Encouraging news: rowing

[Pudmyboy]

From the Telegraph (sorry), tried to copy whole article but failed so this is the first paragraph:
British Rowing is considering banning transgender athletes from the women's category unless they were born female in an unprecedented members' vote, defying the sport’s global governing body
Sounds like good news to me!

If anyone else can either cut and paste the whole article or put up a link I would be grateful, my IT skills are pants

british-rowing-defy-world-governing-body-transgender-rules

Thank you @DailyCake !

This is good news. Deplorable of the world governing body not to have the same rules though.

it's the biggest no brainer of all time in any sport which has weight classes, ie in which physical size has been recognised as conferring an intolerable advantage.

Sounds very encouraging 👍👍

“enabling transgender people to take in sport, rather than sift them out, should be the idea”.

Just not in the women's category are of they biologically male because of the advantages gained from male puberty and male physiology (lung size, pelvic configuration etc). I think the director forgot to say that bit on the end of his sentence.

Grrr typo.
*Just not in the women's category if they are....

OP why apologise for it being the Telegraph? The DT is the newspaper that is most on the side of women on this issue.

What @puffyisgood said.

Indeed - most of the comments under the articles in the Telegraph, Times and Mail are incandescent about the unfairness. i fail to understand why our tedious monitors spend so long frantically reporting posts on here - there's a wholesale awakening going on in the press and pleasingly - it's not going to stop.
The wheels are finally coming off 👏

@MrsOvertonsWindow @flyingbuttress43 you are right, I will no longer be embarrassed about subscribing to papers that support women: what I am sorry about is the paper I used to support (guardian) has become so misogynistic and the party I used to support (labour) no longer stands up for women.

Sadly that's the experience of so many of us on the "left " - that the Guardian, Labour etc support a regressive, sexist, homophobic movement that actively harms children and women. Thank heavens #nodebate is finally over in many places.

But, you shouldn’t be copying whole articles like that and will probably find your post gets deleted. It’s not fair on content producers to copy their work like this, even if it’s the telegraph.

What good news. Thank you for letting everyone know.

What if the members don’t vote no male people in the women’s category? It’s possible, it’s crazy how many women are turkeys voting for Christmas on this topic.

Thing is what about trans women who do not go through male puberty. The word should probably been only people born female or trans women who have not gone through any stages of male puberty

It basically does say that. I CBA to go back to copy and paste for you but it says along the lines of "those signed/identified female at birth" which will be biological sex as we have not yet observed babies being born with blue hair.

"those signed/identified female at birth" which will be biological sex

But men who had their sex wrongly recorded will be eligible? And women who didn't have it recorded won't? Makes perfect sense. 🙄

Get enough of these badly written rules and laws in place and it will be worthwhile bribing someone to put "female"...

What matters is someone's actual sex, which should be recorded in current ID, and that should be corrected if found to be wrong.

This is an attempt at a workaround for the fact that current ID is easily forcifiable, but it's creating another problem, which I can foresee biting within fairly soon.

Boys are exposed to higher levels of testosterone during gestation, infancy and childhood as well. Skeletal structure is different, a boy who has his puberty blocked still won’t have the same skeletal structure as a woman. There is evidence that boys outperform girls physically in childhood except for the brief period around the onset of puberty when girls are ahead of boys developmentally and therefore at that time only might in some cases have an advantage on average in height, and possibly strength and speed. Girls and boys are different too. They also deserve their own categories. Women are not just men who didn’t go through male puberty, male and female physiology is different across the lifespan.

Yeah, a male adult who's not been through puberty, a eunuch basically, has full male height (aren't they supposed to be taller on average than regular men?) if perhaps not the full build/strength and so on, that's one physical advantage for starters, also of course there's the lack of periods, pregnancy, menopause, and so on... allowing such people into women's sport would also be difficult logistically (e.g. would starting puberty blockers at age 11 be sufficient? what about 12? or 13?) and potentially dangerous in that it's potentially encouraging kids and their families to take an unproven, potentially irreversible, treatment before an age at which they can sensibly consent.

“adopt a new approach to the women’s/female category in particular, that allows only athletes who have been declared female at birth to compete in the ‘female’ category”.

I like the fact that this is touted as a new approach.....that only women should be allowed in the women's rowing category!! 🙄

I'm glad they're asking members but with 45% female members I really hope male rowers get on board with it as well. So much easier for men to vote to "be kind" and "inclusive" because they have nothing at all to lose whichever way the vote goes.

And the testosterone levels are only a small part of it. If men and women were essentially the same but with different hormone levels, why are we not seeing the same infiltration of trans men (taking the relevant dose of testosterone) competing top level men's sport.....?

Thanks @WorkingItOutAsIGo I have asked MNHQ to delete that post

In an attempt to resolve a bitter transgender row that has created tensions at board level, British Rowing is asking its 31,500 members to vote by 5pm next Friday on their preferred trans policy, with one option to “adopt a new approach to the women’s/female category in particular, that allows only athletes who have been declared female at birth to compete in the ‘female’ category”.

This isn't a new approach, it's what happened from the very beginning of women's rowing until about five minutes ago when a small group of men threw their toys out of the pram and the world bent over backwards to accommodate them instead of telling them to get stuffed.

In the interest of openness, they should be sharing the https://equalityinsport.org/resources/index.html. UK's Sports Councils Guidance for Transgender Inclusion in Domestic Sport which has among the 10 guiding principles:

Categorisation within the sex binary is and remains the most useful and functional division relative to sporting performance.

Competitive fairness cannot be reconciled with self-identification into the female category in gender- affected sport.

Based upon current evidence, testosterone suppression is unlikely to guarantee fairness between transgender women and natal females in gender-affected sports:

‘Case-by-case’ assessment is unlikely to be practical nor verifiable for entry into gender-affected sports.

Categorisation by sex is lawful, and hence the requirement to request information relating to birth sex is appropriate.

Existing guidance from 2013 was deemed to be out dated and no longer fit for purpose.

As a result of what the review found, the Guidance concludes that the inclusion of transgender people into female sport cannot be balanced regarding transgender inclusion, fairness and safety in gender-affected sport where there is meaningful competition. This is due to retained differences in strength, stamina and physique between the average woman compared with the average transgender woman or non-binary person assigned male at birth, with or without testosterone suppression.

Instead of 'in defiance of the global body'.. .. this should be reported as 'in line with UK Sports Council Guidance... we need to reach a point where all sports organisations are required to implement this guidance from 2021.