How do the people who believe gender is more important than sex think about the sport issue?

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I'm not going to ask posters in good faith to expose themselves on here (though if you do, thank you) and the classroom monitors never post on the sport threads. But anyone who understands the pro gender argument on sport?

I've seen some arguments that I do agree with. It is absolutely true that women's sport has historically been 'lesser' or not existed for sexist reasons - Victorian arguments that women shouldn't do sport at all because it might affect their fertility, or their health, or that it would mean exposing their bodies. And sexist arguments that women's sport has no value because women aren't as strong as men. And the issue that Title IX was meant to fix in the US, that women's sport wasn't funded properly because men weren't interested. And the fact that there are sporting events where women have won overall - ultrarunning for example, or that category of shooting which was unisex until a woman won the Olympic title, and the sexes were immediately separated after that.

I will accept all those, and believe that the only solution is probably open categories, with gatekept XX categories which include certain DSDs on a specific basis (probably only women with Swyer syndrome and CAIS would qualify).

I find it incredible that anyone can genuinely and convincingly defend the current mess in sport. The aim at present seems to be to pretend that the current situation is how it's been for a long time, and no changes can be made without more evidence, while shouting down any efforts to provide such evidence by eg keeping records of people's sex.

I suppose the big change came in 2003 and for a huge number of competitive sportspeople, that's before they were born, or when they were tiny.

@Adrianneanneanne

Still there's no answer as to why we can't just have trans categories. It's almost like a shame thing. Surely the rational thing to do is have a separate group, not pretend you're identical to born women

Because that doesn't validate some enough. When I was at uni they opened 'third space' toilets which anyone could use- they were floor to ceiling and had individual sinks etc but people recognised it was great for those who are trans. Seems to have regressed now and rather than being logical and wanting functional and fair solutions it's about being validated as real women. Haven't found the same phenomenon with transmen to be honest.

I've not read the whole thread so sorry if I'm repeating anything but I've worked with some very young women who would not accept that men are, as a sex, stronger and faster and thought I was old fashioned and sexist for believing otherwise. I used to joke that they'd been watching too many superhero movies and also put it down to their being fortunate enough to have never had to learn the hard way i.e from an assault. I never dared ask what they thought about transwomen in wonen's sport but I feared the worst.

@Floisme

I've not read the whole thread so sorry if I'm repeating anything but I've worked with some very young women who would not accept that men are, as a sex, stronger and faster and thought I was old fashioned and sexist for believing otherwise. I used to joke that they'd been watching too many superhero movies and also put it down to their being fortunate enough to have never had to learn the hard way i.e from an assault. I never dared ask what they thought about transwomen in wonen's sport but I feared the worst.

Absolutely exactly this, Flosime.

I was floored at our last teacher training when I said that boys were stronger than girls, all the other teachers in the room - younger than me - turned on me and acted as though I had just said something appalling.

I remember thinking 'sheesh, girls are going to get hurt!!'

But then amongst my pals, many of whom have teenagers, it is amazing how many completely buy the untruths - a trans woman just has to lower her testosterone though and voila - exactly the same as a woman.

Solve the problem of athletes having the advantage of male puberty by giving young kids puberty blockers because it's completely reversible if they change their minds.

Etc.

Either they have believed what they have read, or they are just parroting what their teenagers are telling them.

Also, I have actually competed at a sport at European level and trained with men, so I know how strong and fast - and deadly - they can be compared with women. Without that actual physical experience maybe women really don't know.....

Because there is some indefinable and unspeakable quality that transwomen have which means that their views matter more than women’s views.

That would be their biological sex. Which is different to gender. And which illustrates why those of the female sex require their own spaces, services, resources and sports, because in a mixed sex group they are always subordinated.

.... and one of my pals was all for supporting JK Rowling and thought it was all rubbish until all of a sudden she said she had changed her mind and didn't want to talk about it any more.

She had seen all the abuse Laurel Hubbard had got and felt sorry for her and was rooting for her to win. I honestly don't know what to say to that, except that it's a very obvious and rather sad example of women always putting others first - abuse and threats hurled at women mean nothing, but when a trans woman is criticised, everyone feels sorry for them.

Here are two of the arguments I’ve seen from trans allies:

One man said that the key test was how trans women actually perform in competition and as some of them hadn’t done very well, that proved they had no unfair advantage.

One woman said it would be unacceptable to make trans women compete in the men’s category as it would out them as trans.

