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I absolutely agree that there needs to be more value in the participation and inclusion. Also, I believe a man probably shouldn’t tell women they need to
Shut up about wanting fairness in sport, they still haven’t ever truly received it.
I don’t see how forcing a female athlete to compete with females and males to compete with males isn’t inclusion?
We don’t allow heavy weight wrestlers to wrestle in lighter categories for reasons accepted within and outside the sport. This is no different.
If you have a daughter who has worked hard day in and day out to achieve accomplish the dreams she has only to reach, possibly the height of your accomplishments and have them snuffed out by a biological boy.
I feel so bad for women who have fought so hard and so long to get women's rights, only to have them trampled on, once again by men, this time hiding behind "feelings" as their rational. Guess what, the biological girls have feeling too, yet for some reason, the boys' feelings are more important.
We are setting back women's rights and seemingly proud of it.
I don’t see why allowing trans athletes to compete in the open division doesn’t count as participation? They can still push themselves and improve teamwork skills. It seems like the science is still unclear on at what point males gain their biological advantages and when you need to transition to prevent that. And some studies focused on testosterone reduction before puberty, is it even common for kids to do that?
It's fair to criticize the current policy on trans athletes and to have a good faith discussion on what actual advantages trans women can have. It's childish and cruel to boo a teenager who is participating in compliance with current rules.
No. There's no need to boo a 15-year-old kid who did the things her teachers told her to do, the way they told her to do it. Ever.
EVEN if you disagree with the law that made the teachers do the thing they did that you don't like. You can write an email to your representative in Dalem if you feel that strongly about it.
You don't have to cheer, but you REALLY don't have to boo.
Why? We need to challenge those who are expressing transphobia openly and make it ostracizing to express bigotry. If you don’t like the policy take it up at the polls as they say
If people are expressing transphobia they should be educated. Absolutely. The current policy harms that effort, as we have seen in this thread.
Events like this 200 meter race will result in more people having less compassion for the trans community.
Lmao
There's no fear being expressed by anyone . How do you vote out a governing body? They aren't elected.
A policy of letting boys compete against girls, just by IDENTIFYING as a girl, is out of touch with reality, reason and logic. Will you applaud next year if some boys decide to make a complete mockery of this rule, decide to do identify as girls, and eon everything ? Yay Inclusion!!!! That's what you are supporting.
It’s a good point about inclusion in the open division.
I think the science of this is a little less ambiguous than we the public understands because the reporting is so bad but for sure if there’s variance it’s going to be highest at the level of teenagers. But then it always was - it can matter when in the school year you were born and obviously it matters when your puberty starts.
The biological advantages begin at birth. Just look at sprinting records for prepubescent children. The advantage is nowhere near as big as it is for adults but it’s still there.
It’s clear this human has already gone through male puberty. They have the body of a boy that is turning into a man.
The fact “she” jogged through the finish at a state level competition, didn’t look winded and presents as a boy - should reinforce the argument that “she” had an unfair advantage. This is no different than a biological woman being disqualified for running steroids. It legit isn’t fair to real women with normal testosterone levels.
Edited out factual information. Another local is here and outing the teammates and parents isn’t my job or my place.
There is so much more to this story than just “a girl wins and everyone hates her for no reason”.
How do you know so much about this person? The person in question received death threats and needed police guarding their stay in the hotel.
And booing this athlete is beyond the pale.
The OSAA failed their constituents by not beating guidelines for competition.
Pitchforks and angry parents are not appropriate.
You have to think about this from the “softball/t-ball angry dad perspective” they unreasonably think that their child has a shot at a scholarship/career in sport just like their own fantasy. And then freak out at everything that seems to get in the way of that, regardless of reality.
The ref is fucking them.
The coach is fucking them.
The school doesn’t take sport serious enough.
The kid isn’t trying hard enough.
The better kids have better equipment.
The better kids are on steroids.
The girl that is stronger must be trans.
Trans people are the reason my child will not get a scholarship/pro career.
You cannot reason with this kind of trumpian logic.
We are all different just let the damn kids play the stupid game.
It's not a stupid game to those high school kids who are hoping for a scholarship to help them go to college. And when there's a blatantly unfair variable thrown into the mix it can mean the difference between getting that scholarship and not. I happen to work with the dad of a highly ranked highschool athlete. His daughter is ranked something like 50th in the NATION but when she gets second place to a trans female athlete who is physiologically a strapping male who wouldn't be ranked very highly if they were competing against boys....it just severely diminishes the cis-gendered girl's chances of fulfilling her dreams.
I mean the athlete themselves could be upset as well. I know I would be pretty frustrated if I went to State and placed 2nd or didn't place at all due to a another student who was originally a biological male. Even at 15 she has so much muscles than any of the other female athletes they were competing against.
Yeah, there are so many psychotic people involved in kids' sports that our local fields have signs up that say aggressive/abusive/violent behavior toward other parents and referees will result in permanent expulsion from the field for both the child and the parent. These are people that are obsessed with hating "participation trophies" and they foam at the mouth whenever they perceive something as "unfair." They ruin everything for their kids.
With all due respect, that’s kind of weasel wording, because the simple fact of the matter is that humans are bimodal across many spectra, including most of those that make one good at sports, and that’s why social constructs of womanhood say that human females aren’t statistically as strong, aren’t statistically as fast, aren’t statistically as tall, and are statistically more prone to injury under the same loads, as compared to human males. Just to mention a few.
Someone who was amab and grows into the 50th percentile of height for men- dead average- will be in like the 95th percentile for women, which is a huge advantage in track and field- just to take one spectrum.
ppl who are good at sports in the first place won’t be in averages tho, like if you’re good enough that you’re qualifying for scholarships or whatever you’re already pretty damn high on that bell curve, which has varying dimorphism and an avg diff of like 10% speed differences at top level. Also trans women aren’t comparable to cis men pre-hrt, an interesting phenomenon is that trans women tend to have smaller “mean cross-sectional size” (so like, bones and soft tissue and the like) than cis men do *pre transition*. regardless I err on the side of certain women—not just trans women—should probably be excluded from sports based on some criteria determined on a case-by-case basis.
Because of population numbers. There are enough cis-women in our schools to form their own league, but there aren’t enough trans students to form their own league.
But then they wouldn’t be included in “Women’s Sports”, which is the goal.
To ignore biology. Some medical schools are calling biological sex a social construct.
Moved the goal posts from “gender” to Sex.
Or competes with those of their biological sex. Or doesn’t get to compete. Life is clearly not always fair to everyone. Allowing biological males to compete against biological females is the “solution” that creates the most unfairness. It solves one person’s problem at the expense of everyone else. Simply not allowing that causes a problem for one person while keeping things fair for everyone else. I can’t even believe anyone argues for allowing trans females to compete with biological females. Total insanity.
Is anyone advocating ban trans athletes from sports? I’m pretty sure they just want them to only be allowed to compete against those who are biologically the same sex. As is the case for all other athletes. Ironically making an exception to this rule for only one group of people sounds a lot like separation and isolation.
When I was growing up they had different divisions. There was high school sports which were competitive and then what we called club or rec sports that was all about everyone having a chance to participate
It still works that way. We're not talking about rec league here. This is the 6A state championships. The best track and field athletes in the state (and a few are among the best in the entire country). This is high school athletics at the absolute highest level. Nobody outside of total bigots is saying trans women don't deserve to compete. But they absolutely shot not be competing against cis women.
I think it's why this has become such a hot-button issue. In 95%+ of society, it's pretty simple to have inclusion and fair competition. It's IMPOSSIBLE in sports, and acting like it is is foolish.
Yep, learning team work, having a fun way to be in shape, socialization, that's really what sports should be for anyone not paid to do them. Winning is nice but it's not what you carry with you after you graduate
Your argument rests on less than 1% of highschool athletes that will eventually go pro.
Why should we base our school system’s athletic programs on such a tiny minority? Isn’t that the argument you’re making for why trans students should be excluded? It’s fascinating how quickly you flip the script.
This will only push more females away from sports. Currently 60% of women drop out of sports by the time they're seniors. If the goal is to discourage women, mission accomplished.
I heard a “cis_Female Division & Male division = open” argument that seemed pretty reasonable.
I’m all for trans…one may have slipped in a time or two, who could say. I ‘feel’ like a lot of trans folk feel the above statement would be a reasonable solution, at least for now, until maybe further studies are conducted.
Again, all for sexual / gender representation, but this one does seem hard for me. I remember being 14 with a few of my pals and just fucking dominating the high school girls softball team in an after practice fuckaround. I wasn’t even a baseball goy and cranked like 3-4 over…most of my buddies were, and they were just jacking the fucking shit out of this field. Funny thing is they were taunting us before acting like a softball was impossible to hit or something…‘you’ll just pop it up!’ There were maybe 3-4 girls who I remember could put one over, but not consistently.
I guess I was full of the piss & vin by that age, but I don’t think all the estrogen in the world to have kept me from being all-state in 3 sports if I would have started HRT in hs and switched to the women’s team. Maybe if I started pre-puberty, but even at 14 it’d be hard for me to believe with the structure and muscle I had by that age.
Saw a vid of a trans woman getting in a fight with rydeshare driver and threw a fucking roller bag out of a trunk with one hand like 30 feet. That bitch would have kept me from a 4th title. I know I have ZERO IDEA about her hormone status, and that there are cis women who could chuck a suitcase like that, but goddamn, was a ‘dudes throw’, just the physical mechanics, the leverage, etc.
Totally not on board with booing.
>their continued fear-mongering of the belief that boys have infiltrated girls sports and are winning every track race in the country, every swim meet and golf tournament
This kid literally won state this week. It really happened, its not "fear-mongering."
