Sport is such an unfair world, trying to find equality and justice in it is futile. We don’t want kids taking growth hormones to boost their chances of making it into the NBA. But that also means we crush the dream of plenty of people. Athletes with asthma can’t use their inhaler under certain circumstances. A few years ago an UFC fighter with Asthma got his win overturned because he used an inhaler inbetween rounds.
There was a huge discussion about allowing prosthetics in “regular” competition. Turned out at the time that proshetics weren’t advanced enough to give an advantage. But I think we all know that this is only a matter of time. And eventually a hard ruling needs to be made that dictates in which direction sport goes.
Banning athletes who take as many hormones, hormone blockers, and other mediaction as transwomen usually take is 100% something that needs to happen. Especially considering that in certain leagues the usage of these substances is the only reason that transwomen are allowed to compete. That feels against the spirit of sport and TUEs. But untill more data exist, I doubt a useful ruling can be made.
What I don’t like about the whole discussion is going for the “They aren’t real women” argument. That feels degrading and hurtful for everyone involved. I don’t want cis or transwomen to have to undergo inspections to determine their gender.
Banning athletes who take as many hormones, hormone blockers, and other mediaction as transwomen usually take is 100% something that needs to happen.
Those hormone blockers block testosterone and the hormones they take are estrogen. Those are not exactly performance enhancing actions. In fact, they do the opposite. If anything, we should be making sure that trans women competing in sports should be taking hormone blockers and estrogen.
You need to re-examine your take because it is truly baffling.
Why do transgender athletes have such a problem with competing in the all-comers category instead of the women’s category, which is reserved for XX born females who have been producing all of the hormones you describe above since birth?
You just made up those requirements. Are XXX and XXY women not allowed to compete in your sport that you made up the requirements for? What about women with Swyer syndrome?
As for why women would prefer competing in a women’s competition, that question kind of answers itself.
Thankfully we can test for which mutations of sex chromosomes produce hormonal profiles that are equivalent to XX born females. In fact, we do that already! :)
But the “hormones” you generically refer to, aka fucking estrogen lol, and hormone blockers Trans women take aren’t an advantage. Ask any trans women, they make you weaker…
Like why point out trans women when trans MEN are taking a hormone that actually promotes strength and athleticism? TERF vibes
They make you weaker, perhaps, but are you at the same level as a cis woman who was never exposed to that level of testosterone?
And trans men are just competing against men that naturally produce those same hormones.
It is simply a complex issue that defies a simple answer.
There are plenty of cis women that have higher natural t levels than men, that’s why many sports already required people stay under certain t levels before trans sporting rights were even in the question.
The effects of increased testosterone last a long time, even if it’s being blocked. And how exactly are testosterone levels being monitored? When? When, if ever, do the athletic advantages of male puberty and testosterone wear off?
People have reasonable and legitimate concerns beyond accusations of transphobia. Sweeping those concerns under the rug and acting like they are unfounded will earn the trans community little support.
So you’re threatening your support of the trans community based on whether or not people agree with your sports opinions. Or, at least you’re implying it’s legitimate that people would do so. L take. Transphobic vibes.
Not agree, but willing to at least engage in a good faith discussion of issues rather than resorting to accusations of transphobia.
This is not a good faith discussion on your part and the fact that you don’t realize that is why I’m calling you transphobic.
Anyone who disagrees with me is transphobic! It’s obviously not possible for me to be wrong!
Every woman has variations in their hormone makeups and history. Besides, the pool of trans women athletes is just so small, and the amount of vitriol is so disproportionate and obviously rooted in transphobia.
The variations between biological men and women are larger and more significant than those between women.
And it isn’t that insignificant. Lia Thomas won an NCAA title, beating an Olympic silver medalist. Laurel Hubbard went to the Olympics. She lived as male 35 years before transitioning. She had given up weightlifting decades earlier. But at that age with little training, she suddenly qualified for the Olympics.
So cool you know about all the accomplishments of trans women!!!
With your passion and drive, you would absolutely be a force to be reckoned with and a wonderful asset. It is such a shame that you are struggling so much with petty name calling and insults because instead of helping the trans cause, the actual effect you have is absolutely the opposite. You hurt it tremendously. You 100% come across as someone who is uneducated, childish, and mindlessly mean. You lack the ability to respond to anyone in a way that encourages them to see things from your point of view.
I’m sure that deep down you have some good points, you are just currently utterly unable to convey them. This is not a reason to give up though, just a reason to spend some time self reflecting. You can be so much better and more useful than you currently are. Not only will that help your community, but it will also help you enjoy your life more on a personal level.
