The Trans Athlete Moral Panic: A Rant
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- čas přidán 9. 12. 2023
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#transrightsarehumanrights #transathletes #politics #sports #rant - Zábava
I think you're wrong, and that this is actually harmful to trans people.
Trans people already face so many hardships trying to get accepted by society (and let's not even mention the awful hatred and even violence directed at them by conservatives)... any legitimate concern about them just gives the bigots ammunition against them. And this is a legitimate concern.
Plenty of women can beat plenty of men in sports. If I went to the Olympics and was allowed to compete with women in every single sport, I would rank last in every single one of them. I'm simply not an athlete.
But in high-level events, men dominate. It's not even comparable. For example, a rank 100-something mostly unknown tennis player very casually crushed some of the best female tennis players (and had a cigarette between matches). Just last month, here in Canada, a male weightlifter entered a women's competition just to make a point (the competition allowed anyone in, they just had to check a box saying they identified as female) and greatly exceeded the records.
But wait, you're going to say... what about trans athletes? Well, those records that the male weightlifter broke? They were held by a trans athlete... who absolutely murdered the previous records, which had been set by women.
Imagine being a female athlete, working so very very hard every single day for years with the hopes that you could one day break the record. Then some trans athlete (by no means as strong as the best male lifter, but leaps and bounds stronger than the best female lifters) comes in and shatters those records, setting them impossibly high. Then a man comes in and greatly exceeds even those new records. They're gone. You're never going to have the slightest chance to get anywhere near close to them ever again. No woman ever will.
It IS obviously unfair.
And conservatives are going to use this legitimate concern to portray trans people as cheats, as destroyers of sports. Personally I don't care about sports at all, but many people do, and they're going to find that trans people competing is a genuine problem.
Trans people don't need that kind of heat. They've already go enough trouble as it is. Don't give the freaking conservative bigots actual good arguments. They virtually never have any, which is why they have to rely on lies and can only convert the brain-rotted zombies who watch Faux News. Don't give them the advantage of truth.
You can be fake-outraged at me if you want.
_Imagine being a female athlete, working so very very hard every single day for years with the hopes that you could one day break the record. Then some trans athlete (by no means as strong as the best male lifter, but leaps and bounds stronger than the best female lifters) comes in and shatters those records, setting them impossibly high. Then a man comes in and greatly exceeds even those new records. They're gone. You're never going to have the slightest chance to get anywhere near close to them ever again. No woman ever will._
You're talking about a single incident when a cis man -- not a trans woman, a cis man who hasn't met any of the medical transition requirements that are typically placed on trans athletes, who took advantage of the gender policy of that event's governing body in order to make what I'm sure he thought was a good point -- entered a competition in the female category. This one incident of a cis man acting in bad faith is your evidence for this "genuine problem." Trans athletes have, until recently, been allowed to freely compete with cis athletes of their gender, for roughly the last twenty years, and this obviously unfair genuine problem has failed to actually materialize, in any sport, anywhere. So saying "imagine being a female athlete in a sport where a trans athlete sets a record impossibly high" is an appropriate way to put it, because the only way most athletes will ever know what that's like is by imagining it, since it never fucking happens.
@@SteveShivesThat day, by the contests stated rules, that weight lifter was a trans woman. He wasn’t protesting trans athletes specifically but that the rules for this contest were so unfairly written for a game with large cash prizes, that even he could compete as a woman.
Sports have to clearly in black and white universally define who counts as trans including rules over trans medications as strict as the rules over other medications and a rule stating how long a person has to be on medical therapies, if any, before competing as a certain gender. Until then athletes are going to exploit the conflicting rules which isn’t fair for anyone.
The vast majority of people, right or wrong, are never going to accept trans athletes if there isn’t even a universal rule governing who counts as a legitimate trans athlete. Because right now it’s far from just you looking at these contests and thinking “That’s not really a trans person, it’s just a guy cheating,” even if the athlete meets the criteria of the individual contest.
I like Emma Vigeland's argument and that every sports is inherently unfair and totally competitive. This is what makes sports after all. With that said, women competing with other women is going to be unfair, regardless if they are trans or cis. That's the end of the discussion.
EDIT: Adding to my comment, there was a Canadian school track meet where a nine year old girl was harassed by a pair of adults claiming that a nine year old girl was a boy. These people don't actually care about others and their beliefs that trans people don't exist (that trans women are not women) supersedes their ability to hold values of compassion for others. It's nothing but seething hatred of difference.
Y'all only care about trans women in women's sports. I never hear ANY complaining about trans men in men's sports. Say it as you really think it: *Women are objectively weaker than men so no woman pretending to be a man would ever beat men in sports*
You just want to hate trans women. That's all.
But you're talking about one incident or scenario and using it to install a blanket ideology. One that is based in feelings. Not in facts (plural). This is a complex issue and requires complex solutions. How old were they when they transitioned makes a huge difference. How long it's been since they transitioned makes a huge difference. Did they go through puberty before or after they transitioned. What sport they are competing in makes a huge difference. You can't Just blindly say It is obviously unfair to let them compete because they were born a different sex. Do I have an answer to these questions? No. But neither do you. And neither do all the crazy, bigoted fanatics out there that are so blinded by their hatred they can't see beyond their own nose. As @steveshives stated, This is not something worth all the insanity and attention we are giving it. This is outright panic and hysteria over a non-issue. This would be like demanding another national pandemic lockdown because one person sneezed one time in the middle of the field standing next to a cow. The reactionary response is freaking absurd.
The hardest part transphobes have of convincing me they really care about the sanctity of women's sports is it relies on the assumption that they have any respect for women's sports in the first place.
Or any respect for women at all!
The latest moral panic on trans folks in sport involved an amateur bike race that had only 5 participants, none of whom had an issue with trans inclusion.
The female athletes themselves who have come out don't care about women's sports?
They didnt say a thing when the US Women's soccer team had to play on astroturf and werent getting paid as much as their male counterparts.
Most of them can't name more than one or two female athletes, and most of them openly mock the WNBA.
Don’t forget people accusing cis kids of being trans because they’re better then their child at sports.
THIS
Or because of something as stupid as a cis-girl having a pixie haircut!
When I hear stuff like this, I have to actively remind myself that humanity really can be better, even if it doesn't feel like it. These arguments always simply boil down to a hatred of trans people. I'd like to think that one day it won't be that way. Transphobes won't always have such a prominent presence in society, if they exist at all in the future.
