This isn’t exactly true to be fair. Caster Semenya has been treated like shit by every sports governing body for no good reason for a good 15 years or so.
Transgender Athletes
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You’re right, Thomas just beat Olympic silver medalists, not gold.
how exactly is it for greater participation when those trying to compete (trans women) are excluded from it?
The Olympics committee were trying to reduce barriers to participation. Initially that meant they removed some of their old rules - including legal and surgical definitions of transition and they reduced the period of consistently low testosterone required before a transwoman became eligible to compete. A couple of years after that policy change they removed the recommendations entirely and asked sports to make up their own rules.
We're seeing the first test cases of the sport-by-sport rule changes that were introduced a couple of years ago. Most of those rules basically use "low testosterone" as the standard and put a minimum test period on it - typically one or two years. It's those new rules, which were simpler and more open than any used in the past, that are under pressure now.
Because people believed she was a man, and forced her to go through sex testing. It had nothing to do with hormones, her literal gender was questioned by the public and the IAAF who made her prove that she was female. This competitive advantage which exists at all CIS levels and nobody has ever cared about before, only rears its head if people think a man is competing against a woman. If it's a man against a man? feck yeah, have at it with hormonal advantages, dude has 6x the testosterone levels of his competitor but the total levels don't indicate steroid use? No-one gives a shit, 'round 1 - fight'.
If people cared about the existence of this advantage as much as they claim to, they'd be equally passionate about eliminating it from CIS sports because fair is fair. The truth is, people are selective about when this advantage is deemed unfair and it's when a trans person is involved or in the case of Caster, where people believe that she's lying about her gender.
while it might seem progressive on paper when compared to the old rules, they are clearly still not inclusive of the majority of trans women.
She won by more than 1.5 seconds which is a large margin in elite swimming. NCAA Championships are firmly in the realm of elite sport so are very pertinent to the discussion. But agreed that if she had beaten Katie Ledecky's time it would be more impressive, if that is the right word.
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Women's sport was created so that they could participate in as fair an arena as possible. Including trans women in CIS female sport undermines this as going through puberty as a male undoubtable gives most trans women an advantage in most sports. At all levels below elite inclusion should drive things but I can't see how you can be fair to both trans women and CIS women if you allow trans women to compete at the elite level. I wish there was.
I'm not a fan of whataboutism but I also look at my son who is decent at his sport and huge (6ft 5 and 110kgs). As a man he plays Div1 NCAA and will play pro and hopefully for his country at the next Olympics. So good, but not truly world class. If he was trans, even with declined testosterone/performance, he would be the best female player in the world by a considerable distance. These sort of cases will arise from time to time and they will devalue elite female sort and disadvantage many CIS women.
Such bans will have an adverse effect on trans sport participation at all levels sadly, so at the very least increased promotion of trans participation at non-elite levels is required. I also know that competing as a woman is important to trans women but I just don't see a solution that will be fair to all, so perhaps we have to take the least shit option and be fair to the majority as best we can?
I also think this is very different from Caster's case where things are far more complicated.
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I talked about Caster because someone quoted me first on that, but women's sport was created so they didn't have to face fully fledged men so it's a bit dishonest to figure trans women into that because they no longer have the strength that first required that distinction. Some people cannot make this distinction, so the debates end up pointless for the most part.
For the rest of it, nobody is denying that trans women have an advantage over CIS women, but advantages are prevalent in sport and considered completely acceptable 99% of the time - the debate should be around quantifying the advantage and then having a discussion from there. You can't just say 'they have an advantage' because advantages exist all over sport, so what? That sentence on its own is meaningless. You have to quantify it so you can then have a reasonable discussion where you can make an informed argument as to why that specific degree of advantage is unacceptable where other advantages might be seen as acceptable. Nobody attempts to do this so the discussion is disingenuous. I've pointed out several times how nobody here would stop a proposed bout between me and another CIS man with 6x my testosterone levels - nobody would consider it so unfair that they would call for it to be banned, but people conveniently gloss over it because they can't allow themselves to concede the point because it undermines their stance.
