Taller, bigger and stronger on average
The International Olympic Committee’s guidelines for transgender athletes are unfair on female athletes and should be suspended while more research is carried out, according to a group of former and current Team GB athletes surveyed by an academic.
In the survey of 15 female British Olympians, most of them answering anonymously, 11 also agreed with the view that “it can never be fair for transgender athletes who have been through male puberty to compete in female sport”, with another declining to answer.
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Among those questioned – who came from track and field, swimming, rowing and modern pentathlon – were Tessa Sanderson, the 1984 Olympic javelin gold medallist, and Sharron Davies, who won a swimming silver in 1980, both of whom have already made their views known.
Devine also found widespread frustration among athletes with the IOC over a perceived lack of consultation before it published its latest transgender guidelines in 2015. The guidelines allow any transgender athlete to compete as a woman without undergoing surgery provided they have reduced their serum testosterone to 10nmols/L for at least 12 months.
Gee, why would female athletes find that frustrating?
The transgender academic Joanna Harper, who advises the IOC, accepts more research is needed. However, she argued: “Transgender women after hormone therapy are taller, bigger and stronger on average than cisgender women. But that does not necessarily make it unfair. In high levels of sport, transgender women are substantially underrepresented. That indicates that whatever physical advantages transgender women have – and they certainly exist – they are not nearly as large as the sociological disadvantages.”
Got that, kids? It’s magic! Transgender women are taller, bigger and stronger but they totally won’t win all the prizes or break women’s bones, because they have sociological disadvantages. Trans academic Joanna Harper knows this for sure and has no bias of any kind whatsoever, and the reporter Sean Ingle is also completely impartial and uninfluenced by his testicular investment in the subject. Women on the other hand can never be objective. That’s a scientific fact.
The assertion that in high levels of sport, transgender women are underrepresented seems at best dubious. Given the demographics of what would appear to be a wave, it is perhaps not surprising that there are not that many in the peak performance years of 24-29. But in other categories, that does not appear to be the case. ‘Underrepresented’ would mean fewer per capita than women born as women. That seems extremely unlikely for youth sport where regulation now allows such competition (ie. Connecticut track and field), and it seems unlikely for Masters sport. Unless the implicit assertion is that the transgender population is in fact enormous.
Naif, they might figure it the same way they seem to count representation in theatre – if the absolute numbers of women are higher than those of transwomen, they are underrepresented. For instance, black female playwrights have a slightly smaller number than white female playwrights; black female playwrights are represented at the percentage that black people are in the population, but white female playwrights are less than half of what they are in the population as a whole. Nonetheless, it is the black women that are underrepresented.
Because people don’t understand statistics, not even the simplest things like percentages and means.
Can you say, “category error”? I knew that you could.
It’s also vintage OB. Bottled and cellared.
Transgender women may be underrepresented in “high levels of sport.”
Perhaps that’s true, but it’s not WOMEN’S problem. If it’s a problem for anyone, it’s a problem for the men.
And it might not be a problem even for the men, depending upon how the condition of “being transgender” is regarded.
Perhaps it is a medical condition, requiring physical alteration through surgery and hormone treatment. It might simply be the case that people who have these medical conditions are rendered less able to compete in sport at high levels.
If it is not regarded as a medical condition, but simply a matter of self-identification, then there is no medical barrier to participation in elite sport . . . as the intact men that they are.
It’s fair to suspend the guidelines until there’s more research. And until that research is done, transgender women should not be allowed to compete in female sports. That just follows and makes sense.
Yes, exactly. The entire issue is that transwomen want to compete against women, in the women’s divisions, challenging women’s records. It’s not simply that transwomen want to compete.
I wonder how many transwomen compete in the men’s division in sex-segregated sports.
There can be NO “research” that shows that men (“transgender women”) don’t outperform women.
That research does not and will not exist, because it’s contradictory to reality.
Why are people giving in to this? Why are some calling for “more research”? Seriously, why? What, precisely, do they think is going to be found?
Because trans-women are women, that’s why. Q.E.D.
Seriously now, the reason why there’s an ongoing dispute about trans-women athletes is that TRAs see that as a chink in their armor around the claim that trans-women are women. Because once you make a distinction based on biological sex between men and women, more distinctions can follow. And that would be problematic for the claim that self-identification alone is sufficient to make one a woman.
A friend of mine recently argued that ending girls and women’s athletics just might be the price we have to pay if we want to respect all marginalized minorities. It’s as if ‘the jocks’ are in competition with ‘the bullied.’ Athletes only win if we lack sufficient sympathy. High school never ends.
That clearly is what far too many think, or McKinnon would never have been able to get away with it. It drives me nuts.
People over 50 are underrepresented in “high levels of sport”. Clumsy, inept people are underrepresented in “high levels of sport”. People in wheelchairs and on crutches are underrepresented in “high levels of sport”.
In some cases, it’s because they are not good at sports. Transgender women can only win if they compete against women; against men, they are way down the list of top athletes (with some exceptions, such as Caitlin Jenner, who decided to transition late in life). If they compete against smaller women, voila, they can win.
It isn’t about playing at all, it’s about winning. For the disabled, we give them the Special Olympics because they cannot compete against people who have stronger, healthier bodies. For women, we give them women’s sports because they can’t compete against the bigger bodied. So women set records in women’s sports, but would not be able to achieve that in men’s sports. Now they won’t be able to achieve that in women’s sports, either, because they are required to accept the men as women.
Do you suppose it would fly if an able-bodied person declared themselves “trans-disabled” and insisted on competing in the Special Olympics, taking the medals away from those that are not able to compete against the able-bodied? No? Of course not.
It’s only women who have to center their movement and their rights around everyone else.