275 female golfers have sent detailed letters to the LPGA voicing concerns about transgender golfers being allowed to compete against women.

[GargoylesofBeelzebub]

x.com/itismarkharris/status/1848423808996413473?s=46&t=AjtjSItRj-kgZwRzL-pdyQ

Yet shamefully they are being ignored.

I'm so sick of this shit.

Hopefully momentum will build and they will exclude these males.

British Fencing today, LPGA soon! Onwards, forwards.

I really hope the pressure is building.

Dh is an avid golfer and loves the competition both male and female (it is a v close second to me..sometimes I don't know if maybe I am the second! 🤣) ...he would never want to see JAMES competing against women. In fact he did say, apart from "that's a fucking bloke", "well highly unlikely to beat the top women anyway". Which is good, but also beside the point. JAMES shouldn't even be in that pool. Are we meant to tell girls not to bother?🤬
So done with this shit 😩

Sorry should have also said spot the obvious odd one out on the photo.

I wondered what was behind this man's sudden growth of a conchences though not enough to stop him bragging about him previously cheating and not having to put any real effort into playing or winning due to his male advantage

Trans golfer opens up on decision to stop competing against females https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/golf/article-13984749/trans-golfer-nicole-powers-stop-competing-biological-female.html?ito=native_share_article-nativemenubutton

Hmmmm…. With a Crowdfunder attached. I wonder what the motivation for this change of heart could be…

Nicole Powers has been very active on TikTok about this and joined their Creator Fund (which pays participants for views). He was then banned from it for saying TW shouldn't participate in women's sports and only after that set up his Go Fund Me.

Couldn't confirm how true that is but the few TikToks I've seen seem to confirm it. I wish he had never competed against women but happy to welcome him to the sane side of the fence. He's certainly very clear that he's still a biological male and retains male advantage.

You know, much as I dislike Grift Fraud Me as a thing full stop, creating one to fund participation by a TW in male sport competitions isn’t the worst use of it. They’ll not get any kind of sponsorship deals & I absolutely believe their SM content has been demonetised. What they’re doing is expensive; they’ll have to train hard to compete against men because they’ll now struggle to compete against them - but struggling to compete against men ≠ belonging in the female category. It means that “participation in [elite] sport” is something to be weighed in the pre-transition risk/benefit analysis 🤦🏻‍♀️

People desperately try to paint the sex divisions in golf as being due to misogyny in the game. And sure there’s a long tradition of that; but there’s also an abundance of data showing male advantage 🤦🏻‍♀️

I apologize. I hadn’t actually opened and read it. I didn’t realise it was to support training and entry into the men’s category. Fair enough, that’s better than I had given credit for.

I'm not wild about the male advantage argument, because there is always some sports where it will be argued that the difference is negligible or non-existent. And that leaves wiggle room. Surely better to say, women have a right to organise their own competitions, open only to women. Even if it's in tiddley-winks or poker or cribbage where sex makes no difference.

Thanks for highlighting the BF change. I'm a fencer but wasn't aware of this. They definitely kept it quiet! I need to be aware of rule changes as a referee, but this wasn't flagged in the normal way. Great news, anyway. Well done, BF.

There are a lot of aspects to being a good, competitive golfer, but how far you hit the ball counts for A LOT.
A fit 30 year amateur man can outdrive a female golf professional by 100 yards

I try to cover all the bases in a way that makes it harder to allow that wiggle room:

1. Obvious male physical advantage- strength, power, muscles, etc
2. Male socialisation - support of sporting interests, better coaches, more sporting resources available to boys, access to places like pool halls, etc
3. Finally, lack of female biology - any and all males do not menstruate, get pregnant or experience menopause so they are at an advantage against all women, even if 1 and 2 can be argued not to apply.

I dislike the inaccurate headlines on these. Women aren’t refusing to play because that person is transgender. It’s because they are male.

i think lots of us (me included) are more than happy to play sports with or against natal females however they identify (as long as they aren’t using any performance enhancing medication ).

I regularly played contact sports with trans players of the female variety. I only noped the fuck out of there when the rules quietly shifted to include anyone identifying as female and I saw the consequences of that first hand.

Yes, but I guess the issue is going to be that would imply that any group could choose to organize itself to exclude any group, just because they wanted to.

This is already legal of course for private groups and arrangements. (But not always looked up on favourably.)

But do we want to say it's ok for groups in a more public sphere to exclude any other group, just because? And in this case on the basis of a protected characteristic. You could have a major chess tournament closed to women, for example.

If there doesn't have to be any reason relating to fairness or safety, then this approach could apply to any group.

The EA2010 in UK law specifically covers this already, saying an organisation needs to prove

......that limiting the service on the basis of sex is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. For example, a legitimate aim could be for reasons of privacy, decency, to prevent trauma or to ensure health and safety. You must then be able to show that your action is a proportionate way of achieving that aim.

Sex exemptions are written into law. This does not mean ginger haired people can be lawfully excluded from a chess tournament or that a chess tournament can choose to reject female applicants "just because". It needs to be justified.

Sure, but this doesn't really address what I was saying in relation to the post I was responding to, which suggested that women have a right to have a competition for just women for any reason they like.

Presumably that right would apply to other groups too.

The legaliity, where it isn't a private event seems questionable, but I think lots of people on FWR might feel a little torn by that. Because if we question whether women should be able to do that, it seems we'd have to question for men, or others, as well.

And yet I think many here feel we should not have to justify women only events.