Democrats block bill to ban transgender Men from competing against Women...

In 2019-2020, June Eastwood competed in women's NCAA cross-country and indoor track his senior year at the University of Montana after three years of being one of Montana's top men's runners as Jonathan.

As a high school student, Eastwood was the Montana boy’s state champion in cross country, the 800 meters, the mile, and the 2 mile for several years in a row.

Today, Jonathan Eastwood is still listed as the all-time Montana state record holder in the Boys’ Class A 800m.

But unfortunately for Eastwood, when he got to college and competed against much faster men from the other colleges and universities in the conference that Montana belongs to, he didn't win championships any more. Eastwood still ranked as one of the University of Montana's top men's runners - by some measures, Eastwood was Montana's best men's runner for several of the three years he ran on the Grizzlies' men's teams. But Eastwood wasn’t the top dog in the men's events he competed in whilst at university because the collegiate conference he ran in as a Jonathan was dominated by much faster men from Northern Arizona and Southern Utah.

A video clip of Eastwood cruising to an easy victory by a large margin in the women's mile race at the Big Sky Conference Championships in February 2020 shows that Eastwood had a much easier time racking up wins once he "transitioned" to June after his junior year of college and spent his senior year competing in the women's division of the NCAA conference in which he'd never managed to win when running against other males. As you can see, Eastwood left all the female runners so far behind that Eastwood appears to be running the women's race all by themself:

Transgenders lie about their sex so we all have to expect they have no problem lying about anything else. They just want attention.

Thank you for writing this. I always appreciate when the honesty comes out.

Rephrasing your comment: “wait until it’s a really big problem before you complain.”

Also the left: “Trump is about to murder us all, we MUST ACT before it’s too late.”

So wait, which is it? Do we “act now, before it’s too late,” or just continue to let this lunacy fester and accumulate to levels that would be more difficult to reign in? You people on the left have one standard when you don’t like something and, by your statement above, the exact opposite when it’s something you happen to support. Thank you for being open about your hypocrisy.

SMDH….

what are you shaking your head at??? y'all pimp this as about "fairness," not purity. you allow women in men's sports because that's "fair" because men are "stronger." you freak out about men with women. ok, then "which men?" cause almost every single trans i am hearing about runs about my speed in junior high. at which point, no, this is not some massive fairness threat like the boys varsity running girls meets.

this is a rare event. 99.99% of meets have no trans runners. very few have 1. and that 1 doesn't affect most events, and isn't grotesquely warping their own event. because they are usually fairly effeminate men who aren't very athletic or fast.

this is a non-issue unless you are fixated on 100% purity. in which case we ignore performance. we strictly enforce gender lines.

in which case, i am sure some cut brown baseball players want a chat about a girl playing on their boys team.

to be crystal clear, the solution i have offered is a 3rd class for trans, wheelchair, paralympics, special olympics, and anyone else who feels left out by the way things are currently structured. it lets trans compete in sports without a bunch of crap -- a good thing -- while not yet crossing the currently unpopular bridge into letting trans compete as girls.

the reality is you folks wouldn't even let that happen because this is really about shoving trans back out of public life, in 20 other ways as well. pronoun rules, bathroom laws, etc. the trans sports thing is just the political "hook" like late term abortions. you then push the rest of the agenda in quiet.

there is nothing hypocritical about saying, we don't have a problem til we have a problem. that means i am not a purist about it. that means my concerns are practical. we need a rule if it's unfair. otherwise let it be. not hypocritical at all. my position is show me we have some high participation, high unfairness problem, and we can talk.

it's like voter ID. what happens is thousands can't vote because we catch 10 people a year cheating at elections.

we have rules against most of what trump is up to because we didn't like how kings behaved, wanted to divide up power, and wrote a constitution.

on trans in sports, we are kind of tripping over this issue for the first time. trans people are more "out" in modern society. ok, how do they integrate into sports. there are different answers. at least one of those answers is avoid the purity thing for a transition period and see if we really do have a competition issue.

