Will it though? The right and Piers Morgan will say, look satanic Disney was pushing trans athletes in women’s sports. And the left will say no big deal. Like seriously how hard is it to say, “I thought you were all about state rights.”
The controversy currently going on in women’s volleyball is likely one of the factors.
I’m completely chill about people being whatever they want for how they dress and act, but competitive sports is my line. It is impossible to account for all the differences and all the science and surgeries and drugs can’t make shorter arms or smaller lungs or wider hips etc. If you used to be male it is completely unfair to allow play in women’s competitive sports and any Trans person who thinks they should be able to play anyhow is nothing but a hypocrite for wanting the same rights and privileges everyone else has, while knowingly trying to force your way into a competition that you have an unfair advantage in.
Fair, I guess. Though there’s this quote of a (trans or xxy, can’t remember) female marathonist that was under the spotlight in the olympics nearly 10 years ago. She pointed out that no one said 1 complain on Phelps having “unnatural” big lungs or higher testosterone than the average male.
That’s quite revealing. To me, dividing sports by genitalia-at-birth is too arbitrary. Same goes with boxing and the weights. Obviously there is a gradient. Any lines will harm.
So… In the end is what would you rather hurt, people or your convictions on how traditionally sport X is organized. I dream we can change how these are organized in light of science… Idk if it’s possible at all…
The issue is that there’s only one phelps and he was born that way. There are thousands of Trans women and allowing them to compete in women’s sports is going to displace most every natural born female athlete across multiple sports at multiple levels of play.
Fair, I guess. Though there’s this quote of a (trans or xxy, can’t remember) female marathonist that was under the spotlight in the olympics nearly 10 years ago. She pointed out that no one said 1 complain on Phelps having “unnatural” big lungs or higher testosterone than the average male.
That’s quite revealing. To me, dividing sports by genitalia-at-birth is too arbitrary. Same goes with boxing and the weights. Obviously there is a gradient. Any lines will harm.
So… In the end is what would you rather hurt, people or your convictions on how traditionally sport X is organized. I dream we can change how these are organized in light of science… Idk if it’s possible at all…
Why are competitive advantages a problem for trans women but not for anyone else? Breanna Stewart (a cis woman) has a wingspan longer than most men taller than her, let alone the women she plays against. Is that unfair? Should we ban her from the WNBA? What about entire groups of people that have biological traits that give them a competitive advantage in certain sports over the rest of world? For example Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes from certain tribes that dominate long distance running in part because of biological advantages. Should we ban them?
And despite the physical advantages they might have, there is little evidence that trans women have some systemic advantage over cis women in sports results. This is a culture war issue fanned by right wing transphobes who hyper focus on a handful of absolute tiny trans women who have done well (out of an already small pool of trans athletes). And the result is that it also negatively harms cis women such as Caster Semenya, Imane Khelif, or even Serena Williams.
The “unfair advantage” part doesn’t actually exist. It’s been accounted for with the 2 year break you have to take. People who still think there is any unfair advantage involved haven’t actually looked into it.
It’s easy to get caught up when people say it happens, but every example where people think it happened since the rules around it were set decades ago have been debunked. It’s already been handled. But of course, we always remain open to if there are any other adjusments that still need to be made. Basically, there is just no conspiracy or agenda.
And honestly, there is no such thing as 100% male or 100% female to start with. That’s just not how the 35 million billion parts humans are comprised of that were never designed to go together in the first place ended up working out when jammed together. Humans are incredibly complex. There are dozens of identified and untold amounts of unidentified markers that determine “how much” male or female our various component makeup is, and the odds of anyone getting 100% of all of them maxxed out to one side is slim enough that it has likely never happened.
That’s not true, as I’ve already pointed out. Males have more stable hips and larger lungs. That doesn’t go away ever.
Counterpoint: competitive sports should never have been gender-segregated in the first place.
If that happened, then 99% of women couldn’t ever play most competitive sports. There would only be men in sports.
That seems to be the case already given the viewership disparity for womens’ sports.
Disparity for sure, but it’s still popular enough to have some fans and it also gets a lot of girls into college.
