The current situation is wrong. It’s dumb and a way to keep people divided. What is sadder are the people that drank the kool-aid and believe there is a problem. The problem is closemindedness and bigotry. I stand with transfer people. Kids, teens and adults. People just wanna be. Please let them
It's a tough issue & cases like this are problematic. But so is the case of a swimmer who was good enough as a male to make a university team transitioning & competing against females who trained all their lives for those competitions & now face a 6'1" opponent who was a male. What's fair then?
Is it fair to be Lance Armstrong?
He has particularly long thigh bones, making him biomechanically suited to cycling. His heart is a third larger than the average male's. His maximum heart rate is over 200bpm. His VO 2 max, is one of the highest recorded at about 83 ml/kg/min. -The Guardian
LOL, is it fair to be Michael Phelps? Where is this going to end?!
"His arm span is 6'7″, 3 inches more than his height. Generally, a person's arm span is equal to their height, but Phelps is not an ordinary person. This characteristic gives him an absurd amount of pulling power in the water."
Then you should start a movement to ban the talented and and gifted from using what they were given Vonnegut wrote about it Harrison Bergeron Read it It’s also a movie that if you prefer
Um, that’s what you want to do. If your goal is to ban all genetic advantages, then every competitor must be equal. Everyone must be the same height, weight, and age. Anyone with a genetic abnormality (like Michael Phelps) would be banned for having an unfair advantage.
That’s a tuffie, huh? Just asking questions, Larry? All this time and energy spent on this issue and you haven’t been able to get your most basic question answered? Do -do you know about Google? Bing? Did you try asking Jeeves? I’m worried about you Larry, your sea-lioning seems off today, you ok?
Absolutely. In most cases it isn't about a culture war vs a policy war at all. I'm sure there are some on the right who want to genuinely win, but a victory was never really the point. The fighting was the point. There isn't much that is more fascist than using your concentrated power to convince1/2
I fear it's mere warm-up. What a significant number of people train with regards to that group, ie. the othering, the non-empathy, will be usable otherwise all the easier
Sorry but I think this particular argument is far more nuanced than that and we need to find a way to get a more positive message across to people who have concerns rather than simple poke fun at them. Too many battles have been lost already by trying to take some sort of intellectual high ground.
Meritocracy is a fundamental principle of sport and even if it is one person perceived to gain an advantage we need to be clear on how that manifests itself in people’s thoughts on the essence of fairness in competition.
This is ALL a tolerance test of how much dehumanization the American public will accept on a small group of citizens before they move onto larger identity groups. The Christian Nationalists did the EXACT SAME THING in the 1930s. Who will be next on the dehumanization list?
Fear makes it seem legitimate. No fear is being manufactured, just hatred. Not a single person on their side has ever been afraid of a transgendered kid playing sports. They just hate them.
This is the kind of thing that maga uses to distract. Has nothing to do with running the country and impacts very few people but it gets magnified so they can get away with fucking up truly important things.
Idk,but I think privacy prevails. It’s kinda crazy that CA would be front and center for this type of case, with NCAA rules. The hate in CA is more prevalent than people think. It’s very frustrating.
The whole point was always just to make people scared and angry.
They just find a victim to turn that fear and hate towards, and get people angry and scared. . .then use that fear and hate to manipulate them to vote for them, so they can make themselves richer once in office.
"9-Year-Old Girl With Short Hair Left Sobbing After Being Attacked for Being Trans" (because this is like totally about young girls being safe you guys, and not a scapegoat to distract from having no actual policies that help people)
They did a poll that asked adults what percentage of people in the country were trans and 40 percent of respondents said 3-5 percent or higher when the real number is about 0.5 percent.
You know this well. It’s all about the fear, it’s about moral outrage, it’s about the other, it has never been about facts. This was the replacement for abortion no matter how stupid it was and it worked (because our Country is dumb as shit)
It's also got the "benefit" of putting women back in their place. Your daughter shouldn't better out on the field than the boys and she better be feminine enough or they're going to have to look at her genitals.
An eye opener. I was always concerned about whether issues, like bathroom use and women's sport were affected by trans people. Unisex bathrooms would solve part of that, and I never realised so few athletes were trans. Was I overly concerned about how trans rights would affect womens rights.
Pulls out calculator....sharpens pencil.....crunches the numbers... 0.002% of the athletes. They convened a congressional panel to deal with the massive threat of 0.002% of all D1 athletes?
I wish we had a quasi-legal group who was investigating wasteful government spending.
No, trans women are not women. They are trans. We all agree that gender isn’t binary, yet we treat athletes as if there are only two choices: male or female. Why not create new categories that reflects reality in not just sports but in life?