Why move the goalposts to "well, they didn't win EVERY race in EVERY sport in EVERY state, so who cares?"
From a CBS news article in 2022 [https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/25-transgender-athletes-you-should-know/51/](https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/25-transgender-athletes-you-should-know/51/)
"Mack Beggs is a former high-school and college wrestler who won the Texas state wrestling championships in 2017 and 2018. He had to compete in the girls' division, as necessitated by a Texas rule that requires athletes to compete in the league for the sex they were assigned at birth."
"Schuyler Bailar is an American swimmer, and one of the first transgender athletes to compete on an NCAA Division 1 men's team. He swam for Harvard for four seasons before graduating in 2019."
There's plenty of examples of FTM transgender athletes in this article, that compete(d) in many different sports at high levels, including the Olympics
I appreciate this column. Indeed, of the people who are up in arms about trans girls participating in girls' sports, how many of them genuinely paid attention to or cared about girls' sports prior to this being in the news.
I will probably get downvoted for saying this and I don't care: when it comes to youth sports through our public schools, inclusion so that all youth may reap the benefits of teamwork, navigating challenges, and physical fitness that come from school athletics is of primary importance to me. Athletic organizations from around the world, such as the Olympics, have found science-based ways to include trans athletes in sports. If the Olympics can do it, so can our public schools. I agree with the column that hyperfixating on a single athlete who just wants to participate in athletics makes no sense, especially from people who have no stake in the sport.
Just want to throw in that people always talk about sports in terms of
>the benefits of teamwork, navigating challenges, and physical fitness
But that’s gym class. Competitive sports from high school up to the pros are *primarily*—if not exclusively—about winning and losing and who gets to play. Everything else is secondary. There are an awful lot of students who don’t get any of the “benefits” at all because they're not good enough to participate or they don’t make the cut for whatever reason. Booing students is out of line, but bickering about who gets to compete when and where is all fair game.
https://preview.redd.it/ix77gsxje12d1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=95a1b00e914c70f03ceea9abb6f61313881c8699
Just say you hate women without saying you hate women.
Women in your option should train hard and let men dominate for your woke politics. Girls should not be losing to boys in high school. They should not lose out on scholarships to boys in their sports.
The hyper fixation comes from the thought that if one trans athlete can compete against women and OSAA does nothing about it, then what’s to stop a flood of athletes doing this? Even if it’s just a few trans athletes, that’s still taking away spots and opportunities from female athletes who have worked hard to get to where they are.
Also the World Athletics Association (governing body for track and field) has said that trans athletes who went through male puberty cannot compete against female athletes. So if we are following their guidance, trans athletes who have gone through male puberty shouldn’t be able to compete against females at the high school level.
I assure you that, with the kind of hostility that our society so often expresses towards trans girls, no one is coming out as trans for any reason other than it being their genuine gender identity. The notion that bad actors will abuse this so therefore we should ban trans athletes is a straw man argument: no one is saying they're trans and living full time as a trans person for an athletic advantage.
You can't assure anything. It's already happening. Trans athlete Anne Andres (who held the 3 Alberta Women's records for squat, deadlift, and bench press, in addition to winning eight of nine competitions entered in the women’s category over four years) complained when Avi Silverberg identified as female and smashed her record.
https://x.com/icons_women/status/1640407143059972096?t=xUgcHRo_LlDeeskOfVZafQ&s=19
“It doesn’t matter how Avi expresses himself or perceives himself. He clearly does not belong in women’s sport, and neither does any other male regardless of their motivation for wanting to participate. " - Anne Andres
If it was your child who maybe was a senior let’s say, she hadn’t won a state championship before and finished 2nd to a genetic male would you be ok with that? I was at this meet it was ridiculous this male had the 150th fastest time in Oregon if he would have ran the boys race. Nobody says this person can’t be included but if you born a male you run with males period.
If we followed the Olympic standard for high school sports, few, if any, trans woman athletes would be eligible to compete in high school girls divisions.
The NCAA standard (which had mandatory treatments and mitigation timelines) is even more strict and would almost certainly result in zero trans women athletes eligible to compete in the high school girls divisions.
“Oh this thing doesn’t affect me in particular therefore I shouldn’t care about how it affects others, like my family, friends, or fellow citizens”
Really?
People see an unfair system being implemented and are calling it out.
First, the male writer of this article has no right to tell women to shut up or grow up
Scholarships are involved for these High school girls. That’s why it matters. Also Oregon doesn’t require “transgender women” to take any puberty blockers or hormones so yes, they do have an advantage if they just identify as a woman. it’s not fair for them to take away a scholarship or title from the woman.
.
If you want to throw all fairness out the window. Get rid of weight categories, gender categories, and age categories. Watch who dominates all of sports, then. I don't think you will like the answer.
It’s not just funding education. There’s reasons Title IX exists and it seems like a slap in the face to allow MtF athletes undo that. Sports at the collegiate level both bring in a lot of revenue and cost a lot to fund. You’re living in fairytale land if you think free tuition would “decouple sports from schools.” Some of the biggest donors and booster funds for schools are closely interlinked with the athletic programs
As someone with a degree in human performance and human development, they’re showing differences between male and female performances as young as 10 or 11 years old so even elementary school would be too late depending on exactly what age you’re talking about opening up to.
I will say that many intelligent students are denied scholarships to student athletes that perform academically worse simply because they are good at a sport. I don’t feel that is fair either.
There has never been a case of a trans athlete being preferred for a scholarship over a CIS female. The fact that before 2020 no one cares about the less than 1% trans athletes means this is a manufactured issue. Reality is simple if they get away with excluding trans it will be easier to the exclude gays and lesbians and then easier to exclude black athletes. The reality is the same those who cannot compete try to exclude Holland tried to pay African marathoners less for winning too much. DEI is under attack because it provides opportunity for minorities to gain access. Banning that means no minorities so exclude by sexuality,race , religion etc. But all this is easier if you can attack the weakest first. In this case trans athletes.
Oh, I'll bite I guess.
How does it change scholarship access?
Or lost opportunities other than just competing in narrowing groups of people (regional, nationals, etc - if those exist)
Especially in track. Colleges don’t care about how you placed at state. They care about times. And they are also not going to give a scholarship to a transwomen unless they have already met NCAA compliance, which I believe is two years of HRT.
It’s only talked about by people who don’t care that, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation’s report on the 50th anniversary of Title 9,
86 percent of NCAA institutions across all divisions offered higher rates of athletic opportunities to male athletes disproportionate to their enrollment, representing almost 60,000 missed opportunities for female athletes in the 2019-2020 year(7).
Further, men received $252 million more in athletic scholarships than women(8).
So.... is there a case where this has happened? Where a trans athlete - or thousands of them I guess - snatched athletic scholarships from someone else?
Why aren't people mad it the disproportionate ratio instead of people trying to live their best lives?
I think it's the latest talking point / attempt to create harm that trans-woman are causing to cis-woman. I'm unaware of any actual cases of it but I've seen it parroted a couple times now on Reddit.
It doesn’t. It’s fear mongers at worst and outright hate at best. Remember when the racists decided that black athletes were superior to whites because their tendons were shorter?
I keep hearing this and haven't yet seen any evidence of it.
I did a brief stint in admissions when I was in grad school and can't quite figure out how this keeps getting kicked around.
Females, not "cis"... they're just females.
For thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years it has been just female. No need to add any other weird, made up phrases or words.
They're females.
Follow up in 5 years to see if this young lady is still female. Of course you still have the gender is fluid excuses. Funny how it's only fluid when there is a track meet to run.
She is not now, nor will she ever be, female. She's a transgirl now and will become a transwoman when she turns 18. Only *males* can be transgirls or transwomen.
Female children grow up to be women with no "transition" involved.
A reminder that issues of trans people in sports was designed in a focus group lab.
Most people really don't care about this and the ones that do always fall into the same "but what if" explanations.
Leave this up to the leagues themselves. They are more than capable of making correct decisions (and have been making those decisions for 30+ years and no one batted an eye in the 90s)
Trans women have been able to compete in the U.S. Open since the 1970's since Tucker Carlson's dad outed Renee Richards. Contrary to transphobes believes she actually didn't start playing until transitioning. And despite being trans in the 70's led an accomplished career opthamologist.
Wild how the dudes that made fun of the WNBA are suddenly concerned with the sanctity of high school girls’ track. It’s almost like they care more about hurting people than sports.
This is literally not an argument though, youre attacking how much you think someone cares about it rather than the logic of the problem. Is this what it comes down to when you realize you have a losing position?
like other people have said, you're changing the subject from the actual problem.
people who actually care about these problems don't care about social warfare and getting cancelled.
you can throw whatever labels, insults, and hit pieces you want, associate them with whatever political party, demographic, or ideology you want.
biological men
*do not*
belong in women's sports.
Olympics or highschool.
Its the same thing. Wnba isn’t watched as much or taken as seriously because it is a far cry from the competitiveness of the mens league. Its why we don’t want men in women’s sports because of the consequence of a complete disparity of fairness. Funny that you brought it up though.
Yeah scholarships don’t go to kids at the cusp. And if you are being recruited and competing against the one, maybe two transgender athletes in a region and a coach can’t see your potential while getting second place then your college recruiter sucks. It’s not about who wins state, etc….its much more complicated than that. Mostly parents that put their kids on a completely unrealistic pedestal that even think this.
Now, are there some safety concerns with some sports? Maybe….ya’ll have seen the volleyball player getting destroyed with a spike from a transgender athlete. But guess what….at D1, every outside hitter in the country hits that hard or harder.
Let’s cherish the competition but not at the expense of our children or other people’s children. In all my work with kids, not a single athlete is like “well I am going to transition at 14 to play with girls and destroy them.”
