To clarify, the pictured poster Caroline Kwan is an ally, not a TERF. The TERFs referred to in the title are the ones ‘protecting a very specific idea of what a woman is’
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I’m so stoked for the future of women rugby. Partially, because it’s a very inclusive sport and it inherits a lot from its lore and ethos - with only a few years left until a woman will referee a high profile test game. And partially, because I want to see the same ferocious generic selection applied to female athletes.
Anyways, give it a go - some really good footy. If you’re absolutely unaware of it, look up highlights of Portia Woodman.
Inclusive? World Rugby is famously transphobic and exclusionary when it comes to women’s rugby…
Not that it’s necessarily a reflection on them today, but rugby union was also one of the last major sports to ban apartheid South Africa. Athletics banned them by '70, cricket tours were being called off from '70, soccer suspended them all the way back in '61, and they weren’t allowed in the Olympics from '64. But they were still doing official international rugby union tours as late as '84.
Yeah because people get hurt in rugby. And when a man plays woman’s rugby people REALLY get hurt. People don’t like that.
Trans women are women.
Your submission in “TERFs taking their gloves off for Imane Khelif” was removed for Transphobia.
I’m not saying it’s ideal, but things do change rapidly. South Africa about to start giving female players centralized contracts, etc.
The NRLW in Australia is an awesome comp and is growing rapidly in viewership too! It’s a great game to watch and young female athletes are finally getting some serious role models they can aspire to as well. I’m not much into rugby union being a New South Welshman but the league games are intense.
rugby is the sport predisposed to head injuries correct?
That’ll certainly make for an interesting game, regardless of who plays.
Rugby, NFL football, hockey, boxing, and even WWE professional wrestling all have histories of multiple athletes suffering from CTE. Women’s hockey I think will have fewer incidences of CTE due to rule and equipment differences but it’s still early to say. We often didn’t find out about CTE in men’s hockey players until after they died young in retirement.
I have no idea what the rules for women’s rugby are like, if there are any differences. The real issue is a swinging motion of the head (caused by falls or sudden stops), not unlike the way a hammer swings. The movement of the brain inside the skull with sudden stops or changes of direction causes tearing like you’d expect if you swung around a bucket of jello and then slammed it against something.
I try to be cognizant of these things and not support these sports so much, yet they’re in my social circles and I do enjoy them. Every athlete makes their own choice to participate in these sports at the end of the day, though I wonder how informed they are about the risks.
yeah, most sports include increased rates of brain damage, weirdly enough, but to my understanding, as somehow who doesn’t know much about sports, rugby is just football (the american one) but with more contact and less padding afaik. Is that accurate?
I don’t have a problem with people voluntarily giving themselves brain damage, i think, but it’s definitely an odd problem to have.
Rugby has some similarities but is otherwise a completely different sport from American (gridiron) football. American football actually evolved out of rugby, first by the introduction of the snap. This led to the concept of “downs” and the requirement to advance the ball a minimum number of yards (originally 5, now 10) within the allotted number of tackles.
The sport was extremely dangerous at the time because of the way mass formations of players would impact into each other at full speed. More rule changes were needed to make it safer, and the field was made wider to give more room for players to run around the other team instead of ploughing through.
The sport was extremely dangerous at the time because of the way mass formations of players would impact into each other at full speed. More rule changes were needed to make it safer, and the field was made wider to give more room for players to run around the other team instead of ploughing through.
is this rugby or the variant of it known as american football?
It was neither? Both? It was an intermediate sport between the two. They had made some of the rule changes to rugby that are more in line with modern American football but not all of them. Modern American football has the forward pass and rules for protecting the passer, called the quarterback. That dangerous in between sport did not.
ok i see, i know that spots have changed over time, i’m just not really sure how they’ve changed. Obviously football has a lot of protective gear now, though it’s debatable how well it works.
I personally like to descirbe myself as tolerant. Not exactly progressive, but I very much see the struggle some people live with and so I decided that not being hostile to anyone is the least that I can do in case I don’t just straight-up support some causes. I had to get this clear, because my opinion doesn’t exactly match with the one detailed in the post or at the very least I find fault in it’s reasoning.
