Lindsay Crouse calls effort to keep biological men out of women's sports an "excuse for transphobia"

The research so far shows that transitioned women do not lose all of the advantages that come with being biologically male. Relative to female athletes they remain heavyweights against middleweights.

Tatar wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

Opposing the participation of biological males in women's sports is actually feminism; supporting the rights of women to be treated equally and fairly. To claim it is transphobia is to be completely blind to the advantages being male carries over female in competitive sports.

When you say women you mean cis women. You want cis women to be treated equally and fairly but have no thought for whether trans women are.

Trans women are a small percent of women but how can excluding any percentage of women from sport be considered feminist?

To answer your question - when some of those women are biologically male. It removes any justification for having women's sport as a protected category. Biological advantage based on sex-defined differences is irrefutable in sports. Women's sports exclude biological males for that reason. Redefining some males as "female" (by virtue of self-definition) does not change that.

Armstronglivs wrote:

But I just read earlier in the thread that "brain scans" have shown male or female brains. If that is so, how can one be "gender fluid"? We apparently have either a male or female brain - whatever that means. So a person can have both a male and female brain? (Or even neither?) Which parts, I wonder? And demonstrated how?

However you pursue the semantic as distinct from the biological issues involved, "they" is generally a plural term and to choose it to describe oneself (how unfortunately singular that is) is to claim to be more than one person. Apart from the apparent confusion involved as to what kind of person and how many - a team, a crowd? - it reeks of a certain grandiosity.

I know nothing of "male brains" or "female brains." You got me there. I'm not the person who brought that up.

YOU brought up the use of "they" as a pronoun. You proposed a history for the term that was incorrect, so I felt the need to tell you that you were wrong.

People say stuff like this all the time:

"You ever go up to someone on the street and they're like, "Hey, watch it, Buddy!'"

"Someone" is a singular noun. "They" is a plural pronoun. However, it has become so commonplace in English, that we don't bat an eye at it anymore. The speaker wasn't trying to imply that the person they encountered had some kind of multiple personality disorder. They were just being lazy with the language. We've all gotten lazy with it, but that's fine. That's how language evolves.

You are wrong if you think that when someone says "refer to me as 'they'," that they want you to think of them as some kind of dual-embodied person.

I'll gladly argue semantics all day because it's over; I have the high ground.

Armstronglivs wrote:

Tatar wrote:

When you say women you mean cis women. You want cis women to be treated equally and fairly but have no thought for whether trans women are.

Trans women are a small percent of women but how can excluding any percentage of women from sport be considered feminist?

To answer your question - when some of those women are biologically male. It removes any justification for having women's sport as a protected category. Biological advantage based on sex-defined differences is irrefutable in sports. Women's sports exclude biological males for that reason. Redefining some males as "female" (by virtue of self-definition) does not change that.

But as I've pointed out before, this would mean trans men (born XX) become eligible for the women's division. Testosterone can be a TUE and would likely be granted.

If you oppose their inclusion in the women's too you would have the farcical situation of both trans- and cis- men and trans- women being in the men's competitions. It is neither trans-inclusive or feminist and I'm surprised you've taken this position.

I've already talked about this topic multiple times but I feel like I should address this article specifically. The main argument of the article falls apart as soon as you find a person that cares about women's sports and doesn't want to include trans women. Three people that I can think of off the top of my head are Emma Hilton, Ross Tucker, and Jon Pike. So what do you say to these people that do care about women's sports and also want to ban trans women.

Lindsay plays the typical game of accusing anyone who opposes her as transphobic and racist. Once I saw those words I could pretty much tell how the rest of the article was going to go. This article didn't include any authentic thoughts or opinions, it was simply the thoughts of the ideology that she subscribes too. As Carl Jung said "People don't have ideas, ideas have people". It's all the same flawed ideas that have been pushed to try and guilt people who want to ban trans women from women's sport to feel guilty instead of focusing on crafting a well constructed argument for her position. Which leads to ironic contradictory statements like "Exclusion elevates nobody".

Lindsay, if you are reading this I invite you to abandon ideology and have an authentic conversation about trans women in sports. I would be more than happy to talk about it. If you would like to talk to someone that has more knowledge of the topic I suggest Emma Hilton, Ross Tucker, or Jon Pike.

Tatar wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

To answer your question - when some of those women are biologically male. It removes any justification for having women's sport as a protected category. Biological advantage based on sex-defined differences is irrefutable in sports. Women's sports exclude biological males for that reason. Redefining some males as "female" (by virtue of self-definition) does not change that.