This is the real bit right here. These bigots don't care a whit about women's athletics *except* when it's their daughter competing, i.e., when they view it as an extension of themselves. All of a sudden they get to feel *personally* victimized, finishing in 8th place instead of 7th because that transwoman was better at sports than their daughter
The most bizarre anti trans legislation that has happened is the chess federation, not athletes in the traditional sense but this is an area that it really shouldn't make a difference.
It doesn’t make a difference in any area
The chess federation rules are design to protect a smaller population that faces a shit ton of misogyny in even participating. It has always and forever had absolutely nothing to do with skill or ability in the competition, but with promoting a marginalized population into participation.
@@puellanivis So instead of actually addressing the misogyny, they segregate women so that the men's division can continue to be a boys club unimpeded and no one has to pay attention to any female players if they don't want to. Doesn't sound like a great solution to me.
@puellanivis With that logic, trans women should be allowed to participate as women, no questions asked as the smallest minority would be trans women.
@@puellanivis Did the chess federation ever care about women in chess before the big scary trans menace?
I can think of one trans athlete who kept winning every event and that was a trans man who was forced to keep fighting against cis women because he was AFAB.
This trans guy was much larger than the cis women he was being pitted against. He wanted to fight against men, but transphobic legislation kept him pitted against women.
I know of this story, it was a Wrestler in Texas if I recall. And the icing on the cake was people were shouting at him that he shouldn't be allowed to compete because "Men shouldn't be in women's sports" completely clueless they were a trans man.
That's how you know there's truely nothing here and it's only bigotry driving this.
Mack Beggs
@@transitorri7794exactly 💯💯
@@transitorri7794 There's something both funny and illuminating to me when transphobes attempts at misgendering backfire. Like telling a trans man 'you will never be a woman' and vice versa.
I'm citing this argument next time. Thank you.
I am a trans athlete, and if I had a dollar for every so-called LGBTQ ally who is actively arguing for my exclusion, I could use it as my sole source of income. I am sick to death of "I am an ally, but--" Like every other sentence that starts with that clause, what it really means is that we can safely ignore everything that preceded the word "but."
Seriously parasocially love ya, Steve. You'll never pay for your own drinks in my presence.
As a cis person who considers himself an ally, I had to catch myself on this topic as well due to its insidiousness. Steve classifying it as a "moral panic" is absolutely bang-on in my opinion, because like all moral panics, it encourages people to skip the step of observation and jump right into reacting to whatever is supposedly happening despite the fact it's not. For someone with no skin in the game, the question of how to treat trans athletes can seem benign, even positive (you're just trying to make sports fair for everyone, after all) until you remember that you aren't in charge of establishing new sports leagues or their rules and how they are applied. The people who would exclude trans athletes don't give two shits about being fair to them (or anyone really) and all supporting supposed fairness is going to lead to is trans athletes being descriminated against and being unable to play ANY sports in a normal setting.
Any time a liberal finds themselves discussing a matter that spawned not from actual problems, but entirely Right-wing talking points, they need to take a step back and ask themselves if they've been manipulated. Discussing what to "do about" trans athletes, even if you think the changes you'd support would be better for them just feeds into the bullshit narrative that something occuring in our country needs to be addressed. Same exact thing with trans people in bathrooms.
I am a tanswoman who was in Martial Arts from age 15 to 38. I came out at age 18. The temple I practiced in does not pair up opponents when sparring by gender. In a real-life situation in NYC, a street fight does not care about your gender. I can honestly say that over the years there were a number of ciswomen I have personally had knock the crap out of me during sparring. I was not letting them. They were just better than me. I was in a Kung Fu Wu Su school. We do not use padding and wear wrestling shoes, just a traditional style kung fu uniform. Again in a street fight, nobody is going to wait for you to take off your shoes and put on padding. I maintain my body by doing age-appropriate gym workouts and long hikes through the forests of upstate NY. It is only recently that I am self-conscious about being a transwoman when I go to the gym. I now have a weird anxiety that if I am "read" there may be a problem. Until recently this never even entered my mind. The climate is changing for the worse
Trans ex-athlete here (if you count ballet dancers as athletes, which I do, because that's some serious athletic work happening onstage, even if it looks effortless and pretty!), and I couldn't agree with you more. Whenever someone says "but" I say that it automatically negates whatever was said before that word. It's only the after part that matters. And we both know that there is no "rational, scientific" reason to keep people like us from competing with people of our own gender other than transphobia. Which is not rational at all.
If you're ever in Toronto, Steve, drinks are on me.
Seriously, being a trans-ally is about more than just tolerating the existence of tran-people. It's about showing some actual F'ing support.
@@thing_under_the_stairs >if you count ballet dancers as athletes
If ballet dancers are not athletes, then nobody is. Y'all are hardcore.
The worst part about this is that trans athletes have to essentially fail in order to prove that they deserve to be included. It's messed up.
Yep, nobody worries too much about us when we lose.
@@NovaPolitteI saw a video where a trans athlete lost a bjj match. People were still throwing a hissyfit. Dambed if you do, dambed if you don't.
@@thatdumbass9856 they literally just don't want us to exist or be seen.
Well when they lose, they also get made fun of because they "tried to cheat, and still couldn't win." There's just no winning w/ Transphobes.
It's the paradox of competition. We aren't allowed to win, because if we do we must ergo be cheating.
I'm an engineer and scientist, so there's data around this subject I find interesting. My first question to the topic of trans people in sports is, what constitutes an unfair advantage? Is a cis woman who is over 6 feet tall (less than 1% of the population) possessing an unfair advantage? Why or why not?
We've rejected cis women from sports for their hormone levels or chromosomes. This happened very recently in the Olympics.
But what gets me is watching some Fox News segments on this with the topic of a trans woman dominating and hearing a cis woman talk about her experience losing to her. The woman came in 9th place. The trans woman came in 8th. There was only one trans person in the race. So... 7 cis women (who later testified to her belonging in the sport) beat a trans woman.
I'm certain every sport is different and nothing I'm saying is a guarantee that people born male belong in the sport, but what it does indicate is that sorting people in the way we do might not be adequate. Particularly when cis women are excluded for things well outside of their control.
It seems like a professional grievance farm like Fox News is in fact good at finding pathetic people whose petty bitch-ass complaints are entirely down to bigotry and a refusal to accept that one lost.
Thing is, cis women are capable of beating cis men in sports and fights, not just the backhanded compliment “untrained men”, but trained men too.
They just aren’t afforded as many resources, are socially discouraged from achieving peak fitness or any natty muscle, and even then, the situation hardly arises to disprove the men in live events.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 fun factoid: the difference in sprinting time between the best male runners and best female runners has been shrinking significantly over the last couple decades or so.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 Which sports? Have you any examples because I don't know of any cis-woman who can defeat a trained cis-man fighter.
