Fairness in sport is a red herring. Using it as a cudgel to assault or undermine trans rights is automatically bad faith. He knows it and did it for clicks.
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You have two masters bike racers that are 55 years old.
One retired early on a fat pension, never had kids, trains 12 hours a week under the watchful eye of a coach, and rides the best equipment available.
The other is still in the 9-5 grind, has a kid at home, canât justify the cost of coaching or afford top shelf kit. Only has 7 hours to train.
THATâS NOT FAIR.
Trans women are women. I would advise any cis male to avoid defending any view to the contrary.
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Right. As a CIS male, I have no dog in this fight, nor do I particularly care about sports competition, but are you as a CIS male gonna turn to all the AFAB folks around and say, âfuck your feelings about fairnessâ? That strikes me as being insensitive.
Itâs perfectly reasonable to prioritize inclusion, but doing so is going to come at the expense of another historically marginalized group.
Did you watch the video in question or are you passing on anotherâs characterization of it? I saw it at the time and thought it was fairly innocuous. I just went back through it, admittedly, I skipped through it and didnât see anything especially objectionable.
Iâm not trying to engage you in a debate on this or prove you wrong, so by all means ignore my request if it suits you, but if thereâs something specific in that video that you think is particularly onerous, Iâd be curious to know what that is.
As for him âdoing it for the clicksâ that video garnered 48k views which seems below average for his content.
He stepped in it as soon as he started talking. And yeah I watched it. Like I said⌠fairness in sport ainât real. Any argument based on that concept is already tainted.
i think i can summarize my feelings on this topic as follows:
- the science shows that going through puberty producing lots of testosterone, unsurprisingly, helps your athletic performance
- people who did not have that advantage are probably annoyed that others got that advantage
- people who do not feel at home in their body want to compete based on who they identify with, not necessarily what gender they were assigned at birth
how could any one stance ever please everyone involved?
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itâs frustrating that a cis female athlete could be at the top of her performance and yet edged out by a trans woman due to biological chemistry. it doesnât mean that trans women shouldnât be considered women, but it does complicate sporting events and the idea of having a level playing field within womensâ sports is jeopardised for now
I see your point and tend to agree. Fairness is certainly nebulous and only a great deal less self-evident than people believe.
Exposure to testosterone in utero is sufficient to produce physiological differences that provides an advantage in certain sporting endeavors. Puberty is not strictly necessary, but will increase those advantages.
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Oh, thatâs absolutely bullshit. Look at race results, for christâs sake!
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You do realize that the biological chemistry of a trans woman on HRT is NOT EVEN CLOSE to the biological chemistry of a man?
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tires thread
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THIS.
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Nor is it close to the biological chemistry of a woman. The physiological advantages a trans-woman might possess may exist to a greater or lesser degree based on the type of transition theyâve had.
Would you then put the onus on the sporting body to interrogate the trans-woman about their transition? I think not.
Also, a 135lb amateur woman beat the entire field (men and women)in the 25mile grav grav race yesterday. Itâs a mass start field containing everything from people âjust trying to finishâ to committed amateur bike racers that donât feel like doing the 50 mile version. Some people are faster than some other people.
Once you move away from the most elite of the elite (to where most examples of this are playing out) there is a gigantic range of w/kg, ability, access to equipment, and other factors that play in. Hell, you can find just as much morphological differences in your average Tuesday night crit between people of the same gender as you can between biologically different athletes as a whole.
We can agree that if you cherry-pick data you can make an argument that biologically male athletes are more likely to have certain advantages over biologically female athletes but that is so far removed from absolute that it has no place in the discussion.
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Youâre wrong. And beware, youâre on a pathway that is known to lead to overt transphobia and the resulting brain worms. Best to back off this line of argument now.
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Youâre missing one aspect of this analysis, which is that the winners tend to come from the end of the bell curve. So, if you map the physiological capabilities of AFAB and AMAB folks, say in terms of W/kg or whatever, theyâd be largely overlapping bell curves except at the extreme ends. On the one end, you have AMAB which the area from which most of your winners are going to come.
But they donât.
Back off before you irrevocably make a fool of yourself.
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Yeah dude, and a woman who is 6â has a distinct advantage over a 5â5" man in a huge range of sports. So what.
Orc is right⌠let it go. This path leads to a really shitty place.
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Fuck⌠itâs SPORT fer chrissake⌠itâs an insanely tiny fraction of people that actually get PAID to do sports. Statistically, itâs almost noise. We only notice the best of the best because they do get paid. For literally everyone else itâs a leisure activity. Let people live their lives.
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You wanted to end the argument by starting with âyouâre wrongâ and then threatened me with the label of transphobe?
Seems about par.
I have been very precise with my use of language here. I have zero inclinations towards fairness in sports, as I mentioned, I have no dog in this fight.
I do however have a trans kid and have been to several gender spectrum conferences in which these things are discussed. FWIW, the folks on the leading edge of gender identity are doing great work, but have demonstrated a limited understanding of sports physiology. Reasonably so, because for them itâs way down on their list of priorities.
Because it doesnât need to be a priority for more than 99% of people participating in âsportâ.
The ones where it matters have governing bodies to work through this, not youtubers.
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