Categories aren’t divided by gender but by physiology. You might have to let go of the connection between the two which you might have been taught as a child
Again, what the fuck are you talking about. Banning trans girls from girl sports teams is banning them from sports, because ‘just play on the boy’s team’ is a non-starter for most everyone. This is like saying gay people could get married when gay marriage was illegal because they could marry someone of the opposite sex: technically true and fucking irrelevant.
Trans girls belong on girls’ teams. You don’t even know that there is a physiological difference between these kids other than their genitals; you ever heard of puberty blockers? Hormone replacement therapy? Those influence your strength and stamina way more than what shape your genitals are.
They’re just trying to call trans girls “biological boys” in a roundabout way because they know actually saying it is disgraceful and embarrassing. They’re an idiot, basically.
It isn’t ‘the boy’s team’. That’s what you were taught as a child. As you seem to understand that dividing into these categories has something to do with physiology, why would you say that trans girls have to *automatically *go with the physiological girls and not the physiological boys?
This a very “Frictionless spherical cow on an infinite plane” response. Categories in sports are, in fact, divided by gender. Just because you think they shouldn’t be is irrelevant to the facts at hand.
In a world where we did not divide sports by gender, and where division was necessary did so only by meaningful physiological criteria like weight, it is true that trans men and women would often end up playing alongside cis people of the opposite gender. But then it’s also true they would end up playing alongside cis people of the same gender, and cis people of opposite genders would end up in the same categories too. That is, obviously, the ideal outcome, but you can’t just act as if it’s the reality we have in order to dismiss legitimate concerns about how these policies impact real people here and now.
You’re either trying to adopt progressive sounding language to justify a harmful transphobic policy, or you are genuinely ignorant of the real harms that you are defending in your misguided attempt to be more-progressive-than-thou.
You’re forgetting about muscle-to-weight-ratio and muscle distribution, amongst others. I’m happy that you acknowledge that dividing by physiology is ‘the ideal outcome’. But then you just wipe everythingfrom the whiteboard and replace it with “make trans (women) happy”.
I, too, want to see trans women happy. But that doesn’t mean it automatically invalidates every other argument.
It’s not a question of forgetting or remembering those things, I simply didn’t go into them because none of them are relevant when the reality today is that we still divide sports teams by gender, not by any physiological characteristics. As long as dividing by gender is the rule, trans women belong on women’s teams and anything else is denying an essential part of their identity, end of story.
But the fact that you’re only interested in talking about those characteristics - very obviously in the mistaken belief that any of them can be used to subdivide “men” and “women” in such a way that all of the trans women get stuck with the cis men and vice versa - makes it entirely clear that your faux progressive language is a sham to poorly mask your deep seated transphobia; perhaps so deep seated that even you don’t recognise it. I’m not here to judge how much of your behavior is conscious and intentional. Regardless, you don’t actually understand the science of sex and gender - if you did you wouldn’t be making these arguments - you’ve just cherry picked a few pieces of it that you think will support your bigotry (knowingly or otherwise).
If you’re being genuine when you say that you want to see trans women happy then this is a time to do some serious reflection and actually learn about sex science from real scientists and not Joe Rogan.
Here’s a question for you to ponder that might perhaps lead you to wonder how you got so mixed up; why isn’t swimming divided by wingspan? Michael Phelps has a crazy fingertip to fingertip span relative to most people, and it’s credited with giving him a significant advantage in swimming competitions. So if wingspan matters, why don’t we divide swimming into wingspan classes? Why are all of these hyper-specific biological details so important when it comes to excluding trans women from sports, but so unimportant that we never bring them up at any other time?
the reality today is that we still divide sports teams by gender
No we don’t. And I find it funny that your argument boils down to “that’s the rule, end of story” and accusing me of “trying to sound progressive”, lol. Maybe you need to think about what that means.
Your example is excellent to point out your mistake.
Phelps is in the top percentage, but there are swimmers with a bigger wingspan. He was a great swimmer, but he was still within range for his competitors. For example: at his peak in say 2008, he handily beat the swimmer in second place by less than 2% in the 200m. The winner in the women’s category, however, was 11,5% percent slower. Can you see the difference? The gold medal in the women’s category would not have even qualified for the olympics, if there hadn’t been a women’s caterory. Do you understand what that means for her?
Meanwhile, Phelps has been beaten, and had his records have been broken, by swimmers with a smaller wingspan.
Of course you could divide swimming categories by wingspan, but the reason they don’t do it is because they don’t feel it’s necessary to create a more meaningful competition. ‘They’ being the athletes and officials that cooperate to regulate the sport.
But that’s entirely different from combining athletes that just don’t stand a chance against eachother. For example, a ‘classic male’ boxer can punch around 100% harder and around 20% faster than a ‘classic female’ boxer with the same weight. Do you think it would be meaningful to put the two into the ring against eachother? What reason could you think of to do so?
