General Trans Thread Part 3

[mamamea]

www.adn.com/sports/2016/05/27/at-alaska-state-track-meet-a-transgender-athlete-makes-her-mark/

"Wangyot posted the third-fastest time in the 200 preliminaries and the fifth-fastest time in the 100 preliminaries. The top eight runners advanced to Saturday's finals."

So Wangyot knocked out two girls from their place in the finals.

BBC are discussing the inclusion of trans athletes on their Sunday morning discussion programme shortly.

Ffs, typical BBC whitewash. They are completely missing the point.

Not mentioning actual hormone levels.

Oh and Kelly Maloney

Wrong body, lady brain. Its full on bingo.

This is infuriating. How anyone can look at KM and not see that he's a homophobic, misogynistic autogynephile (with a history of violence against women) is baffling.

Thank goodness the one panel member who isn't buying into this. And the comments from the public.

And love how KM ignored falon Fox when discussing how it could happen in, for example boxing.

I need tea to calm down now.

This is gaslighting of women on a mass scale; telling them that their realities and bodies and experiences can be reduced to nothing more than a feeling. I'm also sick of the only opposing view usually being presented as coming from a right wing/religious angle, when imo, the whole notion of gender is regressive and conservative.

I think this will lead to girls and women retreating from competitive sport. The testosterone level is set ridiculously high at 10. Most women have levels below 2.3. PCO can push it up to nearer 4 but reducing the max testosterone to 5 would make more sense, and saying that if you have a Y chromosome you can't compete at a high level as a woman. There are lots of other things you can do but competitive female sport shouldn't be one of them. I got annoyed with the bloke who kept saying the level playing field doesn't exist. that isn't an excuse to make things even more unequal.
If some men want to dress as women and believe they have special girlie brains (a notion I find offensive) then if it makes them feel happier i won't object unless women are actually discriminated against by their behaviour.

Do people on FWR really not recognize who Susan Faludi is? Reading people just referring to her as the daughter of a transwoman makes me sad.

Not meaning to derail. I like this thread.

I hadn't heard of her until I read her Guardian article a couple of weeks ago

Found the link on YouTube re the BBC debate about transgender competitors:

Apologies if I've got my facts wrong but didn't Kellie admit that she nearly strangled her ex-wife and it was one of her daughters that stopped her !!!

I've watched a few seconds of that video and so far it's a bunch of obvious males in wigs and make up saying trans women have no advantage. Well sorry but just look at them, they are taller, bigger and stronger than any female I've seen and they aren't even athletes! They are delusional

The thing that annoys me was there was no-one there to talk about physiology or the disparity between female and male sports performances or the examples of average male athletes cleaning up when they compete in women's sports. They asked a bunch of MTTs who all said they got less strong after taking hormones. So what? A sociology professor talking out of his arse and one woman who was there to talk about the shootings in the US who bravely suggested this is unfair on female athletes.

It seem like the doctor at the end was more critical but he was barely given a chance to speak. Why did no one mention that the top women's records across all sports are generally 90% that of men. Why do they think this is? And the guy saying its a "non issue"? Ffs it's the usual "women being hysterical over nothing" narrative.

Puerto - good point. For those who haven't come across Faludi other than on this thread, she wrote "Backlash: the undeclared war against women" which I think is a fantastic piece of writing. The thesis is basically that everytime feminism looks like it might actually be achieving progress towards equality, there is a massive backlash against it - think "women can't have it all" articles in the press, Hollywood going from "9 to 5" (brilliant satire of workplace sexism) to "Working Girl" (Meg Ryan simpers, undermines genuinely competent female boss played by Sigourney Weaver, and gets Harrison Ford as her reward), etc. It was one of the great feminist books of the 90s.

So to read that article is a bit like seeing Achilles shot in the heel - one of my great heroes brought low by the hopeless men in her personal life.

I agree, I thought it was a very biased report, why was there no doctor challenging the ridiculously high testosterone level of 10 and explaining the differences between male and female bodies? You don't develop a female pelvis and muscle composition just by taking a bit of oestrogen. I suspect female athletes are reluctant to speak out against it because the trans lobby will smear them.
Men in wigs and make up, and necklaces. Fine if that's how they want to look but they look more like Dick Emery in drag than women.
I'd quite like to be a swift, it looks fun, but I know I can't become a swift no matter how much I tell people I identify as a swift. (realises she has now left herself open to bird brain jibes.....)

I still have my dog-eared copy of Backlash from my early 1990s student days. It's even more bitterly relevant now. Who would've thought that the new fronts to open up would be the transactivist movement and men from stone age cultures being allowed to trample over decades of progress so that women in Germany and Sweden are being advised to restrict their movements for their own safety. I could not have imagined this back then and I'm sure Susan Faludi couldn't either.

If the definition of trans is "someone whose gender identity does not match their biological sex", there is an admission of the fact that a transwoman has the biological sex: male. In which case why does this get forgotten in every discussion of trans people? To mention the truth to some people when talking about sports or abortion or periods is heresy, but it's an accepted and fundamental part of being trans.

So many inconsistencies!

That's such a good point eight although I think the ideology is moving away from that description with more and more trans people saying their body/penis etc was always "female" since they feel female. In which case the definition of trans seems to become something along the lines of "someone who was assigned the wrong pronouns at birth".

I just find the idea of a person saying they were "always" female when they were born genotypically and phenotypically male nonsensical. In what other way is it possible to be female? I guess we're back to special lady brains again.
I can't multitask and am rubbish at make up and rarely wear jewellery, perhaps I'm really male, or perhaps the genders just aren't that binary.

Lady brains for all! Nobody has a gentleman's brain though.

Here's a petition against the IOC asking for fairness in the Olympic games: www.citizengo.org/en/sc/35683-fairnessatrio-female-athletes?tc=tw&tcid=24886134

Not sure about that Citizengo petition EightNoineTen. Look at the other petitions on it, it seems motivated by socially conservative religious nutters trying to ban abortion and suppress gay rights unfortunately. That's what drives me mad about this - I'm a liberal progressive feminist and my objection to men barging into women's athletics seems to place me on the same side as these loons.

Oops I just signed it shins didn't even think about where it had originated was just glad to be able express my view. I will do that in future though so thanks for the info. I just hope I don't get bombarded with emails from them. Like you I find these people beneath contempt but am also very angry about 'men barging in" as you say.They seem to be barging in everywhere and stomping all over our rights...

Does anyone know if the 2 British Transolympians are the only potential trans olympians at this year's Olympics? Several papers etc have suggested that we're the only team that is thinking of putting trans athletes forward but I was wondering if that's just because we're the only one that's announced that we're thinking of doing it. How much secrecy is there surrounding the teams of other countries? Any knowledgeable sports fans out there?

It's so annoying how the only other people fighting this stuff are of the very right, gay -hating variety. It's odd being on that team iykwim.

Just in case anyone hasn't seen the Abortion Support Network thread ... :(