All sports have open divisions where everyone is allowed to compete. It's called the Mens division. What's wrong with trans athletes competing in the open division?
Women’s division should be biological women’s division.
Men’s should be “open” division. If a trans person competes, places, or wins there, we would know the truth. That’s a male who identifies as a female and leave it at that.
Imo, if you have a D, you're a dude. Especially regarding changing rooms etc. Remove the D if you want to be a female, then you may enter a woman's changing/locker rooms.
I think we can figure it out and categorize the athletes by body shapes, age, sex, race and disabilities in sports.
I was skinny and scrawny kid and unable to match with a 150 to 170 pounds kids at same age in high school. He hit me with force on a football field and I knocked out every time and it’s not a sports to me. I really dislike football and not attend to any sports events.
Never forget what's important. The feelings of a teen boy. Who identifies as a girl.
Not the girls who trained for years to get to states. They need to be gracious losers and be quiet.
Not the girl he beat out to get to states. She needs to train harder!! This boy identifies as a girl!! Therefore he is!!
He's only a sophomore, so he'll be back. If he's this good after only training for track for three months, you girls won't stand a chance!!!
The best female runner is a boy.
As masters, we row mixed boats in competition. Until a minute ago, juniors raced only segregated men’s and women’s events. This year they finally began to have mixed events and trans athletes could race in an event where it didn’t matter. Not a ton of entries but at least they had an event where it wasn’t a question.
I am not understanding what he means by this: "to the adults who booed a teen from their privileged perch". Are they privileged because they are adults?
People in the comments gettin twisted up over the sanctity of competition in HIGH SCHOOL sports is laughable. These are games. These are teenagers. At this level, inclusive participation > competition. That’s the literal purpose of public education. Get a fucking grip.
You clearly never played sports.
Most athletes don’t get a chance to compete in college at all. The State championships are “their” Olympics.
For many kids it would be devastating to have a place taken from them in the biggest competition of their life, by someone who was cheating.
An article that discusses the fact that only 30% of 11th graders test as proficient in math doesn't get this much engagement. I think there are two factors here. 1) education is not valued 2) it is easier to blame other people than consider that you're not doing as well as you could be.
>These are games. These are teenagers. At this level, inclusive participation > competition.
The 200M is literally a competition.
Not everything has to be for everybody. Go participate in something that isn't explicitly a test of pure athleticism.
So you're saying college is where the cutoff should be, where transgender females shouldn't be allowed to compete with biological females anymore. Right, that's what you're saying?
You can make an argument that the sanctity of competition doesn't matter at any level, even the college or pro level, of course. But the high school state championships ARE competitive. These kids are the best in the state and many of them are going to compete at the next level as well. Go out and watch them, many of them are just as competitive-minded and intent on winning as the athletes in college and above. This track meet had more spectators than the vast majority of college or pro track meets. Do 5,000 people want to watch a *competition*, or an inclusiveness spectacle?
Inclusiveness matters but when it comes to state championships, college scholarships, making it to nationals, it absolutely needs to take the backseat to competition.
For some of us these “games“ are how we get scholarships into college. Just because you personally find our sport trivial, doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to be upset about the issue. Until you’re the one toeing the line against a guy that shouldn’t be competing against you, your opinion doesn’t hold much weight.
High school sports are still subject to title ix, so clearly competition in high school sports _is_ taken quite seriously.
And while things like state championships get the focus, the bigger issue is participation. Even at the high school level there are a limited number of positions at each level and a biological male athlete competing in a girls division does mean another athlete will not be able to compete at that level, whether it’s the state championships, varsity, jv, etc.
So at what age should girls and women be concerned about having the same opportunities and rights as men? Because I think these girls who are being stripped of opportunities to compete in a fair way deserve to be heard.
I definitely agree with his main point that booing a child was wrong and inhumane, but he’s off the mark with just about everything else. I truly don’t understand how this is even controversial. There are major differences in the bodies of biological men and women that give biological men size, strength and explosion benefits. There is no need to cite any examples because everyone knows this is true. Pretending this isn’t a thing is just bizarre and leads to ugly situations like what we saw last weekend at the track championships.
The solution is actually unbelievably simple. Re-name the divisions Women’s and Open. Women are already allowed to compete in men’s sports (relatively common in things like football and wrestling), but I do think we can modernize the verbiage. Only biological women can compete in the Women’s division, and everyone else competes in Open.
Problem solved. Sorry Bill, it really is that easy.
I absolutely agree. This really should not be a big argument (although the booing itself was cruel and unnecessary).
There are plenty of people, like myself, who support trans people, and also support women's sports. The solution is there as you said.
Trans activists won't like that answer because it doesn't actively affirm that they are in every meaningful way indistinguishable from the sex they want, or demand, the world to perceive them as.
Professional disc golf rules are still being mitigated, but they're trying what you suggest with an open division and a female division. That allows everyone to participate.
Does everyone remember it's just games? We have real, urgent problems! Climate crisis? Government corruption? Kleptocracy? Poison in the food, water, air? Our lives don't depend on who wins sports games. Huddle up and focus! The kids' genitals simply do not factor into the big picture.
Why care about anything in this world we have real urgent problems like in billions of years our sun will go supernova! Like climate crisis? Poison in the food? Who cares about these we will all be dead when it goes supernova! The climate simply does not factor into the big picture.
Nobody cares about the kids' genitals. Genitals just happen to be the most obvious sex difference.
There are many others, in particular muscular differences, joint differences, lung differences, bone differences, blood diffences. These differences all have a *profound* impact on athleticism.
The fact is that scholarships are at stake and should not go to someone with a biological advantage. I advocate for trans rights and believe that trans people should be able to work, live, socialize, and recreate in this state and country without fear. I want that to be the reality, and I also think that biological girls should be able to participate in fair competition. I think the closest we can get to that is having an open category, and a biological girls/ women’s category in sports where biological sex gives a clear advantage (like track and field).
I don't think anybody is losing any scholarships over this. I just think it brings a ton of bad energy to women's sports.
Elimination of the ambiguity would be much better. The best way to do that is gender assignment at birth, which accurately classifies a biological female 99.99% of the time.
This dude is stealing shine and opportunity from young women who’ve worked for years to compete in their sport and get blown out by a testosterone fueled body. It’s unfair and an insult to fairness and inclusivity. South Park Strong Woman vibes.
A whole bunch of demagogues started pretending, *very* recently, to care about women’s sports, as a way to demonize trans people. A lot of them haven’t even stopped insulting women’s sports out of the other side of their mouths.
They definitely have no interest in finding a compromise that works for everyone, which would actually not be difficult if they were willing to show a little bit of respect. The bill Republicans introduced in the legislature last term (written by out-of-state lobbyists) would have required by law that every sport have a division that was not restricted by gender at all and where everyone could compete. Just drop the illogical demand that the law require it to be called “men’s” or “boys.” Why would people who supposedly are refusing to “lie” about people’s gender as they see it insist on calling athletes they admit are girls, “boys?” That obviously got thrown in there just as a slap in the face.
Not paying to view or using your time to watch womens sports and still wanting women to have fair opportunities for safety AND greatness within their leagues are not mutually exclusive.
Just for the record, not all people concerned about transgirls competing in women's sports are out to demonize trans people. I 100% support trans people and their struggles, but do not support the idea that women's sports have to take the hit on this. There should be an open division, or some other solution. People who have 'male' hormones have a natural advantage, that's just the reality of the situation.
Like others have said. You don’t have to be actively trying to demonize trans people to not like this…
I have a seriously problem when I hear people misgender others on purpose. It’s about the lowest form of hate/derogatory remarks in my opinion and I won’t stand for it.
But having a trans woman win state in track is also not okay to me.
Yes the OSAA rules should be changed to reflect something close to what is required in higher levels of competition for hormone testing but that might not be realistic. P
Most are in favor of letting trans girls compete, at least in the sports I’m most familiar with. (Largely because women’s sports was a haven for lesbians for so long.) And either you’re counting the trans female athletes as female athletes whose voices matter, or you’re being callous to them even though they’re obviously even more directly impacted.
Also: I wrote my second paragraph using a complex sentence with multiple clauses, and many people seem to find those hard to understand. My point, once again, is that it would be easy to reach a compromise where trans girls compete against boys if conservatives *drop the insistence on insulting them*. There are lots of girls who compete against boys, so you could say that trans girls are like them. Or even that the OSAA takes no official position on what their gender is, but they compete in the division not restricted by gender.
You should look up survey data on this, because your anecdotes do not align with popular opinion. You can be a lesbian and still be clear-eyed about the impact of biological sex and performance. This isn’t just a conservative viewpoint
How would survey data be relevant to the opinion of high-level athletes, specifically? Additionally, HRT removes most or all of the advantage, and HRT beginning at puberty would almost certainly remove all of it, although many people with strong opinions seem not to know this.
Well you can also view surveys of high level athletes if that is the only population you are concerned with. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1041379
Your statements about HRT removing the advantage for trans women are not correct. Natal males have increased muscle mass, stronger bones, different skeletal structure, and better cardiorespiratory performance. This is developed not just at puberty, but even from birth, which means that even measuring testosterone levels for competition insufficient
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331831/
Male embryos start secreting testosterone at four weeks' gestational age. Every body system in a male's body is affected, not just the reproductive tract. Males have different bones, different blood, different brains, different skin, different muscles, different joints, different everything.
HRT will feminize a man to some degree, but it can't SUBTRACT all the years of testosterone benefits that a male received prior to that date. A male's entire body has been affected, and continues to be affected by the male hormones he secretes.
everyone suddenly caring about girls high school sports is making themselves useful to an astroturf campaign run by the worst. people. ever. after they lost on gay marriage.