The problem is that all the “genetic advantages” that make someone a good swimmer for example, are all unrelated traits, that are not really rare in people, it’s just that it’s quite rare for them to all be present in one person who then also goes off to be a swimmer. Testosterone on the other hand is a single hormone, exceptionally important in becoming an outstanding athlete and for that precise reason it’s considered a performance-enhancing drug. If you look at it this way it’s not that hard to see the problem.
Being more muscular certainly is an advantage. Being taller also is. Longer arms also are. Lower body-fat percentage also is. Better stamina also is. Better agility also is.
Any boxer you pick randomly should be expected to have one or more of these “genetic advantages”, but all of them, resulting from a single condition is quite a different situation. Elevated testosterone levels are a single cause for developing some of the most important traits of a dominating boxer and so someone with such an advantage can’t be considered a freak of nature in the same sense that someone like Phelps can be. There isn’t a “swimmer hormone” that magically gives you all the advantages in swimming, but there is a “fighter hormone”, that does in boxing. I personally don’t think that Khelif could be anything other than a women. I just think that her body happens to overproduce a literal PED and that’s a problem for anyone who wants to go up against her or those that want to see fights that are more or less determined by technique.
Now for solutions and as far as I see there’s only one that doesn’t involve excluding her from boxing. Simply put her and anyone with similar conditions in a weight class based on their muscle mass and not their actual body mass. Moving her one weight class up for example would at least mean that her opponents have trained with punches of similar force to her’s, something that the lack of seemed to have been a problem for her foes in Paris. She would still have an advantage in terms of speed, but she would pay the price of having less fat for impact absorption. I think that would be a win-win scenario.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
i mean, yeah as far as test goes, it’s a PED, but at the end of the day, does it really matter significantly? I’m not sure.
Sometimes people have test so high it’s literally impossible to measure, there’s no real reason women can’t also experience high test either, though high test is also arguably bad.
Sure they might be physically bigger, but the hard to answer question here is if it’s any more significant than your average olympic athlete. With how prevalent trans people are (not very) and how common it would be for those trans people to be athletes (even less likely) i’m not sure it’s a huge concern or even a significant consideration.
At the end of the day, you’re already sampling for the most unusual, and weirdly built people, that’s why it’s the olympics. Excluding trans people from that seems like it might be a bit more redundant than necessary.
If it’s a real concern, proper class weighting would help, that’s a valid strategy, but another strategy is to simply have multiple medal winning categories.
I appreciate that you are at least kind about it.
In general I don’t think she’s considered a dominating boxer. Other opponents certainly haven’t said so. Even in her last fight, her opponent had a longer reach. I think it’s kind of crazy that people are taking comments from one opponent so seriously, instead of just seeing that opponent as someone who had not properly trained.
We also have no proof of anything to do with her hormone levels or anything else for that matter. In fact, even the disgraced governing body that excluded her has stated it was not a testosterone test that they used.
Simply put her and anyone with similar conditions in a weight class based on their muscle mass and not their actual body mass.
Once you do that you will meed separate groups by height/arm length/anything else that is an advantage. Weight class already groups them in a way that avoids completely inbalanced fights based on muscle mass.
Not to mention the lack of volume of people who would fit the bill. Caster Semenya is the only other athlete I can think of, in recent memory, that might fall into this class & she was runner.
Fully acknowledging there could be other athletes, I haven’t necessarily looked, but I’d still wager the number is pretty low when it comes to this specific issue.
An interesting rant! Cheers
Phelp’s unfair genetic advantage is no different! His mutation gives him advantages at pretty much all endurance sports, not just swimming, and that’s unfair. That’s a problem for anyone that wanted to go up against him. You can’t handwave this.
The Olympics is actually just a competition for which country has the most athletic mutants.
The Olympics is actually just a competition for which country has the most athletic mutants.
I’m going to hold onto that one to use later!
Yep, heard someone complain about Khelif and I asked them if we should have disqualified Phelps considering his genetics give him all the advantages and if they believed we would have complained about Khelif 20 years ago and if they believed that men who’s testosterone is under a certain level should fight in the women’s category. That was the end of them complaining.
I keep bringing up Brittney Griner and ask if she should be forced to play in the NBA and suddenly it’s, “no, she couldn’t even come close to beating the worst NBA player.”