y'all want us to assume that justin gatlin is running girls track in every event every meet across the country. no. so it's not a saturation issue. is it a performance issue? is a trans girl occasionally being in a meet and sometimes winning, really a problem? the NCAA boss said it's maybe 10 trans kids, all sports, all divisions. not that dominant.

i mean, SJSU volleyball? 2nd in regular season. lost at conference. didn't make nationals. supposedly incredibly unfair trans girl only makes honorable mention all-conference.

you don't need a rule for that, sorry. you need a rule for there are hundreds of trans players winning every conference's MVP and deciding who wins what at NCAAs.

for comparison, say, the women's pro 800 in the semenya era.

and the irony of that is she is intersex, not trans, and had been labeled female in her birth certificate. which is the end all be all to a lot of conservatives on these trans rules.

so, y'all are the ones moving about the shop. no, the rule is genetic. no, the rule is birth certificate. no, the rule is pull up your skirt and i'll tell you what you are. no, the rule is you'll take a hormone test.

make up YOUR mind.

What does that have to do with males competing in women's events?

Not much -- I was responding to "why are Democrats OBSESSED with this issue? There are more important things to focus on!"

You missed the memo that most people on the left also don't support transwomen competing in women's sport. Seriously, this a small minority of people who support this, this is not the majority of the left, or the majority of the LGBTI community either, for that matter. Yes it should be nipped in the bud before it gets to be an even bigger problem than it already is.

🎵Hike up your skirt a little more
And show the world to me.🎵

Today is Detrans Awareness Day. The many stories of detransitioners are compelling and painful, and mostly ignored by the mainstream media. Read their stories and learn about the damage being done to vulnerable youth.

really? if you're anti-women's healthcare, and anti-abortion, and think women should stay at home in adulthood and have babies........then i take your supposed concern with women being able to run track without trans competition to be somewhere between insincere (you really are macho, pro-male, anti-liberated female, anti-gay, anti-trans bigots) and incomplete (you care about a very narrow patch of femininity, and a strange one to isolate-- track and field).

so, are you a sincere feminist who supports women in other ways? or is this just a lever using women who you could care less about?

kind if like the GOP who pretends to care about fetuses but could care less about the born babies being taken care of.

Transphobes always argue that the interests of the many (cis people) should override the interests of the few (trans people).

But when it comes to detrantioners, their argument goes the entire opposite. 98% need to be stopped from transitioning because the other 2% might regret.

quit acting like victims. you are actively passing not just sports orders, but also executive orders kicking trans out of the military, pronoun laws, bathroom laws.

your little game is to then pretend like dems are pushing this issue when they vote against YOUR BILL.

i have suggested a 3rd class. i would like a solution and this is over. i think you folks want a dead horse to beat with a baseball bat to pretend how much you like women while you constrict 20 other of their rights. you're the ones obsessed with the trans sports issue because you polled the thing and saw it's unpopular.

41% of first marriages end in divorce. ban marriage?

45% of businesses fail within 5 years. ban starting businesses?

on most other issues the GOP is about you make your choices, you take risks, and you live your consequences. and you have the freedom to end things.

the exceptions are like this and abortion. why? they want the southern white baptist vote. otherwise the whole point to blowing up government is you're on your own. in which case why are you ordering people around on these issues.

A characteristic of trans activists is the lack of empathy for minors who have mutilated their bodies on the advice of "professionals" and now are disfigured and impotent for life.

I can’t speak for conservatives on this topic because I’m not a conservative - and at any rate, I'm not so sure that a lot of conservatives really do believe that an individual's government-issued birth certificate is "the end-all and be-all" for proving or accurately documenting a person's sex the way you’ve alleged.

