I am not sure, or I am not sure where I would draw the line. If the majority of the viewing public decide that a certain set of rules feels more "fair" such that they will pay money to watch that rather than another set of rules does that not sort of define "fair"?
[RD] Trans people in sport
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Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I understand the spectator value makes a sport culturally viable. But a sport is among athletes. Even if no one watches, as long as the athletes are athleting, the sport is achieved.
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Yes, although it needs to be done honestly and consistently.
For example Rugby Union is now considering a proposal here to ban transwomen from playing on safety grounds because of concerns about size and strength.
The problem with that from my pov is that not all transwomen players are going to be stronger and bigger than all ciswomen players.
In fact given that there are apparently only 6 transgender women playing community rugby in England at present (and none playing at the elite level) I would be extremely surprised if there were none amongst the thousands of ciswomen players who were as large and strong as at least some of the transwomen players.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...n-banning-transgender-women-from-womens-rugby
Yes, although it needs to be done honestly and consistently.
For example Rugby Union is now considering a proposal here to ban transwomen from playing on safety grounds because of concerns about size and strength.
The problem with that from my pov is that not all transwomen players are going to be stronger and bigger than all ciswomen players.
In fact given that there are apparently only 6 transgender women playing community rugby in England at present (and none playing at the elite level) I would be extremely surprised if there were none amongst the thousands of ciswomen players who were as large and strong as at least some of the transwomen players.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...n-banning-transgender-women-from-womens-rugby
Yeah, not really sure what the risk is here. Very worst case, we kill the ability for women to make an income engaging in sport at the scale they currently are. The various countries will continue to put tax dollars into international teams, with all the attendant cheating and abuse (but merely in new forms). On the upside, we help a sizeable fraction of teens have a less-confusing life. Well, in Western democracies anyway. Not sure what I'd predict internationally. People respond to incentives, so we'll be able to "just so" anything that shakes out.
People with extreme political views are well-known for trying to rewrite scientific understandings to better fit their paradigm. Sometimes it's useful. In this field, what seems to be most required is a holistic view (whether it's psychology or medicine which themselves obviously integrate), and once you're in a holistic view, the various labels are placeholders for a concept anyway. Anyone who can't flit between psychology and biology will have trouble creating new science or new therapeutics, which just means that damaging paradigms will slow progress that can then only be counter-manded with money from elsewhere.
People with extreme political views are well-known for trying to rewrite scientific understandings to better fit their paradigm. Sometimes it's useful. In this field, what seems to be most required is a holistic view (whether it's psychology or medicine which themselves obviously integrate), and once you're in a holistic view, the various labels are placeholders for a concept anyway. Anyone who can't flit between psychology and biology will have trouble creating new science or new therapeutics, which just means that damaging paradigms will slow progress that can then only be counter-manded with money from elsewhere.
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Cloud_Strife
Deity
The point is to signal to trans women that they're not accepted as women
bernie14
Filter Manipulator
I would say that in elite athletes, it is NOT "largely determined" by either, it is a combination of both. Saying phelps is an amazing swimmer "purely" because of his genetics is silly. The rest is comparing apples to oranges.
Lexicus
Deity
If factors outside of anyone's control play a significant role in sporting outcomes, then why does anyone care about ensuring the integrity or fairness of the competition at all?
As for "apples and oranges", assuming you are talking about the different subgroups I mentioned (e.g. people from rich countries have a non-random distribution among their competitors, or people from Norway have a non-random distribution of outcomes in winter sports), then just asserting this is apples to orange comparison isn't actually doing any argumentative work. You're just saying this but then not giving any reason why it is the case; this would, on its face, validate the point made by @schlaufuchs, @Cloud_Strife and others that fundamentally this is about you (and others in this thread) not considering trans women to be women. If trans women are women, then this is not apples to oranges at all but just another subgroup of women with, perhaps*, a statistical (not deterministic or mechanical) advantage over other women.
