Trans Women are not Women

[theprestige]

The IOC has been allowing transgender athletes since 2004, depending on their hormonal status.

Cite?

Have the Olympics since then been won by transgender athletes? All of the contests? Any of the contests?

Maybe they're not overrunning the sports world after all.

Let's see what the Olympics have actually been allowing, before we leap to any conclusions.

 

[Belz...]

Williams was born with biological advantages over other women as well. And John McEnroe is not a transwoman. He is in his late 50s though so Serena might give him a good game!

Ok then as I said, pit women and men against one another, and see what happens.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

But we are not, if sex and gender are 2 separate things, then we can sort by either. If they are the same, then we encounter the issue of the point being resolved already.

They can be all the woman they want, it's not women's boxing is bio female boxing.

The only counter to the point is by claiming sex and gender are the same.

I already mentioned this a while back and would be willing to bet it would be met by just as much wrath from those who insist that cis is an unnecessary made-up identifier.

 

[theprestige]

The design of tampons isn't arbitrary.

Neither is the segregation of competitive sport by gender.

 

[Brainster]

I can't say I mopped the floor with her, but I can say I won more than I lost. And it had nothing to do with skill, she had me beat on all fronts that way, it was simply that with equal effort I had some severe advantages.

This. Back in my college days I played a fair amount of tennis. I was just okay; against men with any degree of skill I would get whipped, and I didn't even dream about trying out for the team. But I often played gals on the women's team and was seldom challenged even against the best woman; most sets were 6-0 or 6-1. Indeed, I suspect that the concept of mixed doubles was arrived at because it allowed women able to play on the same court as men.

 

[Matthew Best]

Well, my point was, given how little information you gave, it's not easy to draw a rational conclusion. Sure, the post was written in a way that it 'leads' to a specific conclusion, but is it the correct one?

Well, to be honest I don't have any more information than that. I can imagine what the Chinese woman who won the last mixed gold medal thought, though.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

If the choice is causing prejudice to 50% of the population or 0.3%, the choice is easy. I'm all ears for a third option.

Is that the choice?

Does that apply to other areas of discrimation as well? It's OK for Christians to discriminate against homosexuals because there are more Christians than homosexuals?

The vast majority of males and females are not and never will be elite athletes. Nothing that happens with transpeople will ever change that.

I find it hard to accept that it's prejudice against half the world to make it more difficult for them to become something they were never ever going to be anyway.

 

[Ziggurat]

The IOC has been allowing transgender athletes since 2004, depending on their hormonal status. Have the Olympics since then been won by transgender athletes? All of the contests? Any of the contests?

Maybe they're not overrunning the sports world after all.

The 2004 IOC rules required athletes to have undergone full sex change surgery. The new 2015 guidelines no longer require that. We should not expect to know the effects of this change for quite some time.

 

[Belz...]

Is that the choice?

Well, yeah. Either trans people can't compete at all, or most women who would qualify for those competition don't stand a chance. What's your third option?

Does that apply to other areas of discrimation as well? It's OK for Christians to discriminate against homosexuals because there are more Christians than homosexuals?

No, but that's not very comparable, is it? Not discriminating against homosexuals does not prevent them from doing anything else.

The vast majority of males and females are not and never will be elite athletes.

This is at the very least the four millionth time you point this out, and it's still as irrelevant as it was the first time around.

 

[Belz...]

Well, to be honest I don't have any more information than that. I can imagine what the Chinese woman who won the last mixed gold medal thought, though.

If that's all you have then you can't possibly arrive at a conclusion.

 

[deadrose]

As of last year they've also lowered the level of available testosterone allowed, which would be very hard to achieve without having had at least partial surgery.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

That's what "fair" means.

Then every possible solution would have to be considered fair. I don't think you mean that.

I think most people would want to watch a contest they consider fair in that people are operating under the same rules.

But then Federer v Williams would be fair

Or everyone allowed to take steroids would be fair.

No, fairness seems to go beyond that but then it becomes highly subjective.

Is it about both sides having an even chance of winning?
Is it about both sides having equal opportunity to succeed?

If we keep tennis as an example there are possibly a greater number of men who could compete evenly with Serena Williams than there are women. There will be a vast number of women who could have trained their whole lives and still not be anywhere near her standard. So what's fair in this scenario?

Let's take 3 competitors:

1. Serena Williams
2. Berena Williams - A ciswoman who was born in exactly the same circumstances as Serena, trained just as much but is 10% less 'biologically fit for tennis'
3. Serena Willimans - A transwoman who was born in exactly the same circumstances as Serena, trained just as much, but is 10% more 'biologically fit for tennis'

Can you explain to me why its fair for 2 to compete with 1 but not fair for 1 to compete with 3?

 

[cullennz]

Is that the choice?

Does that apply to other areas of discrimation as well? It's OK for Christians to discriminate against homosexuals because there are more Christians than homosexuals?

The vast majority of males and females are not and never will be elite athletes. Nothing that happens with transpeople will ever change that.

