I'm working on it. Maybe. Well, one day. Like when other Left of centre, anti trump, anti corpo type folks oppose the things I oppose in correct manner and degree, duh.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Because the fediverse isn't just you? Trans stuff generally leads to a dogpile of self righteousness. For the next few days I can look forward to dm's about how I'm a transphobe, responses ranging from assholish to abusive etc. And it's not like we're going to come to agreement but...
But, I do think your point has pivoted a bit. from
and these are fundamentally different.
First, in popular context, the big concern about this is in high school and college sports, not professional. And not rec leagues, though sometimes it goes there.
The second stance requires every sport to be reconfigured etc, which gets into the absurdities. (I'm just trying to even imagine how you would do it for the sport I watch most, hockey. On my pitiful Canucks team, we have Connor Garland, who is smaller than some of the women on our PWHL team but having seen both play, it would be incredibly unfair to put Garland in the PWHL. Or my trans soccer teammate who is faster and stronger than almost every woman we play but is similar sized.)
And hey, that's a valid stance and admirable but it is very different than what you led off with. There's no way anyone reading your first response would think that, despite claiming there are no differences between cis and trans women, you actually also want to separate sports based on size etc. Again, valid stance but very different from what you started with.
Yeah. People who are being attacked from all sides atm tend to be a little titchy. Can't justify anyone who is abusive toward you, hope that doesn't happen.
When I said
I was speaking loosely because I didn't want to get into the miniscule details of what my proposed solution is to sports safety. It is founded in reality and fact (but there are significant issues with this approach because edge cases and actually I believe blah blah).
I wasn't speaking about popular context, the person I was replying to specifically mentioned professional sports, and so that's the context I was discussing. I can't debate a point they never made.
Yes, status quo is cis-centric and inherently does not support the existence of transgender people. I do believe that sport should get the big reconfiguration you are talking about. Radical change is required in a great many spaces to actually be fair and just. Sport is one of these. Do I believe it will happen? No, not really. The world does not care enough about whether it is just and fair. I will welcome change that is less radical, but I cannot pretend it is my ideal.
Re: how to do it - research, data. What are the factors that lead to increased performance outcomes and what are the factors that lead to higher rates of injury. Account for these. Throwing transgender people into their own leagues so you don't have to actually do the hard work to truly include them is, I reiterate, transphobic.
I dont think wanting to separate sport based on actual measurable physical metrics rather than a social demographic is at odds with the fact that cis/trans women (on hormones for long enough) lose their significant differences for sport. Separating sport based on physical metrics would mean that someone at the top of the bell curve isn't breaking the skull of someone at the bottom of the bell curve just because they are both women, cis or trans doesn't even come into that.
Apologies, I missed that!
That being said, I don't think fundamentally reworking sports is a particularly useful or workable goal. Sure, if you had a magic wand AND could make everyone cool with it AND balance out existing talent discrepancies but I think there'd be a few hundred priorities for said magic wand before that.
Also, just gaming through your idea in terms of hockey, my national sport, it's hard not to see how this would just relegate women to a distant low tier level, rather in the forefront that they are rapidly becoming. In hockey, we have both the NHL and the feeder league, the AHL. Below that are age restricted leagues and then locals. Almost no women would be strong enough to play in the AHL. In the highest women's league, the PWHL, the team with the highest average weight has an average weight of 154 pounds. On the Canucks' AHL team, a weak, generally undersized team, the smallest guy is 175. (of the 28 rostered skaters, fully half are over 200 pounds.)
So at best, your metrics relegates women to a significantly lower league in the name of fairness. But even then, because it's based on physical characteristics, you'd have a disproportionate share of the guys who were too small for the AHL coming in.
Have you ever gone to a women's sporting event? It's goddamn heartwarming. When I was at Christine Sinclair's retirement game, I almost got teary eyed for the number of young girls and their teams all proudly rocking their jerseys and being so excited about that moment (my friend was crying as she remembered Sinclair coming to her school and really encouraging the girls.) Similarly, watching the Goldeneyes (our PWHL team) play you can feel the girls energy as something almost palpable. Those are special and I wouldn't take them away to say "hey, you can play in the third division welterweight team." I'd be worried your proposed scheme would relegate women to some double minor league.
