[ED] Discussion: Trans Women Are not Women (Part 6)

[Collin237]

The author makes reference to the "Intelligent Design" argument of a couple of decades ago, not as a direct analogy, but as a comparison of the methodology being employed, and the lack of science backing gender ideology.

In this case, however, the church is not fighting science. It's fighting itself.

https://fsspx.news/en/news-events/news/gender-theory-pontifical-right-64359

If you visit a Catholic bookstore in Latin America, you are sure to come across an attractive collection of children's books called Con Francisco a mi lado – “With Francis by My Side.” A photograph of the Sovereign Pontiff adorns each volume as a sponsorship.

Let’s open one of these picture books: in Me, I Am a Dog, the child discovers the story of a “brave little white cat who wants to be seen as a dog.”

The Vatican is producing both sides of the gender ideology, and playing liberals and conservatives against each other.

 

[Ziggurat]

Then how have you identified that transwomen are closer to males than females for the purposes of sport?????

What's the evidence base you are using for your claim?

Transwomen are not closer to males. Transwomen ARE males.

 

[Manger Douse]

But even if we do only look at degree of effect then I am fairly confident in saying that excluding transwomen from participating in sports is a much bigger impact for that individual than for the individual that was knocked down from 7th to 8th or even 1st to 2nd.

Who is saying transgender women should be excluded from sports? ]

 

[Meadmaker]

They might, but they might be exaggerating. Compared to never having competed at all finishing 3rd instead of 2nd of the State Championships is a lesser evil, no?

It seems like you are begging the question here.

Is the significance of not qualifying for the state championship greater than the significance of....whatever it is that the transgirl experiences if she chooses no competition at all rather than competing against other males? Seems pretty subjective.

It's a legitimate question, worthy of discussion, whose answer is not immediately obvious. It's something reasonable people could differ on. To have a meaningful discussion of it, we would also have to make sure we are discussing the reality of the situation. Your framing suggests that the rules a lot of us would want force the choice of "never having competed at all", but that is of course not true.

In her freshman year, Terry Miller competed in the indoor winter season, and posted respectable but unremarkable, middle of the pack, times. In the outdoor spring season, she smashed all time records. It's true that a lot of people, including me, would not have allowed her to compete in circumstances where she would have been lauded as the greatest sprinter in the history of the state of Connecticut, but she still could have competed, just as she had in the winter.

It's an "interesting" point. The person who finished 3rd affected the person that finished 4th. Should we ban them too? How do we decide who is too good to compete and who is allowed to compete? I mean think of the poor bugger that finished last. If we ban all of the people who finished ahead of them they can be first and have their identity validated.

We shouldn't ban anyone, and we shouldn't set the rules in order to validate anyone's identity.

 

[Meadmaker]

This is quite an extreme position then as it seems to suggest that you aren't open to evidence on the matter - there is no level of competitiveness for which you would consider it OK for transwomen to compete alongside ciswomen.

Extreme? My position is that males should compete against males, and females against females, in any competition where males have a distinct advantage that would make competitions between the sexes uncompetitive.

That doesn't seem very extreme to me.

It of course is a double whammy when coupled with efforts to actively prevent people under 18 transitioning (can't remember your personal position on that one). It seems to give people a rather stark choice at an early age... you can be a sportsMAN or a transwoman. But not both.

At that point it seems to me to no longer be an evidence based position but an ideological one.

Uh huh.

But even if we do only look at degree of effect then I am fairly confident in saying that excluding transwomen from participating in sports...

If you say it often enough, maybe it will become true.

 

[Meadmaker]

Colin Wright did a good debunking of that article:

Dr. Eric Vilain Has Abandoned Facts for Ideology

I sort of have mixed feelings about Wright's article. He does a good job of spelling out everything wrong with Vilain's comments, and it is unfortunately necessary, but reading through the debunking made me think about articles that debunk flat Earth theory.

He's giving absolute proof that males do in fact have a natural advantage in athletic competitions over females. Does that seriously need reference to scientific journals? Well, yes, it does, because there are subtle elements of the arguments that sound plausible and might give someone doubt. It is possible to present misleading evidence that might suggest that conventional wisdom is wrong, which is what Vilain et. al. were doing, so it's necessary to make sure that anyone hoodwinked by the pseudoscience in Vilain's piece can be reassured that their eyes do not deceive them. Men really are stronger and faster than women. (Please pardon the lapse into "old style" vocabulary there. Since I was talking about what might be termed "common sense" or easily observable phenomena I thought it appropriate. A more precise statement would be that the vast majority of males were faster and stronger than the vast majority of females, and that the strongest and fastest are inevitably male.)