So if you’re a woman with masculine features and want to be an athlete, you can’t compete with anyone apparently.
Realistically she had a choice - she could have either become the first woman in the NBA and been essentially an also-ran beyond that or do what she did - join the WNBA and set a single game record and tie a career record in her first game. Just going to point that out again, she tied a career record in the WNBA in a single game, the first one she played under them.
Now she’s better known for being arrested and thrown in a Russian prison for trying to bring a weed vape into Russia when that’s illegal there. Pretty sure that’s technically international drug smuggling, albeit in the smallest and most innocuous possible way.
Ah yes, the Air Bud rule. “Nothing says women can’t play in the NBA.”
And, of course, it was her choice on which league to play in. Because players get to choose such things.
It was her choice which leagues to try to join. She didn’t try for the NBA and fail - she didn’t try for the NBA. There were even some commentators far deeper into the sport than I considering the possibility that she might do so before she joined the WNBA instead.
As far as it being the Air Bud rule, one woman has officially been drafted by the NBA in 1977. She decided not to try out because she got pregnant. Mark Cuban talked about considering Britney Griner back in 2013, and there’s currently some chatter about possibly drafting Caitlin Clark though she’d be one of the smallest dozen or so players at only 6’ tall.
But yeah, there is no professional sports league in the US that bans women from participating if they can compete at the relevant level. There’s even the occasional woman that tries out for the NFL, the last of which got injured early on in the process and bowed out. High contact sports are a hard sell for women to compete with men just because of size, weight and strength differences and professional sports athletes being more than a standard deviation from the mean.
50 bucks says they didn’t listen to a word you said and are still complaining about it, just in online echo chambers instead of to you
Well, if that at least shut them up for the time I was hanging around them then good!
Do women want to fight Imane? Probably not.
Do I want to fight Tyson in his prime? Probably also no lol
I’m not trying to make her look like Tyson but they are both outside the norm just like 99% of top athletes.
So far it seems like only Italian women don’t want to fight her.
Do I want to fight Tyson in his prime? Probably also no lol
Do I want to fight Tyson right now at almost 60, also no lol
At least now you can get the drop on him. He won’t hear you coming!
But then his pigeons would descend upon you in numbers
Anyone can become amazing at a sport if they work hard enough at it, but the top athletes are always going to be people who worked hard and have a genetic predisposition to it. Lots of sports are dominated by people who are taller than average. Where do we draw the line on a genetic trait giving someone too much of an advantage?
I mean, it’s the Olympics. The best of the best. If we had a breath holding competition and that one tribe that developed extremely large lunge capacity entered, that’s fair game IMO.
It’s pretty much what happens in long-distance running, and it’s seen as very positive (which it is)
it reminds me of the recent volleyball injury case that went around. Trans student spiked a volley ball into the head of another student (not exactly intentionally) and it injured them quite significantly. Naturally her first reaction was to bitch and moan about it, but at the end of the day, nobody would want to be spiked in the face with a volleyball, from a man, women, child, anybody. That shit would at the very least concuss you, and might even kill you in all honesty.
the fact that the other student was trans is probably more inconsequential than you would think.
I feel this would be a great MythBusters episode: “can you die from being hit in the head with a volleyball? No, but what if we built a machine that shot it as fast as a bullet?”
it would certainly be an interesting one, though if i had to guess, the chicken airplane one is probably similar enough…
as long as you ignore the chicken and the airplane part lol.
I don’t want to fight her, and I’m a dude with martial arts training twice her size. The lady has skill.
Reactionaries don’t want womens sports, they want beauty pageants with extra steps; something they can fap to. That’s why they go after somewhat brolic looking women, regardless if they’re cis or trans: they no make pp hard, therefore they shouldn’t be allowed
Look at how they used to require the female athletes to dress in beach volleyball. Men get loose, comfortable shirts and shorts, while woman were allowed a maximum of 10cm of cloth on their bikini bottoms.
And there were complaints when that was changed. Including the similar white knight shit going on right now- “how will they be able to perform at their best in shorts?! You’re forcing women to have a disadvantage!” No, they’re forcing your dick to have a disadvantage.
And people were pissed when the new options weren’t exposing almost their entire body. Got all angry about the woke giving athletes more options to choose from when performing their sport.
