Woman, Controversial Woman
Photo by Ellietycer at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
I really struggle with the idea that there are some subjects certain people can’t weigh in on. Full disclosure, I’m an American, Caucasian, Christian, college-educated, cis-gendered, heterosexual, married mother, gainfully employed, and living in a zip code with above average household income. The only topics I’m freely allowed to pontificate on are (maybe) women’s issues—though I’m often not considered the right kind of feminist, and (presently) size-discrimination. I ate my way through Covid, and currently fall outside the Lily Pulitzer target market.
I loathe the idea that perspectives are scored for legitimacy according to the laundry list of identities held by whoever is sharing them (much like the one intentionally and ironically included as the second sentence of this musing); but I worry that society is subscribing to the concept that people—both the ones speaking and the ones declining to speak–believe that only those directly affected can voice opinions. This dynamic results in a game of Marginalization Olympics and eliminates the perspective of Middletarians who either have the good sense to keep quiet or lack the gumption to defend their right to…thoughts.
I confess guilt at not only addressing the proverbial elephant in the room but scratching him behind the ears and giving him a name. An intrinsic duty calls me to give voice to what other people may be unwilling or afraid to say, and I deem it courage. My friends and family would call this same trait pig-headed insanity, but I do not shy away from varied perspectives. The best way to get to the heart of any matter—especially difficult, sensitive, or controversial issues–is for people to talk about them, but it is impossible to invite the ideas of others if only some kinds of people are allowed to speak. This is how we devolve into identity politics.
To be clear: the sharing of perspectives is not the airing of grievances or “both-siding” something that is clearly outside the Overton Window. I am not advocating unkindness, bigotry, or violence. I am advocating for tolerance of all people (some might even call it “diversity”) begetting the tolerance of divergent perspectives, and I’m asking for hearts and minds to be open enough to learn from The Other. Steven Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” chastised society by saying, “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” The world is big enough for differences; in fact, when differences are not only unwelcome but not tolerated, the world gets awfully small.
Recently, I have been wrestling with my thoughts on what it means to be a woman and how that intersects with the transgender community. Maybe ‘community’ is too all encompassing a term and unfairly mirrors the prevailing outsized level of societal outrage versus the actual scope, but certainly there is a tremendous amount of mainstream discourse related to sports, athlete equity, and a number of bills winding through state legislatures sponsored to exclude athletes from competing on teams that match only their gender identity.
Are transgender athletes a problem large enough that legislation—the threat of government force—is warranted? While the number of elite trans athletes may be practically very small, do the means employed to address the matter more rightly correspond with the population perceived to be negatively affected by these athletes? The last couple of years have been accompanied by a refrain of “following the science” regarding virus transmission; were we to follow the science in all things, Chromosome Teams would result. What would a biology-based solution like that mean for people merely yearning for inclusion and acceptance?
Utah Governor Spencer Cox released a statement outlining this sort of nuance along with his veto of House Bill 11, which banned transgender students from school sports aligned with their gender identity. His summation referenced that out of 75,000 Utah high school athletes, only four transgender youth were playing sports, and only one participated in girls’ athletics. “Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are part of something…Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few.” Governor Cox’s veto was subsequently overridden by the legislature, which will result in (assuming his referenced statistics are accurate) 1/1000th of 1% of current Utah high school athletes being sidelined. I’m not sure that mobilization of entire state legislatures should be targeting individual teenagers, and I’m very concerned with how that one student is coping.
But what about Lia Thomas? Lia Thomas is the first openly transgender swimmer to win an NCAA Division I national title after finishing first in the women’s 500-yard freestyle in the 2022 championships. Thomas’s win was triumphed as a ground-breaking accomplishment on behalf of both trans people and women but also characterized by fervent women’s rights groups as creating a dynamic where “silver is the new gold” for biological women. From the perspective of both the University of Pennsylvania and the NCAA, Thomas had broken no rules; however, USA Swimming’s metrics (which the NCAA deviated from) were finalized following the start of the season, and would not have permitted any current trans female swimmers to compete on women’s teams.
Are the governing bodies of the sponsoring organizations and the sports themselves—rather than the hollowed halls of government–the more appropriate place for promulgating regulations regarding transgender athletes? Perhaps. But what about defending the rights of female swimmers competing against Thomas? How do the NCAA swimming rules comply with Title IX for them? Conceivably it—dare I say–underscores that legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in programs and activities receiving federal funding is well outside the sandbox that the government should be playing in: let’s pass on federal funding for higher education and sports and go reform the tax code and fix the grid! (Again, I’m not always the right kind of feminist.) There is absolutely no way to reconcile legislative conflict within a law that protects the rights of females and is interpreted to protect the rights of people who identify as female without either prioritizing one group over the other or failing to “follow the science.”
There are folks who might challenge my having any thoughts on this issue because I don’t have the standing required to offer an opinion. I am not an elite swimmer or transgender, I’m merely a woman. A woman who may not be marginalized enough to ask questions which challenge the accepted point of view. However, Caitlyn Jenner, who was an elite athlete and is transgender, commented on Lia Thomas’s circumstances during a January 2022 interview. “We need to protect women’s sports. I feel sorry for the other athletes that are out there, especially at Penn or anybody she is competing against…It’s not good for women’s sports. It’s unfortunate that this is happening.” Jenner Tweeted a follow-up this week commending Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s declaration that Floridian Emma Weyent was the rightful NCAA Champion: “It’s not transphobic or anti-trans, its COMMON SENSE!” As intriguing as these critiques are, it is also fair to point out that Jenner accepted the 2015 Glamour magazine award for Woman of the Year.
Any solution to the conundrums of how to be pro-woman without being anti-trans and how to be an ally without establishing a variegated hierarchy needs to be both inclusive and fair. Trans women who desire full acceptance by a society where portions of the population appear to be aggressively working to exclude them should be contemplated alongside, not with deference but with justness, to XX athletes concerned about competing against a potentially growing pool of XY athletes. I have tried to identify other high-profile trans biological conflict emerging from recent history and consider how those issues were received and addressed to better inform my own thoughts on the matter.
Speaking of Women of the Year, what about Dr. Rachel Levine? Dr. Levine serves as the assistant secretary of health and is the highest ranking trans woman in our nation’s government. Levine was promoted as the first transgender four-star officer in the uniformed services after being named Admiral in the Public Health Service and was also recently named one of USA Today’s twelve ‘Women of the Year.’ I applaud Dr. Levine’s qualifications, success, and contributions to the betterment of our country, and I certainly don’t think this accolade was solicited, however, I also wonder: should USA Today-type recognition (and Glamour magazine before it) simply go to successful people from the transgender population at large? If people are to make an argument like “gender is not binary” in support of trans individuals, it shouldn’t be undermined by forcing people into one of two binary categories like “Woman.” Maybe the better solution is to ditch labels like Man and Woman for everyone altogether and re-brand similar awards as Person of the Year?
Is gender the only biological category with trans phenomena? Could there be any enhanced understanding gleaned from the circumstances of Rachel Dolezal? Dolezal, born of Caucasian parents, resigned amidst controversy while serving as president of the Spokane, Washington NAACP after it was discovered that she was passing as a Black woman. The Venn diagram of people supporting Lia Thomas’s inclusion in women’s swimming overlaps with people who also widely shunned Rachael Dolezal for presenting as Black, so much so that the former college professor and community advocate changed her name and now works as a hairdresser. Black people resoundingly condemned Dolezal for cultural appropriation, some even going so far as to accuse her of committing blackface, but there are current University of Pennsylvania swimmers who fear reprisal should they publicly share thoughts critical of competing with Thomas.
What differences are there between identifying as a different race rather than identifying as a different gender? Is there a difference between someone with XY chromosomes choosing to live and compete as a female and someone with lower concentrations of melanin choosing to live as a Black person? Especially if both being Black or being female are marginalized positions and both are biological traits. From my perspective, discourse about Dolezal’s case was acceptable and understood while cis-female criticism of Thomas competing against women is much more controversial. I suspect it has to do with two differences: the general awareness of Lia Thomas’s trans status whereas Rachel Dolezal concealed her racial identity, and a possible belief that being a racial minority is considered more marginal than being a woman.
I thought Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz’s inquiries during Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearings regarding how the nominee would define a woman were ridiculous, but I also abhorred President Biden’s announcement that he would nominate a Black woman to fill the vacancy. Judge Jackson is exceedingly well qualified, and she deserves to be confirmed. However, as a professional woman, I believe open employment positions preceded by announcements that they will be filled by “a woman” does little to reinforce the idea that women can succeed on our own merits in a competitive field. I also don’t believe one needs to be a professional woman to hold—or express—an opinion like mine.
President Biden would have done more to underscore the reality that Black people and females are fully equipped to serve on the high court had he announced that the best person for the job would be selected and then simply nominated Jackson. The “best candidate” is, for political appointments, identified at the pleasure of the president. If the president prioritizes the voice and perspective of a Black female on the bench, he can easily nominate one.
After contemplating trans female athletes and a SCOTUS nomination announcement qualified by both race and gender, comparing and contrasting the position of NCAA female swimmers in accordance with Title IX with the position of male employment candidates who are not Black in line with Title VII seems reasonable. After all, both are sections in the Civil Rights Act which apply to all Americans, even the less marginalized ones. I do not have a solution for crafting gender-reverent solutions that are fair, compassionate and within the framework of the law as it presently exists. I do know that this current purgatory is unsustainable for all women–trans, cis or otherwise–where both the act of defining woman, and the act of not defining woman are each controversial.
I am left pondering a hypothetical and hoping it reveals some clarity: what would have been the prevailing reaction had President Biden’s SCOTUS nominee been a Black transgender woman?
You bring up points that are sure to catalyze uncomfortable yet necessary conversations. Let us hope they’re substantive.Report
This is a very nice comment and I’m glad it’s at the top. This is what Ordinary Times is supposed to be.Report
After reading your piece, I ran across this report on Los Angeles County Superior Court putting the kibosh on the California decree that corporate boards have a certain demographic makeup:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/04/03/californias-corporate-diversity-law-ruled-unconstitutional-n459698
The point in the article pertinent to your piece:
“. . . where do they get off saying that corporations have to have “a woman” on the board anyway? I have been reliably informed that there are no such things as women anymore because nobody can actually define what a woman is.”Report
That’s commentary, not news reporting.Report
Technically speaking, that’s correct. It is reporting inso far as it links to the a news story about it. It goes on to offer commentary, but I shared that because I happen to agree with it.Report
Many things to unpack here, but let’s start with Lia Thomas. Based on published reports she had 3 wins in the 2021 swimming season – Katie Ledecky had 4 wins in a single meet during the same time. And Thomas’ times in her other events are slower then prior to her transition. She also failed to place in her final meet o the 2022 season, which is expected to be her last meet. Given the number of other women in NCAA competitive swimming who can and have beaten her, I’d say she’s exactly the lack of threat the Governor outlined in his veto.
As to the President’s open nomination of a black woman to a vacant Supreme Court seat, that’s just a campaign promise fulfilled. Which, you gotta admit, is refreshing. Plus it reminds us all that highly qualified jurists come in a variety of packages – Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson earned the ABA’s highest rating for her qualifications. So, much like Lia Thompson, its another tempest in a tea pot.
Why the tempests? I really believe its because the pace of societal change is quickening, and a LOT of people are emotionally, economically, and politically invested in keeping things as they think they were. Its much easier to “force” queer folks – including trans men and women – into their former boxes then it is to acknowledge the ordinary contributions these people make to society. It’s more comfortable to reject a highly qualified judge for SCOTUS because she fits a description of a needed experience that the broader “you” (Not you personally) reject. And its a convenient way to deflect from your political and leadership failures by whipping emotion against such folks.Report
What, if anything ought to be done or needs to be done about trans-gender athletes competing in traditional girls’ and women’s events? I don’t know and neither do the legislators who are in such a damned hurry to pass bills to solve a problem that barely exists — as at least one sensible Republican governor pointed out. Let’s see how things work on the ground for a while and then try to do something — if, after reflecting on our experience, we think we need to do something — once we know what we’re talking about.Report
My argument is precisely nothing needs to be done. Lia Thompson has been a middle of the pack swimmer with occasional wins since transition – which is precisely what she was before transition. She’s no more dominant now then before. There are no clothes on this emperor.Report
There is certainly no large and immediate problem that urgently needs a solution. Ultimately, there may not be a problem at all, but I’m willing to wait and see. Would that others were.Report
When you believe you are loosing your grip on social and political dominance, you seek to preserve it. Said preservation is often done in a way that allows lashing out at the persons believed to be the greatest threat.Report
That is why others are not willing to wait and see if there really is a problem. Because whether or not there is a problem is not the actual problem.Report
My 2nd daughter was a brutal volleyball player in High School. She’s broken noses. She had the size, the build, and the athletic-ness. If we, as a family, had focused on v-ball she’d be elite. By female standards she’s huge and she has the muscles to match.
For all of her size, strength, and height, she’s 6 inches smaller than I am. She’s also weaker than I am.
If I’d taken drugs at her age and transitioned… I would have lost some of the strength but none of the size. I’m not sure all the strength goes away either.
My expectation is starting out male is a really significant advantage in some sports. That transitioning isn’t total, that we’re in non-binary territory.
The disproof for that would be if there are male trans athletes.Report
Just out of curiosity, how would you have felt if your daughter’s gender was questioned and she was forced to submit to testing to verify it before she could compete further?Report
I guess it would depend on who opened that door and why.
Your question assumes binary sexuality. Our technology is way less than perfect, transition does a lot but there are things that don’t change.Report
Well, what forms of “verification” would you be comfortable?