No, actually, trans women are whatever they want to be. Why should we otherise them into a "third team" when they want to be in the women's team, where they feel the most comfortable? How dare you make the assumption that they're not?
What about the cis girls on the girls team? Don’t they also deserve to be most comfortable? That’s what bugs me: you’ll are more concerned for trans girls being comfortable than for girls to be comfirtable.
I think you'll find that they don't care about that anything like as much as you reckon they would. What bugs me is that people like you don't actually care how they feel either
you’re saying trans girls don’t care about my feelings and I should be OK (which I am), but I should care about their feelings? Why? Are trans feelings more important than non-trans feelings?
No, I don’t get to decide how anyone identifies. I am not bothered by trans women. They’ve been around all my life (I grew up partly in San Francisco). We all are free to be who we want to be. And I’m free to not agree that trans women are the same as me, a cis female.
You let the sporting bodies deal with these issues. Politicians should be involved, and American politicians have no say over world governing sporting bodies.
That's why we have weight divisions in sports like football and height divisions in basketball...oh wait....there is no differentiation based on body type in most sports and some human beings regardless of gender have a physical advantage over others.
Odd assessment, probably because it's completely lacking in basic knowledge of social conditioning.
I not only remember but paid attention to the different ways boys and girls are raised. Since trans kids w good parents are raised like their cis peers, there's very few differences between them.
What I can't figure out is what criteria they're thinking that people need to be checked by. After all, we know it's possible for for what's on the birth certificate to be a mistake, so we can't go by that. How about an FMRI scan of their brain?
Do you suppose members of Congress might mind if they had to go through one of those each time they need to walk through a doorway where there might be a toilet on the other side?
What do you mean by a mistake on the birth certificate though? Doesn't that just say what chromosome pairings you're born with? That's as good a system as you can get at that stage, isn't it? Not really up on these things, so excuse me if I'm talking rubbish, but this thread baffles me.
Well, if it's something you didn't know then I think it's a good question. Even it was something that you knew but weren't really sure about, it's probably still a good question, because after all somebody else might read this thread and find the answer that they were afraid to ask.
Birth certificates aren't all the same and I'm not sure quite how much variance there is in them, but as far as I know chromosome testing isn't done at Birth, at least anywhere that I'm aware of. And even if it was, not everyone has a pair of One X and one X or Y chromosome, and even if they do...
There are people who have One X and one Y chromosome who turn out to be as female in as many ways as most people who consider themselves female, and likewise there are people who are born with two X chromosomes who turn out to be as male in as many ways as most people who consider themselves male.
Do you mean behaviorally and how they live their lives? If so, I'm completely following. It's the separation of what the body is, all its parts and biology, from what the person feels, that somehow should make the former null and void, that I can't reconcile.
I thought that if there was a penis, it meant XY in 99.99% of cases, XX if not. But again, this is not something I've studied, just what I've picked up along the way. I'll happily accept a more informed biological explanation.
It's never been that simple. Sometimes at birth it's indistinguishable whether they have a penis or a clitoris. They're actually the same body part in the fetus, and can still be by the time the child is born. They differentiate based on hormone levels and the bodies reaction to those hormones.
Of course, I'm sure a skilled medical professional with plenty of experience would find it easier to make a decision in somewhat ambiguous cases that is likely to be correct, but what I was getting at isn't how frequently mistakes happen, nor about what kinds of mistakes. It's that they do happen.
An often overlooked fact is that even really physically-fit trans people probably don't gravitate toward putting *all* their afternoons into organized sports practice unless it's mandatory in the first place. Also whatever makes a lot of trans brains also makes a lot of em look the part already.
Yeah, here in WA state, the WIAA, the entity in charge of administering high school sports has decided that they’ll now have an “Open” division for trans kids who want to play. My ? Is exactly how many kids will sign up for this? Are there gonna be teams of trans basketball? Trans baseball? Etc
Yes, you are correct, but the right-wing has amplified these small cases into a scenario where even farmers in rural areas believe this is happening in every school.
I've heard farmers repeat all of the propaganda that they were taught by right-wing media. This happened many months ago, when it was important for influencing the election.
Tots and pears 🍐 are no longer enough. As long as they are in bed with the NRA, children will be murdered.nor one child wants to die for your Second Amendment rights. NOT ONE. The Gop is a national terrorist organization. Full stop.
#gopterrorist
Imagine spending millions if not billions on bills to stop *10* transgender people playing sports. It's so ridiculous, it's like something from a movie.
