Judge strikes down anti-trans sports ban after roller derby team fights for its members
Bruce Blakeman’s anti-trans executive order made headlines across the country and led him to battle with New York Attorney General Letitia James.
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If a 5ft trans woman who started transitioning when she was a teen faces off against a 6ft cis volleyball player, should the cis woman be not allowed to compete?
What about cis olympians? They all have natural advantages that make their ability to compete at high levels possible, why are you not calling for them to be banned? Britney Griner is a giant at nearly 7ft, surely she shouldn't be allowed to compete when she has such a innate advantage over your average cis woman, right?
Didn't you read what they wrote? The men would always win. I'm a 5'9" 180-pound cishet man and if I play basketball against Britney Griner, I will definitely win. For sure.
Oh, they meant professional sports? Well I guarantee you that there's literally no possibility that Britney Griner could beat the worst player out of the ~550 men in the NBA. No possibility. Britney Griner is definitely worse than all of those 550 men. Because she has a vagina.
Edit: The blatant sarcasm in my post was undermined by a mod deleting the post I was replying to. Oh well.
It kind of borders on delusion if I'm being honest.
Remember when everyone was completely losing their shit about Laurel Hubbard, the trans powerlifter who had qualified for the olympics? Remember how everyone was claiming she was going to smash records and take the gold etc.?
Now, what did we see in reality? Laurel Hubbard didn't even place. She got beat out by her cis competitors, she broke no records, she fell within the same range of ability as cis women.
Where does this fact leave people's theory about "the men will always win"?
Edit: I see now you were being sarcastic. In any case I'll leave the response as is, since people do think like that. Changed it to be a less pointy, lol.
Yes, very much sarcastic. I am always annoyed by this 'men will always beat women in sports' talking point.
The problem with sarcasm here is that most men believe they can play tennis on par with the Williams sisters. At least according to some survey I saw years ago.
I don't think I can play tennis on par with the Williams brothers. 92-year-old John Williams and his brother Jerry, who may or may not be alive, but who is apparently younger than him. And even if he was dead, he'd still probably beat me at tennis.
I assume Serena or Venus Williams would just serve the ball at such a speed that, when I fail to hit it back and accidentally stand in its way, it will go straight through my skull and embed itself into the wall behind me and she'd just win by automatic forfeit.
Now, what did we see in reality?
We saw a middling to low level male power lifter make the Olympics at 43. That's insane.
No, we saw a trans woman who had radically altered her biological make-up through use of female hormones, train rigorously, and then perform within the same range as cis women, ultimately failing to place and looking at retirement.
And now we see you in denial about that factual reality because you simply can't get over your hate. You're letting your emotions rule your thinking on this.
Also, you're not even correct about the age being some massive barrier, Lidia Valentin also competed in olympics at 36, going so far as to weigh in for the subsequent Olympics and only ultimatelt retired due to an injury.
It's irrational to ban people based simply on their status of being trans as trans people vary widely in their physical ability and biological make-up.
Eh...I'm all the words according to Lemmy. The crowd here seems to all be 13-22 year old ultra liberals. I'm liberal, just not hardcore bleeding edge jump of the left cliff liberal.
Liberals are just conservatives that haven't taken their mask off yet. We are progressives, and leftists, and I'm older than you think
I would have thought the sarcasm was blatantly obvious.
That explains it then. Thanks.
Even if he wasn't being sarcastic, these are children. Not full grown adults
Girls mature faster than boys
Britney Griner is definitely worse than all of those 550 men.
You understand the WNBA all stars would be beat handily by an 8th grade all star team right? It wouldn't be close.
Do I understand that your imaginary scenario is true?
No, I really don't.
This is why this debate is stupid. The people having it are arguing against people who have actually played sport their whole lives. I watched an 8th grade travel team decimate what I thought was our very good team. They had a kid show up that was over 6 (in 8th fucking grade) that could play above the rim. He was unstoppable. That kid would easily be a starter in the WNBA and would smash Griner back to Russia. Get 15 or so of those kids and put them up against any WNBA team you want to put together and they'd win handily.
