Politics Supreme Court rules West Virginia transgender athletes can compete on female sports teams

I’m BlazerCaravan. We met in person years ago, before I transitioned. I respect you a lot. Which is why I’m not offended, just confused.

 

The guy who did this is trying to get trans people banned from competition. It’s really disheartening to see, because the argument stops being about trans people and starts being about Shitty Cis Males who will do harm to women’s sports. I wonder if he wants to go into a women’s bathroom to make our lives worse there too.

This isn’t even about trans athletes; it’s using the threat of cis men to do nothing except hurt trans people.

 

Well it’s great to have you back FAMS. But you should know better than to think I wouldn’t want my daughter to play against another athlete simply because they are transgender. She has and had teammates that were gay and that was no blip on our radar of course.
I simply am concerned if my daughter went up against a person with the strength of a D1 male soccer player in a competitive competition. If you take 18 year old HS men and compare their style of play against my daughter and her 18 year old female teammates….there is NO match on strength, speed and POWER! She plays on a co-ed Futsal team and it freaks me out. The refs have to stop the game every now and then to remind the guys to chill.
I’m concerned that my daughter would get injured playing against an opponent with the strength of a grown man is all.

 

I don't disagree with you at all. But the fact that they are shitty people doesn't change the fact that they exist.

Shitty people will use this to ruin women's sports for one reason or another.

In Canada the conversation isn't how strong or talented that woman is. How much devotion and commitment she has had. Or even if the record holder was born a woman. The conversation is to what degree have they completed their transition and how much of an advantage that gave them.

I don't see how that could be good for the sport. But maybe it is.

 

When you say women decide does that include trans women?

 

Just read that in the US there are supposedly 1.6 Million people over the age of 13 who identify as trans....it was a university study I think from UCLA. Thought it was interesting as I had no idea how large the community is here.

 

the trans community is typically thought to be about 0.5% of the population globally, with about a 60/40 split between trans fem and trans masc. however I bet that’ll normalize to 50/50 as being trans is normalized.

0.5% of 8 billion is 40 million globally.

To put it in perspective, it’s only a little less than the number of people with Celiac disease.

 

This is an interesting question, and it makes me sad that folks assume a trans woman is just a man in women’s clothes. The effects of chemically transitioning are all-encompassing. That there are any trans women who are still built like men is a symptom of a health care system actively trying to keep us from getting the hormones we wanted when we wanted them.

Most trans women didn’t want their male puberty. If I had unlimited access to a Time Machine and hormones, I’d never have experienced the bone and muscle growth of a male puberty. I would have instead had the female puberty I wanted.

I didn’t want to be six feet tall. I didn’t want the muscles I got. I felt like a gorilla out there every day, covered in hair I didn’t want, feet the size of fucking aircraft carriers, gross in every way. Being so uncomfortable with locker rooms meant that I didn’t try out for sports after 9th grade.

If trans kids could just get access to the medicine they need, then the trans women athletes wouldn’t be “women with the bodies of grown men” in the first place. But instead of working for the betterment of all, the cis decide to deny us health care, then deny us participation BECAUSE they denied us health care. We get punished over and over and over because of fear.

 

I have a trans nephew who didn't begin transition until his 20s. Always been tall but frankly does not and probably never will look like a man. But at least he is happy, living and working in England and has a cute girlfriend.

 

Yes..absolutely.

 

With regards to athletic competition, If the women and trans women could come together and establish some guidelines for participation (I believe that's been done already) and have checks and balances to keep out those who are not meeting legit criteria and just fucking around. it can work.
The % of women trans that want to compete probably isn't all that great so it should be manageable.
Men would not have an issue with male trans if they wanted to compete so why should women? Just needs to be done correctly for women's sports.

 

give him ten years on HRT and you’ll be really surprised. Masculinizing hormones do a ton of good work with muscles, voice deepening, and body/facial hair… after top surgery, a very high percentage of trans guys just… pass. They don’t have to swim upstream trying to reverse a male puberty. If he’s already fairly tall he’ll look amazing after a full HRT puberty.