But as I've pointed out before, this would mean trans men (born XX) become eligible for the women's division. Testosterone can be a TUE and would likely be granted.

If you oppose their inclusion in the women's too you would have the farcical situation of both trans- and cis- men and trans- women being in the men's competitions. It is neither trans-inclusive or feminist and I'm surprised you've taken this position.

______________________________

No, this doesn't mean that transmen would be eligible for the women's divison. This would be absurd because gender identity (an unverifiable, subjective concept) would be the only thing that differentiates therapy from doping. TUEs would obviously be abused.

Has it occurred to anybody that transpeople can be included in sports by creating new categories? As it is, women are being asked to sacrifice opportunities because society discriminates against males with gender dysphoria who benefit from living as women. Many women are more compassionate than men, so they jump onboard with the transphobia arguments, arguing that it's mean and bigoted to discriminate against transwomen in sports and that women who care about losing competitons are somehow evil Nazis. It's not bigoted to advocate for women's sport. Also, category discrimination increases participation and opportunties to win. The more categories, the more winners. The trans inclusion people are asking women to cede medals and money to males. They could be asking for the opportunty to compete for their own medals and money.

Here's another thing. There are likely lots of causes of gender dysphoria, but none of them logically lead to the conclusion that tranwomen are literally women and that transmen are literally men. Trans identity is a social fiction meant to ease the pain of gender dysphoria. It does not change somebody's sex class. This isn't hard. It isn't mean. It's reality. It's a basic fact of evolution. To deny the existence of two and only two sex classes is to deny the reality of evolution. It's worse than climate change denial becaue evolution and sex are backed by an undeniable body of scientific evidence.

Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:

jamins velcro wallet wrote:

The argument always comes down to believing the women’s category exists for gender reasons. It doesn’t. The women’s category exist solely because biological women are at a significant disadvantage to men. That is the only reason. If biological women performed at the same level there wouldn’t be a separate category. It just wouldn’t exist. In fact it would be pretty really awesome to see, unfortunately that is not reality.

Okay. Then let's remove the moniker of "women" from the protected category, since that word has been associated with gender.

Why not call the two divisions "restricted" and "unrestricted / open"? No one can argue that don't belong to the "open" category. The open category should welcome anyone, including cis women.

This may actually have to happen at some point. There is not enough general understanding of why the protected category exists, so keeping the current label is a mine field for those believing it is about gender.

If this protected class didn’t exist there would literally be zero biological women in the Olympics for track and field.

abcrunning wrote:

I’m fkn sick of this bs as well.

We have Men and Women categories for good reasons. This is not about transphobia it is about having FairPlay. If we allowed this to continue we will never ever see a woman win a medal.

Yes it is a hot and complex topic so why not creating a 3rd category and every one happy.

Stop the fkn nonsense.

A 3rd category would require the NCAA, USATF, IAAF and IOC to ban transgender athletes from competing in the women's division. What do you believe the process would be to get that accomplished?

If we are dividing it by "biological sex" or chromosomes they would be. Trans men possess XX chromosomes.

I don't think anyone is saying cis women and trans women are literally the same. But they are both women. Nobody thinks American women and Canadian women are literally the same but they are still equally women too.

jamins velcro wallet wrote:

This may actually have to happen at some point. There is not enough general understanding of why the protected category exists, so keeping the current label is a mine field for those believing it is about gender.

If this protected class didn’t exist there would literally be zero biological women in the Olympics for track and field.

It does nothing. The debate isn't about if people should be allowed to run against males. It is about who is allowed in the woman's class. A name change isn't going to solve anything.

You either believe tranwoman shouldn't be allowed to compete or you do. Right now there is exactly a huge list of tranwoman that are competive. It isn't like there are a dozen(or even 1 for that matter) sub 155/4/14:30/30/220 tranwoman out there who would dominate if allowed to run the ncaa/iaaf events. Right now the big names are a 445 miler and a 243 down hill marathoner. I am sure someday we would have some competive tranwoman. Odds of them replacing all CIS woman? About zero.

GD wrote:

Has it occurred to anybody that transpeople can be included in sports by creating new categories? As it is, women are being asked to sacrifice opportunities because society discriminates against males with gender dysphoria who benefit from living as women. Many women are more compassionate than men, so they jump onboard with the transphobia arguments, arguing that it's mean and bigoted to discriminate against transwomen in sports and that women who care about losing competitons are somehow evil Nazis. It's not bigoted to advocate for women's sport. Also, category discrimination increases participation and opportunties to win. The more categories, the more winners.

So many of the arguments in this string of nonsense are laughable, but the kicker in that you take issue with people comparing transphobes to Nazis, when Nazis literally tried to do exactly this with Black athletes.