George, please remember Spock’s motto: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. There are more cis girls than trans girls, and if cis girls don’t want biological boys in the locker rooms or on their teams, I’m gonna side with the cis girls. Please don’t stoop to using names.
If gender is not binary, why are sports binary? I support a category for non-conforming athletes separate from male and female athletes. And if there are not enough non-confirming athletes to make a team, well, that’s life. Please stop demonizing girls who conform to the XX gender.
Not demonizing the very few trans children who play sports doesn’t mean that you’re automatically demonizing girl athletes - I don’t see any of that happening in the post or comments here.
Correct, it’s not in the post. I was referring to the general hate going to cis girl athletes who don’t want to have trans girls on their teams and in their locker rooms. It is riskier to speak out against mixing cis and trans girls; they get more hate from the professional Left than anyone.
Fearmongering using the under-educated as their weapons, standard practice for people who are aiming for a divide and conquer attitude of ruling over a population...
I mean there's a deep discussion that can be had about that but it isn't the focus of this post. My own mother has gone into a panic about trans people in sports, an issue that doesn't matter to her at all, because of how intensely republicans have campaigned on this issue. All for, again, 10 people
The GOP doesn't even want that discussion though, they've made that quite clear.
I'm by no means an expert here,but quick food for thought:wresting leagues are made competitive using weight class instead of gender.Could we find similar measurements for other sports? Do they all really need gender?
The reason this thread is so focused on the number is because republicans have been fearmongering very hard about this issue and acting like millions of trans people have infiltrated our sports leagues etc etc
And there's only ten. Millions of dollars in ads, whole campaigns..for so few people.
Sometimes I wonder if liberals are just more resistant to change. As in: accepts it, can handle it, moves on with it. conservatives get stuck, they can't handle it, they fear it and anything they fear must be stamped out. Just a thought, not sure if it's true.
It’s a distraction. The right is good at creating fear to keep people busy worrying about non-issues that they have turned into issues to keep us from focusing on the problems that matter most. Like children dying in school or women dying from problem pregnancies.
The culture warriors just throw buckets of shit at the wall to see which turds will stick. Plenty don’t and they are quietly forgotten about but, for some reason, this one has and, boy, are they going to go on and on and on about it.
it speaks volumes about the educational expectations of our student athletes that the President of the NCAA doesn't know when to use "fewer" vs. "less"
My daughter is trans. She has NEVER been interested in sports - and neither have her geeky friends. They are much more interested in playing D & D than playing soccer.
More than ignorance and bigotry! It’s overcompensating by mean, insecure bullies who want to impress other mean, insecure bullies by trying to prove they can beat up the weakest, smallest or most segregated people available. Take away trans athletes and these pathetic jerks will find someone else.
The post-mortem on the election included a statement that the "trans people getting sex-change operations in prison" was an ad that the RepubliKKKans played more than any other and THE ad that had the most traction.
Total non-issue, but it brought the RepubliKKKans to the voting places in droves.
Of course it's manufactured. Fascists always pick a marginalized group to demonize in order to justify their abuses of power. They never attack a group that's in a position to fight back, e.g. straight white male lawyers.
Well George , you fail to point out that the less than 10 ( 9?, 7?, 3?) trans athletes have won every major championship in every conceivable sport in the past decade! So unfair ! It needs to end before they take over the govt and force Elon musk out.
Not to mention the ridiculous idea that someone would choose to be stigmatized by a huge portion of the country by being Trans just so they can win at women's sports, which is itself rooted in the sexist idea that women athletes can't compete with men.
The Republicans have spent the past 8 years building an insane “trans-moral panic” and the Democrats allowed it to happen by their silence. I am so angry. 😡
Truly pathetic.... The "small government" party effecting nationwide legislation to criminalise less than 10 people's efforts to participate in sports. That sure looks like small government to me.
There is no small amount of desire to ensure that women's sports cap out alongside third or fourth rate men's sports. So you start at the youth level by making girls choose between excelling in their sport or not having to put up with sexually intrusive examinations.
For further prospective, the # in D1 schools is even smaller. This matters because D1 offers scholarships &, more recently, the opportunity for lucrative endorsements. I attended a D3 school & you could take a walk on spot based on HS performance, no try out needed.
Exactly. And look, I understand there are issues once someone goes through puberty - (gay woman friend is a music teacher and says oxygen capacity is different for boys) and maybe we need to work on rules at college level. But the issue affects so few people. It's just about hate.
I shared a bathroom with a woman who was in transition at Amazon for 5 years & I came out unscathed. They were there to do exactly what I’m in there to do: Use the facilities, make sure I’m still looking remotely alive, wash my hands & head back out. This fear mongering is truly ridiculous.
