Ada

That simply won’t happen. It’s not a solution. Every sport, every league, suddenly splits down the middle over a political desire for exclusion of some of their players? Everyone loses…

it’s not some targeted attack on trans people

It literally is. The transphobic organisations pushing this openly admit that it’s a wedge tactic, a first step to make future trans segregation easier.

One day trans people may no longer be the minority they are and you might be thinking, hey I’d like to have a trans exclusive league.

You can rest assured, we will not reach a day when I enjoy being segregated

The whole idea is to have a league where people are cool with playing with trans people or even make it a league where anybody can play, but also keep leagues for just cis people.

So, “open” leagues tend to just be mens leagues, with the odd adventurous cis woman, and the gender diverse people that have been pushed out of their other spaces.

And I don’t want to play with men for the same reason that most cis women don’t want to play with men. On average, they are stronger, faster and put me at a higher risk of injury.

And it doesn’t matter how “open” the league is, when the majority of people in it are cis men, it’s deeply uncomfortable to navigate that space as anyone who isn’t a cis man.

Trans leagues don’t work because there aren’t enough trans people. That’s not going to change. Trans people will always be a minority. We won’t suddenly get the numbers to support segregated teams.

Your solution is delay segregation, so that we can be segregated in the future. It so fundamentally misses the heart of the issue… Segregation is the problem… If cis folk would just “not” segregate trans folk, the problem would be gone. So your solution is to start with the point we want to end up at, where no one is excluded, until we get to a point where exclusion is possible, and then do it!

You may not be a pretentious but you’re doing the work of pretentious people.

Yeah, because my attitude is the real issue here, not the ongoing campaign of exclusion and hatred targeting trans folk…

Notably, this is so typical of the issues we face. It’s a type of (subtle) transphobia called “Just asking questions” or, more rudely “JAQing off”

You “just asked a question” about trans leagues.

I made a multi paragraph response, from a first hand, lived experience.

Your response in turn, did not connect or engage with a single thing I wrote, despite my entire post being a reply to your question, and was basically just another question, shifting the goal posts to the try and arrive at an answer that aligns with the perspective you clearly already hold.

A perspective clearly on display in your other engagements in this thread, where you haven’t once given ground, taken anything on board or shifted your position in response to someone giving you an answer to your questions. All you have done is push for exclusion, and then just shift the board around to push from a different direction.

You may not be actively transphobic, but you are doing the work of transphobes either way, because you phrase your questions as if you’re open to hearing the responses from folk, but keep pushing for exclusion, no matter what answer you get.

A few years ago, I played roller derby. It’s one of the most trans inclusive sports on the planet. Trans women are explicitly welcome to play in the womens leagues.

I live in Australia, in a city of a couple of million people. We had 4 or so different derby “clubs”, and each one of those could field anywhere between 1 and 3 derby teams of various levels. Once you looked outside of the city to include towns and smaller cities within a couple of hours drive, there were around 10 or so “teams”. I was one of 2 trans folk active in my city at the time (3 if you count someone who was playing on the mens team)

Now, every capitol city in Australia has a similar situation, though the bigger cities can field a few more teams than my city could.

At one tournament weekend, with a whole year of planning, folk decided to put together a trans team for a demonstration game. It took the whole country to fill that team, and they played the game, without having had any chance to practice together.

There wasn’t enough trans folk to make two teams, let alone a meaningful season, with playoffs and multiple rounds against different teams.

“Just make a trans league” has the same meaning as “trans people aren’t allowed to participate”.

im too old and unfit to compete at anything!

To be fair, I am too! I still run, but lets just say, my halcyon days are behind me :P

There also never seems to be any situations of FTM people excelling at sports like is reported of MTF. Happy to accept that might be a media bias issue.

There are no cases of trans fem folk excelling either. At least not trans fem folk on hormone replacement for a decent period of time.

You’ll find studies talking about individual elements of physiology, and drawing extentions from that that. You’ll find studies that don’t take in to account the impacts of hormone replacement. And you’ll find studies written by transphobes with an agenda that outright lie.

But what you won’t find, no matter how hard you look, is any kind of evidence of systemic advantage. What you won’t find is any kind of study that looks at real world sporting outcomes, and shows evidence of trans folk winning more than they should. You’ll find plenty of examples of trans folk being accussed of having advantage for performing well, but unless your position is that trans folk can’t compete unless they are actively disadvantaged, you should expect to see trans folk win sometimes, and place highly sometimes. That only becomes an issue when it occurs more than you would expect given the participation numbers, and it’s at that point, the evidence evaporates.

I want to bring up Lia Thomas as a classic example of what the media portrayal looks like. She is portrayed as a mediocre swimmer, who became a great swimmer when she transitioned. But, there is bias at play in the way that story is told. In order to swim in the women’s category, she needed to be on hormone replacement for a period of time (2 years from memory). During that time, her performance was impacted, but she was still forced to swim with men. And those are the stats that the transphobes will bring up, to call her a mediocre swimmer. If you look at her stats from before she started hormones, her performance was at an elite level. And after the impact of hormones, her performance was elite by women’s standards too, but she set no world records, and she was soundly beat by many cis women. Yet the stories you hear, tell of a trans women breaking records, and magically becoming a contender. Because the stories are part of a wedge tactic, designed to normalise the idea of seperating trans women from cis women.