@@ramenbomberdeluxe4958 Sounds like a pipedream. Let a man and a women train and live exactly the same and then let them beat each other up in 10 matches. The women would be a bloody pulp in at least 9. I mean, we can just abolish gender separation in sports for all I care and see what happens.
Something I'd like to ask these folks - is it "obviously unfair" that Shaquille O'neal had an "unfair advantage" over his much physically smaller peers?
Because we praise genetic advantage in men. Women's sports are seen as "easy mode" and a way to keep "the little ladies out of real men's sports." ESPECIALLY since more than a few were formed after a cis woman started winning at the sport.
Or Michael Phelps over other swimmers?
Guess what - _sport isn't fair_
There are people who are just naturally better at certain sports than other people
Or Mike Tyson over 99 percent of humans
Literally exactly... sports are inherently unfair. That's just the way it is.
No, what gives Shaq an unfair advantage is his supernatural rapping skills.
#wegenie
I'm a decent athlete and I've been struck out, been soundly beaten in billiards, and gotten kidney punched in martial arts by women. I've gotten stuffed in volleyball, destroyed in darts, and out classed in archery. These bigots assume that a cis woman couldn't beat them and that's what baffles me.
I, a cis het man, once joined a university taekwondo class and got paired with a state level athlete for sparring. She kicked me in the shin one time and I called uncle while she remained perplexed as to why I was hurt (I had done taekwondo before but at a very casual level).
Wasn't the first or last time I've been beaten by a girl, and most of them weren't even athletes.
Most men think they could return a serve from Serena WIlliams, this is the problem.
So what? Men are still much physically stronger than women
Stories like yours are so important too. When cis men also tell tales of being beaten by cis women, and cis women tell tales of them beating cis men, it further emboldens me to fight against sexist assumptions by people who degrade women as athletes and fighters.
This is the part that blows my mind. I train weightlifting and kb sport. I don’t compete but I can very well see women performing at levels I know I cannot reach. It occurs to me that, when you combine misogyny and tge Duning-Krugar effect, you get men who operate from a mental fantasy that they are inherently better than women and could theoretically join a new sport like weightlifting and out-total Maddie Rogers in short order. To every one of them I challenge them to pick a sport, learn it, and try to get anywhere near women dominating that sport.
It is amazing how much people who never gave a shit about women's sports are now up in arms over the supposed unfairness just because it gives them another way to gin up indignation over trans issues.
Not to mention that ignoring the trans issue there is considerable variation in natural ability among cis athletes, and yet no one seems to be upset over that "unfairness". (Not that there is necessarily any advantage to being a trans athlete, just granting the premise for sake of argument.)
@@MyMagnificentOctopus Yeah, I'm not being oppressed by the lack of an Olympic basketball event for short people with bad knees. I simply have the wrong body type to ever be world-class at that sport. If cis women turn out to collectively have the wrong body type to be world-class at some sport, so what? Why does that require us to artificially restrict the field of competitors until a cis woman can come out on top? Why is that "fair"?
@@MyMagnificentOctopus There is upset over that, but only when the cis athletes in question *are black*
What man wants to be mistaken for gay because he ogled a transwoman? I swear, that's what some of this is about.
Others do not understand what it means to be transsexual and choose not to find out.
And there are those who are all about the 'natural order.'
Somewhere under there, there's refusal to recognize transwomen as women.
Transwomen (those who went through male puberty) have a very slight performance enhancement,
residue thing from having had a testosterone- programmed body.
BUT!
It's not out of the range of what cisgender women athletes can do!
I think the only "example" of this being unfair was when a trans boy was forced into the girls wrestling competition in Texas. He went on to win the state championship in a category he didn't want to compete in.
It must have given him sp much dysphoria to make a point winning in the wrong competition and I respect him for that
Hi, Steve. I’m trans, but I’m not an athlete, I’m an actor. This kind of panic is starting to seep into my world, too, and it makes me really sad to see, but honestly, this video is really comforting. Seeing you, a cisgender man who has nothing to really gain from supporting us, speaking so well about a topic that a lot of people would either run from, be ambiguous about, or outright hateful toward, it just gives me so much hope. It makes me feel safe. So thanks, man, for your support. It means a lot. ❤️
As I Bernie supporter, I fully endorse the use of "Okay, Bernie Bro," here.
I guess he thought being a Bernie supporter was going to redeem his trash take. 😂
@@rmsmain I suspect a lot of Bernie Bros are actually right-of-center.
@@fnjesusfreakyep, many are. Joe Rogan was a Bernie bro, and I wouldn’t even call him centre right, but on the conspiratorial far right
@@fnjesusfreak Given the overton window in the USA is to the extreme right of the international standard one could say that you are right, however a good deal of the people that support senator Sanders see him as the compromise candidate. His policy platform is the bare minimum of acceptability not the end goal, we would need to go a good way to the left of that platform in order to even get close to what most of us want.
@@fnjesusfreak there are many trump supporters who would vote bernie over trump
Recently there was a transkid who was allowed to compete in field hockey. During a match, a girl on the opposing team got hit in the face with the puck. Nasty injury. The puck happens to have been hit in her direction by the transgirl. EVERY article about it seems to suggest the girl was hit in the face because the girl is trans. The only reason an injury happened is because the girl is trans. EVERY article also seems to leave out the fact that getting hit in the face with a field hockey puck would hurt and cause injury no matter whose stick the puck was hit off. I have never been hit in the face with a field hockey puck (and hope to maintain my record) but I believe that would hurt a lot and there may be blood. I am a 60-year-old transwoman who came out at age 18. One of my ciswoman friends was even using this example of how "She loves me but I just have to realize..." It is very frustrating.
The MMA incident involving the transfem breaking the orbital bone of the ciswomen
people leave out the fact that anyone can break an orbital bone and that its the most common breka in full contact martial arts and doesnt in any way prove or someones strength
Im a trans martial artist
I know that our bodies can be physiologically trained to be better than our opponents yet that isnt considered cheating but when someone transitions to female its bad because of left over bone density lung capacity and height
bone density can be trained (makiwara conditioning, shin conditioning, Iron palm training etc)
Lung capacity can be trained VIA free diving techniques such as Apnea walk/anaerobic walks
and height wont matter because you get paired with someone of the same height or close to
these differences are negligible and can be trained by anyone to get an advantage
No pucks in field hockey.
there was a similar incident in my state over a high school volley ball match. based on the footage, i was not able to tell which kid was a transgender girl but nonetheless, the articles about this issue would literally talk about how common concussions are in volleyball..
Did they forget that field hockey is a *sport* and it's normal for *injuries* to happen in *sports*??
