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Transgender and sports

One Brow said:
in what way is women's Ivy League sports being destroyed by Lia Thomas.
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I'm not in Ivy League sports so I will defer to the reports of morale of the women's swimmers on Penn being really low. Sport is supposed to be fun. That is what is being destroyed and the swimmers are afraid to say anything because people like you will calling them bigots. They rely in the NCAA to make the adult decision but they too are afraid people like you will call them bigots. The NCAA is kicking the can to USA Swimming who are too afraid people like you will call them bigots. They pass it off to the IOC who are afraid people like you will call them bigots. Cancel culture is a real thing and people are justifiably frightened by it.

Congratulations One Brow, you're powerful. With as quick as you, and people like you, are to condemn people as hate filled bigots it has everyone afraid of you. They are so afraid of you that they'd kill off women's sports if that is what it takes. Knowing the polling on this issue, I would bet the majority on JF are against biological males completing in women's' sports but won't touch this thread with a 10 foot pole out of fear.
 
Al-O-Meter said:
I would bet the majority on JF are against biological males completing in women's' sports but won't touch this thread with a 10 foot pole out of fear.
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I am against it.
 
Al-O-Meter said:
I'm not in Ivy League sports so I will defer to the reports of morale of the women's swimmers on Penn being really low. Sport is supposed to be fun. That is what is being destroyed and the swimmers are afraid to say anything because people like you will calling them bigots.
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Their fun is being destroyed because they got a really good teammate, and it has nothing to do with her being trans? Like, we the Jazz brought in Conley, and Joe Ingles talked about how he wasn't going to have fun playing basketball anymore?

Or, they're not having fun because she is trans, but you don't think that makes them bigots for some reason? So, you'll explain how that's not bigoted, right?

Al-O-Meter said:
They rely in the NCAA to make the adult decision but they too are afraid people like you will call them bigots. The NCAA is kicking the can to USA Swimming who are too afraid people like you will call them bigots. They pass it off to the IOC who are afraid people like you will call them bigots. Cancel culture is a real thing and people are justifiably frightened by it.
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Suuuuuure. Because the NCAA blew off people for years complaining about athletes being taken advantage of, but the massive trans lobby might actually criticize them, so they're afraid. USA Swimming has been treating women as second-class swimmers for decades while ignoring the feminists, but the mighty trans lobby has them cowed. The IOC has been forcing entire cities into financial strain and has networks licking their feet, but their power is nothing compared to the trans lobby. That's what you need to believe, eh?

Al-O-Meter said:
Congratulations One Brow, you're powerful. With as quick as you, and people like you, are to condemn people as hate filled bigots it has everyone afraid of you.
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Why should I have any sort of power in that sphere? Lot's of people have called me a bigot, and they didn't scare me. Perhaps because I know who I am.

Perhaps some people know who they are, and don't like that part or want that part spoken out loud. That might make it seem like I have power, but it's really just a cell phone light illuminating a shadow.

Al-O-Meter said:
They are so afraid of you that they'd kill off women's sports if that is what it takes.
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How do good women athletes kill off women's sports? Please be explicit.

Al-O-Meter said:
Knowing the polling on this issue, I would bet the majority on JF are against biological males completing in women's' sports but won't touch this thread with a 10 foot pole out of fear.
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If I had arguments like the ones you've presented, I wouldn't want to make them known either. I'd be too embarrassed.
 
This is a difficult one for me. Not really so much in Junior High and High School, as I think as taxpayers for public education we shouldn't view sports at that level as a means of determining who the most superior specimen is at a given sporting activity, but at that level we should be teaching sportsmanship, hard work, working towards a goal, dealing with defeat, being a good winner, etc..

But I'm going to try to stay out of the weeds on this, so I'm not going to get super detailed on what kind of criteria might be appropriate. As someone who never participated in high school level team sports and who has never been a parent of a person who has, I am not very qualified to address specifics on the issue.

What I will talk about is the continuing effort to delegitimize the sincerity of transgender people. This idea that they are playing a trick on us and we have to be smart enough not to fall for it.

I have made lengthy posts about this in the past and those threads ultimately got closed. But this is the essence of the transgender issue in the U.S., it is that people think that transgender people are lying about who they are. It is automatically denied by anti-trans people when put in that context, but they continue to betray the truth. They will always fall back into the idea that transgender identity is a lie, it is illegitimate and that it is important to not be fooled by it. It is the root of almost every anti-trans argument I have ever seen. It is why anti-trans people smugly mis-gender the trans people they are talking about, because they are proving to their fellow anti-trans friends that they will not be fooled and that they are not afraid to say so.

