The International Cricket Council has become the latest sports body to ban transgender players from the elite women’s game if they have gone through male puberty.
The ICC said it had taken the decision, following an extensive scientific review and nine-month consultation, to “protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players”.
It joins rugby union, swimming, cycling, athletics and rugby league, who have all gone down a similar path in recent years after citing concerns over fairness or safety.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that not many users on Lemmy follow Cricket or understand it fully. My comment isn’t going to cover if the decision by the ICC is correct (or otherwise) but to provide a little insight into the men and women’s games
Speed / pace is a noticeable difference between the sexes. I don’t believe there are any current female players that consistently bowl pace over 120km/h. In contrast, male pace bowlers generally try to meet a consistent speed of 135km/h for the same role. The upper bounds for men is roughly 160km/h and maybe only one or two pro players globally can do this.
There are enough men’s bowlers who can bowl at 150km/h. At this speed an average batter would find it difficult to see the ball. Arguably batters in baseball receive faster pitches but at 150km/h+ including the ball bouncing makes it incredibly difficult to face.
The batting is also different but it might be harder to explain to a non-cricketing audience why this is.
To add extra weight to this comment. It is a common tactic to attempt to “bounce” a batter out, which basically means bowling with enough speed at such a short length that it comes towards the body, and especially, the head. If a batter is unprepared, it usually requires getting out of the way because trying to play a shot is likely to end up with you getting out or struck by the ball.
The ball is much harder and denser than a baseball and even a famous up and coming professional, international, batter died when he failed to get out of the way and was struck in the head.
Basically, there is a very real safety concern for players when it comes to something like this.
Cricket is like Blurnsball, right?
it’s slowly becoming that, yeah.
This isn’t about male bowlers though. The physiology of transgender people changes very quickly after starting Hormone Replacement Therapy. Do you have data on transgender women and bowling in cricket? Because data relating to male bowlers is not applicable.
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Sport is the most boring show on TV by far, and yet the actors are paid insane amounts. The fandom is the most toxic bullshit out there and the show runners encourage it.
Cancel sport already, it’s really dumb.
As one of the characters in (the book) Jurassic Park says, “the two most boring things in the world are sports and fashion.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. But I do have a lot of family members who are athletic, and some have gone as far as olympic competitions. So, I can’t really say they have no valid right to enjoy their sport. And those family members are the most kind and welcoming people, they are absolutely appalled by all this bigoted negativity toward trans athletes, and are smart enough to see if for the fascist malarky it truly is.
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As someone who is not an athlete and not really interested in sports as a spectator either, I’ve used arguments like that before in good faith. Why is it a problem? Most people never get the chance to compete at a high level in any kind of athletics, full stop. Participants at the highest level are all, necessarily, exceptional individuals.
Can you help me understand what makes that particular exception to be so important? Why would women who have undergone one puberty or the other cast aspersions? Like you said, there are methods like testing hormone levels to ensure a level playing field. Given that, it seems like the only aspersions to be cast would be that their history somehow makes them less of a woman, which I can’t agree with.
I can’t speak for everyone but ime when people use the argument they are often more interested equality or inclusion at all costs. Their good intentions blind them to the fact that womens’ sport has spent centuries trying go gain validity / parity with mens’ sport.
But isn’t the whole reason for women’s sports trying to gain validity about inclusion? Doesn’t parity mean, in another word, equality?
I’m not really sure I understand the difference, is all I’m saying. And again, speaking as someone who mainly thinks about sports by wishing they made my life less of a hassle when there’s a road closure for some game I don’t care about.
Just responding to myself here. My original comment which sparked off this discussion/chain appears to have been deleted. I thought I had been respectful but in the future I’d recommend mods just remove news stories that make them uncomfortable instead of censoring comments.
Participants at the highest level are all, necessarily, exceptional individuals.
Bullshit. High level athletes, artists, chefs, etc. aren’t exceptional by god-given talent, but by relentless pursuit of that skill. Some of the best football (soccer) players of all time had unwanted physical builds or even small “defects”. Some of the best volleyball players were way shorter than their peers. The problem with having trans women competing on the same field as cis women in most sports is that the biological advantage they might get far surpasses the most rigorous training they could do, i.e. it becomes about genetic makeup.
The problem with having trans women competing on the same field as cis women in most sports is that the biological advantage they might get far surpasses the most rigorous training they could do, i.e. it becomes about genetic makeup.
The implication of this is that a trans woman who hasn’t devoted her life to the sport will be able to compete at the highest levels. I think that is patently wrong. Most trans women, like most other women, would never have a chance at that without having devoted their lives.
