Rojo - Do you support transgender athletes competing as long as they receive hormonal treatment? Or are you fully against?

Leaving aside the residual effects of being born male my concern would be how you would be able to get round the Testo tests.

This would have to involve WADA type controls which adds even more to the complications.

The irony of WADA making sure drug taking was taking place!

I also would await a legal case that the hormone therapy had side effects and this class action could be sat there immediately or for years later.

If you're clearly born a male I don't see any reasonable way you should allowed to become competing against females

I'm certainly willing to hear a reasonable argument but it's just seems that a person born a biological male would have a big advantage and that's the whole point why we have different leagues for men and women

For me the only real controversy is how to deal with people who aren't clearly born male or female and have legitimate genetic documentation to prove this

If someone has ambiguous gender due to some genetic biological condition. It's possible that they might physically be more a man but sexually more a female

For me this is the only really difficult case to decide because if they've been brought up their whole life as a woman and they don't have a clear biological gender then it does seem unfair to say they can't compete as women even though they might have an unfair advantage

But anyway unless someone can change my mind I don't think people born biological male should be allowed to compete against women, cuz this is the whole point we have different leagues to begin with so can't think of any reasonable argument why someone would get a pass just because psychologically they feel like the opposite gender

If your cromosome is X and Y, you are not a woman. If you are not a woman, you shall not compete as a woman - no matter what hormone cure you are on.

logwithin wrote:

Honest question to others as well.

Is it good enough that there is hormonal treatment, testosterone monitoring, and # of years regarding declaration of gender? Or is this still an unfair impact to women?

For me, given the current status of science right now, I'm fine with the above situation (hormonal treatment and monitoring, and # years as identified gender).

I don't think there is enough information yet on how the body/muscles/bone density/etc. changes during hormonal treatment to really set strict rules on how to define who gets to compete and who doesn't, especially since it can vary by competition discipline (i.e. sprinter vs distance vs thrower vs jumper) and how long the individual has been on hormonal treatment.

Men are also taller. Are they going to do tibia/fibula reduction too? They can do it when they cut the dick off

I agree with this.

However, I'd add that I don't have an issue with transgender women entering an amateur race as women e.g. non-championship road races or even local league cross country. I guess this would create the potential for a guy to just pretend to be transgender, but I can't see it happening to the extent that it's worth worrying about.

Any sport where strength, power or any physical differences that came from male puberty gives advantages should not allow men who now identify as female to compete in the protected female category regardless of surgery and hormone levels in my opinion. This is not for me anything to do with politics, it is to do with fairness for the greatest number. The entire point of female categories is to give women fair competition.

It's still unfair. As I've said in prior threads on this topic, females are not males with T suppression and estrogen supplementation. They are a distinct type of human being with physical and mental traits evolved to support healthy and successful childbearing and childrearing. Obviously, this doesn't mean that females have to have children, or that they're walking uteruses. It does not mean that females have to conform to social expectations about femininity, or that some females aren't masculine in their bodily presentation and behavior. It does mean that all females, regardless of how they live, have shared characteristics that impact athletic performance.

Also, there is no evidence that T suppression eliminates male advantage. See this recent paper:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3

Organs are different etc.

Just a no from me, sorry, always has been.

Shaq would have been a pretty good female college player regardless of how many drugs he had to take.

Like most here, I'm far from a scientist, so I'm not going to make any authoritative statements about what kind of advantages MTF athletes retain after undergoing hormone therapy. My understanding is that the question (really many, many questions) are far from settled.

I will say that I think whatever we learn, we should adopt a sliding scale approach: The higher the level of competition, the more we should require certainty that there is no retained advantage. (I'm assuming the premise of this thread is that we can agree that to the extent there is a provable advantage, MTF athletes should not compete against born females.) At the pro and Olympic level, we should be quite certain that there's zero advantage. At lower levels of competition, I'm okay with MTF athletes competing as long we're reasonably confident that there's no advantage or that any advantage is very minor.

I don't support it all, but the NCAA, USATF and IOC have already agreed to it and it's never going to change.

The issue is whether its potential affect women's sports and so far, Eastwood's 60th place in XC regionals does not give me cause for concern. At least for distance running, it would take an elite male athlete to transgender into an elite female one and that just is isn't going to happen. That a "fake" would be willing to undergo hormone treatments is ridiculous. A person without dyslexia doing so, would be likely to become suicidal after transitioning.

Fully against it. Once someone has gone through puberty as a male, there is no reversing the biological differences (position of the hips and other skeletal differences). If you were born a male, you need to compete against other males. I coach girl's soccer and girl's soccer players are six times more likely to tear an ACL than their male peers. A trans individual will not experience those same risks because they are skeletally different.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

I don't support it all, but the NCAA, USATF and IOC have already agreed to it and it's never going to change.

The issue is whether its potential affect women's sports and so far, Eastwood's 60th place in XC regionals does not give me cause for concern. At least for distance running, it would take an elite male athlete to transgender into an elite female one and that just is isn't going to happen. That a "fake" would be willing to undergo hormone treatments is ridiculous. A person without dyslexia doing so, would be likely to become suicidal after transitioning.