I think there can be a middle ground between "we should significantly reorganize almost every sport and have wild metrics to assess teams" (ignoring of course any knock on effects or how smaller communities could possibly handle this etc) and being transphobic. If you're lumping everything else as transphobic, well it's pretty hard to root for your cause on serious issues.
Sure, in reality we have to settle for things like "reporting on gender pay gaps" instead of "fundamentally uprooting the patriarchy so that people of all genders are uplifted" but the latter is still what I'd push for in discussion. The former is a half measure which hasn't fixed the problem, the latter won't happen. In the trans sports discussion, putting trans people in their own little box doesn't fix the problem for trans people, but it fixes it for cis people, who are the majoriity, so that's fine I suppose.
Re: it wouldn't get watched - plenty of people watch featherweight boxing, or varying degrees of physical (dis)ability at the paralympics! I have no reason to believe that the same wouldn't be true of other sports. You aren't lumping "bad players" with "physically less able players". You'd divide up the sport into divisions which all exhibit people at the peak of physical performance and athleticism for what their meat sack allows. I imagine you'd probably see something very similar (but crucially, not identical) to the current mens and womens' top teams fall out at the end of it. Of course, neither of us can back either way on this up with data, but my opinion remains that this would be fine and even healthy for most sports.
I have watch womens sport leagues! Before we moved I was a regular at our local spot for wheelchair basketball and the womens' teams were a joy.
There might be a middle ground! Othering trans people is not "middle" in any way, as far as I see it.
This really doesn't seem reasonable. Many sports favour size but that's not the end all be all. Again, back to hockey, Quinn Hughes is arguably the second best defenceman on the planet and weighs 180, by NHL standards, he's tiny. That's the beauty of something like the NHL, we get to see the very best in the world against the very best. Watching Hughes against smaller players would be, at best, dull. But if you allow movement between those divisions, very soon you get back to the NHL and no women's leagues. (Or leagues that are so far below the regular leagues that they become even less watched.)
Yes, people watch the paralympics etc but vastly fewer. Boxing is an interesting example but outside of spectacle fights, it's pretty unwatched. It also has to be structured significantly differently as most competitors are not expected to have many fights over their careers. (Pacquio, one of the best boxers of all time, had 73 bouts.)
Consider, even in Canada, where we goddamn love our hockey (every province made a temporary change to our liquor laws so we could watch the Gold medal game in bars), it is all but impossible to watch any of the leagues below the NHL on regular TV/sports packages, even though those are our NHL team's prospects and arguably, the second best hockey league in the world. (KHL is fine but...)
At the end of the day, this has that ring of "I would like to see this, consequences be damned" that the Left is a little famous for. And at the end of the day, these changes would be so an almost insignificant proportion (the number of people who become a pro athlete) of an already small percentage (number of transgender women - I mean, maybe in gymnastics there'd be an issue but for almost every mainstream sport, the concern is pretty unidirectional) can play in a hardly watched league and everyone else just has to suck it up.
It's a thing about which reasonable people can disagree but I think that the sheer amount of gymnastics you have to do to even envisage a world in which this works (okay, we create new metrics for every sport, break every league and create new ones, everyone gets on board with watching dozens of new leagues and pretending there isn't a best league and also women's sports kind of gets relegated) is kind of proof that this isn't an issue that makes someone a transphobe.
Frankly, and why this bugs me, is that I think that when we fight on the thin edge of things like this, even though the cause is noble, it really does make the Left look a little silly. (According to Gallup, about 3/4 of Americans are opposed to transgender women in women's sports.) If we can't be trusted to figure out when we need to compromise with the public/reality, why on Earth would anyone trust our fantastical claims about how we can lead them to a glorious socialist utopia despite all historical evidence to the contrary?
