Democrats 'recalibrating' on trans and gender issues.

[ArabellaScott]

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/some-democrats-recalibrating-approach-to-transgender-issues

'Sports participation has become one of the main fronts in a political battle over transgender rights, although most Republican-controlled states have also implemented policies that affect a bigger slice of the population. There are bans on some gender-affirming health care for transgender young people and rules barring transgender people from using the bathrooms that match their gender identity in schools and occasionally other public places.

At least 25 states are now enforcing laws or policies banning transgender women and girls from competing in at least some women's and girls' sports and three others have adopted laws but have enforcement blocked by the courts.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld state laws barring transgender girls from school teams.'

A brief look at the state of play in the US.

The answer is one transgender woman athlete has qualified for her national team and won zero medals, absolutely the opposite of what you would expect if you believe that trans women are innately better at sport than non-trans women. "It stands to reason" simply doesn't work in the face of actual evidence.

You have provided a list of women who were beaten by other women, not remotely evidence that trans women are innately better at sport.

At least the previous poster who addressed this was honest enough to admit that fairness doesn't come into it.

Let men have opportunities, funding and places meant for women, bouncing women from those places, because Reasons?

No. It's ridiculous. If they don't want to enter as men then fight for another category. Women's spaces and opportunities are to prevent men using and dominating them. They're Not For Men.

I'm confident that the level of narcistic self-obsession involved in identifying as transgender doesn't leave anywhere close to enough time or mental space in anyone's life for the extreme training, practice and preparation required to execute a sport at the very highest level.

I can't function, this country is genociding me, my human rights are abused every time I get on a bus, but hey ho, I'm training eight hours a day with my olympic-level coach and I'm a serious contender to win a medal at the world championships next year said nobody, ever.

We don't have to justify why men should not be in women's sports. It should be self-evident. If trans athletes want to compete in the opposite SEX category, they need to make a better argument as to why we should privilege gender over sex . I have never heard a convincing argument for it.

This kind of post is one that follows those arguments that come from a lack of understanding of competitive advantage.

There doesn’t have to be any medalists who were male people with transgender identities in the female category for those male people to have harmed female athletes. Just one taking the place of a female athlete is harm enough.

There is a reason they have been now fully excluded. There is enough evidence that even suppressed testosterone doesn’t remove male pubertal advantage. Plus that with training, the performance that is competitive with male athletes can be retained.

This is also another version of the ‘just a few’.

At Tokyo, the first Olympics where male people with transgender identities could compete without castration, there was at least 3 male people with transgender identities competing in female sports. Potentially there were others. There was also at least one other who was a reserve.

If a cyclist races in the Tour de France with an electric boosted bike but still doesn’t win, does that make that entry fair competition. If the cyclist doesn’t win, does that mean that entry didn’t cause harm to other athletes?

It was never fair to allow male people to compete in female protected sports categories.

You are mistaken. There was more than one male person with a transgender identity known to be competing at Tokyo Olympics.

However, Hubbard was also a man who was older than the other female competitors which is also a significant indicator of advantage. That male advantage also shows when male people who are able to compete at elite levels of sport at ages where female competitors cease to be able to continue to win at that level of competition.

The fact that the IOC has now finally fully excluded all those male people who were born with the ability to not only produce testosterone but also to process that testosterone to masculinise, meaning no people considered to have a male body outside those with specific DSD conditions, has come from the now repeated research that recognises that male advantage.

The logic of trying to prove that one group of male athletes mustn’t have a physical advantage because they are not taking podium places is deeply flawed. It also lacks the understanding of why protected categories of sport exist in the first place.

The female sports category was established as a protected category based on the need to recognise that female people will not be able to perform at the same level as male people in nearly every sport because of the advantages of the male body. Other protected categories in sport exist, such as age categories, disability categories.

I think the Democrats will win - both the midterms and the Whitehouse.

People seem to be so fed up with Trump. It is now hard to hide the economic mess, the corruption, the failure of the war in Iran, and so on.

It is a genuine nightmare. It will consolidate the Democrats in all things Trans. And who knows where that will all end up.

The Democrats were so bad they made Trump look good, now Trump's so bad that he's making people forget how bad the Democrats are.

Bastard's to the right, Loonies to the left and here I am stuck in the middle of the zoo. 🎶

The Democrats will certainly do very well in the midterms, but two years is a donkey's age in politics. I think the 2028 Presidential race will come down to who is running. Trump will be old news by then.

Then why did they win more votes?

@Igmum. "Looks like no one has women’s rights pegged as a vote winner."

This. It makes me sad. It's also true. Women's rights: always absolutely the last thing on the list. So far down it's invisible.

