No magic solution
Sean Ingle at the Graun reports:
Trans women retain physique, stamina and strength advantages when competing in female sport, even when they reduce their testosterone levels, new guidelines for transgender participation in national and grassroots sport published by the UK sports councils will say on Thursday.
The long-awaited report argues there is no magic solution which balances the inclusion of trans women in female sport while guaranteeing competitive fairness and safety. And, for the first time, it tells sports across Britain that they will have to choose which to prioritise.
See I don’t think it should be a difficult choice. Competitive sport has never been about “inclusion” in the sense of “include everyone regardless of how unfair or dangerous that is.” How could it have been? How can you have competition if you also have to be inclusive? Competition excludes by definition – that’s what competition means.
Stressing that finding new ways to encourage greater inclusion is also hugely important, the report urges national governing bodies to find “innovative and creative ways to ensure nobody is left out” – including coming up with new formats, such as non-contact versions of team sports, that can be played safely and fairly by everyone.
I don’t think it is hugely important though. Even apart from the fact that competition entails exclusion, I don’t think it’s hugely important. Nobody gets included everywhere. I think men who want to live as women should just accept that they still can’t compete against women in sport. If that makes them sad I can’t really care all that much, I suppose because I think they shouldn’t want such a thing, any more than adults should want to be “included” on children’s teams. I’m not into all this “but still let’s do remember how sad this is for trans women.”
“Sport must be a place where everyone can be themselves, where everyone can take part and where everyone is treated with kindness, dignity and respect,” the guidelines state.
Sport in the most general sense, sure, but sport in the sense of competitive sport, well, it can’t be, can it. There is no competitive sport in which “everyone can take part” because people get weeded out.
H/t Naif
Well, at least now sports convenors we be on the hook for making an actual decision, rather than sneaking things in hopes nobody notices. Not that I trust them to “prioritise” the health, safety, and interests of women and girls…
Indeed. Lots of people lose long before any team hits the field because they didn’t make the cut. This has always been the case, but somehow, now that the participation of trans identified males is at issue, “inclusion” is suddenly so very, very important. Somehow rules and standards must be bent, stretched and broken to make sure they can play on teams for which they are not eligible. Either you’re entitled to try out, based on particular criteria, or you’re not. Ophelia’s right. In this regard, there is absolutely no difference between adults “identifying” as children, and males “identifying” as females. While the former would rightly be considered out of the question, laughably ridiculous, and grossly unfair, the latter is, inexplicably, supposedly, a laudible goal to be pursued. How has the material criterion of sex suddenly become so elastic or nebulous, when the material criterion of age has not? As with the fight over women’s right to abortion, none of this would not be happening if it were boys and men losing out to women.
Why is this “exclusion” now considered problematic? How much of the trans agenda gets a hearing because of the supposed disadvantaged condition of trans identified people? Even if TiMs actually were the most oppressed , marginalized, and victimized group EVER (which I do not believe), that would not justify handing over women’s rights to them as some sort of consolation prize, or as a balm to faux-progressive guilt.
I’ve seen a sufficient amount of gridiron football to understand that this “everyone can take part/be themselves” shite is an anathema to sporting events, which are often simulated battles.
It’s soppy and it’s sissy, on top of everything else that’s wrong with it.
Funny how this “inclusiveness” is a priority for sports in which TiMs have an advantage when competing against women and girls. It’s like they’re bending over backwards to all but give “everyone wins”, “participation” awards to TiMs, but if you’re a woman or girl who’s lost a spot on the team because of this, you’re supposed to suck it up, and “try harder.”
Sounds good. Sounds inclusive. Sounds warm and fuzzy.
But there are already some sports “adapted”, such as touch rugby where a touch is considered tackle. And men/boys will still beat women/girls because they are faster when they run for the ball, kick harder when going for touch, and can run longer due to heart lung size disparities.
Why is it so FUCKING hard to let girls/women have their own sports?