Field Hockey does not have a puck. It has a ball.
Source: I played Field Hockey for nearly 15 years.
We're headed towards 1.5C warming in the next year and somehow this is the most urgent topic for some people.
Also we’re heading towards fascism and and witnessing the rolling back of rights and the explosion of wealth inequality and weakening labor laws and this is what people are concerned about. Sorry not sorry that I don’t care about Transgender people competing in sports it’s not a real issue and transphobic conservatives that don’t even watch women’s sports are the only people that care.
A few years ago, a national ban to bar trans people from sports was proposed, in that hearing it was brought up how many people the ban would effect. Turns out it's 80. Out of the 350 million Americans that live in this nation the entire weight was Congress was being pressed to bar less than 100 people from competing in Sport at the college level or above.
The "trans sports debate" is bigotry, and nothing more.
So much energy into making the lives of a small group much, much worse. Just leave trans people alone, gosh dangit. What would the U.S. be like if that same amount of energy were funneled into something useful, like making society a safer place for trans people and others?
I kind of wonder if some people don't want trans women competing with other women because, if afab women can beat amab women, then that would come across as a challenge to the perceived superiority of "males" (since they categorize amab women as "male") over "females". The entire identity of some cis men rests on the assumed superiority of men over women.
Everyone whining about "Fairness" should look into para-sports (Sports for disabled) The politics and bureaucracy that goes into. One day your competing among the best, the next moment you can get your disabilty reclassified, or disqualified from competing a certain sport.
Could you explain that a bit more? I don't know anything about this.
And along the lines of paralympians, remember that brief panic that "oh no, people will cut off their legs to weigh less and win races if we allow people with blades to compete!!!"? Yeah.
@@BS-vx8dg It's very complex issue. I have personal experience with being reclassified out of being able to meaningfully compete, and I've know other athletes come up against problems with classifications too. This documentary came out a couple of years ago, and I feel that's it's fairlt accurate and nuanced, but I do feel like a missing angle around ableism in disable communities where I sometimes feel that there can a lot of "disability" policing. czcams.com/video/AKJ481FcN6s/video.htmlsi=sC6lUsa3TVBMXMbv
@@TheVincentKyle Oh right, I remember the runner with blades, and people saying he had an unfair advantage because they were so high-tech. A guy with no legs has the "advantage" in track. Riiiiight.
I have come to realise that the International Olympic Committee are just a bunch of puritannical authoritarians. The treatment of disabled athletes, of trans athletes, of Caster Semenya. They have an outdated view of the human body and need some bloody educuation.
Not an athelte but, I am a trans person... Thank you as ever for your allyship. The louder the better. You are absolutely right in describing it as literally just two words, moral panic. The fact that they deemed this level of 'unfairness' for a non-existent 'trans advantage' in something like *chess* of all things as well is just insane. The same sport where there was a debacle with a buttplug giving somebody an advantage. I'll compete with a watermelon in me and see what they think.
Ok, I need more info on this "debacle" you have mentioned, because "chess butt plug debacle" just aren't words that go together naturally in my mind, unless as the punchline to a really good joke!
@thing_under_the_stairs look up Hans Niemann and the chess buttplug scandal. The accusation is that they were cheating using a vibrating buttplug controlled by an AI with the vibration being a system to give them the next move.
I don't know, but perhaps it was remote controlled and attached to a computer?
@@thing_under_the_stairs there was a fiasco that a player was using a remote vibing one to 'cheat' somehow in a tournament. Its a very weird read.
@@ShikiKiryu Wow. Just wow. I never dreamed that people would go to such lengths to cheat in a game of chess! What were they doing, feeding the player moves via Morse code or something?
And they're worried about us trans people playing chess having some sort of advantage how? Because we can come up with a more bizarre and depraved way to cheat than the cis already have?!?
I am a trans woman who played some pretty high level sports before transitioning. I toured other countries playing rugby and won medals in cross country skiing. After going on hormones, I lost a LOT of strength while maintaining a similar workout program. My sports performance has drastically reduced.
How i've been treated made me leave competitve sports altogether. I only play sports recreationally that I know I am not good at, so that no one will crap on me if I score a goal or something with my "obvious advantages". It sucks.
Thank you for this video, Steve. Another banger.
I know Steve and other commenters remarked on the topic, but I heard the best opinion on the "fairness" stuff from Tracie Harris. How do you define what is and is not fair in a sport? Because there's all sorts of physical advantages people can have. Something like height for basketball and volleyball is an easy example. So maybe the best place to address that first premise is to ask them to define what that fairness is, because reality-wise it's far from "obvious".
And, yeah, genetic tests aren't gonna work. XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity is one of many examples. Also the transphobes aren't going to want to spend the money on genetic tests when they can do genital inspections of kids which is what they really care about.
thanks, steve. i also want to point out the only reason there are "girls' sports" is because title ix required schools to let girls play sports but the schools decided that they didn't fund the girls so they separated the girls from the boys when title ix allows schools to be primarily co-opt.
also these hormone laws that are supposed to be "protecting female athletes" at the olympic level are, surprise surprise, are targeting cis women of color who naturally produce more testosterone than the so called "norm." and, yeah, person, many fucking school districts and states are now requiring a doctor's signature on a genital assessment to "prove" that girls are girls and boys are boys (tho this is coming down way harder on girls, gee, wonder why).
They will target all cis-women: just look at prior examples of athletes whose testosterone levels are considered to high and then had to face an embarrasingly public discussion about their genitals and endocrine system of their body...
It is the weird idea that femininity can solely be judged based on the amount of dominant male sex hormone someone has as a woman, along with the misconceptions of how hormones work, and sporting unions thinking that everyone has the exact same hormones.
As a transwoman, I once had an endocrinologist basically get the fire in her eyes when I mentioned some of the hateful rhetoric that I felt was uptaking (which, looking back, it definitely was) and then mentioned the sports thing.
She explicitly decided to explain how as endocrinologists they see people with problems (physically or mentally) who have all kinds of varying amounts of hormones in their body, and that someone complaining about feeling hypersexual doesn't always have a mountain of testosterone (whether male or female), just like how they see people who feel perfectly happy with having a very high sex drive who can also vary big time in how high testosterone levels are.
She concluded the explanation with: "And don't get me started on pregnant women. We sometimes see hormonal values go through the roof to absolutely insane degrees, yet these people feel fine whereas other people become emotional wrecks. Sometimes it is so disruptive that we try to influence that hormone a bit, only to find out it makes things even worse. So the idea that everyone can function the exact same with the same amount of hormones is absolute bullshit. But that idea is not something we put on men, obviously, only women are necessary to be screened because well, let's jam another speculum up there because hehe!"
