Transgender Athletes

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larkim Dec 2021 7:29pm, 2 Dec 2021 16,195 posts	0 larkim @larkim also consider how comfortable any of the women in the league would feel about expressing concern, given the abuse they might receive? Yes, I'd considered that, but it was actually quite a while before the debate turned poisonous that my experience stems from. Honestly at the track it was all hugs and positivity. Her competitive level was also very insignificant so perhaps that also avoided it becoming a conflict issue.
RooA Dec 2021 8:04pm, 2 Dec 2021 1,685 posts	0 RooA The podcast is, again, very good. There is no getting away from the fact that inclusion of transwomen in the category that affirms their gender identity is to the detriment of fairness and in many cases safety for women. So, again, we really do just have to choose. The IOC have thrown it to the federations to choose. We'll see how that goes I guess. A key point that I'd already written in my blog but came up in the podcast is this "no assumption of advantage". If we can't assume an advantage for a transwoman, who according to the IOC does NOT have to be reducing testosterone, then how can we assume advantage for men and thus maintain the female category in sport at all? Why does a person's declaration of a sense of an inner "woman" gender identity mean that they move from a position where an advantage is assumed to a position where one can't be? Assumption of advantage is the basis of ALL sporting categories. Why do we drop the assumption here but not elsewhere?
larkim Dec 2021 10:15am, 3 Dec 2021 16,196 posts	0 larkim Just reading the IOC doc, it doesn't talk about no "assumption" of advantage, it is no "presumption" of advantage. Is that dancing on the head of pin to identify a difference? The precise wording in the IOC doc adds a bit more nuance to the criticism that "there is no assumption / presumption of advantage" which would clearly be nonsense as Tucker says and you point out RooA. What it actually says is "No athlete should be precluded from competing or excluded from competition on the exclusive grounds of an unverified, alleged or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical and or transgender status". I can agree, for example, that it might be right that the world crown green bowling federation (if such a body exists, and if such categorisation issues exist) might have a hard job saying that they think that male bowlers have an unfair advantage so transwomen cannot compete with other women. The issue then is, as Tucker notes, that it asks for "robust and peer reviewed research" to be the basis of exclusion on the grounds of unfair competitive advantage. Which raises the question about how specific and detailed that research needs to be; will all sporting bodies end up in the same position as World Athletics where they can sustain a ban for only narrowly defined distances (I know that is more a DSD issue than trans, but the analogy is pretty similar I hope from a scientific perspective) but as their evidence doesn't extend to 100m or 5000m they cannot implement rules which, to the outsider at least, seem inconsistent and lacking in common sense. On the basis of what I've heard from Tucker et al, it feels to me like the evidence does already exist for most purposes; strength retention, size, muscle mass, etc all of which are pretty fundamental physical advantages that men typically have over women and which don't appear to be removed by reassignment procedures and which are clearly retained if someone simply identifies their gender differently. For most sports, that ought to be enough, shouldn't it? The discussion about archery was interesting; that seems to me to be the sort of sport in which challenging the evidence might be useful before making an presumption of advantage, and given the range of sports over which the IOC presides, perhaps that's what they are intending. stillmed.olympics.com
SPR Dec 2021 10:32am, 3 Dec 2021 35,836 posts	0 SPR I think it's pretty simple that if there's no advantage via sex in a sport, there's no reason to have separate categories. Maybe encouraging participation if the sport is male dominated could be a reason.
Cheg Dec 2021 10:36am, 3 Dec 2021 3,628 posts	0 Cheg Fallon Sherrock in the darts is a great example of that.
paul the builder Dec 2021 10:42am, 3 Dec 2021 7,352 posts	0 paul the builder Lark - so your hypothesis is that the IOC know what the outcome should be for the majority of sports (grey areas being Crown Green Bowling and the like)? But they don't want to be prescriptive, and would rather each individual sport governing body, probably meaning individually within each country also, need to do the research themselves (slightly differently for each sport)?
RooA Dec 2021 10:49am, 3 Dec 2021 1,686 posts	0 RooA There is no requirement for physical transition now from the IOC. So a male person announces a trans identity and suddenly that person's competitive advantage is "unverified, alleged or perceived" rather than accepted as fact, as it was five minutes before the announcement of the trans identity? Semantics aside we can see this makes no sense, right? The requirement is that the person's self declared identity is "genuine". How are we supposed to tell?
fraggle Dec 2021 11:01am, 3 Dec 2021 3,136 posts	0 fraggle I don’t think people self identify for fun though From my own circle of family/friends, there is a young person who has recently announced they are no longer happy being identified as male, and would prefer to be she/her. In conversation with this young person, I note several points 1 its very scary to ‘come out’ because transgender people are some of the most marginalised and misunderstood people in society. They fear online and in person abuse. 2 in the uk there is currently at least a two year wait for your first appointment at a gender identity clinic, so many self identifying women will still have ‘male bodies’ while they wait to be seen. And this is still the start of a very long process 3 for this young person the thought of surgery itself is scary, and taking some female hormones is ‘enough to make me feel ok and not hate myself’’ so may never fully transition. To be honest, it’s not something I ever gave much thought to, until it was happening to someone I know.
RooA Dec 2021 11:04am, 3 Dec 2021 1,687 posts	0 RooA Noone will ever game the system because some people are genuine?
fetcheveryone Dec 2021 11:07am, 3 Dec 2021 26,825 posts	0 fetcheveryone Noone will ever game the system because some people are genuine? There will always be someone gaming any system, but that in itself doesn't mean that the system is wrong.