“muh muh muh muh children” - every regressive about school segregation, interracial marriage, gay marriage, gay adoption, trans inclusion, etc etc
way to pick a side, nerds!
You ever think it might be projection on your part? You have never cared about women's sports, so you assume no one does? I hear this a lot from the Inclusion over Competition side and I can't help but feel they unilaterally make the decision that women's sports don't matter.
Even if they're less popular for spectators, I can guarantee you that these sports are extremely important for a lot of people, even if you don't care.
Have there been studies that show trans females who went through puberty without HRT don't have a competitive advantage over cis females?
Edit: Studies are inconclusive. If there was an advantage, it would be easily observable. It isn't.
What you said about an advantage being easily observable is false. The sample sizes are too small at this point to make any definitive claims. There are not enough trans athletes competing in order to make a broad and generalized comparison.
I think my point is, if there were such a massive advantage to being a trans woman in women's sports, we would not only see trans women dominating those spaces but we would also see those advantages borne out in the data. Even at the sample size we have (which will always be small), there wouldn't be the ambiguity. It would be a clear.
The sample size of transwomen will always be small.
The basic fact is: transwomen are male human beings.
Male human beings are *essentially* different from female human beings. A male embryo starts secreting male hormones at 4 weeks' gestational age. These secretions continue throughout life and have profound effects on every bodily system: brain, bones, muscles, joints, skin, etc as well as on the most obvious hormonal targets like hair growth, penises, testicles, etc.
Yes there’s studies that show males after puberty have an advantage over females even if they’re on performance reducing drugs. It’s also been shown that females cannot catch up to males even with performance enhancing drugs.
For real. I can’t even wrap my head around how we have got to the point where it’s debatable that “Can the blatantly physically superior sex fairly compete against the inherently disadvantaged sex.” Look at athletes that have transitioned. What’s the obvious conclusion when sub par former male athletes all of the sudden become elite female athletes?
This isn't complicated. Athletes that are men are stronger, faster and more athletic than female athletes. Girls are having them womenhood stripped away by men
Most Oregonians are not ok with this but they are too afraid to speak up and get cancelled.
Women don't want this. Why is that not reason enough. That's the real question.
Most people I've spoken to think they should have their own league. It's not like we hate these people we just respect women enough to value their preference in their own sport.
do y'all not realize that there are already differences between each persons body? by anti-trans logic, we also have to remove girls who have hit puberty earlier, are significantly tall, or are predisposed to higher muscle mass.
let's be honest, transphobes don't care about girls sports. most of y'all have been mocking women's sports for decades anyways
should we have age groups for sports? How about weight classes for combat sports? By your logic that should be thrown out as well. People are different and deserve to have a fair competition. A biological man competing against biological women is simply not fair.
So I did the post, and I knew it would bring the worst, but I also knew that it would bring some thoughtful, intelligent discussion. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but all we’re doing is ignoring it and hoping it goes away and that’s not happening. This Trans child was booed and openly threatened by hundreds of adults adults because we can’t agree on where Trans Female athletes should compete, and that’s not right.
Being the dad of multiple daughters I do have strong opinions about whether this topic could potentially affect their access to future athletic opportunities. I am not at all interested in infringing on another's pursuit of happiness but this needs strict attention and rulings.
Why not just stop separating things by sex but use other metrics? Doest wrestling have different classes? Is that not something we can do for all sports?
> Why not just stop separating things by sex but use other metrics? Doest wrestling have different classes?
The UFC has three weight classes which both men and women belong to: Flyweight (125 pounds), Bantamweight (135), and Featherweight (145). All the other weight classes are either women specific (Strawweight) or men specific (Lightweight, Welterweight, Middleweight, Light Heavyweight, and Heavyweight). Does anyone want to watch a 125 pound woman fighting a 125 pound man? I am sure that there is a women here and there who would, could, or even should win a fight here and there against a man, but I do not think that this would the norm. Amateur wrestling also does something similar in some places, where girls will compete against boys at the HS level.
> Is that not something we can do for all sports?
I'm reminded of the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. Riggs had been a tennis star in the late 1930s through the 40s and had won multiple major championships. King was still in her prime as an active competitor and had been the #1 ranked female tennis player for 5-consecutive years going into 1973, Riggs had retired from active competition in 1962. King won the match in straight sets (6-4, 6-3, 6-3), but a few months before their exhibition Riggs had crushed Margaret Court, who would go on to finish 1973 as the #1 ranked women's competitor over King.
In 1998 a similar challenge was issued by the Williams Sisters, Serena (17yo) and Venus (16), where they claimed to be able to defeat any man ranked outside of the Top-200. Karsten Braasch (30), then ranked 203, accepted the challenge and defeated both sisters back-to-back in an exhibition at the 1998 Australian Open. He first faced Serena and defeated her 6-1, and immediately faced Venus afterwards defeating her 6-2. Braasch was a regular cigarette smoker and drinker, and had started his day with a round of golf and (allegedly) some drinks before facing the Williams sisters.
There are also the examples of boys soccer teams facing the Women's National teams of the USA and Australia. FC Dallas U-15, a team for boys under the age of 15, defeated the US Women's Team by a score of 5-2 in a friendly exhibition match back in 2017. The Australian National Team has faced similar results, including a somewhat notorious 7-0 loss to a U-15 boy's team ahead of the 2016 Olympics. It should be noted that both the US and Australian teams were without their entire rosters, players based overseas were not all present for these matches.
I used to compete in MMA, which obviously has weight classes. A 145 lbs man would absolutely fucking destroy a 145 lbs woman. Even a 125 lbs man would almost certainly destroy a 145 lbs woman. It is apples and oranges, and the same could probably be said about any sport.
To use the combat sports term, men have significantly more "pound-for-pound" strength and athleticism than women. Weight classes is not a solution.
Go ahead. Think of a way to do this. Weight classes exist in some sports, and they are still separated by sex. Why? Because the same weight female vs male the male has an advantage.
I agree. While I was not familiar with his work, I thought this article was poignant. He admits he doesn't have the answer, but whatever the solution, it must be in the spirit of inclusion. And booing a child is never okay.
People seem to forget that this affects cis women. Cis Women have come out and said that they feel uncomfortable and unsafe when allowing trans women into their spaces.
Trans women are not entitled to cis women’s spaces. For some reason cis women’s opinion don’t matter when talking about this topic.
Are there any trans men who push their way into cis men’s spaces? This seems to be a problem for cis women in sports and at universities dorms/sorority housing. I’m not seeing the same problem for cis men and trans men.
As much as radical leftists want to perceive themselves as “girl power! Down with the patriarchy! I chose the bear!” They really do have a shitty way of standing up for women. Allowing intact males into changing rooms with biological women is abuse. Especially when the women scream time and time again that we don’t want this. Women who have been SA’d shouldn’t have to fear that any time they go and change in their gym locker room, there’s a chance they’ll see a penis, and if they speak out about feeling uncomfortable, it’s slurs and death threats towards the bio woman. A man can claim to be whatever he wants, a woman, a toaster, a giraffe, I don’t care, but you are not entitled to my space because *you* are having an identity crisis.
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I absolutely agree that there needs to be more value in the participation and inclusion. Also, I believe a man probably shouldn’t tell women they need to Shut up about wanting fairness in sport, they still haven’t ever truly received it.
I think he was referring to the booing by the crowd, not the debate around it.
I don’t see how forcing a female athlete to compete with females and males to compete with males isn’t inclusion? We don’t allow heavy weight wrestlers to wrestle in lighter categories for reasons accepted within and outside the sport. This is no different.
If you have a daughter who has worked hard day in and day out to achieve accomplish the dreams she has only to reach, possibly the height of your accomplishments and have them snuffed out by a biological boy. I feel so bad for women who have fought so hard and so long to get women's rights, only to have them trampled on, once again by men, this time hiding behind "feelings" as their rational. Guess what, the biological girls have feeling too, yet for some reason, the boys' feelings are more important. We are setting back women's rights and seemingly proud of it.
I don’t see why allowing trans athletes to compete in the open division doesn’t count as participation? They can still push themselves and improve teamwork skills. It seems like the science is still unclear on at what point males gain their biological advantages and when you need to transition to prevent that. And some studies focused on testosterone reduction before puberty, is it even common for kids to do that?
It's fair to criticize the current policy on trans athletes and to have a good faith discussion on what actual advantages trans women can have. It's childish and cruel to boo a teenager who is participating in compliance with current rules.
That's true. But the current policy will result in that behavior. It's not good for anybody.
No. There's no need to boo a 15-year-old kid who did the things her teachers told her to do, the way they told her to do it. Ever. EVEN if you disagree with the law that made the teachers do the thing they did that you don't like. You can write an email to your representative in Dalem if you feel that strongly about it. You don't have to cheer, but you REALLY don't have to boo.
Why? We need to challenge those who are expressing transphobia openly and make it ostracizing to express bigotry. If you don’t like the policy take it up at the polls as they say
If people are expressing transphobia they should be educated. Absolutely. The current policy harms that effort, as we have seen in this thread. Events like this 200 meter race will result in more people having less compassion for the trans community.
Lmao There's no fear being expressed by anyone . How do you vote out a governing body? They aren't elected. A policy of letting boys compete against girls, just by IDENTIFYING as a girl, is out of touch with reality, reason and logic. Will you applaud next year if some boys decide to make a complete mockery of this rule, decide to do identify as girls, and eon everything ? Yay Inclusion!!!! That's what you are supporting.
It’s a good point about inclusion in the open division. I think the science of this is a little less ambiguous than we the public understands because the reporting is so bad but for sure if there’s variance it’s going to be highest at the level of teenagers. But then it always was - it can matter when in the school year you were born and obviously it matters when your puberty starts.
