Or, you could make teams coed like a lot of adult softball leagues.
For me this is quite simple, if the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has filed suit against a policy then the policy is the morally correct one.
The ADF consistently misgenders the trans-athletes which I find totally offensive.
Athletes need to be allowed to compete as the gender they have chosen, period. Any other position is simply based on hatred and ignorance.
Can anyone show evidence that an athlete has chosen to change gender solely for some sort of athletic advantage? Rather I’d suggest that these are people that have have struggled in many ways before finding the courage to become their true and authentic selves.
Your post would be much better if you said “In my opinion” at the beginning of those two sentences.
There are many caring and thoughtful people here, and some of them disagree with you.
A lot of this debate would fade away if Americans didn’t have this irrational emphasis on sports. Take away scholarships and admissions preferences for college athletes, similar to the rest of the world, and would anyone much care who came in 1st and who came in 10th?
I’m comfortable with the language I used.
My son played at a high level in roller hockey as a child and young adult, and now plays rec ice hockey. No scholarships, no admissions preferences, are you kidding of course people care who wins the local beer league championship, and which age group team wins the national championship.
I was a triathlete for a while. Yes of course I cared who was first and who was 10th.
Have you followed the cases of the age-group marathon cheaters and the age-group marathon cheater sleuths and the age-group marathon cheater who was exposed and who took his life? The cheaters and the sleuths both care a lot.
A lot of athletes, not just the top-rated ones that get scholarships, care deeply about victory. It’s an important part of life for a lot of recreational athletes.
This is another example of Americans having irrational and mentally unhealthy views on sports. Unless you’re doing it professionally, sports should be about having fun, making friends, and staying physically healthy. A 12 year old can get excited at a shiny medal. If you’re a 40-year-old amateur still so obsessed about that shiny medal, you’re willing to lie about your age, something is very wrong with you.
@roethlisburger, you said that “A lot of this debate would fade away if Americans didn’t have this irrational emphasis on sports.” And maybe you think that people wanting to win is irrational and mentally unhealthy. That doesn’t tell you anything about whether people want to win.
A lot of people are competitive. They want to engage in activities with winners and losers. They want to win at sports, and at they want to win at other competitive pursuits. Many enjoy watching sporting competitions and other competitions. Taking away college scholarships is not going to remove that desire for victory, and the concomitant desire for perceived fairness in competition.
You might not like competition. That’s fine. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s cup of tea. But lots of people do like competition. They want a chance to compete, and they want the competition to be fair, according to their idea of fair.
Bringing athletic scholarships into the argument is an acknowledgement of what this is really about—money. Not fairness. Not the integrity of the sport. Money.
Women’s athletic scholarships are mostly dirty money, anyway…a heist of the revenue generated by Bubba getting his brains bashed in on the gridiron so Suzie can play tennis, go to college for free, and satisfy a quota.
Well then, here is why, in my opinion, you are looking at this simplistically.
The primary reason why gender separation exists in sports is because otherwise, men would dominate just about every physical sport. Testosterone is incredibly powerful, resulting in many differences including height, bone structure and muscle mass. In tennis, one of the Williams sisters proclaimed in 1998 that no man outside the top 200 could beat her. Enter Karsten Braasch, then ranked #203 on the male circuit. who played both Williams sisters one afternoon in 1998, winning 6-1 against one, and 6-2 against the other, and that was after starting the day with a round of golf, some drinks, and some cigarettes. It’s not clear that any woman tennis player could beat any man ranked in the top 500.
Now that we have established the massive advantage that testosterone provides, it’s also been explained earlier that not all those advantages go away after transitioning (and the numerous medals by M->F athletes attest to that as well). Allowing a male to female transgender athlete to compete against XX women completely invalidates the primary purpose of there being separate gender sports in the first place.
Those who advocate for allowing M->F transgender athletes to compete at will in the women’s sections are basically saying that one person’s need to be recognized for her new gender identity outweighs the new unfair playing field that has been foisted on every XX woman. I reject that completely.
But remember that in most cases what we call “Men’s” sports is actually not limited to only men. They are more accurately described as “Open”. For example, women are free to compete to try to make a men’s professional soccer team, but the reason they haven’t yet comes back to testosterone. Then again, until recently no woman could complete the physically demanding Marines Infantry Officer Course so perhaps other barriers will fall.
I believe that all M->F transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in the “Open” section of all sports. For sports where this is not allowed, that is what needs to be fixed.
I can sort of (sort of) be sympathetic to trans women athletes wanting to compete in women’s sports. They think of themselves as women (and I am happy to think of them as women too). After transitioning, they are worse at their sports than they were before their transition. They like to compete, and want to compete in their new gender.
