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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

The Guardian on trans athletes

43 replies

Cordeliasdemonbabies · 13/01/2026 15:33

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/trans-youth-athletes-ban-supreme-court-case www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/trans-youth-athletes-ban-supreme-court-case]]]]

Highly unbalanced article as ever. Talks about being banned from sport instead of playing in the appropriate category. Covers the male athlete that won several state finals in the girls category with no mention of the female athletes who were cheated out of podium places.

Obviously Trump doesn't give a single, shiny shit about women and fair play but its such an easy issue to get traction on. Its so obviously unfair and the Dems cannot bring themselves to acknowledge it so its an open goal in the culture war. Gavin Newsome, the Dem California governor even said it was unfair recently and his own party lambasted him over it.

Feel very hopeless about US politics. How are people supposed to trust the party that is supposedly not insane when they back stuff like this?

OP posts:
IrnBruAndDietCoke · 13/01/2026 15:41

I teach AP Human Geography, the US semi-equivalent of A level, here in an international school in Asia. Chapter 1 of the textbook describes ‘how we can map discrimination’ with… you guessed it… men excluded from women’s sports. Guess who they think is being discriminated against, you’ll never see it coming. 🙄 And this is the course where the spec claims it is ‘committed to truth and seeing all sides of debate’.
America is all just such a lost cause. Even our students don’t want to study there anymore. They don’t see going to the US as a ticket out of an oppressive country anymore, they see it as a crazy place.

TheywontletmehavethenameIwant · 13/01/2026 15:58

I won't click on the article because I won't give that paper the clicks, but your description of the article doesn't surprise me, I think this ideology has warped some minds so thoroughly, I don't think they'll ever be able to think straight again.

@IrnBruAndDietCoke - your students seem very intelligent, they should give Europe, especially the UK, a wide birth as well, the whole of the West is a lost cause.

MarieDeGournay · 13/01/2026 16:26

I'm not going to read the article either , but thank you for bringing it to our attention OP.

I feel that articles like that are starting to look out of touch and old fashioned - soooo early 2020s🙄 The tide is going out and the likes of The Guardian are going to be left in a little tidal pool while most people have accepted that TW are not actually W, and men shouldn't compete in women's sports.

Maybe that's the attitude to adopt to genderwoo - eyeroll, shrug, sigh, oh for heaven's sake, no-one really believes you can change sex, do they?

Maybe I'm doing that thing that athletes do of visualising the race or the jump.
Maybe I am being the change you want to see.
But increasingly I'm not arguing or preaching, but just saying
'oh for heaven's sake, no-one really believes you can change sex, do they?'🙄

A bit long for a t-shirt, unfortunately😄

igelkott2026 · 13/01/2026 16:45

Interestingly I received an email today from my running club about a study being carried out by Loughborough University.

To be eligible you have to be a fast runner (be able to do a parkrun in under 20 minutes). Which clearly more men can do than women.

They ask for certain information, including "gender on passport". I wonder if they know you can change your recorded sex on your passport if you have a GRC.

I am tempted to send them an email but it will probably smack of sour grapes as I am too slow!

TeiTetua · 13/01/2026 17:10

Here's an article from an American news source about the case being presented to the Supreme Court there. It concerns bans against transgender athletes in certain states (they say that at present, 27 states have such bans). Unfortunately if you read the article, you do have to swallow the word "cisgender" and hear male-to-female transgender individuals referred to as "her" and "transgender woman". But the article does give a pretty balanced description of the cases, and the arguments made by the plaintiffs' lawyers and by the state governments defending the bans.
www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-transgender-athlete-bans-oral-argument/

QAOPspaceman · 13/01/2026 17:10

That's from the American wing of the Guardian website, the existence of which is a big reason the Guardian got its adult nappies in a twist over this

BTT · 13/01/2026 17:45

Sam Levin makes no attempt at balance or logic in this piece. He uses the words and phrases we have seen many times before. Pure propaganda.

logiccalls · 13/01/2026 18:00

Nobody can change sex. Therefore there is no such thing as trans. Therefore we must stop using the invented language.

spannasaurus · 13/01/2026 18:11

igelkott2026 · 13/01/2026 16:45

Interestingly I received an email today from my running club about a study being carried out by Loughborough University.

To be eligible you have to be a fast runner (be able to do a parkrun in under 20 minutes). Which clearly more men can do than women.

They ask for certain information, including "gender on passport". I wonder if they know you can change your recorded sex on your passport if you have a GRC.

I am tempted to send them an email but it will probably smack of sour grapes as I am too slow!

You can change the sex on your passport and driving licence without a GRC in the UK.

It's only the issue of a new birth certificate in the wrong sex that requires a GRC

ETA I misread your post as I wonder if you can change sex on passport rather than I wo der if they know

nicepotoftea · 13/01/2026 18:32

To be fair, Guardian articles on this issue are well researched and balanced, as long as they are written by Sean Ingle.

GCScot · 13/01/2026 18:51

Note that the Guardian never allows comments below the line on articles about trans issues. I think they know full well many of their readers are gender critical and they don't want to give them the opportunity to voice their beliefs

OpheliaWitchoftheWoods · 13/01/2026 18:52

The narrative is just being bellowed by the powerful few over reality and everyone forced to live under them. As if they can just word and bully it into existence.

Fuck that, it doesn't work, it just makes people increasingly pissed off and willing to vote for anyone or anything that will stop it.

Brefugee · 13/01/2026 18:54

igelkott2026 · 13/01/2026 16:45

Interestingly I received an email today from my running club about a study being carried out by Loughborough University.