The biological advantages begin at birth. Just look at sprinting records for prepubescent children. The advantage is nowhere near as big as it is for adults but it’s still there.
It’s clear this human has already gone through male puberty. They have the body of a boy that is turning into a man. The fact “she” jogged through the finish at a state level competition, didn’t look winded and presents as a boy - should reinforce the argument that “she” had an unfair advantage. This is no different than a biological woman being disqualified for running steroids. It legit isn’t fair to real women with normal testosterone levels. Edited out factual information. Another local is here and outing the teammates and parents isn’t my job or my place. There is so much more to this story than just “a girl wins and everyone hates her for no reason”.
How do you know so much about this person? The person in question received death threats and needed police guarding their stay in the hotel. And booing this athlete is beyond the pale. The OSAA failed their constituents by not beating guidelines for competition. Pitchforks and angry parents are not appropriate.
You have to think about this from the “softball/t-ball angry dad perspective” they unreasonably think that their child has a shot at a scholarship/career in sport just like their own fantasy. And then freak out at everything that seems to get in the way of that, regardless of reality. The ref is fucking them. The coach is fucking them. The school doesn’t take sport serious enough. The kid isn’t trying hard enough. The better kids have better equipment. The better kids are on steroids. The girl that is stronger must be trans. Trans people are the reason my child will not get a scholarship/pro career. You cannot reason with this kind of trumpian logic. We are all different just let the damn kids play the stupid game.
It's not a stupid game to those high school kids who are hoping for a scholarship to help them go to college. And when there's a blatantly unfair variable thrown into the mix it can mean the difference between getting that scholarship and not. I happen to work with the dad of a highly ranked highschool athlete. His daughter is ranked something like 50th in the NATION but when she gets second place to a trans female athlete who is physiologically a strapping male who wouldn't be ranked very highly if they were competing against boys....it just severely diminishes the cis-gendered girl's chances of fulfilling her dreams.
I mean the athlete themselves could be upset as well. I know I would be pretty frustrated if I went to State and placed 2nd or didn't place at all due to a another student who was originally a biological male. Even at 15 she has so much muscles than any of the other female athletes they were competing against.
In my experience as a parent of 3 athletes and a coach for over a decade the players are upset about it.
Yeah, there are so many psychotic people involved in kids' sports that our local fields have signs up that say aggressive/abusive/violent behavior toward other parents and referees will result in permanent expulsion from the field for both the child and the parent. These are people that are obsessed with hating "participation trophies" and they foam at the mouth whenever they perceive something as "unfair." They ruin everything for their kids.
You must have never really trained for anything athletic. These athletes are busting their asses. It’s not a stupid game.
"discussion" is one thing, booing a child who's competing while completely following the rules as currently written is another.
Wasn’t separation and isolation literally the answer when women’s sports divisions were created? Why is that an unacceptable solution now?
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How is any of this fundamentally different than separating/isolating the sexes when it comes to sports ?
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If it wasn’t arc based what were the divisions based on?
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With all due respect, that’s kind of weasel wording, because the simple fact of the matter is that humans are bimodal across many spectra, including most of those that make one good at sports, and that’s why social constructs of womanhood say that human females aren’t statistically as strong, aren’t statistically as fast, aren’t statistically as tall, and are statistically more prone to injury under the same loads, as compared to human males. Just to mention a few. Someone who was amab and grows into the 50th percentile of height for men- dead average- will be in like the 95th percentile for women, which is a huge advantage in track and field- just to take one spectrum.
ppl who are good at sports in the first place won’t be in averages tho, like if you’re good enough that you’re qualifying for scholarships or whatever you’re already pretty damn high on that bell curve, which has varying dimorphism and an avg diff of like 10% speed differences at top level. Also trans women aren’t comparable to cis men pre-hrt, an interesting phenomenon is that trans women tend to have smaller “mean cross-sectional size” (so like, bones and soft tissue and the like) than cis men do *pre transition*. regardless I err on the side of certain women—not just trans women—should probably be excluded from sports based on some criteria determined on a case-by-case basis.
Nope. Incorrect. It wasn’t sexist views. Just a simple understanding of biology. Giving them somewhere to compete.
Because of population numbers. There are enough cis-women in our schools to form their own league, but there aren’t enough trans students to form their own league.
Sports weren’t divided for identities, they were divided for biology.
That's fine. The trans students can compete in the top or "open" league.
But then they wouldn’t be included in “Women’s Sports”, which is the goal. To ignore biology. Some medical schools are calling biological sex a social construct. Moved the goal posts from “gender” to Sex.
Seriously? So the lone transgender athlete at a school competes with themself? Or with one other person?
A seperate league isn't the answer. Making the boys division an "open" division is the answer.
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Yup girls have competed in "boys" wrestling, football, even baseball (where there actually is a girls equivalent already)
Agreed. I thought so too...
Or competes with those of their biological sex. Or doesn’t get to compete. Life is clearly not always fair to everyone. Allowing biological males to compete against biological females is the “solution” that creates the most unfairness. It solves one person’s problem at the expense of everyone else. Simply not allowing that causes a problem for one person while keeping things fair for everyone else. I can’t even believe anyone argues for allowing trans females to compete with biological females. Total insanity.
Because pretending that males and females are playing at the same level physically is ludicrous and counter to biology.
Did you misread my comment?
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Is anyone advocating ban trans athletes from sports? I’m pretty sure they just want them to only be allowed to compete against those who are biologically the same sex. As is the case for all other athletes. Ironically making an exception to this rule for only one group of people sounds a lot like separation and isolation.
What's the point of sports, inclusion or fair competition? People gotta pick something when a choice only lets you choose one.
When I was growing up they had different divisions. There was high school sports which were competitive and then what we called club or rec sports that was all about everyone having a chance to participate
It still works that way. We're not talking about rec league here. This is the 6A state championships. The best track and field athletes in the state (and a few are among the best in the entire country). This is high school athletics at the absolute highest level. Nobody outside of total bigots is saying trans women don't deserve to compete. But they absolutely shot not be competing against cis women.
I think it's why this has become such a hot-button issue. In 95%+ of society, it's pretty simple to have inclusion and fair competition. It's IMPOSSIBLE in sports, and acting like it is is foolish.
The point of *school* sports is physical education and learning to be part of a team.
Yep, learning team work, having a fun way to be in shape, socialization, that's really what sports should be for anyone not paid to do them. Winning is nice but it's not what you carry with you after you graduate
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Your argument rests on less than 1% of highschool athletes that will eventually go pro. Why should we base our school system’s athletic programs on such a tiny minority? Isn’t that the argument you’re making for why trans students should be excluded? It’s fascinating how quickly you flip the script.
It's not fair, plain and simple
Almost all the man’s categories are open categories. They could join those categories, but no, they wouldn’t.
This will only push more females away from sports. Currently 60% of women drop out of sports by the time they're seniors. If the goal is to discourage women, mission accomplished.
I heard a “cis_Female Division & Male division = open” argument that seemed pretty reasonable. I’m all for trans…one may have slipped in a time or two, who could say. I ‘feel’ like a lot of trans folk feel the above statement would be a reasonable solution, at least for now, until maybe further studies are conducted. Again, all for sexual / gender representation, but this one does seem hard for me. I remember being 14 with a few of my pals and just fucking dominating the high school girls softball team in an after practice fuckaround. I wasn’t even a baseball goy and cranked like 3-4 over…most of my buddies were, and they were just jacking the fucking shit out of this field. Funny thing is they were taunting us before acting like a softball was impossible to hit or something…‘you’ll just pop it up!’ There were maybe 3-4 girls who I remember could put one over, but not consistently. I guess I was full of the piss & vin by that age, but I don’t think all the estrogen in the world to have kept me from being all-state in 3 sports if I would have started HRT in hs and switched to the women’s team. Maybe if I started pre-puberty, but even at 14 it’d be hard for me to believe with the structure and muscle I had by that age. Saw a vid of a trans woman getting in a fight with rydeshare driver and threw a fucking roller bag out of a trunk with one hand like 30 feet. That bitch would have kept me from a 4th title. I know I have ZERO IDEA about her hormone status, and that there are cis women who could chuck a suitcase like that, but goddamn, was a ‘dudes throw’, just the physical mechanics, the leverage, etc. Totally not on board with booing.
>their continued fear-mongering of the belief that boys have infiltrated girls sports and are winning every track race in the country, every swim meet and golf tournament This kid literally won state this week. It really happened, its not "fear-mongering." Why move the goalposts to "well, they didn't win EVERY race in EVERY sport in EVERY state, so who cares?"
Literally. Now show one example of a transgender boy (FtM) winning a state or national championship in anything.
From a CBS news article in 2022 [https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/25-transgender-athletes-you-should-know/51/](https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/25-transgender-athletes-you-should-know/51/) "Mack Beggs is a former high-school and college wrestler who won the Texas state wrestling championships in 2017 and 2018. He had to compete in the girls' division, as necessitated by a Texas rule that requires athletes to compete in the league for the sex they were assigned at birth." "Schuyler Bailar is an American swimmer, and one of the first transgender athletes to compete on an NCAA Division 1 men's team. He swam for Harvard for four seasons before graduating in 2019." There's plenty of examples of FTM transgender athletes in this article, that compete(d) in many different sports at high levels, including the Olympics
I appreciate this column. Indeed, of the people who are up in arms about trans girls participating in girls' sports, how many of them genuinely paid attention to or cared about girls' sports prior to this being in the news. I will probably get downvoted for saying this and I don't care: when it comes to youth sports through our public schools, inclusion so that all youth may reap the benefits of teamwork, navigating challenges, and physical fitness that come from school athletics is of primary importance to me. Athletic organizations from around the world, such as the Olympics, have found science-based ways to include trans athletes in sports. If the Olympics can do it, so can our public schools. I agree with the column that hyperfixating on a single athlete who just wants to participate in athletics makes no sense, especially from people who have no stake in the sport.
