How to reply to DD?

[Louise57]

I was talking to DD about this (after learning this www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4748604-lia-thomas-loses-record)

She's not trans obsessed but isnt GC either and doesnt always agree with common sense for example this: She said that trans are actually underrepresented(!!!) in sports. She said that "if performance was the same between trans and normal people and there was no advantage and trans make up 1/200 of the population wouldnt you expect to have 1/200 first place go to trans?" She also tried to say some statistics about how trans should be seen in every few races or something but she didnt really explain that bit too well but the point was that "trans are underrepresented by population and that the occasional good trans sportsperson should be expected and isnt evidence of an overwhelming advantage"

DD is usually quite good at this statistics stuff (she just graduated in maths) and we usually agree on everything but I didnt really have a good answer to this at the time and tried to change the topic but I feel that the conversation is still weighing in the air. Am I just getting bogged down in the statistics of it? what can I say to explain to her that that isnt all there is to it?

She said that this was all for the point of argument but to be honest I have my doubts given what she argued (i.e. I think shes more sympathetic to the TRA cause than she lets on around me, even though I havent "come out" as GC).

Yes she keeps tweeting about it. And I think Dr Emma Hilton and Colin Wright have a book in the offing too!!

Honestly, I would just park this issue as a topic of discussion with her. You won’t get anywhere and can only hope that with time… sense kicks in with her and her friends

It is up to the OP how to work out how they approach their daughter.

Yes sure and it wasn't meant to be a dig at you or anyone else, all this info is gold dust. I come at this from the perspective of being a mum of a very confused 13-yo who wants to bind and is using male pronouns at school and much more. We're at the edge of a precipice and I'm all about de-escalation at the moment.

All this info is gold dust but at the heart of this is a relationship between a mother and a daughter, that's what I mean

It sounds like she is more interested in the statistical puzzle than outright rejecting your arguments though. I really like statistics too - the below is very long sorry.

It is quite possible that on average trans women are less good at sports than other men (either because of the late transitioning, or because of the drugs etc or because the subset of men that becomes trans tend to be less sporty). But also transwomen might be less likely to put themselves into male competitions because they don't think they belong there. So you could expect that the number of transwomen actually winning male events is close to 0. The number of transmen winning in male events is also going to be 0 (because biology). The number participating is likely to be close to 0. So that is already 50% of sporting competitions (actually more but lets call it 50%) with effectively 0 trans people winning.

Which leads onto the other 50% - women. Transmen might (I don't know) be less likely to participate than women for a variety of reasons - because they are less likely to be sporty, because taking testosterone excludes them, because surgical interventions/puberty blockers make sport harder. Nonetheless there are still female non-binaries and transmen competing. That just leaves the small subset of trans people that are transwomen. It is very very clear that when transwomen compete against women they have an advantage. This is very obvious when you look at the statistics of the the numbers of transwomen in sport and their relative success (especially if you factor in age differences e.g. a 48 yr old transwomen competing successfully against women in their 20s).+ It is also obviously going to be the case when you look at the physical differences. If you want more proof you can look at the records for historical male and female gold medal winners/record holders. Especially the records set by East German athletes etc - they were higher than other competitors because testosterone makes a difference. They were lower than the men's though because so does being born male. So the only reason that more transwomen aren't visibly succeeding in sport is because of the numbers of transwomen actually participating. These participation barriers are for a number of reasons:

1. Actual rules - until recently many sports excluded transwomen from participating from women's sports. Some still do. Some are discussing putting those barrers back n place.
2. Social pressures "that person shouldn't be competing with women they are cheating" or social shaming
3. Self exclusion - a transwomen thinking "I won't compete against women its not fair". Many transwomen think like this.

I think most transactivists and "Terfs" agree that the main reason transwomen are underrepresented in women's sports are for the three reasons above. The main difference is in whether they think this is bad or good. The fact remains that if you removed the 3 main barriers to transwomen participating in women's sports you would see a much higher number of transwomen winning - far more than an expected 1 in 200 participation rate. In fact they would almost certainly dominate the top levels. Whether we want this to happen is the question.

+Obviously that needs to be caveated with the fact that most of the transwomen to come to publc attention are quite high profile -

And I absolutely agree with you.

