I don’t understand why this is being posted now, nor why it’s trending. There are far more up-to-date sources to be found. Human rights should not be a debate
That must be so frustrating for those women who now see that they have no chance due to genetics. I'm surprised that having male bone density isn't considered "doping" if you compete as a female.
Isn't there always going to be someone better due to genetics? As a cis man, I know that even if I trained 24/7 with the world's best trainers, I'd never be as good a runner as some Kenyan dude or as good a basketball player as a tall and lanky dude. I have no chance due to genetics, even though I have a male body.
It's not like humans were made equally. Each body has genetic advantages and disadvantages, and your early childhood nutrition permanently changes your athletic potential too. You can't exactly level the playing field to begin with.
Why don't these sports have brackets instead of gender divides? Is a biological man/woman divide really the most useful distinguisher between athletes?
I guess for context, I just don't get the brouhaha. I am fairly active and tremendously enjoy several sports, even though I'm no good at them despite years of training and effort. A large part of it may be genetics. These are just hobbies and games.
Professionally, doing what I do for work, I'm also mediocre at best. There are people more intelligent than me, better communicators than me, more ambitious than me, more focused than me. Some of that is genetics too, though harder to tease apart.
So what? We don't know the upper limits of human potential, especially the environmental and epigenetic contributors that keep producing better and better athletes and thinkers. We're not static chess pieces with finite moves, but constantly evolving animals whose body plans keep adapting to new conditions as they arise and work to our advantage.
You can slice and dice a million humans into subgroups and there are always going to be statistical clumps, much of which is genetic. But so what? Why is that such a big deal for concern?
If the goal is to tease out the absolute best, only a no holds barred competition (with or without doping) can reveal that, and the competitors will likely get better over time. Anything else is just a handicap made for spectacle and entertainment, so why does it matter HOW you bracket? Why is the sex bracketing more important than race or weight or height or mental ability or leg strength or whatever other distinguisher? Humans never were equal to begin with.
People have been worrying about trans women in athletics for the last fifty years and the discourse against them competing has never changed. Underlying all the arguments is the belief that trans women are not women. A cis woman who is stronger, bigger, and faster than her peers is never called out for the circumstances of her birth and upbringing that allowed it to happen. But the circumstances of a trans woman's birth and upbringing is a matter of controversy instead of being a normal variation. If Lia Thomas was a cis woman with the same physical capabilities she does now, nobody would care.
Underlying everything is the science that says that a person who goes through puberty as a male gets permanent increases in bone and muscle density over people who go through puberty as a female.
In day to day life this ends up washing out in a sea of averages and individuals. In competitive sports, on the other hand, where we're no longer talking about averages but about peaks of performance, peak performers that experienced male puberty will always outperform peak performers that experienced female puberty. The advantage does not go away with hormone therapies, either. You'd get the same controversy if you let heavyweight boxers identify as welterweights too.
Many sports have handicapping systems that restrict or normalize natural advantages to allow fair competition. In track and field, for example, the most basic of these was the male-female split.
Lia Thomas is cheating the handicapping system. It's not fair.
Yeah, I understand there is that controversy (should newcomers with different bodies be able to displace old timers)... and presumably there isn't as much controversy about trans men who can't perform as well as cis men?
But what I don't get is why women's brackets are so much more important than, say, racial or height or any other brackets.
As a cluster, are "people born with vaginas" more similar in athletic ability than "people born of a certain ethnicity" or "people who reliably ate at last 1500 calories a day" or whatever.
Presumably this goes the other way too, with cis women being better at ultra endurance sports than cis men. So what?
Like isn't the whole point of brackets to give lesser athletes a moment to shine in the spotlight, even though they aren't technically the best? So why don't they just make more brackets not based on genitalia?
I think you ought to tell the women who beat her that they had no chance of beating her.
In the NCAA Division I Women's Championship, she competed in the 100 yard, 200 yard, and 500 yard Freestyle events. She won only the last of those. This makes sense, as pre-transition, the longer freestyle events were her best ones.
No, it’s very different. We’re not talking about 90%+ of women, we’re talking about the women who previously held records, who now can no longer compete because we’ve expanded the definition of “woman” to include anyone who claims to be one.
We used to separate men and women in sports exactly so this wouldn’t happen. Now, you have no chance unless you are born male.
So by your own argument, are Caster Semenya or Christine Mboma not women? In the fear around transgender individuals competing and somehow dominating all records (which is a small amount of an even smaller minority) you end up outright excluding cisgender women because they don't fit your increasingly narrow idea of what a woman is supposed to be.