(I honestly never have seen a doctor get rightfully angry that visibly).
as a specialist in games, the idea that competitive event sports are 'fair' is like, literally the opposite of true. The sports aren't fair, we're trying to find the best players. If they were fair everyone would be playing with handicaps to bring the win-lose rates in line
Call this reductive if you must, but given how almost all trans panic seems to be regarding trans women I'm of the belief the entire premise of the panic is "if I look at a woman and like her butt and it turns out she's trans, am I gay??!" Seriously, that's it.
There’s a several-years old video by ContraPoints titled “Are Traps Gay?” that addresses just this-I highly recommend it, extremely well done and one of my favorites. (Spoiler: the short answer is *No* ! 😉) The very scary side of what you’re describing is the violence it sometimes leads to, and the literal “trans panic” defense that perpetrators will (and have) use to justify it. A primary source of anti-trans hate is misogyny, after all, so it’s not surprising that it sometimes takes the form you’re describing. (Though for the record, I do think the big picture is more complex, since not every transphobe is a straight man-or I guess in the case of trans men, a straight woman!)
its only gay if you want it to be gay :3
The existence of trans men completely destroys their rhetoric so they never talk about them. The threat of a man “pretending” to be a woman is so scary to them because they see men as so superior to women that any man who willingly becomes a woman must have ulterior motives. This argument cannot be made about transmasculine people, so if they ever mentioned a trans man it would force them to admit that trans people don’t have any sinister reason for being trans, they’re just living their best lives.
Reminds me about, at least from my perspective, it seems like you see a lot more lesbians in games and tv shows etc than you do gay men. Maybe it's just the media I happen to be consuming, I haven't looked into this much, but it makes me wonder if it's in part because straight men are more okay with watching two women together than they are two men. Or ways to cheat around it like 'female only aliens' like the Asari in Mass Effect before they finally gave M/M options in ME 3 etc.
It is curious how much of the complaining is targeted at trans women, not trans men. Kind of like how so many homophobes are anti-gay men, but bi or lesbian women will get a quiet pass (so long as they are attractive.)
The cruelty is the point. Few or none of the people up in arms of trans folk in sports care about the sport; they care about another chance to bash trans people without getting called for it.
Not only do I appreciate your moral outrage but more importantly your well based critical thinking. People can be irrational scared idiots
That's true, but the letter writer sounded like they were bending over backwards to be friendly and calm. Having even a strong disagreement with someone doesn't in itself make you irrational.
I also like how this person claims that they like a 'logical argument' 'wants a syllogism' "P1, P2, C".
Yet never offers one directly. He indirectly does, but its first premise is thoroughly dunked on by Steve.
Listen, I might be disabled, but I'm still trans. This kind of support is what we fucking need. You're the best, Steve.
It would require a deep dive into the sexism of sports, and a sober dose of honesty, but the "issue" of trans athletes is, I agree, complete BS. One of the (sadly) compelling arguments I've heard is "why would they take the pay cut playing women's sports?"
The response will likely be "because its better to be no1 in the women leagues than off the board in the men leagues", and they will likely post Shapiro's new movie as "evidence"
"Why would they choose to be a woman when [insert any number of ways being a woman can be more difficult than being a man]?"
"Because it's not a choice dingus."
There.
@cafeeineaddicted8123 I find their outrage on this topic disingenuous. They didn't give a damn about women's sports before anyone said "trans athletes".
Their stance is blatantly anti-trans.
I've been an intersex trans athlete my whole life.
I'm curious how they'll regulate people like me.
I have ovaries, I have testes.
I'm a competitor internationally in several of my events.
only in the last thousand days or so has it become a "The trans problem" situation for me.
Just let me compete.
I'm sorry this has happened to you. I read Caster Semenya's story and it broke my heart, as does yours. Intersex is such as misunderstood condition and you'd think the International regulators of sport would know better than they apparently do.
Oh hey, we discovered the new "I'm not racist, but..."
It is all inter-related. Beauty standards are racist because slave owners needed a reason for Balck women to work the fields, while White women are too fair and dainty to even protect themselves.
Coming from a rural PA area, there was always talk of girls playing on boys high teams and vice versa because the schools did not offer that program for the other side. I think we had a girl play soccer because she didn't want to play volleyball which the primary girls sport offered at the start of the year. Conversely, a neighboring school had a boy play girls field hockey. He even wore the skirt. It essentially limits all kids regardless of cis or trans. But yeah, "think about the children."
And I am sure that boy went on to break _every single record_ in girls field hockey all across the nation. \s
Steve... As solely a means of notifying you to another current day example (who has recently endured some unfortunate pushback due to revised league-issued transgender-eligibility rules), Natalie Ryan has ranked as high as #16 on the Professional Disc Golf Association's US Tour.
And thank you for continuing to be the principled voice that your community needs!
I'm guessing you mean this as the micro-exception that support's Steve's rule?
Rightoids like to bring up the 'fact' that the average Highschool-age CIS-male can out-run the fastest cis-female runner in history -- Halba Diouf (I believe this is who I'm thinking of) is a French Transwoman Olympian who's only considered the 9th fastest woman ever recorded. So I feel like this example alone is enough to debunk that silly 'factoid' they never shut up about.
"If you disagree, show me your argument."
-person who provided no argument
Love Ya steve, wasn't sure what to expect when I clicked on this. But Loved your breakdown. Really appreciate progressive people speaking up on stuff like this.
The evidentiary bar is much clearer than Steve is making it. Steve is leaving himself open to anecdotal replies he'll have to argue with.
Here's the bar. What is the percentage representation of trans athletes in a given sport at a given level? What is the percentage representation of trans athletes in winners circles of that sport at that level? If it is not higher, being trans is not a benefit. Unless you cherry pick down to an individual school or person, I cannot find any sport at any level where being trans is a benefit.
my guess is whatever physical benefits being trans could bring is completely swamped by all the other barriers stepping in the way of sports participation
not only that but there's at least one (skateboarding) where it's a disadvantage
There is one notable example I know of where a trans person mopped the floor against a league of cis girls:
This took place in Texas, where a trans high school wrestler in the girls' league took the championship after going completely undefeated.
His name is Mack Beggs, and he was competing in the girls' league because Texas forbade him from competing in the boys' league because Texas lawmakers are transphobic, and their transphobia in its infinite stupidity managed to actually create the imaginary situation they were trying to prevent: boys unfairly competing in and dominating girls' sports.