@TheGreatATuin

I'm not sure it makes much of a difference. Once you've managed to have such a mental disconnect that you think it makes sense to categorise anything by gender stereotypes, you either have to determinedly keep ignoring the blatant problems with it or realise that you've been defending something indefensible. It turns out a lot of people would rather double down than admit that they got something very, very wrong.

Yup

Thank you all.

If girls/women are just as strong as boys/men, why are they worried about getting attacked because they could just flick them away like flies, surely?
And obviously the men's and women's sporting achievements etc would all be on a par too!
How stupid are these people??!!

I have seen it argued that we should be reframing sport to make it about participating and not winning.

From what I can see there are essentially two groups of people on this.

One group actually believes that there is no real difference between male and female competitors. Most people like this aren't highly sporty themselves and don't work in very physically demanding sectors where they can directly compare themselves to people of the opposite sex.

They think that the idea of differences in this way is just sexism.

Then there are people who realize there is a difference but think it doesn't matter. Some of them think that basically if you are making transwomen compete with men, it is horrible and impossible, so in order to be welcoming and inclusive, they must be with women. They tend to value inclusion over eveyrthing else - that is the ultimate good.

Others believe that transwomen are just really good at sports compared to other women, in the same way tall people are better at pole jump. They have totally accepted the premise that TWAW in a completely literal way.

Thanks to all but particularly @MangyInseam. It makes me feel calmer to have the arguments laid out like this.

Main thing I take away from it is that many people aren't very good at logical reasoning.

They know how to semi-intellectually justify a position, but they don't know how to interrogate it for coherence. Or they just don't want to.

The actual fallacy is obvious and straightforward - as Jon Pike just put it on Andrew Doyle's Free Speech Nation yesterday:

The argument that people advocating for Thomas's right to to swim is that those male advantages don't matter from the point of view of fairness. Now there's an argument there, but it's an argument for unisex sport - is an argument for the abolition of women's sport.

You could say, look let's just everyone compete in the same competition. No women's sport. Men will win all the time - almost all the time - because of their biological advantages.

What you've got here is actually a worse argument than that 19th century chauvinism. What you've got here is that with kind of added postmodern salt and pepper, yes, added seasoning, to say that, well, male advantage does matter so we should have a female category, but then male advantage doesn't matter for trans people to compete in that female category.

It's a metaphysical belief but people aren't used to hearing those any more so it's odd. Children used to be more likely to grow up hearing that 'this bread and wine will be to you his body and his blood' or to hear about ordination - different kinds of transformation based on words and belief rather than fact. This seems to be the new version.

Other posters have done a much better job at expressing what I feel, but I'd just like to add my 2 cents.

I'm an experienced female runner and I've witnessed the differences between the sexes. Males have larger lung capacity and hearts, bigger muscles, generally longer legs etc. It all adds up.

It may be 'only' be about 5 transwomen a year, but they qualify and run the Boston Marathon in women's spaces. This event is prestigious and most runners have to time qualify by age and sex in another marathon to apply. This is also the event in which women were banned from running for decades and it took the likes of interlopers Bobbi Gibb and Katherine Switzer to prove that they could run it to open it up to women.

Those 5 slots have been taken from deserving females. I'd be open to a trans category. www.marathoninvestigation.com/2018/03/trangender-boston-marathon.html

Would a TW compete in a woman's event if they thought they could win a men's one?

@Tiddlywinkly thank you for that. Absolutely fascinating article from start to finish - the public idea of the 'Run in a Dress' events clearly being that it is a sacrifice for men to dress as women, a funny humiliation or joke with a mixed homophobic/transphobic/misogynist undertow, and yet Stevie found wearing that Alice in Wonderland dress immensely exciting to the point that it's their main memory of the event, and it was a route to going out in public as a woman. And now says 'i am a female' and the writer agrees. Never thinks about the women bumped from the list to accommodate their place.

[quote Tiddlywinkly]Other posters have done a much better job at expressing what I feel, but I'd just like to add my 2 cents.

I'm an experienced female runner and I've witnessed the differences between the sexes. Males have larger lung capacity and hearts, bigger muscles, generally longer legs etc. It all adds up.

It may be 'only' be about 5 transwomen a year, but they qualify and run the Boston Marathon in women's spaces. This event is prestigious and most runners have to time qualify by age and sex in another marathon to apply. This is also the event in which women were banned from running for decades and it took the likes of interlopers Bobbi Gibb and Katherine Switzer to prove that they could run it to open it up to women.