Those cases are different and you know it. The athlete mentioned above is Lia Thomas. From wikipedia:
> In the 2018–2019 season she was, when competing in the men's team, ranked 554 in the 200 freestyle, 65 in the 500 freestyle, and 32 in the 1650 freestyle. In the 2021–2022 season, those ranks are now, when competing in the women's team, 5 in the 200 freestyle, first in the 500 freestyle, and eight in the 1650 freestyle.
How am I excluding cisgender women? I am arguing that forcing cis women to compete against trans women, who have the undeniable advantage of being born with a male body, is unfair. Athletics are separated by sex because, as a rule, men are just bigger and stronger than women. Like another commenter pointed out, if we remove this separation, 99% of female athletes would no longer be able to compete.
I brought up examples of women who were born with an undeniable advantage. They are faster and stronger than most other women because of their genetics. Should they be not considered women? Should they have to compete in their own bracket? Saying that it's 'different' isn't much of an argument.
I bring this up because part of the problem was transgender fears is what fuels the discrimination those individuals face despite being cisgender women.
If your answer is 'it's complicated' then you're admitting that defining what is and isn't a woman is more complicated than how it seems. The majority of transgender women competing in these sports do not break records or anything of the sort.
If we start to limit who can enter women's competitions based on traits, should we do same with males too? Like maybe not allow above average height players in basketball, to make more even field?
> are Caster Semenya or Christine Mboma not women?
My apologies for posting under a shitty throwaway, but fyi, the two athletes you mentioned are XY and thus not women by the simplest and most straightforward of definitions.
It is a very common position that they should be excluded from women's sports. In fact, the fact that all three medalists in the women's 800m at the 2016 Olympics have XY chromosomes is a very strong argument for doing so!
I'm with you on that reasoning, but it is worth noting that were we to drop the gender segregation in athletics then many female athletes lose their careers. It is easy to see why that's a concern for them, even if you don't agree that it is a good reason to keep the segregation.
Human Rights were made by humans. They are not natural, nor given by god. They emerged from the suffering of people and debates. Thus, we MUST debate them, especially when new aspect appear, and we must adapt our views to a new world.
And debates also serve for learning. People learn the reasoning, the history and the deeper implications of something through debate. And regarding human rights this today is more than necessary. Just look at how the peoples are acting today, on social networks, twitter, in debates. They all know the humans rights and take them for granted, yet openly violate and break them, because they don't understand them and just focus on their own single-minded ideology. Especially in the last two years with the pandemia and now the war this became very visible.
Thus, we do need far more debates about those things again. Every generation need to debate it anew to understand it.
Almost by definition a “human right” is debated because it’s based on time and culture. It used to mean the right to be alive, then freedom from slavery was added, then access to food.
Shelter isn’t even an established right, what makes you think wanting to be treated differently from how you used to be would be?
What about access to sex? Internet? A car? Mass transit?
A British former TV writer who became a very prominent transphobe years ago was just interviewed and claims to have had his life ruined as a consequence of publicly vilifying a vulnerable segment of society. Be prepared for a new wave of anti-trans sentiment wherever you get your content as new people take up his ridiculous crusade.
His life is ruined because of how he is online, as much as what his crusade was. While most people who spoke up for sex-based rights "buttoned it" when they were piled on and called TERFs, he decided the only way to clear his name was to fight the battle, but he found himself without many allies because he can be so toxic. He drove away his own friends and called people out on Twitter for not backing him up.
However, while I say "this is as much about him as it is about his crusade", he behaved the same way during the Irish abortion campaign (he was for abortion rights btw) and Gamergate. The reason he wasn't "ruined" back then was because the trans rights issue is far more toxic. Nobody is allowed question the current narrative.
The idea that 'no one is allowed to question the current narrative' is rather absurd, considering I live in a state which has openly investigated and harassed families with transgender kids.
The reason why the debate is 'far more toxic' is because there are places which are outright attacking and removing rights of transgender individuals. Naturally this means people are going to be far more defensive because they don't want to be marked as less-than-human.
I think this all very much depends on where you live.
For example, the UK only introduced the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, and that law still stands. The UK doesn't have self-ID, but there are plans to update the GRA to include it. This is very much in line with what trans activists want.
The problem with self-ID is that it necessarily clashes with existing sex-based protections in the Equality Act, and whether you agree with women's rights or trans rights or both, these contradictions need to be discussed. The problem is that the discussion is enough to get you piled-on, blocked, fired etc.