Someone wanting to look down her pants?
Someone wanting to look at all her medical records?
Someone wanting genetic testing?
Would you consider any of that to be okay?
As to who opens the door and why, I propose two possibilities:
1.) All athletes looking to compete in female/women’s events must verify that they meet the appropriate criteria for being a female/woman.
2.) Competitors have the right to challenge the gender/sex of another competitor.
How much of that would you be comfortable with for your daughter?Report
This is irrelevant because there is no question on what the situation is.
Lia’s competitors have darn good reason to “question her gender”, or more exactly, how far and how effective her transitioning is.
The big problem is “fully transitioned” is really “fully transitioned to the extent medical science allows” which is limited.
Trying to expand that into “everyone’s gender can be questioned” is specious.
I thought InMD had a really good point. Should society be fine with every solo record in women’s sports being held by a trans athlete?Report
Google Caster Semenya.
What if someone accused your daughter of not being a “real woman”? What if that accusation was taken seriously?
I’m not even weighing in on what the rules should be but pointing out a likely unintended consequence of whatever they are.
Especially if rules are based on who SEEMS like a woman.Report
Caster is inter-sex. This whole debate is about what to do about that.
Whatever we do, they’re not going to be “unintended consequences”.
We’re trying to figure out what to do with people that aren’t binary. Trying very hard to pretend that everyone is binary ignores the reality that everyone isn’t.Report
In the last 5 years, how many records in woman’s sports – any woman’s sports, have been set and held by transwomen?
Again, this is not an issue. Its not a thing. Its not a “problem.”Report
I think it’s naive to believe it won’t happen eventually under current rules (it will of course take time).
But why would that change your opinion? Shouldn’t your answer be not ‘this is not something that will ever happen’ but rather, ‘so what who cares if it does’?Report
Its a statistical nothing burger now that is being used as a kludge legislatively to keep trans people from achieving “normalcy.” As long as that remains the case I want the numbers to help prove the point.Report
“I think it’s naive to believe it won’t happen eventually under current rules (it will of course take time).”
based on what? Your doctorate in sports medicine? Your deep understanding of the effects of HRT on trans athletes?
Or just some hand-waving about “natural advantages” and some references to “trans women are taller than the average cis women” as if the average cis female collegiate swimmer wasn’t several inches above that average?Report
The trans community is currently 1.4M in the US. The intersection between that and athletes is pretty limited.
We’re looking at a below-top-500 man who was turned into a top 10 woman. Her time didn’t change that much, the big difference is who she’s competing against.
If she’d been a top 50 athlete before transitioning, she’d be dominate now and setting records that will probably never be broken by a cis-woman.
The odds in any year of a top 50 athlete transitioning are low, but they’re not low enough to expect it to never happen.Report
It’s amazing to me how people on the left insist we “follow the science” except when that science is biology.
https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/a-look-at-the-numbers-and-times-no-denying-the-advantages-of-lia-thomas/Report
Sure, she’s an elite swimmer. She was before transition, a nd while she has undergone some physiological change as a result of changing her hormone balance, she remains an elite swimmer. Her wins – which I documented above, say as much.
But she’s not the top of the game under either gender. She’s not beating every elite female. Nor will she.Report
I am baffled as how you could label someone ranked 554th as an “elite swimmer”. Leah Thomas was an *objectively* average male collegiate swimmer – who only became “elite” after she began transitioning and competed against females.
As for Katie Ledecky – yes, could have beaten plenty of men. But not elite ones. In her trademark event (the 800m), her fastest time is still 30 seconds slower than the world record. There is a reason why men and women do not compete against each other.
Regardless, is your point that Leah Thomas should be able to compete against women because some women could beat her in some events?
I don’t get it. And I don’t think it is particularly helpful to trans advocacy to pretend that this isn’t an issue.Report
I have two points – one is that Lia Thompson’s alleged dominance is overblown, and is being used as a red herring but those who want to legislate queer people out of existence and/or back into the closet.
My second point is that she is a woman, and should be allowed to compete as such. As a matter of both sports ethics and personal liberty.Report
Those are 4 points.
1. That the advantage is overblown. [Objectively false]
2. A red herring. [Perhaps by some, but largely untrue]
3. Sports ethics [Is it ethical for biological women to compete against biological men?]
4. Personal liberty [I can’t wait to bring this up in the next free speech debate!!! ;)]Report
“[Objectively false]”
Please provide the data that objectively falsifies the argument that the advantage is overblown.Report
Well you can start with the link I first posted and then work your way through the last 100 years of measured athletic performance between men and women.
Or you can save time and present the data demonstrating how Leah Thomas DID NOT have a distinct advantage over her female competitors.
What a brazen attempt at gaslighting. Kudos.Report
Trans women are not men.
I know this statement flies in the face of Rightward PC, but medical transition is, well, medical, and it has a number of impacts on the physiology of trans women, many of which are relevant to their athletic performance. My understanding is that in some sports, you see some advantage, but it’s not true of all sports, and the advantage is nothing like the differences you see between men’s and women’s leagues.Report
Look at her win/loss record and her times post-transition. She’s a solid competitive swimmer, but she’s not got any advantage, as has been noted numerous times above.Report
The big advantage she got was she started competing against women while her swim times barely changed.Report
I don’t think it’s as simple as “She’s a woman”. Let me put it this way, if a woman had been taking testosterone or some testosterone analog as a PED, is it valid to take action against her, or at least mark her accomplishments with the asterixis of having been found to be using PEDs?
Of course, woman naturally produce testosterone, and IIRC there was a case rather recently of a female athlete who just happened to naturally produce an anomalously large amount of testosterone, so it’s not a cut and dried as I make it out to be.
Still, it’s valid question. A woman who went through puberty producing testosterone at the levels a man does is going to have an edge. Organizations and individuals are allowed to grapple with how that should be dealt with.
Politicians looking to virtue signal to their base should stay the hell out of it.Report
“Still, it’s valid question. A woman who went through puberty producing testosterone at the levels a man does is going to have an edge.”
You’re making an assumption. Specifically, you’re assuming that testosterone produced muscle REMAINS in the absence of testosterone. (It does not, in fact. The military study I linked to in the still stuck in moderation post shows that pretty clearly, as trans gender servicemembers converged on cis averages within two years).
The only things that would linger from male puberty are being “taller on average” and having “denser skeleton” on average.
Athletes are not “average” — especially on the former (the average cis female Olympic swimmer in 2016 was 5″9. Ledekcy is 6 foot, and Lia Thomas is 5’8″) and bone density is as much hindrance as anything else — it’s unnecessary when you lack dense, T-powered musculature and is simply mass you have to move and power despite losing the T-powered gains in blood oxygenation.
I do not know why everyone seems to believe that male musculature remains when T levels are reduced to cis female range. They don’t. They literally can’t. No amount of gym time or effort can keep them. You cannot maintain them without T.Report
What’s funny is there have been plenty of trans NCAA (and other organization) athletes before. They mostly give middling performances (like most athletes DO — very few are super stars like, say, Phelps) and nobody even notices them.
Occasionally one wins (which, hey statistically will happen), or performs well, and we get this drama about how trans women will dominate all the women’s sports forever despite them not doing so RIGHT NOW.
By bigots who don’t care about women’s sports at all unless there’s a trans woman to hate, in which case they have to defend all the “Real women” with the passion of a thousand fiery, bigoted suns.
If you’re all up in arms about Lia but couldn’t name a single other female swimmer? Why do you suddenly care?
And especially if you’re one of the idiots who saw a picture of Katie Ledecky and called her proof that trans women had an unfair advantage. That was funny as hell. (She’s cis, she’s an excellent swimmer, which means she’s quite muscular and has a body that looks much like Lia’s. Because they’re both competitive swimmers. She’s also three inches TALLER than Lia, btw)Report
I’m allowed to care about frivolous abortions without knowing the names of the aborters, aren’t I? Seriously. Swimming performance is related to oestrogen and progesterone supplementation — and you aren’t going to test girls for that, are you? That’s a fast ticket to “I was raped and then booted off the team…”Report
The amount of progesterone trans women take (most do not, and those that do tend to only take them for a few years as progesterone does do some work in the last stages of puberty) moves their blood progesterone levels up to the cis female average — which itself varies over their menstrual cycle, so trans women do not normally even reach the peak level of non-pregnant cis women.
As for estrogen, again, the target is standard cis female ranges.
Your argument appears to be “it’s an unfair advantage for trans women to have estrogen and progesterone levels the same as or below cis women” which is a weird take.Report
Ouch.
To sum up, Lia’s performance is off by 4-6% from her male peak.
The problem is elite women are typically 11% lower than elite men.
Ergo what we’ve done is taken an athlete who was at the bottom of the top 500 and put an extra 5% onto their score by changing pools and genders. 5% is crazy big for these things.Report
I think that it is probably fair to assume that under the existing NCAA rules we will eventually reach a point where every solo record in womens sports is held by a trans athlete.Report
That. That exactly.
Gender differences are serious in these sports. That’s the reality we keep flinching away from understanding.
We don’t let men and women compete together because if we did ALL of the top athletes would be male. We’d have stupid lopsided numbers, like all 100 of the top athletes being male and/or only a tiny percentage of the top 1000 female.Report
How is that fair to assume?
That’s certainly not what science OR real life shows. Both show that, after a year or so of HRT, the differences are non-existent.
Sure, your average trans women is taller than your average cis women — but what’s that mean to athletes? Lia Thomas is actually shorter than the average cis Olympic swimmer by a full inch, for instance.
You don’t keep the benefits of testosterone when you stop having it, and HRT lowers trans women to the cis range — generally the lower end of the cis female range — for T. Work out as hard as you like, you’ll still end up as strong as a woman working out that hard.
There are plenty of trans athletes — occasionally one will even win. How many can you name?
Lia Thomas, for instance, saw her times drop as she moved through HRT — her best times in the women’s division are about as far behind the women’s records as her best times in the men’s (pre-HRT) were behind the men’s records. (Her worst showing in the men’s division. btw, was when she had already started HRT but not yet been on it long enough to qualify for the women’s division).
It seems like you’re doing what a lot of people are doing — assuming a trans woman is just a dude in a dress, that HRT does nothing more than grow tits.
That’s fundamentally not true. Musculature, blood oxygenation, and a host of other physical factors — all the things that make men stronger and have more stamina on average — those are all testosterone dependent. Without testosterone in the cis male range, you don’t have them. Nor do you KEEP them if you transition.
And for all the talk about slightly denser bones (just more weight to drag you down, in a body now lacking the T to more effectively oxygenate your blood, and no longer having the denser muscles that skeleton was there to support) and broader shoulders “on average” is all stuff that means Michael Phelps — who has a mutant wingspan, produces half the lactic acid as his competitors, and has double-jointed ankles — should be banned.Report
I think that may be going a little far. Only a very small percentage of people worldwide practice any kind of sport at a competitive level. And only an even smaller percentage of people worldwide are transgender. So not only is the overlap of these two sets going to be exceedingly small, but there are sports where elite cis-gendered women can beat elite cis-gendered men so trans athletes will be a wash wrt solo records.
Even if the last were not the case, in the amount of time before trans athletes might someday eventually come to dominate there will be other issues wrt performance and fairness (gene therapy, CRISPR designer babies, people raised on Mars vs earth, etc.) Heck, right now you could make a case that people who grew up at high elevations have an advantage over others because of how their bodies have developed to process oxygen more efficiently.
That isn’t to say there’s no issue, but blowing it out of proportion doesn’t help the debate. Honestly, given the example of volleyball elsewhere in the comments, it strikes me that there are a few sports where it might make the most sense to drop mens/womens categories and go to weight/height classes.Report
“Heck, right now you could make a case that people who grew up at high elevations have an advantage over others because of how their bodies have developed to process oxygen more efficiently.”
Elite athletes get to be elite in part because they have physical and/or mental anomalies that offer some sort of advantage.
The current debate over trans athletes pretends the question is, “Should we allow folks who might have an inherent physical advantage compete?” Really the question is, “What inherent physical advantages are we willing to tolerate?”
Up until now, the question was, “Any and all.”
There might be good reason to categorize trans athletes differently than cis athletes. It might be that whatever advantage they might have is less than all of the other variations that already exist. It’ll take lots of time and research to REALLY understand that.
But we already tolerate folks who have larger lungs or longer limbs or extra jointedness… even folks who have all three (paging Michael Phelps)… because of their genes. So we shouldn’t pretend like this is some new thing that didn’t already exist in sports.Report
Yes. and thank you for bringing up Caster Semenya (I thought of her when I read this article but couldn’t recall her name correctly to find articles on her).Report
Serious question then: Do you think it was wrong and/or unnecessary to have implemented separate womens sports to begin with?
I personally don’t have much of a dog in this particular fight but I think it’s fair to ask if we’re ok with where this approach goes if followed to its natural conclusion.Report
I do think that is a fair question and is one I’ve wondered about myself at various points.
I think historically it probably made sense as a quick-and-dirty way of addressing certain physical differences that tend to exist between the sexes.
I also think there are many places where it makes no sense. Is there any real reason for curling or bowling or darts or billiards to be differentiated?
To try to answer your question as directly as I can:
I do not think it was wrong *at the time* to have implemented separate mens and womens sports when we did.
I think we may be approaching a point wherein we rethink those categories and consider differently how we group athletes, including but not limited to biological sex at birth.
I can’t remember if it was here or elsewhere but I’ve long argued that we are very arbitrary in what we consider to be fair and unfair advantages in sport.
This particular situation is not one I have dug deeply into with regards to the sports angle but what I do know makes me think that there are many more areas of potential ‘advantage’ that would be better worth paying attention to if we really cared about fairness in athletics.