At least flat Earth theory has the virtue of being apparently true if one fails to actually do investigation to decide the issue. I'm sure that the average caveman (or...caveperson) probably believed the Earth was flat, because it looks kind of flat, and he really didn't have time to think about such things when he is busy worrying about whether the saber toothed tiger might attack, or when the tribe from across the river will send a war party to try and steal access to the best fruit trees for gathering. So, he probably figured that the apparent local flatness went on forever. On the other hand, our ancestors figured out that when forming a war party to attack that neighboring tribe, it was better to give the spears to the people with the penises.

 

[Paul2]

It's that simple?

If, by "simple," you mean the very small and specific issue at hand - whether there are authorities who claim a sports advantage by men - then, yes. An issue that narrow can be just that simple. If you mean the entire issue of trans sports, then, no. That's not so simple.

I hope you didn't think that I thought anything more than just the narrow issue I was posted about was simple.

Then why don't we just reduce the scores of trans women by 10% and call it even?

Because it's not that simple.

 

[xjx388]

Hang on you made the argument that a transwomen was much closer to a cisman than a ciswoman and then when i point out and example where it's not the case you say 'exactly?'

Mckinnon's times are not related to being a transwoman?

Then how have you identified that transwomen are closer to males than females for the purposes of sport?????

What's the evidence base you are using for your claim?

Hold up: transwomen are biologically male. Thus, it should be obvious that a transwoman is closer to a bio man than a bio woman. The example you pointed out proves it. The slowest biological males would have beat (and did beat) the fastest biological females.

Just to illustrate what should be quite obvious: If Caitlyn Jenner had transitioned prior to her Olympic decatholon gold medal, Jenner would have destroyed the female competition of the time. Even if the transition had been a year or so before the Olympics, the hormone treatments may have caused her to falter some against the males but not dulled the advantage enough to be comparable to a female. Even a middle of the road male would have destroyed the females in that competition. And given that the women only compete in a pentathalon, Jenner's previous training as a male decatalete would have given Jenner an insurrmountable advantage in endurance.

Now, I think it's equally obvious that not every male would dominate female sports. The problem is that, on average, they would.

 

[Olmstead]

This is quite an extreme position then as it seems to suggest that you aren't open to evidence on the matter - there is no level of competitiveness for which you would consider it OK for transwomen to compete alongside ciswomen.

How much are you planning to cripple a transwoman until she performs within a female bell curve? You're talking about women sports as if it's Formula 1, and all you have to do is introduce some regulations to bring the competitors closer together.

 

[Collin237]

If, by "simple," you mean the very small and specific issue at hand - whether there are authorities who claim a sports advantage by men - then, yes. An issue that narrow can be just that simple. If you mean the entire issue of trans sports, then, no. That's not so simple.

I hope you didn't think that I thought anything more than just the narrow issue I was posted about was simple.

Because it's not that simple.

The issues that Conservatives rail about are that simple. They always involve sports in which the score is a real number with a decimal point. Some obscure ideological reason, perhaps. So let them have the real numbers, and the center-through-left majority will get the integers.

 

[Wolrab]

Quote:
Running. Swimming. Rowing. Kayaking. Short distance, long distance. Accomplished in teams or attempted alone.These are such diverse events, requiring different parts of the body and diverse types of talent. And yet they all share something: Their women's speed world records are all about 90 percent of their men's speed world records, in both short, middle and long distances.

Damned men causing the Women's Play Gap.

 

[Emily's Cat]

In other related news, I have read the ACLU is fighting a freedom of information request to find out how many male prisoners in CA have been transferred to women's prisons.

Yeah - that one floored me.

The woman filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the number of male prisoners housed in female prison wards in Washington. Instead of having her request answered per her rights... she found herself being sued by the ACLU.

The concept of the ACLU suing someone for filing a FOIA request is mid boggling. It's the antithesis of what the ACLU used to stand for.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aclu-sues-private-citizen-to-suppress-public-records-request-in-washington-state-301268835.html

 

[Collin237]

Yeah - that one floored me.

The woman filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the number of male prisoners housed in female prison wards in Washington. Instead of having her request answered per her rights... she found herself being sued by the ACLU.

