News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Coed teams exist. They're finding issue with mtf athletes playing against a league of individuals who didn't go through puberty as a male. That's clearly an advantage, and to say otherwise is to ignore science altogether.
Maybe the solution is non-gendered weight classes for sports, or just more coed teams. Idk
Edit: yall will convince yourselves of anything lol. Really wild the dumb shit some people will say
What about trans women who transitioned before puberty? What about cis or intersex women with elevated levels of testosterone? What about sports where it has been shown that after a long enough period of medical transition trans people have no significant advantage over their cis counterparts?
You appeal to science yet fail to cite a single source, so let me do it for you:
Good news! Puberty blockers exist and have been studied and used for literal decades for other reasons.
The science says 2-3 years of hormone therapy levels the playing field and there's no more advantage.
In fact, women who haven't transitioned often have an advantage because their testosterone levels can be higher than women who have transitioned.
And that's the crux of the issue: human variation.
Would you be opposed to a requirement that trans women wanting to compete in women's leagues undergo 3 years of hormone therapy before being allowed to play?
I think most trans people would agree that's reasonable, but at that point, you also have to talk about the bans on transition for minors, which would affect a minors ability to have that time frame met, and then their ability to play.
True, and that's a thorny problem but one that has to be addressed eventually.
In the case of a trans woman having not went through puberty as a male then yeah true enough as far as I know.
Are you sure about that? Because I looked it up and (after a few instances of "we have no idea but maybe not") I found this. I'll also admit that I only read the conclusion so I can't make any guarantees for the quality of the paper.
Yeah that's the thing: Testosterone is only one part of athletic ability. The paper lists some parameters that are either not affected or affected but not reduced to within the average range of cis women, but the obvious example would be height.
The paper does what all transphobes, and coincidentally most sexists, do when this subject comes up:
Pretends that the average woman has a shot at high level athletics even at just the college level.
If there's scholarships on the line, the people getting them are going to have certain natural advantages on top of busting their asses for years at the sport.
To quote an old Utah Jazz coach:
So when you compare the average 22 year old woman to an elite college athlete, you're gonna a very large gap. Just like comparing an average 22 year old guy to whoever just won the Heisman trophy.
The difference is larger in women. Because the average guy is more likely to have played sports growing up, and those gains in coordination when you g last for life.
And that's not even it.
There are just soooooooooo many reasons why this who thing is overblown fearmongering designed to get idiots mad at a very small very vulnerable group.
Of all the things to be mad about right now, your mad at tops, absolutely tops, double digit young non-paid athletes.
Just fucking why?
If it's not transphobia, what other reason do you care to still be going thru this thread desperately trying to have the same argument?
Well I care about the truth for its own sake, but you can also call it pedantry. I recognize that this is culture war bullshit by conservatives meant to demonize trans people for what's mostly a non-issue, but setting aside conservatives being conservatives it is a debate worth having. And I have nothing better to do, that helps too.
Ah, yes, let’s make laws specifically banning 2-5 children from ever having fun.
Like… what the fuck is wrong with you that you think a law targeting under 10 people in the entirety of the US is justified and not literally just bullying those kids on a national level to hope they fucking commit suicide? A law to tell 5 kids, specifically, that fuck them and they’re not allowed to have fun is god damn crazy.
https://www.newsweek.com/how-many-transgender-athletes-play-womens-sports-1796006
So you're saying that people like Michael Phelps should be excluded from competing in sports due to the famous athelete's "biological advantages"?
Should Michael Phelps be allowed to compete against 13 year olds?
If they're allowed to team up on him, sure. XD
So segregating competitors to some extent based on physical ability makes sense?
Depends on what the point is.
If the point is to give everyone a chance to compete fairly then breaking the sport into tiers based on ability makes sense and gender segregation would be unnecessary.
If the point is to make space for women to participate in sports, then excluding certain kinds of women because of some personal characteristic outside of their control would defeat the purpose. Trans women deserve not to have to play with the boys too.
It's not segregated by gender, it's segregated by sex.
If genotype and hormone testing aren't mandatory then it's gender segregregated. Sex isn't a property one can assume from outward appearances.
Of course it is. You can instantly tell the sex of 99% of people from a single glance. And it's pretty simple to clear up that last 1% with a single brief exchange.
Admitting that you can only get 99% accuracy is an admission that sex isn't what you're seeing when you try to guess someone's gender, and that you think that the existence of trans and gender-nonconforming people is something that can be ignored because our lives are less important than the convenience of your assumptions.
https://www.advocate.com/news/lesbian-mistaken-transgender-arizona-walmart
This is not the dumbest statement I've heard today, but that's only because I unfortunately saw a few clips of Trump trying to string a coherent thought together earlier.
I said it's about sex. You keep bringing up gender. Gender does not matter in sports. It is ABSOLUTELY something that can and should be ignored. No one (except bigots obviously) is attempting to guess anyone's gender in sports. Sports does not segregate anyone by gender. Or race, or sexuality, or religion...it's all immaterial.
If this was true then cis women would be forced to compete with trans men, causing exactly the same problems as you hope to ignore by insisting that sports are segregated by sex rather than gender.
If you actually believe what you say you do, then you think these guys should be on women's teams:
Personally, I think you're pretty weird for demanding that certain kinds of men should be forced into women's sports just because of their sex.
That's only not happening because trans men are physically unable to compete with cis men (on average). If there were a sport where cis women had a physical advantage over cis men, and trans men tried to join the cis men league, we'd be having the same discussion.
Wow, I didn't expect you to make this so easy for me.