What does rankle me about this is all the places wherein the objections to trans women competing with cis women are steeped in hateful and/or wrongheaded thinking on what it means to be trans. That is definitely not the ONLY reason folks are objecting… but when I do see THOSE objections… I find that really loathsome. And, to be 100% clear, I do not think your objections have any of that to them… nor do most of the objections raised here.Report
To be clear, I’m not really objecting. Part of what I mean by not having much of a dog in this is the asymmetry of the situation. Mens sports are not really impacted if a trans man or the odd outlier woman can cut it. However, depending on the approach, there really is a potential for massively changing womens sports as we currently know them.
Like, high school level boys soccer teams can and have defeated professional women. So if you go totally sex agnostic you’re going to greatly expand the pool of boys and men and greatly reduce the pool of girls and women. But if you integrate trans women into womens sports you will get the Lia Thomas situations and at some point under current rules in the NCAA you will get someone who was a top 100 level mens talent pre-transition as opposed to a more marginal one and that individual will be unbeatable, except by other trans women athletes. If that’s what we’re going to do we have to be willing to tell women who have a problem with it that they are wrong.
So I guess if I object to anything it’s the idea that the answer is obvious (not saying that’s you).Report
“Like, high school level boys soccer teams can and have defeated professional women.
Okay, I think I’ve asked you this twice now: Do you think HRT does nothing to trans women’s muscular development and stamina?
Because you’re acting like trans women have identical strength and stamina AFTER a year of HRT as they had before, which is categorically false.
They don’t, and they physically CAN’T. Heck, I referenced an Army study below showing changes in trans servicemembers PT scores over two years (they converged to cis values in anything unrelated to the slightly taller average height trans women have over cis women).
So all this stuff about “boys teams beating professional women” is entirely irrelevant, unless that boys team spent a year on T-blockers and heavy estrogen doses.Report
Read my comment again and consider if this is actually responding to it.Report
i did, and you’re STILL acting like a HRT will not impact that top 100 male swimmer who transitioned.
All things being equal, a top 100 male swimmer who underwent HRT should result in a top 100 female swimmer, yes?
Which is exactly what Lia Thomas did — her times are consistent (versus the top times in the men’s bracket pre-HRT, and the top times in the women’s bracket post-HRT).
You say “was a top 100 level mens talent pre-transition as opposed to a more marginal one and that individual will be unbeatable”
Why? Do you think their bodies don’t change under HRT? Because you’re clearly assuming that they’ll continue to perform to their prior level despite HRT. That’s the bedrock of your claims.
And it’s categorially untrue. Literally what lets male athletes outperform women in sports is testosterone — the very thing trans women take blockers again (if not outright remove the source), to push their T values into cis ranges (generally the LOW end) and then replace with cis-levels of estrogen.
So yes, I’m actually responding to it. Because you’re clearly stating a trans woman retains all the advantages of a male athlete despite transition. It’s literally the only way your argument flows.
If that’s NOT your bedrock assumption, why would we assume a top 100 male swimmer would, post-transition, be “unbeatable”?Report
You’re still not there- so let me help. Hormone therapies may downgrade performance to some varying degree. But downgrading performance from a (potentially much) higher baseline is not the same as evening the playing field, or fair competition, as those concepts have until recently been broadly understood and which led to the creation of women’s athletics in the first place.
You can point to some interesting exceptions and outliers, but those IMO only serve to prove the rule. What you’re really arguing for is re-defining what those concepts mean, which is fair enough. But I think honest debate requires being forthright about that, as opposed to arguing that’s how it always was and has been all along.
And this gets to the final piece of my comment, which is about how to respond to women, and women athletes in particular, who take issue with the re-definition. I think I generally lack standing to tell them they are wrong about this particular subject. Obviously you do not, which again, fair enough. The intent of all of my comments here has merely been to try to keep it honest.Report
You are simply fundamentally wrong here. I mean |I can’t make it any simpler.
The difference between men and women’s athletics is purely testosterone and the denser, more powerful musculature you can develop with it – and the corresponding higher ability to oxygenate blood that ALSO comes with T.
The thing is — and for some reason you don’t want to believe this — these things do not persist without T. Period. That’s not an open question.
T lets you BUILD those muscles but T is needed to KEEP those muscles.
You cannot retain male levels of musculature or blood oxygenation, to name just TWO critical components, without male T levels.
There’s not “some degradation” — with T suppressed to cis female levels along with estrogen, performance converges on cis averages. (I’d link but it gets stuck in moderation, so google “Effect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance in transwomen and transmen: implications for sporting organisations and legislators”)
The takeaway: After two years, trans women had no advantage over cis women servicemembers in push-ups and sit-ups, but retained a small edge in speed over the 1.5m run (undoubtable due to trans women being slightly taller than the average cis woman, and if that’s your argument Lia Thomas at 5’8″ should be allowed to swim and cis swimmer Ledecky, at 6 foot, shouldn’t)
You are simply fundamentally wrong in your bedrock assumption — trans women do not have the advantage you just assume they have.
Absolutely men out-perform women in sports — and that out-performance is based on testosterone, and they cannot keep that edge without it. They do not “degrade somewhat” — they converge on cis values no matter how hard they try to retain that edge, as long as their T is within cis values.
(In fact, one could claim a handicap — they do end up with, on average, being slightly taller and with slightly denser bones — but they no longer have the T-driven ability to power that extra mass. Not to mention that such slight advantages “on average” mean squat in professional athletics, when the average member of that sport might be six inches above the average for that gender)
” The intent of all of my comments here has merely been to try to keep it honest.”
Perhaps you shouldn’t start from incorrect facts then. That’s not honesty. At best, it’s willful ignorance.
Absolutely men have an edge over women in most sports. But that edge requires male T ranges to sustain. That’s the actual, real facts here.Report
I’m very open to the idea that we don’t understand everything that’s going on here.
The problem is Lia’s times decreased, but no where close to enough to keep her “below top 500” position.
So what is going on there? This is Oliver Wendell Jones staring at his latest (off screen) disaster saying “but the science is correct!”Report
This is sorta true but sorta not. The whole division of sports by sex was an attempt to control this, and the existence of trans athletes is posing a bit of a challenge that is being blown up into a crisis for no extremely compelling reason.
Say we do nothing. The worst plausible scenario is that trans women end up dominating some women’s sports. Like that may not be the best outcome in the universe, but these are games. Why is it an emergency?
Also, of course, if you confine trans athletes to play in the league dictated by their birth sex, a lot of trans women will be unable to compete at all and trans men will have significant advantages.
It’s not clear to me that’s more fair or worthwhile.
So then you’re just left not letting trans athletes compete at all.
Why is that better?Report
We were typing at the same time but this overlaps with some of what I said, in much clearer terms.
I mean, maybe we end up with four divisions (cis mens, cis womens, trans mens, trans womens) or something else.
I don’t think this has an easy or obvious answer.
I just think we should stop pretending that this swimmer is the first athlete who MAY have had some genetic physical advantage she was born with.Report
Yeah part of the issue is that, to me, it just seems like a low salience issue, and a lot of the anxiety is, AFAICT, driven by a variation on the same old trans panic, suggesting that mediocre male athletes will transition solely to gain an advantage in women’s sports, which, like, that’s actually a bizarre and dumb thing to doReport
Also, trans people are a small minority. Consigning them to leagues of their own may mean that they just don’t get to compete in a lot of places.Report
Too many people saw Futurama where Bender got a quick sex change that in no way changed his ability to perform.
Which makes me think the people screaming here think HRT on a trans woman just grows a pair of boobs and that’s the end of it, that literally nothing else changes.
It’s weirdly ignorant and transphobic, and just seems to treat transwomen as men with a boob job and maybe having their genitals re-arranged, with everything else staying the same.
Hand to god, I think it’s the fact that facial hair is permanent (and thus needs removal) for trans women. Obviously that means the muscles stay, because the beard is life.Report
It’s like the bathroom bills all over again.
You think someone is going to completely and entirely turn their life upside down, undergo expensive medical procedures, subject themselves to oppression and prejudice, so they can win a Women’s Gold Medal?
A teen is going to come out as trans so he can listen to girls poop?Report
Exactly this.
Any sort of athletics at that level is absurdly, absurdly, tilted towards an incredibly small percentage of humans who had all sort of biological advantages.
This entire thing is almost completely pointless. Sports are pretty much inherently unfair, and complaining about ‘fairness’ in them is utterly stupid…sport literally cannot be fair, because being good at them is winning a genetic lottery.
If we want to divide people by some hormone levels, whatever, sure, set that up, boxing has weight classes, we can have that, I guess. But it really is interesting how this is supposedly _important_.
It’s even dumber when it’s about kids, which have even more of a genetic lottery by being at vastly different places on their development, and trans kids are sometimes _way behind_ thanks to hormone blockers. Like, even if you think the effects of testosterone somehow makes someone permanently better at sports, it’s sorta telling that the laws don’t acknowledge exempt trans girls _who have always been on testosterone blockers_. (And thus are actually literally weaker than _cis girls_ their age.)
Of course, these rules apply all the way down anyway, even before puberty, making a surreal claim that a ten-year-old boy is better at sports than a ten-year-old girl (And thus a ten-year-old trans girl would be better.)
Um…no, they aren’t.Report
Heh, well for one I said under existing NCAA rules, not worldwide, and for two, I think if we’re going to use hypothetical colonies on Mars and GATTACA style gene editing as points of comparison I’m not sure it’s me who is going a little far. 🙂
But ok, for NCAA sports I guess maybe we can take golf, bowling, and rifles out of the equation either for reasons of statistical popularity or lack of sex-based advantage such that no one would care anyway. I still think I am right.Report
Great piece, Jennifer.
And a very timely one. Illustrates perfectly the issues with deeming an imaginary, ever-changing window our yardstick for acceptable discourse. The truth is, women and allies of women are being silenced about perfectly reasonable opinions that SHOULD be in the realm of open scientific, political, cultural, and feminist debate – beliefs, by the way, that were only a few years ago held by virtually all people, and are still held by most people worldwide – deemed outside this conceptual entity that does not actually exist.
Meanwhile, it’s considered fine by the gatekeepers to post death threats against women as long as someone considers them a TERF. It’s considered fine that trans activists are deceptively infiltrating and working to defund feminist groups, to deplatform individuals, filing false lawsuits to ruin people’s lives, hanging women in effigy, attempting to get people fired from their jobs and in many cases succeeding, and so forth. So an imaginary window that prevents one side of a legitimate debate from discussing their genuinely held beliefs, and the other side is allowed to make death threats and ruin people’s lives, well, that’s not a very good imaginary window.
I am, of course, all for free speech, and I of course think this mystical window that does not exist should be flung as wide open as possible because those who attempt to police speech are always the bad guys. But the issue is that it’s being unfairly enforced, with some people being allowed to say and even DO some truly heinous things, while the other side can’t even make the most anodyne remarks about issues that are very far from settled, well, that’s really neither fair nor is it morally right.Report
Got some citations to back that up? Because all I’m seeing is transwomen, and specifically transwomen of color, being hunted and murdered quite routinely.Report
There’s been an increase in people identifying as trans, and there’s been an increase in murders in general but particularly in urban areas. There’s also been an increase in the attention that these stories get. So I’m not sure about “hunted” (which implies being targeted for being trans) or “regularly” (which implies greater frequency than the average person in a similar setting).Report
OK, I asked for some specific things, and you didn’t provide me with any of them. How has the murder rate gone overall? What’s happened to the murder rate in the cities / neighborhoods where these murders took place? What’s the murder rate for trans people versus total? Would you at least concede that with the increase in attention given to trans issues and the increased self-identification of people as trans, we’d expect to see an increase in the total number of trans murders? This goes back to an old Conan O’Brien bit about Alaska being the home of the most Eskimo murders.Report
*check date and time*
Hmm. What I did I just…oh yeah
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/new-york-city-lgbtq-bar-set-ablaze-arson-attack-rcna23209
Approximately 14 hours before this comment was made, someone tried to set a queer bar on fire in New York City. A bar owned by two non-binary people.Report
I’m not trying to call Pinky out, BTW, I’m saying ‘At literally any particular time, a hate crime against queer people is very close to that particular time’.
Like, we could just randomly select one.Report
OT Hosts – I don’t remember ever seeing Veronica’s last name here before. Does this comment represent any breach?Report
For instance, the AG and governor of Texas are able to send out official letters indicating that parents of trans children should be investigated by DFPS for child abuse, and if they have agreed to their children receiving the gender affirming care recommended by most clinicians, the children should be removed and the parents should be prosecuted for child abuse.Report
Literally, none of this is true.Report
If you think of it as Dolezal claiming to be a black and Thomas to be a woman, then the stories correspond. Both were claiming to be part of an oppressed group that they’re not. But if you think of Thomas claiming to be trans, then the claims are different, at least by progressive thinking.Report
Trans women are women. Trans men are men. They aren’t “claiming” to be anything. They are being genuine and true to who they are.Report
Of course not. (I mean, if we’re going to argue with assertions, at least I have reality on my side.)Report
Which reality? The reality that human attempts to enforce two genders as a norm flies in the face of the six genders we know exist due to our DNA? That trans youth commit suicide at significant rates because they lack emotional, medical and social support? That the anti-queer backlash won’t actually keep queer people from existing?Report
We went over this recently. Four of the six gene combinations you listed represented a combined .3% of the population at most, and the data is ambiguous because they present as men or women, so people can go through their lives not noticing. I know of no research indicating that they are more likely to seek transition. Additionally, there is a category called “intersex”, where the physical sexual structures don’t conform to the typical male or female. None of these things are related to transsexuality.