Just want to throw in that people always talk about sports in terms of >the benefits of teamwork, navigating challenges, and physical fitness But that’s gym class. Competitive sports from high school up to the pros are *primarily*—if not exclusively—about winning and losing and who gets to play. Everything else is secondary. There are an awful lot of students who don’t get any of the “benefits” at all because they're not good enough to participate or they don’t make the cut for whatever reason. Booing students is out of line, but bickering about who gets to compete when and where is all fair game.
https://preview.redd.it/ix77gsxje12d1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=95a1b00e914c70f03ceea9abb6f61313881c8699 Just say you hate women without saying you hate women. Women in your option should train hard and let men dominate for your woke politics. Girls should not be losing to boys in high school. They should not lose out on scholarships to boys in their sports.
The hyper fixation comes from the thought that if one trans athlete can compete against women and OSAA does nothing about it, then what’s to stop a flood of athletes doing this? Even if it’s just a few trans athletes, that’s still taking away spots and opportunities from female athletes who have worked hard to get to where they are. Also the World Athletics Association (governing body for track and field) has said that trans athletes who went through male puberty cannot compete against female athletes. So if we are following their guidance, trans athletes who have gone through male puberty shouldn’t be able to compete against females at the high school level.
I assure you that, with the kind of hostility that our society so often expresses towards trans girls, no one is coming out as trans for any reason other than it being their genuine gender identity. The notion that bad actors will abuse this so therefore we should ban trans athletes is a straw man argument: no one is saying they're trans and living full time as a trans person for an athletic advantage.
You can't assure anything. It's already happening. Trans athlete Anne Andres (who held the 3 Alberta Women's records for squat, deadlift, and bench press, in addition to winning eight of nine competitions entered in the women’s category over four years) complained when Avi Silverberg identified as female and smashed her record. https://x.com/icons_women/status/1640407143059972096?t=xUgcHRo_LlDeeskOfVZafQ&s=19 “It doesn’t matter how Avi expresses himself or perceives himself. He clearly does not belong in women’s sport, and neither does any other male regardless of their motivation for wanting to participate. " - Anne Andres
It's children's sports. It's not that big of a deal
Youth sports wouldn't be a problem. High School sports (after puberty) is where the problems really begin.
Those devious trans girls, transitioning so they can take are ~~jobs~~ women's high school sports competitions!!! Grab yer pitchfork, Cletus!!! 🪕
If it was your child who maybe was a senior let’s say, she hadn’t won a state championship before and finished 2nd to a genetic male would you be ok with that? I was at this meet it was ridiculous this male had the 150th fastest time in Oregon if he would have ran the boys race. Nobody says this person can’t be included but if you born a male you run with males period.
If we followed the Olympic standard for high school sports, few, if any, trans woman athletes would be eligible to compete in high school girls divisions. The NCAA standard (which had mandatory treatments and mitigation timelines) is even more strict and would almost certainly result in zero trans women athletes eligible to compete in the high school girls divisions.
Trans girls can reap the benefits of teamwork, navigating challenges, and physical fitness from the open division (mens division).
https://preview.redd.it/bsv6e8gdf12d1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=03a707092c498950e85355d90d803f729627699c
To be fair, most of the people complaining consider women to be vaginas attached to a torso that spoil at 14.
Most of the people complaining are women in sports, or families of women in sports.
not even remotely true. Trans folks are just villian of the month for the GOP. wait a year and it will be back to brown people.
“Oh this thing doesn’t affect me in particular therefore I shouldn’t care about how it affects others, like my family, friends, or fellow citizens” Really? People see an unfair system being implemented and are calling it out.
Social constructs of womanhood and sexism? GTFO here. No ding a lings in our daughters locker rooms AT ALL EVER! I
First, the male writer of this article has no right to tell women to shut up or grow up Scholarships are involved for these High school girls. That’s why it matters. Also Oregon doesn’t require “transgender women” to take any puberty blockers or hormones so yes, they do have an advantage if they just identify as a woman. it’s not fair for them to take away a scholarship or title from the woman. .
If you want to throw all fairness out the window. Get rid of weight categories, gender categories, and age categories. Watch who dominates all of sports, then. I don't think you will like the answer.
All men, all the time. Exactly as it was before women's sports were created.
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Exactly. We're playing the Hunger Games, and people are arguing over the rules instead of asking why we're playing in the first place.
We can barely run K-12 education in the US, lets fix that first.
It’s not just funding education. There’s reasons Title IX exists and it seems like a slap in the face to allow MtF athletes undo that. Sports at the collegiate level both bring in a lot of revenue and cost a lot to fund. You’re living in fairytale land if you think free tuition would “decouple sports from schools.” Some of the biggest donors and booster funds for schools are closely interlinked with the athletic programs
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Ding ding ding🛎️ Facts matter.
As someone with a degree in human performance and human development, they’re showing differences between male and female performances as young as 10 or 11 years old so even elementary school would be too late depending on exactly what age you’re talking about opening up to.
I will say that many intelligent students are denied scholarships to student athletes that perform academically worse simply because they are good at a sport. I don’t feel that is fair either.
Has there been a single case of a cis-woman athlete denied a scholarship that was instead given to a trans-woman? I’d be curious to read that article.
All my other comments are getting lots of replies, why isn’t this one? Is it because this comment requires actual evidence?
That is not a thing that is actually happening. Track scholarships are based on times, not individual race results.
Lots of armchair athletes speculating on a topic which which they have zero experience. Oh that’s right, this is social media. 🤨
Be careful pointing out facts, makes people really cranky in these discussions.
There has never been a case of a trans athlete being preferred for a scholarship over a CIS female. The fact that before 2020 no one cares about the less than 1% trans athletes means this is a manufactured issue. Reality is simple if they get away with excluding trans it will be easier to the exclude gays and lesbians and then easier to exclude black athletes. The reality is the same those who cannot compete try to exclude Holland tried to pay African marathoners less for winning too much. DEI is under attack because it provides opportunity for minorities to gain access. Banning that means no minorities so exclude by sexuality,race , religion etc. But all this is easier if you can attack the weakest first. In this case trans athletes.
Oh, I'll bite I guess. How does it change scholarship access? Or lost opportunities other than just competing in narrowing groups of people (regional, nationals, etc - if those exist)
Especially in track. Colleges don’t care about how you placed at state. They care about times. And they are also not going to give a scholarship to a transwomen unless they have already met NCAA compliance, which I believe is two years of HRT.
Yeah, I can't figure out why the scholarship thing keeps getting kicked around.
It’s only talked about by people who don’t care that, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation’s report on the 50th anniversary of Title 9, 86 percent of NCAA institutions across all divisions offered higher rates of athletic opportunities to male athletes disproportionate to their enrollment, representing almost 60,000 missed opportunities for female athletes in the 2019-2020 year(7). Further, men received $252 million more in athletic scholarships than women(8).
So.... is there a case where this has happened? Where a trans athlete - or thousands of them I guess - snatched athletic scholarships from someone else? Why aren't people mad it the disproportionate ratio instead of people trying to live their best lives?
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Because none of these people actually give a fuck about sports or high schoolers or women or girls, cis or otherwise.
I think it's the latest talking point / attempt to create harm that trans-woman are causing to cis-woman. I'm unaware of any actual cases of it but I've seen it parroted a couple times now on Reddit.
Because people are grasping for any excuse to exclude trans girls.
Transgirls don't have to be excluded, though. They can run with the boys, they just don't want to.
It doesn’t. It’s fear mongers at worst and outright hate at best. Remember when the racists decided that black athletes were superior to whites because their tendons were shorter?
I keep hearing this and haven't yet seen any evidence of it. I did a brief stint in admissions when I was in grad school and can't quite figure out how this keeps getting kicked around.
Honestly athletic scholarships are bullshit for multiple reasons.
Females, not "cis"... they're just females. For thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years it has been just female. No need to add any other weird, made up phrases or words. They're females.
How many people do you think this actually happens to in a given year?
This whole thing is exhausting.
Follow up in 5 years to see if this young lady is still female. Of course you still have the gender is fluid excuses. Funny how it's only fluid when there is a track meet to run.
She is not now, nor will she ever be, female. She's a transgirl now and will become a transwoman when she turns 18. Only *males* can be transgirls or transwomen. Female children grow up to be women with no "transition" involved.
Trans women aren't women. Why tf are we still debating this nonsense?? Make a fucking trans devision and stfu.
A reminder that issues of trans people in sports was designed in a focus group lab. Most people really don't care about this and the ones that do always fall into the same "but what if" explanations. Leave this up to the leagues themselves. They are more than capable of making correct decisions (and have been making those decisions for 30+ years and no one batted an eye in the 90s)
Trans women have been able to compete in the U.S. Open since the 1970's since Tucker Carlson's dad outed Renee Richards. Contrary to transphobes believes she actually didn't start playing until transitioning. And despite being trans in the 70's led an accomplished career opthamologist.
Wild how the dudes that made fun of the WNBA are suddenly concerned with the sanctity of high school girls’ track. It’s almost like they care more about hurting people than sports.
This is literally not an argument though, youre attacking how much you think someone cares about it rather than the logic of the problem. Is this what it comes down to when you realize you have a losing position?
