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The US swimmer Lia Thomas, who rose to global prominence after becoming the first transgender athlete to win a NCAA college title in March 2022, has lost a legal case against World Aquatics at the court of arbitration for sport – and with it any hopes of making next month’s Paris Olympics.
The 25-year-old also remains barred from swimming in the female category after failing to overturn rules introduced by swimming’s governing body in the summer of 2022, which prohibit anyone who has undergone “any part of male puberty” from the female category.
Thomas had argued that those rules should be declared “invalid and unlawful” as they were contrary to the Olympic charter and the World Aquatics constitution.
However, in a 24-page decision, the court concluded that Thomas was “simply not entitled to engage with eligibility to compete in WA competitions” as someone who was no longer a member of US swimming.
The news was welcomed by World Aquatics, who hailed it as “a major step forward in our efforts to protect women’s sport”.
I know I’m gonna catch heat for this, but sex-segregated physical competitions is one of the very few places where trans women shouldn’t be treated the same. Women’s sports competitions aren’t segregated by gender, they’re segregated by sex. Trans women are women in gender, but their body isn’t a biologically female body. That’s the exact definition of transgender - when your body’s biological sex doesn’t match your sense of gender. So by definition, trans women don’t have a biologically female body.
The whole point of sex-segregated sports is for people with female bodies to be able to have a fair competition, instead of them not even getting a chance to compete at all because if they had to compete against biological males then almost 100% of females wouldn’t even make the team. This is the whole reason why sports competitions are segregated by sex.
TLDR trans women should always be treated as women - except for sex-segregated physical competitions
The thing that really sucks is that tran women are gonna get absolutely dominated by cis men. HRT for long enough really does so so much to the body (hence why most sports allow trans people who have transitioned to compete). Tho trans men also would have insane advantage overs cis women if they competed together
Maybe there isn’t any good solution. But what you are saying leads to a conclusion that there is no place in sports for trans people. Then again, these conversations always fall apart when we talk about cis people with abnormal hormone profiles.
End of the day, a lot of competitive sports come down to genetics. There isn’t much room for someone with disadvantagious genetics to become the best in the world. For me, I don’t see much difference in a trans woman who’s transitioned being world class in swimming and a tall ass cis woman dominating in basketball. Especially when we don’t see trans people sweeping in competitions as a wider trend
There is a place for trans people in sport. Male, female, trans. Done.
I really don’t think there are enough trans people competing at the highest levels to sustain that though.
Honestly, I think it’s not that big of a deal. I’m sure something can be worked out sure, but it’s not the most important issue that trans people have to deal with.
That sounds like a more ideal compromise, though I am not sure if even that is without its own set of issues.
Basically, athletic performance falls on the same gradient as masculinity. The more masculine your body is, the more capable you are as an athlete on average. If you are a trans woman taking T blockers/estrogen supplements, your body becomes more feminine, but in turn you lose much of that athletic capability.
So hypothetically, if I am a trans woman and an athlete, where I am paid based on how well I do, am I incentivised to not take T blockers/estrogen supplements, or take them in more limited doses, in order to be a more capable athlete? Basically, am I forced to compromise my gender identity for a better paycheck?
We could force every trans athlete to undergo lab work before every match to make sure their T levels are within a certain threshold, but then is that someone’s fault if their body is not being as responsive to the medication they’re taking, and now they’re out a job? Not to mention how that would basically force their medical history to be public knowledge.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable inviting these sorts of scenarios to occur, to be honest.
Trans people get the lab work you’re talking about done regularly anyway, because it’s part of ensuring their levels are safe and correct.
You’re voting for exclusion (trans competitions will never happen) because you’re uncomfortable with trans people having to do something that is already part of their daily lives
I think you may have misread what I was suggesting.
Trans people should never have to disclose part of their medical history to stay employed. Even if you get regular testing and it’s no big deal, what goes into your medical record should be between you, your doctor, and no one else. There should never be a scenario of “Star kicker of [team] barred from competition because her labs showed she is too masc.”
My point was not to suggest that as an option, but more that it would be a bad proposition to try to avoid the scenario where trans people would be incentivised to partially detransition (MtF) or take too many supplements (FtM) when athletic performance is directly correlated to how many androgens your body has.
I don’t know how to avoid that scenario in a capitalist system, to be honest with you.