But I can state with a pretty high degree of confidence that no adult of any political stripe who’s really well-informed about the most accurate, reliable, cost-efficient, convenient, hassle-free and easy-to-adminster methods of sex verification available in this day and age - and who also wants the female category of sports to be tightly ring-fenced so that males can’t horn in - seriously regards a person's birth certificate as the end-all and be-all when it comes to determining sex for the purposes of sports classification and other matters like medical care, locker rooms and changing rooms, communal restrooms, showers, spas, US Selective Service registration, military service and housing placement in communal insitutional settings like shared dorms, shelters, domestic/IP violence refuges, rape crisis centers, rehabs, prisons, nursing homes, immigration detention, and refugee and DP camps.

Birth certificates are notoriously unreliable as an accurate proof of sex especially when it comes to determining eligibility for female competition in international sports.

Birth certificates also can't be relied on to determine who's male and who's female for the purposes of sex classification in local, state, regional and national sports in countries like the USA where many states allow people to change the sex markers on their own or their minor-age children's birth certificates - and where significant numbers of students who do school sports and athletes who compete in sports outside of school contexts were born in foreign countries, and quite a few are still citizens of foreign countries to boot.

After all, there are still many parts of the world such as poorer areas of Africa, Asia and the Americas where it’s still pretty common for women to give birth in non-medical settings and it’s also long been the custom for moms and dads not to register the births of their children with government authorities when the kids are still babies or young children. As a result, even in the 21st century large numbers of adults around the world grew up and reached late adolescence or even full-fledged adulthood without ever getting a birth certificate,, and plenty of minors are still growing up that way right now.

Moreover, because of wars, revolutions, coups, natural disasters and/or the collapse of the governments or administrative arms of the governments in many parts of the world, plenty of people who are alive today and will be alive in the future never had the chance to have their births registered or obtained BCs when they were growing up - or if they did, they ended up losing their BCs and other official papers and couldn’t replace them.

In addition, there’s always been way too much incentive and way too many opportunities for governments, national sports federations, sports scouts, teams, coaches, managers and athletes themselves to arrange for ID documents such as birth certificates, passports and driver’s license that have inaccurate sex markers stating that persons known or suspected to be male are actually female.

The flaws of using the sex markers on government birth certificates as the basis for determining whether an athlete is eligible to compete in women’s elite international sports were made patently clear at the 2016 Olympics at Rio, where all three of the medal winners in the women’s 800m in track were males with DSDs whose government-issued passports and BCs said their sex is female.

The flaws of relying on legal sex markers stated in birth certificates and passports to determine eligibility for the female category of sport was illustrated once again at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. A storm of controversy and outrage arose over the IOC’s decision to allow two boxers who’ve been ruled ineligible for other women’s boxing bouts because they allegedly have XY chromosomes (and male DSDs similar to the one Semeny has) to compete and clean up in women’s Olympic boxing in Paris. Then to make matters worse, the head of the IOC and the IOC's press officers repeatedly justified the IOC's decision by saying the two athletes whose sex and eligibility for the women's category was contested - Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan - had presented passports issued by their home countries stating their sex is female, and that’s all the proof needed by the men in charge at the IOC.

As it turned out. both Khelif and Lin easily won Olympic gold medals in their respective weight classes in women’s boxing by trouncing all the female fighters they went up against in the ring.

After the Paris Olympics, one of Khelif’s trainers in France gave an interview to a French press outlet saying that Khelif has male chromosomes and had been undergoing medical treatment to lower his male testosterone levels - aand a French-Algerian reporter published leaked medical records saying that Khelif has been diagnosed with the same DSD as Semenya, XY 5-ARD.

Since the Paris Olympics, Lin travelled to the UK to compete in a women’s boxing bout there, but was declared ineligible for undisclosed reasons.

The actions of the Paris Olymics officials in 2024 were in sharp contrast to the findings of the Court of Arbitration for Sports in the decision that put an end to Caster Semenya's long-running legal battle against the IAAF/WA in 2019. In ruling against Semenya and for the IAAF/WA, the CAS panel that decided the case said that it recognized that when it comes to determining eligibility for the female category of sports, athletes’ legal sex as stated on their identity documents like birth certificates and passports can’t be relied on as “the end-all and be-all.”