Those 5 slots have been taken from deserving females. I'd be open to a trans category. www.marathoninvestigation.com/2018/03/trangender-boston-marathon.html[/quote]
And it's not just the direct impact on the women bumped out, it's a wider, insidious negative effect on women's sports in general. Why bother even starting to compete when you have a massive handicap in your ability to win? For contact team sports like my own, it just takes a transwoman on one team to change the whole dynamic of a game. To know that every time you go up against them in a tackle you have a much higher chance of injury.

Main thing I take away from it is that many people aren't very good at logical reasoning.

They know how to semi-intellectually justify a position, but they don't know how to interrogate it for coherence. Or they just don't want to.

I think your last sentence has it. For most politically aware, vaguely bright and thoughtful people, if you were asked a simple question (eg "what is a woman") that you couldn't immediately answer, or something was stopping you from being able to answer, you might forget about it after one or two times but surely once you'd deliberately ignored it for the third/ fourth/fiftieth time something would start pinging in your brain: you're not quite sure what you think on this - why is that?

For me there would be a desire to grapple with it, even if it's to conclude that you don't know, or to narrow down in the bit you think is fuzzy or problematic.

But clearly, ppl are making a deliberate decision to not think about it too hard yet simultaneously proclaim that their statements are the correct views.

[quote Tiddlywinkly]Other posters have done a much better job at expressing what I feel, but I'd just like to add my 2 cents.

I'm an experienced female runner and I've witnessed the differences between the sexes. Males have larger lung capacity and hearts, bigger muscles, generally longer legs etc. It all adds up.

It may be 'only' be about 5 transwomen a year, but they qualify and run the Boston Marathon in women's spaces. This event is prestigious and most runners have to time qualify by age and sex in another marathon to apply. This is also the event in which women were banned from running for decades and it took the likes of interlopers Bobbi Gibb and Katherine Switzer to prove that they could run it to open it up to women.

Those 5 slots have been taken from deserving females. I'd be open to a trans category. www.marathoninvestigation.com/2018/03/trangender-boston-marathon.html[/quote]
"As for “bumping” someone, I don’t really think that’s an issue, and it never crossed my mind at all until you brought it up."

No, of course it didn't. Who cares about anyone else but meee?

If someone believes trans women are women, they dont need to think about it because its women winning womens sports. People that believe people can change sex/gender just accept that some men chestfeed and give birth and some women have a penis and big lungs. Its just luck like being tall or bendy.

I think it depends on the sport. Some sports disciplines make it harder to see biological differences than others and that's where a lot of the focus has been - you're arguing about times or weights, but both sexes make essentially the same moves. Of course if you're setting male and female athletes directly against each other in those disciplines, then the differences are obviously visible right on the track or in the pool.

Having just enjoyed watching the Winter Olympics, again in those disciplones where the difference between men and women is merely time, it's easy to fool yourself into ignoring differences.

But when you look at the freestyle ski and snowboarding jumping events, the differences were stark. The women simply do not generate the power needed for the extra rotations men manage in their jumps.

Even without looking at an athlete's shape or size, if you just focus on the jumps in a competition, you know whether you're watching male or female athletes.

In figure skating, the same issue finds a different expression. At first it was thought that female figure skaters wouldn't be able to do quads. Same reason - not generating enough power. But the Russians have perfected a technique called pre-rotation, which has allowed them to train about ten or so female figure skaters to do quads (some not yet in senior competition).

The problem is that pre-rotation causes longterm spinal damage when taught to children, hence the careers of Russian female figure skaters are not only hypercompetitive but extremely short. The last two Olympic champions in women's figure skating were Russian minors. They both retired before the next Olympic games came around, because they couldn't continue. So did the silver medallist. Male figure skaters have much longer careers (on average).

So either women cannot do the same rotations or their bodies cannot endure the physical stress for as long as their male counterparts.

I wonder if it might be worth focusing on sports where the differences between male and female bodies result in visibly different moves that clearly demonstrate male advantage.

It’s also likely to become evident that the only way Russia has managed to get a small group of females to do quads repeatedly is to systematically dope them with agents that increase their strength and stamina.

I think there is a not of unspoken sexism misogyny in the "inclusivity versus fairness" framing. - Inclusivity means ability to compete with a reasonable chance of success given your group (female, transwomen etc). - Thus inclusivity for one group directly hards inclusivity for the other group (but its women so it doesn't matter)
In my mind female sport category exist not because women are fundamentally weaker (across all dimensions) but because sport has evolved to celebrate the elite male physique. -

It is interesting watching the interchange with Tony Reali on twitter with Emma Hilton (Fond of Beetles). He really had taken the 'it is all very complicated' and very socially acceptable route. He even doubted that 'female athletes' were being coerced to STFU. No... that can't be happening surely?