I know the rant was about the fear of biological males disrupting a female sport. However, a biological female at birth going through conversion and then competing against other biological females is no less an issue of men disrupting women’s sports. Texas is just the state of bad-faith and incompetence. what they really want is trans-erasure but they were too misogynistic and got in their own way by not seeing this coming. They can’t even do discrimination right.
If it is unfair to have a biological advantage, Michael Phelps should return every single award he won. His biological advantages made him a near-impossible swimmer to beat. Every time he stood at the edge of the pool the real question was "who is going to come in second?". Lia Thomas took part in 3 events. The 100m, 200m, and 500m. In the only race she won, the 500m race, she didn't break any records. Katie Ledecky (biologically female) held the record before Lia Thomas, and Katie Ledecky held the record after Lia Thomas. Thomas lost the 100m and the 200m. She was joint 5th with Participation Trophy Barbie (Riley Gaines), and dead last in the 100m. The usual response from the anit-trans people is "She failed them on purpose." Umm, why would she do that then win the 500m?
Doesn't Phelps have multiple physical abnormalities that directly benefit his swimming ability? I remember seeing something claim that in relation to a joke about real life X-Men.
I think that Messi is a great example. Because he is a medically hormone-enhanced athlete. We had the privilege to observe and enjoy an extraordinary athlete thanks to advance medicine and hormone treatment. And shouldn't that be sports? The joy to observe fellow humans make extraordinary feats?
What nobody jumping on the panic does seem to realize are the effects of HRT... But then again, we're used to hearing the same debunked stuff from haters again. And again. And again.
Guess what we've had athletes who were born, physically female, gave birth to a child, lived as a female their entire life had a DNA test and found out they were XY so how's the DNA test going to work. Her birth certificate was female, but her DNA test was male. There was a trans guy on TikTok that I've followed for a while that got the DNA test after transitioning and found out yup XY you can be born female and have an XYY chromosome, and want to transition or not I believe I have an XY chromosome, but I like being feminine and being female I grow a lot of hair around my chin though I do also have a lot more hair than either of my parents ever had on top. Mom's hair started going thin in her early 30s. My dad was in his middle teens. I'm almost 40 still a very full head of hair, thin hair, but lots of it
The sheer number of people out there that think a DNA test will definitively prove gender, or even sex, is mind boggling. You can tell who never had a biology class since the 10th grade.
Apparently they used to test chromosomes at the Olympics, and a lot of cis-women competitors actually failed (not because they were transgender, just because they didn't have XX chromosomes) and were told to discretely retire due to their results. The practice only stopped after 1992.
Bad science hurts everyone! The proportion of people who have no idea about the complexity of determining sex between hormones, physical features, and chromosomes is crazy to me. Even a cursory interest in science should tell you to ALWAYS be suspicious of the claim of a clear binary in any context. Interest in biology will take you past suspicion.
That's because genetics and biological sex isn't as simple as XX and XY or what's in your pants, as there are many other combinations and a lot of people don't understand how these other chromosomal pairings work. People really should've paid attention in biology class because this is pretty standard knowledge.
Each individual sport has it's own markers for traditional success. For example, basketball traditionally is advantageous for a participant to be tall. Horse racing- short and lean. Wrestling is interesting because it usually goes off of weight class and Olympic weightlifting takes into consideration range of motion and percentage of bodyweight lifted. There are so many ways to talk about the different ways to encourage a wider distribution of fairness in sports. Jessiegender (sp?) Has done a couple videos on the topic of anyone is interested. She also has a lot of Star Trek videos too.
Thanks for your unyielding and understanding support for ALL of the lgbt community.
You are correct sir. I myself ran into this with one of our friends. Thanks for doing the looking.
New Rule: Only pass laws to punish crimes that ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
And no changing the definition of crimes like 'grooming' to mean 'whatever the hell Republicans don't like.'
Thank you! People who otherwise lean left but then buy into points of the trans panic keep legitimizing the points of right wing ideology.
In my experience it's the tip of the iceberg and they don't actually lean left on much. Just left of their far right friends.
Or, like all the other right wingers, they are compulsive liars asking questions in bad faith while pretending to be an ally.
@@Mythic00 While you're right-Dawkins and Rowling, for instance, showed considerable conservative leanings before-it would be nice if such folks aren't now lending their clout to the right-wing cause in general.
A lot of right wing ideology is buried so deep within people that we don't really question it, even when we see a real-life negative result of those ideologies, like trans people being excluded from sports. The temptation to think very simply about complex topics can be strong, especially when we feel that our well being or identity is threatened, whether or not there actually is a present threat.
@@robertmiller9735Witnessing the bigotry of people like Dawkins and Rowling were hard lessons to me in how someone can be so "smart" in one respect, but then so, so stupid in another (to put it crudely).
Very well put. Thank you for being such a fierce ally.
Thank you, I totally agree. The more I dig into the subject the more it seems that gendered sports are about maintaining the patriarchy, than being based on science.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that viral video, where Matt Walsh was promoting his latest transphobic film and he accidentally admitted that sports were not be invaded by trans people!
The real question is, is Matt Walsh Steve Shives doppelgänger in the mirror universe?
It's typically also abusing history and trying to rewrite it: The amount of times I hear people saying "it's unfair for the amount of work women had to do to get their own category!" is pretty astonishing, when it is not exactly difficult to find numerous examples of men and their fragile masculinity feeling threatened by a female competitor having enlisted as a man.
This due to the fact that women were barred from sports for quite some time out of all kinds of weird ideas of how dangerous it would be to their health and winning those competitions that should've been won by a man.
The fear of men seeing their positions taken by women resulted in some of the men creating the actual women categories just so they could keep winning, the categories some people now claim women have fought for.
Yes, it is partially true, but with those categories created, it practically saw sexism and pervert doctors from the beginning trying to make absolutely sure no man was invading those championships.
I have been asked to discuss (among other things) this point with a politician, who I know is very much into sport, so that will be interesting, also because well, the politician is a woman: I seriously wonder if she has thought it through well what the revision of some guidelines mean for cis-female athletes... Because I somehow feel she didn't think it through (the result of this invite was me responding to a transphobic tweet she made about something else, and that tweet was something she backpeddled from in the first response...)
Moral panic is what people do best though. And they seem to get better daily. I guess that's just how practice works, they are building up for the big panic tournament.