First, Katy is trans, so where trans rights clash with female sex-based rights, I would assume that Katy is firmly on the trans side. Before using this article as the conversation-ender you think it is, go and steel-man the opposition before you claim that their fears are "at best, overblown"
Second, this article compares being trans with being gay. They're two different things entirely. The only "right" gay people wanted, above being left alone, was equality in law: the right to get married. Gay marriage ask nothing of us. But trans rights asks for something: to believe, and act as if we believe, the reality inside someone else's head, even if it conflicts with our own senses. Personally, I'm fine with that. I'm a married man, long gone from the dating pool. But let's say a woman is about to enter a private space to get undressed and she sees someone that she percieves to be male, but that person says "I am a woman and you must treat me in all respects as if I am a woman". Does that affect her? I would say yes, because she must override the powerful urge to protect her personal safety. Remember, according to this very article, the trans woman in the changing room doesn't need to have undergone surgery, taken hormones or obtained a Gender Recognition Cert. They may look absolutely male while undressed. So this woman must disbelieve her eyes and ignore the inner voice warning her of a possible risk.
On the one hand we tell women to be careful and avoid risks, choose a safe route home, carry pepper spray etc. But when they refuse to get completely naked in a room with someone who looks like "a male stranger"? Bigot!
Third, the article effectively says "look, it's not big deal anyway because you don't even need hormones/op/GRC to change the sex marker on you ID, change sports category, enter the spaces provided for the opposite sex or even have your crimes recorded as being committed by the opposite sex". So... Give us self-id because we effectively have it anyway? That doesn't work, particularly if a lot of people are opposed to it.
Certain trans rights clash with certain female sex-based protections, and many women are only finding out about it when they read stuff like this [1] in the newspapers. Of course they're pissed. This problem isn't going away. It needs to be worked out.
> Second, this article compares being trans with being gay. They're two different things entirely. The only "right" gay people wanted, above being left alone, was equality in law
Presenting this as a difference is a lie. There is no difference. Trans people only want to be left alone and to have equality in the law. (No, misgendering does not qualify as leaving them alone.)
You can solve all of these situations by treating the transgender woman the same way one would treat a cisgender woman in that situation. Nobody is obligated to be comfortable undressing in front of a trans woman, in the same way they are not obligated to be comfortable undressing in front of a cis woman. Nobody's going to call them a bigot just for not being comfortable getting naked in front of a stranger.
Transgender people are liable to get beaten for using the changing room or restroom, so many try to avoid public changing rooms anyways.
> So... Give us self-id because we effectively have it anyway? That doesn't work, particularly if a lot of people are opposed to it.
No, it's more like "Give us self-ID because it will help us, and all the reason anyone will give to oppose it are false." This is what the article is about. It will help them get married with the correct name on the certificate, along with some other boring administrative things, which, like gay marriage, asks absolutely nothing of you. It is entirely irrelevant to your example with changing rooms. The hospital example, which is mostly behind a paywall, seems more to do with a horribly sexist notion popular in Britain that a woman cannot commit rape than with the gender of any parties involved. (Note that I am referring to "rape", not "things that British law would consider rape", which is also subject to this notion.) In any case, it too has nothing to do with GRA reform.
What even is a "sex-based right" anyways? Most legal civil rights are equality rights, which apply to everyone equally.
Again, this is objectively false. I live in a state which has been actively removing the rights of and harassing transgender individuals. This is not something that's up for debate.
To say that 'nobody is removing rights for those who want to live as the other sex' is to deny reality.
What state, and which rights are being removed? Give us some pointers to the laws related to those rights which are being removed. If you can show proof that men and women who want to live as the opposite sex are granted fewer rights than others I will concede your point.
It shocks me how many low-quality, misinformed comments are allowed to stay in this thread. It’s not hard to understand the difference of gender vs. sex. People think it’s fine to publicly harass and harm someone because their existence confuses them. Language like this is why I have friends who can’t step out the house to do something as simple as grocery shopping without something humiliating happening to them. It wasn’t nearly this bad before, and it’s getting worse as this topic becomes more heated. There is a terrible war happening right now, but people are instead obsessed with making others feel as ashamed as possible for their existence.
I think a lot of us on the terf side of the debate have no intention of publicly harassing or harming anyone. We just don't think trans women are the same as women, and the differences ought to be respected by sports, family locker rooms, etc.
Leaving aside the question of sports, do you really not see how banning someone who looks feminine from women's restrooms would cause awkwardness or discomfort for that person? If a transgender women is being abused by her male partner, you think that she should be barred from any women's resources or support groups even though she is going through the very situation that these resources were designed for?
Also, what about trans men. Do you feel comfortable with a bunch of bearded men with deep voices in the women's facilities? Or, do you instead think by some sort of double standard that trans men are men but trans women are not women?
I'm sorry, but unless you can answer these questions reasonably then your claim that you have no intention of harming anyone doesn't hold up.