As a thought exercise if we remove all gender from this debate and we just talked about what people claim is their view that seems to be paraphrased as 'significant advantages brought about by the presence of elevated testosterone levels over time and the effect that has on the human body are unfair and should not exist in sport between two competitors' then they should apply that equally across CIS divisions because after all, the gender isn't important here, it's the advantage that they're pretending they care about. They won't, though, because the truth is they don't care about the very same advantage when it shows up elsewhere. Usually when someone only cares about something sometimes but not other times, it's not actually the thing they care about.
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Just on this point I think the important difference is that we are talking about an advantage that having male and female sports is meant to eliminate. If you go to the logical extension of "people are people" you end up with a single open category that men win all the time.
Is that even a thing? Most of us will have levels between 300 and 1000 nangrams per decilitre of blood. It varies all the time for a variety of reasons but within that range there is only a small variation in things like muscle mass. In your example I am assuming you are saying that the hyper- testosterone person will be bigger/more muscly than you? In this case weight divisions are in place to protect from precisely this level of dangerous inequality. Not to mention current testosterone levels aren't, IMO, the biggest issue but rather having gone through puberty as a male.
Yes, but it wasn't just not Ledecky's time. I remember looking at the last 10 or so years, and I can't remember if this year was the only year she would've won or if she would have gotten another narrow victory as well. The runner up, who would have won if Thomas didn't race, was not close to normal winning times.
Agreed but you only need to finish 1st and a CIS woman missed out on an NCAA championship to a trans woman.
The easiest solution is to allow all drugs, performance enhancing or otherwise and just have races that everyone can enter.
So no mens or womens 100m. Just a 100m race that anyone can enter and do the same for everything else.
Just let the best humanoid win.
So no mens or womens 100m. Just a 100m race that anyone can enter and do the same for everything else.
Just let the best humanoid win.
That's not a problem though, unless the trans woman has aced the world record by a mile, if she's not even beating the bets times out there why is it an issue?
I should add that I think you and @Zarlak have made the most interesting arguments in this thread by a mile, but this comment stood out a bit to me.
most likely ultra long endurance e.g. power walking and swimming the English channel
That thought exercise makes perfect sense. If you remove the wall between mens and womens sports and just have a combined event. You are ignoring the crux of the problem and jumping to solution on an empty premise.
You are not advocating for what you think you are. you are also fighting the wrong people.
MOST people worth giving a Fcuk about, genuinely are talking from an inclusive point that wants this all to work without anyone losing out. You’re wedded to the idea that people trying to find a way through it that’s not ‘Let everyone in’ are evil. They’re not. There are more good people than bad. It’s these folks that are looking sympathetically at it, and still realising it’s an unsolvable problem.
fact is trans women are not dominating any sport on the planet. when a trans woman wins something everyone cries foul, but when they lose it's barely mentioned - confirmation bias 101.
yes, Lia is doing better against women than she did against men. that's to be somewhat expected, as she's only been transitioning for 2 years. she is performing significantly worse than she did as a man though due to the hormone treatments, and it can take up to 5 years to complete transitioning properly. but she's not 'dominating'. she lost to a trans man who has taken no testosterone just a few days after her win.
do we have the right balance right now? maybe, maybe not. it's still a relatively new phenomenon that sporting bodies are working to get right. but just outright banning trans women from competing is a stupidly blunt move borne frankly out of hysteria. there are barely any trans athletes, they rarely win, and they are clearly not dominating every race. segregation also has massive consequences elsewhere in society, at grass roots sports, at the treatment of trans people generally.
proponents in this thread would tell you it doesn't matter where they finish - just by competing at all it means a cis woman who may have finished 400th will miss out. i mean, that says it all to me.
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his point is that these advantages exist naturally already within male and female sports. you can never eliminate every advantage, not in any sport. no one cares except when trans people are involved.