If public school sports are about teaching, in any capacity at all, then within *reason, transgender people should be allowed to play in the sport as the gender they identify as. At that level it should not matter at all if one athletic student is faster, scores higher, or whatever else. Safety should be considered, which is true regardless of transgender athletes.

I don't think college level sports should be considered amature sports or that the athletes should be considered "student athletes." At that level it is a business, money is being made and athletes are maneuvering for lucrative opportunities, not to mention scholarships. I think at that level there should be some kind of standards that account for testosterone levels of transgender athletes and other relevant factors that I'm not really qualified to get into specifics of. I think people using transgender identity specifically for sporting opportunities is EXTREMELY unlikely (anyone who wants me to go on about that aspect, just ask and I'll likely post 500 words about how I feel about that) but I care enough about transgender rights that I'm more than willing to take this issue away from the anti-trans community by placing restrictions on some transgender athletes so that the bigots can STFU unless they want to fully admit their hate and malice towards the trans community in general.
 
I actually audibly laughed at the being afraid to post in this thread quip.

I don't post in here because I don't currently have an active interest to.

I do have an anthropology degree so I'd like to think I'm more qualified to speak on this subject than most here, at least academically, but people don't really care about education tells them different than what they want to believe, so it's kind of pointless to argue at all. That, and I'm old. Probably be all over this topic 15 years ago.
 
Darkwing Duck said:
I actually audibly laughed at the being afraid to post in this thread quip.

I don't post in here because I don't currently have an active interest to.

I do have an anthropology degree so I'd like to think I'm more qualified to speak on this subject than most here, at least academically, but people don't really care about education tells them different than what they want to believe, so it's kind of pointless to argue at all. That, and I'm old. Probably be all over this topic 15 years ago.
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Well I'd be very interested in your input for what that's worth.
 
One Brow said:
Any particular reasons that haven't been expressed?
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Nah I dont think its any new reason. Just believe that being a male physically is advantageous in sports.
 
fishonjazz said:
Nah I dont think its any new reason. Just believe that being a male physically is advantageous in sports.
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And yet there are no restrictions within either the female or male teams to prevent people with massive physical advantages over the other athletes from playing against them. This has never been a criteria in school sports, that you can't play if you're physically superior to the rest of the students. Like this has never even sort of been a consideration... until transgender students wanted to compete as their gender of identity.
 
Gameface said:
Well I'd be very interested in your input for what that's worth.
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To be fair, any thoughts I have bring in new questions that have to be researched (e.g. What does Western/US society as a whole expect from non-professional, organized athletics) which bring new questions and thoughts, which would leave me with something like a college term paper, and I don't have any interest at all in the time involved in that. My interests tend to comparative cross-culturally, rather than any one culture.

So I do have two thought questions that end up popping up in head that I AM interested in.

First, the hypothetical. If we lived in the world from the Pixar movie, "The Incredibles," should Dash be banned from competing in athletic competitions? What would be the language of said ban? Could other people with "superpowers" compete? Would Violet be banned from competing athletically as well?

Second, a defining question. This thread has touched on college and high school sports. One is considered women's sports, the latter girls' sports. "Women" and "girls" are gender terms. Boys'/Men's sports are also gender terms that some want to differentiate from girl's/women's sports purely biologically. As such, what is the biological difference between girls and women? If your answer is age, what is the biological difference between being ~6574 days old and ~6575 days old and why is that the differentiation?
 
Gameface said:
And yet there are no restrictions within either the female or male teams to prevent people with massive physical advantages over the other athletes from playing against them. This has never been a criteria in school sports, that you can't play if you're physically superior to the rest of the students. Like this has never even sort of been a consideration... until transgender students wanted to compete as their gender of identity.
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Exactly. because the average male is similar to the average male in physical nature. The average female is similar to the average female in physical nature. But the average female isn't similar to the average male in physical nature. That is the reason for the seperation imo. I was a decent basketball player but not good enough to play at the college level (maybe a salt lake community or something). I played basketball against the female basketball team members in high school and jr high. The very best females I played against were WAY worse than I was. I could beat them with ease. And I wasn't even that good.
 
Gameface said:
And yet there are no restrictions within either the female or male teams to prevent people with massive physical advantages over the other athletes from playing against them. This has never been a criteria in school sports, that you can't play if you're physically superior to the rest of the students. Like this has never even sort of been a consideration.
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What are you talking about? Of course there are restrictions! Performance enhancing drugs are banned because they give a massive physical advantage. Wrestling has weight classes so that smaller wrestler have a weight to compete when larger athletes would overpower them. Before matches, they don't ask the wrestlers how heavy they feel that day. They put them on a scale. There are all sorts of restrictions used to balance competition, all the way up to putting large schools with a history of athletic success in higher divisions. 1A teams don't have to beat 6A teams to win state titles. A Division I school doesn't usually get any credit toward bowl eligibility for beating a Division III school. Making restrictions to balance competition is the rule in sport, not the exception.
 
fishonjazz said:
Exactly. because the average male is similar to the average male in physical nature. The average female is similar to the average female in physical nature. But the average female isn't similar to the average male in physical nature. That is the reason for the seperation imo. I was a decent basketball player but not good enough to play at the college level (maybe a salt lake community or something). I played basketball against the female basketball team members in high school and jr high. The very best females I played against were WAY worse than I was. I could beat them with ease. And I wasn't even that good.
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This is not remotely true.
 