How much ‘kindness, dignity and respect’ is actually present in, say, the boxing ring in, let us say, the second fight between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder, or the fight between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, in which the latter was reduced to a near-vegetable existence? One gets fed up with these ridiculous platitudes. Yes, sports have rules designed to prevent, so far as is possible, too much damage, and in this they may be distinguished from gladiatorial contests in the Roman arena (though one suspects were gladiatorial contests re-introduced, there would be eager crowds of spectators). And on the amateur level an Irish friend recalls a hurling match between two Irish villages who hated each other in which the hurling sticks were used for very much more than hitting the sliotar. Playing golf with Donald Trump, I have heard, does not involve much ‘kindness, dignity and respect’, at least on one side.
I played a lot of sport (rugby mainly) in my youth, take a certain interest in it still now, and was pleased with, for example, Radacanu’s recent success in the US Open; but I do not enjoy the way governments use sport as a way of demonstrating national prowess, with lavish praise for Radacanu in the House of Commons, whereas the achievements of scientists and artists get little attention in such places. But sport of course is easy to understand: someone wins and someone loses, whereas in other more important fields of human endeavour this is not so obviously the case, if it is the case at all. We make far too much of the value of sport.
That said, I have nothing against people who do sports because they enjoy them. And if trans-people want to enjoy sports why can they not do so without destroying the enjoyment of others? Is it so difficult?
Sports are by their very nature competitive, and by their very nature create winners and losers. It is only by competing as a team against Nature that we can have a situation in which veryone wins; as when everyone in the town helps to hold back floodwaters by co-operatively building levee banks.
The most successful sporting types tend to be the ones who hate losing, because they have a lot of ego invested in it. Oh, and they don’t mind winning, either.
Golf I am told is the one game in which the world’s best and the world’s worst can go round the course together, and both have a satisfactory time.
Well, I can’t help but think that our competing against Nature (of which we are part) has had, shall we say, mixed results.
As for golf, I suppose that you mean that the world’s best compete among themselves and the world’s worst compete among themselves, and not with one another. Throw a trump in the midst, though, and I wonder if the time spent is quite so satisfactory.
What about croquet? I have always thought it is the perfect English game. Everyone in whites for the occasion, afternoon tea laid on, and underneath the placid and civilised exterior everybody seething with rage and hatred inside as their balls are banged into the shrubbery just as they have got themselves in a good position for the next hoop. I wonder if Ivy Compton-Burnett ever wrote about croquet.If she didn’t she should have.
I think Omar’s point about golf is that two players are playing parallel non-intersecting games. One of them could be absent and it would not affect the situation. Bowling is another example. Also, both golf and bowling have handicap systems that allow good players and bad players to compare scores at the end without a guarantee that the good player will prevail.
Well, Sackbut, I’m ignorant about golf and have always found it a singularly uninteresting game. No doubt I’m missing something, but I was delighted to find that the brilliant (and, alas, defunct) Robin Williams’ account, in Scots, of the invention of golf sums up my feelings about it; and the fact that Trump enjoys it, and enjoys cheating and winning at it (the intersectional version of it, which requires another player who will be the LOSER — for I’m pretty sure Trump wouldn’t enjoy a parallel non-intersectional version that lacks LOSERS, so long as it is not him) confirmed those feelings.
Positions in sports -“Left wing”, “centre forward” and (jocular) “left right out.” When we played games at my primary school you picked teams, and it went Geoffrey, Barry, Alan, Russell, then down through all the boys and then you came to the girls. I was pleased that I was well up in the useful girls side. We did play games where everyone could take part with some enjoyment, but it involved a bat, and the big hitters would be picked first.
Everyone knows that you have to meet certain criteria to play high level sport and that for each one that succeeds hundreds fail. They are supposed to swallow their disappointment and do something else, and the person who was not quite good enough for high level will then star in their works 5-a-side or at the local tennis club. Even being in the running for the Olympics or to play football among the professionals will give you huge kudos among the civilians.
