Trans issues 2 - TG Women in Competitive Sport

[Oldmanmatt]

Actually, not the best response, too emotionally motivated.

I have nothing but empathy / sympathy with what you've been through here OMM - it sounds disgusting and unacceptable.

Football or other team sports to one side....do you honestly believe that the reason there is a systematic 10%+ difference in running times between the best males and females is because of opportunity and bias?

I am talking about pure athletic or power output.

The way you talk about it, it's as if you think that gap is entirely or at least mostly because of society when JulieM is saying it really isn't.

This doesn't mean I condone any of the behaviour you have faced, I want to be super clear about that.

No.

My point was (way back) that whilst it will always be more likely that a “man” will be (for the sake of argument) the worlds fastest over 100m, given the massive increase in population, ever increasing access, opportunity and shifting societal attitudes, at some point, the person with the best combination of power, weight etc, might just have been born without balls. Between that and now, a variety of possibilities exist.
Currently, there are 3 billion-ish women on the planet. The genetic variety and combinations is mind boggling.
To take a hypothetical extreme to illustrate, imagine all 3 billion women are born today, raised and nurtured identically to their brothers, every single one trained and prepared to run the 100m. Do you not think we would see a considerable improvement of the best times, over the real current times?
Of course, doing the same with the males would improve their times too.
But, there is going to be a diminishing return, there is a maximum speed that a human can reach under it’s own steam, a plateau around which only the conditions of the day will determine the “winner”.
To be clear, if you are an Olympic 100m runner, you are a freak. If you are the world record holder, today, I don’t even know what to call you, because you are 1 in 7 billion (actually, way more, because as far as we know, you are faster than any other human who ever existed).

Ultimately, my underlying point is that, trying to judge where women’s performance in the 100m might peak, based on where we are after barely more than a single lifetime’s worth, of thus far limited emancipation and opportunity, seems ambitious.

 

[slab_happy]

Biology aside, anyone assigned male at birth has an advantage due to male privilege and the misogynist nature of human society.

I may be misunderstanding your intent here, but I feel like I have to point out that society certainly doesn't continue to grant anyone "male privilege" if they come out as a trans woman.

Transmisogny (hatred directed at trans women specifically for being trans women) is real and incredibly virulent, and trans women are the victims of violence (including sexual violence) at horrifically high rates.

So yes, we live in a misogynist society -- and trans women are targets of that hatred too.

 

[slab_happy]

Hubbard was just the first openly trans athlete

So we might have two whole competitors?

And I see that (if the allegations are true and she is trans), Barrett has also had surgery and would also have qualified under the old rules.

However, I will note that the Washington Times is a very right-wing newspaper owned by the Moonies which has promoted conspiracy theories like the Seth Rich one, claims that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, and claims that the January 6th attack on the Capitol was really carried out by "Antifa". And the entire story seems to be based on obsessive transphobe Graham Linehan finding an old unverified Twitter account which people think might be Barrett's. So personally I'm going to take it with a pinch of salt.

But in any case, if she is trans, then she's also had surgery and the rule change would make no difference for her.

If you lose your balls then your T goes down to zero. You cant function to any extent in any athletic pursuit and then have to take exogenous T to make up for it.

Nope, as far as I'm aware trans women who've had orchiectomies don't have to take exogenous T in order to "function to any extent to any athletic pursuit."

I'm not sure where you got that idea from? If you've got a source for it, let me know.

Is there really no difference between athletic performance of a male with or without gonads?

If by "males" you mean trans women -- thinking about it, I don't know off the top of my head if anyone's done a direct comparison between the performance of trans women who are taking anti-androgens to suppress testosterone to "normal female" levels and those who've had orchiectomies. Though I doubt it because there's so little research full stop.

Arguably, the latter group at least could be disadvantaged compared to cis women, since we do get a bit of testosterone produced by our ovaries.

And there are plenty of cis women with testosterone levels that are naturally above the ones trans women are now required to meet in some sports (2.5 nnm/l), and as long as you don't have XY chromosomes, there's no requirement to suppress endogenous testosterone at all.

