Trans women athletes rule

  • Jorunn@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        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.

        • AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          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

          • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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            19 hours ago

            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.

      • glitchdx@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        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.

        • jason@discuss.online
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          23 hours ago

          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.

        • Nelots@lemmy.zip
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          16 hours ago

          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.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        They’ve been allowed to participate in the Olympics for over 20 years, and no Trans athlete has ever won a medal.

        • outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          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.

      • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        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.

        • ObliviousEnlightenment@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          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

      • lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        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

          • lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            22 hours ago

            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

            • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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              17 hours ago

              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.

    • rockerface🇺🇦@lemmy.cafe
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        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

        • rockerface🇺🇦@lemmy.cafe
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          2 days ago

          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.

            • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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              2 days ago

              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…

          • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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            2 days ago

            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.

    • mkwt@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        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

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        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

        • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 days ago

          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.

        • BarbudoGrande@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          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.

          • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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            2 days ago

            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.

            • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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              2 days ago

              at that point we should just actually realize Dark Olympics, just allow every assistance you can get, go wild.

              • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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                2 days ago

                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.

            • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              2 days ago

              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

    • BabyVi@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        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

      • LwL@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      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.