The point of all leagues/divisions/brackets is to foster community and competition. Consistent domination of any one group of people stifles that.
If people with green eyes started winning every single javelin competition it would be a reason to consider making a green eyed javelineer league assuming their was the numbers and interest to support it (otherwise you’re just banning green eye’d javelineers de facto).
I don’t really know enough about ethnicity and sporting performance. Crude divisions like melanin levels seems obviously flawed because I’m not sure what a Kenyan has in common with a Fijian in terms of athletic propensity.
Idk if like white marathon runners feel like they can’t compete in their sport because of whatever advantages the people written about in that born to run book are supposed to have.
I’ve only heard claims about stuff like white people and swimming and sub Saharan African people and sprinting at the Olympic level and I’ve never bothered to look into them because that’s basically irrelevant. Olympic athletes are a tiny minority, it’s not what funds careers and it’s not what most athletes do. Almost all athletics is on a much more local level where difference like this should they be real, again I’ve never fact checked this, don’t manifest.
Like all sport is unfair, that’s inherently the point of it. When I run a race I’m seeing how well my arthritic ruin of a body compares to spry athleaisure mums. We only divide stuff if it’s preventing people from playing because of insurmountable (or the perception thereof, e.g. women’s vs open chess) barriers.
Realitically wealth and support have much larger effects than any of the weird things I’ve seen highlighted, so it’s all Pearl clutching at this point.
I don’t advocate for a separate league for trans athletes, we have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for 20 years and there have been no medals awarded to trans people.
Trans women are not “biologically male” and trans men aren’t “biologically female”. A trans man on T therapy becomes heavily muscular, experiences organ enlargement etc. Trans women get the opposite effect, my fucking q angle changed with musculature changes ffs. Yeah I probably have a Y chromosome although I’ve never been sequences, it isn’t do much these days. The bodies we end up with are not identical to natal men/women but then no man or women is identical to another, even identical twins are different. We end up within the normal ranges of performance, yeah there are jacked trans women, there are also jacked cis women. I go to the gym 4 days a week and run 40 km a week and I can’t even do a pullup lmao after 2 years of this. All aggregate studies to date find no evidence of advantage to trans women.
Unless there is evidence of trans domination in sports there is 0 reason to ban us. Besides, as treatments improve and early intervention becomes more normal there will be fewer and fewer differences, a process which is heavily hindered by discriminatory bullshit stoking hatred and fear.
Noted re Quinn although they were one player on a team of otherwise cis women who won gold. It takes an extreme amount of misogyny to discount the efforts of their teammates. It also seems that the team didn’t sweep, and only won gold in a kickoff so like hardly evidence of some inherent superiority of trans people at sport.
I could go through the team and find someone else with something unusual about them and you would have to accept that this trait could be just as responsible for the win.
As trans women do not dominate sport, nor do trans men, there is no evidence suggesting a need for separate leagues. As I noted in my example, sports is about community and competition. At this point excluding trans people is not warranted on a defense of competition and would harm community. Again as per the example because there are not enough trans people to form leagues and the social context means funding and interest would be inadequate to support athletes it would be a defacto ban on at least trans women. Trans men can probably hold their own in open classes which is no doubt where they probably want to compete.
If it becomes a problem then there are other options to explore beyond outright bans. Remember most athletes are not Olympians, they are school kids, uni students, community members. Most sport is done for very low stakes on local or regional scales, what sport is the 1 trans woman in a school year meant to play if she’s banned?
This leads to biology language. Just refer to what you mean. Do you mean chromosomal sex? that is a strange thing to talk about as most people don’t know theirs we can’t see it, touch it, smell it whatever. Do you mean secondary sex characteristics? primary sex characteristics? do you mean people that have undergone a male or female puberty? Do you mean tall and short people? weak and strong people? people with hormones at a certain level? what is it that you’re actually trying to talk about?
The problem becomes a lot more solvable if we start actually talking about it accurately. Maybe trans men can never get a win in javelin throwing, maybe trans women dominate. Ok so if that happens and we look at why and it turns out that idk elbow knobbliness is a huge factor then we can set up leagues binning people into ranges. Whatever is reasonable, we can go granular if needed, a trans man who took puberty blockers and transitioned might have no abnormal disadvantage and visa versa for a trans woman.
If you start trying to legislate based on arbitrary shit you’re going to necessarily exclude some cis women, even if you don’t think trans women are real women that should still bother you. Like racists targetting black women with accusations of being trans because they have more masculinised secondary sex characteristics, or women getting awards stripped from them because they were later diagnosed with some hormone abnormality.
deleted by creator
The point of all leagues/divisions/brackets is to foster community and competition. Consistent domination of any one group of people stifles that.