"It's not fair! Blacks are genetically stronger, faster, and more agile than Whites! They should compete in their own divisions and there will be more opportunities for them to win their OWN medals."

If you put a gun to my head and made me choose between NO gender-based categories and ADDITIONAL categories for transgender or intersex athletes, I'd say NO categories.

Let's all agree to keep it to two categories for the time being, and let all women (including transwomen) compete together and all men (including transmen) compete together. I promise you that when you are watching it on TV, you won't be able to tell the difference.

It is not about how many. It is about who should be allowed in the protected class. Having even one person in a protected class who shouldn’t is a problem. Your argument is like saying there are only so many dopers, they won’t displace everyone. Why bother testing athletes.

Okay so let’s take a step back and think about why sports are divided into male and female. It’s based on sex not gender, this is because if you were born with testicles you are much more likely to be better at sports, all other things equal. Now, identifying as a woman when I am a biological man doesn’t change my sex, it changes my gender, but sports aren’t divided by gender they are divided by sex so it doesn’t matter what I identify as (or at least we shouldn’t). It’s really not that complicated. If I’m homosexual and want to compete against women you would say no, we don’t divide sports on whether you like girls or boys we divide sports on whether you are a biological man or woman. So you can be homosexual and compete in the men’s league and there’s no problem with this. Likewise we don’t have lesbian women switch to compete in the men’s league because that’s not the point of dividing the sports. So, there really is no logic for allowing trans women to compete with the biological women. This doesn’t mean I’m transphobic I just don’t think changing the rules which ensure fairness in sport is a right of trans people.

Until women's sport make the same revenue as men's they won't get the same investment.

Do people who oppose this....Do people think homosexual and transgender are the same thing?

If that's the big misunderstanding, then I guess we just wasted a lot of time debating this.

NERunner00053 wrote:

I've noticed that you've avoided any criticisms of how this site pushes transphobia. It's with wordy rubbish like this. Maybe just try to do some listening & think if this thread, the way you handle these issues, is good for the transgender community. Think about if it's really good for women's sports the way men come on here & feel like they have the green light to bash transgender people......

. It shouldn't be a point of pride that zero transgender people feel comfortable on here & very few women do. It shouldn't be a point of pride that pro after pro on things like the Citius Mag podcast recount awful things said about them here or avoid this place altogether when it's supposed to be one of the leading running authorities.

The site doesn't push transphobia. The site pushes facts. Men and women are different biologically. I also will not let you define excluding trans atheltes from women's competition as transphobia.

We've helped Joanna Harper becoming a famous figure by publishing her guest columns way before anyone else was. And I do listen. I fact, actually reached out to Joanna yesterday to set up a zoom call so she can explain to me the whole concept of gender and why we don't just abolish it. It seems antiquated.

You obviously don't like it when people write stuff you don't agree with. I don't take it as an offense that Citius asks people, "What's the worst thing said about your on letsrun?" That means this is the home of running fans. I take it as a compliment. It's really n o different than asking an NBA star, "What's the worse thing any fan has said to you."

We are literally the one place in the world where running fans have a voice. Our sport doesn't have talk radio.

Rojo thinks girls transitioning to live as boys should be considered "butch lesbians" instead, even though many of them are attracted to men. So there does seem to some huge misunderstandings on this topic.

______________________-

I'm honestly at a loss here. We can restrict categories based on sex criteria AND keep testosterone on the banned substance list. If people want to start granting TUEs to people on T for the purposes of gender transition, I'm saying the best option for inclusion is to create new catetories for people with these medical conditions.

Your second response is Orwellian. You say that you don't think anybody is saying that cis and trans women are literally the same, but then you go on to call them "both women." On what grounds? What makes a trans woman a woman? What makes any woman a woman? The only accurate answer is: a human being whose body either makes large gametes (eggs) or has the biological structures, or precurser to the structures, that are responsible for making and releasing eggs. It's really that easy.

Tatar wrote:

You think an 18 year old high school kid is going to pretend to be trans when they're not and then get a doctor to give them estrogen so they grow hips and breasts, just so they can own the libs?

You don't get it. We've been told that it's inhuamne to make people get hormone treatment (of course we are also its inhumane if a parent doesn't let there 15 year old get it as well) . The law says nothing about treatment. You don't have to do anything. You just show up at the track meet and self-declare. No treatment is required.

It blows my mind that people like yourself don't even know the facts. You don't even know what the law says. You have a narrative and want to push it.

The argument gets really messy and complicated if we force treatment. As is, it's pretty simple.