To be eligible you have to be a fast runner (be able to do a parkrun in under 20 minutes). Which clearly more men can do than women.

They ask for certain information, including "gender on passport". I wonder if they know you can change your recorded sex on your passport if you have a GRC.

I am tempted to send them an email but it will probably smack of sour grapes as I am too slow!

tell them that you identify as running a sub 20 minute ParkRun

HelenaWaiting · 13/01/2026 21:51

GCScot · 13/01/2026 18:51

Note that the Guardian never allows comments below the line on articles about trans issues. I think they know full well many of their readers are gender critical and they don't want to give them the opportunity to voice their beliefs

They used to. Then I posted a comment explaining my objection to being referred to as "cis". That got deleted. I objected and was told the deletion was because my comment was "likely to cause heated debate." Fortunately, they left it up just long enough for lots of other Gender Criticals to wade in. There weren't too many more trans articles with comments enabled after that.

BookAndPiano · 13/01/2026 22:01

We must stop saying Transwomen and just say men.

The more we say Transwoman, the more acceptable the term becomes.

Every single time, we replace Transwoman with Man, it will show up the lunacy of whatever sentence it is in.

"The man demanded he have access to women's changing rooms."
"The man won the women's boxing championship"

And as for The Guardian: a more poisonous rag written by a bunch of semi literates who still think they are the cleverest pupils in the fourth form, never existed. They are ridiculous.

Happily, they are always begging for money, so hopefully their demise is hastening towards them faster than a man in a women's Fun Run.

99bottlesofkombucha · 13/01/2026 22:09

igelkott2026 · 13/01/2026 16:45

Interestingly I received an email today from my running club about a study being carried out by Loughborough University.

To be eligible you have to be a fast runner (be able to do a parkrun in under 20 minutes). Which clearly more men can do than women.

They ask for certain information, including "gender on passport". I wonder if they know you can change your recorded sex on your passport if you have a GRC.

I am tempted to send them an email but it will probably smack of sour grapes as I am too slow!

I’d contact them asking why this study is biased to focus primarily on men given the time cut off (and maybe check the equivalent time ie if I’ve checked a few big runs and 8% of the men are under 20 minutes, what is the time that 8% of the women are under? Perhaps add something about could you explain why this study needs to be biased towards data on men or is it a more general approach taken by the university to neglect research on women?

obviously the men running as women would make that last result incorrect but I wouldn’t go into that at all or your email would be written off.

HildegardP · 13/01/2026 23:27

igelkott2026 · 13/01/2026 16:45

Interestingly I received an email today from my running club about a study being carried out by Loughborough University.

To be eligible you have to be a fast runner (be able to do a parkrun in under 20 minutes). Which clearly more men can do than women.

They ask for certain information, including "gender on passport". I wonder if they know you can change your recorded sex on your passport if you have a GRC.

I am tempted to send them an email but it will probably smack of sour grapes as I am too slow!

Loughborough? That'll be poor, puddled Joanne Harper's desperate quest to prove that blokes who claim to be women magically lose male athletic advantages like male Q-angle, & larger hearts & lungs & attendant male VO2 maxes, when they go on titty skittles.
Emma Hilton has trounced his schonky studies beautifully in the past, I wonder if he'll give her anything better to work with this time? (That was a wholly rhetorical question.)

NotBadConsidering · 13/01/2026 23:42

Sam Levin is the poor excuse for a “journalist” who wrote about the “terrible transphobia” with the Wi Spa scandal then casually forgot to write a follow up article about a man being charged with indecent exposure over it.

BaronMunchausen · 14/01/2026 00:01

That's one weird article. The "bliss" and "joy" to be had from gender affirmation via playing in teams that match one's gender identity. Those are my quotes - the only word deserving of the Guardian's quotes is "unfairness". What could possibly be unfair about teenage boys competing against girls? The fact that the legal battles only concern "trans girls" is a coincidence unworthy of comment. One male athlete "won first place in the high jump, first place in the triple jump, and silver in the long jump in the California state finals" for young female athletes. It should, the Guardian tells us, "have been a moment of pure celebration".

Most frightening of all is the mother of a trans identifying female framing the right of males to participate in female sports as the all-important key to trans rights:
"The sports issue is so important, because it fundamentally tells us whether people believe trans people exist... Once you take the position that trans girls are not girls for the purposes of sports, you have now dehumanized them."

Pryceosh1987 · 14/01/2026 00:08

Trans athletes are cheaters. They have the edge on the competition.

MsGrumpytrousers · 14/01/2026 00:10

Tough!

Namelessnelly · 14/01/2026 05:17

So if an able bodied athlete demanded to take part in the paralympics as they identified as disabled, do you think there would be such support and demands for “inclusion” from the same people demanding men be allowed in women’s sports?

Ereshkigalangcleg · 14/01/2026 05:47

NotBadConsidering · 13/01/2026 23:42

Sam Levin is the poor excuse for a “journalist” who wrote about the “terrible transphobia” with the Wi Spa scandal then casually forgot to write a follow up article about a man being charged with indecent exposure over it.

And gave the UK Guardian a dressing down when they had the temerity to publish a balanced article about proposed U.K. law changes, with the immortal line that as journalists their primary responsibility was to recognise “trans women” were women, or something very similar.

Ereshkigalangcleg · 14/01/2026 06:22

Ereshkigalangcleg · 14/01/2026 05:47

And gave the UK Guardian a dressing down when they had the temerity to publish a balanced article about proposed U.K. law changes, with the immortal line that as journalists their primary responsibility was to recognise “trans women” were women, or something very similar.

The line

And our journalism should be grounded in the principle that trans women are women and that trans people should have the right to feel safe to live as themselves.