*I know we have good reasons to assume this is the case, at least from the brief research I did for my participation in this thread, but I do not believe it has been established through real evidence, partly because there don't seem to be enough trans competitors to get statistically significant results of any real analysis of the question. Anyway, in the absence of real evidence one way or the other about trans performance in sports I do not think we can treat the "trans advantage" as an established fact - certainly nowhere near to the degree that, for example, rich people or people from rich countries have been well-established to have a nonrandom advantage in many sports (e.g. here).
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bernie14
Filter Manipulator
it's not an either or. As for apples and oranges, I was referring to this;
Just as cis woman athletes who reach the elite pinnacle of their sport will outperform the vast, vast majority of cis men in that sport, cis woman athletes who reach the very top of their sports will dominate over the vast, vast majority of trans women who aren't athletes at all.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
There's a difference between framing this conversation as one of "women" with male bodies entering a space and women with women's bodies existing in their own space. It's a very subtle distinction, but it is, I believe, the crux of the whole question. This is the core issue with approaching this argument from the starting point of showing male and female distribution charts. The image presented in this case is one of men - "all men" - being overlaid completely on top of all women. But this is not what is happening. We are not bringing men into women's sports, we are not bringing male bodies into women's sports. We are considering the presence of trans women's bodies within women's sports. If you wanted to demonstrate some skewing effect trans women might have on women's sports, then the comparison is not men's times and women's times, or male bodies and female bodies, but cis women's times and trans women's times, and cis women's bodies and trans women's bodies. This is not done, in part because people haven't really bothered to collect that data, but in larger part because trans women are assumed to be "scientifically male" and so comparing "all men" to "all women" is assumed to be good enough. But this serves to taint the pool from the start, as it affects the way one perceives and approaches the problem as it arises, as I noted to emzie a few pages back. If you take identical body shapes (similar height, weight, lifting, etc.) of a trans woman and a cis woman - like let's say myself and Katie Ledecky, and had both of us compete in parallel, otherwise identical universes with identical outcomes, where like her I win Olympic gold at 15, set a dozen records, and beat Olympic athletes by entire pool-lengths, etc. What happens? For Ledecky, nothing, because there's a circular reasoning to sex as a social phenomenon: Ledecky's body is that of a "biological female" so all of her physical attributes must be legitimate female attributes. If Ledecky is female, and Ledecky is 6', then women can be 6'; if Ledecky is female, and Ledecky can swim 100m in 53s, then women can swim 100m in 53 seconds. Her dominance is a testament to her skill, her hard-work, and her talent. She represents the peak of female performance. That circular reasoning applies in precisely the opposite direction for me. If I win, my body is immediately scrutinized. The inherent assumption is that my success must have come from some fundamentally male component of my body, and the logic works backwards from that telos: Sophie has won, Sophie is 6', she must have won because men (or "biological males") are more likely to be tall. If Sophie is "male" and Sophie is 6', then Sophie is 6', not because women can be 6', but because her maleness makes her 6'. The scrutiny gets the more absurd when the reason doesn't even end up being something definite, but some abstract, purely speculative reason with no actual measured basis: Sophie has won, Sophie is a "biological male", men are stronger than women, ergo Sophie must be stronger than her competitors and that's why she won. The absurdity is double faceted: not only because the people speculating have no idea how strong I actually am or provide a metric for what "strong" even means in this context, but also because Ledecky and I squatting the same exact amount results in Ledecky's lift declared to be a normal "female" amount and mine to be a grotesque illegitimate amount, owing to its fundamentally masculine nature.
