Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, details the shock Gaines and other swimmers felt when they learned they would have to share a locker room with Thomas at the championships in Atlanta. It documents a number of races they swam in with Thomas, including the 200-yard final in which Thomas and Gaines tied for fifth but Thomas, not Gaines, was handed the fifth-place trophy.
Thomas swam for Pennsylvania. She competed for the men’s team at Penn before her gender transition.
Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title in any sport, finishing in front of three Olympic medalists for the championship. By not making the final, the lawsuit mentions that Florida swimmer Tylor Mathieu, who was not a plaintiff, was denied first-team All-American honors in that event.
Other plaintiffs included athletes from volleyball and track.
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The Economist looked at and has a perfectly reasonable solution.
The short version is that gender may be fluid, but biological sex isn’t.
They propose two categories, biological female by sex and Open.
Kinda like it used to be.
It literally is (since people change sex everyday), and even if we pretend it isn’t, it’s blatantly not binary either, but a spectrum, and a socially constructed one at that.
All this “perfectly reasonable” solution is, is more of the same old ignorant transphobia, with some added misogyny for good measure.
How many times today did you change your Y chromosome to X or vice versa?
That’s not reasonable it’s just a new form of segregation. Stating that we (trans women) are both equal to women but seperate which has been ruled unconstitutional and discriminatory.
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How is that solving the problem at all?
But the problem with thus line of thinking is it opens a massive can of worms. Like for example all of the best long distance runners in the world come from a handful of tribes in Kenya, where they have thinner calves and ankles than other people. And this is statistically a much bigger advantage than the advantage trans women get. So should we ban Kenyans from competing since they have a biological advantage too?
Or even simpler stuff like height. Tall people have advantages in so many sports. So if you’re only 150cm because of your biology, you’re never going to be a pro basketball player for example. Does that mean we need to do something about this, since it’s so unfair?
I think you’ve nailed it here. There is so much focus on the genetic advantage a trans woman has in women’s sports, but at the elite level genetics already plays a determinative role. It’s in every sport. I saw a video the other day on powerlifting. Sure, we all know that weight classes are important, but this video was about femur length. The guy with the world record for squat, in his weight class, has very short femurs, and the video showed the physics of how this gives him a purely genetic advantage in the squat over others who have trained just as hard and are just as strong. At the elite level where everyone is training hard and has good diet and coaching, the difference between winning and losing often comes down to genetic variation. It’s not just purely physical advantages either. At the elite level, psychological fitness is also critical to success and psychology is also profoundly influenced by both genetics and early childhood development, which are not under the individual athlete’s control. On top of that there are economic disparities. On average, a person from a very poor family is much less likely to end up as an elite level skier or hockey player.
There are so many genetic and social factors that contribute to success in elite sports that I don’t think the women who are complaining about trans athletes have much credibility.
This is why I’ve felt that if we are going to stop trans women from competing with women, it’s time to do away with the gender aspect of sport where possible. The Paralymics maintain ratings for the severity of disability that an athlete is overcoming. Why couldn’t we do similar for natural ability in other sport, not unlike weight classes?
It’s all very hypothetical, but with a perfect system we’d be seeing ability bands of athletes with a high confidence that the only difference between competitors is the effort and strategy that they put into their sport, rather than any kind of natural advantage. Men and women would occasionally compete together and it’d be great.
So just get rid of women’s sports?
In my hypothetical setup, I guess so? Are you concerned that no one would engage with anything less than the ‘top class’ of ability which would mean in many sports women would mostly be marginalised? Because it’s a fair concern
I think the first step needs to be asking why we do this and what we want. We have women’s sports because (cis) women generally cannot compete sufficiently with (cis) men. But what are we trying to accomplish? I would say in middle school and high school our goal should be inclusivity. So trans men and women should be able to compete in their identified genders.
On the other hand in college and the Olympics inclusivity is probably not as important for adults competing at some of the highest levels. So I am more willing to accept some limits, but I’m certainly not well versed enough to know where to draw that line.
It’s very easy to resolve, most kids that participate in sports are themselves (shockingly) also kids and will not have gained any advantage if allowed to transition early enough. Even a year or two of puberty is going to shed away very quickly.
(And leave us older trans people who are no longer teenagers who might have gone through a full puberty to have that advantage not participate in sports, and leave kids alone to transition and participate in their chosen gender.)
Either way this is a problem that resolves itself if trans people are allowed to accept and be themselves when they figure it out, which would be a lot more possible if people actually took the time to understand us.
Also genetic advantages like Micheal Phelp’s lungs and body have always been a part of sports. So if we happen to want to play sports we’re still women playing sports with a genetic disadvantage in every way that matters to us like having babies. (sports are the last thing on most of our minds)
Either way stop making trans people the center of your political battles. We just want to live without you fucking up our lives. We aren’t anything that matters to the vast majority of instances. We are the rare exception. Go figure out that they’d rather you argue about us than about the actual issues like health care, abortion, union rights, civil rights, etc.
Letting kids transition before they even reach puberty is a great way to potentially ruin their lives forever. Kids are so impressionable and change faster than the wind. They instantly succumb to peer pressure and 99% of the cases have no clue what they want because they are kids. They don’t have a lot of life experience.
I know only one case where I knew that transition would have been normal at any age for him. When we were kids it would have been 100% impossible. Now we are older farts and he still didn’t transition, he doesn’t want and would have regretted the decision if he would have had the possibility to do it as a kid.
Transition as a kid should be nearly impossible and you should be put through an infinite amount of tests and visits to the doctor. Reach an age where you can be considered an adult, go ahead and schedule an appointment and transition away. Do as you please.
It’s not that they shouldn’t be allowed to compete, I think there needs to be a greater restriction on who and how they compete.
This whole thing started because of Lia Thomas who was a competetive male swimmer from the age of 5 until they completed hormone treatment at the age of 22.
They had the benefit of male puberty and trained as a male. That’s going to make a difference.
Now if you take a child who has not yet hit puberty, put them on blockers, then allow them to transition with hormones and surgery, you’re going to end up with a completely different athelete.
It’s good that the sports organization recognizes that trans atheletes need to be on hormones for a set period of time before being allowed to compete, but there needs to be a policy addressing WHEN they started the hormone treatment.
Starting after puberty has completed should be a non-starter, or at the very least a different category of competition.
I have a name you should look up: Caster Semenya. She has too much natural strogens but she was born a girl. And the same kind of claims were made against her. “She is not a real woman”, “she is actually a man”, …
My understanding is that if the athlete is correctly undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) the biological advantage is significantly reduced if not removed. I am sure there are exceptions though.
Edit: Everything below
After looking through some studies it seems like Trans fem athletes do maintain some advantage, or atleast the current wait time is not enough for the edge to be eliminated.
Best example I could find https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/current-treatment-period-may-be-too-short-to-remove-competitive-advantage-of-transgender-athletes/
I mean, the question is what’s fair both to trans women and cis women. Competing against competitors with an advantage and being excluded are both unfair. Absolutely eliminating advantage isn’t the standard that minimizes unfairness, it’s a balancing act between competing interests.
I’m not sure sports have found exactly the perfect balance, and it may vary a bit by sport, but it doesn’t seem to be wildly off in favor of trans women.
Here’s the thing: who cares? Like okay, lots of people care, but why? Why cant trans athletes compete? What wound does anyone suffer?