This is so frustrating and ridiculous. The data that we currently have shows no significant difference between cis and trans women with regards to physiological measures, like cardiovascular performance and strength performance. This whole thing is just misogynistic nonsense and suggests that women could never beat a man in anything. At the elite levels of sports a lot of the women involved would comfortably beat most of the men competing. Anecdotally I used to be beaten in my sport by a lot of women at my peak years ago, regularly. Now, almost 2 years into HRT, I am significantly weaker and have a much lower VO2max than I did before with similar training, plus I’m being beaten by more women than I used to because I’m slower, can’t jump as high, and my body is not as flexible or agile as the cis girls I compete against. Cis and trans women do compete on an equal playing field, have for a long time and should for a long time into the future
This is just anecdotal evidence, but it's straight from a trans person, about my own experiences with my trans friends: My best friend transitioned a few years before I did. (We joke that we traded genders.) Although she's a fair bit taller than I am and has always been quite thin, she's also trained in martial arts from childhood, and had a lot of wiry strength in her upper body... until she started on hormones. Between anti-androgens and estrogen, my friend, who had been easily able to lift and carry much heavier objects than I could, lost that upper body strength within her first year on hormones. During this time we were roommates, and suddenly she was asking me for help moving furniture, carrying groceries, and even opening stubborn jars. (We joked about that a lot, too!) And that was before I started T! Now I can pick her up and toss her over my shoulder with the muscle mass I've gained, although nothing can make me taller, so I just look like a buff hobbit hauling around a screeching elf. And I don't even work out that much - my athletic activities of choice have always been dancing and biking!
So yes, use of hormones by trans people makes a *massive* difference in a person's strength, and where their muscle mass is concentrated. My BFF's legs have become stronger while she lost her upper body strength, while I've gained upper body strength and had to work a lot harder to keep my legs as strong as they were. And we'll compete against each other at anything, anytime, just because.
Thanks again for the great rant, and for being a true ally, Steve. We need more of you in this world.
Thank you so much for being willing to share this. And just gotta say, the sentence “a buff hobbit hauling around a screeching elf” made me laugh with delight!
This is a great example of the impact of hormones on strength... do you worry that it gives credence to the people who say that transwomen / girls NOT on hormone treatment shouldn't be competing against cis girls?
@@kanderson-oo7usit doesn’t give credence to such a thing at all
@@kanderson-oo7us That's a tough question. I can't deny that hormone use can hugely impact a person's strength, and where that strength is concentrated. But I'm also not a transmedicalist, and I *really* don't like the feeling of excluding a group of people because they aren't, and possibly *can't* get certain medications, which can also have some pretty drastic side effects. It's not like hormone therapy is 100% risk free, either.
I think that's where for some sports it might not matter much, but for others things like weight categories might be more useful. And on top of everything else, I honestly don't know much about sports. My sister was always the jock in the family, and I was really into ballet. Granted, I'm much better equipped for lifting other dancers now, except that I'm too short for partnered work! XD
One thing that I've notice over the years though is that there is much more variation of size and shape within genders than the gender essentialists want to admit to. I've known girls and women who were around or over 6', and guys who are around my size. With every possible sort of build. Trying to put people into two categories, male and female, is either inadequate or pointless. I haven't quite figured out which yet.
Not just anecdotal, there's actually medical studies that've looked into this; hormones have a massive impact on one's physique and performance. Having your T levels dropped to the average (and usually slightly below) cis-female's will genuinely land you within their average performance/strength ranges -- maybe slightly (and I mean SLIGHTLY) above or below average -- after about a year of HRT.
Amen to all of this. As a non-athletic trans person, thanks for being an ally!!
Where is that "biologically unfair" argument defending the person that comes in 24th place from the 1st place winner & why would matching genitals invalidate the arguments?
Steve you always warm my heart when you defend trans people harder than I would in my videos. Let no one convince you you aren't a top tier ally.
It's so hard being God's Chosen People, having advantages in sports, beauty pageants, racecar driving, cooking, real estate, porn, videogames
“I’m an ally, but….”
Oh, please stop right there.
People saying "I'm an ally" early in a post has reliably become a massive red flag.
A great demonstration of why I like the perspective that "ally" is a verb, not a noun. Because the person making that comment is definitely NOT allying with trans people.
Plus, trans women lose muscle mass when they go on HRT. So they lose some of their athletic prowess when they transition. So what advantage do they have? And even if do go by that argument, aren't tall folks have an "unfair" advantage in Basketball?
That… that *person* either has a picture of Matt Walsh on his desk or in his wallet.
And thank you, Steve. Your soul is a moral compass more accurate than *EVERY* religious person I can think of.
Thank you. I've used a lot of these arguments before, but now I have a few new ones to add to my toolbox. I stan you, Steve.
When I discovered your channel years ago, it was your Star Trek content that drew me in. It's your continued trans allyship that's kept me.
Thanks for being an awesome human, Steve.
Sadly the reason this is effective propaganda is that it seems reasonable to a lot of people. Most people think “men stronger than women,” and just assume it’s some sort of immutable trait instead of a set of averages caused by hormone differences. It takes actual work for these people to realize they were wrong. For a lot of men it also activates some castration anxiety since they don’t want to believe that they can be “unmanned” so completely.
Yeah, this comment wins. This right here is such a strong point about why this part of dispelling sexism is so much more difficult than anything else.
People are more easily convinced that “well yeah, women are just as smart and emotionally strong as guys”, but they see the physical traits and how there’s extra crumbs to follow and get so tightly fooled by it.
Even many progressives have been duped by this one single issue and it’s heartbreaking.
Great vid, Steve.
Thanks for speaking out/sharing.
THANK YOU for posting this.
Let me know when over 50% of Olympic gold medal winners are trans. Then we can look into whether its fair or not.
They can't even show that trans people win the same percent of matches, etc as the percentage of trans people in society.
The moral panic is literally just "we watched that one Futurama episode and failed to understand it was obvious satire".
Thank you Steve! This actually made my day, to hear an ally unequivocally stand up for us :) I deeply appreciate it. I've been pretty discouraged in wanting to do anything competitive (if there's a woman's category), solely because I don't want to deal with transphobes. Like, unless a league specifically says I'm welcome, I'll assume I'm not and just not even bother. I've got a lot of other things to worry about and I have to pick my battles, y'know. I try not to think about it and I try not to internalize the B.S., but it's tough some days. So to hear someone point out the nonsense and call it out for what it is (transphobia), warms my heart. Thank you
Fascinating takes. I’ll admit I’ve fallen for the moral panic in the past, but this really put it in perspective.
In the trans athletes debate I’ve always felt caught with my pants down when I’m arguing with my very conservative family. I didn’t have good logical ground to stand on in their defense until I watched this video. Thank you.
I know. Every time these claims come up, it always ends the same. I do a modicum of research and realize that they are all based on a few trans athletes doing well in a couple of events, or on that time Fallon Fox defeated a cis woman in an MMA fight like fifteen years ago. It's ridiculous.
