Transwomen are not Women - Part 14

[Emily's Cat]

There is a thread on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe forum where all the lies about the Cass report are being posted and accepted uncritically. These are demonstrably false statements (such as the review discarded >90% of the research, that studies were discarded for not being double-blinded, that the review aims to deny transition until age 25, etc). I actually think that they don't even care that these are demonstrably false. They are like religious fundamentalists who think they are justified in 'lying for Jesus'.

Last year I tried posting on the Science-based Medicine comments section about the reviews in Scandinavian countries finding weak evidence for youth gender medicine, citing an article in the Lancet. The majority of posters refused to look at the article at all and accused me of lying about the contents. They were like a bunch of religious fundamentalists refusing to look at a blasphemous text.

Similar thing came up on IIDB, with the same false claims being made (in comic form). When I pointed out that their information was demonstrable false, I was just completely ignored and the falsehoods have not been addressed at all. I expect they'll come back around in a day or two and be presented again as if they're completely true.

That said... there's also an element to that particular discussion that is completely novel in its weirdness. One of the posters has been for several years arguing that it's a violation of human rights to "force" a child to go through puberty in the first place, and that kids should have the "right" to choose "which" puberty they go through. There've been several occasions where I've gone into great detail about why a male juvenile cannot go through a female puberty and vice versa... what with lacking the parts that are central to that experience in the first place. It might be one of the strangest arguments I've dealt with... and it's made further baffling by the number of otherwise reasonable people who seem to think that argument makes perfect sense.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I agree. I really don't understand why people are objecting to your posts. We should be debating ideas and it is irrelevant whether the person who puts up an idea for critical evaluation agrees with it or not.

It alters the nature of the discussion. Part of what has happened in this case is that d4m10n's representation is being argued with as if it is their position... but d4m10n isn't defending it as if it were their position, because it's NOT their position.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I just don't think the number of males with "gendery feels" is anywhere even remotely close to the number of females without them. Yes, there will occasionally be an all-male podium in a world with lax sex-segregation enforcement, but that isn't nearly the same thing as the literal end of women's sport.

You're missing the dynamic nature of the system.

That's not what is happening *now*, but what we're seeing *now* is a whole lot more male competitors and male winners than we saw even five years ago. The number of males competing in female athletics has increased over time.

Do you think that the number of male competitors has plateaued and will not increase in the future?

 

[Emily's Cat]

That's interesting. I was not previously aware of that forum so I went to have a look. One of the people posting demonstrably false statements there (a Moderator, no less!) has the same username as one of our posters here, but on this forum he's noticeably avoided posting in this thread. I wonder why?

Quite obviously the same person. It does rather raise the question of why they absolutely and completely refuse to discuss this topic here, but are freely involved in spread actual disinformation elsewhere.

ETA: On further reading, one might be inclined to wonder whether the implied power of being a moderator has an influence on the decision whether or not to participate in a discussion by that particular individual.

 

[smartcooky]

Yes, there will occasionally be an all-male podium in a world with lax sex-segregation enforcement, but that isn't nearly the same thing as the literal end of women's sport.

Its the beginning of the end, that's for sure.

Winning medals at Olympics and World Championships is worth big money for the athletes. Gold medals can earn athletes upwards of US$500,000 per medal (Hong Kong pays US$613,000, Singapore US$737,000). Even countries such as Kazakhstan, Italy and The Philippines, pay over US$250,000..... and that is before any sponsorship, image rights and advertising deals.

Keeping in mind that the 258th ranked male 100m sprinter (Tavis Wilson) has a personal best of 10.39, a time that would smash the women's world record or 10.49 seconds (set by Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988) then had World Athletics (formerly known as the IAAF) not closed the door to transgender women competing in women's events, how long to you think it would have taken for a few of these lower ranked men to work out that there was easy money to be made by making a fiat ID as a women, and then coming in to sweep the women's podium?

