This is very good write up and shows complexity of the issue. I actually learned couple of things here, thank you. It is unfortunate that quite often pro-trans right community does not recognize the complexity and have an attitude that trans-women are women and always should be allowed into women sports, without recognizing that it is not that simple and often discussions of those details are just shut down.
It is understandable. A lot of people want to show their support but may not have the best understanding of exactly what trans folk are up against. Similarly a lot of the anti-trans rhetoric tends to paint things very broadly and tends to make the conversation entirely about physical attributes and not about the actual role sports play more widely in the web of personal human connection.
Within the trans community sports are one of those things that people can get kind of wistful about because you are either someone who doesn’t give a damn about sports but the topic is frequently used as a “gotcha” to frame you personally as a societal problem of classification that will never be solved… Or sports is something that once brought you joy and you labor in vain to overcome the barriers. It becomes one more thing you had to give up participation in, often even in amateur spaces where it’s done just for fun and exercise. When other barriers to being openly trans include issues with retaining connection with family/friends and freedom of travel issues of being severed from previously valuable social connections become compounded.
Children are often encouraged to pursue and enjoy some sort of physical activity from a young age, often before there’s any reason to segregate the sexes. A lot of parents are keen to go over the top in their support because they know there is a fair amount of potential leg up from disadvantaged classes to be had in the realm of sport scholarship to post secondary. Even a lot of purely acedemic University portfolios are benefited by participating in some sort of extracurricular sport so it cannot be said that giving it all up doesn’t present some actual hardship to young trans people more generally.
Trans voices are very often lost in these discussions which sucks because it’s nessisary to know more than just the basics to give proper context. In our absence there’s a lot of stuff that is designed to seem perfectly reasonable but is actually designed to be purposefully exclusionary because we as a group are not well understood by the general public. Often even our nearest and dearest struggle to empathize. It’s easier to just list all the problems we present rather than actually talk about potential solutions.
This is very good write up and shows complexity of the issue. I actually learned couple of things here, thank you. It is unfortunate that quite often pro-trans right community does not recognize the complexity and have an attitude that trans-women are women and always should be allowed into women sports, without recognizing that it is not that simple and often discussions of those details are just shut down.
It is understandable. A lot of people want to show their support but may not have the best understanding of exactly what trans folk are up against. Similarly a lot of the anti-trans rhetoric tends to paint things very broadly and tends to make the conversation entirely about physical attributes and not about the actual role sports play more widely in the web of personal human connection.
Within the trans community sports are one of those things that people can get kind of wistful about because you are either someone who doesn’t give a damn about sports but the topic is frequently used as a “gotcha” to frame you personally as a societal problem of classification that will never be solved… Or sports is something that once brought you joy and you labor in vain to overcome the barriers. It becomes one more thing you had to give up participation in, often even in amateur spaces where it’s done just for fun and exercise. When other barriers to being openly trans include issues with retaining connection with family/friends and freedom of travel issues of being severed from previously valuable social connections become compounded.
Children are often encouraged to pursue and enjoy some sort of physical activity from a young age, often before there’s any reason to segregate the sexes. A lot of parents are keen to go over the top in their support because they know there is a fair amount of potential leg up from disadvantaged classes to be had in the realm of sport scholarship to post secondary. Even a lot of purely acedemic University portfolios are benefited by participating in some sort of extracurricular sport so it cannot be said that giving it all up doesn’t present some actual hardship to young trans people more generally.
Trans voices are very often lost in these discussions which sucks because it’s nessisary to know more than just the basics to give proper context. In our absence there’s a lot of stuff that is designed to seem perfectly reasonable but is actually designed to be purposefully exclusionary because we as a group are not well understood by the general public. Often even our nearest and dearest struggle to empathize. It’s easier to just list all the problems we present rather than actually talk about potential solutions.