Presidential candidates and political campaigns run to win the electoral college vote, not the popular vote. And Democrats have more registered voters than Republicans nationwide.

@Mouldemort how many women and girls missing out on scholarships because of men and boys competing in their category is too many, do you think?

How many women and girls put off competitive swimming because of Lia Thomas in the changing room?

There’s no middle ground as my answer is ‘none’. It’s outrageous that a girl missed out on a sports scholarship because a boy competed. It’s outrageous that women missed out on swimming and competing and winning, just because Lia Thomas wanted to be in the women’s changing rooms.

if you are taking about trans women and girls the answer is close to zero.

How many women and girls are missing out on scholarship/ because women’s sports are underfunded?

Don't look over here... look over there!

Yes, women's sports are underfunded and they have fewer opportunities than men.
Which makes every male who competes in women's sports - whatever excuses he makes for himself and whether he succeeds in winning or not - even more despicable.

Close to zero is not close enough

The UN report misrepresents the HeCheated findings. The latter findings are accurate but are not limited to "medals, trophies and places". For example in a competition with ten people (nine women and one trans woman) and the trans woman comes fourth, then the HeCheated will say that seven women will have lost a place as follows;

• the woman that would have come fourth will now come fifth
• the woman that would have come fifth will now come sixth
• the woman that would have come sixth will now come seventh
• the woman that would have come seventh will now come eighth
• the woman that would have come eighth will now come ninth
• the woman that would have come ninth will now come tenth
• the woman that would have come tenth was not allowed to take part because of the trans woman taking the place

This means that one trans woman will have displaced seven women, despite only being one person. This is not a facially plausible conclusion and is more rhetorical than factual.

Even worse it can be misrepresented as "seven medals/trophies", even though in our example the three women who were medalled were not affected. This mistake was made by Baroness Sharon Davies in a radio interview.

It also has to be pointed out that several of the events in the HeCheated findings were not sports and/or had medals (eg a Jeopardy competition)

100% this. Men stealing women's spaces sports and resources to validate their delusions, supported by handmaidens such as @Mouldemort

Any competition for women in which a male with delusions about his sex pushes a woman out of the rankings is not acceptable. Men can compete with men, or all the transwomen can set up their own categories and compete with each other.

How is that a misrepresentation? It sounds like a reasonable conclusion to me. A man taking part in the women's category will have a knock on or down effect, it's robbed women all the way down.

But that doesn’t misrepresent places. If a man comes 4th and everyone moves down a place then they have lost out. A small number of men can have a massive effect - and that’s before you start looking at the increased risk of serious injury - and women have received life changing injuries from men in sports - and those men exposing themselves in the changing rooms.

As I say above, one is too many. Let’s have fair competition in sports. If you wouldn’t countenance an able bodied person in the paralympics or a heavyweight battering the featherweights then you shouldn’t advocate for men in women’s sports.

Just one male person’s inclusion in a sport can have significant negative impact on female athletes.

The negative impact becomes significantly increased when scholarship offers are included. Because even those exceptional female athletes who come in after first place athletes can attract offers of scholarship.

This is the analysis from hecheated.

@hecheateddotorg
18th March 2025 on x.com

x.com/hecheateddotorg/status/1901812921681756628?s=46

To analyze performance differences between "trans"-identified male and actual female participants in girls' sport, we need look no further than girls' high school track and field.

Track and field provides the clearest data as it is an individual sport and has had the highest number of recorded male participants to date at the high school level.

There are a total of 37 male athletes on record who have participated in girls' high school track and field in the United States.

Of these 37, one athlete participated in only one race due to the cancellation of the season during the COVID 19 pandemic. Another athlete participated in a tech/private school league that did not participate in a state championship. These two athletes will be excluded from the data.

Out of 1,276 completed events, male athletes finished as follows:

1st place: 440 (34%)
2nd place: 188 (15%)
3rd place: 123 (10%)
Other: 485 (41%)

Male athletes came in 1st 34% of the time, only 7% less often than they did than any other place outside the top 3.
They finished in the top three in 59% of their events and outside the top eight in only 19% of their events.

24 of the 35 male athletes (68%) qualified for their respective State Championship meet in a total of 136 events.

When looking at athletes competing against same-sex peers, depending on the state and division of competition, anywhere from 5 to 15% of athletes are expected to qualify.

For example in states that use regional-sectional qualification, the top 4 finishers at a regional meet (often with 2 heats of 8 runners each) qualify for the sectional meet where the top 4 finishers at the sectional then advance to State. This means that out of 32 runners at regionals, only 4 (12.5%) will advance to State.