This is excellent context, I did not know, thank you. It makes a huge difference and removes the "dominating the sport" argument almost entirely
I completely agree with this and have seen first hand how decisions at the top of a sport affect trans people and their treatment everywhere. A FtM trans person I know very well has been questioned about their opinion on this over and over again by people who believe "common sense has won out " he is 12 years old, though the questioners are adults in the main, all seemingly trying to score a point or two. People are weirdly aggresive about it even when they think they are trying to make a relevant point.
The "there are advantages between biological males" argument simply doesn't cut it here in my opinion. It's irrelevant.
As a biological man, you know you're competing against other biological men and therefore you know you'll likely get beaten by a LeBron James, Messi, Nadal or whoever.
The most sensible arbitrary line is that of sex: male/female. It's easier to accept for a woman that another biological woman is just more talented or has better body characteristics for the sport they compete in.
It's harder to tolerate that if you're competing against a MTF athlete.
As a biological man, you know you're competing against other biological men and therefore you know you'll likely get beaten by a LeBron James, Messi, Nadal or whoever.
The most sensible arbitrary line is that of sex: male/female. It's easier to accept for a woman that another biological woman is just more talented or has better body characteristics for the sport they compete in.
It's harder to tolerate that if you're competing against a MTF athlete.
I think the point @Wibble was making is that people generally race to win, not to break records.
It's not an easy situation to resolve and essentially comes down to the fact that in most sports - the complaints will come in if a transwoman is successful and will do so irrespective of any rules about blood chemistry measurements. In fact the complaints will come in if any athlete improves their ranking following transition - despite the fact that peak adult rankings don't always map directly onto adolescent performance rankings.
Is that fair? In the interests of sporting competition we make unfair rules all the time - about age, weight, past performance, nationality etc. We don't however generally make distinctions based on things like foot size or height etc. More subtle differences only really get acknowledged in para-sports where there's a lot of debate around fair classification and fair placement of individuals in categories.
This is where it gets complicated and it becomes hard to resolve the social desire for inclusion against the concept of sporting fairness. The separation into men's and women's events were historically not seen as "subtle differences" - they were either like the age category immutable, or like the weight category something easy to measure and define. We knew and accepted the sporting fairness of those rules.
It's not easy to define sporting fairness, and unfortunately it's very difficult to prescribe a fair set of rules for each individual or even for each event - ask the para Olympics teams about that. Which is why seemingly arbitrary rules (like current testosterone blood level) get written and then rejected. Which sends us back to birth biological sex (and even genotype) as a starting point. It's not easy to be fair to everyone, that's why there's a debate.
I absolutely get and understand the issue and why it is not easy to be fair, but an outright ban does feel a bit reactionary and does do a huge amount of damage as I have written about above.
The trouble is the public attitudes to this all over the world. Until there is a common understanding that gender is not binary but is a wide spectrum then people will always conciously or unconciously look to rule against the minority, we've seen it time and time again in all walks of society all around the world.
This is why sporting bodies have such a big responsibility to get it right, to take this slowly and to try to get the balance between fairness and inclusivity right, attitudes like Lord Coe's and this arbitrary ban are not doing that, they are just falling in line with a populist ideal.
how many genders are there?
the decision is based on biological sex for example male/female which isn't so much a spectrum. Those who have been prevented from competing were males although I believe they should create a new category for the sake of equal opportunity.
this 'solution' keeps coming up. so what category is this then, a third category just for trans people? how many trans athletes do you think there are?
Just let them compete in female but with handicap
Say -5 sec for swimming or some numbers according to science.
That way they can compete and their advantages are subset.
Massive headache finding the right numbers though.
But no. Outright participation is not fair on all CIS in that field.
Lack of solution for now doesnt mean justifying the unfairness.
I was thinking the same thing this morning. If there was a formula that could calculate how much advantage any one transgender athlete had, it could be used to calculate a handicap for that person. It would be possible to do on an individual level as there are few transgender athletes competing at the top of their sports.
This doesn't work in team sports.
