Because excluding trans women from sports was never actually about fairness. It’s about normalizing excluding trans people from aspects of public life.
Given a long enough time on the right hormones, and most (not all) of that advantage disappears.
“While absolute lean mass remains higher in trans women, relative percentage lean mass and fat mass (and muscle strength corrected for lean mass), hemoglobin, and VO2 peak corrected for weight was no different to cisgender women. After 2 years of GAHT, no advantage was observed for physical performance measured by running time or in trans women. By 4 years, there was no advantage in sit-ups. While push-up performance declined in trans women, a statistical advantage remained relative to cisgender women.”
There’s also a large band of ability within people. Michael Phelps has a genetic advantage, but his accomplishments are still celebrated.
I’m trans and I actually agree with you. I don’t know the solution to make things fair, but I wouldn’t want to use a strong biological advantage over someone else.
I see it like if I’d been born with some identifiable and categorised physical advantage then I shouldn’t be competing against people without that advantage.
It’s debatable how big the difference is, however, and whether it’s a gap easily closed or not. My thoughts are that there could be an open category where anyone could compete on the understanding that there may be severe biological differences. There’s no easy solution :(
Edit: thinking about it, sporting competitions are more sex-catagorised than gender-categorised. I don’t think someone identifying as female with no physical/medical alterations from a biological male form should compete with biological females and I don’t think that should be controversial since the gender isn’t what people care about there. It’s the physical characteristics.
In some sports that might provide an advantage, in some a disadvantage, but I do this it’s important to discuss!
At that point, however, you’d be better ignoring gender and sex entirely and only categorising sports like ‘feather weight’ or ‘strong muscular development’ or something
I think this is where it makes sense to go. Like wrestling, right? Just make every sport competition divided on gender if it’s that important, and then divided on the basis of body mass. Although frankly I think that would make every sport ten times more boring than it needs to be. Like smaller athletes usually need to figure out a way to still compete, and that’s where part of the fun is, both in competing and watching. If an athlete feels disadvantaged, they’re just lazy and not training well or enough.
Then again, I do think sports should be less owned by massive corporations and media companies, and move more to their dimension of play, admiration for each other and self-improvement. Not saying sports shouldn’t be jobs and not have money go in and out, but they should center that dimension a lot less.
I mean… some cis women are born thicker and taller than others which might be an advantage over other women, biologically. Yet, nobody disqualifies those women from competing. It just means everyone else has to be twice as competitive and work around their physical limits. Sports are largely about overcoming one’s performance limits. Like, a shorter basketball player can still play basketball and be really good at it, it’s all about how they train, what they focus on and how they play. And it’s about how good they are at dealing with the space around them and controlling their body. This was always the case, always in the history of sports. Being a stronger athlete was never a problem before, and now suddenly it is? It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s just an excuse for bad athletes who don’t wanna git gud to demand special treatment. I’m speaking as a cis woman who’s bigger than most other women around me. Not my fault that I can accidentally throw other chicks to the bleachers without even being aware of them, and I’m still a woman no matter how other people see me. So yeah, this whole discourse affects me too, because trans people being targeted also targets any person who was born intersex or just different.
What’s your idea of what a trans woman’s body looks like, exactly? Like, do you think a trans woman is just “a man in a dress”? Because that’s just straight up inaccurate in every way. HRT changes trans people’s bodies and how those bodies work. That’s why we say “trans women are women and trans men are men”.
Like, would you think making someone with the body of Buck Angel compete in women’s competitions would be fair? Google Buck Angel, look at him and then come back at me.
Ok, hold on, why would you forbid trans women from competing? Because of “unfair advantages”?
First off, trans women who completed their transition don’t have a male body. They have a female body. And some athletes are naturally better at some sports than others. Like, shorter basketball players are naturally disadvantaged at basket, which is why they need to train twice as hard as taller players or switch to another sport.
Also, every whiny white woman complaining about trans women doing better than them always forgets to mention the athletes winning are still the cis ones, which destroys the idea that trans women have an advantage.
The point never held up either in sports nor anywhere else. And it was never about sports anyway.
From experience, female clothes aren’t proportioned to fit trans women as well as cis women. While in your other comment you make a good point about some cis women also being outside the ‘conventional’ physical expectations for women in western society, that doesn’t also mean that trans people don’t face the same issues. We talk about these problems from a trans perspective because trans people are often targeted with legislation and rules from people who don’t understand, and are blocked from being treated as their preferred gender.
A bulky cis woman might share physical characteristics with a trans woman, but their existence is also significantly less opposed.
Wait what? I get why someone would forbid trans women from participating in female sports events, but why TF can’t they go to beauty contests?
Because excluding trans women from sports was never actually about fairness. It’s about normalizing excluding trans people from aspects of public life.
It’s wrong to ban trans women from women’s sports, because trans women are women.
But they have the muscles of a male and usually beat all women-since-birth in competitions.