Al-O-Meter said:
What are you talking about? Of course there are restrictions! Performance enhancing drugs are banned because they give a massive physical advantage. Wrestling has weight classes so that smaller wrestler have a weight to compete when larger athletes would overpower them. Before matches, they don't ask the wrestlers how heavy they feel that day. They put them on a scale. There are all sorts of restrictions used to balance competition, all the way up to putting large schools with a history of athletic success in higher divisions. 1A teams don't have to beat 6A teams to win state titles. A Division I school doesn't usually get any credit toward bowl eligibility for beating a Division III school. Making restrictions to balance competition is the rule in sport, not the exception.
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EAD. talk about the **** I said if you want to have a discussion
 
Gameface said:
This is not remotely true.
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Me (an average male basketball player) playing against the best female basketball players in high school and jr high and dominating them is absolutely true. They had no chance against me.
As for the average male not being similar to the average female in physical nature google agrees with me. Average male is 5 feet 9 inches and 197 lbs. Average female is 5 feet 4 inches and 170 lbs. Those height and weight disparties would never be allowed to box or wrestle or compete in mma against each other for a reason. That doesn't take into account the other differences such as coordination, leaping ability, strength, speed, etc that the average male is also superior in comparison to the average female.
 
Al-O-Meter said:
What are you talking about? Of course there are restrictions! Performance enhancing drugs are banned because they give a massive physical advantage. Wrestling has weight classes so that smaller wrestler have a weight to compete when larger athletes would overpower them. Before matches, they don't ask the wrestlers how heavy they feel that day. They put them on a scale. There are all sorts of restrictions used to balance competition, all the way up to putting large schools with a history of athletic success in higher divisions. 1A teams don't have to beat 6A teams to win state titles. A Division I school doesn't usually get any credit toward bowl eligibility for beating a Division III school. Making restrictions to balance competition is the rule in sport, not the exception.
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Also I know that in youth football if you are too big then you have to play on the line because if you were a running back or something the other players would have no chance to tackle you. They call them (players that can ONLY play on the line) X-men or something like that.
 
fishonjazz said:
Me (an average male basketball player) playing against the best female basketball players in high school and jr high and dominating them is absolutely true. They had no chance against me.
As for the average male not being similar to the average female in physical nature google agrees with me. Average male is 5 feet 9 inches and 197 lbs. Average female is 5 feet 4 inches and 170 lbs. Those height and weight disparties would never be allowed to box or wrestle or compete in mma against each other for a reason. That doesn't take into account the other differences such as coordination, leaping ability, strength, speed, etc that the average male is also superior in comparison to the average female.
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Yes, average male athletes are much bigger than average female athletes. No question.

Same reason we have size restrictions in pee wee football as kids at that stage have large physique differences at that stage. Larger kids are line only to protect the smaller players.

The trans women that are winning women's competitions would not be competing at near the level if they competed against biological males in the majority of instances (i.e. the trans weightlifter in the olympics would be leaps and bounds below the mens minimum qualifier). I'm not even sure how someone can argue against this with a straight face.

By middle school and high school it begins to even out, and tryouts tend to weed out the less athletic folks, at least in the bigger more competitive schools.

And as competition increases (college then NBA/WNBA using bball as any example) the top athletes rise up. WNBA women simply cannot compete against NBA men physically. There is a reason only one woman was ever drafted in the NBA (by the Jazz) but never played.

These same characteristics flow through to lower levels of competition.

If It becomes the societal norm for biological males identifying as females to compete in women's sports, on average these trans athletes will have a physiological advantage over cisgender females, and you'll see it at an even greater rate.

Right now I'd guess many trans athletes play in their biological sport for many reasons, societal pressure and discrimination being a key driver.

I'm not sure who is pressing a narrative here that a trans person is trying to fool anyone. I think they are dealing with a difficult phsiological/psychological issue where their brain and body don't jive. That does not mean cisgender females should be penalized or lose out on opportunities like scholarships, etc.



We all know the suicide rate for trans people is sky high no matter how much support they have (I can't imagine what I'd feel like if I couldn't indentify with my biological gender). Whatever side someone is one, we should all agree that this group needs love and support, even if many disagree how that support should be supplied. I think we can be respectful of everyone's rights without enhancing or taking away rights of others.