The reality is that 99.7% of humanity have XX or XY chromosomes. They are genetically male or female. Those two words refer to objective sex. They don’t refer to the subjective. These days, the term “gender” is often used to refer to the subjective side, and it’s not a good word for that use, but whatever. The more important linguistic point to make is that an adjective typically is used to modify the meaning of a noun (I’m trying to think of a counter-example and I can’t come up with one). To describe someone as an adjective noun is to say that he’s a member of the broad category, the noun, who has some distinguishing trait, the adjective. To describe an XY as an adjective female is false. It’s literally nonsensical.
The realities you describe are heartbreaking, but they pertain to the struggles of a person regarding his/her subjectivity, not their sexual reality.Report
PS: While this argument involves word usage, it’s not merely semantic, as we see a confusion about sex and gender simultaneous with a confusion about terminology about sex and gender.Report
The confusion about sex and gender is because they are, literally, synonyms. Gender was invented as a synonym for sex (A word which, uh, has another meaning.), and sex has always included social labeling aspects as well as biological labeling ones. So did gender, when it was introduced.
It is extremely new to try to make any sort of distinction between them.Report
Up until 20 years ago, the term “gender” was mainly used to refer to a trait of words, not people. In more modern usage, the term “sex” refers to a physical trait of a person, and “gender” refers to a cultural norm or state of mind. I’m not crazy about that usage, but I can understand it and it would make some sense. But the trans argument relies on the idea that a change in gender results in a change of sex, and that undercuts the new usages. Clarity demands some consistency.
ETA: I just saw that DavidTC made more comments below, so I’ll probably be adding to these ideas down there.Report
The few transpeople I know IRL, and the many more I read periodically, do not see expressing their true gender as subjective. Regardless of the “plumbing” or genetics, for a trans women to remain expressing as a man is simply not possible without overwhelming psychological damage. How that relates to their sexual reality (again as physically expressed by genetalia at birth) is not the issue they are seeking to resolve.Report
“do not see expressing their true gender as subjective”
By definition, that’s subjective. Every word in it is subjective. It makes no reference to anything objective.Report
Do you see your gender as subjective?Report
Do I see my gender as subjective? By the modern definition of gender, it’s subjective. Beyond that, any discussion of something I see rather than something concrete is subjective. So yes, doubly so.Report
Hey, someone remind me: Does humans pointing at a specific genetic marker and assigning and group common phenotypes associated with that marker actually make the division of those phenotypes divide _mean_ anything?
Like, if I label the various eye colors as someone’s eyesex (Ignore the very small heterochromatic minority that does not count), does eyesex become more or less a real thing if I track down the genes that cause it?
What if I do the same with skin color, does that make this concept of ‘race’ real…oh, hell, bad choice, let me pick something else.
Sex is a social construct, and I do mean _sex_, not gender. (That is also, I say, pretending that the common use of the term is the real meaning of that.) This entire framework of dividing humans in this manner, and building massive amounts of law around them is a _choice_, it’s not some magical thing. We could have picked all sorts of things. Other cultures have.
The reason we picked this one was, tada, the patriarchy. In fact, that divide _is_ the patriarchy, in a sense.Report
Seriously, the amount of people who think that biological sex is some objective thing. (which is a thing that _mostly_ is true, it is at least bimodal) but then they go on to think that ‘truth’ means _anything_, like that makes sex some objectively true division of people.
We can actually divide people in any manner whatsoever, and none of them are ‘true’, because…they’re all just divisions we made up. We could find the exact median height, or just make up an imaginary line, and classify every human as ‘tall’ or ‘short’. (And have about the same amount of ‘interheight’ people who hit exactly the line as far as we can measure.)
Does that make it a real division? Does that mean that ‘tall people’ and ‘short people’ have some objective meaning other than what we assigned to them?
Or we could find some random piece of genetic fluff that is one of the genetic junk in us, whether a specific gene is A, C, G, or T, have a completely objective way of dividing people into four groups that is never fuzzy…and what the hell does it mean? What are we using it for?
Biological sex may be ‘real’ (Whatever that means. It can be a conclusion based on an observation of reality.), but _grouping_ people by that in society is inarguable a social construct.
And it’s a social construct that mostly exists _to hold up ingroups and outgroups_, to set standards and norm for, well, things we should not be setting standards and norms for.Report
This line of thought suggests we should simply merge men’s and women’s sports.
That has the advantage of being a logically clear and clean solution that’s easy to describe and justify.
It has the disadvantage that no women will be in the top 100, or even 1000, in some sports.
We created a separate league for them for that reason.Report
Actually, some of the time we created a separate league for them because they beat men and it was embarrassing. Like in shooting, which was mixed event (Literally, even before it was listed as a mixed event, women could hypothetically have competed in the ‘mens’.) until a woman started winning, and they immediately said ‘Wait, no, we need a women’s team’.
This happened _twice_. It happened with rifles in 1976, resulting in that getting segregated in 1984, and it happened with air pistols in 1984, and, tada, that was split into a men and women’s event in 1988.
Looking at the differences in scores between men and women, which seems to indicate women are _fractionally_ better at the moment, there is absolutely no justification for having separate men and women shooting categories, and yet here we are.
…anyway, there actually is a much more logical way to do this: Dividing athletes by ‘class’.
Boxing already does this. They use weight, we could use other things.
Because that’s what we’re really trying to say, right? We’re trying to say ‘Of athletes with these specific natural abilities, this one is best among those’. But instead of stupidly using ‘genitalia shape’ as a proxy for ‘natural abilities’, we can just measure whatever it is we think those natural abilities are. Muscle density? Twitch rate? Bone density? Whatever.
Grouping them that way seems a good deal more logical. Measure the thing we’re trying to measure.
Plus, it, uh…means we no longer _only_ have what can be best be described as ‘super-genetic freaks’ as athletes. Sure, those exist and probably have the world records, but we can dial the notch down one level and see people compete who are just ‘really good’, not ‘literally million-to-one-genetic-quirks’.Report
Here is the “pregnancy division” of the swimmers.
… yeah, that’d go over well.
Horsemanship is still coed in the Olympics.
If there were reasonable “height weight” or other “we can measure this” that didn’t devolve immediately down to “and male/female” I would be interested.
Martial Arts, for example, would theoretically enable women to compete with men (with some moves being easier and others harder). However, you’d need to create some female-centric Martial Arts, from scratch. Again.Report
Biological sex relates to reproductive function.
Now let me be careful and say that reproductive function doesn’t determine biological sex. A person may have a body part that doesn’t perform its structural function, such as an ovary that doesn’t contain eggs or an eye that doesn’t detect light. That doesn’t change the structural purpose of that body part.
The male body and female body are capable of producing children in a shared act. That is real. No number of female bodies are capable of producing children, nor are any number of male bodies. No person born male or female has ever had their genitalia replaced and then produced children sharing their genetic material. Unusual combination of X and Y chromosomes occur, but they present as male if any Y is present or female if no Y is present, and if they are able to reproduce it’s as that sex.
I’m fine if you want to use a different word to describe the cultural/emotional constructs around sex – that’s what the term “gender” has been doing lately – but any denial of the reality of biological sex is a denial of reality.Report
See, all you’re going to get here is a snarky “well I GUESS YOU THINK THAT WOMEN WHO AREN’T BABY FACTORIES AREN’T REAL WOMEN THEN, OWNED BY FACTS AND LOGIC YOU CHRIST-CULTIE”Report
Commenting is by its nature a hope-filled act.Report
Pssst: Body parts do not have ‘purpose’. Purpose requires intent, and evolution does not have intent.
What you mean is that you have mentally assigned purposes to things, but you want to caveat that those things can still have that purpose even if, technically, they cannot do it.
This is gibberish on top of gibberish.
So to start with: Literally none of this argument is relevant to anything I said.
But…it’s wrong anyway. Like, in every possible way. It’s not particularly relevant, but please note it is utterly wrong.
One of the most common sort of intersex variation is actually AIS, which is a XY karotype and a female phenotype. (Well, technically, it can also happen to XX karotypes, but…that is not very common, and actually hard to notice anyway.)
Honestly, I’m not sure what variations you even think you’re talking about, or what you mean ‘reproduce as that sex’.
A chunk of intersex conditions result in somewhat ambiguous overies/testes, and what shape’s someone body is a result of hormones, not genes.
So there are, indeed, situations where people with XY karotypes can, indeed, get pregnant and give birth, or where people with XX karotypes can father children. Because that is controlled by bodily development, not genetics.
This is, again, not actually relevant to any point I’m making. But maybe stop reading summaries of things by transphobic people?
Denying the reality of skin color is a denial of reality, right? I mean, people actually have a skin color. We can observe it with cameras and stuff. So why do people say race doesn’t exist?
Or maybe the argument is actually ‘The physical traits may exist, but this society-wide division based on those traits is actually just a random division that we have invented for fairly bad historic reasons and there is literally no purpose in continuing it as one of the major labels in society.’.
Caring what combinations of people can make kids is relevant literally only to people who are trying to have sex without doing that, or who are trying to do that. It is a personal medical thing that has no bearing on anyone.
And incidentally, these _exact_ points were made about homosexuality, the exact same statements about how we should classify homosexual relationships as different because ‘heterosexual sex is somehow exceptional because it can make children and other sex is a different thing and should be called something different’.
It’s _really_ hard to see how your position logically differs from that one. Asserting that ‘any baby-making possibility is so important we need to be super-clear about labeling which people can do it with each other’ is literally textbook homophobia.Report
If you’d prefer “function” over “purpose”, I think I’m ok with that. But it’s inarguable that heterosexual sex has a function that any other sexual act doesn’t. As for the XY thing, I was basically preempting Philip H (see above thread). Sex differences are functionally different than ethnicity differences.
Sorry if each of those sentences is disconnected, but your comment covered a lot.Report
…how can body parts have a function that they cannot do? What is that supposed to mean? Who assigned this function?
And, incidentally, with all your focus on ‘doesn’t perform’, I feel I should mention that pre-pubescent and post-menopausal people have a sex. Despite the fact their bodies ‘aren’t supposed to’ be able to reproduce.
Reproductive functioning is actually a horribly bad idea to try to based any sort of sex sort on. If you insist on sorting human bimodally by ‘sex’, the obvious things to use would be a combination of: Genitalia shape and/or body shape and/or hormones, all of which _mostly_ tend to align in people, splitting them in two categories generally.
That’s the rational way to operate the sex classification, and is in fact how we’ve operated that classification forever. I disagree with having that classification at all, but _historically_, that’s what it is, some vague blend of those, not some nonsensical abstract ‘function’.
Sadly for transphobes, all those things can change in trans people, so they had to find something else.Report
Or shorter: “Cis het folks are just normal people because sometimes they can make babies. Everyone else is a sex pervert, even if they CAN make babies”
I mean that’s what it is in the end. The belief that if you’re gay, it’s a perverted sex thing. If you’re trans, it’s a perverted sex thing. Kink, fetish, mental trauma, whatever.
It’s just not possible a gay man can like men the way straight men like women, or a trans woman can just be a woman whose body parts didn’t come out right.
No, it’s got to be perverted sex stuff and HOW DARE YOU DO THAT AROUND ME
Now let me go back to fondling my wife in public while I scream about the gay couple holding hands in public like the deviant sexual fiends they are.Report
Did I say pervert? I’d say pervert if I meant pervert. But we’re sufficiently far from the original topic that I’m not sure what you’re referring to. But I’m not talking about people’s subjective opinions right now, I’m replying to DavidTC’s idea that biological sex isn’t objective.Report
LOL. I literally said biological sex was objective, or at least is bimodal enough that it usually can be measured in a fairly objective way. It’s not _absolute_, but it is objective enough to use as a classification in most cases, although weirdly not in a few ways that transphobes insist on using it. (Because it is assuredly is not well correlated to reproduction.)
You just can’t seem to grasp that language divisions, even ones that we can measure mostly objectively, (or even _completely_ objectively) do not actually make those divisions important to society, or a useful way to classify humans. That using the division, drrawing the line where we draw it, is itself a social construct.
We can _objectively_ classify people as tall or short, we just need to invent some exact height to calculate that based off. That doesn’t make that ‘real’. We could construct entire social norms about how tall people and short people behave, how tall people are better and have more rights, and then have a ‘short civil rights’ movement to let short people regain some power, undoing the tallrearchy, and then eventually we invent lifts in shoes and slouching and even surgery to change it, and other people asserting that height is inherent and people can’t change their biological height, even with surgery to do just that…
…and literally every aspect of that division is a damn social construct and not ‘real’ in any sense.
And it is the same with ‘biological sex’.Report
I’m used to philosophical language, where “objective” is usually equivalent to “absolute” or “real”.Report
A non-ironic version of this is beauty.
We can and do objectively classify some people as beautiful, and we do construct all sorts of norms about how beautiful people are better and more desirable.
It may be “objective” to say a young blonde with delicate facial features looks good in a little black dress , but the norm that says she performs better as an executive assistant is entirely arbitrary and constructed.
I’ve seen plenty of people who accept the arbitrary construction as an objective reality- “Pretty girls get picked as assistants more often, so they must be naturally better.”
And from that, construct a normative assertion:
“Therefore Gawd must have decreed that pretty young girls must be deferential to wealthy older men. It’s just nature, people.”Report
Judging from the assistants I’ve seen, the young pretty assistant is more of a Hollywood myth/mechanic than a reality.Report
The question of (philosophically) objective beauty is actually pretty interesting.Report
I feel like asking these question might be helpful for people asserting that ‘sex is real’:
Is Indian caste system objective?