This is where the racial comparisons are especially apropos, because the logic operates in precisely the same way. It's the same logic that rests at the heart of the racist "lunch pail warrior"/"physical freak" trope that pops up so frequently in sports discourse. When a white male athlete succeeds, this is assumed to be normal and standard: his success is simply a testament to his talent, his skill, and, especially, his hard work. He is to be commended for his performance. When the black male athlete succeeds, a degree of scrutiny is applied to his blackness, and the logic, once again, proceeds backwards from there. There must be some physiological quality to his body that is the reason for his success. When the white athlete is fast, he is fast because he is fast, but when the black athlete is fast, he is fast because black people are fast. In many cases, the reasoning goes a step further: that the black athlete is somehow successful in spite of himself: he's lazy, but he's such a physical freak that he overcomes a lack of effort with raw talent. Again, this runs parallel to the sorts of ad-hoc natural experiments people like to conduct comparing a pre-transition trans woman's performance in the men's category, to her performance in the woman's category. The comparison is made in service of an argument that the trans woman's success is owing to purely her body, that she wins in spite of her effort or ability. It's the same circular logic stemming from the same base assumption: that black bodies and trans bodies are "other," that they are allowed to compete "with us" and their success is to be regarded as an other's success as contrasted with our success.
Even though our white supremacist society is still extraordinarily racist in the way we regard, discuss, and scrutinize black bodies, sports nevertheless operate generally under the principle that black people are by-default to be included within the competition. It is recognized, however uncomfortable it might make some people, that "they" and "we" are of the same stuff, and that to explicitly bar them from competition on the basis of some racial quality would be cruel, inhumane, and racist. This is not something which we decided through a metaphysical contemplation of The Good. It is not self-evidently obvious that this ought to be done, to the extent that racist "scientists" to this day insist on the presence of some datum or another that definitively proves racial variance. And if you go back 100 years you can find all manner of public discourses about the essential otherness of black people and how their presence in this or another competition is to be condemned and legally prohibited in arguments that look suspiciously similar to the ones we have now about trans people. These racist arguments were overcome, not through scientific evidence of our transcendent equality in all things, but rather on the basis of a priori moral principles and through political action. Even when groups of black athletes are definitively shown to possess some essential, geographically-derived advantage, this doesn't necessitate a reassessment of eligibility on the basis of geographic origin or genetic makeup, because the eligibility is premised on ethical priors, not a posteriori empirical evidence of equality.
So then when we look at the distribution charts, and consider fairness in this question, the matter is not one of comparing men and women, but one of considering broadly, the distribution of trans women and trans women's bodies within the overall women's distribution chart. This is why the framing is so important, because when you frame the argument as male charts laid over female charts, the image you come away with is the overnight materialization of an entire secondary hump on an otherwise clean standard distribution, when the reality would probably be, given our tiny population, the significant overlap in male and female physiology, and the random variance in trans women's bodies, a virtually unchanged distribution. Having set aside that image, the next bogeyman image summoned is usually to posit that the thin wedge at the end of the curve where elite athletes are represented would be roughly the same but singularly occupied by trans women. But even were that so (and remember we have no examples of trans women overwhelmingly crowding out a sport, and only a handful of successful trans athletes whose success is always assumed - but never definitively proven - to be owing to some vague quality of her "male" body), I don't see how this would in reality be any different than looking at the thin wedge of height distribution in women's basketball and seeing an almost singular representation of 6'+ women (another statistical anomaly), or looking at a curve for women's swimming and seeing an almost singular representation of American, Australian, and Western European women. If trans women's bodies were, truly, an abomination that bestowed supernatural X-Men style mutant powers that relegated cis women to a separate hump way down on the 1st quartile of the curve, or carved out a demonstrable blip for themselves in the 10th decile or something, then I could see a point. But I have never seen that shown to be the case, only vague speculation on the basis of men's bodies. And if you understand trans women to be biological women possessing women's bodies, then most of these arguments become patently absurd, and begin to read like 19th century anthropologists whipping out the calipers in order to ascribe Irish drunkenness and indolence to their supposedly recessed brow ridges.