It’s not about protecting women. It’s about attacking women.
There I fixed your conclusion.
Genetically, he’s been disqualified for swimming due to having a Z chromosome, meaning he’s sexually a fish.
I thought ZZ made you a bird.
We need to settle this, everyone. Is Phelps a bird or a fish? No other options here.
Those guys are assholes. I keep bumping into them mid-air. Have they ever once apologized?
ZZ/ZW is used by assorted fish and birds. Disgusting. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… MASS HYSTERIA. Brought to you by the woke mob. Thanks, Obama.
No, it’s because men participate in what is effectively an open division and if you want to participate in the protected division and you have traits that even hint at not being protected, you will be scrutinized to remain in the protected division. It’s really that simple.
This is a pretty good take, except that the men’s division is also protected. Performance enhancing drugs are not allowed, it is not a free-for-all open division.
I don’t think anyone thinks the men’s and woman’s division should be combined because there is no good way to differentiate the difficult place in the middle; this is a classic heap paradox, just because the division between woman and not woman is difficult does not mean it doesn’t exist.
Just one example from speed climbing men’s WR = 4.74s, woman’s WR = 6.06s; the men are 27.8% faster. No one is arguing that men are more dedicated and train more, that they have access to better nutrition or equipment. Men have a natural advantage; combining the divisions would simply mean that no women could possibly get into the top class competition. This maps across ALL sport.
This maps across ALL sport.
Well, while mostly true, there are always exceptions.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240731-the-sports-where-women-outperform-men
Tldr ultradistance events and some shooting
Interesting.
TIL there are people who swim marathons.
Should we have other protected divisions though? Why don’t we have a protected division for people not born with attributes that help them? Making a division aimed at women and then not letting the best women compete in it seems rather dumb and it’d be similar to making a division for men who aren’t athletic so they can compete without having to be the best.
I want to see a baseball game played by two teams of people with situs inversus and watch the arguments about if it’s still left field
We do, we have the Para-Olympics. But, it seems you’re conflating being good with being scrutinized. The better you are in a protected class, the more you should be scrutinized to retain the class protection. It does not mean you will be disqualified… You may be the best ever in that protected class.
We could make a lazy couch division if we wanted to. I don’t think anyone wants that.
Para-Olympics are divisions for people with disabilities. It’s not for people without advantages (and I’m not saying there should be, just posing a hypothetical). If we don’t allow the best women to compete because they’re too advantaged, doesn’t that also imply we should have other divisions for less advantaged people too?
Obviously the woman thing we’re seeing is just conservatives policing what the idea of a woman is though. They don’t actually care about the women or the sport. They were not watching women’s MMA (or whatever the event was) before this happened. It still does bring into consideration what divisions we should have though, and whether women’s division actually makes sense to have or if it should be something else, and what that should be. We don’t have divisions for socio-economic status despite that playing a large role in most sports. Should we?
Just saying it was another type of protected division. I agree, the men’s division is also protected to some degree from PED users. There is no clean solution. I like someone else’s post about Heap Problems. It’s clear there are naturally occurring classes of athlete, but the lines we draw are arbitrary, and that’s just how it is. Just like any other science experiment, we must pick and choose variables that make the most sense, as we cannot infinitely slice.
Sports is full of divisions. Age divisions. Weight divisions. Each sport has its own set of rules based on what gives an advantage in that sport.
Yes. I think that this is the concern of everyone who is genuinely interested in fair competition. While I’m sure that some people are triggered ( in both directions ) by the transgender debate.
I mentioned in another thread that I think the simple solution to this is to not define divisions by gender, but to simply measure testosterone and have a high-T “open” division and a low-T division. This is where the perceived competitive advantage lies and sidesteps the whole gender issue entirely.
Should Brittney Griner be tested for testosterone and then forced to play in the NBA if it’s too high?
The WNBA is still part of the NBA. She’s been playing in the NBA
You know what I mean.
What’s funny is that is THE issue we’re discussing - misogyny in sports. That the NBA in your mind defaults to “Real Men’s Basketball^TM” and women have this little side denominator with their girl basketball… like no. Be exact if you don’t want to be sexist. The NBA is both the men’s and women’s basketball associations.
What you MEANT was whether Britney should change to the men’s division of the NBA.