I’d rather submit my records to a sports oversight board than be excluded from competing.
You say “trans people shouldn’t have to disclose their medical history to stay employed”, but you’re seemingly happy to speak for trans folk and just accept that they should be unemployed.
The real irony being that anyone in elite sports, trans or not, already has to submit to the lab work you’re uncomfortable with, as a condition of their employment.
The scenario you’re trying to avoid? That’s why the lab work already happens, because many cis athletes take performance enhancing drugs to gain advantage, because they’re incentivised to in a capitalist society.
But somehow, that lab work is only an issue that you feel the need to speak up on when it’s for trans folk?
The problem is that fundamentally there are differences within the genders that favour one competitor over another.
Take Michael Phelps – “Michael Phelps’s height, wingspan, and large hands and feet give him an advantage in swimming. His body also produces less lactic acid than his rivals, which shortens his recovery time.” According to that he should have been disqualified from competing as his body was fundamentally different from his competitors.Yet he was glorified for his achievements even though he had an edge nobody else had.
Herein lies the biggest issue … trans people are disqualified for the simple reason nobody in power wants to deal with them, so the anti-trans movement wins again.
Stop labeling people anti-trans just because they disagree with you about the mechanics of a zero-sum competition situation. The majority of people here are PRO-TRANS, and ALSO pro-women. We all just want the system that provides the most fairness in a situation where there’s no way for it to be completely fair to everyone.
If there are 10 seats on a team, every spot taken by a person means that a different person doesn’t get that spot. So we as a caring society have to decide who CAN get that seat, and also who CAN’T get that seat. It all comes down to whether or not women born with biologically male bodies have a physical advantage over women born with biologically female bodies. At the very minimum, people who went through male puberty have a physical advantage over people who didn’t go through male puberty.
I think you make a valid point that someone could be trying to find fairness in a difficult situation without being anti-trans.
On the other hand, it’s sports. Which is not driven by fairness, but by money. I don’t give a shit either way, as far as I am concerned dope everyone up the gills and modify everyone into super humans, it is just silly sports. But I am not the person paying or advertising.
And that is all that matters. Will the advertisers put in money, and will people pay to watch. Currently, the society of those groups of people say no.
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Of course they would, there are only so many to go around. They sell seats and products. That is how it works. You spend money to make a winning team, you appease the fans, you make money. OR you are really rich and want to brag about having a winning team. Money, Money, Money.
Who doesn’t?
I am not disagreeing that it is difficult to figure out rules if you want to make it fair for everyone competing, but the reality is businesses are making money, and this is a diversion that does not make them money.
Can you define male puberty though? Like qualitatively in specific terms and with specific language?
Being pro trans is being pro women. Excluding some women from women’s sports would be discriminatory to those women. In this case those women are transgender, and they are being excluded because they are transgender. Which would be opposed to their right to participate, a right we recognize for all other women and girls. That would be anti trans, in this specific context. It doesn’t mean you oppose all of trans rights, but you’re actively supporting the exclusion of trans people from professional athletics.
Where did the person you are replying to say that they couldn’t compete in male professional athletics?
Preventing trans women from competing in women’s sports is a ban on trans women in sports. Trans women do not have testosterone levels anywhere near cis male levels. And none of us are going to degrade ourselves by being categorized as men.
If you would make trans women compete against men then you’re saying trans women aren’t women. It’s as simple as that.
Where do trans men compete?
You are saying it would be degrading to have a trans woman compete against men, but a trans man is not allowed to compete against anyone because they are taking a banned substance to transition. Which is more degrading?
True! Yes trans men should be allowed to compete in men’s categories. I think they are strictly speaking so long as their T levels aren’t abnormally high (same as all men).
Your comment history is rife with “biologically male/biologically female” bullshit.
Sit down.
I’m not sure what your complaint is with biologically male/female being bullshit. Do you think that a person who was born with male parts but a female mind/spirit/soul doesn’t have testosterone levels and musculature different from a person who was born with female parts?
If you don’t understand, far be it from to educate you.
Go read a book.
You want me to read a book about what you think? Where can I find such a book? It sounds suspiciously like you don’t want to engage in a real conversation and just want to tell people who don’t agree 100% with you that they are uneducated morons.