Same in the UK, the small boats crisis had been blown out of all proportion. In 2023 there were 29k crossers 0.04% of the UK population and not enough to fill Stoke City Football Stadium, and of those only 8.7k, 0.01% of the population, were not granted asylum - not enough to fill Grimsby stadium1/2
I'm not saying minority issues are not important, they are worthy of reasoned, calm understanding and intelligent concessions where required form all parties, but they're being demonised, 'Othered' and blown out of all proportion. That' isn't kind, it isn't fair and it's just not cricket. 2/2
Blanket bans’ are not based on evidence (given there is no definitive evidence that trans women on long-term GAHT have a performance advantage over sissgender women) and do not recognize that trans women are as diverse as cisgender women.
Blanket bans’ are not based on evidence (given there is no definitive evidence that trans women on long-term GAHT have a performance advantage over sissgender women) and do not recognize that trans women are as diverse as cisgender women.
George, i love you.
This stance on transgender isnt totally founded in facts.
Many transgender people are just normal people. When you enter competitve athelics where doping with your own blood is illegal...
Having a male frame built through puberty is ridiculously more unfair
And yet, the loudest people who have a problem with that are the ones who want to deny gender-affirming healthcare from transgender adolescents as well, so they're forced to go through an incongruous puberty.
Sounds like they're creating the very problem they are up in arms about, doesn't it?
No. Lets be very clear about the difference between body dismorphia and fad trans.
I have personal experience with both perspectives.
I have a problem with banning care for any child, but i also want my children to experience puberty naturally before they make an unforced decision.
It turns out, I have experience with both as well. The latter would certainly benefit from de-stigmatizing therapy and social transitioning in the years before puberty to prevent rash or uneducated choices.
But I suspect our opinions/conclusions won't ever mesh 100% on this subject.
Perhaps more than you think..but as i age..i rarely think younger me knew better.
gender is far more fluid than most are willing to admit or even think about...the fear of it makes them hide behind strict rules..but...life is not as short as people think. 18 is a very very young age...
Blanket bans’ are not based on evidence (given there is no definitive evidence that trans women on long-term GAHT have a performance advantage over sissgender women) and do not recognize that trans women are as diverse as cisgender women.
Blanket laws are nearly always oppresive to some.
Individualilzed laws become oppressive to the ones having to parse the difference.
CIS gender has almost become derogatory and that is wildy dangerous unless we make babies in labs.
Trans are not better. No one is.
We all just want choice
It is terrifying and horrifying. I am so sorry that you're having to deal with this bullshit, and I hope you have allies and community to make it more bearable.
I live in Seattle, so that helps a lot, but I am a government contractor…so…I am the targeted group. Truth is, I am damn good at my job with 25 years experience. I am considered essential personnel by position and department. I am trying to renegotiate my contract to include protections.
Transgender issues are not as significant as the slim majority of voters were led to believe. Nor is it so common that surgeries occur in high school infirmaries. Leave people be, let them be as they think of themselves, as long as they are not directly harming anyone else.
.0019607%. They got played by their own hatred and ignorance, tricked into fighting a culture war while they voted for the billionaires to win the class war.
But it keeps us focused on something other than the price of eggs NOT coming down, or reductions to social security, or less investment in our communities, or less regulation that leads to unsafe water or food or air quality.
The party of tax cuts for billionaire trust fund babies and illegal wars for corporate profit broke out trans and woke to create a no cost hot button issue to distract their low IQ constituents with.
There are many valid reasons for women and girls to be concerned about and interested in keeping their sports teams single sex at all levels of competition. This is a complex issue that deserves respectful discussion and debate, not dismissive minimization.
Comments
Perhaps we should take a long hard look at why we structure our sports in such a way that we would have to worry about injury if participation by...
Why do we conduct ourselves as if we are citizens of Sparta instead of living in our modern day?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/25/fischer-wells-trans-athlete-kentucky/
It’s so rare that it could best be handled individually on a case-by-case basis. Making this a national issue is deranged.
He has particularly long thigh bones, making him biomechanically suited to cycling. His heart is a third larger than the average male's. His maximum heart rate is over 200bpm. His VO 2 max, is one of the highest recorded at about 83 ml/kg/min. -The Guardian
"His arm span is 6'7″, 3 inches more than his height. Generally, a person's arm span is equal to their height, but Phelps is not an ordinary person. This characteristic gives him an absurd amount of pulling power in the water."
Like CRT, BLM, Gas stoves, economic anxiety, eggs, etc.
Some Americans need something to hate in order to get out of bed in the morning.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11176146/#:~:text=Although%20anabolic%20steroid%20use%20was,substance%20abuse%20according%20to%20sport.