The trans community is full of so many unspeakable incredibly amazing individuals. I’m sure you can find some to look up to and learn from. Good luck. I know you’ve got it in you!
lmao I’m not here to convince transphobic people of anything. take your smug tone-policing and shove it up your damn ass
boohoo waaaaa I said someone has terf vibes 😭😭😭😭
Then maybe ask yourself this - Why are you here?
Put another way, what do you think that you have accomplished with this last comment? Do you think you hurt my feelings? If so, do you think my feelings being hurt benefited you in some way?
If you aren’t here to help other people understand your point of view, and you’re not trying to understand other peoples point of view, then what are you accomplishing by spending your time here?
Does it make you feel better by treating people like this? Do you leave this app feeling better or worse?
I hope you feel better soon, it hurts to see you struggling so hard. Your current way of trying to deal with things isn’t working, so maybe a big change would be a good idea. Only you can make that change though.
From one internet stranger to another: You’ve got this, and you are so much stronger than you are currently realising!
oh my God my life has been changed
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Many sports have two divisions: Open and Womens. This even includes ones like Chess and various e-sports. The NFL, NBA, and MLB all allow women, or at least have no rule banning them (In the former two cases, ever, in the latter, any more, the 1952 ban was rescinded in the 90’s.)
So to answer your question: Everyone can already compete in one division.
The NFL, NBA, and MLB all allow women
They may technically allow them, but do you think most women, even very skilled ones, would want to face the abuse they would get from players, coaches and fans if they decided to do it?
Just because it is allowed doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a major hardship. And I think the vast majority of women in sports are smart enough to understand that is what they would face.
Replace women with black people and your argument sounds exactly like the enlightened individuals arguing that baseball shouldn’t be integrated even if there were black men out there good enough to play ball with white men.
Jackie Robinson absolutely understood that he would face unyielding discrimination. So did the flood of black ballplayers that followed him in the years to come. Hardship didn’t deter any of them.
I didn’t say anything about ‘shouldn’t.’ I’m explaining why it generally doesn’t happen. If a woman things she can handle all of that discrimination and feels she’s athletically capable, I’m not going to be the one to tell her not to.
Plenty of women in shooting sports. Turns out shooting is one of those sports where men don’t seem to have a significant biological advantage. None of them complain about abuse.
So you’re saying all male athletes except in shooting sports have a biological advantage over all female athletes? The worst NBA player is still better than the best WNBA player?
I don’t follow NBA but I do casually watch some hockey (including women’s hockey) and I’d be surprised if even the very best women’s hockey players could beat a team made up of lower ranked NHL players. The men will have better puck handling, higher speed, more weight, and they shoot more often opening up more plays.
My anecdotal sports experience, for what that’s worth: when I was 14-15 playing soccer, women’s university teams would play against us for training. The women were taller than us on average, ran a bit faster, used more vocal communication, and were much more physically aggressive. The men had better endurance, ball-handling, and positioning. We never lost, and no one seemed surprised by this.
It’s not just the obvious height and weight advantages at play, and I’m not sure how much socialization matters but I’d wager less than our biology in sports and other extreme athletic endeavours.
Britney Griner is probably on par with a second-stringer in the NBA. She’s one of the few that there were mutterings she might be the first woman in the NBA, but instead she set a single game record and tied a career record in her first game in the WNBA.
The Williams sisters in tennis used to claim they could beat any man outside the top 200 when they were near the top of women’s tennis, so they were challenged by the 203rd ranked male player and just destroyed. He claimed at one point that he was playing closer to someone ranked 500th to keep the game fun. They later amended their claim to being able to beat any man outside the top 350.
I never said those were your words. I’m telling you how it comes across, and I’m letting you you’re wrong about the reason “why it generally doesn’t happen”.
At least in baseball, a sport where intelligence, reaction time, skill, and experience matter a lot more than raw strength, the barriers for little girls who dream of playing in the Majors are a lot more than just the discrimination they might face if they make it that far. It’s the deeply rooted cultural barriers that prevent women from even getting a shot, and in a sport where even 1st round draft picks spend years in the minors getting their reps in, lack of experience is a death sentence no matter how much raw talent you have.
At every level of play, girls are heavily encouraged to switch to softball or outright denied the opportunity to play. They’re excluded from youth travel ball teams because “the boys will be bigger in a few years and need the reps”. A lot of high school teams won’t let them try out because Title IX considers a softball team equivalent. It took a lawsuit for Litttle League to allow girls to play baseball. Young women playing baseball at smaller colleges are often lured away with softball scholarships at big universities (not that there’s anything wrong with pursuing better educational opportunities).
Every woman playing college or minor league baseball says the same thing; they faced far more discrimination as kids just trying to play than they ever have in the locker room once they got the chance.
Okay, so what is your explanation for why there aren’t women playing major league baseball or in the NBA or the NFL?