“Being a good sport” i.e. accepting failure and disappointment stoically used to be a big part of at least the Anglo speakers.
@Omar – not quite true about golf. Someone who takes 10 strokes to reach the putting green is going to annoy someone who takes 3 or 4. A friend of mine plays golf, not well, but tries to be at a standard so that she can accompany her very sporty partner round the course, without too much difference between them. But it is definitely far better than eg tennis in good vs not so good.
@Tim Harris #5 I found myself enjoying the BMX cycling at the Olympics, where the Brits were doing well and a lot of brave, skilled girls were doing somersaults on bikes. I enjoy watching a little sport, but do get annoyed it gets so much air time, and as you say, so much national honour is involved.
A news programme will usually include quite a bit about sport especially football. Imagine if they had the same coverage for eg the latest archaeological finds – not huge things like Sutton Hoo, but “at the dig in Bury Mound, Lincolnshire, Professor Spade’s team found 30 beakers, and 23 glass beads.”
Golf and bowling of course have winners and losers.
Consider tennis. One player hits shots toward the other player, and the other player has to return them. Their actions directly involve the other player. It’s nearly impossible to play a game of tennis by oneself.
Golf, on the other hand, can be played perfectly successfully by oneself. When two people play, they play parallel one-person games, and whoever has the best score wins. Same thing with bowling. In both cases, what one player does has no effect on what the other player does. They are both playing against the course, or the alley, and seeing who does better; they are not playing directly against each other.
Two tennis players, one excellent and one terrible, do not have that experience; the excellent player’s shots would often be unreturnable, and the excellent player rarely have any trouble returning the shots of the other player. Ditto pool or baseball or boxing or any sport where people have the ability to impede the other player(s) attempts at scoring.
I was going to suggest running, but an excellent runner would leave the poor runner far behind, and that’s not a fun outing. At least in golf they stay together, regardless of the score.
Sackbut:
You got it in one.
After my 95th birthday, I plan to take up hang-gliding. Less risk that way.
I used to know a keen practitioner. After he finished his long stretch in the hospital, (no pain, no gain) he sold his rebuilt glider for whatever he could get, and took up something else. I think it could have been tiddlewinks, but I have no confirmation of that.
If his name had been Heisenberg, he could have named his new machine Wannabet? Or Who Needs Certainty? or Go Preach It To The Birds..!. Or something.
I just looked up the Nigel Benn-Gerald McClellan fight, which I don’t think I’d heard of before. Jeeeeeeeezus.
There’s another factor in the mix , stuck among being kind and ”inclusive” and being fair and safe for women. It’s the magic solution which can tip the scales, and probably will: winning. The woman’s team with the biggest, meanest, most competitive transwomen has an enormous edge over other teams, and will probably outcompete most other teams, and will absolutely wipe the floor with those teams concerned about being kind, fair, and respectful to the needs and rights of women.
Managers, coaches, fans, and even many female players aren’t stupid. If they prioritize winning, they’re going to pretend they prioritize the inclusion of transwomen. Two elements on the scale vs. one. Abracadabra! It’s the championship!
Which could also work to end it, since the handicap would become so obvious. Unfair unfair unfair they don’t mind, but once it’s about actually losing…
I was in the position of being the last picked, and in fact would not have been selected by either team except the teacher made one of the teams take me.
Which might work with fans that favor winning, and by large margins, but probably won’t with fans that want to see a genuine challenging match. Lots of people tune out when it’s lopsided, while most of the ones who want enormous wins don’t tune out when it’s not.
And then there’s the fact that a lot of men watch women’s volleyball to watch the women. Transwomen won’t go over well with them.
Oh yes, volleyball. Let’s see the old letches on the sports committee defend itty-bitty-teeny-weeny bikinis when it’s a 6’4″ intact TiM wearing one.