But if you would like an example of this happening in a lower profile sport, look at what happened in NZ with downhill Mountain-Biking. It was a well-followed and popular sport here, until we had this man, Anton Weatherly, who used fiat ID to call himself a woman... Kate Weatherly. He started competing against girls. As a man, he was no more than an average, middle of the field men's downhill mountain bike competitor. Then, as a transwoman, he absolutely dominated the female divisions. In a sport where the first half-dozen competitors are usually only separated by a few seconds across the whole half-dozen, Weatherley was consistently winning by half a minute or more. As a result, women's Mountain Biking started losing numbers (while the male divisions were gaining numbers), and that is hardly surprising - what serious competitor wants to participate in a sport in which the best they could ever hope for is to achieve is a distant second, even less if more males made the switch.

Then the UCI banned transwomen from women's competitions, and the numbers started picking up again.

If you allow transwomen's participation in girls sports, it will poison the tree at its roots - the supply of elite athletes die at its source! Transwomen in female sports is a cancer that will eventually kill the victim.

 

[lionking]

I just don't think the number of males with "gendery feels" is anywhere even remotely close to the number of females without them. Yes, there will occasionally be an all-male podium in a world with lax sex-segregation enforcement, but that isn't nearly the same thing as the literal end of women's sport.

It will be the end of women’s competitive sport.

 

[Orphia Nay]

I’d imagine that men would assault/kill trans women for various reasons including in sex transactions.

Perhaps, but odds are that none of the study participants would be murdered during the study period.

There were slightly fewer than 5,000 subjects in the study. In total, they were followed for less than 60,000 person-years. The homicide rate in the Netherlands appears to be roughly 1 per 100,000 population per year. So you would need a 100,000 person-year study just to maybe get one (unless it turns out to be significantly higher than the background), and that still wouldn't be enough to be statistically meaningful. OK, if you found that 10 were killed, you could probably say with some confidence that this is highly improbable to be merely a random coincidence. But I doubt that's what they found, or they would have mentioned it in their results.

Hmm, good point. But couldn’t the likelihood be higher in different societies, like in the US, where the murder rate is so much higher?

 

[Orphia Nay]

*Day 345 of begging someone from the Protrans side to actually clearly state a single point.*

Well, to be fair, this thread is a very hostile environment, and people tend to be ganged-up on, from what I’ve seen.

I’m against trans men in women’s competitive sport, but I sympathise with trans people for their difficult lives.

The rest of the argument ultimately seems to be a human linguistic/thought experiment on both sides.

I do enjoy your posts, they get me thinking.

 

[Lplus]

No one ever doubts that there are male and female cats, dogs, sheep, horses, birds, whales, etc etc.

Yet for some reason, gender (sex) is fluid in humans?

I call BS.

Gender is a result of self awareness. Animals aren't self aware, as far as we know...

 

[Ziggurat]

I just don't think the number of males with "gendery feels" is anywhere even remotely close to the number of females without them. Yes, there will occasionally be an all-male podium in a world with lax sex-segregation enforcement, but that isn't nearly the same thing as the literal end of women's sport.

It’s the likely end of competitive women’s sports at the professional level. Because there can easily be enough males with gendery feels to fill up those podiums, and at that point, there is no point.

 

[Ziggurat]

It wasn't until I wanna say the late 60s that sex researchers started to treat "gender" as anything but a difference in term.

And the people doing that were monsters.

 

[Samson]

Ò

It’s the likely end of competitive women’s sports at the professlional level. Because there can easily be enough males with gendery feels to fill up those podiums, and at that point, there is no point.

It is the slipperyest slippery slope.
I have listened to countless podcasts describing how insubstantial is the problem.
Usually by men masquerading as thoughtful and analytical .
Here is one with Debra Soh.
I have time to listen to all these while working.

Vaush, I will not say more. Minute 34 if interested.

https://youtu.be/fK0YPY1tjJQ?si=-i2BzMwDugd5zT4J

 

[JoeMorgue]

We've looped back to the question of "Okay then why are we only seeing biological men who want to dominate women's sports and not the other way around?"

When a Serena Williams or a Ronda Rousey or a Caitlin Clark wakes up one day, decides she's a man, and that's she's happy being the 45,963th best male tennis player in the world instead of the best female tennis player maybe of all time because "that matches her internal gender identity soul that is so important" we can talk. But that never seems to happen or if it does it happens so rarely it's not in the discourse.

