British Rowing consultation on trans and NB policy

[cakesandchocolate]

https://www.britishrowing.org/2022/09/british-rowing-announces-revised-trans-and-non-binary-inclusion-competition-policy-and-procedures/

information with a link to feedback form open to all, not just BR members.
An opportunity to offer opinion on sport inclusion policy going forward

Getting back to the point... this is my sport. Women's rowing. And I'll give my view, based on extensive experience of women's, mixed, scratch and lightweight rowing, coaching and coxing. I know what I know.

Oh mark. Do you think we are stupid?

you can pretend that short men don’t have an advantage over tall women all you like.

Men have advantages over women of the same height, of the same weight, of the same inside leg measurement, with the same length of eyelashes or whatever you want to measure and categorise.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MNTrolls/comments/11vhi0q/mark19735 lol

@SquidwardBound
"eyelashes"
😂😂

@Mark19735
I have no idea what you mean when you say that the fear of the sex classes being diluted won't last.

@PermanentTemporary
Good point. We have been sealioned!

People with a male q angle, larger lung capacity, higher muscule to fat ratio, slower heart rate and hundred other slight biological differences have an advantage over people who don't have those feature. Fortunately there is a really simple way to split one group from the other and it's not height, weight or a tendency to wear lipstick or not.

Why ignore all the other advantages of male physiology? Would it be OK to pitch a male v female boxer if they were the same weight...?

He's the same on the Property board. I hadn't realised he'd made it over here too, until today. 🙄

@zibzibara
Now it all makes sense!

=============================
Anyhow, I have submitted my survey. IMO the preamble by British Rowing is very misleading about the guidance from the UKSECG (may have got the letters in the wrong order there) about inclusion vs fairness - they state clearly that you have to choose one or the other, and they cannot be balanced. Also implies that they think testosterone monitoring is a viable, though not preferred, mitigation method, when they don't. And they try to muddy the waters by saying the jury is still out on the science of whether advantage can be mitigated. It isn't. Lastly, and most egregiously in my opinion they try to introduce the idea of "meaningful competition" as the test of whether males can be integrated into women's sport. The phrase they use is "fair and meaningful" but my guess is that the intention is to drop the "fair" bit and just claim that it's still meaningful because the male advantage has been reduced and that fairness doesn't matter as much in female competition. Jon Pike has a paper on this linguistic sleight of hand.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00948705.2023.2167720

Ah I see Mark the MRA has found his way here 🤪

More of those pesky facts

I feel genuinely sad that BR took the plunge and went for 'open' and 'female' categories, which was surely the right way forward for inclusion AND fairness, and then added a unnecessary doping route for male people to be somehow eligible for the female category. No athletes should be doping themselves to be in that category.

I suppose the egregious insult of a medicated man being considered the same as a woman is more of a minority opinion. But I fucking feel it.

Yes. I imagine they thought of it as a compromise. 🙄
That's meant to be an "eyeroll" emoji, by the way. I am notorious for my poor emoji selection skills.

And it's not a minority opinion.

You keep posting as if to clarify, but it is still incoherent. Although the men’s activist cues are really clear.

Jon Pike has a paper on this linguistic sleight of hand.

@BellaAmorosa that was a very clarifying read, thank you for sharing it!

Mark: mansplain mansplain sneery something something

Women of FWR: here is your arse, pop back to 4chan there's a good lad

You're welcome, @zibzibara

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Thanks for the link to the questionnaire. I was not filled with confidence by having to answer a question on whether my gender identity matches the sex I was assigned at birth! Hardly an unbiased question.

Have you ever looked into wheelchair rugby? Many of the issues being raised on this thread have been addressed, quite elegantly, by the bodies that make the rules in that sport. They have managed to find solutions that accommodate athletes with traumatic spinal cord injuries (i.e. ones that were born without any impairment) but also ones with degenerative conditions such as polio or muscular dystrophy, or neurological disorders such as cerebral palsy. I'm sure that the rule-making bodies have heated discussions about what is and isn't "fair" and there'll have been people arguing it's unfair on those born with disabilities to have people who only recently had amputations joining the team, as these would have acquired more muscle mass than someone with say, cerebral palsy could ever hope to build in a lifetime of training. But do you know what? They've managed to create a fast-moving, exciting sport that is great to watch. And one that accommodates people with all sorts of physical disadvantages - all playing on the same court. What's not to like about that? Wouldn't it be great if women's sport could do the same? Personally I'd prefer not to emphasise the "women are weaker" arguments quite so heavily - my suspicion is that this is playing right into the hands of the MRAs that many posters seem to think I align with, and I think it is a strategic mistake to do this, but it does seem to be the consensus on this board so let's run with it. Let's enable all the weaker people to participate in sport together - regardless of whether their weakness stems from congenital factors such as XX chromosomes or from feminising hormone therapies in later life. Why is that so hard?

Anyway, now that others have stopped typing ... I've circulated the link to my crewmates. We've touched on the issue before but I genuinely don't want to influence them. They should just know it's happening.

Being female is not a disability.

That is an incredibly offensive bit of sealioning.

I mean… I almost want to applaud the effort that’s gone into being quite so misogynistic while pretending to be so reasonable, inclusive and kind (unlike us ‘hysterical’ women).

Except I don’t. Because I’m utterly fed up with this misogynistic shite.

It's odd to look back and remember the misogyny that pervaded sport in the old days. And here it is again. Guess it never really went away. There were always women who couldn't see it though.

Back to the actual point of the thread.

Principle 5

A Junior rower under the age of 16 intending to compete as a Junior Woman may be considered and approved by the Expert Panel on application without supporting medical evidence. This will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis and following determination that the trans or non-binary junior has not started puberty.

How exactly is the expert pane going to make the determination that the junior has not started puberty without supporting medical evidence?