To think it’s completely and utterly unacceptable for men to compete in women’s sports?

[SwainedFreed]

How the hell is this being allowed! I’ve seen the volume of medals they are earning - medals which should be earned by women. Men and women are not physically comparable and this is just a line which once again shouldn’t be crossed.

Kinda. It’s pretty much fixed in cycling, triathlon, rugby, athletics, swimming and a bunch of other sports. It’s not fixed in cricket, football or hockey and this is where the focus should be rather than some random amateur bike race on the other side of the Atlantic. I guess it was an easy story for some DM hack rather than eg investigating what is happening in English hockey. Much easier to file a “look at the mad Americans” story.

Women should be protected and this is in no way protecting women from participating and competing in sports.

Well this is a refreshing thread. Will this be the Olympics that finally peaks the nation to the utter unfairness and outright cheating of favouring the pretenders over women?

I don't know what infuriates me more: the fact sports bodies are willing to pretend biology doesnt matter to be kind to men. Or the fact the Dutch team includes a volleyball player who is a convicted paedophile.

Men should never be competing in women’s sports. Doesn’t matter how they identify. Sports are sex-segregated to create a level playing field and to allow women to compete fairly against their own sex class. Sport is not about having your inner gender feelings validated. It’s about fair competition.

Men who enter women’s sport are destroying the integrity of women’s sport. Their inclusion means the exclusion of women and girls for whom the female sport category was created in the first place.

Women and girls in sport have every right to follow their dream without it being smashed by a strapping male person with a feminine gender identity.

Transwomen have every right to follow their dream of succeeding in sport too, which is why they can compete with other males. Nobody is excluding transwomen from sport - but they should only compete in the men’s category because they are biological males.

YANBU.

Part of the problem with grass roots sport is any ban will be both difficult, and expensive to actually police.

You can't just single out individuals who want to participate because someone suspects they look a bit masculine and might be trans, so even if you take the sensible route and swab absolutely everyone, those swabs still have to be processed, and unless the governing body, or the participants themselves are willing to foot the cost of that, it would fall to the club, and in a lot of sports local amateur clubs just don't have the finances to do that.

It does stick in the craw doesn’t it, because the one thing you want to see in any sport is fairness, so they don’t race donkeys against thoroughbreds, cairns against greyhounds, ten year olds against adults. But men who have been through male puberty, who have male pelvic development, male heart and lung size, increased bone length and who aren’t prone to more injury by their ligaments loosening one week in four are pitched against female athletes and no one bats an eyelash, ( with a few honourable exceptions). It’s almost as though a female athlete’s hard work, sacrifice, records, triumphs, sponsorships, earning power etc don’t actually matter.

How can these men have the barefaced audacity to put themselves into the women's races and then stand on the podium after stealing a place from a woman? How? Doesn't sound like something a woman would do.

She might only have been in her role for three weeks but she's held some fairly batshit views for a long time. I've heard nothing from her to suggest she's had a change of heart.

If they are not good enough, or don't feel comfortable competing with men at elite level then yes maybe they should give up.
They won't be in a minority - most people arent elite at sports and most of us can live with being average!

Fair Play for Women exposed the US Rowing rules: "You pick your “gender” at the start of the season, and you’re done. No more fair racing for females then, because any male can declare themselves a woman and race in women’s and girls’ events."

There is one exception in the US Rowing policy. It is for mixed crew races, which require equal numbers of male and female rowers in each boat. In those events, the females must be “assigned female at birth”. Yes, they can see that letting males claim female seats in the boat gives that crew an unfair advantage, but in this case it affects their male opposition, so it’s not allowed."

It varies by sport and by country. So in cycling, the UCI (the international governing body) states that males cannot compete in female competitions. In the US, the country governing body (USA Cycling) derogates from this for non-elite competition. In the U.K. our governing body (British Cycling) applies it at all levels of competition - in fact the rules originated with British cycling and were then adopted by the UCI.

Similarly, in the U.K, males are banned from female events in triathlon, swimming, athletics, rugby at every level of competition not just elite.

The US is very much an outlier which is why so many of these egregious stories tend to come from there.

There is also the issue that the testosterone levels set for m to f transitioners are far higher than those normally seen in women ( because they are men) and this is accepted, but if a woman is tested and found to have raised testosterone which a f to m transman would be likely to have, this is seen as using testosterone as a drug to enhance endurance strength and performance. Hmmm.

You watch your U15 cricketing daughter face a transgirl fast bowler and tell me it's fair. The power differential (and potential for injury) is obvious.

Quite, shameless male entitlement; as obvious as the cock and balls on display.

There aren’t (AFAIK) any transwomen competing in the Olympics. They are banned from competing in the female category in all the major Olympic sports.

The madness that we regularly see reported from the US isn’t representative of the situation at elite level or even at the domestic level in other countries.

It would be fairly straight forward for under 18's. You can't get a GRC before the age of 18 so a birth certificate should give you all the info you need. It wouldn't be an unreasonable ask as many Y18 teams are categorised by age as well as sex,

Transwomen may be banned, but we know from previous years that athletes with DSD, who have been through male puberty, but who identify /have been identified as female (because let’s face it, they are not going to win medals as men) do turn up in the athletics.

Why should they not compete? Why should they miss out on the medals, the opportunities and the recognition they have trained for?

We don’t demand to see the birth certificate of a child to check whether they really are a U12, or of an adult in a sport with age groupings. You do it on an honesty basis and the same applies for sex. When you register as an athlete with a governing body you are asked for your DOB and birth sex and expected to answer honestly. If you are later found to have lied you get sanctioned, just the same as if you had lied about your DOB.

Who recalls
Karaten Braasch a male tennis player ranked number 203 played a single set against Serena Williams and a single set against Venus. He won 6-1 against Serena and 6-2 against Venus . Two of the greatest female tennis players of all time

Says it all doesn't it

@viques the rules around DSDs in athletics have been massively tightened. There’s not going to be another repeat of Rio 2016.

It's so fucking maddening I can't even look at it any more. The world has gone absolutely fucking mad. Makes me hate certain people tbh, I've had to step back from it. Yet another way for men to shaft women as in time immemorial. And the fucking "be kind" idiots 🙄 and the idiotic handmaidens cheering it on and fawning all over these men........

The penis pandering #bekind handmaidens actually annoy me more than the entitled men. They’re betraying their own sex to support extreme dangerous misogyny. They disgust me

Sure, but in adult sports the only way to be certain is to swab. Not everyone has a passport, and due to GRC you can't be certain any paperwork will actually display birth sex anyway. Swab is unambiguous and everyone is capable of providing a sample.

The same governing bodies usually oversee both women's and men's sports, so if you place strictures on one and not the other I'd expect someone, sooner or later, to take exception and challenge it. It's why I don't think it's as straightforward as declaring men/boys sports as an open category but religiously testing or expecting documentation from anyone wishing to participate in womens/girls. There is also the complication that in some sports, men's club cricket especially, at the lowest levels it's still common for boys of 13 or 14 to be playing with fully grown men, so the logical end point is that everyone is going to have to prove their eligibility anyway, and swab doesn't present the privacy risk of carrying around documentation, nor the risk of losing/misplacing it.

Maybe my view on this is too simplistic, but I think that if you were born with a penis, then you should not compete with people who were not born with a penis.