I’m serious, too. Do you disagree that people born with male parts have different levels of hormones and musculature and bone differences from people born with female parts? I’m wildly in favor of trans rights and understand that I will never understand what it’s like for them, so I am always trying to learn new ways to look at different situations.
I can’t believe OP actually said it:
dO yOUr OwN ResEArcH!
The most classic stereotypical retort of someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is trying to deflect because they know they’re unable to support their claim
I absolutely won’t sit down. You don’t have any authority to silence people, neither from a power perspective nor a moral perspective. You need to grow up and learn how to have a discussion with people you disagree with.
On a personal level I’ve been very friendly and engaging in serious discussion with other people. And on the subject matter I’ve been very clear, on-topic, rational, understanding, and providing of citations for my claims. You should learn how to do it.
Trans women have been allowed in the Olympics for 20 years now. There have been zero trans medalists. If this advantage actually exists, why aren’t they winning?
If i had to guess I’d say it’s simply numbers. Compared to the rest of the population, trans people are extremely rare, and so there likely just haven’t been enough trans people to have been there yet.
Of it was simply numbers, there would have been a trans gold medalist by now. Trans people make up 1-3% of the population. Over the span of 20 years and hundreds of competitions each year, surely a group that supposedly physically dominates the gender group they are in would at least have gotten one gold medal.
There have only been 4 known transgender Olympic athletes so far.
And of those 4 it seems like none of them are born-male people who are now competing in a women’s event, which is the only situation where the trans person would have an advantage.
https://thesportsgrail.com/list-of-the-transgender-athletes-competing-at-tokyo-olympics-2020/
You need to be a one in a million talent. I’m a male and despite not taking testosterone blockers I don’t have enough talent to be successful in any sport against women. Even with my testosterone, I just don’t have elite genetics
3% of the population, about 300 events per Olympics, assume 5 in the past 20 years, so that’s a conservative estimate of 1500 medals. You’d expect 45 medals to just be proportional, and significantly more than 45 would prove an advantage. 0 shows an extremely severe disadvantage.
Actually more like 60 medals would be the baseline expectation if you’re counting winter Olympics too.
Even if you estimate as conservatively as possible, 1% of the population and ignore winter Olympics, you have an expected medal count of 15, 0 is a massive anomaly without some sort of significant disadvantage.
Edit: triple all those numbers to include silver and bronze, realistic estimate of 180, extremely conservative estimate of 45.
You are completely ignoring the externalities of competing at the Olympic level. Trans people are going through so many societal, cultural, interpersonal, and internal conflicts that focusing on training at an Olympic level is going to be more difficult. You can be the most physically gifted athlete in the world, but if your head is not in the right space to train 12 hours a day while still going about your normal life then you aren’t going to be able to compete at that level. Hell, look at how far Tiger Woods’s performances fell after his public disgrace. Yes, some of that was drugs and some was from an injury, but a lot of sports is mental.
Also, you are ignoring that while the Olympic committee might allow it, do you think most countries in the world are so open about trans people?
Also also, do you remember the controversy around the East German women’s team from the 70s? How everyone suspected some were men? There might have been trans people winning medals, just maybe not openly.
There have only been 4 known transgender Olympic athletes so far.
And of those 4 it seems like none of them are born-male people who are now competing in a women’s event, which is the only situation where the trans person would have an advantage.
https://thesportsgrail.com/list-of-the-transgender-athletes-competing-at-tokyo-olympics-2020/
You knew you were going to catch heat for something that’s extremely popular and common opinion?
Bruh, I got cooked for voicing this opinion so many fucking times.
Banned from many subreddits for voicing this opinion
The real answer here is to do away with gender/sex separation and instead have classifications based of total mass, bone density, muscle fiber density, and maybe hormonal levels. Stop trying to deal with the generalistics and target the issues that actually matter.
If it could be done in a reasonable way then I’d be totally fine with that
On HRT, trans women have similar muscle mass to cis women. They do not have an advantage.
Is it all about muscle mass? What about bone structure? Lung capacity? Heart size/volume? Stuff like that?
I’m not a doctor.
I mean, it’s testable. On average, how do trans women compare to cis women in some particular sport? From my knowledge, when actually competing, trans women on hrt do not, in fact, do significantly better than cis women.
Doesn’t that depend on when they start?