This number also does not take into account the fact that only the best runners on a team will be entered in a regional meet and often the same runner will qualify in multiple events. A runner may also have a higher chance of qualifying in a relay as 8 runners (top 2 teams) advance to state rather than 4 in this type of qualification.

In other types of qualification or less competitive, smaller regions, it may be easier to qualify.

At the State Championship meet, there are typically 24 entries in each event. 1 of the 24 will win, meaning 4% of the 15% of athletes who have qualified for state will be a state champion, or 0.6%.
Of the 24 male athletes who qualified for state against girls, 11 of them (46%) have won a state championship title, or 31% of the total.

4 of the 35 male athletes (11%) have also achieved a top 10 national ranking.
The percentage of male athletes who have been in the top 10 of all track and field athletes in the female division in the entire nation is higher than the percentage of female athletes who have won a state title.

To find the percentage of female athletes who are in the top 10, we can take the 57 indoor and outdoor events ranked on milesplit. com multiplied by 10 (10 athletes in each) then divide by the total number of female athletes in high school track and field - 506,015 (according to nfhs. org).

This number does not take into account the fact that many athletes in the top 10 appear there in multiple events and several of the 57 events are less commonly run. (All 4 male athletes in the top 10 achieved that placement in a main event).

This means less than 0.11 percent of female athletes achieve a top 10 ranking.

"But not all states require hormone therapy!"

It is true that some states do not require males to undergo any sort of testosterone suppression or medical intervention in order to compete against girls.

We can therefore, look to the athletes who have reportedly begun "identifying" as the opposite sex and undergone "medical interventions" prior to puberty or in early middle school as it has been proposed that males who do so are in line with "average female performance."

There are 3 athletes who have reportedly "transitioned" prior to puberty. Based on their feminized appearances and high voices, we can infer this included puberty blockers.

All 3 athletes qualified for the state championship meet, 2 of the athletes were conference champions, and one athletes was not only a state champion and New England champion, but he was ranked in the national top 10.
None of these performances are in line with an "average" athlete. In fact, the national ranking out of three athletes is statistically unlikely to the point of being impossible without an athletic advantage.

"But you just know about the athletes who are good. There could be more you don't hear about because they don't win anything."

When we look at the expected percentages, we can see that about 6 out of 1,000 athletes win state and 1 out of 1,000 are in the top 10 national ranking.

In order to see the 24 males as state champions and 4 males in the top 10, there should be around 4,000 males who have competed in the girls' division in track and field. (3,965 additional athletes, none of whom can have won a state title).

There have been 37 on record.
Numerous state senators and legislators have come forward testifying to the number of "trans"-identifying males participating in their states.
When these legislators testify that there have "only been 2" in the state, or in the case of Ohio, 17 athletes in 8 years, and these numbers include all sports, and when male athletes have been banned from participating in girls' sports in about half of the states in the nation, it is not likely that there are an additional 3,963 male athletes that not only does nobody know about, but who also have not won a single state title.

In regards to the prepubescent "transitioners," there should be an additional 1,000 of them who have not won a state title or achieved a top 10 ranking. This is also highly unlikely, as we've seen multiple prepubescent "transitioners" in other sports also winning national and state championship titles.

Male participation in the female division is not just unfair, it is blatantly so.
These percentages do not reflect the cost to the female athletes behind them.

Just 2 male athletes in cross country and track and field in Maine have negatively impacted over 2,000 female athletes.

If each male athlete negatively impacted 500 female on average, that means over 18,500 female high school track and field athletes in the United States have been forced to compete against and have been negatively impacted by these boys.

This includes loss of titles, loss of medals, loss of relay spots, loss of entries in large meets, loss of qualifications for championships, loss of records, loss of privacy, and loss of confidence.

*2 male athletes in Maine negatively impacted over 1,600 girls

3 boys in Washington, over 2,000.

end -

And this was just a snapshot of those male athlete’s sporting careers.

I cannot imagine the degree of harm that an athlete such as Caster Semenya caused in numbers of displaced female people in his sporting career.

It is a false perspective to limit harm to only podium places. It is correct to include the harm of female athletes who have had their ranking demoted by the inclusion of a male athlete who should not have been included because he is not female and accessed a protected sports category.

It is also correct to note the negative impact of causing female people to no longer participate. There are some female athletes even at elite level who stopped competing because male
people kept taking podium places (keeping in mind some events reward places outside the top 3).

The "trans women and girls" you mention are men and boys.

In your comments you are basically demanding to know why men and boys shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's and girls' sports.

The answer should be obvious.

There was a trans athlete, a trans men (biological woman) participating to the past winter Olympics, in the female category, obviously not taking testosterone. This demonstrates that participation of trans athletes in their sex category is possible, nobody is excluded.