That's the point. Trans-women athletes are essentially testosterone doping. They've got more muscle mass, and a heavier bone structure. That doesn't go away after the transition. The British Journal of Sports Medicine confirmed that.
In non-competitive leagues, I could care less...everyone can play with everyone...it's fine. When you're talking about the Olympics and college sports where the girls have trained their whole lives for a given event only to be beat out by someone who got to take the equivalent of human growth hormones and testosterone is unfair.
You are welcome to believe that an 8th grader can beat Britney Griner in a basketball game, but just saying it doesn't make it true and I'm not sure why you think otherwise.
And you may not have noticed, but I haven't talked about trans people in this discussion at all, since that wasn't the point I was addressing.
I directly said what I was addressing.
And that proves what about Britney Griner? That's not even the same sport! Your claim was an eighth grader who has never played her could beat her in basketball, which proves that all 550 men on the NBA are better than her.
Unless you're claiming all sports require the same amount of athletic skill and ability, this is a terrible argument. And if that is your claim, it's weird that athletes don't hop from sport to sport constantly.
Trans-women athletes are essentially testosterone doping.
Are you seriously suggesting that trans women, the people taking anti-androgens to suppress testosterone production because testosterone is literally poison to them, are doping themselves with testosterone to gain an advantage in sports? Is that really a thing you believe?
They’ve got more muscle mass, and a heavier bone structure. That doesn’t go away after the transition. The British Journal of Sports Medicine confirmed that.
Why don't we take a look at what the British Journal of Sports Medicine actually said:
One of the most noticeable disparities between gender groups was in height and mass (table 1), with (cisgender men) and transgender women being taller and heavier than their cisgender and transgender counterparts (table 1). Body composition measures (fat mass % and fat-free mass %, table 2) between transgender women and cisgender women found no difference. However, transgender women are, on average as a cohort taller and heavier.
So you're partially correct in that trans women do, on average, have more mass than cis women, but only because trans women tend to be taller. Does that translate to an advantage in athletics?
Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and (cisgender men). Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women.
Apparently not. Trans women, despite being larger on average, performed worse than cisgender women. This is from your own source. Did you not actually read the study, or are you intentionally cherry-picking to misrepresent its conclusions?
When you’re talking about the Olympics and college sports where the girls have trained their whole lives for a given event only to be beat out by someone who got to take the equivalent of human growth hormones and testosterone is unfair.
Imagine a woman training her whole life for an event and being beaten by Brittney Griner. That actually happened, and I bet it was emotionally devastating.
Imagine training your whole life, and then finding out that you were born with a permanent medical condition that will require taking drugs that reduce your athletic performance to below the average of your peers, and this condition will also make lots of sexist chuds want to ban you from sports entirely. I bet that would really be unfair, wouldn't you agree?
Okay? So what are the rules then? Only trans people that started transitioning before a certain age? Or has been transitioning for a certain number of years? Or should we measure bone density, muscle density, estrogen, testosterone, other various hormones, etc? What if they were a competitive athlete before transitioning? Is it transphobic to ask a person to prove they meet these requirements? Because apparently, based on the mods here, it's transphobic to even consider that a person who was born a man might have a physical advantage over someone born a woman.
It's not like all athletes taking PEDs are better than all of their natural counterparts. But it does afford them an unfair advantage. So we ban their use. A trans person could have an advantage that is the result of them being born a man. This is real and has happened. The existence of that possibility is no different than the possibility an athlete would be superior as a result of PEDs.
Yes, the rules that have been in place about transition time have served fine since even before right-wingers politicized trans people's existence.
The irrational part is to try and create blanket bans based solely on the fact that an athlete is trans.
It completely ignores the fact that trans biology falls on a very wide spectrum and is dependent on numerous factors. It doesn't make sense to treat trans athletes as their assigned at birth sex because their biology is literally no longer that of their birth gender. It varies by degrees, but it is no more fair to ban a cis woman for being tall than it is to ban a trans woman for being the same height.