But the goal of anti-androgens as part of hormone therapy is to suppress testosterone as much as possible anyway; trans women aren't trying to hang onto any of it, because they are trying to reverse the effects of testosterone on their bodies. That's kind of the point.

(This makes it in some respects much less of a conflict than with DSD athletes, where many of them very understandably don't want to be forced into medically unecessary treatment to change their bodies when they're perfectly fine with them.)

If by "males" you mean men -- there's obviously a huge difference between the performance of a man who's had his testicles removed, and one who hasn't and who also isn't taking anti-androgens because he's not a trans woman.

This is an example of why talking about trans women as "males" is unclear and potentially misleading, by the way.

 

[Murph]

Sorry slab I thought I thought i would help out by saying more than one but maybe the WT are full of shit. Heres another lot mKing the claim, probably even more full of shit . While we are here though I also raise you a third trans woman at Tokyo. I dont claim to know how many competed in total, just that the "only one" claim that is regularly made is likely to not be totally accurate.

Of course, not a flood, but certainly it wasnt "none for at least a hundred years" as predicted by York.

The orchiectomy point, like I say, not the expert, happy to accept that balls-on makes no difference so long as hormones controlled. I cant remember where I got the idea and a quick Google didn't help.

 

[mrjonathanr]

I found this summary of World Athletics’s current rules around this helpful:
world-athletics-new-regulations-dsd-transgender-athletes

 

[slab_happy]

Sorry slab I thought I thought i would help out by saying more than one but maybe the WT are full of shit. Heres another lot mKing the claim, probably even more full of shit . While we are here though I also raise you a third trans woman at Tokyo. I dont claim to know how many competed in total, just that the "only one" claim that is regularly made is likely to not be totally accurate.

Of course, not a flood, but certainly it wasnt "none for at least a hundred years" as predicted by York.

The orchiectomy point, like I say, not the expert, happy to accept that balls-on makes no difference so long as hormones controlled. I cant remember where I got the idea and a quick Google didn't help.

Okay, so we've definitely got Chelsea Wolfe as well. Though she went as a reserve on the team and didn't actually end up competing.

(And hey, Google tells me she's autistic! :bounce: Cue me doing the "one of us, one of us" chant. This has absolutely no relevance to the current discussion, just makes me happy.)

I'm not sure why you think it invalidating York's prediction is so significant, though. That's just one opinion from a retired athlete who happens to be trans.

And obviously we both agree that it's not a flood.

 

[Fiend]

(And hey, Google tells me she's autistic! :bounce: Cue me doing the "one of us, one of us" chant. This has absolutely no relevance to the current discussion, just makes me happy.)

That goes back to Barrow"s anecdote on the other thread that his friend in the medical profession found there was invarably underlying mental health conditions with trans perple, leading to the possibility of "Cure the autism, cure the trans leanings". I wonder if leeches, trepanning, or electric shock therapy would be best?? :-\

 

[slab_happy]

If you lose your balls then your T goes down to zero. You cant function to any extent in any athletic pursuit and then have to take exogenous T to make up for it.

Nope, as far as I'm aware trans women who've had orchiectomies don't have to take exogenous T in order to "function to any extent to any athletic pursuit."

I'm not sure where you got that idea from? If you've got a source for it, let me know.

Men competing in the men's category who have unusually low testosterone because of a DSD or other medical condition are allowed to take exogenous testosterone under a therapeutic use exemption, e.g. this Olympic swimmer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Spajari

So I'm wondering if that could possibly what you're thinking of? But that's because it's considered necessary treatment for a medical condition, not because you need testosterone to "function to any extent to any athletic pursuit".

(Also, doesn't apply to women.)

There are female athletes who have CAIS, whose bodies are incapable of responding in any way to androgens (and who thus don't even get the physical effects from androgens that non-DSD cis women experience -- famously, women with CAIS tend to have great skin because they don't get androgens causing acne!).