In all of this rambling you have fundamentally failed to understand any of what I said. You’re trying, but you can’t even begin to grasp the points, can you?
As you yourself point out, Phelps has been beaten, despite the unusual advantage given by his wingspan. And there are people who have failed to beat him despite having a greater advantage of wingspan. Both of which underscore exactly the point I was making; that ultimately these minutiae of biological differentials are meaningless. Yet you insist that they matter intensely, only and specifically when it comes to the subject of trans people playing sports. In any context we would write off factors like muscle-to-weight ratio and muscle distribution as valuable, but not something worth subdividing a sport over. But because this is about trans people, suddenly we must do everything in our power to prevent those factors from “unfairly” unbalancing the competition.
If you want teams to be divided by physiology, you will need to devise meaningful measures of physiology. But all of your arguments so far have just come down to gender essentialist claims that somehow dividing by sex is dividing by physiology. For every example where this is true, there as many where it is not. Human beings are infinitely complex creatures. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it here. If you want to make the claim that sports should be divided on physiological measures then you need to figure out what those physiological measures are, and accept that sometimes this will end up with XY and XX chromosomes competing against each other. And if that’s not a reality you’re willing to live with then you need to admit that all of this is just pearl-clutching transphobic nonsense.
I have a feeling you’re trying to say that dividing by XY/XX is too broad of a brush (which is why you think the wingspan thing is a great counter argument). But, sadly, broad the brush must be. It’s impossible to organise 8 billion sports competitions where you only compete against your exact genetic equal, aka yourself. Not having a perfect solution doesn’t mean you should opt for a worse one.
Also we do sometimes decide that XY and XX can compete against each other. Interestingly enough, we do this in cases where the physiological differences are unimportant. In most sports, for example, they are lumped together when it’s more meaningful to create age groups, and only split up when differences caused by sex become too large.
The weird argument at the end shows exactly the inverse of what you think it does. I don’t have any problem ‘accepting’ that they are grouped by physiology, and sometimes not, after deciding on measures we find meaningful. In fact, it is you who cannot accept this.
We’re where we started: Deep down you understand that there are meaningful reasons to divide categories on scientific factors, but at the end you decide to brush all that away because you believe that ‘being pro-trans on all fronts’, with a big emphasis on all, is more important.
What the fuck are you talking about. Forcing trans girls to play with boys in single gender sports is a ban.
Categories aren’t divided by gender but by physiology. You might have to let go of the connection between the two which you might have been taught as a child
Again, what the fuck are you talking about. Banning trans girls from girl sports teams is banning them from sports, because ‘just play on the boy’s team’ is a non-starter for most everyone. This is like saying gay people could get married when gay marriage was illegal because they could marry someone of the opposite sex: technically true and fucking irrelevant.
Trans girls belong on girls’ teams. You don’t even know that there is a physiological difference between these kids other than their genitals; you ever heard of puberty blockers? Hormone replacement therapy? Those influence your strength and stamina way more than what shape your genitals are.
They’re just trying to call trans girls “biological boys” in a roundabout way because they know actually saying it is disgraceful and embarrassing. They’re an idiot, basically.
It isn’t ‘the boy’s team’. That’s what you were taught as a child. As you seem to understand that dividing into these categories has something to do with physiology, why would you say that trans girls have to *automatically *go with the physiological girls and not the physiological boys?
This a very “Frictionless spherical cow on an infinite plane” response. Categories in sports are, in fact, divided by gender. Just because you think they shouldn’t be is irrelevant to the facts at hand.
In a world where we did not divide sports by gender, and where division was necessary did so only by meaningful physiological criteria like weight, it is true that trans men and women would often end up playing alongside cis people of the opposite gender. But then it’s also true they would end up playing alongside cis people of the same gender, and cis people of opposite genders would end up in the same categories too. That is, obviously, the ideal outcome, but you can’t just act as if it’s the reality we have in order to dismiss legitimate concerns about how these policies impact real people here and now.
You’re either trying to adopt progressive sounding language to justify a harmful transphobic policy, or you are genuinely ignorant of the real harms that you are defending in your misguided attempt to be more-progressive-than-thou.
You’re forgetting about muscle-to-weight-ratio and muscle distribution, amongst others. I’m happy that you acknowledge that dividing by physiology is ‘the ideal outcome’. But then you just wipe everythingfrom the whiteboard and replace it with “make trans (women) happy”.
I, too, want to see trans women happy. But that doesn’t mean it automatically invalidates every other argument.
It’s not a question of forgetting or remembering those things, I simply didn’t go into them because none of them are relevant when the reality today is that we still divide sports teams by gender, not by any physiological characteristics. As long as dividing by gender is the rule, trans women belong on women’s teams and anything else is denying an essential part of their identity, end of story.
