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NCAA bans trans women from women's sports in reversal of 15-year policy.

The largest college sports governing body in the country made the change following President Trump’s executive order banning trans girls from girls’ school sports.

26 comments

  • I don't think there's going to be a good solution to this unless we stop segregating sports by gender entirely, but that of course brings additional problems.

    There will be sports with primarily one gender at the top tier and those who don't cut it will end up in a second, less prestigious tier although many people already view womens leagues as beneath men's leagues.

    Some men will (wrongly) will be embarrassed to be computing against primarily women, but even those who aren't embarrassed will still receive harassment for competing against women.

  • I’ve been deeply frustrated by the progressive stance on trans people in professional sports.

    Anyone who began medical transitioning after puberty will have reasonably notable physical differences from cisgender people in their appropriately gendered sport. It’s similar to doping, but something their body was doing naturally with incorrect hormones that didn’t reflect their gender.

    I certainly don’t feel good about it, but I do think there is a very viable argument to disqualify those kinds of trans people (who medically transitioned after puberty) from competition. The debate becomes much more nuanced as you consider different sports where physical differences between gender matter less. Rugby, weightlifting; trans folks are out. Target shooting, chess, darts; no problem. It’s a debate to be had sport by sport, league by league. The whole issue should have been messaged that way from the beginning.

    Queer advocacy groups taking a broad “all or nothing” civil rights stance on this was a HUGE mistake. It’s an argument they were destined to lose, only affected a minuscule number of athletes, and wasted so much time and effort that could have been spent on other battles for trans rights. US Democrats take their cues on queer issues from those queer advocacy groups, so they rolled with it and got trampled.

    I really want to have a conversation with queer strategists and Democrat policy leaders to understand why this was the hill they decided to make trans rights die on.

    • Please lecture us more about how unequal we should be and how we should "just take it" when the majority disagrees. /s

      Democrats spent next to no time or money defending us during this election, so maybe don't blame trans folks for the bigotry thrust upon them. I could talk about how much muscle mass and other body changes brings most trans folks to (normally) on par with cis competitors, or how being discriminatory this way hurts cis women (because let's be honest, it seems none of you chucklefucks think about trans men), especially if they have POTS or another endocrine disorder. But why bother at this point?

      We're talking about NCAA sports here, often young teens and adults who very much haven't finished puberty. There are only something like 10 trans people out of over 500k, and these bigoted shits wrote laws to call them invalid and unable to compete or play with their peers. This shit reeks of not wanting to let black folks compete because "they can run better" or some other racist shit.

      As for your "hill to die on" shit, when have I lost enough rights and privileges to be "acceptable"? What's the next "hill" we shouldn't supposedly die on? Maybe going to the bathroom in public restrooms? Perhaps we should be banned from social gatherings with cis women (again, y'all don't care about men)? How about we segregate water fountains to make sure our filthy trans lips don't touch pristine cis water?

      Sorry, I mean, you just "chose this hill to die on". I hope this doesn't "make you hate trans people" or "show how unhinged trans people are". I know I should be thankful to be alive at all, since if I get too uppity we might start talking about whether or not my transness makes me unemployable or if I'm stealing jobs from women because of my unfair puberty advantages or something.

    • Just want to preface this whole argument with a "This issue is pretty complex, and there are valid reasons to be concerned on both sides."

      I always see the "physical differences" argument, and my response is where do you draw the line? There are outliers of both cis men and women, so if we're going purely off natural physical ability, is it okay to bump the lowest performance cis men into the women's league, or the highest performance women into the men's leagues?

      It's funny you mention rugby, because I have a cis female friend who plays. She's 5'11 and ~180lbs, and an absolute tank on the field. I'm trans, and we're basically the exact same size/weight. Her 1RM on basically anything other than bench has always been higher than mine, even as a guy. If the concern is purely about physical differences, then at what point do you start singling out non-trans people for being outliers, even if it's 100% natural?

      While I absolutely understand the issues with allowing those who've gone through testosterone puberty into sports with those who haven't (painting with as broad a brush as possible), I think the main reason I struggle to agree with bans of trans athletes in any capacity is simply because it's 100% going to be abused by shitty people, and is an overly simplistic solution.

      My overly simplistic solution? Stop grouping people by gender, and just break it up into tiered leagues/divisions/weight classes like football/soccer, baseball, or wrestling? Will there be a natural segmentation based off sex? For a lot of sports, almost definitely. But I think it's the most equitable solution, and also helps break down the idea that women can't possibly compete against men in any way, or that men are inherently better than women. You now also get the added benefit that people who might normally be cut from a team for low performance now have the opportunity to play in a lower division, and have a reason for the players in the low/mid divisions who might obliterate the competition to have a reason to keep improving for a shot at a higher division.

      Now, feel free to tear apart my idea, because I'm sure there are many aspects of it I didn't clearly think through, but it's just a thought.

      • It's funny you mention rugby, because I have a cis female friend who plays. She's 5'11 and ~180lbs, and an absolute tank on the field. I'm trans, and we're basically the exact same size/weight. Her 1RM on basically anything other than bench has always been higher than mine, even as a guy

        Just to add on to this: I was an all state scrum half and played at a division 1 school in college, and I have played with women that can absolutely wreck my ass on a rugby pitch. There's absolutely no reason a woman couldn't play with men if they're at the same skill level.

    • I mostly agree. But at the same time, unmedicated humans are not strictly male or female either. Bodies vary a lot. So there are women out there with an advantage over other women because their bodies are more male than the average. So determining who is fair to compete against who by chromosome isn't really fair either. What they need is some better measure of advantages earned by genetics vs hard work. Then there should be categories of competition based on that. The middle categories would have overlap between men and women. That would really allow more people to fairly compete.

    • Completely agree.

      The whole point of women's sport leagues is because it's unfair to have them compete against men. Trying to impose fairness with something designed to be unfair is folly.

      • "The whole point of having negro sports leagues is because it's unfair to have them compete against whites. Trying to impose fairness with something designed to be unfair is folly."

        Followed by:

        "There's no rule saying that negroes can't play in the National League."

26 comments