locker room. I am quite confident that’s not something she does because she wants to.
Eh, some of us do choose not to get surgeries. Dilation is hard work!
They’ve been allowed to participate in the Olympics for over 20 years, and no Trans athlete has ever won a medal.
Yeah, its called ‘hiding your power level’ and obviously a conspiracy to keep our precious sweet girls out of sports and stop creepy dudes from raping them! Its all a pedophile conspiracy!
Im not projecting! No projection! No projection! You’re projection!
So anyway I’m the new genital inspector for this school district, to keep your kids safe from playing with any trans people. No I can’t always be sure with just a visual check, ‘unfortunately’. Yes we have to check before and after every game, in case of gay changelings.
Don’t worry, you can trust me; im church certified.
Do trans athletes even exist in a statistically significant number to even warrant the conversation in the first place? I think I’ve only ever even heard of a trans athlete in SNL skits and shit like that. Granted, I don’t pay attention to sports in general.
Hit the nail on the head right there. Tempest in a teacup. That’s their bread and butter. Hyper focus on something… then, piss and moan about it non stop. I honestly don’t understand how anyone listens to these professional whiners. What a waste of oxygen.
It’s for this very reason that I’ve always thought it would be easier to just give sports to the conservatives and then try to take that ground back at some point where trans people are more accepted. Don’t let a perfect outcome get in the way of good and all that. But I’m neither trans nor interested in sports, so I realize my opinion here holds little weight and I haven’t thought very deeply about it.
They chose this topic because it is divisive. If we drop out of sports they will simply find another arena of life to eject us from. It’s not about sports for right wing politicians and interest groups, but about getting conservatives engaged in bigotry against us so they become angry and polarized and vote for bigoted parties.
We can never make them happy with our behavior because our behavior doesn’t matter. The narrative they weave around us matters to them, not reality.
I meant more like conservatives should shut up about it because it’s a non issue, not that we should give up anything to them.
Yeah the motive is revealed in the methods. Conservatives never propose legislation that specifically addresses any advantage trans women have, instead opting for blanket bans. The science shows that trans women have very little if any advantage in sports, and in my sports we’re actually at a competitive disadvantage. Hell, even the chuddiest of chuds could realize that trans women certainly can’t have an advantage in all sports. Do trans women have an advantage in women’s gymnastics? Have you seen the type of bodies that excel in that sport?
I would be open to conversations of sports fairness if they came from a place of honest good faith, but they don’t. The default stance should be equality first, with restrictions only introduced when absolutely necessary. Is it possible there’s some sport that trans women have some massive advantage in? Well trans women should quickly dominate that sport’s upper echelons. If you find such a sport, then maybe we can have the conversation about fairness. But even then, it should be limited to just what is absolutely necessary to ensure fairness, nothing more. For example, maybe some handicap system would be appropriate for an individual sport. But even then, such intervention should only be done if there is some enormous unfair advantage that trans women are systematically demonstrating.
Instead, we just get bigots that talk about a trans girl “stealing” their spot in a sports competition, as if she doesn’t have the exact same right to compete as any other girl. It’s fundamentally about devaluing the humanity of trans people all together. Trans identities aren’t to be respected, they’re to be tolerated and humored at best, persecuted at worst. It’s no different than the same instincts that kept sports racially segregated for generations.
Considering roller derby has been fully inclusive for years and hasn’t seen any sort of advantage play out, I find it unlikely it’ll show up anywhere
And they are under represented. I don’t recall the numbers but the percentage of trans people in the overall population is much higher than among athletes
I think you mean over represented.
No, I mean that among trans people, there are proportionally less athletes than among cis people. The few that do go into sports are over represented in (right wing) media if that’s what you mean
Yeah I thought you meant in media. Cause yeah, in media and right-wing circles they massively over represent the number of trans athletes in the sports.
Good to know. If I choose to change instances I’ll go to this one.
Litteraly a 80% to 20% issue or more. Push for it all you want
Hmm? 80% to 20% what? Push for what?
Written by The Chaser?
It’s like the Australian equivalent of The Onion.
Transfemmes have every right to participate in sports that match their gender.
Especially mud wrestling.
I prefer mud slinging myself
Sports divisions kinda need to be overhauled anyway. Would be nice to have it based on the actual physical factors that affect a human’s performance in a specific sport, instead of just 2 groups for everything with blurry definitions and a massive overlap in terms of said performance.
Paralympics has such a system kinda. We could extend that system to the point where it includes people nowadays forced into “Olympic Games” or what ever they are called
Yeah, just stick with weight classes.
Or something analogous depending on the thing. Weight classes in shooting or long jump seems off.
More weight obviously means that you can push the bullet faster
Did not consider, am not a sports doer.