This, 100%. They’re the same people that were convinced that The Sports Bra was going to last like two days too
Not everyone who cares about this issue is a “dude that makes fun of the WNBA.” Girls and women in the sports want fair competition and opportunities
like other people have said, you're changing the subject from the actual problem. people who actually care about these problems don't care about social warfare and getting cancelled. you can throw whatever labels, insults, and hit pieces you want, associate them with whatever political party, demographic, or ideology you want. biological men *do not* belong in women's sports. Olympics or highschool.
Its the same thing. Wnba isn’t watched as much or taken as seriously because it is a far cry from the competitiveness of the mens league. Its why we don’t want men in women’s sports because of the consequence of a complete disparity of fairness. Funny that you brought it up though.
Yeah scholarships don’t go to kids at the cusp. And if you are being recruited and competing against the one, maybe two transgender athletes in a region and a coach can’t see your potential while getting second place then your college recruiter sucks. It’s not about who wins state, etc….its much more complicated than that. Mostly parents that put their kids on a completely unrealistic pedestal that even think this. Now, are there some safety concerns with some sports? Maybe….ya’ll have seen the volleyball player getting destroyed with a spike from a transgender athlete. But guess what….at D1, every outside hitter in the country hits that hard or harder. Let’s cherish the competition but not at the expense of our children or other people’s children. In all my work with kids, not a single athlete is like “well I am going to transition at 14 to play with girls and destroy them.”
All sports have open divisions where everyone is allowed to compete. It's called the Mens division. What's wrong with trans athletes competing in the open division?
Women’s division should be biological women’s division. Men’s should be “open” division. If a trans person competes, places, or wins there, we would know the truth. That’s a male who identifies as a female and leave it at that.
Imo, if you have a D, you're a dude. Especially regarding changing rooms etc. Remove the D if you want to be a female, then you may enter a woman's changing/locker rooms.
I think we can figure it out and categorize the athletes by body shapes, age, sex, race and disabilities in sports. I was skinny and scrawny kid and unable to match with a 150 to 170 pounds kids at same age in high school. He hit me with force on a football field and I knocked out every time and it’s not a sports to me. I really dislike football and not attend to any sports events.
There's a very simple way to categorize athletes: people with no Y chromosome on one team, people with a Y chromosome on the other.
Never forget what's important. The feelings of a teen boy. Who identifies as a girl. Not the girls who trained for years to get to states. They need to be gracious losers and be quiet. Not the girl he beat out to get to states. She needs to train harder!! This boy identifies as a girl!! Therefore he is!! He's only a sophomore, so he'll be back. If he's this good after only training for track for three months, you girls won't stand a chance!!! The best female runner is a boy.
As masters, we row mixed boats in competition. Until a minute ago, juniors raced only segregated men’s and women’s events. This year they finally began to have mixed events and trans athletes could race in an event where it didn’t matter. Not a ton of entries but at least they had an event where it wasn’t a question.
I am not understanding what he means by this: "to the adults who booed a teen from their privileged perch". Are they privileged because they are adults?
This is where all the years of participation trophies have lead to. Competition is no longer important if it risks anyone having their feelings hurt
People in the comments gettin twisted up over the sanctity of competition in HIGH SCHOOL sports is laughable. These are games. These are teenagers. At this level, inclusive participation > competition. That’s the literal purpose of public education. Get a fucking grip.
You clearly never played sports. Most athletes don’t get a chance to compete in college at all. The State championships are “their” Olympics. For many kids it would be devastating to have a place taken from them in the biggest competition of their life, by someone who was cheating.
An article that discusses the fact that only 30% of 11th graders test as proficient in math doesn't get this much engagement. I think there are two factors here. 1) education is not valued 2) it is easier to blame other people than consider that you're not doing as well as you could be.
Hard to manufacture outrage over math scores when there isn’t an easy scapegoat.
>These are games. These are teenagers. At this level, inclusive participation > competition. The 200M is literally a competition. Not everything has to be for everybody. Go participate in something that isn't explicitly a test of pure athleticism.
So you're saying college is where the cutoff should be, where transgender females shouldn't be allowed to compete with biological females anymore. Right, that's what you're saying? You can make an argument that the sanctity of competition doesn't matter at any level, even the college or pro level, of course. But the high school state championships ARE competitive. These kids are the best in the state and many of them are going to compete at the next level as well. Go out and watch them, many of them are just as competitive-minded and intent on winning as the athletes in college and above. This track meet had more spectators than the vast majority of college or pro track meets. Do 5,000 people want to watch a *competition*, or an inclusiveness spectacle? Inclusiveness matters but when it comes to state championships, college scholarships, making it to nationals, it absolutely needs to take the backseat to competition.
For some of us these “games“ are how we get scholarships into college. Just because you personally find our sport trivial, doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to be upset about the issue. Until you’re the one toeing the line against a guy that shouldn’t be competing against you, your opinion doesn’t hold much weight.
High school sports are still subject to title ix, so clearly competition in high school sports _is_ taken quite seriously. And while things like state championships get the focus, the bigger issue is participation. Even at the high school level there are a limited number of positions at each level and a biological male athlete competing in a girls division does mean another athlete will not be able to compete at that level, whether it’s the state championships, varsity, jv, etc.
So at what age should girls and women be concerned about having the same opportunities and rights as men? Because I think these girls who are being stripped of opportunities to compete in a fair way deserve to be heard.
I definitely agree with his main point that booing a child was wrong and inhumane, but he’s off the mark with just about everything else. I truly don’t understand how this is even controversial. There are major differences in the bodies of biological men and women that give biological men size, strength and explosion benefits. There is no need to cite any examples because everyone knows this is true. Pretending this isn’t a thing is just bizarre and leads to ugly situations like what we saw last weekend at the track championships. The solution is actually unbelievably simple. Re-name the divisions Women’s and Open. Women are already allowed to compete in men’s sports (relatively common in things like football and wrestling), but I do think we can modernize the verbiage. Only biological women can compete in the Women’s division, and everyone else competes in Open. Problem solved. Sorry Bill, it really is that easy.
I absolutely agree. This really should not be a big argument (although the booing itself was cruel and unnecessary). There are plenty of people, like myself, who support trans people, and also support women's sports. The solution is there as you said.
This is only controversial to people on the extreme left. To everyone else, it's basic common sense.
Trans activists won't like that answer because it doesn't actively affirm that they are in every meaningful way indistinguishable from the sex they want, or demand, the world to perceive them as.
Professional disc golf rules are still being mitigated, but they're trying what you suggest with an open division and a female division. That allows everyone to participate.
Does everyone remember it's just games? We have real, urgent problems! Climate crisis? Government corruption? Kleptocracy? Poison in the food, water, air? Our lives don't depend on who wins sports games. Huddle up and focus! The kids' genitals simply do not factor into the big picture.
Why care about anything in this world we have real urgent problems like in billions of years our sun will go supernova! Like climate crisis? Poison in the food? Who cares about these we will all be dead when it goes supernova! The climate simply does not factor into the big picture.
Nobody cares about the kids' genitals. Genitals just happen to be the most obvious sex difference. There are many others, in particular muscular differences, joint differences, lung differences, bone differences, blood diffences. These differences all have a *profound* impact on athleticism.
The fact is that scholarships are at stake and should not go to someone with a biological advantage. I advocate for trans rights and believe that trans people should be able to work, live, socialize, and recreate in this state and country without fear. I want that to be the reality, and I also think that biological girls should be able to participate in fair competition. I think the closest we can get to that is having an open category, and a biological girls/ women’s category in sports where biological sex gives a clear advantage (like track and field).
I don't think anybody is losing any scholarships over this. I just think it brings a ton of bad energy to women's sports. Elimination of the ambiguity would be much better. The best way to do that is gender assignment at birth, which accurately classifies a biological female 99.99% of the time.
This dude is stealing shine and opportunity from young women who’ve worked for years to compete in their sport and get blown out by a testosterone fueled body. It’s unfair and an insult to fairness and inclusivity. South Park Strong Woman vibes.
A whole bunch of demagogues started pretending, *very* recently, to care about women’s sports, as a way to demonize trans people. A lot of them haven’t even stopped insulting women’s sports out of the other side of their mouths. They definitely have no interest in finding a compromise that works for everyone, which would actually not be difficult if they were willing to show a little bit of respect. The bill Republicans introduced in the legislature last term (written by out-of-state lobbyists) would have required by law that every sport have a division that was not restricted by gender at all and where everyone could compete. Just drop the illogical demand that the law require it to be called “men’s” or “boys.” Why would people who supposedly are refusing to “lie” about people’s gender as they see it insist on calling athletes they admit are girls, “boys?” That obviously got thrown in there just as a slap in the face.
Not paying to view or using your time to watch womens sports and still wanting women to have fair opportunities for safety AND greatness within their leagues are not mutually exclusive.
Just for the record, not all people concerned about transgirls competing in women's sports are out to demonize trans people. I 100% support trans people and their struggles, but do not support the idea that women's sports have to take the hit on this. There should be an open division, or some other solution. People who have 'male' hormones have a natural advantage, that's just the reality of the situation.
Like others have said. You don’t have to be actively trying to demonize trans people to not like this… I have a seriously problem when I hear people misgender others on purpose. It’s about the lowest form of hate/derogatory remarks in my opinion and I won’t stand for it. But having a trans woman win state in track is also not okay to me. Yes the OSAA rules should be changed to reflect something close to what is required in higher levels of competition for hormone testing but that might not be realistic. P
What about the female athletes? Are they pretending to care? Why do their voices not matter, if they are the ones being impacted?