Is Indian caste system real?
Can people really be in one caste or another?
I mean, it clearly _does_ exist, right? So, it must be real, right? Or…what?
If it doesn’t ‘really’ exist, why not? What do you mean by that?Report
I’d say, the Indian caste system is real in that the term refers to a historical reality. The thinking behind the Indian caste system doesn’t point to a truth about the individuals classified by it, so it’s cultural and thus subjective.Report
The caste system does, indeed, operate off truths about people. Who is in what caste is very objective.
You just don’t believe the truths which the caste system uses to divide people is a good way to divide people.Report
Why did you ask the questions, if not to encourage clarity? I could ask you some questions and then say “nuh-uh” to your answers and it wouldn’t help the conversation. I mean, I know I’m supposed to argue with you now about that comment, but we’ve already noted that you and I are using the word “objective” differently, so it wouldn’t help anything.Report
We do not, in any manner, use the word objective differently.
But fine, fine, explain what the hell you think ‘a truth about the individuals classified by it’ means.
The caste system is, indeed, pointing to truths about individuals, specifically, their ancestors.
Who someone’s ancestor is is an actual physical fact that exist in the real world and can be measured in a very objective way.
Please explain how you think the concept of _parentage_ is cultural and subjective.Report
Note this was actually incredibly badly phrased, there’s all sort of ways parentage is cultural and social, like adoption, and other cultures might not recognize fathers, for example.
So, let me rephrase: Please explain how ‘Who someone’s direct genetic ancestors are’ is cultural and subjective.Report
Whether someone is a genetic ancestor is highly cultural in regards to whether any one cares. Lots of cultures have practices adoption in different ways. The flippin Romans did it in many famous instances so it’s not like it shouldn’t be familiar.Report
If you’re meaning “ancestors” to talk about “parents”, that’s kind of silly.
If you’re meaning “ancestors” to talk about “genome”, that’s actually measurable, apparently.Report
Yeah, I caught that too. Parentage is actually cultural, I meant something else.
But the point I am trying to make is that the caste system is, indeed, completely objective. It is measuring an ‘objective thing’, in the sense that it identifying who is the actual descendants of whom, and is as reasonably as correct as any such system can be. (And it could be made perfect with genetic testing.) It’s actually more objective than ‘sex’, in fact, which is always going to get slightly fuzzy at certain boundaries.
We just _don’t like_ what it does with those objective facts!
Because, again, the issue is not ‘How can we objectively divide people’, which is answered with ‘literally any measurement we can invent’, the issue is ‘What do we think those invented divisions mean’?Report
always going to get slightly fuzzy at certain boundaries.
But hammering out where those boundaries stop allowing for accurate measurability is really important.
Is it at 73%?
Is it at 92%?
Is it at 99.48%?
Because if it’s in the high-enough 90’s, we might find ourselves with a number that can’t really be expected to fit in a random person’s dunbar circle.Report
Weirdly, no offense, that actually isn’t where I’m trying to go with this conversation, Jaybird. It is where a _lot_ of people go, but…not me.
I mean, I did correct the weird misunderstanding of intersex people and chromosomes, but I keep repeating that is not my point, and in fact I agree that people can be sorted into two sex _pretty well_, although not perfectly. I’m not going to stand here and argue that people can’t be sorted by sex. They usually can, and the people who cannot are negligable.
In fact, people can indeed be sorted all sorts of ways, and we can make those methods as ‘objective’ as we want, using hard and fast measurement rules!
[insert Family Guy image with skin color chart]
My points are:
a) caring about any particular grouping of people (Even if the grouping can be measured objectively.) is a social construct we have decided to do, singling that specific way of grouping out as an important one instead of any other way of grouping. Just because things measure something objective [insert Family Guy image with skin color chart again] doesn’t mean that we should treat what they are measuring as a relevant thing
b) the reason we do that with sex is literally millennia of sexism towards women. That’s the reason we have decided to elevate this as a social construct. So this idea of people trying be _really clear_ about who women are, and how people should be sorted, is itself rather problematic
Like, we’ve had enough discussions about race here to understand that the western concept of it was _constructed_, built up to justify slavery. We understand it’s a social construct, even if that social construct is backed up by an objective measurement of ‘How reflective to light someone’s skin is’.
It really only takes a very small step to see where I’m going with that. Agree or disagree, the logic is, at least, followable.Report
I assume that you posed your questions as an analogy to sex categories. The analogy fails short because there’s nothing inherent in a person about their caste, no physical difference that would be discernable to an outsider. I guess you could say that someone’s genetic code makes them a certain caste, but if children of two castes were switched at birth or moved to England they’d be interchangeable. Caste refers to a cultural convention whereas sex refers to a difference in biological function.
A few times you seem to say that something can be mostly objective, so I have to assume the word has a different meaning to you.Report
…are you asserting that who someone is the genetic offspring of is not inherent? Or can’t be discerned? (It’s usually fricking public information!)
Um, not to people who understood the system: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/01/tech/cisco-lawsuit-caste-discrimination/index.html
The fact that American don’t believe in the system doesn’t make it less objective. How are you acting like _beliefs_ of a group of people can make a concept more or less objective?
No, it refers to a specific ancestry.
That ancestry is then given a cultural meaning, which we may not like, but I didn’t ask anything about _that_. I asked if it was _objective_, not ‘is it a good thing’.
You seem to think someone’s caste somehow isn’t objective because you don’t like how those objective facts, facts about who someone’s biological parents are, are _then used_.
Welcome to _my_ world.
No, it doesn’t, and that’s pretty easy to demonstrate, as babies have a sex, and no one thinks that sex fulfils any sort of biological reproductive function.
This is an absurd stretch to start with, the concept we’ve _ever_ used sex to refer to ‘What humans fill what roles in reproduction’ is ahistoric garbage that transphobes invented _only a decade ago_.
Sex has always referred to, depending on who you ask, ‘What is in their pants’ or ‘What I am assuming is in their pants from their general body shape and behavior’.
I have asserted that _grouping_ can be mostly objective. As in, most things can be sorted in an objective manner, fitted within the rules with no problem, but some subjectivity may be required for a few of edge cases.
This is…a thing that is literally true about all language, and if you don’t understand it you don’t understand how language works.Report
I’m not sure what to make of your assertions about sex and biological function. I always start with Aquinas to see what the Western tradition thinks about things:
“It was necessary for woman to be made, as the Scripture says, as a ‘helper’ to man; not, indeed, as a helpmate in other works, as some say, since man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works; but as a helper in the work of generation.”
If that’s something that people historically haven’t talked about much, it’s out of a sense of propriety, not because people didn’t believe it. Jewish and Christian tradition have always seen the sex distinction in terms of reproduction. The ancient Greeks seem to have seen heterosexual sex as being mainly for reproduction. I mean, I have to wonder if I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, it seems so obviously to be historically wrong.Report
LOL. No, this is what Aquinas thought:
Now, ‘deficient’ is actually slightly unfair, what is meant by that is ‘not fully formed’ or ‘unfinished’.
Because it was, in fact, the common thought at the time that women were basically unfinished men, that people were normally men, but women were just born missing…um…one specific part that might, in fact, be the part we are talking about.
In the quote you gave, Aquinas is merely trying to explain why the hell God made them _at all_. And by ‘them’, I mean ‘unfinished men without penises’.
Huh. Interesting how you’ve totally misunderstood that entire thing.
Hey, fun thing to check: Go back two decades and find out how people talk about transgender people. They would speak, literally, about surgeries turning men into women. That’s the actual wording. It’s why they were _called_ ‘sex change operations’.
And, yes, that’s a phrasing that we would find problematic, we now assert that trans people have _always_ been their sex and the surgery just updates their box to fix it…but the point is that the historic concept of sex at that time was, literally, ‘what genitalia someone had’.
Claiming it has ever had anything to do with reproduction functioning is straight-up _lying_ by the part of transphobes, very very very recent lying that they just started doing, and I cannot emphasis that enough.Report
I’m more than 20 years old. You’re describing how liberals talked about transgender people.Report
I’m talking about how society talked about trans people since before the concept even existed. Where genitalia defined sex.
Billy Tipton was outed as a biological woman after he died, due to his genitalia, and all the newspapers ran stories about how he was really a woman. Here’s an obit:
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1989-04-06-8901180335-story.html
Strangely, none of the obits seem concerned about what role he would play in reproduction making him a woman.
As he couldn’t possibly have children.
Being dead and all.
This is where the entire thing falls down. You’re trying to build a world where people used to distinguish sex by ‘role in reproduction’, but problem is that’s actually a lie. All the way back to Aquinas, that’s a lie.
Women have been _defined_ by the lack of a penis, historically, although it got a little more nuanced later. It’s why ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is a very dirty pun.
Women’s _role in society_ was childbirth, but that wasn’t the _defining trait_ of them.
For a rather insulting comparison: The role of a dog in society is a pet, but that certainly isn’t the defining trait of a dog…there are pets that are not dogs, and there are also dogs that are not pets.
Sex has always referred to genitalia (Or, rather, assumed genitalia). Trying to change this is incredibly recent history that has been rewritten by transphobes _in the last decade_.
And let’s not get into the absurd idea that defining women by their reproductive role in society is somehow a thing we want to do.Report
You know that, before modern science, people didn’t understand the female’s role in reproduction but did realize she had one. The core of what Aquinas believed on the subject wasn’t about semen – he was never a scientist – but about what a woman was, and that’s why I quoted him on the creation of the woman. He describes woman as necessary for reproduction, not primarily as someone lacking a part.Report
He didn’t _need_ to point that second thing every time he talked about women (although he did in plenty of places) because that was literally the concept of women at that time…unfinished men, partially made men, lacking the important man part.
This is, uh, actually the historic understanding of women in the western world, it’s straight of out Aristotle. It’s basically how all philosophy (and medicine) at the time felt about what women were.
His explanation is not _what_ women are, it is _why_ women are. Why God would make (Or, rather, set up nature to make) such an unfinished creature.
Aquinas is basically answering one of the standard philosophic questions of his age. It’s like ‘Why is there evil in the world?’, except it’s ‘Why are there women in the world?’.
And he, like a lot of philosophers, in fact, exactly like Aristotle, came to the idea that women were needed for reproduction, hence that is why they _exist_. Aquinas is actually not being original here, he’s just rephrasing Aristotle and swapping in ‘God made Nature do this’ instead of ‘Nature did this’.
The definition of what women _are_ is an entirely different question, and one he doesn’t try to answer there.
Here’s an actual dissection of why he thought women existed:
https://womenpriests.org/theology/aqui-wom-thomas-aquinas-on-the-generation-of-women/
To put it as he did: “If it were not for some [divine] power that wanted the feminine sex to exist, the birth of a woman would be just another accident, such as that of other monsters [= a dog with two heads, a calf with five legs, etc.]”
Ie, women are _seriously deformed_, but it’s actually fine here, because God wants them that way, they serve a purpose.Report
OK…you know that Aquinas was all about things’ purposes, right? How that makes my whole argument? That what made a woman a woman was in the purpose of reproduction?Report
Have you…read the thing you’re quoting? Please actually do so: https://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/sum102.htm
The way he and everyone else see women: As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher observes (De Gener. Animal. iv, 2).
Followed by his ‘but everything material is God’s plan’ logic: On the other hand, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature’s intention as directed to the work of generation. Now the general intention of nature depends on God, Who is the universal Author of nature. Therefore, in producing nature, God formed not only the male but also the female.
This is not complicated. He first summarized how he (and everyone else) know that women are messed-up men, and then he says ‘But we still actually need them for a purpose, so God made them exist.’.
And you’re trying to argue that the _second_ part of that is what he (and everyone else) thinks women are, instead of the _first_ part.
This is utter nonsense.Report
Just as an aside: The irony here is that men are just, in fact, messed up women.
The basics of human fetal development are well known. All fetuses start off female, and will continue along the female development path absent intervention.
That intervention is the SRY gene on the Y chromosome (basically it’s only real job, it’s quite a simple thing) which causes a surge of testosterone at around 6 to 8 weeks.
When it doesn’t activate — which happens in about 1 in 80,000 people — you have Swyer syndrome.
Female to examination, to anything but a DNA test or invasive enough scans to determine the ovaries haven’t formed quite properly. Often not caught until puberty (mostly due to delayed puberty) because unperformed gonads can’t quite pump out enough estrogen.
Quite capable of bearing children, although requiring a surrogate egg.
Just one of several intersex conditions, which have a rate of about 1 in 2000 or so overall.Report
As for grouping things, I think you’re using the word “objective” to mean easy. There’s a world of difference between saying that most things are easy to categorize and saying that categories reflect reality.Report
I have no idea what you even think you’re arguing at this point.
99% of people are easy to categorize by sex by very clear rules while making no subjective decisions at all, because every indicator points the same way.
A small percentage have conflicting indicators of sex and require subjective decisions, where conflicting things are weighted against each other.
Literally none of that has anything to do with things being ‘reality’ or not. All traits observed about humans are reality.
Grouping those things due to observed traits is a social construct, and it is ‘real’ in the sense that set theory is real, which is a statement that really has no meaning at all. Things are real, how we decide to put them together is…just how we decide to put them together. There is no reality or unreality possible in any specific grouping.Report
I don’t have a simple answer to trans athletes competing in women’s events, because it forces a question of what it means to be an athlete.
Performance-enhancing steroids are banned because they give an “unnatural” advantage to the athlete, with the assumption that athleticism should be based on “natural” bodies.
But of course, trans people require hormones to correct their bodies to align with their gender.