I find it hard to accept that it's prejudice against half the world to make it more difficult for them to become something they were never ever going to be anyway.

Do you think 26 year olds should be able to enter boxing tournaments with 15 year olds?

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Well, yeah. Either trans people can't compete at all, or most women who would qualify for those competition don't stand a chance. What's your third option?

And 'most women who would qualify for those competitions' is not anywhere near 50% of the population.

In fact, assuming that competitions remain the same size then even if I accept your logic then 1 transwoman accepted into the competition means 1 ciswoman being denied entrance. So the numbers affected are, and always would be identical from that point of view.

No, but that's not very comparable, is it? Not discriminating against homosexuals does not prevent them from doing anything else.

Well it's exactly the same logic. The second sentence here makes no sense to me. Christians would say that not discriminating against homosexuals stops them practising their religion. Allowing transwomen to win everything in sport would make absolutely no tangible difference to the vast majority of women

This is at the very least the four millionth time you point this out, and it's still as irrelevant as it was the first time around.

It matters when you quote spurious numbers to make a point.

 

[Belz...]

Then every possible solution would have to be considered fair.

It's considered fair when it's agreed to. It doesn't change its arbitrary nature.

Can you explain to me why its fair for 2 to compete with 1 but not fair for 1 to compete with 3?

I'm sorry, I've run out of patience trying to explain to you the basics of human psychology and of words.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Do you think 26 year olds should be able to enter boxing tournaments with 15 year olds?

I don't know. I imagine their are plenty 15 year olds who could outbox many 26 year olds. I wouldn't put one in the ring with the world champion though

 

[Belz...]

And 'most women who would qualify for those competitions' is not anywhere near 50% of the population.

That is. Completely. Irrelevant.

This point that you think is so important that you have to make it in every single post is completely void of any meaning. It's pointless. Stop bringing it up.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

It's considered fair when it's agreed to. It doesn't change its arbitrary nature.

I'm sorry, I've run out of patience trying to explain to you the basics of human psychology and of words.

I'll take that as a no then.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

That is. Completely. Irrelevant.

This point that you think is so important that you have to make it in every single post is completely void of any meaning. It's pointless. Stop bringing it up.

It's not irrelevant in the least. You just can't see the point because you are tied into an old paradigm and happy to throw transwomen under the bus thanks to bad maths.

 

[theprestige]

Here's something I didn't know (probably not really relevant to this discussion, but interesting nonetheless).

From 1968 until 1992 the Olympic skeet shooting event was open to men and women. Then in 1992 it was actually won by a woman.

So what happened at the next Olympics? It was made men-only.

When something like this is mentioned, I'm always curious about the details of what actually went into the decision. Unfortunately, there isn't much available from the usual convenience sources (i.e., Wikipedia).

But here's some thoughts that come to my mind:

The decision was apparently made by the international governing organization for competitive shooting: the ISSF. Whether this decision was made entirely internally, or influenced by the IOC, is not known.

The ISSF already had some segregated events, so it's not like they were committed to co-ed shooting competitions.

The fact that in 6 olympiads, a woman only won once, argues that clearly the co-ed format wasn't working. It's possible that they had already planned to eliminate the co-ed Olympic event, and it was just a quirk of history that a woman happened to win the last such event.

It might also have been a complete fluke. The woman who won only placed 8th at her next major international competition.

The ISSF is responsible for increasing international participation in their sport. They may have started with a co-ed skeet event simply because there weren't enough competitors to make a good Olympic field otherwise.

As competitive skeet shooting became more popular internationally, everyone understood that audiences wouldn't be interested in seeing women consistently lose to men, and so they knew they were going to have to cancel the co-ed event at some point anyway.

Maybe they had only the men's event in the next olympiad because they already had enough international competitors to make a full field. By the following olympiad, they had enough olympic-tier women to introduce a women's event.

The ISSF is responsible for increasing international participation in their sport. This probably means that sooner or later, they have to promote the sport in cultures with strong taboos against co-ed competition. Maybe in 1992 the were facing the choice of keeping the co-ed event, or getting several more countries to send competitors to the Olympics.

---

An interesting and relevant note about the women's event introduced in the next olympiad: The men's event had five series of 25 targets, for a total of 125 shots. The women's even had three series of 25 targets, for a total of 75 shots.

In Olympic Skeet, the shooter starts each round with the shotgun at their hip, lifting it to their shoulder only after the trap has been released. That's a certain amount of lifting and lowering.

And that brings us back to the convergence of skill and strength. Target shooting is all about fine motor control, but with the added challenge of progressive muscle stress over time.

A woman can certainly be as good a shot as a man, given the same innate talent and the same training regimen. For their first shots. Do they still have skill parity at the 75th shot? The 100th? At some point, strength and stamina become important factors in the athlete's ability to compete at the highest levels, regardless of how skillful they are, or how good their fine motor control is when they're fully rested.

It's probably no accident that Olympic Skeet requires of women only 3/5ths of the stamina it requires of men. That one Chinese woman that one time notwithstanding.