British Rowing consultation on trans and NB policy

@sevenbyseven
I know you didn't - sorry if it came across as if I was scolding you. I was trying to agree that we can't pretend facts aren't facts.

@zibzibara
Fascinating article. The insuperable moral issue is that at some point the researchers would be experimenting on human babies!

I strongly suggest you read the previous threads you have been on to refresh your memory.

Women do not owe you your type of ‘nuanced’ discussion. Because your posts lack any knowledge of either feminism, biological reality, sports knowledge or any respect of women and girls. We know this from our previous interactions with you.

“Fighting this on ideological grounds across all sports and prioritising sex differences as the primary and universal discriminator is picking the wrong fight. We should be asking "how can we make this work" rather than saying "We refuse on principle even to consider the idea that this could work".”

You are talking bollocks. Your premise is false to start with. It doesn’t matter if you get new people to go through this with you. The result is still the same.

Agree with all of this. I didn't mean in any way that women's bodies are inferior, just weaker as in less muscular.

Everyone knows that the only fair arrangement for girls and women is to separate the sexes, by sex, from the age that boys start to have a biological advantage (around 8).

Anyone who pretends to believe otherwise is either lying, or prioritising men's feelings over justice for women, or both.

This thread isnt about netball or golf or equestrianism or sailing. It's about rowing. So your arguments do not apply. Stop derailing.

Women's bodies are different to men's. Often weaker which means we can't compete in strength/speed competition but differences also mean women perform differently to men in sports like gymnastics and skating, where the disciplines are different for men and women.

@PermanentTemporary & @Helleofabore
You may have covered this, but it should be pointed out that case-by-case determination is cruel especially to kids because it will necessarily result in inconsistencies and perceived unfairness. BR will be drowning in legal challenges.

So sinister. It's almost as if women were at one time banned from most sports and have spent decades carving out the rights to compete in our own right.
We had to fight men to "allow us" to compete and now we're having to fight the same Victorian males to allow us to continue to with hard won sports for women.

I sort of agree with you and also @nothingcomestonothing
We're adapted for gathering and trapping our food (which the family group/tribe relied on for two thirds of its nutritional needs) rather than hunting and fighting. So absolutely, we are smaller, slower and weaker.

But...we would last longer in a famine (yay for thigh and bum fat) and have greater resistance to disease. Lower testosterone makes us more risk-averse and less aggressive, so we tend to live longer (assuming we survive childbirth!). Our joints are more flexible, our pelvises can in effect expand and contract. Pretty amazing, IMO. And all of this is because WE CAN GESTATE AND GIVE BIRTH - as well as run, jump, throw, swim, row, etc, etc.

There is no point in men's and women's bodies competing directly in sport. They're different machines, adapted for different purposes. The sexist logic is to say that if women are athletically inferior, we are physically inferior (not true, see above) and therefore we are just inferior in every way and not even proper human beings.

Most sports were devised as ways for men to practice hunting or fighting skills, so they reward physical attributes that males have. If the broom challenge or the chair challenge were sports, male people would struggle to even take part.

These threads are indeed a mixed bag. You get thoughtful, considered posts like the ones @nothingcomestonothing and @JustWaking have made in the last pages, and then you get rabid ones lacking any nuance and it's a real chore separating the wheat from the chaff.

I'm taking two things from what I've read so far. There is a relevant distinction between competing with, and competing against. Contact sports that pit opponents in opposition to each other have a safety dimension that might require a different treatment to sports where participants compete against the elements. Rugby and Boxing are meaningfully different in this sense to Skiing, Sailing, Shooting or Golf.

The second thing is this idea of inherent, or residual, male advantage. Some sports are relatively simple, in that a single function is tested to its extreme. 100m sprint, javelin, 50m butterfly, that sort of thing. The ones to which the Olympic motto of Faster, Higher, Stronger applies. I completely agree that in such sports, male advantage will often outweigh other forms of advantage to the extent that it would be justified to use eligibility criteria to remove this. That would improve fairness and restore uncertainty. But there are many other sports where male advantage is not inherent, or overwhelming. Equestrianism already sees women and men competing. In dinghy sailing, there is a sizeable advantage to heavier sailors in strong winds, but a significant disadvantage in lighter winds. This is addressed through the design criteria for the class of boat being used in a regatta and could be further equalised by rules about mast height and sail area, for example. I can't see how sex differences between sailors would come into the equation. In golf, there are many skills that a player must master - teeing off involves some aspect of biomechanics and strength, but there are already different tees for ladies and men. The remaining skills - assessing wind effects and the lie of the land, club selection, technique for playing out of the rough, and putting ... where's the inherent male advantage in any of those? There is no reason why golf couldn't be mixed.

