Discussion: Transwomen are not women (Part 7)

[Olmstead]

Actually, that's not correct. They did not raise the limit when they realized that female athletes could have higher levels than were previously allowed. What they did was eliminate the limits for anyone with XX chromosomes.

Current World Athletics (governing body for international track and field) testesterone limits only apply to people with y chromosomes.

Oh, okay. I was going by what ponderingturtle was saying and quoting. I don't understand why we're having this discussion then?

 

[Louden Wilde]

Actually, that's not correct. They did not raise the limit when they realized that female athletes could have higher levels than were previously allowed. What they did was eliminate the limits for anyone with XX chromosomes.

Current World Athletics (governing body for international track and field) testesterone limits only apply to people with y chromosomes.

Good point - forgot that. Cements that Semenya has a Y (i.e. has a DSD).

 

[Louden Wilde]

True it is only hormone level. See its fun to provide unsourced statements as if they had any kind of weight.

see this post again

 

[Olmstead]

Yet you couldn't tell. Then it is suddenly all that matters.

See I am dating a trans woman and sure I wasn't sure how I would react when I got to her genitals, but I also was not afraid to call that out as an issue with me and internalized transphobia in me rather that some fault in her.

As I said. It's a personal matter. If a lesbian put the moves on an androgynous looking heterosexual male, you'd never call her bigoted for opting out when she realised her mistake.

 

[Louden Wilde]

Oh, okay. I was going by what ponderingturtle was saying and quoting. I don't understand why we're having this discussion then?

We shouldn't be. This is a distraction at best. The goal by some TRAs is to conflate DSDs/medical conditions with gender/ID. It seems clear that the goal is not to have a genuine discussion about why they feel that gender/ID is (generally) more important than sex and all the corollaries of that demonstrably false belief (redefining the word woman, getting rid of sex categories, female only spaces, representation, etc.).

 

[Louden Wilde]

As I said. It's a personal matter. If a lesbian put the moves on an androgynous looking heterosexual male, you'd never call her bigoted for opting out when she realised her mistake.

Actually, they would (& are) call her a bigot if that male decided they identified as a woman.

 

[TomB]

It occurs to me that some seem to be looking for a type of universal rule or law that can be applied to every individual in every circumstance. I don't think that's practical.

The thing about sports is that a separate classification was created primarily to address a specific issue: the differences in performance between males as a population and females as a population. Pointing to individuals within either population does not advance a point.

So the starting line for qualifying for each group is based upon the definition of that population: is this person male or female?

Now there is a relatively small group of people for whom the answer to that question is not immediately obvious. I'm not going to use the term "population" for this group because it's a diverse enough group that I don't think they can be treated as a uniform population. This group includes people with DSDs and people who are transitioning. My position is that in these situations decisions need to be made at an individual case by case level.

At that level of detail, while I'm not opposed to guidelines, I don't like rules or laws. There are times when what is called for is discretion or judgement. I think this is one of those cases. A biological male who identifies as a woman can make the case to a sports league that they can fairly compete in the female division. The league can then make a decision considering whatever supporting information the applicant chooses to provide based on the individual and the particular sport. The same goes in the other direction, though approval would likely be easier in most cases due to the lack in competitive advantage. One issue of said approval in that case would also be exemption from rules banning the use of certain hormones which are otherwise considered PEDs.

I realize that this means that a biological female's sex could be challenged, but that is already the case. It's nothing new. If you have leagues with eligibility criteria, an athlete's eligibility is and has always been open to challenge based on that criteria, be it age, weight class, PED use, grades, or sex. It's nothing new and not the "gotcha" some people seem to think it is.

 

[TomB]

Yet you couldn't tell. Then it is suddenly all that matters.

See I am dating a trans woman and sure I wasn't sure how I would react when I got to her genitals, but I also was not afraid to call that out as an issue with me and internalized transphobia in me rather that some fault in her.

I would question why the choice is between "internalized transphobia" and "some fault in her."

Would it be inaccurate to say that if your attraction waned upon encountering her genitals it would simply be a case of sexual incompatibility due to anatomical or anatomical preference issues?

 

[Cain]

So what is the sex of XY women or XX men?

The sex of an XY woman is male. The sex of an XX man is female. Generally speaking -- no, in the vast majority of cases (which can get needlessly complicated if venturing into a non-functioning SRY gene).

Keeping it limited to the the fertile with a separate infertile category makes everything so much easier. If you want to go hard into biology go hard into biology and don't fart around.

This is clumsy misdirection.

 

[Meadmaker]

I would question why the choice is between "internalized transphobia" and "some fault in her."

I think a more accurate term would be "heterosexuality".

 

[theprestige]

But they're women.

In the minds of some. In what circumstances should that view prevail, and why?

(For the sake of full disclosure: I believe that transgender people should be able to participate in sport in the category which corresponds with their trans gender - eg transwomen in women's sport - except for at elite and/or professional/semi-professional level.)

Except that wherever competitive sport is segregated, at every level, it is segregated by sex, not gender*. What you're describing here is not transgenderism, but transsexualism.

The policy you propose is transsex-affirming, not transgender-affirming. After all the effort with language, to establish that gender and sex are not the same, it's kind of silly that you've fallen right back into the trap of using one as a proxy for the other.

