Trans people being allowed to compete against women in the Olympics

[OhShutUpThomas]

The Olympics are now allowing men who have taken hormones for 12 months compete against women.

It is NOT transphobic to say that this is grossly unfair and a huge violation of women's rights.

Women who have trained all their lives cannot be expected to compete against people with male bodies and who will be allowed roughly 4 times the normal female testosterone levels.

It's not on. We can't stand for it.

Please get behind this mumsnet. Someone needs to take a stand.

It's NOT transphobic to state that this is unfair. It really isn't.

But splitting it on XX doesn't make it fair for 50% of the population. Where ever you draw a line you make it unfair on the vast vast majority.

I couldn't compete against Jess Ennis-hill because she has a huge HUGE genetic advantage over me, in build, musculature and likely hormones too. It makes no difference whatsoever that she is XX and so am I.

This ruling makes it fair for 0.000001% of the population at the expense of a different 0.000001% of the population.

I do buy the thin end of the wedge argument - the problem is that really does sound like trans bashing...because you really find yourself saying but lots of men with no interest in being trans except to win medals will turn up and they aren't real women....and I desperately don't like the phrase 'real women' playing any part of the conversation.

I don't think elite sportswomen necessarily have high testosterone

I was thinking about this yesterday. There are lots of people - particularly women it has to be said (ref all the mumsnet threads on letting girls skive off PE) - who HATE sport. I guess those women would just find it funny that transwomen are taking the place of regular women in these events.

So women with high testosterone aren't allowed to compete as women anyway:

high testosterone ban

The measurable dividing line is having two X chromosomes

I think that one sentence encapsulates everything if we are not going to have all sexes/genders/whatevers competing together. Any divide has to be measurable and clear to avoid confusion and endless arguing (and some atheltes manipulation in order to win).

Not everyone will be happy of course - this is a no-win-for-all situation. A very, very tiny number of MTF professional athletes may feel it is unfair, but nothing stopping them from setting up their own games under whatever criteria they like (but I suspect they'd have screaming arguments about it among themselves.....)

Re genetic advantage, that would make the argument for dividing up women (and men) further into height/weight/other (depending on sport) categories etc. After all, there is sometimes a veterans section. However, that doesn't mean that pre-op trans women fall into the women category - I feel they obviously don't.

I'm glad to see Ice providing an argument, to stimulate debate, and I wish that more people would step up here - but I guess must of us agree.

People who have an X and a Y already have a fair chance to compete in the olympics. In the males section. If they arent good enough to compete then, well, tough shit. Like you say ice, they lack the 'genetic' advantage (if we say TGism is innate) to do well at their sport.
No different to you competing against Jessica Ennis-Hill.

Why can't pre op trans women compete as men? They don't have to bother with even taking hormones then.

pre-op transwomen should not be able to compete as female if they really believed they were women they'd have the op seems to me

Because that wouldn't validate them as women or give them an unfair advantage over women.

Just to clarify on this point IceBeing She is still (XY), has exceptional musculature for a woman and a much higher testosterone level than average for a woman (though far lower than the male elite athletes). She cannot compete fairly against the elite male athletes so if she is not allowed to compete against the women then her dream of life as an elite sportsperson is over

Post operative transwomen don't maintain higher testosterone levels than women - they actually aim to suppress testosterone to the lower end of the natural women's range (around 0.5 nmol/L) at which point they only have a 15 - 20% muscle mass advantage over women although still lack the same levels of subcutaneous fat giving them a greater power to weight advantage.

So the artificially higher levels set by the IoC (10 nmol/L) clearly won't be fair to your example of a post-operative transwoman, and in fact to me shows clear signs of trying to favour intact men "identifying" as women over both women and post-operative transwomen.

Also, looking at something very basic, such as height. It becomes clear when looking at the bell curve of men's v women's height that a woman can be exceptionally tall for a woman (within that 0.01%) at 6'3" and yet still just be "tall" for a man.

Similarly take a woman like Serena Williams who is considered exceptionally muscular for a woman (to the extent people have tried to say she is a man) and her muscles are nowhere near the levels of extremely muscular men.

So if a slightly above average man declared himself a woman, he automatically vaults into elite.

My dh is looking forward to achieving his dream of being a goalie for liverpool ladies

He's 6'2 (72 inches - take a look at the bell curve!!). Current goalie (siobhan chamberlain) is 5'11 (69 inches - almost equal on the bell curve except men are going gradually up and women shooting down)

Of course better than the footballing dream, he will get to see boobies in the shower ( face at dh...!!)

Sport should be split as it always has been - by biological SEX. Anything else is grossly unfair to women.

If somebody who is born and brought up MALE decides to take a load of female hormones, then yes this may make them less competitive against elite men. However, their CHOICE to do this does not entitle them to intrude in the competitions of people who are born FEMALE, thus giving themselves an advantage and making sport unfair for women.

There is NO reasonable argument against this, which I suspect is why we are yet to hear one.

And Icebeing I wish you'd go start your own thread about how all sport is unfair anyway because some people are better, because it's really nothing to do with this and is a pretty niche view on things.

What you seem to be saying Ice is that there is no point in classification.

However sport is full of classification - different weights, different sports teams, different Leagues, different levels of experience, different types of car, different ages of horse, differently classes of boat, different age groups, different disabilities, different abilities.

You wouldn't compete in a marathon against elite runners, but you can compete against people of a similar age group, experience and sex.

Ofcourse there will be outliers in any group who will be significantly different to the rest of the group, but the point of classification is to make sport more interesting and to enable participation - otherwise there would be one fastest horse and one fastest racing car and no Paralympics and pretty much no women's sport at all.

If men and women can compete equally, there is no reason for any separation of the sexes and no need for this ruling. If they can't (and I haven't seen any evidence that they can in most sports), then the classification needs to be made according to whether they have a man's or a woman's body, because that is the reason for the classification.

Obviously there are a very few cases where this is not clear cut. But that doesn't have much to do with self determination of gender - any more than a heavy weight boxer can feel like a featherweight boxer.

some people are born intersex

What's your point Claudia?

A very few people are born intersex.

That is not the same as being transsexual.

Many transactivists are anti-intersex anyway, and believe intersex children should be forced into a gender of their parent's choosing at an early age.
It is another area of transactivism.

Intersex people aren't transgender.

You do get quite a few transgender people claiming to be intersex but that's normally bullshit.

merry but those born intersex may have a huge advantage and hence even though they a few you may find they are a large percentage of gold medal winners in female athletics.

As vazder points out it is possible to be banned from competing against women even though you are XX if you have a testosterone disorder of some sort. So the XX line isn't actually that obvious a line.

Maryz I don't know why you are so determined to believe I am not on the level with this. I also don't know why, now there is some actual discussion going, you and ShutupThomas are so determined to throw me off the thread.

Don't want to throw you off the thread at all. Please do stay and discuss the impact of transgender athletes on women's sport.

But if you want to discuss some of the more outlandish ideas you have on sport in general, it would be more polite to start your own thread specifically about this, rather than detail this one.