We should design these sports and introduce rules that reduce barriers between men and women, not build them up. The rules of basketball were written by people who made choices - ones that mean faster, taller players score more points. But we can chose different rules. Netball places lower physical demands on competitors than basketball but requires greater shooting accuracy and much greater tactical awareness. Are accuracy and tactics things in which there is inherent male advantage? Many universities have mixed netball teams. Why is this a bad thing?

In the long run, the sporting associations will come up with eligibility criteria and rules that balance maximising grass-roots participation with maintaining a level of spectator excitement in elite competitions. Fighting this on ideological grounds across all sports and prioritising sex differences as the primary and universal discriminator is picking the wrong fight. We should be asking "how can we make this work" rather than saying "We refuse on principle even to consider the idea that this could work".

Our sinister plot 🙌🏽🙌🏽

imagine women taking part in sport against other women

how very very outrageous

@nothingcomestonothing even more uplifting is if researchers achieve and refine this in humans, men become entirely expendable:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11601-bone-stem-cells-turned-into-primitive-sperm-cells/

"the technique could allow infertile men to father their own children, and even allow women to produce their own sperm."

Why shouldn't we emphasise the "women are weaker" argument? Women are, on average, smaller, weaker and slower than men. Surely that's the main reason for sex categories in sport

Same way as children are smaller, weaker and slower so aren't expected to compete against adults. There's no shame in it, it's just biology.

Personally I'd prefer not to emphasise the "women are weaker" arguments quite so heavily - my suspicion is that this is playing right into the hands of the MRAs that many posters seem to think I align with

it was about men having leisure, while woman kept the hearth and home, and women not taking part in anysport

This relates to something I've been thinking about a lot recently, inspired by a post on the antipodean fruitfarm. The narrative is always about women being weaker, less than, being relegated to keep house while men did exciting important stuff. But from an evolutionary perspective, that's not what's happening. Men do the dangerous stuff because they are less valuable - if you've got 100 men and one woman, you get one pregnancy a year. If you've got 100 women and one man, you could get 100 pregnancies a year, thus hugely improving the chance of your species surviving. So men are built to chase and physically overpower animals for food, because they are much more expendable than women, from an evolutionary perspective. Women weren't stuck in the cave sweeping up because they were less good at humaning, but because a woman was far more precious a resource than a man, the men could safely be risked.

I'm not explaining it very well, the original post was more eloquent, but it did make me consider my own ingrained assumptions, even after decades of feminist thought and action, that women are less than, physically. We're not, we're more valuable.

A Junior rower under the age of 16 intending to compete as a Junior Woman may be considered and approved by the Expert Panel on application without supporting medical evidence. This will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis and following determination that the trans or non-binary junior has not started puberty.

As the NHS states most boys will start puberty between 12 and 14, saying that medical evidence is unnecessary is a nonsense.

I know Permanent.

One one hand you have people such as the male rugby players in the female teams making their arguments about it being ‘their’ place and they don’t want to be removed from the teams.

Then you have supposedly inclusive policies such as this that then leave those male rowers open to being removed from their teams because they should not have been in those teams to start with.

I understand what they are trying to do, but the reality here is that it is harmful to both male and female rowers.

What happens if that under 16 rower wants to move teams and the new team asks for the expert panel to reassess?

Or they age out and move up to another age group? Need to get reassessed ? Or if the next category doesn’t allow this rower to compete they have then ‘lost’ their team.

This is a minefield.