From the Executive Summary of the 2019 CAS decision:

once it is recognisedthat it is legitimate to have separate categories of male and female competition, it inevitably follows that it is necessary to devise an objective, fair and effective means of determining which individuals may, and which may not, participate in those categories.

The [CAS] Panel accepts the IAAF’s submission that reference to a person’s legal sex alone may not always constitute a fair and effective means of making that determination.

the reason for the separation between male and female categories in competitive athletics is ultimately founded on biology rather than legal status.

the purpose of the male-female divide in competitive athletics is not to protect athletes with a female legal sex from having to compete against athletes with a male legal sex. Nor is it to protect athletes with a female gender identity from having to compete against athletes with a male gender identity. Rather, it is to protect individuals whose bodies have developed in a certain way… from having to compete against individuals who, by virtue of their bodies having developed in a different way, possess certain physical traits that create such a significant performance advantage that fair competition between the two groups is not possible.

In most cases, the former group comprises individuals with a female legal sex and a female gender identity, while the latter group comprises individuals with a male legal sex and male gender identity. However, this is not true of all cases.

the fact that a person is recognised in law as a woman and identifies as a woman does not necessarily mean that they lack those insuperable performance advantages associated with certain biological traits that predominate in individuals who are generally (but not always) recognised in law as males and self-identify as males. It is human biology, not legal status or gender identity, that ultimately determines which individuals possess the physical traits which give rise to that insuperable advantage and which do not.

https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/CAS_Executive_Summary__5794_.pdf

In the nearly 6 years since the CAS issued its decision in the Semenya case, the thinking at IAAF/World Athletics HQ has evolved further. WA has taken several steps to to clarify that whilst the organization values inclusion, it has a fundamental duty to insure fairness for female athletes in women's competition first and foremost. Thus WA has said it's going to prioritize strengthening measues to protect the female category against male incursion over trying to placate and accommodate male athletes who believe they should be included in women's competition, either because they have certain DSDs that caused their male genitals not to develop normally, or they underwent totally normal male sex development but at some point in life decided to adopt a trans or other "expansive" gender identity different to their sex.

As a result, WA is now in the process of adopting a new policy that will re-institute the kind of DNA testing the IAAF and IOC abandoned in the 1990s.

Under WA's new policy, all athletes seeking eligbility for elite women's competion will have to undergo a one-time DNA sex screen to ascertain their sex chromosomes and check for the presence or absence of the SRY gene in whole or part.

Under WA's new policy, the only athletes with male sex chromosomes and the SRY gene who were born with testes that produce, or previously produced, male levels of testosterone who'll be allowed to compete in women's elite track & field will be those with Complete Androgen Insensitivy Syndrome, aka CAIS.

WA has said the only issue still to be decided is whether the DNA sex testing that's going to be reinstituted for elite track & field athletes will be carried out on cells taken from inside cheeks inside the mouth through a quick, painless swab - or on cells taken from a bit of blood obtained from a finger prick or regular blood draw and preserved on blotter paper.

(The dried blood spot method has been used with great success since the 1960s in most of the government-administered newborn screening programs that are routinely used to check babies for a wide range of health conditions. NBS programs are mandatory in all states and territories in the USA and in a great many other countries too.)

Also undecided is whether WA will require all althletes across the board to undergo DNA sex screening like World Aquatics already does, or whether WA will only require the DNA sex testing for athletes seeking to compete in the female category.

My hunch is that WA might require the DNA sex testing for all athletes regardless of which sex category they compete in. Because doing that would go a long way to pre-empting - and providing WA with cover against - accusations that WA is practicing sex discrimination and setting up a system of sexist double standards by "policing women's bodies" in ways that men's bodies aren't "policed," and expecting athletes in the female category to undergo and accept extra scrutiny and invasiveness that athletes in the male or open category aren't being asked to go through.