The difference between chemicals which “correct” and those which “enhance” is hard to pin down.Report
When you drill down, it varies by sport, and by direction of transition. And it’s a new enough subject that a lot of the data is equivocal.
Which is probably what you’d expect going into it.
And once we sort out the data, you’re left with the question of what we’re supposed to do with this data about performance. It’s not like other physical characteristics don’t have a huge impact on people’s performance in sports, right?Report
Right and this is one subject I just don’t have a strong opinion about and could be persuaded.
The only fixed pole star is that we should endeavor to craft rules and structure that allow the most amount of people to pursue their best lives.Report
There is a legit conversation / debate / discussion to be had regarding trans athletes. And that is a conversation that should be had within and among the various athletic organizations.
Government has no business injecting itself in such conversations absent a significant need to protect a persons basic civil rights.Report
I think this taken with Pilly’s comment at 11:08 and CJ’s at 8:36 pretty much sum up my thoughts.Report
Two words. Title IX.Report
I would add that people who don’t even know what changes HRT actually causes should ALSO not be weighing in.
Half the people screaming about Lia Thomas seem to assume she just kept the musculature she had developed before she went on HRT. Which sure, if that was the case, that’d absolutely BE a problem for fair competition.
In reality, that’s not how it works at all. There’s no keeping denser, male musculature without keeping your T well above cis female ranges. Work out all you want, your body simply cannot support it without testosterone, and so cannot keep it.
And heck, you can see this by comparing Lia Thomas’s relative times in the men’s and female divisions — she’s about 10 seconds back from the women’s record in her best event as a woman, and was 12 seconds back from the men’s before HRT (the difference is simply that she’s now hitting peak swimming age, btw — her times SHOULD improve). You can also look at her events — she saw the worst drop-off in times in the longest distance events and moved to shorter distances (lost stamina and loss of ability to oxygenate her blood).
A lot of people weighing in on this seem to think HRT is literally just….taking the male body and slapping a wig on it.
Then again, most of the people screaming about this only care about women’s sports if there’s a trans woman to yell about. (Strangely, they never seem to scream when trans athletes aren’t winning —- I do recall a big story about a trans weightlifter who everyone expected to crush the competition with her “unfair advantages” — she did quite poorly, because again — HRT for trans women suppresses their T to cis levels, and often the lower end of cis levels)Report
What about heart size?Report
What about it?
Trans women lose the ability to oxygenate blood as efficiently as men do, and the heart size difference is miniscule — and again, if you want to claim “denser bones” are a big advantage (despite being useful only for anchoring heavy muscle trans women can no longer cultivate), then it’s extra mass and biological upkeep has to be considered.
And again: Lai Thomas is not the only trans athlete. How many can you name, and why aren’t they winning all the events? What happened to that trans weightlifter? How did she do?
How does Lia compare to Katie Ledecky? You know, the swimmer three inches taller who is considerably faster?Report
“This one trans woman overperforms in this one sport relative to how good she was before transitioning,” is a pretty weak argument that you’d see this same pattern with all trans women even in that sport.
It’s a single data point that might, if you’re so inclined, prompt further investigation.Report
““This one trans woman overperforms in this one sport relative to how good she was before transitioning,”
In this case, it was one trans woman performing identical relative to the division as she had prior to HRT in the OTHER division.
And that was blown up as if she’d suddenly improved, instead of basically remaining roughly in the same spot in the new division as the old.
Which hey, is a really interesting data point.Report
To be fair, she could simply be doping.
This reminds me of baseball players in the 80s and 90s. Various people pointed out their records made no sense unless something else was going on. People age, age has predictable effects, we weren’t seeing those effects.
Low and behold, something else was going on.
Here we have an athlete that wasn’t very competitive and now suddenly she is. Transitioning is supposed to have predictable effects, we’re not seeing those effects.Report
What happened to that trans weightlifter? How did she do?
She qualified for the Olympics at the age of 42. Although she failed all her lifts at the Olympics, successfully repeating the lifts she made at the Roma Cup would have placed her fifth at the Olympics.
This is really very extraordinary. Weightlifting performance peaks in the mid 20s, and nobody expects a 42-year-old woman to total 270 kg. She still holds the IWF women’s masters records for the 35-39 age group, and the gulf is enormous: 280 kg total, compared to 213 kg for the next weight class. For men, the difference in records between the open weight class and the next highest is just 16 kg.
This was nearly a decade after starting transition, mind you. If you wanted to prove that the strength advantage of exposure to testosterone is totally eliminated within a year of hormone therapy, you’d be hard pressed to find a worse example than Laurel Hubbard.Report
It should be noted here that the male advantage is much greater in strength sports than in speed sports. In speed sports, men’s extra strength is partially negated by extra body weight. In strength sports, this is much less of an issue. Consequently elite men outperform elite women by ~60% rather than ~10%.
Similarly, if late-transitioning trans women have an advantage, we should expect to see this most clearly in strength sports, with the advantage in speed sports being much more subtle or non-existent, perhaps at most on the order of a couple percent.Report
I thought what Dark said earlier really illustrated the issue with speed. Even small looking margins can be insurmountable.Report
“…what changes HRT actually causes should ALSO not be weighing in.”
You got a primer on that, or a citation?Report
I mean it’s really easily googeable but also there’s a lot of potential changes but I’m not sure you’re really asking about, say, fat redistribution. Specifically are you interest in FTM or MTF? Are you looking specifically for changes that involve athletic performance? Or changes in general? (here’s a good general overview: https://www.gendergp.com/hrt-timelines-hormones-effects/)
Athletically, I found this a particularly interesting piece — as it’s based on PT performance in the military, which has a certain default level of fitness but NOT college+ level athletes — https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577
Quick take: After 2 years, trans women had dropped to cis performance (as measured in sit-ups and push-ups), but still were slightly faster (9% versus average cis female) in a 1.5 mile run — that however is likely the “average trans woman is taller than the average cis woman” issue, which is not exactly an issue with professional athletics, simply because if height is an advantage in a sport then those participating at that level will be taller than the “average” for their gender. (Lia Thomas, for instance, is 5’8″. Ledecky is 6 foot. The average height for 2016 female Olympic swimmers was 5’9″. The Average American female height is 5’4″). The military has a minimum height, but there is no feedback mechanism pushing for taller service members.
It’s a good study to show how HRT on trans servicemembers massively affected performance (a significant drop, to cis levels, in push-up and situps for trans women, the opposite for trans men) , despite a consistent fitness regime. It’s still not comparing apples to apples (professional athletes to athletes), but it’s somewhat better than “athletes to nationwide averages” even it doesn’t really get into how far out on the bell curve any college or better athlete is physically. (Check the average height on Olympic fencers….)
One year might be too short for trans athletes (although again, there is the problem that too many studies compare athletes to “average” values), but the NCAA also only has that four year window for competition and they’re still square in the “maturing bodies and skill” window as well. Plus, I suspect more and more trans athletes will have gone on HRT without ever experiencing the “wrong puberty” — meaning that ALL the supposed “advantages” are gone. If you went from blockers to gender-affirming HRT as a transwomen at 16, you won’t even have those skeletal markers much less “male muscles” or whatnot.Report
The observation about *when* someone transitions is a really good point. Despite Texas and Arizona now trying to make puberty-blockers and transition prior to adulthood out to be child abuse, it is becoming more often the case that a transgender woman has transitioned prior to all those effects of puberty that supposedly would give an advantage over cis gendered women.
If the real issue is ‘fairness’ then at the very least, rules for transgender athletes should take that into account.Report
That is genuinely surprising to me, because I had always thought the overall physiological effects of exposure to gonadal hormones during adolescence would be pretty permanent in the adult. Thank you for the links!Report
I’m surprised that so many people here are surprised by this. If trans women could maintain male performance levels after undergoing years of hormone therapy, this wouldn’t even be a debate. The question is whether and under what circumstances they retain any advantage, not whether they retain the entire advantage.
No judgment; I’m just surprised that this isn’t common knowledge.Report
” The question is whether and under what circumstances they retain any advantage”
and apparently the answer is “none, literally none, except for the overall length of major skeletal structures”, and that hardly seems worth a smirking snort of “well I’m surprised that you’re surprised, hmph”
(but I get it, you’re an Ally, you’re better than we are)Report
I did, btw, and appears stuck in moderation due to the links. 🙂 I’m sure it’ll eventually show.
basically a link to a broad overview of HRT effects on transitioning individuals, and then a more on-point US military study on trans service members.
The latter showed convergence on cis physical abilities within two years (except for trans women running times, which remained about 10% higher than cis women’s times, likely due to being –on average — taller than the average cis women. An issue that’s not really a concern in competitive sports, as any sports where that’s an advantage competitors will all be taller than average). It’s still not athlete-to-athlete, but at least you’re measuring athletic performance with people on a similar minimum physical baseline rather than measuring athletes against averages.
That might indicate the NCAA should wait two years not one for HRT, however when talking college athletics you’re dealing with college-aged bodies (ie: not actually finished with puberty, which means HRT is more effective and faster) and you also have a narrow competitive window.
In practice, it appears despite trans athletes being able to participate for quite some time under the one-year HRT rule, they’ve all seemed to follow the Lia Thomas route — that is, they remain about as competitive versus the top/record holders (for the given gender division they’re competing in) as before, indicating one year seems to be a solid rule of thumb. They are not running away with titles or anything of that nature.Report
Yep, evidence in support of the claim, that’s what I was looking for.
Thank you!Report
No problem. I sometimes forget that what’s common knowledge about HRT to me is not, in fact, common knowledge to everyone.
I had to do a significantly deep dive into it some time back, so I’ve found myself really frustrated with the absolute total lack of basic knowledge for people legislating this stuff.
And then there’s the….I don’t know what to call the “You see winners but not losers” — sort of effect. There are lots of trans athletes who you don’t hear about, because they don’t win races or sports or whatever and thus generate controversial media clicks. But you DO hear about the ones that win, so it generates a reporting bias that gives a very wrong impression.
Or to quote one particular idiot I was listening to in person: “I can always recognize a trans woman, it’s so obvious” while two trans women kept trying not to laugh as they were “Do tell, how do you know?” as he obliviously held court on the subject.
I’m still torn between wondering what percentage of cis women he’d decided were trans, and how many trans women walked past him that he never considered for a moment weren’t cis.
Honestly, I blame the prior use of “real life experience” — a year of required living as your gender BEFORE anything else (no HRT, no surgeries, not even hair removal being covered) — has affected what most people think of as “trans women” and “trans men”. And I think the new focus on sports doesn’t help either, as…
Well let’s put it this way, I watched someone post a picture of Katie Ledecky on Reddit with “trans women shouldn’t be allowed to compete” and a WHOLE lot of people spent a lot of time talking about how obviously trans she was and how unfair it was. She’s cis — and apparently cis women cannot have broad shoulders or muscles.
Same things levied at female tennis players, weight lifters, etc…..Report
I appreciate you not being offended that I asked for evidence.
I mean, it’s rational to think that a person who was male through puberty would retain the advantages as long as the work was done to maintain it. Having evidence that the advantages are lost despite effort is interesting.Report
Testosterone is powerful, powerful stuff. So is estrogen.
It was quite eye opening to see the differences trans women can see on E — and I’m talking “grown adults here” not those still going through puberty and transitioning: Odd things like measurably better color perception, increased flexibility (I can’t remember exactly what the mechanism is offhand, only that it’s due to ligament changes — often results in smaller feet and hands).
Fat redistribution all over (the body stops placing new fat in ‘male’ places and places it in the ‘female’ places — since fat is generally burned off fairly evenly this gradually appears to ‘move’ the fat), facial features change (that’s ligaments again and fat redistribution) — basically all the meat stuff moves around, changes, and alters. FTM see similar things in reverse. Trans people at 60 see this — they don’t call it “second puberty” for no reason.
The only things that don’t really have some change is your skeleton if you start past your early 20s (you’d be amazed at how long bone growth continues), but despite TV claims the human skeleton isn’t actually gendered to the visible eye. The various ratios and sizes of the human skeleton are large ranges, with significant overlap between genders (that does include pelvis and shoulders) — so “gendering” a skeleton is taking dozens or hundreds of measurements and looking for enough that fall outside the large overlap to make a statistical statement.
Testosterone and estrogen are very, very, very powerful things. Luckily for trans people (especially now that we have bioidenticals to offer), they’re pretty darn safe — your body is built to handle either, after all.
We’re all female in the beginning. If you’ve got a Y chromosome around about 6 or 9 weeks I can’t recall, your Y chromosome does basically the only thing it exists to do, which flips a switch to start pumping out testosterone. That deviates the developing fetus down the “male” path, off the default “female” path.
If that switch malfunctions — which it does — you end up with someone born fully female, all the bits and bobs, and physically capable of bearing children. Likely she’s infertile due to issues with her eggs, but not always — and perfectly capable of handling IVF from a donor if she is.
That initial flood of hormones isn’t the only time in fetal development that you get a surge of T or E, just the most pivotal. One of the running hypothesis on trans people is simply that one or more of the developmental stages that requires a certain level of T or E doesn’t get the ranges it needs, or the timing it needs,, you end up with a brain and body wired to different genders or sometimes not wired to one at all.
There’s no uncracking that egg, nor any specific gene tied to it (it’s a mix of hormone levels mediated by the developing fetus, the mother carrying it, and likely the environment around the mother as well — too many moving, independent parts, no clear genetics — and what genetic correlations there are seem to be in real deep neural structures).