The concept of the ACLU suing someone for filing a FOIA request is mid boggling. It's the antithesis of what the ACLU used to stand for.

It sure is! For once, the ACLU is actually doing the right thing!

But they're not doing what you say they are. They're suing the prison to deny the FOIA request, and their reason makes perfect sense.

The prison already has a system for preventing violence between cis and trans people, and your news agency is trying to destroy it.

https://www.aclu-wa.org/pages/faq-does-v-washington-department-corrections

 

[lionking]

Much of the debate about transwomen competing against cis women in sport seems to concentrate on track events. I think it is wrong and unfair in track sports. But I’m far more concerned about contact sports.

Cis women are being injured by transwomen in contact sports. This is why rugby has banned transwomen at the highest level:

https://theconversation.com/why-the...es-from-the-womens-game-are-reasonable-152178

The increased forces generated by transwomen significantly raise the risk of serious and catastrophic injury to female players. plug this into a lexical methodology. From the evidence, it doesn’t look as if transwomen competing in women’s rugby is safe. The increased forces generated by transwomen significantly raise the risk of serious and catastrophic injury to female players.

Which is a good decision in my view. But at lower levels of the sport cis women are being hurt by transwomen. How can this be defended?

 

[Meadmaker]

How much are you planning to cripple a transwoman until she performs within a female bell curve? You're talking about women sports as if it's Formula 1, and all you have to do is introduce some regulations to bring the competitors closer together.

This gets to something I've brought up before. I'm not opposed, in principle, to the idea of males competing in female divisions if their male advantage has been removed by feminizing treatments.

In practice, though, I worry about two things. The first is that it almost seems like you could end up picking winners. It's possible to know that if you set hormone levels required at level A, then the the transwoman still has an advantage that is insurmountable, but if you set them at level B, she has a deficit that is insurmountable. How do you balance that?

My bigger concern is that hormone levels seriously mess with people's bodies and in some cases minds. I would worry that people will choose treatment plans based on eligibility for sports participation, and I don't think anything good can come out of that.

These are issues I don't have strong feelings about, because I simply don't have enough knowledge to say whether or not my concerns can be addressed in a way that preserves competitiveness and safety. Hopefully the doctors, coaches, advisers and professionals in sports and medicine have good answers to those concerns.

 

[Meadmaker]

ETA: (to previous post)

Another thought occurred to me. There has been an awful lot of talk in this thread about the effects of male puberty and the advantages given by that. Do you set hormone levels or required treatments differently for people who have gone through male puberty?

It just seems to get into a big mess.

Well, regardless, I know there are people looking at the issue and trying to do the right thing. I just hope that when they do so, they keep focused on issues related to sporting competitions in their decision.

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Maybe I'm confused, so I'll just ask: are you claiming that transwomen aren't males?

I'm saying that the population males has a mean and distribution for attributes and that the population transwomen in all likelihood has a different mean and distribution for the same attributes.

So if you say something like the average male can bench fifty pounds more than the average female it does not follow that the average transwoman can bench fifty pounds more than the average female.

Whether transwomen ARE males or not is neither here nor there with respect to this point. It's a statistical observation

Avocados are fruits. Fruits have much lower fat content than cakes. But it would be wrong to assume Avocados therefore have lower fat content than cakes.

 

[Aber]

I'm saying that the population males has a mean and distribution for attributes and that the population transwomen in all likelihood has a different mean and distribution for the same attributes.

What leads you to that conclusion?

 

[Collin237]

My bigger concern is that hormone levels seriously mess with people's bodies and in some cases minds. I would worry that people will choose treatment plans based on eligibility for sports participation, and I don't think anything good can come out of that.

Adverse effects from hormone therapy are supposed to be evidence that the patient is a desister.

I've only seen one case where rebellion against this reasoning was related to sports. Someone wrote into the New York Times (sorry, I don't have the link), saying they admittedly forced themself through transition because of a sexual complex. As a teenage boy, he had just been hired as a coach of a girls' team, and he quit before he even started, because he felt guilty for thinking the girls were pretty. And he spent the rest of his life looking for a way to atone for being male.

If that's typical, I think you have nothing to worry about.

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm saying that the population males has a mean and distribution for attributes and that the population transwomen in all likelihood has a different mean and distribution for the same attributes.

The difference between men and women in this regard is primarily genetic. Unless you are asserting that transgenderism is genetic, then we should not expect significant deviations, certainly much smaller than between men and women.