I’ll also point you at this study…

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/11/586.full

Conclusions

This research compares transgender male and transgender female athletes to their cisgender counterparts. Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and CM. Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women. Therefore, this research shows the potential complexity of transgender athlete physiology and its effects on the laboratory measures of physical performance. A long-term longitudinal study is needed to confirm whether these findings are directly related to gender-affirming hormone therapy owing to the study’s shortcomings, particularly its cross-sectional design and limited sample size, which make confirming the causal effect of gender-affirmative care on sports performance problematic.

Now, it’s guilty of the very thing I pointed out earlier. It looks at a single attribute in isolation, and draws conclusions from it. But when you compare it with studies that find advantage in other areas, it becomes clear, that the answer will not be found in studies highlight individual areas. What does an advantage in height mean for example, if offset by cardiovascular disadvantage?

There is a reason we don’t see trans women dominating sports. And that’s because they don’t. Anything telling you otherwise, is pushing an agenda.

And of course, I’m pushing an agenda too. But my agenda is to not be excluded from the sports I love, and not to have sports used as an excuse to exclude me from other arease of society. My agenda is my safety.

I’ve posted things like this many times before, and rarely does it get anywhere, because people have already made up their mind. You claim to have not made up yours, but if you are reading this and your first instinct is to try and find rebuttals and arguments, then I’d suggest to you that maybe you have made up your mind already. If your first instinct wasn’t a defensive desire to argue and debate the topic, then well, you’re one of the rare ones…

Before I respond in detail, let me ask, are you open to the possibility of changing your position? Because most folk aren’t, because facts don’t change minds when positions are held emotionally.

If sporting bodies/scientists etc can find ways of managing the situation so it is proven to be fair then great (the paralympics have various categories for instance, off the top of my head why can’t other sports?), but until then this insistence upon something that in many instances isn’t fair in a sporting sense creates a wedge issue right wing types can and do exploit because the average sports fan

The vicious irony here is that the limited science there was, did show that trans folk competing with cis folk of the same gender either had no advantage, or the advantage was too small to identify without further study. Study that was impossible due to the very small number of trans folk actively in involved in sports to begin with.

Yet despite that, the right wing types created a wedge, and folk like you jumped on board

How they think rather than what they think. I recognised it in myself and have really tried to get passed it.

Then I’m genuinely asking you to do so here as well. For me, I’m trans, I used to be a semi elite runner, and a roller derby player. I’ve ran with men and women, and I’ve played roller derby with men and women. I also know the science around trans folk in sports. So I’ve lived this, experiencing it first hand, as well as having a very strong personal interest in following the science.

You are wrong on this.

your refusal to deal with simple reality

The irony here is that “simple reality” shows that in most sports, trans women don’t have advantage, and sometimes, have disadvantage in comparison to cis women. But that reality doesn’t align with peoples intuitive expectations of how it works, and thus, it’s incredibly easy to mislead people in to anti trans positions by using sports as a wedge tactic, which is exactly why it’s happening, and exactly why it’s working.

I could show you the studies backing up my claim, but experience tells me that you won’t be open to them. Facts alone don’t generally work convincing people to change their positions, because rarely have they arrived at those positions through facts alone. And given that you are vehemently arguing with people about a topic that doesn’t directly impact you and that you didn’t care about until politicians and talking heads started to use it to stir up fear and hate, chances are, facts have little to do with how you arrived at your position. Hell, you’re even waiving the need to look at the facts, by declaring that your position is reality, completely closing down the possibility you might be wrong.

Does the changes to bone structure and density and muscle composition fade away?

Literally, yes…

You can’t opt out of capitalism. You can opt out of not funding Rowling

As I said, if not voluntarily giving money to or making excuses for someone who will use that money to hurt people is too much to ask of someone, then their context and intent is quite clear.

Including yours.

“I grew up with Harry Potter and loved it and I’m interested to see the new [whatever]” is not equivalent to promoting transphobia.

It is equivalent, because in this case, it is literally promoting transphobia. One of the worlds leading transphobes will directly benefit from the profits this show makes, and will directly turn those profits against dismantling the rights of trans folk.

This isn’t an analogy, it’s not dramatic license, or over exaggeration.

You cannot make a black and white determination like that without context and intent.

If you know she will hurt trans people with the money she makes, and you do things that continue to make her money (which includes just advocating for continued consumption of her work), it is black and white, and the context and intent are quite visible.

By itself, it doesn’t mean someone is transphobic. But it does mean that at the very least, personal nostalgia is more important to that person than the harm their actions cause. And that is plenty of intent and context.