They got exactly no traction.
Letting this BS slide was a major error.
Seriously. Just stop dividing sports by gender and just do divisions by skill level or weight class or something, depending on the sport.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgxjmnnxwno.amp
They just find a victim to turn that fear and hate towards, and get people angry and scared. . .then use that fear and hate to manipulate them to vote for them, so they can make themselves richer once in office.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/06/15/9-year-old-girl-gender-question-track-meet/
I DGAF who is in the next bathroom stall.
"801"
"How many of them have an openly trans child?"
"1"
This is a problem because the worlds richest man doesn't like something.
I wish we had a quasi-legal group who was investigating wasteful government spending.
Physically, no.
Sport is a physical activity.
Weight classes and categories are there to bring fairness to the competition.
Knowing what is fair, and what is not, requires that expertise.
It's not fair to ban trans women from competing because too many people didn't make it past high school biology.
You may not remember your life, for whatever reason,
but some of us were present during ours.
Your assessment of prepubescence and strengths,
is garbage.
I not only remember but paid attention to the different ways boys and girls are raised. Since trans kids w good parents are raised like their cis peers, there's very few differences between them.
They make utter mockery of your physical attribute claims, and destroy fair opportunity for all other competitors.
Dismantling the Constitution of the United States of America!
This is why things like Trans Day of Visibility are so important.
Most MAGA will never meet a trans person. They’re only projecting their hate and life failures on minority communities - again.
.001% of athletes are trans? Well hold the fuck up, we gotta deal with this epidemic
#gopterrorist
Just like it wasn't about where you sat on a bus or which public water fountain you used.
Even without this sub-discussion it's preposterous to even consider anything else than acceptance.
People are just scared of what they don't understand, and it's not OK to turn that into hate and exclusion.
I'm by no means an expert here,but quick food for thought:wresting leagues are made competitive using weight class instead of gender.Could we find similar measurements for other sports? Do they all really need gender?
And there's only ten. Millions of dollars in ads, whole campaigns..for so few people.
This is a class war. Once people realize that and mobilize they will be stopped.
Left or right. Poor is poor
Total non-issue, but it brought the RepubliKKKans to the voting places in droves.
*Also, STFU, Charlie, you dumb prejudiced asshole
We will ban all trans from sport for medicare for all instead of any private health insurance and federal abortion law to replace roe.
Meanwhile, I'd like to know how many of the half million cisgender NCAA athletes take performance-enhancing drugs (legal and illegal).
Sorry that is all.
Thank you George for your notices.
much of the world
There is no small amount of desire to ensure that women's sports cap out alongside third or fourth rate men's sports. So you start at the youth level by making girls choose between excelling in their sport or not having to put up with sexually intrusive examinations.
Is that what you meant?
Sport is a physical activity.
There are differences beyond one's thoughts.
Categories, and weight classes are not unfair.
They in fact, bring fairness to the competition.
WARNING: This post is intended as sarcasm. Don't @ me, GOP snowflakes.
Besides, any of these haters think some men don't ogle other men and some women don't ogle other women?
So they are protecting women’s sports while attacking every other right that women have?
https://t.co/O2vNM8sUVC
https://t.co/O2vNM8sUVC
This stance on transgender isnt totally founded in facts.
Many transgender people are just normal people. When you enter competitve athelics where doping with your own blood is illegal...
Having a male frame built through puberty is ridiculously more unfair
Sounds like they're creating the very problem they are up in arms about, doesn't it?
I have personal experience with both perspectives.
I have a problem with banning care for any child, but i also want my children to experience puberty naturally before they make an unforced decision.
But I suspect our opinions/conclusions won't ever mesh 100% on this subject.
gender is far more fluid than most are willing to admit or even think about...the fear of it makes them hide behind strict rules..but...life is not as short as people think. 18 is a very very young age...
https://t.co/O2vNM8sUVC
Individualilzed laws become oppressive to the ones having to parse the difference.
CIS gender has almost become derogatory and that is wildy dangerous unless we make babies in labs.
Trans are not better. No one is.
We all just want choice
510,000 athletes and less than 10 are trans. I think that is 0.00196%.
Australia doesn't feel like it is far enough away...
Zero.
Oh, why is that?
Satan's is enjoying quite the rid at present.
Edit button, please
" In God We Trust "
Also that water must always be wet
Despite what some woke Democrats 😞 think .
Hooray 🎉
They create fake outrage.
This way their indoctrinated mob never expects any real accomplishments.
Think about it 🤔
Outside of blocking good legislation what have they done in the past 25 yrs ?