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Trans women have no advantage in elite sport, new report finds
(www.thepinknews.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Then do we ban cis women who are tall or have a high bone density from women's sports? Do we allow trans women who don't have these advantages? Why single out trans people? If you judge that certain advantages are too much, why ban all trans people specifically?
This is it, exactly.
Every time I've gone and looked into it, the research seems to indicate that trans women who've been on HRT for a year or two do retain some advantages due to testosterone-fueled puberty, but those advantages they may retain are well within the bounds of what's expected between cis women. In other words, sure, maybe a trans woman is taller than she'd be had she not gone through T-puberty, but there are cis women who are also tall, and we're not banning them on that basis. The same goes for any other advantages they (trans women) retain.
We are banning them specifically because they gained that advantage by going through puberty as a gender they aren't competing as. And none of those other women competitors had the ability to do that.
That is the difference. And I think that's a fine reason to ban someone from competing (AT A HIGH LEVEL, NOT CHILDREN'S SPORTS).
And I'm saying that's a bogus reason to ban trans women from women's sports. If their advantage is no greater than that of the advantages between cis women, then including medically transitioned trans women in women's sports does not un-level the playing field.
ETA: The way that we control for the testosterone-fueled changes a trans woman's body undergoes in puberty is by requiring them to be on HRT (including T suppressors) for a long enough amount of time that those advantages become negligible and they can fairly compete with other athletes, not by outright banning them. It's ridiculous and more than a little offensive to act like outright banning trans women from high level competition is the right thing to do.
Emphasis on medically transitioned.
Some people seem to think that lgbt activists want to make it so that any male athlete could just put on a wig, say "I'm trans now", steal medals from women and then detransition the next day. (As depicted in that Futurama episode.)
Letting trans people who have medically transitioned for several years compete is a very different beast from letting anyone who claims to be trans compete.
Absolutely. It's still a bit arbitrary, but at least there's data and established history to back this up as a viable way for trans women to compete. It's how we've been doing things in most major sports already, if they have any policy for trans athletes at all. It's worked out fine, I have yet to see any example of a trans athlete that is blowing her competition out of the water, so to speak. All of their examples are heavily cherry picked and misrepresented to look poorly on the trans community, but at closer inspection are anything but that.
That said, there are still some problems. For one, focusing on T-levels ends up with people like Caster Semenya, a cis-woman with a condition that means she produces a bunch of testosterone, being barred from competing.