Use size where appropriate, use lean muscle mass where appropriate, use something else where appropriate. Clearly hockey is a case where size is a useful but not perfect metric, so it may need to be taken in conjunction with other metrics. I do not think movement between divisions would be common, as ideally it would be largely based on physical characteristics which people don't have much control over.
Anyway, I should be clear, I am not overly attached to my specific idea of how to divide up sports, I am moreso just opposed to the idea of excluding trans men from mens sports, and trans women from womens sports.
The way sports are framed in the media/society I think is largely to blame for this. The advent of people generally finally giving a damn about women's football, for example, is almost certainly due to a shift in the media narrative surrounding it. If the media and the promoters hype up some division the same way they do another, I reckon you'll see the support.
My suggested approach might not be the way to do it, but yes, transgender people do not deserve to be relegated to their own little box where they won't be bother anyone. You expressed concerns about whether people would watch "lower" divisions in my proposed solution - do you truly, and I mean genuinely in your core, believe that trans exclusive sport divisions would even get a second glance?
I think this is somewhat fallacious. Just because my proposed solution may be unrealistic doesn't make the exclusion of trans people any less transphobic.
Yeah, I am well aware of the transphobia problem in the usa ;P
I understand where you're coming from on the Left Idealism. Its an in-joke on the left for a reason, right? Its just like, exhausting to always be the one who has to compromise. I imagine many marginalized folks from other backgrounds can agree.
I think this is the crux. Like, we can both probably admit this is pretty ridiculous and implausible solution you've proposed. (there is no set of metrics that somehow allows Messi in the same league as the best footballers in the world, or that lets Muggsy Bogues, 5"3 in the top division of basketball, but those are some of the best in the world at their sports.) But somehow, despite that, and there not really being a good solution, folks are still transphobic if they'd rather you didn't break sports on behalf of a tiny fraction of a small percentage of people? I mean it's just a little ridiculous...
Consider anything else. Disabled people can't play traditional sports in the same way. Is it disability-phobic that they are relegated to their own leagues and events? If we're willing to break sports on behalf of one group, it seems incredibly unequal to not do so for others. All non accessible sports are by definition exclusionary.
Nope. But, a reasonable solution isn't to break sports for everyone else in the name of equality.
We make tradeoffs all the time. Cafes and bars hosting open mic nights is exclusionary to deaf people, should we make it illegal to have one without a sign language interpreter even though that would make those events financially unviable in many cases? My sister, like many, has trouble reading, so struggles with foreign movies. Should all foreign movies have large pauses so that anyone who struggles has time to catch up? Or are we phobic to deaf or those with reading issues?
Trans folks face very real and heartbreaking struggles., here are so many serious issues that affect them. Breaking sports on their behalf isn't going to win hearts and minds. Insisting that people who don't think we should implement unrealistic solutions are transphobic is not helping.
To be clear, I don't think people are transphobic if they disagree with my solution. I think they are sharing a transphobic view if they share that the solution is to exclude trans people. We can completely divorce this conversation from my idea of how to solve the issue. People far more qualified than you or I will be the ones to figure this out. I can only hope that they will not so willingly throw trans folk under the bus.
You mention disability sports and open mic nights.
I'm not disabled, nor have I studied this, so I can't speak to how they feel about having a total separate set of events. Whether or not it is acceptable is not for me to comment on. It feels, to me, a bit exclusionary in an icky way, but I can't begin to comprehend the lived experiences of the disabled and how or why disabled sport being its own thing has been good or bad for them.
Open mic nights being inaccessible to deaf folks is perhaps a bad example, because sign language interpreters are well established and if they wanted to make their open mic night accessible they could, very easily.
Anyway, I appreciate that you have taken the time to have a discussion about this but I think I'd like to disengage from this thread now - keep well
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for being clear and polite throughout! That's an increasingly rare thing on threads like this.
I do hope though you'll maybe think about this next time someone gets labelled as transphobic for not wanting to break sports for a tiny fraction of a small percentage of people. Until we have a good solution to present them, it's not an entirely unreasonable position as I think has been demonstrated.
Take care and thanks again!