But the fact that you’re only interested in talking about those characteristics - very obviously in the mistaken belief that any of them can be used to subdivide “men” and “women” in such a way that all of the trans women get stuck with the cis men and vice versa - makes it entirely clear that your faux progressive language is a sham to poorly mask your deep seated transphobia; perhaps so deep seated that even you don’t recognise it. I’m not here to judge how much of your behavior is conscious and intentional. Regardless, you don’t actually understand the science of sex and gender - if you did you wouldn’t be making these arguments - you’ve just cherry picked a few pieces of it that you think will support your bigotry (knowingly or otherwise).
If you’re being genuine when you say that you want to see trans women happy then this is a time to do some serious reflection and actually learn about sex science from real scientists and not Joe Rogan.
Here’s a question for you to ponder that might perhaps lead you to wonder how you got so mixed up; why isn’t swimming divided by wingspan? Michael Phelps has a crazy fingertip to fingertip span relative to most people, and it’s credited with giving him a significant advantage in swimming competitions. So if wingspan matters, why don’t we divide swimming into wingspan classes? Why are all of these hyper-specific biological details so important when it comes to excluding trans women from sports, but so unimportant that we never bring them up at any other time?
No we don’t. And I find it funny that your argument boils down to “that’s the rule, end of story” and accusing me of “trying to sound progressive”, lol. Maybe you need to think about what that means.
Your example is excellent to point out your mistake.
Phelps is in the top percentage, but there are swimmers with a bigger wingspan. He was a great swimmer, but he was still within range for his competitors. For example: at his peak in say 2008, he handily beat the swimmer in second place by less than 2% in the 200m. The winner in the women’s category, however, was 11,5% percent slower. Can you see the difference? The gold medal in the women’s category would not have even qualified for the olympics, if there hadn’t been a women’s caterory. Do you understand what that means for her?
Meanwhile, Phelps has been beaten, and had his records have been broken, by swimmers with a smaller wingspan.
Of course you could divide swimming categories by wingspan, but the reason they don’t do it is because they don’t feel it’s necessary to create a more meaningful competition. ‘They’ being the athletes and officials that cooperate to regulate the sport.
But that’s entirely different from combining athletes that just don’t stand a chance against eachother. For example, a ‘classic male’ boxer can punch around 100% harder and around 20% faster than a ‘classic female’ boxer with the same weight. Do you think it would be meaningful to put the two into the ring against eachother? What reason could you think of to do so?
In all of this rambling you have fundamentally failed to understand any of what I said. You’re trying, but you can’t even begin to grasp the points, can you?
As you yourself point out, Phelps has been beaten, despite the unusual advantage given by his wingspan. And there are people who have failed to beat him despite having a greater advantage of wingspan. Both of which underscore exactly the point I was making; that ultimately these minutiae of biological differentials are meaningless. Yet you insist that they matter intensely, only and specifically when it comes to the subject of trans people playing sports. In any context we would write off factors like muscle-to-weight ratio and muscle distribution as valuable, but not something worth subdividing a sport over. But because this is about trans people, suddenly we must do everything in our power to prevent those factors from “unfairly” unbalancing the competition.
If you want teams to be divided by physiology, you will need to devise meaningful measures of physiology. But all of your arguments so far have just come down to gender essentialist claims that somehow dividing by sex is dividing by physiology. For every example where this is true, there as many where it is not. Human beings are infinitely complex creatures. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it here. If you want to make the claim that sports should be divided on physiological measures then you need to figure out what those physiological measures are, and accept that sometimes this will end up with XY and XX chromosomes competing against each other. And if that’s not a reality you’re willing to live with then you need to admit that all of this is just pearl-clutching transphobic nonsense.
I have a feeling you’re trying to say that dividing by XY/XX is too broad of a brush (which is why you think the wingspan thing is a great counter argument). But, sadly, broad the brush must be. It’s impossible to organise 8 billion sports competitions where you only compete against your exact genetic equal, aka yourself. Not having a perfect solution doesn’t mean you should opt for a worse one.
Also we do sometimes decide that XY and XX can compete against each other. Interestingly enough, we do this in cases where the physiological differences are unimportant. In most sports, for example, they are lumped together when it’s more meaningful to create age groups, and only split up when differences caused by sex become too large.
The weird argument at the end shows exactly the inverse of what you think it does. I don’t have any problem ‘accepting’ that they are grouped by physiology, and sometimes not, after deciding on measures we find meaningful. In fact, it is you who cannot accept this.
We’re where we started: Deep down you understand that there are meaningful reasons to divide categories on scientific factors, but at the end you decide to brush all that away because you believe that ‘being pro-trans on all fronts’, with a big emphasis on all, is more important.