TLDR: transwomen aren't as "successful" in women's sport proportionally as you would expect because they are less likely to be competing in women's sports than women are. If you look at the numbers that do compete, they are statistically overrepresented not underrepresented. If we "removed all the barriers" for transwomen competing with women (which we are in the process of doing) you would see far more transwomen on podiums comparative to the overall population size. In fact they would probably dominate the top levels if we could successfully remove all legal and social barriers. Yay. Progress.

If your DD is thinking about men who have had the 'full surgeries', then, as the wonderful Exulansic has documented in so many of her videos, many of them are effectively crippled as a result of said surgeries. Which makes sense - one cannot expect to form an extensive cavity within the muscular and other structures of a male without doing great damage. Frequent urinary tract infections and other medical complications are common. One of her videos is regarding a male who completely lost the use of one arm, as a result of Facial Feminisation Surgery. So these individuals are unlikely to be top athlete material, even if they were sporty before the surgeries.

Absolutely let's have trans people in sports, but in the right sex category. IIRC there was a trans man in the last Olympics playing football. They had, very ethically, chosen not to medicate, so that they could play. If, as often suggested here, we had a Women's and an Open category, TW could compete without any upset to their identity.

Elite sports is a tiny sub-category of humans. It is entirely unsurprising that different groups are variously over- or under-represented for a whole range of reasons. The whole point of an elite group is that it is not representative of the wider society, so, if your daughter is looking for a standard bell curve distribution she will be disappointed.

That doesn't mean that TW and TM shouldn't be able to participate and compete. Rather that we need to ensure safe and fair participation for a whole range of disadvantaged groups including women.

I’d argue that going through male puberty gives them advantage. Larger heart and lungs gives them more aerobic capacity. Larger skeleton enables longer strides, higher jumps and greater distance with arm stroke in swimming.

Even if they have less muscle than before, it’s still probably more than most women and is still probably distributed around the male skeleton to be an advantage over womens muscle/fat distribution.

I find the fair play for women to be a great resource. They have links & articles in their Facebook page & are very neutral but informative & really articulate about how unfair TW in sports is

I don't think the '1 in 200 prizes/0.5%' argument is a complete nonsense, in terms of a way of thinking it probably is along the right track, but as a specific number it'd be very, very wrong to use in this context, e.g.:

(a) over half of the 0.5% that you get in e.g. census data relates to nonspecific or ambiguous discrepancies between gender identity and birth sex, i.e. not flat out men/women identifying as women/men, which is what we're interested in when we talk about the trans/sports issue;
(b) the 0.5% only refers to how people identify - the number of people who've actually medically transitioned/are taking the opposite sex's hormones [a pre-requisite for nearly all male participation in top level women's sports] is far smaller, not even 0.05%;
(c) there's a strong historical element, e.g. there was no pathway at all for TWs to compete in the Olympics until 2004;
(d) there's a strong geographical element, e.g. not more than about say a couple of dozen of the world's 200 and something countries are nearly in a place where their Olympic federation would even nearly countenance entering a TW in a women's sporting class;
(e) there's a strong 'shame' factor, with many of the not-0.5% not wanting to go public with their gender identity and/or recognising that they'd face a lot of opposition in women's sports/that it'd be unfair for them to compete;
(f) the average age for beginning a medical transition is around 30 years old, i.e. after athletic peak;
(g) etc etc.

This is a bit of a tangential suggestion but I wonder if she's interested in statistics whether you reading the book "Invisible Women" and either lying it around where she can flick through it, or expressing your surprise/rage about some of the statistics raised in the book around her.

It's not about the Trans issue directly at all.

But I think it is easy for young women, especially those who have not yet experienced discrimination related to pregnancy and child rearing to think that all the important battles have been won for women (votes and pay) and think we are living with equality already.

Even though I was already a feminist, that book was a punch in the gut about how much of society is designed around men, their bodies and concerns. And the many areas that disadvantages women.

It doesn't address transgenderism but it does demonstrate how disadvantaged female bodies are in society, in a way that we cannot identify out of or men into. And it is full of stats.

I wonder if it might do more to find common ground on feminism and how it effects her first rather than a theoretical debate about elite athletes. Unless she's sporty herself, in which case surely imagining that she personally had to compete against males and how unfair that would be no matter how hard she trained ought to be enough!

She said that "if performance was the same between trans and normal people and there was no advantage and trans make up 1/200 of the population wouldnt you expect to have 1/200 first place go to trans?"

That's the data of the overall population. To make a fair comparison, the stats should be about the amount of trans in sports x cisgender and how they rank