On top of that, many women (and likely trans women though I can’t say for sure) do devote their lives to a sport but still never make it to the highest levels of competition. It’s obviously not just about “god-given talent” as you said, but exceptional circumstances are a necessary condition. Not necessarily in the same way and the same set of conditions for every athlete, but every top-level performer is, necessarily, exceptional.
The implication of this is that a trans woman who hasn’t devoted her life to the sport will be able to compete at the highest levels
There’s no such implication. They’d still have to train, but there’d be an inherent advantage. A common example used to justify the division of sports between male and female categories is grip strength – the female world record is ~65kg, whereas the male average is ~50kg. A trans woman who underwent male puberty would have an unfair advantage, on average.
A common example used to justify the division of sports between male and female categories is grip strength – the female world record is ~65kg, whereas the male average is ~50kg.
I’ve seen this statistic before in this context. What I hadn’t seen (despite trying to find it) is any data on trans women’s grip strength, or how well grip strength correlates to athletic ability. I don’t disagree that trans women have had different life circumstances than cis women, and that those circumstances likely give them an advantage in many different sports. What I don’t think follows from that is this advantage being an unfair advantage, especially since every top level athlete has advantages (inherent and otherwise) that have led them to their position.
As I understand it, “male puberty” does confer some definite athletic advantages, but hormone therapy and other processes undergone by trans women largely mitigate those advantages. What I can’t say (and haven’t seen discussed scientifically or otherwise) is whether or to what degree those advantages remain “unfair” or even significant.
Just make it third category.
- female sports won’t get affected
- fairness will increase
- fans can watch their own "cup of coffee "
- possible pretenders will no longer be motivated by easy winning
It’s own category with like 5 people in each sport. Great idea.
What is the alternative though that won’t ruin female’s sports that was built as part or followup of female’s emancipation ?
Some sports do it based on what kind of puberty you went through.
As a significant number of the physical advantages come through going through male puberty.
That could be a good start.
Which sports do that?
A quick Google gave me this:
Several international governing bodies including World Athletics, World Aquatics and World Rugby have restricted trans women who had undergone male puberty from participating in the female category
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_sports
Oh i misunderstood i though you said that if someone is born one sex but get to transiaion by chems in puberty they are allowed.
No, it depends which puberty they go through.
You can trigger whatever puberty you want by taking hormones/medication.
The one where trans women play in the women’s league and trans men in the men’s. If it causes any sort on unfairness we would have seen it by now.
We have. That’s why it’s a dumb idea.
Where? All the hyped up news stories have been titles like “trans woman destroys women in insert sport here” but if you look into it they took 600th or something and beat maybe 10 women.
That is what tons of folks fights against. But i agree it makes sense. However, is taking testosteron considered doping for females or is it OK? if it’s OK, why other “chems” are not allowed?
The testosterone for trans men is just to get to the levels that average cis men have, I’m pretty sure they test for excess testosterone. Some medication is allowed for sick athletes that is considered doping for anyone who isn’t sick, like the therapy for increasing blood oxygen levels which is a common form of doping but is a valid treatment for some illnesses.
Medication for sick people seems kinda different thing to me than being healthy and chumming chems to gain muscles.
So testosterone for female( born) athletes should be allowed until they reach avg male(born) level? Is that really a thing we want to introduce into sports ? Will steroids also count as getting to avg male upper muscle mass ? Where is the line? Won’t that make female athletes either obsolete or force them to chems chumming which then can cause them health issues given that most of them propably don’t plan to transition and might want start families etc?
For trans men they get like an injection of testosterone, they aren’t getting it to play sports, it’s medication for dysphoria. I haven’t said anyone else other than trans men should be taking it and definitely nothing about steroids.
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Imo we should get rid of the distinction by gender and just use weight classes, or whatever attributes are appropriate for a given sport.
Avg Joe can weight about or even less than avg Jane but he still outperforms her in physical activities. It’s gonna be quite hard. But i can see it working as one of the many params in complex evaluation formula which never will be finished in sense every year someone will come up with exceptions and new paralela.
That’s true for grouping by gender as well, probably even more so. Genetic lottery means some will always be better at a given sport than others of the same gender putting in the same effort. But it’s so engrained in our thinking that we don’t even perceive it as a problem, instead we tell those with physical disadvantage that they were just not made for a certain sport.
So we are far from competing with perfect here, and being able to pick other attributes to group by should enable us create much more evenly matched groups. I mean, right now we just use one deciding factor for everything and call it a day. And that’s before we get into the whole gender discussion.
