Golf - LPGA ban transgender athletes who transitioned after puberty

[BruceAndNosh]

https://www.golfmonthly.com/news/transgender-golfer-hailey-davidson-banned-lpga
The science is the same, regardless of the sport

I really dislike the "transitioned after puberty" line and wish it wasn't used, it leaves just another loophole for future use.

It does toseland I agree. However, I think we always knew that this was going to be about staged gains.

It has been a phrase used, after all, by the experts who at least have been producing the papers and the studies to achieve this.

This is really significant though.

Sadly, I doubt that they will turn back time and replace the lost earnings for the displaced female golfers.

A step in the right direction!

Great news.

The headline is misleading - it should say ‘LPGA ban adult human males from playing in the adult human female category’. All that will now happen is that TWs and their followers will cry about trans people being banned from playing golf.

Took the words out of my mouth. It's like wedging the door open.
Why is it so hard to say no males in the category created to exclude males in order to include women and girls?
Males have an advantage over women and girls from birth - regardless of whether they go through puberty. Even males with a DSD which means they can't go through puberty are still bigger and stronger than women. And no males have periods.

It’s a small step, and welcome, but really, what has it come to that we have to celebrate these grudging admissions that they got it wrong in the first place.

I am frustrated because I doubt their good faith. It seems like a move to appease women athletes and make it less obvious that males are in women's competitions, but there is no intention of taking it further - it's more like a step back to take a step forward. There is no logic to drawing the line at puberty - there is just as much evidence out there that boys outperform girls before puberty. It's similar to World Athletics protecting the female category for elite athletes but not for women at the levels below, which just hides the male competitors and consequent unfairness away from the TV cameras. Policies like these essentially embed the idea that women's sport can be mixed sex and doesn't have to be fair to women.

If British Triathlon can ban all males why can't all these other sports?

It's become almost a standard approach, but will have the same effect over time as allowing adult males in women's competition - it will push out the women and girls.

Perfect the Telegraph the wording is "any players assigned male at birth and who have gone through male puberty are not eligible”

Given males can only go through male puberty and presumably taking puberty blockers for too many years would damage a man's health badly enough that elite sport would be unlikely it seems ok.

I agree that the wording should just be "no males" but until we recover the use of language that might be too ambiguous..

Is it certain that puberty-blocked males would be too weak or ill to compete? I suspect that view is based on one high profile case. But I would love to see some evidence.

Eunuchs were set to guard harems for a reason.
Plus there are males with DSDs.
All males have male athletic performance advantage to some degree or other.

But just to reiterate, I don't reject this kind of policy because I can't accept "half a loaf" - I am concerned that they are part of a long-term strategy to make men in women's sports much harder to fight against.

You are right snowy. If male children are competing in female events for the age, then yes they have clear advantages. This has been proven numerous times as we have read the studies.

However, do PGA competitions include children’s competitions? (Scrap that question, yes they do. )

https://www.girlsgolf.org

I believe this is part of the LPGA. I wonder if they will release a specific policy for these programmes? I hope so.

While I agree as it leaves the loophole open for children to be targeted, I suspect it will be meaningless in terms of elite sport. Any child transitioned before puberty will have such catastrophic physical health issues as an adult that participating in any sport at elite level will be a distant dream

The language of players "assigned male at birth" leaves it open for people who were believed to be female at birth but who are actually male and go through a male puberty. For example, Caster semenya is a person who was assigned female at birth but went through a male puberty and is in fact a male person. Under these rules semenya is eligible to compete in the LPGA despite being male

I haven’t listened to this yet but it seems to have some relevancy.
https://shows.acast.com/realscienceofsport/episodes/is-the-credibility-of-sports-sciences-most-respected-journal

When it comes to sport stories, I always check in with these blokes.

Agreed. I think this language is doing us a disservice. I think the media needs to start using biological terms for clarity.

It all depends on what they mean as "transitioned".

Currently that means "has gone through male puberty", so in order to be considered "transitioned" then the medical intervention has to be pre-puberty.

What happens if or when Self ID is law and we have fully intact, hormonally undisturbed males being accepted as legally the opposite sex? Will the current Supreme Court judgement affect this?

I can't help but think that messing around with weasley language is a massive mistake. We need the law to be totally clear that sex is what matters and what never changes. You could dig this behemoth up in 1500 years and still tell he was a male, ffs.

It's all worded to make the men playing in women's categories look like the victims, it's always worded to make them look like the victims. It's annoying, it's about women's rights not 'trans' and there's never any mention about how they're not being denied the right to play golf competitively, they just have to play in the correct category. . But with any luck, the ban on puberty blockers until 16 will mean no man will be eligible to play in the Women's category in golf in future.

Golfing institutions were very reluctant to admit women in the first place, so it doesn't surprise me that they've left a loophole that means girls and women still have to play against boys/men who are proven to be bigger (and therefore stronger) even before puberty, that's why the growth charts in the Red Book have separate ones for girls and boys.