The fact that mediocre men have decided they can just redefine themselves into being exceptional women (and if we all pause to take in how... weird and sorta disturbing that is) is the only sports context we see this in is not something we're all just obligated to not notice to make the trans narrative easier to swallow.

If the whole "My gender identity is so super important and not something I'm just doing on a whim" really is true then why aren't an equal or at least substantial number of biological women deciding they'd rather be D+, C- male athletes? This is not an idle question.

 

[d4m10n]

People that I've been interacting with for about 20 years, in a venue based on skepticism and science, have become zealots. To a point where they won't even consent to read the summary of the Cass report put out by the UK government, because some reddit comic maker has already told them that Cass cherry picked bigoted stuff and wants trans kids to die.

This is especially nutty since the Cass report clearly stakes out a middle path:

The distressing symptoms that occur in these ‘body and mind’ conditions are real, and like pain or discomfort that arises from other causes can be addressed and helped with psychological interventions. It is very important that gender-questioning young people are able to access these evidence-based treatments alongside any other clinically appropriate interventions to support their gender care.​

The highlighted bits are the sticking points, but nowhere in the report does one get the sense that the authors are ideologically committed to accepting or rejecting any given treatment model.

 

[Elaedith]

Similar thing came up on IIDB, with the same false claims being made (in comic form). When I pointed out that their information was demonstrable false, I was just completely ignored and the falsehoods have not been addressed at all. I expect they'll come back around in a day or two and be presented again as if they're completely true.

That said... there's also an element to that particular discussion that is completely novel in its weirdness. One of the posters has been for several years arguing that it's a violation of human rights to "force" a child to go through puberty in the first place, and that kids should have the "right" to choose "which" puberty they go through. There've been several occasions where I've gone into great detail about why a male juvenile cannot go through a female puberty and vice versa... what with lacking the parts that are central to that experience in the first place. It might be one of the strangest arguments I've dealt with... and it's made further baffling by the number of otherwise reasonable people who seem to think that argument makes perfect sense.

Yes, that comes up on SBM too. Sex hormones will produce secondary sexual characteristics that resemble the other sex, and they also have neurological effects. However, there is no evidence that the neurological effects are the same as those of natural puberty, which occurs in complex stages with those parts triggered by sex steroid hormones related temporally to other aspects of brain development. The roles of sex hormones in brain restructuring at puberty is well established (although not that well understood), but the posters will imply you are making it up.

Worse, their go-to 'expert' on gender medicine (who runs a gender clinic, unsurprisingly) posted an implication that studies have shown puberty blockers do not affect brain development, supported by a link to a paper which literally says that they might do but we don't know because there are no long-term studies. And despite being pointed out numerous times it was not corrected.

 

[Darat]

We've looped back to the question of "Okay then why are we only seeing biological men who want to dominate women's sports and not the other way around?"

When a Serena Williams or a Ronda Rousey or a Caitlin Clark wakes up one day, decides she's a man, and that's she's happy being the 45,963th best male tennis player in the world instead of the best female tennis player maybe of all time because "that matches her internal gender identity soul that is so important" we can talk. But that never seems to happen or if it does it happens so rarely it's not in the discourse.

The fact that mediocre men have decided they can just redefine themselves into being exceptional women (and if we all pause to take in how... weird and sorta disturbing that is) is the only sports context we see this in is not something we're all just obligated to not notice to make the trans narrative easier to swallow.

If the whole "My gender identity is so super important and not something I'm just doing on a whim" really is true then why aren't an equal or at least substantial number of biological women deciding they'd rather be D+, C- male athletes? This is not an idle question.

How do we know there aren't? They simply wouldn't get reported like the rest of the "non-top" athletes. Just done a very quick Google search and there are trans men playing football at least: https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/03/04/truk-trans-men-football-team/

 

[d4m10n]

Do you think that the number of male competitors has plateaued and will not increase in the future?