Regarding the actual formulas, I think we just need to find good tradeoffs between fairness and practicality. Of course even a perfectly fair system will fail if it doesn’t work in practice, but I think we can do much better than just using gender in pretty much all cases.
You’ve just killed all of women’s sports by relegating them to the bottom tiers, congratulations.
This is just a complete non solution to the problem and effectively just ends up with trans people being banned from sports altogether.
“Trans” sports teams/leagues (whatever that means) can’t really exist at the amateur local level anywhere but the biggest citiess due to there being not a lot of trans people, and even less trans people who want to play sports.
The struggle to even get enough trans guys or trans girls to form a team for football or whatever would be a challenge in and of itself, and then this team would pretty much have to fly across the country (or possibly to a different country altogether) to even play a match.
This is not a reasonable solution for anyone but the people who want to ban trans people from sports.
The second issue is that this is just fear mongering and not an actual issue to be solved but that’s being argued all over this thread already.
What is your suggestion than?
Does he have to have a better suggestion in order to point out how yours isn’t viable?
It’s preferable, as that’s what constructive productive discussion is about as opposite to just negating and pointing out all is wrong all the time while never accepting any ideas.
It can be very constructive to point out why something is a bad idea without having an alternative in mind.
Doing something just to do something is how a lot of mistakes and accidents happen.
all the time while never accepting any ideas.
That hyperbole. What about good ideas?
I disagree because it doesn’t lead anywhere , thus it doesn’t consruct anything.
It can stop you from making things worse, but I’m tired of arguing this with you.
Believe what you want.
Trans people should be allowed in the sports of their gender provided they’ve been on HRT consistently for some time
The length can be argued but 2-3 years seem to be enough.
However those sport associations claim they had researches done and conclusions were that it is not fair due to difference in physical abilities and it brings health risk for female athletes.
2-3 years doesn’t change lung size or bone density. There is a lot of stuff that doesn’t change once it’s developed.
Just make a separate league
Two categories:
- Women
- Open
Perfectly fair and simple.
women as females or identifier ? Open is males + trans females + trans males ?
Identity is irrelevant. The separation exists so that women get fair competition.
Women as in someone who was born as, and always has been, biologically female.
Open means everyone, unrestricted.
I see so in other words keep it stricly male and female category and let female to enter male category by choice.
Then we are where se are with people lobbing for change.
So, do transgender leagues get the same amount of resources as male and female? There’s no way they’re going to bring in as much money as male or even female leagues.
Female leaves done bring as much as male leagues either. So male leagues sponsors female leagues. So i guess nope, as male and female leagues do not either.
I think it’s simpler. Have two categories: one for the weaker gender, one that is open for anybody. First category is needed only for sports and hobbies where there are differences between the groups, and the decision whether it matters can be derived statistically. If there’s only one category and a significant majority of the top players are from a single gender group, they need a second category.
Then again, I’m not sure what this means if we applied this logic to other things. For instance, 73% of NBA players were black, 0.4% asian in 2021, but that doesn’t seem like something that needs fixing.
I’m not sure i follow. So you basically suggest to keep male and female categories but rename them? Or do you suggest to devide female category to stronger and weaker ?
Default to one category, separate if statistics show that one gender group is significantly stronger. Some sports have already established that knowledge, so they can have 2 categories as is. Male and female are fine names.
So status quo more or less, but underlining that gender groups have differences in some things. That seems to be unclear to some people.
Well that;s how we got male and female categories. But now we got in between who are apparently weaker than males but can often easily top females. Obvious decision would be to go for certain win.
There are obviously people who misuse it unjustly to get to the top. Where is the line to become weaker? Would you lower rewards for weaker category to motivate folks to move to stronger one, wouldn’t that make females left at the tail all the time ?But now we got in between who are apparently weaker than males but can often easily top females.
They have the burden of proof to irrefutably show that they are on the same level as the women. I don’t know and don’t have to know how they can do that. If they cannot do that, they go to the default category or come up with something else to do with their life.
In priciple i agree but … i can imagine that it’s pretty simple to just give weak performance on the test day then win every competition ever after but just sightly ahead of females.
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Studies have shown that after around 2 years of HRT the strength of trans women level out to the average of cis women. The only things that really stay the same are things like bone length /bone density, and it’s not like there are no cis women with dense bones that are tall.
