Anti-trans or just facing reality?

a high school coach and teacher wrote:

xcr wrote:

I started this thread after reading a thread from another poster who canceled their supporter's club membership because of concerns over "anti-trans" discussions on the podcasts and a news article on today's homepage.

I don't see how acknowledging the difference between male and female athletic abilities is "anti-trans" or "transphobic". Neither is discussing one of the most significant issues facing sport today. All sport is built on the principle of fairness and rules governing fairness. We don't allow false starts. We don't allow performance enhancing drugs. You are penalized for starting a game before the whistle blows, but if it blows again and you don't stop, you are also penalized. I think we can all agree how challenging it must be to face a gender identity crisis, particularly for children, and they deserve our full support.

The idea that we should only recognize the physical differences between males and females in elite sports misses the point. Someone who wakes up at 5:30 am to run before work and before the kids wake up, so she can place top 3 in the 35 - 40 age category at the local turkey trot, deserves the same right to fairness as someone trying to make an Olympic final. The same goes for kids in middle school. We should have empathy for Casta Symenia, but we should also have empathy for Anjee Willson who missed out on a handful of global medals, and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, I know Casta Symenia is not trans. This is about fairness and a level playing field.

Perhaps some of the responsibility for the difficulty middle school and high school trans kids face in sports lies with the adults and schools who pretend that it's OK and allow this to happen in the first place. Denying reality is not a successful strategy in the long run and serves no one.

I have been a supporters club member from day one. I come to Letsrun daily because it's the only place I've found that focuses on actual news and issues facing our sport. That also means discussing topics that may make us feel uncomfortable, not pretending that they don't exist.

Here's the problem as I see it. The issue of transgender people in sports is, on a macro scale, only minimally about sports. It is fundamentally driven by conservatives who are anti-trans, full-stop, and this is just one easy arrow to pull from their quiver in order to stoke hatred of, and promote discrimination against a certain demographic group of people whom they personally dislike. I don't hear a lot of crowing about restricting trans-males from competing in men's races (I've coached a few who have done it). It's almost universally about trans women competing in women's races, and it comes down to one basic chemical: testosterone. The conservative framing of the argument is "look what these trans people are doing to society! They're ruining women's sports! It's unfair!" So what is their response to a scientific approach to the issue, which is to follow established biological and psychological protocols to identify trans kids early on and provide them with the medical treatments necessary to allow them to correlate their gender identities more fully with their physical forms, which would then level the playing field entirely with trans girls competing with cis girls? Of course they're opposed to it. So that means that they really don't care about the sports element at all. Again, just like with the issue of abortion, it is the compulsive drive to control OTHER people's bodies, and that practice doesn't have a very noble history (slavery, etc.).

You aren't a bigot if you think it's unfair that certain people get to compete with more testosterone than other people. In fact, that's a rational viewpoint.

You ARE a bigot if you think it's unfair that certain people get to compete with more testosterone than other people, AND that those with higher levels shouldn't be allowed to go through medical treatments that block testosterone from an early age so that their physical advantages don't occur in the first place.

And don't forget, these are mostly KIDS that we're talking about. Kids deserve to grow up in supportive, caring environments where they get to socially engage with their peers, including in athletics. If we have the means to be able to make this happen fairly, we should.

(and look, I know some of you are going to post all kinds of right-wing garbage about detransitioning and people who now say they made a mistake, etc...... so I'm just going to get out ahead of you and state that it is EXTREMELY rare that this happens. The science is very clear that transgenderism is real, it's diagnosable, and there are safe, effective treatments that have successfully been used by thousands of people who now get to live their lives as fully actualized people, instead of prisoners inside the wrong body.

Lenny Leonard wrote:

Why are there separate categories for male/female wrote:

The question I rarely (if ever) see discussed is why are there separate categories for male and female competitors? (and I do think it started as male and female not men and women). I always thought the answer was because of science/biology differences. If that is correct, then individuals with a Y chromosome should not be allowed to compete against individuals with no Y chromosome. It makes no sense to me to hold competitions based upon a social construct. If we divided the results by social construct or individual feelings then I want my award for being the first sales tax consultant in my last race.

And this does not make me transphobic, it just means I have a different opinion than those who disagree with me.

The question rarely gets discussed because it’s such common knowledge that has occurred in just the past two generations.

You “always thought” that we separate them based on science/biology differences, but we don’t. We haven’t since 1972.

Being ignorant is not the same as having “a different opinion than those who disagree” with you. It just means you are incorrect.

Empirically speaking, you\'re not making sense wrote:

puckle wrote:

Those arguing “fairness” here just assert so based on a philosophical or religious binary position, not based on any mathematically or empirically quantifiable notion of fairness.

Empirically, a competition is not unfairly biased in favor of a subgroup if the fraction of medal winners from that subgroup doesn’t exceed their fraction in the entire group, all to within empirical variance tolerance and caveats of probabilistic analysis with small numbers.

That is not how we define fairness, neither mathematically nor empirically.

If I run a bunch of 100m races against the finalists from the last world championships, and I get a 10m head start every time, I'm still going to win 0% of those races.

Nevertheless, those races are unfairly slanted in my favor.

People with no understanding of game theory should really stay away from mathematical terminology.

Lenny Leonard wrote:

RunRagged wrote:

Two years ago at a conference on women's sports, Ross Tucker gave a talk which illustrates how absurd - but tiresomely predictable - it is for gender identity ideologues to claim there's no empircal evidence, or not enough empirical evidence, to establish for certain that males as a class have significant physical advantages over females as a class which make it unfair for anyone male to be competing in female sports.

Tucker starts off by pointing out that traditionally sports scientists have not bothered doing any research on female athletes at all. Speaking about his work for World Rugby studying concussions, Tucker said:

One of the big challenges we've got is trying to get a handle on concussion in women because it turns out there may be some significant risks in females that don't exist in men.

There's actually a broader concept here. There are many areas of medicine where doctors have traditionally just treated people as though they are humans and they don't recognize these sex differences. This is another area where sex matters.

I remember when I was an honors student many years ago, we were doing research and the thing we were told at the very beginning was: "don't study women."

The very first research I ever did was where stuck a bunch of cyclists in a heat chamber and we measured their performance, and muscle activation, and body temperature and heart rate and so on in response to different temperatures - and the message was that you should only study men because otherwise you get complications that are induced by the menstrual cycle and female hormones. Everyone said "okay, fine."

This is how it was. This how sports science evolved. There was a box for "too hard" and female research was put into the "too hard" box.

Video:youtu.be/gOPWFMS3w6E?si=1Ndgors1mxV8Cv...

We are not debating whether transgender women have an athletic advantage. They do. It doesn't matter. They are still women, so they should run against women.

You are arguing against an invisible opponent.