No neural chemistry irregularities to address after they’re born, nothing like that. That’s why “transition” became the treatment. There’s nothing to fix. Just a dichotomy between brain and body, and the brain side is not something you can touch. Nothing’s wrong with it, and there’s no neurotransmitter level that corresponds to ‘what gender I feel’, nor any brain structure that’s responsible for it.
So they fix the one thing they can — the body. And luckily, hormones are black magic.Report
I think the concern is that yeah, maybe the 0.05% all-the-genetic-knobs-turned-up women will still be at the top, but behind them will be a long list of “Jane-was-John, Glen-was-Glenda, Hedwig, Pat…” and then waaaay down at the bottom will be a few women who’d been women their whole lives and didn’t just, like, come by it lately.
Meaning it will be yet another thing where a space that women fought for and made themselves will be colonized by men, and taken away from them, with a few tokens kept around so the men can point to them and say “See? We totally let girls win! You’re just lying when you say we don’t! You’re just whining because you didn’t try hard enough.”Report
HRT for trans women suppresses their T to cis levels, and often the lower end of cis levels)
For those who are primarily concerned with esthetic results, I have no doubt that this is true. However, serious athletes are generally willing to sacrifice esthetics for performance. For a while the limit for eligibility was 10 nmol/L, while normal female levels are on the order of 0.5-2 nmol/L. The most common limit now is 5 nmol/L, which is an improvement, but, just…why? Why not require them to keep T at average or lower levels?
I think it’s an open question how long the advantage from prior testosterone exposure lasts. But the bare minimum to do here to avoid creating an unfair advantage is to stop allowing trans women to maintain testosterone at outlier levels while competing.Report
I’ll make a note Ronald Reagan promised to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. Bush I basically promised an African-American replacement for Thurgood Marshall. Which was ya’ know, fine. There was no pearl clutching. It turns out in a nation of 300 million people, there’s not one person most qualified to be a SC Justice, as much as people want to believe in some false ranking. You could restrict it to Hispanic female lesbians from south of the Mason-Dixon line and fine probably a dozen possible nominees.Report
Trump also promised to nominate a woman before naming Barrett. Somehow no one on the right side of the aisle was upset about that.Report
And Republicans fish in the Republican pool and Democrats fish in the Democratic pool. Some pools are more thinly-stocked than others — compare Clarence Thomas’s resume with that of white Republican appointees — but most politically interesting pools are well-enough stocked to provide first-rate candidates.Report
On trans athletics.
Okay let’s imagine that none of us are transphobic in any way, and that we are willing to completely accept trans people and their lived gender. The reason I bring this up is to argue that many objections to trans athletes are simply masked transphobia, and when we dig into the details people will either accept trans people or double down. In other words, motivated reasoning is revealed over the course of discussion.
First, hormone therapy works. It is very difficult for a trans woman to maintain the kind of muscle mass that comes with high testosterone. It’s not impossible, given enough discipline, for some trans women to maintain a fair amount of muscle, but the same applies to some cis women. Furthermore, given that about half a percentage of people are trans, there are likely to be more cis women with such genetic gifts than there are trans women, even if on average trans women can (perhaps) maintain more muscle.
In other words, say 10% of trans women have what it takes to compete in a sport, but only 1% of cis women do. Would that be unfair? But why? Given how uncommon trans people are, there will still be more competitive cis women. Where is the lack of fairness? Is it unfair if a particular cis women can’t compete in a sport because she lacks the physical gifts, but some trans woman can? Why does that unfairness not apply the same between cis women?
If a trans woman transitions post-puberty, she will have a larger skeleton than most cis women. However, if a large skeleton implies an unfair advantage, does that apply to cis women who have large skeletons? In other words, if you find genetics an unfair advantage, then I have bad news for you regarding sports.
When you criticize trans women for having “genetic advantages” (to the degree we might), do you extend that in a neutral way to cis women? In other words, if X% of trans women have property Z, but only Y% of cis women do, why exclusively target trans women, only some of whom have property Z, but then celebrate cis women with Z? If property Z is “unfair”, then it is unfair for everyone, yes?
In fact, the idea that trans women can easily out-compete cis women has so far proven false. This is unsurprising. The gift of athletic achievement is a rare property, and trans women are already fairly uncommon. The odds of being both trans and athletically gifted turn out to be low.
If you read the attacks on trans athletes and then compare this to the reality of trans athletics, it’s clear that our attackers are dishonest and hateful. The sad part is that hate works. It’s easy to paint us as predators and villains. It is easy to outright lie about a trans athlete and to be believed, because many people want to believe the worst about us. If, however, you think about this in a principled way, you have to ask about cis women who have rare genetic gifts that let them compete at high levels. In fact, they dominate the highest levels, which is why trans women do not. We rarely have corresponding gifts, and just being trans does not erase that fact. The fact that many people just accept this for cis people, but then suddenly become concerned when trans women compete shows motivated reasoning. The problem is not the genetic differences. The problem is simply the fact that some athletes are trans.
Back to my first statement. Imagine we are all not transphobic.Report
Veronica – Please see my comment of 2:35pm.Report
Our examples on the table are a swimmer who turned from a below top 500 man into a top 10 woman, and a weight lifter who became a 20-ish Olympiad at the age of 42.Report
Obviously there’s a limited number of talented male athletes and only a small percentage of them would ever consider themselves trans, but there’s no reason to think that those who do won’t be able to dominate. We don’t keep records of averages, we keep records of the greatest, so the impact of any advantage should accumulate over time.Report
The official party line seems to be “there is no advantage because of chemistry”; If true then there is no problem and no issue.
Our examples seem to disprove this. Non-elite want-ta-be athletes transform into elite athletes as part of their transitioning.
So we have dueling facts.Report
Whose official party line? I mean, I get that estrogen is going to affect bone density, musculature, et cetera, but I’m still wondering about heart and lung size, for example. They don’t get smaller, nor does the length of the bones. When I’m reading comments like “yes, but there are people who are taller”, I’m not persuaded that we’re getting a thorough, neutral presentation of facts.Report
I’m way more interested in the bottom line and view all of these chemistry details as obfuscating that.
Is the expected result of a top 550 male athlete transitioning that she is now a top 10 female athlete?
How about a top 50? Is the expected result that she becomes basically invincible to anyone who isn’t intersex or also trans?
“Why” these are things doesn’t really matter. Assuming that these statements reflect reality (and our examples on the table suggest they do), eventually all female records in some sports will have been set by someone who was born male.
So we end up with two societal goods at odds. Fully accepting trans people into society suggests we ignore this.
Letting cis women compete only against each other to level the playing field suggests the opposite.Report
True. I’m interested in those things because they go against the theme of estrogen making a male body more female. I don’t personally care about anyone’s lung size beyond that. The kind of first-tier argument is that men are better athletes than women. The second tier is the “yes but” of HRT, and I can understand how muscle mass (for example) could be affected. I was thinking about the things that aren’t affected. Ultimately you and I are looking for an answer to the same question, but since we don’t have a large pool of top-notch male athletes who’ve undergone HRT I think we have to come at the answer indirectly.Report
Does anyone else remember Renee Richards, a trans woman tennis player from the 70s? Same thing: she wanted to play women’s professional tennis, was rejected when the various tennis orgs all started requiring genetic tests, but then a judge ruled she could play. There was a lot of hubbub about her unfair advantages, but as it turned out she was good but not great.
The weird part: the reporter who outed her as trans was Tucker Carlson’s father.Report
?!?! That last bit is the weirdest “and the rest of the story” ever.
Now that you jog that memory i do remember her but haven’t’ even heard the name mentioned in a very long item.Report
ESPN did a documentary about her, 10-15 years ago. It’s not bad. If I remember correctly, she never won anything on the main singles tour, but was part of a really good doubles team.Report
Or, as the joke went in those days, mixed singles.Report
You’re familiar with the idea of taking hormonal supplements in order to win a scholarship (steroids, in other words).
Now, let’s see: a transsexual female takes supplements of oestrogen and progesterone. Which are directly correlated with improved performance.
We aren’t talking testosterone, folks. We’re talking “this person is allowed to take this performance-enhancing hormone” — and reading the wikipedia, at pretty high doses in order to have them serve as functional anti-androgens.Report
The amount of progesterone trans women take (most do not, and those that do tend to only take them for a few years as progesterone does do some work in the last stages of puberty) moves their blood progesterone levels up to the cis female average — which itself varies over their menstrual cycle, so trans women do not normally even reach the peak level of non-pregnant cis women. Pregnant women, of course, have much higher levels.
As for estrogen, again, the target is standard cis female ranges.
Your argument appears to be “it’s an unfair advantage for trans women to have estrogen and progesterone levels the same as or below cis women” which is a weird take.
mean you roped in abortion bounty laws to this in your other, almost identical comment, so I’m sure you’ll come up with some new, totally unrelated buzzwords you know nothing about and pretend that’s your real objection next.
You might say I’m very familiar with the way bigots like to argue, and absolutely deciding to throw abortion into it and claiming estrogen and progesterone are “performance enhancing drugs” when discussing trans women who are dosed to get them PRECIESLY to cis female ranges is…
Well, it’s definitely a move I’m familiar with.Report
I’ve very deliberately avoided commenting on this post because as I mentioned at the outset, I didn’t have any firm opinion or body of knowledge on the subject beyond a desire to maximize people’s ability to participate with dignity in life.
But reading the comments here, a couple things stand out-JS’s assertions about the effect of HRT on forcing a decline in performance are essentially unrefuted and in doing just a bit of googling, are confirmed by a couple other sources.
And no one has been able to put up any data showing a consistent dominance of transwomen in women’s sports, even though trans people have been eligible to play collegiate sports since 2004.
Outsports for example, documents 31 trans athletes who play in college sports, and although they do well, they don’t dominate the sport in any meaningful way.
https://www.outsports.com/trans/2022/1/7/22850789/trans-athletes-college-ncaa-lia-thomas
This for me is the deciding factor. The primary claim being made is that allowing trans people to compete will result in the virtual elimination of cis women in sports, but this just doesn’t seem to be happening.
People can talk and theorize all day about human biology or hypotheticals, but the bottom line real world data is that for the past 18 years trans people have been competing in college sports without creating any sort of pattern of dominance.Report
And Lia Thompson is no exception to that rule.Report
“A decline in performance” isn’t contested. The issue seems to be the hit to performance isn’t balanced against the new league they’re in, i.e. they have a large gain in relative performance.
So Lia turns from ranking 550(ish) as a man into a top 10 woman. Her time went down by 5%, but that’s the same as it going up by 5-6% because she’s ranked against people 11% slower.
Trans is what, half a percent? Even that includes people who transitioned as children and people who transition after they’re past sporting age. The typical meet doesn’t have any.
Further, it’s not like we’re handing them Superman costumes. Moving from the top 10,000 to the top 5,000 would mean nothing in most sports. A 5% bonus means nothing if even after that you’re still not elite.
Your link is a happiness and puppies article. Lia is in there and it doesn’t mention that she was below 500 before transitioning and top 10 afterwards. Another I’d like stats for is Juniper Eastwood (your link). Short of Caitlyn Jenner I can’t think of any elite athletes who transitioned. But agreed, 31 athletes out of tens or hundreds of thousands won’t “dominate”.
Straw man. One person out of 200 isn’t going to “eliminate” cis women in sports.
The claim is 5% on top of being world class already means Caitlyn Jenner could have set records that are impossible for a cis woman to beat.
If that’s true, and our example athletes make it look like it is, then over the very long term all of those records will be held by people who transition before the end of their athletic career.Report
Except we’ve had 18 years of trans people playing collegiate sports and your prediction doesn’t seem to have any validity.
Of the top 10 record holding female college swimmers, runners, volleyball players, basketball players, how many are trans?
If your theory were valid, we would be seeing evidence by now don’t you think?Report
That link you put out there suggests the total number of trans athletes rounds to roughly zero. There were 31 in that link and several of them were “first”.
The first indication that there’s an issue is unlikely to be a top of the line athlete, just because top of the line athletes are themselves crazy rare. For every name we know there are tens or hundreds of thousands in that sport that we don’t.
Statistically the likely first indication there’s an issue would be sub-elite athletes suddenly become elite. We have multiple instances of exactly that happening on the table in front of us.
“Seeing evidence” is what we’re doing here.
What we should be doing is looking at relative placement before and after. So that 550 becoming top 10 is really damning. Ditto that 42 year old weight lifter. That runner in your link might be another example but we don’t have enough information.Report
If the claim is now “mediocre male athletes can become pretty good female athletes”, and we pair that with “and the total instances of this happening round to zero”, I’m just not sure what the problem is.Report
As long as we’re willing to live with the occasional Jenner setting records that can’t be broken by cis women, then there is no problem.
However we have this strong desire by society to separate men’s and women’s sports “because of fairness”. We’re setting up a situation where eventually all women’s sports records set by people who were born men (admittedly that’s over the course of decades).
If we care about this, and maybe we don’t, then what we should do is see whether there actually is a problem. One or two data points aren’t a trend. If there actually is a massive improvement in relative position, then we should figure out why that is and under what circumstance.
Someone suggested the issue was accepting as “normal” T levels that are outliers for females, it might be that we change a few rules and we’re fine.(*)
And all of that may be way too reasonable and logical for an issue that is virtue signaling in the culture war.
(*) Another outcome is we don’t understand as much as we think we do about the chemistry. Another outcome is to maintain health a trans person needs chemistry levels that are incompatible with fairness. This is not my field.Report
Athletes have been searching that special edge, that tiny advantage since forever.
Whether it is shaving off body hair or oiling their body, or more recent things like blood doping or Carbo loading, they are constantly striving for advantage.
And some of those advantages (like steroids) were in fact powerful enough to warp the competitive field.