…or I don’t watch basketball and just didn’t know that.
Nah, it must be that I hate women.
What do you think the letters in “NBA” stand for?
Interesting apology for your accidental misogyny. Kinda looks like you do hate women.
You can’t tell how high someone is by measuring testosterone. Maybe you were thinking of the Toblerone test.
You’re right. Determining what’s fair and what is a task non-transphobic scientists should be working on, not something you discuss lightly around a beer at a pub. There needs to be actual research.
Transphobes will probably not like the conclusions of that research, though…
Cute weed joke considering it landed her in a horrific Russian prison as a queer woman, but also, I didn’t say she was too high.
While sensible, is T really the only factor at play here? Once you get into the science where do you draw the line?
Realistically it probably depends on the sport. Y chromosomes, being exposed to certain levels of testosterone in utero (unless one is resistant or unresponsive to the hormone), being exposed to certain levels of testosterone in puberty and maintaining certain levels of testosterone all do things to the body than could effect performance and that’s all still mostly just focused on the one hormone. How much each of those things has an impact (if any) is going to depend entirely on the nature of the sport in question.
I looked her up again to get caught up on what kind of info wikipedia has updated on her.
I really admire her stance.
So she was actually a robot all along…
Honestly I can’t believe she is so brave to face the world with a stance like that.
Courage.
Alfred Kinsey proved that everyone’s on the vertical-align spectrum.
What stance are we talking about here? I don’t see it indicated on the picture
it’s listed below age
Oh rofl ty
The Italian just got skill issue’d and conservatives were attracted to it like my cat to a nice steak.
Phelps needs to be investigated because I’m pretty sure he is a largely a dolphin
She almost, ALMOST has it!
Just a little bit of mental extension and she’ll realize that this is the same reason trans women should be allowed to play women’s sports as well
It sounds like that’s her argument.
So much of this fear and hysteria is bound up in the media’s need to find “perfect” athletes, rather than the social need to venerate exercise and healthy competition. You get this fixation on cheating and this endless bickering over who has an “unfair” advantage, while losing sight of the general value of people feeling inspired to play sports and swim and just get the fuck outside to touch some grass.
The need to know who should win the shiniest trophy seems to eclipse any other concern. It becomes a justification for all the hatred and bigotry that The Olympics was originally intended to cut against.
“Superman vs Thor” mentality.
Also, these TERFs (and other bigots) haven’t seemed to have noticed that women who play sports at a high level like in the Olympics haven’t asked for their protection.
Everyone wants to play sports safely. You don’t need to ask for it.
Oh cool, let’s check out some TERF messaging:
Sport is inherently physical, so the different physiologies of the sexes matters. Whilst everyone should be able to participate in sport, the Sports Councils’ Equality Group’s International Research Literature Review states “There are significant differences between the sexes which render direct competition between males and females unfair in most ‘gender-affected sports’”. The peer-reviewed scientific literature found evidence that:
Alright, pretty reasonable start. We all want fairness.
On average, compared to age-matched females at any given body weight, adult males have:
- 40- 50% greater upper limb strength
- 20-40% greater lower limb strength
- 12kg more skeletal muscle mass [1]
Hold up, did we just use a study about (cis) adult males to argue that trans women shouldn’t be allowed? Oh no, that doesn’t seem very scientific… Well, I’m sure it’s fine, let’s check their references:
[1] Janssen et al 2000, Handelsman et al 2018
Okay, it’s fine, I’ll look them up myself:
Skeletal muscle mass and distribution in 468 men and women aged 18-88 yr
Okay well, that can’t be right, their numbers are just coming from a comparison to men, they’re just pushing the narrative that trans women and men are equal. Huh. Let’s check their other reference:
Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance
Wait, this study doesn’t prove anything about trans women either. In fact, considering their comparisons of low and high-level testosterone in males, you could reasonably extrapolate that trans women on feminising HRT are comparable to their peers from this study. I wonder why the post didn’t bring up that possibility? Ah well, let’s move on, shall we?
