Also, “lazy transphobia”?
It is lazy to sit there and applaud Thomas. It was lazy to let trans women into women’s sports. It is lazy to rely on testosterone as the measure to allow trans women to compete; & lazy to ignore recreational sport having had all boundaries dismantled.
It isn’t transphobic to want sport to be segregated by sex. And the work people are doing to try to ensure that girls’ & women’s sport continues to exist is anything but lazy.
In an ideal world Charlotte Nichols & all the other “ZOMG YOU TRANSPHOBES!” people would run laps while they reconsider this stance. Push-ups, sit-ups - let’s even bring in ballet punishments: silencing by (for example) petit allegro is a fine tradition. And then we can see how measurably differently men & women (of whatever gender identity) perform. If they really believe what they say, surely they’d jump at the chance to help with researching this claimed absence of difference in physical abilities between women & trans women? Doubtless those ranting on Twitter would be breaking down the doors of their local university’s Sports Science department were such a study to recruit.
In fact - why isn’t there any such study? It doesn’t need to be elite athletes, so it’s not a sample size problem. Participant names wouldn’t be published, there are no grounds to claim taking part would put an individual at risk. Covid has shown that such a study could very successfully run internationally, so refusing to participate because it was assumed to be “too white” (which would be foolish, given research must begin somewhere*) would be a non-starter. And as a bonus, we might even get some more research into exercise & the female body (crazy thought, I know, but I’m dreaming big this morning) simply by virtue of needing to have comparative data.
This - seriously & genuinely - is research to benefit trans people, but it isn’t being done. Trans men taking testosterone gain a very different muscle-building capacity: they need information about how best to use that safely, and studies to be looking at & for long-term implications. Exactly which weight-bearing exercise will be best for trans women and which for trans men plus what sort of regime for bone protection best suits each group needs researching given the heightened but non-identical osteoporosis risks.
- I can’t imagine that a study with a majority of ethnic minority subjects/participants would be found acceptable either, mind you: I’ve seen people argue that black people should never be asked to be involved in medical research but medical research should never be done without them - & of course refuse to explain how that would actually be able to work. Not parody accounts, not being sarcastic, just rolling through in their luxury belief Zorb-of-Privilege where they always hold the talking stick & once they’ve come up with the wondrous solutions to the world’s problems it’s up to the little people to figure out how to actually enact them. Can’t expect them to do ALL the work - & in fact, do feel free to pay them for all this emotional labour