So no, it is not transphobic to have rules and regulations specific to trans athletes when it comes to competitive level sports (whatever experts and committees decide is fair based on actual data) it is transphobic to just outright ban trans people based solely on that status and ignore the biological reality of the individual and whether or not they fall within the range of cis competitors (spoiler, most do).
It's really stupid for people to get this outraged about a tiny percentage of the population, an even smaller percentage of which actually compete at high levels.
Cis women and trans women have been found to have comparable performance in sports. Generally, cis women have an advantage over trans women.
I'm sure that you'll be objective and apply the same reasoning against cis women now that you know they have a physical advantage over other women.
What the hell are you on about?
You know what, go ahead and list these record settings. I want to see them.
Omit "school record" or any regional / divisional / age related records. Those get set and broke constantly. Show me ACTUAL records. World records. Professional league records.
Insofar as I know, there's been two trans folk to make it to the Olympics. One is Quinn, AFAB soccer midfielder who is nb. Their team won gold in the 2020 Olympics.
The other is Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand, who was competing in weightlifting, which I think we can agree is either the most ideal or close to the most ideal situation for conservatives and TERF's to push their nonsense takes wrt trans folks in sports. Laurel failed her three lift attempts and placed last in her group.
I think anyone would be hard pressed to say in either of those two cases the trans person was malicious or "cheating" somehow.
Thanks. It was a genuine question. I've never heard of a single trans person who has set such a record.
Every time I hear stuff on the news it's "Trans girl shatters high school record". Given that there are basically thousands of possible records per grade per school, I would absolutely expect a few records to be set by trans girls. The thousands of records set per year by cis girls goes unrecognized and unreported.
Whenever cis girls succeed, they're ignored. Whenever transgender people succeed, they're punished. Whenever they fail, they're still punished.
Quinn was AFAB and has not taken testosterone.
Wikipedia ID's them as trans, so they're on the very short list of trans olympic athletes.
That may be but since they haven't done any chemical transition it's entirely irrelevant. What all these shitlords get up up in arms about is MTF.
I was listing "trans athlete in the Olympics" though, not "trans athlete in the Olympics who has done chemical transition".
I thought my wording was fairly clear. Sorry if you got confused somehow.
That must be why we've repeatedly seen instances where trans women set records within the women's category of their respective sport! Because it's all equal and impossible for a trans woman to have an advantage.
Name three.
Of the dozen or so times when a top ranked female tennis player played either a much lower ranked or handicapped male player, I think the male lost only once (1973 King vs Riggs, through there are claims that Riggs threw the match).
There exist sports where having XX chromosome is not a disadvantage. Male and female equestrians have been competing against each other in the Olympics since the modern Olympics began.
The issue of gender and 'what makes a woman a woman' in sports is not new. There are plenty of cases of men pretending to be women and claiming top prizes. I don't envy the officials who have to do gender tests , as there are many people who are neither XX or XY.
EDIT: now that I've had some time to go though my sources a little better, I should correct a couple things. According to the Wikipedia article, females have won more than a couple matches against males, though all of those matches involved either a handicap or a much lower ranked male. The Williams sisters themselves only claimed they could beat any male outside the top 200 (but they both lost by a wide margin in friendly sets to #203).
Male and Female equestrians have only been competing against each other since 1952, and not since the beginning of the modem Olympics.
"The entire reason for women's sports is..."
...is actually because they were banned from playing sports until 1974, and then when allowed starting beating some men's teams and the men bellyached about it.
Personally, I have competed in powerlifting, one sport that has gotten attention in the press for not letting trans women compete with cis women, particularly after a trans woman beat out other cis women by huge margin in competition.
I will let the ladies know that the only reason they're in their own division is actually because of oppression and they should have no issue competing against men.
That is the case in modern sports science, yes, but the interesting thing - at least to me is - that's not what happened in real life.
That may be the case now but that is not how it came to be.