Yes, on account of top-down policy changes lead by World Rugby and other international and national organizations, such as the NAIA. I've no way of knowing when it would have plateaued in the counterfactual event that these sporting bodies had continued with their earlier policies, but my intuition is that it would have done so relatively quickly. Only a tiny fraction of post-pubescent male athletes ever committed to cross-sex hormones, we've discussed a decent fraction of them here.

UCI banned transwomen from women's competitions, and the numbers started picking up again.

How much had female enrollment fallen in the pre-ban era?

It’s the likely end of competitive women’s sports at the professional level. Because there can easily be enough males with gendery feels to fill up those podiums, and at that point, there is no point.

You may well be right about that, but since the tide has turned we're never going to know how bad it would have gotten in a world where all the sporting orgs kept going along with the idea that Kate Weatherly and Rachel McKinnon and Laurel Hubbard and Lia Thomas and Grace McKenzie are all stunning and brave.

 

[theprestige]

I just don't think the number of males with "gendery feels" is anywhere even remotely close to the number of females without them. Yes, there will occasionally be an all-male podium in a world with lax sex-segregation enforcement, but that isn't nearly the same thing as the literal end of women's sport.

Every single all-male podium in a women's sport is an injustice to the women who competed there. Each such injustice contributes to normalizing the unjust practices, which has pernicious effects on society as a whole.

It would perhaps be a tolerable injustice, if it were the lesser of two evils. But it's not. Simply put, it is plain evil where good should be. Nobody is helped by any all male podium in women's sports except predators, charlatans, and misogynists.

So no, your minimization argument doesn't impress me. Quite the opposite. This debate would be very different, if it were actually about how competing as women were the best treatment for gender dysphoria known to science, and we needed to allow some small injustices for the greater good. But it's not. You're just arguing that we need to allow small evils for no good reason, and embrace a paradigm where these evils can only grow.

---

Also, for avoidance of doubt: Is this your minimization argument, sincerely argued by you? Or are you just parroting a TRA line that we are already well familiar with, for some reason that escapes me still?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Hmm, good point. But couldn’t the likelihood be higher in different societies, like in the US, where the murder rate is so much higher?

Sure, but across multiple countries, multiple years, the rate of murder of transgender people is actually lower per capita than most other cohorts that get compared. It's consistently lower than the rate at which females are murdered.

I think one of the only exceptions, if memory serves, is Brazil - and that one has some confounding circumstances, in that there's a really disproportionately high volume of transgender identifying males who are prostitutes, and that skews the stats. When you compare the murder rate among transgender prostitutes and female prostitutes, the females are killed at a higher rate.

There's a lot of misleading stats when it comes to the rate of suicide, murder, and sexual assault related to transgender identified people. One of the most common ones has to do with the rate of suicide and sexual assault among young people.

When sexual assault rates are presented, they tend to show a very high rate for people who are transgender - but they mix the sexes. When you tease it apart, you see that there's a very high rate of sexual assault for females who identify as transgender, and a much lower rate for males. The rate for transgender identified females is higher than for females in general; the rate for transgender identified males is lower than for females, and slightly higher than for males in general. The other issue is that there's no discussion of timing involved. There is reasonable suggestion that the sexual assaults occur prior to those females identifying as transgender, as there's frequently a history of childhood sexual abuse.

When it comes to suicidality, there's a skew based on sex, but there's also a misleading interpretation based on pre-existing mental health issues. When you look the rates of suicidality by sex for transgender identified youth they end up being pretty much the same as for any other youth of the same sex who has mental health issues. This strongly suggests that the cause of the suicidality is the mental health issues - and in this case, gender dysphoria is NOT considered among the mental health issues at play. Some people will (and have) argue that being transgender is the cause of the mental health issues, but that doesn't explain why youth who don't identify as transgender, but who have the same types of mental health issues, exhibit suicidality at the same rates.

 

[theprestige]

I’m against trans men in women’s competitive sport, but I sympathise with trans people for their difficult lives.

And it is this seemingly charitable and human position which, unexamined, countenances a host of evils that we should be examining for what they are, rather than blindly accepting them as dogma out of misapplied sympathy.