To return again to racial segregation, were we to make the argument that integration could only come with the consent of a "substantial majority" of white athletes, and that an imposed inclusion would constitute an inherent perception of unfairness that would destroy the sport, we would, in all likelihood, still live in a deeply, explicitly segregated society. Integration in sports happened in the first part by individuals who insisted on inclusion over and above the loud, violent and overwhelming objections of deeply racist white spectators and athletes, and in the second part by explicit court orders mandating equal access and fair treatment, again often in the face of extreme violence, abuse, and attempts at technically legal, surreptitious de facto exclusion. To reiterate, the arguments for inclusion and fair treatment ought to, and in the case of racial integration, very explicitly do - come from a priori ethical principles, not a posteriori empirical data or the court of public opinion.
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It will definitely have to happen due to the work put in by cis-women (though obviously not a majority, it won't be democratic). I still don't understand why men should get any say whatsoever. Either we're forcing people into a segregated category or we're forcing people into giving up the protections they've set up for themselves.
Now, of course men have the capability of forcing cis-women to accept stuff we impose upon them. We do all types of things to women in order to protect others from the choices women make about their own spaces. But each of these is accompanied with an argument as to what gives us the right to do so.
Now, of course men have the capability of forcing cis-women to accept stuff we impose upon them. We do all types of things to women in order to protect others from the choices women make about their own spaces. But each of these is accompanied with an argument as to what gives us the right to do so.
One can agree or disagree, but at least this position is clear and internally consistent.
I can respect that.
So in the same breath... you use an analogy to respond to my point (a tactic that I've already stated specifically that I reject), then expressly admit that your analogy fails... but then say it doesn't matter ... essentially because... you don't want it to, since it would undermine your argument.
The bottom line is your firefighter analogy is flawed, fails, and you've admitted as much. Not to mention the fact that I already said I reject analogies in this discussion because of the very flaws that are present in the analogy you tried and failed to make. So your analogy is not worth responding to.
Again, this entire position is irrelevant to my point, because as I've stated, my position is premised on a baseline of accepting that trans women are women so they should be eligible to participate in womens sport. Abstract appeals to "categories" are not relevant to my argument. Again, I'm not willing to argue this in terms of an abstraction about weight classes in boxing or some other such analogy. This topic does not analogize well, for a myriad of reasons, as has already clearly been demonstrated again, by your failed attempt to analogize it.
Trans women are women, so they should be eligible to participate in womens sport. The psychological trauma and social, mental and other damage that occurs to trans women as a result of exclusion from womens sport is one of the factors that outweigh the concerns about the "competitive integrity" of womens sport. If you can argue from the baseline acceptance of trans women as women that nevertheless, they should be excluded, then I would be interested to hear your argument. But if your argument is essentially... "Well they're (scare quotes) 'women' *wink*, but not REAL women", then we talking past each other.
Saying "they're not biologically female" and then using that as a basis to argue for exclusion of trans women from womens sport, is another way taking the position that trans women aren't women. The hair you're trying to split doesn't split.
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Manfred Belheim
Moaner Lisa
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Is there no physical reality to the concepts of "star" and "planet", no quantifiable differences that exist between the objects to which we apply these labels that exist outside of us imbuing the labels with meaning? If we could ask a planet what it thinks it is, and it told us it was a star, would we assume it must be correct and throw out our old model and/or redefine our words? Why should we assume that anything must understand every aspect of its being better than any outside observer is able to? Fair enough if it's an aspect of its inner self that no other being can even directly perceive, but matters pertaining to the readily observable material structure of the thing itself? Is it for me to overrule the results of a CT scan performed by trained medical professionals on the basis that I know my own self better than they ever could?
I realise it's possible to philosophise and post-modernise pretty much any concept into an amorphous blob, but there doesn't seem much utility in it beyond navel-gazing.
Manfred Belheim
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Firstly, I can't say I remember you stating you explicitly refuse to deal with analogies. That seems a somewhat broad restriction to impose on people you're talking to, but hey ho.