You know that the two sexes are different. You know that sex segregation in sports makes sense. You know it's not appropriate for transwomen to compete as the opposite sex. You make an exception for this at the "non-elite" level because why? Because it affirms trans-gender identity. It affirms trans-gender identity by affirming transsexual identity. You're trying to have it both ways. And you're hoping we won't notice that your transgender activism is really transsexual activism.

---
*You may find this confusing, since historically gender has been synonymous with sex, but that's not my fault. You're the one playing silly buggers with language.

 

[Meadmaker]

Sometimes you just have to subject women to an array of incredibly invasive and intimate medical examinations to prove they count as a real woman. You know, to protect them.

Any chick accused to having too broad shoulders or other manly features will have to subject themselves to a vagina inspection and a blood draw. Have to protect modesty and all that.

Why the dishonesty? You don't want that. I don't want that. No one wants that. You know no one wants that.

And yet, here we are, posting as if anyone in the world was advocating for it.

Those of us who think that only biological females ought to be allowed in girls' sports want the rule to be like the ones that were used everywhere, without question, until about 2010. And everyone knows that, too. Somehow, there were no genital inspections required.

And, I suppose there were extremely rare cases where one did happen or was demanded, and the circumstances are instructive in considering whether there will be genital inspections or blood draws in the future. Sometimes, they happened when the coach was suspected of cheating. Today, I think more coaches might be suspected of cheating. It would always be with the best intentions, but I could picture it happening. I could imagine a coach who thought that trans-exclusionary policies were a sin might participate in concealing the biological sex of one of his athletes.

In the vast majority of cases, one coach would ask the other if Jessica was really a girl, and that would be be that.

 

[theprestige]

We're talking about gender, not (biological) sex. Seems like you haven't learned much at all from all the pages of this thread so far.

I think we're actually talking about sex. The only places in public policy where there's any real controversy is where sex, not gender, is the distinguishing factor.

All the pages of this thread so far, and you still haven't come up with a sensical definition of gender apart from sex.

 

[theprestige]

So transwomen are in a constant state of quantum flux, both women and not women, both the exact same category and a special category, all at the same time.

Clear as mud.

Transwomen are women wherever gender predominates, and nothing of value is at risk (other than pronouns). Transwomen are men wherever sex predominates, which is where all the important stuff happens anyway.

 

[lionking]

She was never assigned male sex, clearly she does not meet the physical criteria of a male being having a penis so she is a woman.

She is a woman by all the categories people here are demanding. All they have released is that her testosterone levels are unusually high, and to compete she would need to take drugs. That is the entirety of the justification. Two other runners were also banned from the Olympics for exactly that reason.

Though I guess you could label her freak and put her outside the categories of male and female.

Semenya has fathered children. You are wrong again.

 

[theprestige]

It occurs to me that some seem to be looking for a type of universal rule or law that can be applied to every individual in every circumstance. I don't think that's practical.

Depends on the goal. I think those that are looking for a universal rule are attempting an attack on common sense via reductio ad absurdum. They're weaponizing the principle that the perfect is the enemy of the good. "If you can't come up with a perfect rule that addresses every possible edge case I could ever come up with, you have to concede the argument and let me decide what the rules should be."

My approach from the start of this has been that there's practical limits to trans acceptance and accommodation, where the general rules and guidelines start to break down; and what do we do with the edge cases at or beyond those limits?

The result of that approach has been the acrimonious debate on display here. And the regular fringe resets back to the perfect enemy of the good. Luckily the pattern is easy enough to follow. It's probably best just to ignore those contributions (since they don't really contribute anything anyway).

 

[Cain]

I would question why the choice is between "internalized transphobia" and "some fault in her."

Would it be inaccurate to say that if your attraction waned upon encountering her genitals it would simply be a case of sexual incompatibility due to anatomical or anatomical preference issues?

This goes back to the BBC article where lesbians claim they were pressured into sex with trans women for fear of being "transphobic" (and "genital fetishists" and "perverts"). Attraction triggers are amoral. Maybe in an ideal world, people would be more turned on by virtuous character traits rather than body shape, but it's not so easy to transcend to the beast within.

 

[theprestige]

Transwomen are furries. Unless you've been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. In that case, you have a real medical condition that deserves compassion and treatment and accommodation - but not affirmation! Same as paranoid schizophrenia and BIID. Absent that diagnosis, though, your self-identity is on par with a fursona. Which deserves common courtesy, nothing more.

 

[Sherkeu]

it's not coincidence that professional basketball players are all unusually tall. Should Shaq have been banned for his unusual and unfair advantage of being a huge guy?

It is also not a coincidence that most males are taller than females:
For males and females of age 18 today (in the US):

47% of males are taller than 5'10"
less than 1% of females are taller than 5'10"

But instead of being just one example, these are millions of data points.

The odds that any trans woman suddenly is vaulted into the 1% of female height upon "declaring" themselves women are close to 1 in 2. Half of them will be taller than 99% of other women.

 

[ponderingturtle]

see this post again

That does not state the policy that you are articulating there. Please find something that actually supports your statements.