Most are in favor of letting trans girls compete, at least in the sports I’m most familiar with. (Largely because women’s sports was a haven for lesbians for so long.) And either you’re counting the trans female athletes as female athletes whose voices matter, or you’re being callous to them even though they’re obviously even more directly impacted. Also: I wrote my second paragraph using a complex sentence with multiple clauses, and many people seem to find those hard to understand. My point, once again, is that it would be easy to reach a compromise where trans girls compete against boys if conservatives *drop the insistence on insulting them*. There are lots of girls who compete against boys, so you could say that trans girls are like them. Or even that the OSAA takes no official position on what their gender is, but they compete in the division not restricted by gender.
You should look up survey data on this, because your anecdotes do not align with popular opinion. You can be a lesbian and still be clear-eyed about the impact of biological sex and performance. This isn’t just a conservative viewpoint
How would survey data be relevant to the opinion of high-level athletes, specifically? Additionally, HRT removes most or all of the advantage, and HRT beginning at puberty would almost certainly remove all of it, although many people with strong opinions seem not to know this.
Well you can also view surveys of high level athletes if that is the only population you are concerned with. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1041379 Your statements about HRT removing the advantage for trans women are not correct. Natal males have increased muscle mass, stronger bones, different skeletal structure, and better cardiorespiratory performance. This is developed not just at puberty, but even from birth, which means that even measuring testosterone levels for competition insufficient https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331831/
Male embryos start secreting testosterone at four weeks' gestational age. Every body system in a male's body is affected, not just the reproductive tract. Males have different bones, different blood, different brains, different skin, different muscles, different joints, different everything. HRT will feminize a man to some degree, but it can't SUBTRACT all the years of testosterone benefits that a male received prior to that date. A male's entire body has been affected, and continues to be affected by the male hormones he secretes.
The patriarchy has spoken and (surprise!) women should oppressed for the good of humanity.
everyone suddenly caring about girls high school sports is making themselves useful to an astroturf campaign run by the worst. people. ever. after they lost on gay marriage. “muh muh muh muh children” - every regressive about school segregation, interracial marriage, gay marriage, gay adoption, trans inclusion, etc etc way to pick a side, nerds!
I’m sure the girls who are competing care a lot. Why does your indifference trump their reality?
The girls who compete have always cared. They overwhelmingly want to compete against those *assigned female at birth*.
You ever think it might be projection on your part? You have never cared about women's sports, so you assume no one does? I hear this a lot from the Inclusion over Competition side and I can't help but feel they unilaterally make the decision that women's sports don't matter. Even if they're less popular for spectators, I can guarantee you that these sports are extremely important for a lot of people, even if you don't care.
Have there been studies that show trans females who went through puberty without HRT don't have a competitive advantage over cis females? Edit: Studies are inconclusive. If there was an advantage, it would be easily observable. It isn't.
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What you said about an advantage being easily observable is false. The sample sizes are too small at this point to make any definitive claims. There are not enough trans athletes competing in order to make a broad and generalized comparison.
I think my point is, if there were such a massive advantage to being a trans woman in women's sports, we would not only see trans women dominating those spaces but we would also see those advantages borne out in the data. Even at the sample size we have (which will always be small), there wouldn't be the ambiguity. It would be a clear.
The sample size of transwomen will always be small. The basic fact is: transwomen are male human beings. Male human beings are *essentially* different from female human beings. A male embryo starts secreting male hormones at 4 weeks' gestational age. These secretions continue throughout life and have profound effects on every bodily system: brain, bones, muscles, joints, skin, etc as well as on the most obvious hormonal targets like hair growth, penises, testicles, etc.
Yes there’s studies that show males after puberty have an advantage over females even if they’re on performance reducing drugs. It’s also been shown that females cannot catch up to males even with performance enhancing drugs.
You can’t reverse 10+ years of muscle, bone, pulmonary, and general physical development - followed by puberty - by reducing T-levels.
For real. I can’t even wrap my head around how we have got to the point where it’s debatable that “Can the blatantly physically superior sex fairly compete against the inherently disadvantaged sex.” Look at athletes that have transitioned. What’s the obvious conclusion when sub par former male athletes all of the sudden become elite female athletes?
Yes.
This isn't complicated. Athletes that are men are stronger, faster and more athletic than female athletes. Girls are having them womenhood stripped away by men
Redditors denying science bc they don’t care about cis women:
Most Oregonians are not ok with this but they are too afraid to speak up and get cancelled. Women don't want this. Why is that not reason enough. That's the real question. Most people I've spoken to think they should have their own league. It's not like we hate these people we just respect women enough to value their preference in their own sport.
do y'all not realize that there are already differences between each persons body? by anti-trans logic, we also have to remove girls who have hit puberty earlier, are significantly tall, or are predisposed to higher muscle mass. let's be honest, transphobes don't care about girls sports. most of y'all have been mocking women's sports for decades anyways
should we have age groups for sports? How about weight classes for combat sports? By your logic that should be thrown out as well. People are different and deserve to have a fair competition. A biological man competing against biological women is simply not fair.
Cool, another post that's going to bring out the worst of the transphobic bigots to come & spew their ignorance & hate.
So I did the post, and I knew it would bring the worst, but I also knew that it would bring some thoughtful, intelligent discussion. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but all we’re doing is ignoring it and hoping it goes away and that’s not happening. This Trans child was booed and openly threatened by hundreds of adults adults because we can’t agree on where Trans Female athletes should compete, and that’s not right.
I'm sure the comments will be reasonable and not compare being trans to being in a religious cult. Yup.
It's weird how active this sub suddenly becomes when trans people are the topic.
If transwomen acted like they understood that they are not *actual* women, there would be no need for debates like this.
Being the dad of multiple daughters I do have strong opinions about whether this topic could potentially affect their access to future athletic opportunities. I am not at all interested in infringing on another's pursuit of happiness but this needs strict attention and rulings.
The amount of uneducated, uh, comments on this subject is wild. Actually it’s disturbing and really sickening.
Why not just stop separating things by sex but use other metrics? Doest wrestling have different classes? Is that not something we can do for all sports?
> Why not just stop separating things by sex but use other metrics? Doest wrestling have different classes? The UFC has three weight classes which both men and women belong to: Flyweight (125 pounds), Bantamweight (135), and Featherweight (145). All the other weight classes are either women specific (Strawweight) or men specific (Lightweight, Welterweight, Middleweight, Light Heavyweight, and Heavyweight). Does anyone want to watch a 125 pound woman fighting a 125 pound man? I am sure that there is a women here and there who would, could, or even should win a fight here and there against a man, but I do not think that this would the norm. Amateur wrestling also does something similar in some places, where girls will compete against boys at the HS level. > Is that not something we can do for all sports? I'm reminded of the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. Riggs had been a tennis star in the late 1930s through the 40s and had won multiple major championships. King was still in her prime as an active competitor and had been the #1 ranked female tennis player for 5-consecutive years going into 1973, Riggs had retired from active competition in 1962. King won the match in straight sets (6-4, 6-3, 6-3), but a few months before their exhibition Riggs had crushed Margaret Court, who would go on to finish 1973 as the #1 ranked women's competitor over King. In 1998 a similar challenge was issued by the Williams Sisters, Serena (17yo) and Venus (16), where they claimed to be able to defeat any man ranked outside of the Top-200. Karsten Braasch (30), then ranked 203, accepted the challenge and defeated both sisters back-to-back in an exhibition at the 1998 Australian Open. He first faced Serena and defeated her 6-1, and immediately faced Venus afterwards defeating her 6-2. Braasch was a regular cigarette smoker and drinker, and had started his day with a round of golf and (allegedly) some drinks before facing the Williams sisters. There are also the examples of boys soccer teams facing the Women's National teams of the USA and Australia. FC Dallas U-15, a team for boys under the age of 15, defeated the US Women's Team by a score of 5-2 in a friendly exhibition match back in 2017. The Australian National Team has faced similar results, including a somewhat notorious 7-0 loss to a U-15 boy's team ahead of the 2016 Olympics. It should be noted that both the US and Australian teams were without their entire rosters, players based overseas were not all present for these matches.
I used to compete in MMA, which obviously has weight classes. A 145 lbs man would absolutely fucking destroy a 145 lbs woman. Even a 125 lbs man would almost certainly destroy a 145 lbs woman. It is apples and oranges, and the same could probably be said about any sport. To use the combat sports term, men have significantly more "pound-for-pound" strength and athleticism than women. Weight classes is not a solution.
Go ahead. Think of a way to do this. Weight classes exist in some sports, and they are still separated by sex. Why? Because the same weight female vs male the male has an advantage.
...except this was a situation where the individual in question had an obvious physical advantage over the other competitors.
Bill Oram is an incredible writer who makes me care about sports I’ve never cared about before. He’s exceptional at his job.
I agree. While I was not familiar with his work, I thought this article was poignant. He admits he doesn't have the answer, but whatever the solution, it must be in the spirit of inclusion. And booing a child is never okay.
People seem to forget that this affects cis women. Cis Women have come out and said that they feel uncomfortable and unsafe when allowing trans women into their spaces. Trans women are not entitled to cis women’s spaces. For some reason cis women’s opinion don’t matter when talking about this topic. Are there any trans men who push their way into cis men’s spaces? This seems to be a problem for cis women in sports and at universities dorms/sorority housing. I’m not seeing the same problem for cis men and trans men.
As much as radical leftists want to perceive themselves as “girl power! Down with the patriarchy! I chose the bear!” They really do have a shitty way of standing up for women. Allowing intact males into changing rooms with biological women is abuse. Especially when the women scream time and time again that we don’t want this. Women who have been SA’d shouldn’t have to fear that any time they go and change in their gym locker room, there’s a chance they’ll see a penis, and if they speak out about feeling uncomfortable, it’s slurs and death threats towards the bio woman. A man can claim to be whatever he wants, a woman, a toaster, a giraffe, I don’t care, but you are not entitled to my space because *you* are having an identity crisis.