But most other advantages have proven to be so insignificant as to not be a problem or are embraced as legitimate aspects of the sport.
One advantage which does have a powerful effect, and which no one seems to mind, is money.
To be an elite athlete requires money (or its time value equivalent) and lots of it.
The amateur athlete who holds a full time job and lacks sponsors almost never becomes elite.
But we just accept this as being ok, that’s just how the world works.Report
My favorite example: MLB is death on steroids, but has no problem with an athlete having their vision Lasik’ed down to 20/15 or even 20/10 for a few years.Report
RE: Money
There is an element of reversing cause and effect here. Elites can find backers. Phelps got stupid good in HS, which generated fame, which generated money.
More to the point I’m not sure where this takes us. If you want us to “just accept this as ok” then you need to be real clear on what you’re asking people to accept.Report
This is especially the case with individual Olympic sports. The only ones making any kind of money are the tiny handful famous enough for endorsement and sponsorship deals. You have to be incredibly good before you get rich off that.Report
There is this strange set of beliefs people have about trans athletes.
1. Their beliefs about HRT is that it’s purely cosmetic — that is, perhaps it grows small breasts on a trans woman, facial hair and muscles on a trans man (weirdly in contrast to their belief that trans women don’t lose muscle mass, but perhaps they don’t realize trans women suppress T to cis levels) — and that it’s. That “trans” people are basically just like they were originally, only metaphorically wearing a bad wig and a cheap boob job.
2. Even with the minimal changes they think actually occur — they seem to believe that a cis man growing breasts, or a cis woman growing facial hair would not, in any way, bother them at all. Especially not when the eternal glory of winning a NCAA college swim meet is at hand. (In real life, this causes rampant dysphoria. A cis man experiencing breast budding is not, in fact, going to be like “Cool!”)
Which leads to some fun arguments wherein I’ve heard people dismiss transitioning as both “trivial” (an athlete not quite up to snuff in their division would do it on a lark to win, like Bender in Futurama!) and also “mutilating your body” (“so why don’t you just try to be happy as you are, before you destroy your body like that!”) at the same time.
Not the only dichotomy — it’s “trendy”, yet also a “mental illness” (how’s that work? MAGIC. This week on tik-tok we’re giving out paranoid delusions and schizophrenia! The new trend!) for instance.
I won’t even get into the weird sexual element of it, or the internalized misogyny and homophobia that lurks right under the surface of a lot of the men screaming their sudden interest in women’s sports, or the recent weird insistence that trans people will call you a bigot if you don’t sleep with them (trans people, in general, do not want to sleep with bigots due to not liking to be assaulted and do, in fact, think genital preference is a thing. They’ve thought a lot more about genitals, sex, and gender than your average person for obvious).
Hand to God, it feels like 1993 again. Just…gay panic 2.0. Grooming kids, kids being gay due to “trends”, gays in men’s locker rooms staring lustfully at men, treating them like women…..even down to “I had to kill him because he made a pass at me and my gay panic, a real mental illness that causes murder, kicked in”.
Someone sanded off the 1990s anti-gay stuff the GOP rode so hard and well and just subbed in the word “trans”. Then a few of them (DeSantis) lost the plot and started screaming about gays again.Report
I am friends with several trans people but felt it was impolite to pry into the intimate details of how it all works, so thanks for the primer.
This does feel very much like Gay Panic 2.0 , but taking place in a different environment in which the basic premise of a liberal democracy is suddenly up for debate and authoritarians are out and proud.
Like, the Moral Majority types had to shoehorn bigotry into the language and framework of secular liberalism but the DeSantis types are going straight for the Stalinesque model of belligerent absurdity.
What we’ve seen in history is that there is no amount of liberalism that can’t be rolled back, or any degree of progress that is safe.Report
There is a strong element of that. The moral police have pretty much lost the gays and they still need to justify their existence.
None of which undermines anything I’ve said about math and statistical expectations.
I don’t have any emotional involvement in this. I don’t relate to trans, but I don’t relate to tattoos or body piercings either. Not my body. Not my problem.Report
“I am friends with several trans people but felt it was impolite to pry into the intimate details of how it all works, so thanks for the primer.”
It became something I had a sudden need to take a deep dive into, suffice it to say.
What’s confused me is that this clearly started as your basic “Let’s relive the DOMA glory days” with bathroom bills, but the GOP has jumped from “It’s about ethics in women’s athletics and not breaching the estrogen shield on women’s restroom (trans men do not exist)” it’s gone right back into bashing gays TOO.
Florida, of course, and then there’s Tennessee which is proposing to alter it’s state marriage laws to basically reduce marriage to “common-law only” — which they think will back-door ban gay marriage, because common law marriage in their Constitution is defined as man/woman — but what they’ve DONE is remove the laws against underage marriage and forced marriages so…
WTF even.Report
IMO, the social conservatives have never surrendered on any issue, but merely kept their heads low.
Same sex marriage, abortion, feminism, multiculturalism…they have never embraced these things and now that they sense the rising tide of authoritarianism they are emboldened to let their freak flag fly.Report
I’m just…surprised to see them go mask off.
They had their play, and just decided to call an audible for a play that failed decades ago — and seem deliberately tying the two issues together, the one thing their PR was careful to keep apart!
Do they think today’s America is LESS gay friendly?Report
They are happy to rub shoulders with, and have speak at their functions with, people like Amari and Vermeule and the Federalist guys who are all chattering excitedly about how they want a “postliberal” state, and the dictator of Hungary is the keynote speaker at CPAC, so, yeah, its a total Springtime for Hitler moment for them.Report
Missed this mango:
https://twitter.com/NoahShachtman/status/1511870180900626438
Paul Gosar to attend white nationalist social gathering on Hitler’s birthdayReport
That’s just like him, politicizing what should be a community event.Report
Js quotes an airforce study.
The one where transwomen run 9% faster than average women.
He falsely claims that there was a training regimen (other than normal military service — which in the airforce need not be weightlifting), in order to show that transwomen “can’t hold onto muscle.” Even the study itself says that gender dysphoria may play a role in the loss of ability to do pushups and pullups.
There are no disincentives in the military for a transwoman’s physical fitness — if she can do what a normal woman can. There’s simply not much in the way of incentives for her to be all “Rargh, I Am Woman” and to do 100 pullups.
The gendergp link (if you keep clicking inside it) goes to a study showing pronounced differences between transwomen and cis-womyn remain after 3 years.
That’s a long time in high school sports, isn’t it?Report
Changing your name constantly doesn’t actually fool people in a comment section this small.
I do love your trolling dedication — but “cis-womyn” gives the game away.Report
Happy to use the same name if the jannies will let me.
Also happy to read the research and learn something.
Wish you’d do the same.
You haven’t addressed how “giving tons of estrogen in order to crash someone’s testosterone” is going to make a “pre-transition” person similar to a post-transition person, or a woman. This is called “using large doses of one hormone to reduce the action of another hormone” — something not terribly likely to become “exactly the same” as normal.
I maintain they are not very similar at all. Notably, in neurologically based metrics, including aggression. Other metrics include the dramatic spike in suicides post-transition (and diminishment of sexual activities).Report
I’ve given you the research. Your response was “Dur, they must have just half-assed it. You know those trans women. LAZY”.
And what you just posted? Lies and idiocy.
Idiocy being your thoughts on HRT (you’ve neglected the role of anti-androgens, and completely just ignored the ability to simply test people’s blood to determine if hormonal levels are in cis ranges or not)
Lies being the suicide stats (suicide rates DROPPED after gender affirming care, not rose), the libido (mtf saw a drop the first three months then a rise and ftm saw a rapid rise), and you literally just made up the aggression one.
I’m not arguing with a lying troll — particularly a POOR one.Report
My response was to just read the research. The researchers picked “gender dysphoria” as a potential explanatory principle to why these people were better at running than cis-women, but not better at pullups or pushups.
I’m not calling them LAZY. I’m pointing out that you don’t have a consistent regimen to look at, in this one study (and hence the incentives are all for them losing muscle mass). Find me a better study.
My reading (of wikipedia, mind) shows that the use of anti-androgens is done through oestrogen, another performance enhancing drug.
I also object to the idea that any hormone has equivalent action throughout the body in all doses. (High Testosterone boys have smaller gonads, for example).
You’re changing the entire ballgame by changing it from “sex change” to “gender affirming care.” Which means you’re now talking to a strawman and not me. When you are willing to come back and talk with me, that’s fine. I’ll be here.
I’m comparing “preop” to “postop” because I think that preop is not the same as postop. If all transsexual females were postop, I think you’d find far fewer people having a megafit.
I’m not just making up the aggression — should I cite sources? I know someone who studies this stuff professionally.
There is an alternate hypothesis that neatly explains the aggression. I’m going to refrain from discussing it except if explicitly asked to do so, as a mere hypothesis is considered inflammatory in leftist circles.
ETA: Apologies. My comment above was unclear, due to editing timelimits. On reread, I see how you came to the conclusion that I was talking about “transitioning” from “male to female” hormonally, as opposed to an actual sex change.Report
That would be a dumb assumption as oestrogen doesn’t reduce androgens, at least not that I’ve ever heard.Report
She likely saw a snipped about E monotherapy. It requires quite high doses of E, because 1 for 1, T suppresses E not the other way around.
So when reducing T to cis female levels you have two choices (three if you count removal of the testes — fairly common, but doctors tend to require a year on HRT first) — blocker + E (most common), E monotherapy (high levels of E only, until T is fully suppressed, then can be stepped down because once T is suppressed you need less E to keep it down)
Regardless of which one you go to, the goal is to maintain T levels in the cis-female range (any higher and you get new facial hair growth, among other things) and your various E ranges in the pre-menopausal range.
Some doctors like to “simulate” original puberty by slowly stepping up E, and there’s anecdotal evidence that adding low progesterone dosages after a year (or a certain developmental milestone) does wonders, but it seems a “some need it, some don’t” which also happens in cis female puberty.
Other doctors just try to get you into the right ranges for T and E and just see what happens.
Of course, after a year or so on HRT if you decide to get gender confirmation surgery as a trans woman (specifically the genital set, as there are other surgeries considered gender confirming), you can go off the T-blockers just as if you’d had an orchi.
Not that it really matters, suppressed T is suppressed T. Having or not having testes literally just changes whether you’re having to keep it suppressed or not. The target blood levels don’t change due to surgery.Report
“My reading (of wikipedia, mind) shows that the use of anti-androgens is done through oestrogen, another performance enhancing drug.”
Oestrogen is just another spelling for estrogen, a thing which everyone produces but is much higher in women.
I want that to sink in. You just called ESTROGEN a performance enhancing drug. That’s the level you’re working at.
For everyone who ISN’T you: Estrogen can be used to reduce T in what’s called “E monotherapy” in which very high doses of E are used to suppress T down to cis-levels. This avoids the use of an anti-androgen such as spiro. It’s not all that commonly done simply because it’s considerably more tricky, requires higher doses of E, and dialing in the dosage takes a lot more time — and those initial high levels of E needed to suppress T initially (after that point, T can be kept suppressed with lower dosages) do run a risk of blood clots (for exactly the same reason pregnant women have a higher risk of blood clots) so generally doctors prefer an anti-androgen to suppress T, and remove the anti-androgen if the patient gets an orchi (removal of the testes) or GCS which removes the testes.
“I also object to the idea that any hormone has equivalent action throughout the body in all doses. (High Testosterone boys have smaller gonads, for example).”
You also thought estrogen was a performance enhancing drug, so I think we’ve established how much that is.
Finally, as to your weird “post-op/pre-op” thing — I assume you’re talking about GCS involving the genitals. Which…changes nothing performance wise, or hormone level wise — except the patient can stop taking an anti-androgen (if they haven’t previously had an orchi, which many have had) or lower their E-dose. Their blood hormonal levels of T and E remain the same.
I’m sure in your head, the head that thinks ESTROGEN is a performance enhancing drug, this all makes sense.
In the real world, literally the only difference between someone who has had gender confirmation surgery or not is, well, the shape of whatever bit they had the surgery on and their drug regime will change a bit to maintain the same, exact levels they previously had.
Surgery does not change their target ranges, nor their performance at sports. Unless you’re making some weird argument about drag coefficients when swimming.Report
Huh. I’d heard of just taking E in large doses, no anti-androgen, but…assumed it just basically overrode the T, not that it could actually suppress production.
But yeah, it’s also the ‘actually dangerous’ option.Report
“Huh. I’d heard of just taking E in large doses, no anti-androgen, but…assumed it just basically overrode the T, not that it could actually suppress production.
But yeah, it’s also the ‘actually dangerous’ option.”
Less so than you’d think (again, we stopped using the really dangerous form of oral E, and you’re not using ANY form of oral E for monotherapy — injections only).
The evidence on whether it suppresses T is pretty much anecdotal, as some trans woman have been able to lower their E injections significantly while T stays suppressed and others haven’t.
Most endos don’t bother with it, unless there’s a real problem with the blockers. Even then, they’d start heavily suggesting an orchi (it’s relatively cheap and quite safe outpatient surgery with a quick recovery). Again, doctors want at LEAST a year of HRT prior to that, for good reasons.
you can go off HRT and most of the changes will revert, and the few that don’t can be handled easily enough (laser or electrolysis for facial hair in trans men who decided to go off HRT, gynecomastia/breast reduction — it’s the same thing — for trans women who did).
But removing of the testes or ovaries DOES make you dependent on supplements going forward if you change your mind.
That being said, the actual detransition rate is about 2%, with 60% of this citing “social pressure” as the reason. which is…pretty darn good for medical results, so the current system seems pretty conservative.Report
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