To prove your argument, name one example of a trans man who was required to participate in women's sports without controversy.
As counter-argument, here's a trans man that was forced to compete in women's wrestling and won two state championships because he wasn't allowed to compete with men: https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/06/01/trans-wrestling-mack-beggs-texas-sport-changing-the-game-hulu/
And here's another article focusing on trans men competing against cis men in sports:
https://www.insidehook.com/sports/trans-athletes-win-boys-sports
Everything you just confidently said is completely irrelevant.
Let's start with the beginning of my argument above. Can you name a sport where cis women have a physical advantage over cis men?
Again, if your argument is about competetive fairness, then we don't need gender segregation to make sure everyone gets a chance to compete fairly. Ranking on some objective measure of performance can ensure that nobody is out of their league at sports.
If the point of segregating by gender in sports is to make space for women in sports, then we could just do that. No point in discriminating about it since trans folks are rare anyway.
Since the actual point of women's sports is to protect fragile male egos from getting beaten by girls, forcing trans women into men's leagues doesn't solve the problem either.
And to answer your question, extreme long distance running. Here's an article about it: https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/news/a44172975/are-women-better-endurance-runners/
The women's section is separate from the open section specifically so that women can get their place to compete without being dominated by men's biological advantages over them. Micheal Phelps is competing in the open section, which is... Well... Open. Also please leave strawmanning to the conservatives.
You missed my point.
If the argument is that unfair competition due to "biological advantages" should be reduced then I agree. Sports should be segregated by performance classes and open to all genders.
But if the point of segregating sports is to make space for women in sports, then excluding trans women is nothing more than discrimination on par with excluding black or disabled women. Trans women deserve not to have to play with the boys too.
That's probably the ideal solution, but the problem is that nobody's gonna watch anything except the top leagues. I mean watching the kinda good but not really amazing people's football league just isn't an appealing prospect, unless I misunderstood what you meant by performance classes. The whole point of this debate (other than conservatives shitting on trans women anyway) is that you need a framework where:
1-trans people can compete, 2-cis women aren't unfairly disadvantaged and 3-that people would actually watch.
I'm frankly not sure such a thing exists.
If we can only have two of those three then ditching the commerciality of it all would be my preference. Sports are actually worth watching when they aren't just an excuse to extract profit from professional and collegiate athletes.
Realistically, we can't have 3 in any case. Women's sports gets a tiny fraction of the viewership as it is and I don't see the inclusion or exclusion of trans women affecting those numbers much.
This is a really stupid argument. The thing that makes athletes special is their biology.
There's a reason that DK Metcalf towers over all of the cornerbacks in the NFL. He's a biological specimen that has incredible agility, height, muscle mass, and speed.
https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/d-k-metcalf-proves-he-s-an-athletic-freak-at-combine
Michael Phelps also has a biological advantage that very few humans have.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/we-celebrated-michael-phelpss-genetic-differences-why-punish-caster-semenya-for-hers/2019/05/02/93d08c8c-6c2b-11e9-be3a-33217240a539_story.html
None of this excludes them over their competition.
I'll just copy my reply to the other guy.
Thanks for the gibberish. So many words to say absolutely nothing.
That would be an argument worth discussing if the Nazis weren't also trying to ban puberty blockers and frothing at the mouth claiming the trans agenda is coming for their kids. But no, right now, that's a garbage bad faith argument, because it already has an obvious answer. That's how they poison the discussion.
Gavin Newsom is not a Nazi.
If he's capitulating to Nazis, that makes him complicit. Sorry if he had other good qualities, but he's bending the knee.
He's not capitulating. His position is supported by the vast majority. It's likely what he actually believes.
Please tell me what these "issues" are, with peer reviewed scientific sources. There are no significant advantages to a "male puberty" that are not countered by HRT. Furthermore, the same people touting trans kids for their supposed "advantages" are the same people forcing them to develop those "advantages" by restricting their access to healthcare before puberty begins.
The cruelty is the point.
Uh... Palm size? Heart and lung size? Height? Don't get me wrong I recognize this for the culture war bullshit it is, but there is some truth to this that needs to be addressed.
Edit: I only read the conclusion (and wouldn't be able to tell if the methodology is flawed anyway) but I found this.
So shouldn't we eliminate all players who may have physical advantages? What about a woman from birth who grows to 6'5"? Seems like that'd be an unfair advantage when playing against other women who may be only 5'10".
I mean by your logic we should just eliminate women's leagues entirely and make everything coed.
That's not my logic, that's your logic. Some people are born with genetic traits that make them good at certain sports, and that's always been the case. Your argument is that it's unfair if people have advantages and should be banned, so why not take it all the way instead of nitpicking here and there?
Because that's stupid? Why SHOULD we "take it all the way"?
Because you're stopping at an arbitrary point to give in to bigots.
That's not at all why we stop there. We stop there because it's been an effective way to organize sports for 10,000 years.
Let's check the science
Athletes have always leveraged unfair advantages in sports. There’s a reason there’s super tall players in basketball and short ones in gymnastics. May be they should enforce that average height of teams must match global averages. Countries with fewer resources just can’t support athletes in many sports so why not make that more fair?
There’s research showing that some women athletes (i.e., born with female reproductive organs) have higher testosterone levels than many men, and even some male athletes. So why are they allowed to compete in women sports instead of men?
There’s a lot of ways to make sports more fair. Banning transgender people without fair science based facts is not one of them and is plain bigotry. It’s like saying an athlete on anti-depressants should be banned because they are happier and more motivated so have an unfair advantage.