I think I’ve already pretty thoroughly answered the question of why women haven’t played baseball at the major league level since Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson, and Connie Morgan played in the Negro Leagues in the early 50s; women have been systematically shut out of baseball for decades, and while those barriers are slowly being torn down, their effects will continue to be felt for a long time. We’re only just now beginning to see women play at the collegiate and minor league level, so I would imagine we’re still a few decades away from women playing at the Major League level.
The NBA and NFL are entirely different stories. Those are sports where brute strength is absolutely required and being huge helps a lot. It’s definitely not some fear of discrimination that’s keeping women out of those sports though.
Edit: Because I’ve seen your other responses, and I can tell you’ve been waiting for me to say something about how men are stronger than women so you can have your gotcha moment, I’ll also say that trans women are women, not men. That male testosterone advantage doesn’t exist for someone who has to suppress theirs for at least a year before competing to a level below what many cis women naturally have. Trans women have competed alongside cis women for decades and it’s never been a problem. Republicans just needed a new boogie man.
Right, but no women? Not one since the introduction of the rule? I’ve know many female athletes and all of them would and could handle the abuse if they wanted to compete with male athletes.
At the same time, can you make an evidentiary argument that there is not one WNBA player that is more skilled than the worst NBA player?
So why have womens sports then why not just let everyone compete in one division?
Because that would be the end of female athletes.
Same reason weight classes exist in some sports. Put a featherweight against a heavyweight of similar fitness and experience and it would be terribly boring and no one would care.
And having competitors with insane testosterone counts won’t end “female” sports?
Huh?
We if we have people who are men in all but name competing in womens sports that wont kill female athletes? There are undenyable differences when it comes to sport and i doubt trans athletes are getting surgery to change their bone structure are they? Either eliminate all female athletes and let trans athletes compete as women or dont u cant have both its called doublethink.
Then you’d have people cry because most men would dominate most of those sports, leaving most women in the dust and with no chance of winning them.
Ding ding ding
Really wow i never though of this is suprising nobody has complained about this in womens leagues yet?
Agreed honestly, the division of any thing by gender seems out of date these days. Go based on skill, age, or weight/height, something… just leave gender out of it.
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Oh thank you. I needed a laugh, there is always someone that has to go full triggered keyboard warrior in these threads. Bunch of comments, all of them intentionally ignorant, purposefully bad faith and I suspect you just LOVE feeling like the only smart person in the world.
Well, you are being a downvoted for a reason. And that is most people are bored of these little edgelord takes. But good on you for keeping sticking to your guns in the face of context, reason and public mockery, you sure are “brave” for being the only person with “the truth”, pity not everything brave is also smart.
😂
Wow u got downvotes as well so i guess we are both brave. How about u address any of my points instead of just being distrespectfull.
In general, and I’m sure some people here will be incensed at the suggestion, people do not give a shit about women’s sports and the only time many of them do is when they find out a “man” is competing in them.
Women care about women’s sports.
A lot of them don’t. Just like a lot of women are against subsidized pre and post-natal care. Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you care about women’s issues.
And, based on what I’ve seen, the vast majority of complaints about this come from men anyway.
Most of the women in women’s sports who are asked support trans inclusion (somewhat sport dependent, some sports are historically more queer friendly than others) and find equal pay to be a much bigger issue for women’s sports. For some reason nobody who is “concerned” about women’s sports wants to hear that, though. 🤷♂️
The reason for women getting paid less in sports is due to advertisement revenue. Not as many people watch women’s sports, so advertisers pay less. This results in female athletes getting paid less. I know that economics is not everyone’s strong point, but you really don’t have to get very deep into it to understand this concept, all it takes is an open mind and the willingness to learn something new.
“Female athletes are more concerned about equal pay than trans people in sports.”
“Ah yes but you see, nobody watches or cares about women’s sports so equal pay is impossible.”
Yes, thank you for illustrating why female athletes are more concerned about that than a manufactured hysteria from the right, lmao.
Many female athletes understand why the pay is less, and so for them, it ceases to be a concern. This is a simple economics/demand issue that many people have no problem grasping. Some people struggle to understand the basics of economics, and for them, they think there is injustice in the pay for women’s sports. This same mentality would argue that every meal everywhere on the planet should always cost the same amount. However, the vast majority of people are able to understand why this wouldn’t make sense. It is just when emotional issues get mixed in with this basic concept that some people lose their ability to reason logically.
A separate and unrelated group of female athletes would prefer to compete with other people who are genetically similar to themselves so they can see how they rank amongst their peers, and for them transwomen in sports is a concern.
These two issues are not directly connected, and there is no solid reason to bring up one issue to try to downplay the other. While it may feel like changing the subject is a way to win an argument because it moves the focus elsewhere, it doesn’t actually work against people who are paying attention. This is the sort of tactic that can be used on children or people who don’t really care about a topic, but it does nothing against fully mentally developed people who are genuinely interested in understanding.