Handgrip strength is often seen as a wider indicator human muscle strength[2] and mean maximal hand-grip strength over 2,000 European young adult males and females shows:
Oh, huh, still conflating cis men and trans women…
- Female handgrip at 329 Newtons
- Male handgrip at 541 Newtons
- Highly trained female athletes still have weaker hand grip than 75% of untrained male subjects [3]
Hmm, it doesn’t seem very feminist to perpetuate the wildly inaccurate myth that the majority of males would outcompete elite female athletes…
Okay, so would you like me to keep picking this apart, or could we agree that it’s scientifically unsound now? If any of these “facts” were relevant to the discussion of trans women in sports, I might (reluctantly) agree that there’s a safety argument to be made. But I think what this conversation lacks most is empirical evidence. It seems that if an organisation like the one you linked above, who ostensibly want what’s safest for all women, that they’d love to fund such a study that proves definitively what’s safest. That they wouldn’t care what the result was. So why have no studies into actual trans women been done?
I know this is quite anecdotal, but myself and most trans femmes I’ve talked too (who are on HRT) can describe the experience of losing that strength that comes alongside testosterone. If you want something more empirical, I have read countless instances of trans female athletes being unable to come close to matching their pre-transition Personal Best’s. In fact, the gap between their pre and post-transition PBs is often on par with the gap between female and male results more generally. I can’t recall a single instance where their PB went up after hormones. Whereas most athletes in their prime continue to push their PB higher.
The link was to disprove the previous claim and provide at least one example of women in sport calling for protection.
Whether or not they are justified in asking for a balance between saftey and fairness is a can of worms I’m leaving closed.
All I see is another progressive organisation that has been infiltrated by TERFs. The page you link too reeks of their tactics and arguments. The fact they’re based on TERF Island (UK) says a lot as well.
For the women involved that aren’t TERFs, I think it can be all too easy to subscribe to their arguments when you’ve worked so hard to achieve fairness and equality. But the conflation of trans women and cis men as equals, without any scientific proof, leads me to believe that even they are being deceptive here. I mean, the TERF tactic of denying trans men their identities also shows up towards the end:
Transgender men and boys, or non-binary women and girls, who do not take hormones or who have not undergone any form of medical transition, share the same physiological features as biological women and therefore should be welcomed in the female category.
Like, I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s fair to use people who dislike trans people to prove your point. You’re fair and reasonable to not want to open that can of worms. All I’m saying is that finding a definitively anti-transgender reference doesn’t prove your point, because there’s no way to seperate the TERF from the science in that article. Meanwhile, I have never seen an Olympic-class athlete complain about transgender women in sports until Angela Carini. And even she has turned around and profusely apologised for what she said:
“It wasn’t something I intended to do,” Carini said. “Actually, I want to apologise to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke.”
She added that if she met Khelif again, she would “embrace her”.
So, I dunno, I don’t really think you’ve disproven that claim at all.
finding a definitively anti-transgender reference doesn’t prove your point
Ok. I think I can provide an example and avoid any sensitive topics. Co-ed soccer has different rules (e.g no slide tackles) because women have asked to be protected.
I have never seen an Olympic-class athlete complain about transgender women in sports
That wasn’t the claim I was countering. A more general statement was made.
Olympic-classwomenathleteshave never asked for protectionfrom transgender womenin sports.The original statement made was too broad.
Yes, we really need to make sure a sport where people punch each other into unconsciousness is safe.
Why didn’t I realize that before?
And yes, people who want protection do have to ask for it.
Regulations in general contradict you. You’re forced to wear a seatbelt whether you asked for it or not, even if you don’t want to. Not sure how that related to trans rights or sports, though.
I was confused because despite the title suggesting she’s a TERF, this sounds on the face of it like a pretty trans-inclusive statement.
I’m pretty sure she isn’t a TERF, Caroline is a left-wing pop culture/politics streamer.
Not sure that she is. I can’t find anything that suggests that she is.
I found one tweet where she talked about the need to have trans actors play trans roles. I don’t think that would even occur to many TERFs.
Ah, if she’s not a TERF it is pretty inclusive. The title made it sound like this person is a transphobe though and I have no idea who they are.
When you’re a gold medal winning man, you have overcome the obstacles of a normal man to become a superman.
When you’re a gold medal winning woman, you have overcome the obstacles of a normal woman to become a man.
That’s the logic at play.
That’s so gross, I like it
The lizard people were actually amphibians all along!