But I don’t think it’s fair for them to compete with people who didn’t grow up in male bodies. As far as I can tell, they have a substantial advantage. I would change my mind if I learned that the advantage was only a slight one.
You could also do away with the time limits on the SAT and ACT and everyone could retake it until a perfect score was achieved, because does it really matter who comes in first and gets the full scholarship? I mean, most of us can read and add and we should all get the same chance at college. Does it matter who can do the problems faster? who can write the perfect sentence?
Of course it matters.
If it didn’t matter that winning was done in a fair way, why wouldn’t we just let all baseball players take all the steroids they want to, or let teams have 2000 players and pay them whatever they want so that those teams control all the good talent? The rules, even in professional sports, are to make the games fair, and thus interesting, for everyone.
If my daughter had to compete against male players (and the men’s rules and equipment are very different in her sport), she would have lost every game, wouldn’t have even been a bench player (starter on the girls team). She was 5’ tall and 13 years old when she started high school, and many boys were 18 and 6’2". Even if only the seniors played, she would have been 17 and 5’2", and wouldn’t have had 3 years of experience because she never would have gotten onto the field.
When my kids were 5 and 6, they were in the same swim team group as Missy Franklin. That was already a disadvantage because of biology - that girl had fins for feet.
One of my kids did play co-ed hockey. There was definitely a difference between the boys and the girls, even those who were about the same height. When the physical differences became more noticeable (about age 13) it was sometimes dangerous to have them playing together. She was checked into the boards more than once.
I disagree. Your argument suggests that cis-females are without advantage, and along come transgender females with an unfair advantage.
Men’s 100m is exclusively black men. They have some kind of privileged advantage for that particular event. Do we need to fix that?
The issue at hand is becoming an argument of “my privilege is less advantageous than your privilege.”
I don’t understand why it is such an issue for some of these girls to accept that they aren’t the best. Embrace teammates and competitors. Make the sport fun and welcoming.
No one can credibly argue the average advantage is only slight if you go through puberty as a male in many sports. The 50th percentile male is roughly as tall as the 97th percentile female. Of course, any particular trans-woman might be shorter than any particular cis-female. For that matter, any individual cis-man can be shorter than a particular cis-woman.
At the MLB level, those rules are ultimately about the league doing what it thinks is in its best financial interest, and not theoretical fairness concerns. How much profit is generated from high school track teams?
This is a simple math problem : you protect the 1% ( or whatever percentage ) transgender athlete population or the 99% genetically born female athlete population. I don’t see how you can please both parties. One will be at a disadvantage. Clearly the transgender athlete will have more muscle mass and bigger bones than the genetically female one, even after transition. Ultimately, it depends of the value system of the society. What is fair for one is not fair for the other and you just have to deal with it.
In my post I have:
A. an argument as to why “biological sex” is a meaningless term.
B. reasons that a person whose karyotype is XY does not, invariably, have a male type body, and why a person who has a karyotype of XX does not, invariably, have a female body type.
C. an explanation as to why a person’s body type can be changed even fairly late in life, no matter whether their karyotype is XX or XY.
Can you please clarify which of these topics, in your opinion, is not related to a discussion of transgender athletes? Especially since the main argument raised against transgender athletes competing with members of their chosen gender is that they should compete with people who are of the same “biological sex”, and moreover, that the reason for this is the claim that the “biological sex” determines the body type. Finally, there is the fact that “biological sex” has been used as a synonym for XX versus XY karyotypes.
I think that the relationship between my post and the OP is extremely clear.
A solution might be some sort of a scoring system. In some sports this will be very subjective. For instance, the US Tennis Association ranks players on a basically 1-7 scale. Players can be a 3.5, a 4 or a 4.5. Men and women have different rankings currently. If men’s and women’s rankings were on the same scale then any player with that level ranking would play against another player of that ranking. (The same could be true for professional level players. I’m sure that Serena and the other top women would still only be competing against women. No female professional player can serve fast enough or hit hard enough to be able to win against the top males).
For track for instance if an athlete ran above a certain level, they would compete against other athletes at the same level. If the transgendered women competed at a mostly male level, they’d compete that way.
I know this idea is only half-baked and I’m sure there are flaws.
So a woman could win a tennis tournament and only get 3/7th of the top prize, that is always won by a man? Hmm, I wonder if this ever happens and the woman gets $1M and the man gets $5M? Why yes, yes it does.
The USTA rankings are for club players like me. I don’t know if they’d apply to the professionals.
As of now, the women and the men in professional tennis get the same winnings at the slams and the tournaments where both men’s and women’s matches take place, like Indian Wells. There are men only and women only tournaments. I don’t know how the winnings of those match up.