Hi! You seem to be under the impression that I’m going to engage with your argument fetish, but you’re going to have to find someone else to take the bait. I do not engage in debate in which minorities are fine to remove from sports, and unfortunately for you since I have been on the internet for more than five minutes I am not swayed by claims of “just wanting to understand.” If you’re so concerned about understanding the issue of trans people being singled out for exclusion from sports you can RTFA ❤️
Well, no worries, before you are at any danger of having an argument or productive conversation with someone, you will first need to learn how to form a coherent point of view. Nobody has said anything about excluding minorities from sports. Sorry if that’s not what you are claiming, but I read your last comment several times but was unable to figure out what you were hoping to convey. I’m not sure if the issue was a poor combination of mistyping and autocorrect or what, perhaps you’re just sleep deprived or otherwise inebriated. 🫶
People know the “why”, but that doesn’t mean that female athletes are happy with it and don’t want to be paid more. They absolutely do, it’s something that high ranking athletes talk about all the time. But I guess you pay more attention to the headlines hating on trans women.
“economics is not everyone’s strong point” GTFO with your condescending attitude. Wow. If you’re so interested in telling other people to be open minded, maybe listen to what female athletes actually have to say.
You are right. There are professional female athletes who want to earn more money. Many of them are extremely smart, and they find things they can do that will make them more money. A vocal minority gets stuck trying to fight reality. These are the ones you see and imagine are the majority. This is not the majority by any stretch of the imagination.
If you think it is unfair that women athletes get paid the amount the market pays them, then you have every right to go pay them more. Trying to force other people to pay them more is a waste of time.
The “market” is doing a notoriously great job at distributing wealth right now. How much money do the 1% have now?
Well, unfortunately, lots of people like to complain about what the market does while simultaneously encouraging it to do it with their wallets/purses. For instance, they say the market should give female athletes more money while simultaneously not buying their cards, jerseys, or going to their events.
.
Wow, I honestly thought Lemmy would be less transphobic. This totally rational comment downvoted for no reason. If most women in sports aren’t concerned about trans women being there, why are all these assholes concerned about it.
You misunderstood. Us not wanting to compete against genetic men is absolutely not transphobic. I support transwomen whole-heartedly, they should absolutely have equal rights, and it is rude to intentionally mis-gender them. This has everything to do with wanting fair competition in sports. Men’s bodies are built differently than women’s bodies. This is not a human issue. This is an animal issue. It is across all species that the bodies of males and females are built differently. If this were not the case, then we never would have had male/female segregation in sports.
Just gonna point out historically most male/female segregation in sports is actually due to sexism, and a lack of women’s rights, not due to an “animal issue”.
Sexism against who? Do you mean against men since they were not historically allowed to play women’s sports sports, while women were allowed to play men’s? Correct me if I’m wrong, but women are allowed in nearly all of the world’s major leagues. They just don’t perform competitively enough to be drafted.
To be clear, I was saying sexual dimorphism goes much deeper than just humans. In most animal species, there is a huge difference in size and strength between males and females. Humans are not unique in this, that’s all I was saying.
the word “genetic men” is a terf phrase fyi
Then give a label for someone who is born with a penis. If your goal is clear communication, then clear labeling should be your friend, not something to try to attack into extinction.
You say you want clarity but you’re missing clarity yourself. Why is it important to exclude people born with penises from women’s sports? You don’t know what that person may have experienced hormonally over the years, and you definitely don’t know their gender. Someone being born with a penis doesn’t actually give you the information you’re claiming to want with your terf-phrase. If you want to find inclusive language, maybe look at what some trans orgs have suggested.
I don’t think most women are into sport for the pay
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This article isn’t a moral panic. Did anyone even look at it? It’s talking about four athletes and their experiences, some of them positive.
I don’t disagree with you, necessarily. It’s an incredibly grey issue and one of the few issues that the left shouldn’t be as absolutist about and have a conversation. And beyond that, it’s so low on the list of priorities. Even for trans people themselves I can’t imagine this is high on the list.
But your Protip makes you look like a tool. Why preemptively try to act like you’re some kind of martyr?
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“Sort by controversial” is just complaining about being hidden due to downvotes. It also doesn’t make sense for multiple reasons. They’ve already seen your comment, you’re upvoted, you’re not necessarily going to get downvotes due to a nuanced conversation, Lemmy isn’t usually busy enough to be buried in comments, etc.
You can say it’s a controversial subject without victimizing yourself.
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Sorry you’re offended. I hope you get better.
Agreed 100%. Sports are entertainment. This is a distraction. Get people upset about trans women in sports and they might get less upset about things like healthcare costs. Or at least not upset enough to stop voting for bigots.
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