No, there should be 2 categories. One for congenintal females and an open division. Banning anyone is moronic.
No, @phelans shorts short is right. She was treated like shit, even forced to lower her T levels to be able to compete.
But Caster isn't relevant to this thread. She's intersex. The issue is with congenital males having an unfair advantage competing with and against congenital females.
In time there will be more. At one point in time there perhaps were not a lot of athletes for the para Olympics but we got there. We could even try putting all trans in the same category both (trans women and trans men) and see how we get on.
that would surely open up another can of worms
I do think a possibility for swimming and most track and field events would be the option to offer two sets of medals (so two golds might be awarded for example) in the same race. It might address issues some of the issues around competitive fairness and number of competitors - though it would still fail to offer true distinction-free inclusion or privacy.
It's when you go into the details of that approach that it gets murky. The Olympics limits athlete numbers by country, so do you offer additional places to athletes (perhaps under the IOC banner). In the US, where sports scholarships are so important, how do you handle the rankings or decide who can compete in trials.
It also isn't really an approach you can follow when it comes to sports that aren't "against the clock" like tennis or football.
At the sub-elite level, inclusion should be the default position.
It gets tougher as you move from leisure sport into competitive sport, and money and glory increase. Fairness and inclusion are hard to deliver.
Mens at his original placemet average time minus womens average time would be a start.
Not perfect but a general number eveyone can agree with
If men's mean time is 1 minute and women's 1.20 then a 20 sec handicapped should be applied.
Don't you ever get tired of stereotyping everyone you disagree with?
and as soon as one won, i am sure you'll be calling for bigger handicaps, it works both ways
No, it isn't some random advantage when we're talking about men and women, as on average there's a very significant and quantifiable superiority in athletic performance. Every single record in men's sport is better than in women's sport, except for when they use lighter weight or something similar. If a man has an advantage over other men then it's seen as something innate, something he was born with, unless he's using drug enhancers but a male competing with a woman it's not a level playing field from a biological perspective.
The problem with that is there’s only so many lanes on a track or in a pool and if a trans athlete is competing, it means they’ve taken a spot from a non-trans athlete.
No you wouldnt
Why is that an issue? surely non trans athletes are not any more important than trans athletes.
Some of the arguments here are just ridiculousNo you wouldnt
I think we will end up having to have a tightly defined set of events for Male, Female and "Mixed" athletes so that we can be inclusive without being discriminatory to female athletes. This is already happening in events like swimming where they have introduced "mixed" relays where 2 athletes are female and 2 are Male. It creates a unique racing environment where the tactical differences and physicality differences add to the excitement of the event. - So maybe we should shart considering how to do this in a positive and inclusive way rather than just having entrenched battle-lines over what constitutes Male and Female in athletics / sports terms.
Whilst I want sports to be inclusive we also have to protect people from the threat of injury from having massive imbalances in physical forms, that an athlete raised as a man might have, if they went to perform in a female event.
So the "mixed" category of events could be setup with agreed rules around whatever was deemed to be fair.
They won't get the classifications correct all the time and there will be issues of fairness as happens with disabled athletes and their classification system used in the Olympics, but this process is at least open to consultation and debate rather than just a simple barometer of hormone levels to determine if someone qualifies as a female athlete.
There are countless other events / sports where physical factors are not dominant and women and men can compete on equal terms, eg the equestrian events, darts, Snooker etc.
Whilst I want sports to be inclusive we also have to protect people from the threat of injury from having massive imbalances in physical forms, that an athlete raised as a man might have, if they went to perform in a female event.
So the "mixed" category of events could be setup with agreed rules around whatever was deemed to be fair.
They won't get the classifications correct all the time and there will be issues of fairness as happens with disabled athletes and their classification system used in the Olympics, but this process is at least open to consultation and debate rather than just a simple barometer of hormone levels to determine if someone qualifies as a female athlete.
There are countless other events / sports where physical factors are not dominant and women and men can compete on equal terms, eg the equestrian events, darts, Snooker etc.