 

Or kids for that matter.

With respect to sports, it gets more dicy. As, women are naturally disadvantaged when compared to men to differing degrees, based on the sport.

I don't think there is a perfect solution. Except that people need to have access to the medical care they and their doctor deem necessary, when they deem it necessary.

Then hopefully these concerns go away.

 

Having grown up in the 90s, I remember all the jokes and gags and horror films and… men playing trans women because the real trans women didn’t look “trans enough” (i.e., like men in dresses) for the audience to properly clock. Or cis women playing trans women if the character needed to hide and trap another character like in Ace Ventura… hey remember the extended joke about Ace forcibly ripping off a trans woman’s pants and everyone puking at the sight of her penis? Fun times, fun times.

Gender is a spectrum and made up but socially, the genders of man and woman have a lot of gravity about them. A lot of this is learned from your family and society writ large (really, all of it is, but biological sex markers help curious children notice the differences and correlate).

imagine a world where being left handed was seen as satanic, evil, and so people who were born left-handed were taught to write right-handed. Before it was widely accepted, you’d have brave parents who insisted their left-handed child be allowed to stay left-handed, but the percentages would of course be minuscule. And then as it gains acceptance the numbers skyrocket until they level off at about 20%.

There are some indicators that a lot more people would be trans if they weren’t instantly and constantly bullied into conformity. I’m not saying 20%, but 0.5% feels… low. But right now we’re using an 8-crayons set of colors to describe a trans experience socially when we could be using a big 128-color crayon set instead. If a boy were allowed to choose between blue and periwinkle instead of just blue or pink, more boys might make the choice to be periwinkle instead.

Most detransitioners (like 9 out of 10) say the reason they went back was because of social pressure or lack of support from family or friends, and most retransition when they’re in a more supportive environment. Sending your relative to some conversion camp in the woods that bills itself as Totally Not A Conversion Camp sometimes works because you’re applying a hydronic press amount’s worth of social pressure to a child who just wants their family to love them again. But the effects only last as long as the kid is beholden to their family. Jokes in movies and on TV act as a sort of passive conversion camp, constantly reminding anyone who might step way out of line what society’s bounds are.

heck, even a lack of representation can seem like negative rep. Like did you know Star Trek writers wanted gay and trans characters in The Next Generation but all their attempts were stopped before filming by the producer of the show (Rick Berman) because he was just… a proud homophobe and didn’t want any of that gay shit in Star Trek? That’s society enforcing the gravity of gender (because even homosexuality before being accepted was a gender norms thing: back then the definition of being a proper man or a woman did not include being attracted to the same sex).

anyway this got away from me and became an essay; I just think the subject is interesting.

 

See, this is why I said we should change the thread title to "I'm Dealing with a Few Cisgender Issues" lol
Like for fuck's sake. This is just cis-on-cis crime.

 

Yeah, I have no problem at all with any trans.

Only people who would destroy women's sports. My only concern, is in allowing women the ability to compete in fair competitions.

I just feel that women should not be disadvantaged in their sport or division, and anybody who would put them at a disadvantage should compete up to the next division. Nobody should ever be prevented from competing if they can compete.

I understand that it's a sensitive issue, but we have rules to make things possible for the most people.

There has to be a line somewhere that prevents abuse of the system.

Now, whatever is deemed to be fair, I'm alright with.

Perhaps a law allowing anybody who hasn't been through male puberty to compete with women would be fair? I'm not sure. I don't know if we even have enough information to make that call. If so, I'm good with it.

It seems certain that anybody who has gone through male puberty has a definite advantage over anybody who has not in most athletic competitions. So that seems to be a good place to draw the line.

If we can come up with an acceptable way to verify that it seems a good place to start.

But it must be based on science and facts. Not feelings or biases, IMO.

Regardless of this issue with women's sports, everyone should have access to the healthcare they and their doctor agree is needed.

 

What would destroy women's sports is women allying themselves with bigots who don't give a damn about women's sports, who oppose women's rights, but want to use women athletes to attack trans people.