But where will they play?
.
Wales’ first gay rugby team has criticised plans to ban trans women from playing women’s rugby.
That is, plans to ban men from playing women’s rugby. Men can have whatever fantasies about their own identities they like, but that doesn’t mean they can impose their fantasies on everyone else no matter what, and it especially doesn’t mean that when it’s a matter of the relative safety of women rugby players.
The sport’s governing body World Rugby is considering the move over “safety concerns” – claiming a female player is at a higher risk of being injured by a player that has gone through male puberty.
Because she is. Obviously. It’s not a mere “claim” and there’s no call for scare quotes on safety concerns – the concerns are real, and women’s safety does matter, believe it or not.
And in its report, published by the Guardian newspaper, it says trans women have significant physical advantages over biological women even after they take medication to lower testosterone.
However, if these proposals get the go-ahead then doubts surround where and where trans women are able to play competitive rugby.
Why do those doubts matter more than the fact that allowing men to play on women’s teams will inevitably cause injury to the women? Why don’t women matter?
Cardiff Lions, Wales’ first gay inclusive rugby team, have slammed the proposals – and said the plans effectively amount to a ban on trans women playing the sport – because they would not be able to play men’s rugby either.
Why does that matter more than women’s safety? Why don’t the Cardiff Lions care about that?
World Rugby’s 38-page draft document, produced by its transgender working group, said there is likely to be “at least a 20-30% greater risk” of injury when a female player is tackled by someone who has gone through male puberty. It argues the advantage is so great – and the potential consequences for the safety of participants in tackles, scrums and mauls [also so great] – it should mean that welfare concerns should be prioritised. And the document claims those advantages are not reduced when a trans women takes testosterone-suppressing medication- “with only small reductions in strength and no loss in bone mass or muscle volume or size after testosterone suppression”.
But the Cardiff Lions don’t care about all that. Not their problem.
Where is it written than everybody has a right to play rugby at all, especially at that level? Transwomen shouldn’t play against women because women can too easily get hurt. If the transwomen, because of their performance-reducing drugs or whatever, are unable to compete against men, well, is that the men’s fault? They made choices, and as a consequence they’re just no longer good at rugby. Do something else.
If this goes on, pretty soon guys like me will be demanding the right to play professional rugby! That’d be a laugh.
If LGBTQetc. organizations would put their considerable clout and resources into fielding either transgender or unisex rugby teams, then there would be a place for Transwomen and Transmen to play.
Indeed. Everyone, at some point in their life, has had to compromise on their preferences for all sorts of reasons — including physical ones. They don’t want to play; they want to dominate.
Exactly. I wanted more than anything to be a singer. The problem is, I can’t sing! So no college music department would consider me, no band would allow me to be their lead singer, and no one would come to see me sing. But if I identify as a good singer, then could I force these groups to validate that? No, I could not. Nor should I try. It simply isn’t reality. (And while I recognize that singing is quite subjective, the only living individual I have found that thinks I can sing is my dog. He is more than willing to validate my fantasy, but then, dogs are good at that.)
We all have things we wanted desperately to do. Very few of us get to achieve more than a fraction of those things, and many don’t get to achieve any of them at all. The right to sport is one I question, but is apparently accepted by many as a right. But the right to play professional sport, and to have a fair shot of winning (or a greater than fair shot if you are a man playing on a woman’s team) is not a right, nor should it ever be.
Someone with no legs can’t play serious rugby either and there’s bound to be more double amputees than transwomen…
Of COURSE they can play with the men, if they are good enough. If they aren’t good enough to play with elite men, they can find a recreational men’s team to play with. I’ve run or played on recreational softball teams for about 40 years. I’m not a very good player, no talent and little skill, but I’ve always been able to find a team that suits my abilities. If it’s about playing rugby, and not just being able to beat up women, these men can find a team.
Oh, maddog, don’t be so silly! They can’t play on men’s teams means (per my trans decoder ring) that they can’t win when they play against men. They can win championships and world records when they play against women, so naturally they want to play women. It’s their right!
It’s not a mere “claim” and the scare quotes are doubly not called for because the decision was the result of 5 months research. World Rugby announced back in February they’d be consulting “independent experts and leaders in the fields of sports science, biology, medicine, ethics and law, as well as rugby administration, medical and playing representatives” (The Guardian 22 Feb 2020). They now not only “claim” increased risk of injury, they give us the numbers (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/jul/19/transwomen-face-potential-womens-rugby-ban-over-safety-concerns).
I’m becoming more and more convinced that the ideology is grounded in an epistemology that is unconcerned with disconfirming evidence. Or rather, evidence cannot falsify anything about it. If some datum appears to, then the datum should be rejected as being transphobic. If a true thing doesn’t advance the cause, then it should be rejected. Ultimately, what determines whether a belief is justified is whether it is woke or not, correspondence theory of truth be damned.
It’s an epistemology that places moral claims as its highest arbiters. Is there even a name for that?
The claim that transwomen would be banned from playing men’s rugby under the WR proposals is simply false. In fact, quite the opposite, women would be allowed to play with men’s teams where the local competition wishes to allow it and the female athlete is willing to assume the risk. Essentially a continuation of what is done U12 and U13.
The Moralistic Fallacy.
I would say rather “it’s an epistemology that places a central dogma as its highest arbiter.” And the name for that is religion.
So let me get this straight: Gay men can form their own rugby team where the inclusion/exclusion factor is your sexual orientation. That’s fine, totally OK, no problem with that.
Women can form their own rugby team where the inclusion/exclusion factor is sex (not gender). How terrible! These awful exclusionary women!
The studies on muscle mass and bone density and height seem to form a consensus that even after testerone suppression, estrogen delivery etc males still outperform females. Here’s where the TRA argument gets specious. Yes, there are men who are small, not strong and they are in the left tail end of the distribution of males. They don’t typically play contact sports like rugby because they’d get hammered. There are also women who are tall and strong, and they are at the right tail of the distribution of females.
But sports aren’t divided by height or weight. Because overall, most men are stronger, heavier and taller than most women. If you combined men and women and then plotted the distribution, it would look bimodal. But it isn’t, it’s two overlapping distributions. And the composition of the distribution changes based on trait.
The women in the overlapping female right tail for height, for example, might not be in the right tail for strength. A man in the male left tail of the height distribution might be short, but boy is he strong. All of these people will move around depending on which trait distribution you model. Choosing a variable metric such as weight rather than sex obfuscates those differences and so the sport will always self-select the male half of the weight spectrum. Might the odd female end up there with the best of them? Sure, I guess it’s possible. But they would be a huge outlier. Males would overwhelmingly dominate the sport in question whether it’s rugby, long-distance running or the high jump. And it looks like that’s what they want.