“It's true that professional Trans athletes may need to decide whether to delay taking hormones, and then may choose to retire earlier than they would like from top-level professional sports - balancing up how hormones will affect their chances competing. Much like professional women athletes may need to decide whether to delay having children, and then choose to retire earlier than they would like from top-level professional sports - balancing up how pregnancy will affect their chances competing (both during the pregnancy and also the permanent changes it makes to your body). Being a professional athlete impacts every part of your life.”

It is remarkable isn’t it. That women need to make such choices and balance their desire to have children with sport.

Whereas male athletes now don’t have to make such a choice to make performance limiting decisions, such as deliberately losing muscle mass (and it is known that can be regained through training) to ‘shape’ their bodies and take hormones. They get to extend their sports career.

Even into their 40s and 50s! They can still compete at Olympic level whereas the vast majority of women are perimenopausal by then and cannot compete.

@Helleofabore - absolutely. I find it so odd. I do wonder who writes these policies. The guidance makes talking to kids exploring gender identity sound like a minefield, but the policies seem set up to make the situation more distressing for a child. Most kids take their cues from adults. If adults tell them consistently that the right category for them is the open one, wouldn't that be clearer? 'I'm a trans girl, I row in the open races' shouldn't be a distressing or threatening explanation to make.

That sounds like a recipe for harm right there. So a pubescent male who has experienced all the benefits of starting puberty can still be rowing in a female team? Just because the panel needs no evidence and that male rower “looks like” he hasn’t gone through puberty yet?

That seems to be discriminatory to me. I know some shorter men that didn’t even start gaining muscle mass until 17/18, still much stronger than girls of equal age though!

And if that male rower then goes through puberty (either a late puberty or detranisitioned or the treatment ceased being effective, what then? They are told they are no longer welcome?

Mark

You have had posters patiently discuss this with you and link you to research across multiple threads now. Your posts still come across as a men’s rights activist would post.

Do you have anything of positive note to contribute about women’s rowing?

Otherwise, I recommend maybe going back to read the previous threads you have been on where you have tried to regurgitate weak arguments about needing thousands of categories because you don’t understand the purpose of sport and you don’t understand feminism, it’s intention or it’s history, while holding entrenched prejudicial views on feminism.

I am happy to repost the studies and the posts explaining where your misrepresentations of feminism are wrong. I can simply cut and paste since it seems you are saying the same things here as you did last time.

Women absolutely aren't trying to exclude anyone from sports at any level - not men, not Trans people.

We just want to keep a category which is only for women, so that women can compete meaningfully. Why should women dedicate their life to training in their sport - to be the best they can possibly be - just to have someone cheat and take away any chance they have to win on the day? It's exactly the same as doping, which is banned.

A doped male athlete is the fastest of all. Are you suggesting we remove all restrictions and have a single open category where only doped male athletes have a chance of winning? Personally, I think that would be a bit shit.

Open category + protected women's category (no doping allowed for anyone) is fine by me, and gives access to everyone. Oh, and both categories should also have prize money, training opportunities etc - that's about fair access and opportunity.

It's true that professional Trans athletes may need to decide whether to delay taking hormones, and then may choose to retire earlier than they would like from top-level professional sports - balancing up how hormones will affect their chances competing. Much like professional women athletes may need to decide whether to delay having children, and then choose to retire earlier than they would like from top-level professional sports - balancing up how pregnancy will affect their chances competing (both during the pregnancy and also the permanent changes it makes to your body). Being a professional athlete impacts every part of your life.

At recreational levels, athletes should still compete in the fair categories. Less might depend on results, but it's still important to the competitors that recreational sports is fair. All athletes must accept that their life choices will affect their performance - whether that's taking hormones, getting pregnant, or having some drinks with friends - and that's ok.

I deliberately didn't make it an airplane (which just taxis around) but a flying car: which still drives really well, and can have an exciting race on the ground against other flying cars. But isn't quite as specialised for going round a track as an F1 car.

Lots of people are very interested in watching women's sports - it's just as awe-inspiring and brilliant as men's sport.

We don't and can't have pregnancy as a sport. That's just silly

@MrsOvertonsWindow
Yup. The gender doping examples we keep hearing about are increasing support for women's single sex sport.

I think you have fundamentally miss understood something if you think women are trying to stop men doing sport because they aren't they are trying to stop them from doing women's sport.