Yes, and a bunch of other things.
TBH the best solution would be to do away with the Olympics altogether. It has nothing in common with the Greek Olympics and is nothing but evil now.
this is not correct, on average trans women don’t perform any better at competitive sports than cis women
check the results section of this review paper for more info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10641525/
Quote right from the opening paragraph:
And skimming through the article extremely quickly, they say in several places that the data shows trans people do have at least a slight advantage over cis people.
And on top of all that, this is a review article, not a study. A review article is just someone’s overview and discussion of a topic, kind of like a newspaper op-ed
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I wonder what you would think of trans men dominating their cis-female competition while having periods
So, monthly periods. Then exclude irregular women, women who have had a hysterectomy and such.
I agree with the point of trans women having an unfair advantage, but your reductionist point of view is moronic, unless you meant it as a joke, which certainly did not land.
So… After they have been on HRT for a while? Periods are triggered by hormones, and there’s a lot more to a period than just bleeding. Many trans women experience cramps, bloating, mood swings, etc. on a monthly cycle. There are also some cis women who have irregular or no periods; would they still be allowed to compete or would you ban them as well?
Dude, hormone blockers exist. They don’t have any advantages if they’re on hormones/ hormone blockers.
Edit: I’ll die on this hill. Enjoy being evil the future.
My understanding is that’s true for muscle mass. However, if they transition after puberty like Lia Thomas did, height and wingspan will remain; both of which confer huge advantages in swimming. Apparently that’s a major reason why Michael Phelps did so well, his arm span is ridiculous.
That site could use a little more proof reading.
Probably AI. There’s probably a reddit comment out there joking about how Phelps is 14 feet tall.
Are there no cis women with large wing spans or abnormal height, though? Are they still allowed to compete? Why would trans women specifically be excluded for that?
While outliers exist, this has to do with averages. On average men are taller than women, and this difference usually manifests between the ages of 12-15. This confers an advantage. However, for trans athletes who transition before puberty it’s far less cut and dry and there’s a good case to be made for inclusion.
So again why are cisgender women who are above average allowed to compete but transgender women are CATEGORICALLY not allowed to compete even if we’re within the average for all women?
Because athletic associations decided long ago to segregate athletics by sex to account for this average difference, even though some women are taller and stronger than men.
So it’s just a ban on trans women from sports, just because with no actual logic or ethical rationale behind it. Even though it is literally not fair, and the justification provided for it is “fairness”. Gotcha.
It’s literally the most logical and ethical rationale that could be achieved. The ethical and logical rationale is that sexual dimorphism exists, and we understand it quite succinctly.
They are separated by sex, because people are separated by sex characteristics.
Since Gender no longer refers to sex, it only refers to perceived place in society, it has no place being used as a metric for sports.
Literally the only reason we have a separate category of women’s sports is because, on average, women are physically weaker than men. If both sexes could compete against each other, women would barely exist in elite sports. If that wasn’t the case, there’d be no justification for excluding cis men from women’s sports. After all, being male is “just another advantage” like being tall, right?
On average, cis women are physically weaker than trans women also, and so the same logic applies.
The only equitable solution I can see is a third category of trans sports, where trans people compete against each other
What do you mean by “being evil in the future”?
If Shaq took hormone blockers, would she still have an advantage?
Probably not many, but that is because he is already in his 50s. If you do that with an Olympic level male athlete, on his early 20s and on his prime, then absolutely.
Aside from height? Not really.
Kind of a contradiction in that trans women aren’t female bit lol. Very much depends on how you define that and how you measure it.
The categories are also not called female categories, they’re called women’s categories, which is effectively the same thing in this conversation. Female is a loose category encompassing people with many typed of bodies and many hormonal levels and many degrees of feminization and masculinization. This is effectively excluding one group of women specifically and ignoring all other groups that have advantages.
Trans women are not biologically female - that is not up for debate. Gender and sex were used interchangeably for the majority of the Olympics’ existence so you can’t “well ackshually” about the definition of women’s sports here - they meant biologically female and you know it. There is no contradiction unless you completely ignore the context.
Honestly, at this point I think the person you are responding to is either a troll, or just so violently obsessed with inclusion that they will refuse every single argument that does not align with their view, while defending all avenues that align with their way of thinking, no matter how ridiculous they might be.