Right-wing conservatives and those who identify as “gender critical” are up in arms after World Eightball Pool Federation allows trans women to participate.
In recent years, transgender athletes have been targeted by laws and internal policies aimed at barring their participation in sports. Initial bans on transgender participation were mainly in elite swimming and high school athletics, but increasingly, these bans are extending to areas where the argument of an “unfair advantage” is even more challenging to justify. Recent controversies and bans have included transgender participation in disc golf, beauty pageants, and chess. Now, a new target has emerged for those opposing trans participation: pool.
On Saturday, the Daily Mail reported that Alexandra Cunha, currently ranked fifth in World Eightball Pool Foundation (WEPF), quit, stating, “I recently played against a transgender player and was devastated by the loss.” Her decision followed a policy change by the organization. Two months prior, their policy required participants to be “born female.” Following criticism, the organization amended its policy to allow transgender players, incorporating guidelines about medical transition and testosterone suppression in accordance with International Olympic Committee standards.
Cunha, along with other players against transgender inclusion who had started a Signal chat, argued that transgender women possess an unfair advantage in pool. They told The Daily Mail that transgender women might execute a stronger “break” in the game. It’s important to note that no studies have been cited to confirm any such advantage for transgender women in pool.
Outrage from far-right newspapers and “gender critical” accounts was swift. Riley Gaines, also famous for placing in 5th place in a swimming race in which she competed against a transgender woman, retweeted a post calling a trans competitor a “trans identified male,” a derisive acronym used towards transgender women that shortens to “TIM,” a stereotypically masculine name. Helen Joyce, who has openly advocated for a “reduction” in trans people, called one of the women who quit “a bloody heroine.” News stories decrying trans participation in pool were pushed on the far-right website Breitbart as well as the “gender critical” magazine Reduxx.
Quickly though, people began to mock the idea of trans women having an insurmountable advantage at pool. Speak Out Sister, a trans-inclusive feminist organization, remarked, “Amazed to find out that strength is an advantage when playing pool. Guess the cues and balls are heavier than we knew.” User She Guevera jokingly responded, “Rightly so, they have a clear unfair advantage in judging angles and distances.🙄” Many others pointed out how the outrage over trans people in pool is similar to outrages of transgender people in other competitions with dubious “advantages” that transgender people supposedly have.
In recent months, transgender people have been targeted in a much wider variety of competitions than one might expect. Earlier this year, the Disc Golf Pro Tour announced it would shut down five events for all women just to stop a transgender woman from competing after she won a court case allowing her to compete. FIDE, the world’s largest chess organization, also made headlines earlier this year whenever it announced that under new guidelines, transgender women have “no right to participate” in women’s chess. Earlier this year, Italy banned transgender women from beauty pageants after a trans woman won the title of Miss Netherlands. Increasingly, the rationale for banning transgender people from these competitions has grown suspect.
It is important to note that the initial focus on transgender people in sports in the current wave of legislative attacks on trans people was a political calculation designed to usher in discrimination on transgender people. Terry Schilling, leader of The American Principles Project, described his organization’s initial relentless focus on trans people in sports as a means to an end: “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues.” In a later interview with the New York Times, he stated, “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about, and we threw everything at the wall.”
Evidence does not support the claim that transgender athletes are dominating sports. Transgender women have been eligible to compete in the Olympics for two decades, yet no transgender woman has secured any medal. Furthermore, policies targeting transgender individuals often end up being used against cisgender athletes who face accusations of being transgender following their victories. In states where bans are not in place, individual organizations may implement various medical criteria related to transition for competition eligibility, as was the case with WEPF. Despite these measures, those opposing transgender inclusion remain discontent with the participation of transgender athletes in competitions against cisgender counterparts, regardless of the competition involved.
What about measuring a trans person’s performance and then setting them in a suitable performance group?
This is the answer to all of this. Weight class exists in multiple sports and no one cares. Just pick a way to group people by skill.
Weight class isn’t an answer. At any given weight and training level, on average, someone with cis female ranges of testosterone will have less muscle mass than someone with cis male levels of testosterone.
Even after anti androgens and/or orchiectomy?
No. A trans woman on androgen blockers etc does not have testosterone levels in the cis male range. They normally have cis female range, and even lower if they’ve had bottom surgery of some kind
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I said weight class is an example of how classifying ppl into skill groups bothers no one. The actual way to pick groups would be sport by sport.
I mean, the person you’re replying to said skill level.
That’s true. But even that isn’t fair. Extant hormones impact athletic potential independent of skill level.
But sure, grouping people by performance level is, in theory, a solution, but it ignores the social element of being the “odd one out” in your group, which will discourage people who are outliers from participating, and it doesn’t address the impossibility of assessing people’s performance levels on that scale
You’ve lost me. Why does grouping by skill level lead to people being the odd one out?
I said performance level. Testosterone gives athletic advantage. Which means that for any given training level, on average, someone that has significant testosterone in their system will perform better than someone who does not.
And that means that by and large, we still end up with roughly gender based divisions, with the odd exception for outliers. And those outliers are often going to be the “odd one out” in their group.
In pool??? It bloody well does not.
And assuming all men are better at sports than all women is ludicrous. Could you beat Venus Williams at tennis? Nope. You don’t have the skills.
It does. Take a look at Lia Thomas for example. Not the transphobic misinformation about her, but her actual performance data. Her performance dropped once she started hormonal medical transition.
Similarly, the work of Joanna Harper on runners, whilst limited in scope, showed a consistent performance drop when trans women start hormonal medical transition.
Similarly, every athletic (swimming or otherwise) world record is held by someone that was testosterone dominant at the time they set the record.
That doesn’t mean that every person that is testosterone dominant beats every person that is estrogen dominant, but what it does mean is that athletic performance results tend to produce a bimodal distribution, and the two peaks correlate with (recent) dominant hormone levels.
And what that means is that if you take two people with Venus Williams skill at tennis, but one of them is testosterone dominant, the other is estrogen dominant, the advantage is going to be with the testosterone dominant person.
I did nothing of the sort. My entire point was that this isn’t the case. If you group by performance, ie, by real world sporting outcomes, you get the bimodal distribution I was talking about. And that means that you’re going to end up with sports that aren’t technically gendered, but defacto are, because that’s how the distribution spreads out. And when that happens, the outliers, ie, the estrogen powered folk that perform at a level more common in testosterone powered folk and vice-versa, will sometimes find themselves the odd one out in what is still a de-facto gendered sport.
And speaking as a trans woman who has been forced to play with men, being the “odd one out” is not an experience I enjoyed. It stopped me from participating in sports for many years. For some folk, being the odd one out is isolating and just means that we won’t play. And that’s not an experience I would like to see become more common for anyone, cis or trans.
I don’t know what the answer is. Grouping sports by binary genders isn’t it. But pretending hormones don’t play a factor isn’t it either.
That’s what we already had. The transphobes are dismantling it.