If people with green eyes started winning every single javelin competition it would be a reason to consider making a green eyed javelineer league assuming their was the numbers and interest to support it (otherwise you’re just banning green eye’d javelineers de facto).
deleted by creator
I don’t really know enough about ethnicity and sporting performance. Crude divisions like melanin levels seems obviously flawed because I’m not sure what a Kenyan has in common with a Fijian in terms of athletic propensity.
Idk if like white marathon runners feel like they can’t compete in their sport because of whatever advantages the people written about in that born to run book are supposed to have.
I’ve only heard claims about stuff like white people and swimming and sub Saharan African people and sprinting at the Olympic level and I’ve never bothered to look into them because that’s basically irrelevant. Olympic athletes are a tiny minority, it’s not what funds careers and it’s not what most athletes do. Almost all athletics is on a much more local level where difference like this should they be real, again I’ve never fact checked this, don’t manifest.
Like all sport is unfair, that’s inherently the point of it. When I run a race I’m seeing how well my arthritic ruin of a body compares to spry athleaisure mums. We only divide stuff if it’s preventing people from playing because of insurmountable (or the perception thereof, e.g. women’s vs open chess) barriers.
Realitically wealth and support have much larger effects than any of the weird things I’ve seen highlighted, so it’s all Pearl clutching at this point.
deleted by creator
I don’t advocate for a separate league for trans athletes, we have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for 20 years and there have been no medals awarded to trans people.
Trans women are not “biologically male” and trans men aren’t “biologically female”. A trans man on T therapy becomes heavily muscular, experiences organ enlargement etc. Trans women get the opposite effect, my fucking q angle changed with musculature changes ffs. Yeah I probably have a Y chromosome although I’ve never been sequences, it isn’t do much these days. The bodies we end up with are not identical to natal men/women but then no man or women is identical to another, even identical twins are different. We end up within the normal ranges of performance, yeah there are jacked trans women, there are also jacked cis women. I go to the gym 4 days a week and run 40 km a week and I can’t even do a pullup lmao after 2 years of this. All aggregate studies to date find no evidence of advantage to trans women.
Unless there is evidence of trans domination in sports there is 0 reason to ban us. Besides, as treatments improve and early intervention becomes more normal there will be fewer and fewer differences, a process which is heavily hindered by discriminatory bullshit stoking hatred and fear.
deleted by creator
Noted re Quinn although they were one player on a team of otherwise cis women who won gold. It takes an extreme amount of misogyny to discount the efforts of their teammates. It also seems that the team didn’t sweep, and only won gold in a kickoff so like hardly evidence of some inherent superiority of trans people at sport.
I could go through the team and find someone else with something unusual about them and you would have to accept that this trait could be just as responsible for the win.
As trans women do not dominate sport, nor do trans men, there is no evidence suggesting a need for separate leagues. As I noted in my example, sports is about community and competition. At this point excluding trans people is not warranted on a defense of competition and would harm community. Again as per the example because there are not enough trans people to form leagues and the social context means funding and interest would be inadequate to support athletes it would be a defacto ban on at least trans women. Trans men can probably hold their own in open classes which is no doubt where they probably want to compete.
If it becomes a problem then there are other options to explore beyond outright bans. Remember most athletes are not Olympians, they are school kids, uni students, community members. Most sport is done for very low stakes on local or regional scales, what sport is the 1 trans woman in a school year meant to play if she’s banned?
This leads to biology language. Just refer to what you mean. Do you mean chromosomal sex? that is a strange thing to talk about as most people don’t know theirs we can’t see it, touch it, smell it whatever. Do you mean secondary sex characteristics? primary sex characteristics? do you mean people that have undergone a male or female puberty? Do you mean tall and short people? weak and strong people? people with hormones at a certain level? what is it that you’re actually trying to talk about?
The problem becomes a lot more solvable if we start actually talking about it accurately. Maybe trans men can never get a win in javelin throwing, maybe trans women dominate. Ok so if that happens and we look at why and it turns out that idk elbow knobbliness is a huge factor then we can set up leagues binning people into ranges. Whatever is reasonable, we can go granular if needed, a trans man who took puberty blockers and transitioned might have no abnormal disadvantage and visa versa for a trans woman.
If you start trying to legislate based on arbitrary shit you’re going to necessarily exclude some cis women, even if you don’t think trans women are real women that should still bother you. Like racists targetting black women with accusations of being trans because they have more masculinised secondary sex characteristics, or women getting awards stripped from them because they were later diagnosed with some hormone abnormality.
deleted by creator