 

[slab_happy]

Sorry slab I thought I thought i would help out by saying more than one but maybe the WT are full of shit. Heres another lot mKing the claim, probably even more full of shit .

Oh, I registered that the claim got repeated a fair bit, especially in anti-trans circles (if a site insists on referring to trans women as "trans-identified males", that's a very loud dogwhistle -- they use it to avoid ever saying "trans women", and also because they can abbreviate it to "TIM" and they think it's hilariously witty to have an acronym that's a man's name to apply to trans women).

But it still doesn't seem to have a source other than, as I said, obsessive transphobe Graham Linehan finding an old unverified Twitter account which might be Barrett's.

Worth being aware that there's a whole thing where some people get very into "transvestigating" and trying to prove that famous or semi-famous or mildly notable people are "secretly trans". It seems like a hobby for some of them.

Recently some of them came up with a conspiracy theory that Daniel Radcliffe was only expressing support for trans rights because his girlfriend is "secretly trans", which they concluded because she's tall and looks insufficiently feminine for them. She is now pregnant:

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/04/09/daniel-radcliffe-erin-darke-transphobia/

So, yeah, Barrett might or might not be trans, but I feel it's probably best to avoid that whole rabbit hole and stick to discussion of the athletes like Hubbard and Wolfe who we know are actually definitely trans.

 

[slab_happy]

(And hey, Google tells me she's autistic! :bounce: Cue me doing the "one of us, one of us" chant. This has absolutely no relevance to the current discussion, just makes me happy.)

That goes back to Barrow"s anecdote on the other thread that his friend in the medical profession found there was invarably underlying mental health conditions with trans perple, leading to the possibility of "Cure the autism, cure the trans leanings". I wonder if leeches, trepanning, or electric shock therapy would be best?? :-\

Miriam Cates would support exorcism, I suspect ...

(Okay, we only know that her church did exorcisms to try to cure gay people of being gay, but I think we can make a guess.)

Actually, historically, one whole school of conversion therapy aimed at stopping "effeminate" male children from growing up to be gay or trans was deeply intertwined with a lot of the same psychologists trying the same tactics to "cure" autistic children. In both cases, the strategy being basically "punish them until they stop acting weird".

I might dig up some links later, but it's incredibly depressing and involves at least one suicide and thus feels like a bit of a downer in a reply to a joke.

 

[slab_happy]

For anyone who would like to be appalled and depressed:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/06/07/sissy.boy.experiment/index.html
http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/what-are-little-boys-made-of-main

Rekers’s co-author on the paper about “Kraig”, Ivar Lovaas, was simultaneously running very similar treatment programs aimed at “curing” autistic children via behaviour modification. Though with the addition of electric shocks as punishment.

The thinking in psychology at the time was that being gay and being trans were gradations of the same thing, and it was all about gender identity— if you had a boy who was feminine (which was thought to be about identifying with his mother), he was destined to grow up to be gay, and if he was extra feminine, he might become a "transsexual".

Then as being gay became much more socially acceptable (and it became overwhelmingly clear that therapy didn't "cure" anyone from being gay), some of the conversion therapists shifted ground to "well, okay, maybe we can't prevent your gender non-conforming kid from growing up to be gay, but we can at least stop them from being trans!"

So if you run into anyone nowadays who tries to tell you that therapy aimed at "curing" trans kids is totally different and has no connection to conversion therapy for gay kids -- historically, it began as the same thing, and some of the big names in conversion therapy for trans kids were previously doing it to treat gay and "pre-homosexual" kids too (or, like Kenneth Zucker, dangling the possibility that conversion therapy might make them heterosexual as well as cis).

 

[slab_happy]

Apparently Lance Armstrong is starting a podcast on trans inclusion and fairness in sport.

Irony is dead.

 

[galpinos]

Apparently Lance Armstrong is starting a podcast on trans inclusion and fairness in sport.

Irony is dead.

He knows what it's like to be cancelled, according to his social media.

 

[slab_happy]

The "readers added context" here is pretty delightful:

https://twitter.com/lancearmstrong/status/1672775264580042752