Weight, or muscle mass %, or reaction speed, or stamina, or whatever makes sense in the context of a specific competition. I’m neither a sports person nor an expert on human anatomy, but surely there are better ways to do it than what we have now.
sports MMR
that genuinely feels like it might be the best option, provided you can set up a reliable rule framework for it and avoid people just paying to be moved up or down the ranks
i don’t think physical bracketing really makes sense for many things other than boxing, like there’s a lot of other factors going on in something like football…
TBF, American Football is definitely the kind of sport where physical bracketing would make sense.
Yeah, weight/weight classes would be much fairer, either seperately or combined like they do in (some) bodybuilding now.
But testosterone is a hell of a drug, and height and weight matter a lot, and weight classes are a choice. You could end up with far too many categories to fill.
Trans mascs too
“the only sport i have an unfair advantage in over you is sumo wrestling, Bethany.”
Sumo is really the ultimate fair sport. There are no weight classes. Very few rules (setting aside the unwritten Japanese cultural traditions).
Watching sumo, you quickly learn why every other fighting sport has weight classes.
does that make it a fair sport or a really unfair sport? also I saw a YouTube video something along the lines of “where’s the glory” in the thumbnail, it was REALLY interesting
It’s the difference between equality and equity.
https://thestandard.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/equality-equity-fence.png
Would that not make it a fairly rich person’s game? Their calorie intake is like 20,000 calories. Throw in the ability to train and eat while being able to afford that, Id find it hard for most people
Joke’s on you: All sports at basically all levels are a rich person’s game.
Luck is just the culmination of one’s self-compounding privilege.
I think many high level competitive sports are a rich man’s game.
Behind a lot of athletes (from automotive to sports combat), are a sponsor or “team” that handles a lot of the talents needs and training.
Still, the only way I could afford 20k calories daily would be gas station grub and cheap sugary booze.
I was saddened to learn that professional long distance runners have a team who sign up for the race with them and run in front of them in formation to reduce drag. Marathon running seemed like the very purest form of sport where it was about nothing beyond your ability to run fast for a long time, but money found a way to make it this complicated team game where solo runners now have something like a 3’30" disadvantage at the top level.
at that point we should just actually realize Dark Olympics, just allow every assistance you can get, go wild.
one olympics with basically no rules, one olympics where it’s literally just naked people with 0 assistance of any kind beyond what’s needed to keep them healthy.
Maybe swimming? Any high energy sports will cause you to have a high calorie diet, but I the diet is like 1/8-1/2 of the sumo wrestlers, and I feel like you get a decent amount of endurance and training from a lake/ocean/river if you don’t have a community pool around
How much beans with rice is 20k calories?
About 3.2 gallons or 12 liters. That may be affordable but I think I’d tap out after 1 day of eating 3 gallons or beans and rice and someone saying it’s the same tomorrow, haha.
12 liters? I wouldn’t even get half down my throat.
Earth is stupid.
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Michael Phelps has an inate advantage but no one seems to give a shit. In a truly just world trans women would be allowed to seek excellence and be valued for their capabilities instead of shunned. For the record I don’t really think trans women have an advantage over similarly matched cis women. I just think the notion of fairness in sports is inherently ridiculous.
It actually kind of pisses me off that the government is so involved in sports. It’s ridiculously stupid. Like the time when Congress was investigating the football that was deflated in a game. Like why does it even matter? It’s a game. The outcome is irrelevant to anything else important going on.
It’s like if the cops came to your house for playing monopoly wrong or something
It does seem sensible to require some proof of some set time of hrt for trans athletes in top level competition, and that’s about it. Once you’ve been on E for a while all studies I’m aware of show there really isn’t any inherent advantage to being AMAB.
And for any lower competition levels it doesn’t really matter anyway since you can likely find cis women that are better than the men anyway, so who cares if some trans girl has some physical advantage while she waits for hrt to start or whatever.
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objectively
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseyedarvin/2024/04/25/transgender-athletes-could-be-at-a-physical-disadvantage-new-research-shows/
- https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577.full?ijkey=yjlCzZVZFRDZzHz&keytype=ref
There are very few studies on the topic. Do not reply to this comment as we will not allow a debate on this very divisive topic quite literally designed to use transphobia for political gain by the right.
I will say this: It’s possible trans women have some advantages, and it’s also possible we have disadvantages. Either way in reality there has not been any issues of trans women infiltrating sports and ruining it in any way. Until there is more data debating our participation in sports is not worthwhile. Remember that this topic is being pushed by lobby organizations specifically because it gets people riled up.
Fun fact. Trans women have competed in roller derby- a contact heavy sport- for decades; and no advantage has yet materialized
Ok? And what about the sentence right after that one that addresses all this?
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🙄
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What do you mean? There are loads of transphobes literally arguing that transfem athletes are transitioning so they can compete in women’s categories because they’re not good enough in men’s categories.
They said this about Lia Thomas endlessly. They’re still saying this about her.
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