Yeah, Ik I’m gonna get downvoted to oblivion and I’m gonna get called TERF but that’s the reason it’s controversial in the first place
Given a long enough time on the right hormones, and most (not all) of that advantage disappears. “While absolute lean mass remains higher in trans women, relative percentage lean mass and fat mass (and muscle strength corrected for lean mass), hemoglobin, and VO2 peak corrected for weight was no different to cisgender women. After 2 years of GAHT, no advantage was observed for physical performance measured by running time or in trans women. By 4 years, there was no advantage in sit-ups. While push-up performance declined in trans women, a statistical advantage remained relative to cisgender women.”
There’s also a large band of ability within people. Michael Phelps has a genetic advantage, but his accomplishments are still celebrated.
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/clinem/dgad414/7223439?login=false
It’s rare that I see someone type a comment that mentions everything I want to say. You rock!
I’m trans and I actually agree with you. I don’t know the solution to make things fair, but I wouldn’t want to use a strong biological advantage over someone else.
I see it like if I’d been born with some identifiable and categorised physical advantage then I shouldn’t be competing against people without that advantage.
It’s debatable how big the difference is, however, and whether it’s a gap easily closed or not. My thoughts are that there could be an open category where anyone could compete on the understanding that there may be severe biological differences. There’s no easy solution :(
Edit: thinking about it, sporting competitions are more sex-catagorised than gender-categorised. I don’t think someone identifying as female with no physical/medical alterations from a biological male form should compete with biological females and I don’t think that should be controversial since the gender isn’t what people care about there. It’s the physical characteristics. In some sports that might provide an advantage, in some a disadvantage, but I do this it’s important to discuss! At that point, however, you’d be better ignoring gender and sex entirely and only categorising sports like ‘feather weight’ or ‘strong muscular development’ or something
Just make it body mass based
I think this is where it makes sense to go. Like wrestling, right? Just make every sport competition divided on gender if it’s that important, and then divided on the basis of body mass. Although frankly I think that would make every sport ten times more boring than it needs to be. Like smaller athletes usually need to figure out a way to still compete, and that’s where part of the fun is, both in competing and watching. If an athlete feels disadvantaged, they’re just lazy and not training well or enough.
Then again, I do think sports should be less owned by massive corporations and media companies, and move more to their dimension of play, admiration for each other and self-improvement. Not saying sports shouldn’t be jobs and not have money go in and out, but they should center that dimension a lot less.
I mean… some cis women are born thicker and taller than others which might be an advantage over other women, biologically. Yet, nobody disqualifies those women from competing. It just means everyone else has to be twice as competitive and work around their physical limits. Sports are largely about overcoming one’s performance limits. Like, a shorter basketball player can still play basketball and be really good at it, it’s all about how they train, what they focus on and how they play. And it’s about how good they are at dealing with the space around them and controlling their body. This was always the case, always in the history of sports. Being a stronger athlete was never a problem before, and now suddenly it is? It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s just an excuse for bad athletes who don’t wanna git gud to demand special treatment. I’m speaking as a cis woman who’s bigger than most other women around me. Not my fault that I can accidentally throw other chicks to the bleachers without even being aware of them, and I’m still a woman no matter how other people see me. So yeah, this whole discourse affects me too, because trans people being targeted also targets any person who was born intersex or just different.
What’s your idea of what a trans woman’s body looks like, exactly? Like, do you think a trans woman is just “a man in a dress”? Because that’s just straight up inaccurate in every way. HRT changes trans people’s bodies and how those bodies work. That’s why we say “trans women are women and trans men are men”. Like, would you think making someone with the body of Buck Angel compete in women’s competitions would be fair? Google Buck Angel, look at him and then come back at me.
Hormones are not going to reshape someone’s body structure
Except they do. Literally look at any picture of a trans woman before and after transitioning. Their bodies literally change in every sense.
“Oh their fat is accumulated in other places”
I’m talking about internal stuff
“Internal stuff”? What do you mean? You mean like men have more organs than women or something…? What kinda statement is this
Ok, hold on, why would you forbid trans women from competing? Because of “unfair advantages”? First off, trans women who completed their transition don’t have a male body. They have a female body. And some athletes are naturally better at some sports than others. Like, shorter basketball players are naturally disadvantaged at basket, which is why they need to train twice as hard as taller players or switch to another sport. Also, every whiny white woman complaining about trans women doing better than them always forgets to mention the athletes winning are still the cis ones, which destroys the idea that trans women have an advantage.
The point never held up either in sports nor anywhere else. And it was never about sports anyway.
Bone and muscle structure won’t change because of transition
You’d be surprised.
From experience, female clothes aren’t proportioned to fit trans women as well as cis women. While in your other comment you make a good point about some cis women also being outside the ‘conventional’ physical expectations for women in western society, that doesn’t also mean that trans people don’t face the same issues. We talk about these problems from a trans perspective because trans people are often targeted with legislation and rules from people who don’t understand, and are blocked from being treated as their preferred gender. A bulky cis woman might share physical characteristics with a trans woman, but their existence is also significantly less opposed.
Edit: to my first point there are a number of biological size/proportion differences between cis men and cis women that can be seen here: https://ehs.oregonstate.edu/sites/ehs.oregonstate.edu/files/pdf/ergo/ergonomicsanddesignreferenceguidewhitepaper.pdf