__________________

I agree that it won't change any time soon. We'll have to see lots of examples of females losing money and titles before reasonable people decide to put science before virtue signaling. Even scientists have been deluded by a noxious strand of postmodern misogyny calling itself feminism.

BTW: we don't need to see an elite male transition to witness the impact of tranwomen in sports. There have already been several examples of this impacting female competition, from the Connecticut high school track & field example, to CeCe Telfer in DII, "Veronica Ivy" in age-group cycling. None of these people were elite as boys or men. These examples might not matter to people who only care about Olympic sport, but they have a real impact on the girls and women who lose out on titles, scholarships, and success.

We've already seen intersex males who were raised as girls dominate the 800m at World Champs and Olympics. World Athletics has lots of private data on the dominance of intersex males in elite competition; apparently this is some of the most compelling data in the Caster Semenya rulings. Intersex conditions are not exactly common. Being trans will not have to be common, either, for transwomen to have a significant impact on women's sports.

Last but not least. I don't know if you've noticed the upsurge in the number of people identifying as trans. Being trans today is not what it was 20 years ago. For some, trans is more of a political or aesthetic choice than a solution to longstanding gender dysphoria. You may think it's absurd that a non-trans person would transition, but this is not true. Trans is very likely a Western cultural response to gender nonconformity, rather than a stable category representing a single medical affliction. In the past, there was extensive gatekeeping for sex reassignment surgery precisely because people commonly misidentify the source of their misery. (PS: East Germany pumped their women athletes full of steroids several decades ago, and many athletes continue to harm their bodies for the sake of a win. Don't think for a second that some athletes or nations won't exploit the hormone rules). Note that the Biden order names "gender identity," a subjective concept that does not allow gatekeeping.

I anticipate some arguing in the future that transwomen should not have to take hormones to compete since they are already women. I know people with PhDs who think that people should be able to compete based on gender identity.

It's an interesting question for today's society and sporting organizations.

People's personal preferences don't really bother me one way or another. I go about my business, you go about yours. It's all good :)

But asking XX biological women to compete against non-XX, non-biological women goes against the entire purpose of women competing in a class by themselves.

Testosterone is only one small part of the picture. There are other hormones as well. And as others have pointed out, there are organ differences, musculoskeletal differences, etc; most especially, the differences that are produced by having gone through the process of male puberty.

Here's a simple mental test:

You have a 28yo daughter, girlfriend, wife who gets into MMA. Now you find out that her next fight is against a 28yo trans person who was "male" a couple of years ago and who is now "female." This fighter has undergone hormone suppressive treatment (or whatever it's called, I don't know). And let's say this upcoming opponent had numerous fights 2-4 years ago -- as a MAN.

Are you cool with this upcoming fight? ... ummm right, I didn't think so.

If the physiological differences are a problem in MMA, they are a problem in basketball, track, and other sports.

Now, if a trans "female", formerly presenting "male", wants to get on the track against me (a male), I have no problem with it. Got pretty nails and long flowing hair? Wore a skirt and heels to the meet before you changed into shorts and spikes? Had breast augmentation? Ok, no problem, I'm fine with all that. We are both in the same physiological class, so let's compete. We may not be in the same psychological class, but we don’t have separate sporting competitions for individuals with varying psychological profiles (except Special Olympics).

It seems to me that the people who should be protesting against the integration of XY trans athletes into women's competitions should be the women in each relevant sport. I may think what I think, but as a man I am not affected by any of this.

Maybe this whole thing would get settled if a bunch of top-notch MMA dudes who feel like a woman (not judging, again I don't care one way or another) would enter fights ... as women.

Concerning the voices supposedly speaking for women's rights are now not speaking of 'women' but of 'females'. Reminds me of the incel alt-right use of 'femoids'.

The science done on this exact topic says the physical advantages of being a male don't magically go away after going on estrogen.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6469959/

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/782557v1

Tatar wrote:

Concerning the voices supposedly speaking for women's rights are now not speaking of 'women' but of 'females'. Reminds me of the incel alt-right use of 'femoids'.

Well the thing is, trans women may sometimes be included in the term "women" -- so it seems that when drawing a distinction one may sometimes use the term "female" to refer to XX biological women.

But, there may also be something to what you said. It strikes me as a bit odd that, from what I can see, the loudest and most vociferous voices against trans women competing against women are men. Seems strange to me, bc as a man this doesn't really affect me. I would think that the women affected by all this would be speaking up the loudest.

Anyhoo, I feel awfully young at heart. Maybe I'll declare myself a child and go kill it at some 7-8yo 50 yard dash competitions. If anybody objects, it must be that they don't respect my rights and my personal dignity.

Against. There's more to being male than just testosterone. The most obvious example, of course, is what if Lebron James decided to transition and play in the WNBA. It would just be silly.

I'm not saying this is fair. It's definitely unfair to exclude transgender women from women's sports. It's also not fair that people who are paralyzed can't compete in women's sports. It's never going to be 100% fair. But it's about what's the most fair solution for the most people. Allowing biological men (transgender women) to compete in women's sports would be unfair to large numbers of women.

If competing in track and field events is the MOST important thing in your life, then don't transition and compete with men. Sorry. Sometimes you have to make choices.