Secondly, I didn't admit that it failed, I just stated that you (or any other casual observer who does deal in analogies) might say that it is flawed. In other words I could anticipate the objection, but I didn't think it was an aspect of the analogy that was relevant. But nevertheless suggested that you simply replace the particulars of the analogy with something else (suggestions were given) that didn't have that aspect. Curiously you chose to cut all that part out of the quote though. Anyway, it just seemed more time-efficient than going back and editing what I'd already written just to appease a predicted response that hadn't even happened yet, and which I didn't think mattered anyway, but again hey ho. You live and you learn.
I was going to reply to this, but realised it's just repeated everything you just said and claimed above, so I guess that's not worth responding to either (at least not doubly so).
This just seems to be you saying that you're not willing to entertain any argument with your position whatsoever because your mind is completely made up. Surely the whole point of using an analogy in an argument or discussion is because you're unable to reach an agreement on the topic directly, but by drawing a parallel to a different topic where you presume there may be an agreement, you hope that the other party will appreciate the parallel and reassess on that basis.
But if you refuse to accept any dissenting opinion on the topic directly, and also refuse to entertain any indirect methods either, you're basically saying you don't want to have the conversation and sticking your fingers in your ears. Fair enough I suppose, although one wonders why you would bother posting about it on a discussion forum, but I still generally consider that it is sometimes worth replying to people anyway, even with such a caveat, because it's a forum and other people are reading.
This is only true if you assume that I'm using the words "woman" and "female" as interchangeable synonyms, which I don't think I can have made clearer that I am not doing. And I seem to remember saying this to you before and you acted as if I had just pulled this distinction entirely out of thin air for my own purposes, rather than it being a distinction that was actually loudly proclaimed by progressive types for many years, including on this very forum (and I don't actually object because it is a very useful distinction, as is evidenced by the mess produced in this thread as a result of people not making it).
I can anticipate I'll be asked to back this claim up, which seems to me as reasonable as being asked to back up the claim that the Moon exists given how prevalent it was, but if you just search for the phrase "sex and gender are" both on google and in this OT forum you'll see it for yourself. It's actually quite interesting to see the dates and note when the words that followed changed from something like "are different things" to "are both socially constructed". I can only surmise that the former stance allowed too much clear reasoning and too many logical deductions to be made and needed to be replaced with something more useful from an idealogical perspective.
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Yes, although it needs to be done honestly and consistently.
For example Rugby Union is now considering a proposal here to ban transwomen from playing on safety grounds because of concerns about size and strength.
The problem with that from my pov is that not all transwomen players are going to be stronger and bigger than all ciswomen players.
In fact given that there are apparently only 6 transgender women playing community rugby in England at present (and none playing at the elite level) I would be extremely surprised if there were none amongst the thousands of ciswomen players who were as large and strong as at least some of the transwomen players.
RFU to vote on banning transgender women from women’s rugby union
Transgender women will no longer be allowed to play in female contact rugby competitions in England due to safety and fairness concerns, under new recommendations from the RFU to be voted on next Fridaywww.theguardian.com
World rugby and English rugby are wrong here, being very over the top and reactive, and I hope other unions like the French and NZ stick to their guns about this.
Rugby is definitely a sport where sizes and roles are so varied this "size and safety" figleaf shouldn't matter. In national teams there's 60kg wingers and props above 90kg, more than a 50% difference between different positions. There's no rule that says the props can't absolutely clatter the wingers if they catch them in full flight, it just doesn't happen much because of how the play unfolds.
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Indeed the US has NFLish football, and the kickers might as well be women (I kid, I kid); actually I understand in high school and now NCAA (uni/college/etc level) there are women kickers, despite the fact that there are some really massive physical specimens usually interior linemen (linepersons?).
Zardnaar
Deity
I thought Australians were try hard Americans?
I don't think the NZ Rugby Union will change its position but NZ is 5 million people out of almost 8 billion.
One of the most progressive countries in the world as well. Not perfect but almost everywhere else is worse.
I don't think the NZ Rugby Union will change its position but NZ is 5 million people out of almost 8 billion.
One of the most progressive countries in the world as well. Not perfect but almost everywhere else is worse.
Noble Zarkon
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Nothing magical, just basic human physiology.
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