That said, I don't think cisgender women athletes should necessarily lose out on potential opportunities whether it is playing time, scholarships, etc. And ultimately, they should decide, not me.

An open division makes more sense to me.
 
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fishonjazz said:
Exactly. because the average male is similar to the average male in physical nature. The average female is similar to the average female in physical nature. But the average female isn't similar to the average male in physical nature. That is the reason for the seperation imo. I was a decent basketball player but not good enough to play at the college level (maybe a salt lake community or something). I played basketball against the female basketball team members in high school and jr high. The very best females I played against were WAY worse than I was. I could beat them with ease. And I wasn't even that good.
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However, if there were a female player as good as you (I likely played with a couple back in the day), they would be allowed on the girl's team anyhow, right?
 
TheGoldStandard said:
By middle school and high school it begins to even out, and tryouts tend to weed out the less athletic folks, at least in the bigger more competitive schools.
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You just contradicted yourself. Size differences and athleticism do not tend to even out, they become more pronounced as kids mature. The reason it gets handled differently is that pee-wee leagues and high school leagues have different goals for their athletics programs and their athletes.

TheGoldStandard said:
If It becomes the societal norm for biological males identifying as females to compete in women's sports, on average these trans athletes will have a physiological advantage over cisgender females, and you'll see it at an even greater rate.
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You do realize that this physiological advantage fades over time as the transition proceeds, right?

TheGoldStandard said:
That does not mean cisgender females should be penalized or lose out on opportunities like scholarships, etc.
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Not qualifying for an athletic scholarship is not a penalty, and getting an athletic scholarship is not a right. Millions of girls already don't get that opportunity. This position is only supportable if you take the position that trans women are not real women, and therefore need to be excluded from this particular woman's space. Is that your position?

TheGoldStandard said:
I have a trans family member, and I fully support them. We all know the suicide rate for trans people is sky high no matter how much support they have (I can't imagine what I'd feel like if I couldn't indentify with my biological gender). Whatever side someone is one, we should all agree that this group needs love and support, even if many disagree how that support should be supplied. I think we can be respectful of everyone's rights without enhancing or taking away rights of others.

That said, I don't think cisgender women athletes should necessarily lose out on potential opportunities whether it is playing time, scholarships, etc. And ultimately, they should decide, not me.
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All cisgender women, or just those are are marginally good enough that they can qualify for a scholarship by the exclusion of trans women?
 
Gameface said:
This is a difficult one for me. Not really so much in Junior High and High School, as I think as taxpayers for public education we shouldn't view sports at that level as a means of determining who the most superior specimen is at a given sporting activity, but at that level we should be teaching sportsmanship, hard work, working towards a goal, dealing with defeat, being a good winner, etc..

But I'm going to try to stay out of the weeds on this, so I'm not going to get super detailed on what kind of criteria might be appropriate. As someone who never participated in high school level team sports and who has never been a parent of a person who has, I am not very qualified to address specifics on the issue.

What I will talk about is the continuing effort to delegitimize the sincerity of transgender people. This idea that they are playing a trick on us and we have to be smart enough not to fall for it.

I have made lengthy posts about this in the past and those threads ultimately got closed. But this is the essence of the transgender issue in the U.S., it is that people think that transgender people are lying about who they are. It is automatically denied by anti-trans people when put in that context, but they continue to betray the truth. They will always fall back into the idea that transgender identity is a lie, it is illegitimate and that it is important to not be fooled by it. It is the root of almost every anti-trans argument I have ever seen. It is why anti-trans people smugly mis-gender the trans people they are talking about, because they are proving to their fellow anti-trans friends that they will not be fooled and that they are not afraid to say so.

If public school sports are about teaching, in any capacity at all, then within *reason, transgender people should be allowed to play in the sport as the gender they identify as. At that level it should not matter at all if one athletic student is faster, scores higher, or whatever else. Safety should be considered, which is true regardless of transgender athletes.

I don't think college level sports should be considered amature sports or that the athletes should be considered "student athletes." At that level it is a business, money is being made and athletes are maneuvering for lucrative opportunities, not to mention scholarships. I think at that level there should be some kind of standards that account for testosterone levels of transgender athletes and other relevant factors that I'm not really qualified to get into specifics of. I think people using transgender identity specifically for sporting opportunities is EXTREMELY unlikely (anyone who wants me to go on about that aspect, just ask and I'll likely post 500 words about how I feel about that) but I care enough about transgender rights that I'm more than willing to take this issue away from the anti-trans community by placing restrictions on some transgender athletes so that the bigots can STFU unless they want to fully admit their hate and malice towards the trans community in general.
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Love you, my man.
 
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