Edit: taken from another comment of mine:
found a more recent study that states endurance things like running and swimming level out by around 2 years, with most things level out after about 4 with the exception of upper body strength. Which is still declining in trans women past that point
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/clinem/dgad414/7223439
So the 1 year that is recommended is too soon for trans women athletes to start competing, but for endurance sports like racing and swimming it should be fine by 2 years. Other sports may need more time, but also we shouldn’t be delaying the lives of trans people for so long. We need to find a good middle ground because it’s not like exceptional cis women don’t exist in those same sports.
This is all also completely ignoring that if a trans women starts hrt before puberty then there is no real difference. So the real solution is to let trans teenagers transition.
Aren’t their trans women who don’t take HRT?
That compete in sports? No.
The vast-vast majority of trans women take HRT and many of the ones that don’t, don’t because of a lack of access.
Makes sense thanks for the explanation. Yea, I figure it’s way less common for a trans woman to not want to go the HRT route if they have the ability to, but I know a few must exist.
They do exist and they are just as valid, but they’re definitely not the ones competing in sports (plus there are already requirements for trans women to be on HRT before competing in women’s leagues)
The word you’re looking for is biologically.
Thanks
Why did my comment get removed?
Probably a biased mod who gets mad whenever a discussion doesn’t go their way.
Brand new user totally understands how things work here. Alternatively, recently banmed user totally understands why they got banned. BIASED MODS!!!
Simply because there is a huge difference, biologically, between a cisgender man and a transgender women who is on HRT.
You can argue that there is still residual advantages remaining after transition, that’s fine. But to call them men is both plainly incorrect, and also offensive.
Why did my comment get removed?
Hmm I wonder
My fist thought was “why does the International Criminal Court care”
God I thought it said the international criminal court
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It’s worth noting that “scientifically a male” is genuinely a more complicated phrase than it might initially seem at first, because trans people generally do more than just socially transition, changing their name and clothes. Sex differences are primarily mediated through sex hormones, and radically changing one’s hormonal profile, as happens with hormone therapies, causes very real biological effects. A trans woman, while being stronger than your average cis woman, will lose a meaningful amount of muscle due to the lack of testosterone (and will also generally develop better cardiovascular health, again due to the lack of testosterone). Depending on the sport and the individuals in question, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that there are cases where some amount of residual muscle doesn’t necessarily confer a particularly large benefit such that a blanket ban is warranted.
Depending on the sport and the individuals in question, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that there are cases where some amount of residual muscle doesn’t necessarily confer a particularly large benefit such that a blanket ban is warranted.
Agreed. That said, I’ve yet to see a major sport league that bans transgenders in women’s divisions without at least some empirical research existing that demonstrates an unfair advantage.
I mean both chess and pool have recently banned transgender women from competition.
So the push is not purely an evidence-driven one. In fact there is a very loud political faction trying to remove transgender women from all events, from the highest levels all the way down to park fun-runs.
My bad, I actually wasn’t aware of that. That’s fucking ridiculous.
Isn’t that ridiculous, given that women have empirically proven to be better swimmers in most cases that most men. And I’m certain the reason for banning transgender women from chess is because they realize these people are smarter than the average bear. And more likely to outclass their opponents every time. And you know what? They’re right about that.
Can’t pretend I’m particularly familiar with the specifics, but to be clear, I do think it is absolutely possible, and indeed likely, that there are situations where a genuine advantage is present, and I think the line really needs to be drawn by each individual sports body.
I understand the idealism of wanting there to be no real restrictions, but you need some regulations, if only to prevent the bad-faith asshole who decides to identify as a woman for the day of a competition. As time passes and more studies are done, we’ll be able to draw more evidence-based lines that more accurately balance accessibility and fairness.
My only real point here is just to say that this phrase “biological/scientific male” is way way messier than a simple binary category like that might suggest. A huge amount of tissues in the body of some level of sex differentiation, and that differentiation also varies a lot based on the stage of development that their exposed to hormones. A trans person isn’t going to change their skeleton with hormones, but there are other things that do meaningfully change to get closer to the other sex. A trans woman’s breasts, for instance, are genuinely just as “biologically female” as any cis woman’s.
Cricket is as a fun as baseball.
Downvote this foo!
Or don’t, I’m not your mama.
I thought I told you to get rid of those sideburns! …“But Mr Burns I don’t think know you what sideburns…”
I’ve had it with your attitude! You’re outa here!!
Appropriate then, that the issue is dicks
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I’d be mad except… it’s fucking cricket.
Cricket is the second-most popular sport in the world.
I’ve literally never seen a game of it, and know nothing about it, but this affects a lot of people.
Like baseball but slower.
Get that terf garbage out of here.
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