We are not allowed to succeed. If we do, obviously we are cheating. Any evaluation of us as individuals who put in effort to achieve something, is erased.
Fallon Fox got beat by several cis women who were better mma fighters than her too, but they don't like to notice that.
@@Avrysatos They don't, and they don't like to admit that concussions and cranial fractures happen frequently in fights between cis women MMA fighters either, preferring to pretend it only happened in the one fight mentioned.
1) open divisions already exist in sports, most sports organizations have no gender restrictions on athletes in the men's division, if you can perform at a level that a man can you are in.
2) these are the same arguments we heard in the 1930's about racial integration in sport, that black people "Had a competitive advantage and therefore shouldn't be allowed to compete" and it that's where your talking points come from you're on the losing side.
Hilariously (or tragicomically?) there is one counter example to the open division thing I know. Skeet shooting before I want to say 1992 there was no gender division at all, but then a woman one the gold medal at the Olympics so the professional body set up an exclusive men's and women's division to prevent that from happening again. So that would be the only case I'm clear there is no open division, but perhaps a rather telling one.
I had someone once try to tell me that I have a genetic advantage over cis women. If you are on hormones for more than a year, your muscle mass basically disappears. I used to be able to lift 200 lbs when I was a mover, I've been on hormones for about a year now, and 50 lbs is a lot to me now.
Steve, thank you for always being on the right side of *real* LGBTQ+ allyship. These things mean a lot to me and so many others.
I do think a gender neutral, ability tiered system is probably the simplest way to deal with the issue. Like how they have weight categories in boxing and wrestling, but base it on some other physical standards other than just weight. And then whatever bracket you fall into based on your overall capabilities, you go compete against others in that bracket, regardless of gender. 🤷♂
"I told them, fix their hearts or die".
-David Lynch.
My favourite argument: if transitioning gender gave you an unfair advantage in sports Lance Armstrong would be missing both his testicles by now.
It's obvious that non-identical-clone leagues are inherently unfair.
That's why I refuse to watch any sport that hasn't gone all-clone.
Thanks - just thanks.
Tall people have a genetic advantage, but we don't have rules to kick tall people out because they have an advantage.
Wow. Thank you for this. You have really opened my eyes. I appreciate that.
I'll admit, I wasn't terribly interested in watching Ask Away (it's neat it's there, but I don't need that much of Steve, especially if I want to avoid going too deep down the parasocial rabbit hole), so I'm quite glad Steve clipped this bit and posted it separately. A strong rant, thank you.
The actual merit of claiming trans athletes of any gender have smoe kind of blanket advantage in any sport aside - where's those "fairness" hawks getting upset for, say, short people who'd love to play Basketball? Say those short people are really frigging amazing, outplay anyone their height - but dang, that hoop is just much easier to reach even for a slightly less skilled and otherwise slightly less genetically gifted person who's 6'8. All athletes at high levels put in as much time, as much grit and hard work as any other athlete. Even in boxing with weight classes... If you're at just the lower end of your weight class, have a body that tends towards just a slightly lower muscle mass proportion - it's gonna be harder for you. Any hormones, sex and gender related phenotypical trends- comes out to just another piece of that fabric, and say, height, is definitely a more direct finger on the scale of fairness than having gone through "male" puberty. Not to mention socioeconomic factors - Michael Phelps born into poverty in a different time ends up at least a few inches shorter, less strong, maybe didn't even have the time or access to train from a young age. If it's about fairness, give all kids a fair chance to start and pursue sports first. Support the paralympics. "weird" non-pro or non-mainstream leagues, "weird" sports, women's sports, what have you. If you;re just watching men's NFL or soccer and the Olympics.... You're the problem in making sports an unfair career.
and again, the height thing is a gross oversimplification of all the factors that actually go into being succesful in Basketball - for what i know, there may be some 4 footer out there who could totally make up for their height by basially vaulting to the hoop - but they might never have been encouraged to even try basketball.
Good on you Steve! I have had this conversation too many times and it certainly is some BS.
Excellent. This was just absolutely amazing. Thank you for just saying it so plainly.
There's currently an outcry about a trans Irish dancer in the US. She was cleared to be in the competition, but as soon as she won, everyone flipped out. The governing body is standing with her so far, we just hope it stays that way.
In my casual Irish country dancing classes the women often need to stand in for "men" anyways.
It is not like the moves are substantially different between the sexes.
It’s even dumber than saying super tall people shouldn’t be allowed to play basketball 😂
That does get me. Is it fair that Deion Sanders could run a 4.2/40 and I can't? It's so unfair.
Thanks for successfully melding logic and emotion within your response. Kudos.
I started transitioning while in the Army, so I have actual numbers, anecdotal though they are, to back up that trans women lose strength as they take hormones.
Before I started hormones, the three fitness test scores I care to remember were; Deadlift: ~270lbs, Sprint-Drag-Carry: 1 minute 24 seconds, and 2 Mile Run: 17 minutes, 38 seconds.
Not great, save the Sprint-Drag, I'm proud of that time.
6 months into HRT, same events; Deadlift: 245lbs, Sprint-Drag: 2 minutes 5 seconds, 2 Mile: 19 minutes 45 seconds
1 year 3 months into HRT; 220lbs, 1 minute 34 seconds, 20 minutes 53 seconds.
I had to explain to my COC what my hormones were doing to my body because they kept trying to reprimand and punish me for my falling scores
With allies like this..
Fuckin' right? jeez!
I am a proponent of there being no divide between gender in sport. I realize we are not there yet but I ask myself why there is any segregation in GOLF for example.
Thank you, Steve!
Did he just suggest DNA testing some 60 million kids? You think they're gonna spend over $9 Billion when they already just want to do Genital inspections?
🤔 do trans gals really have an advantage ? i mean I'm a horrendous athlete 🤷♀️ so this must mean I'm just the worst trans woman ever huh 😆
"My feelings don't care about your facts" wins out every time.
I had to pause at the fact that the after-roll commercial for this video is a movie called "Lady Ballers". I think the algorithm is confused.
I always loved when they scream about Mack Biggs. "Look at what this trans girl wants to do! She wants to participate in girls wrestling!" Meanwhile, Biggs was a trans *man* who desperately wanted to wrestle against men, but they literally would not let him do so. He wanted out of girls wrestling.
Have you heard of the movie Lady Ballers? Basically a distillation of all the prejudices you have just alluded to concerning the "unfairness" of trans athletes competing against cis ones. It's produced by the Daily Wire, which pretty much says everything there is to say about it.
I have been reporting promotions of it on CZcams as hate speech for the specific reasons you outline.
They been talking about hemoglobin levels lately when you bring up testosterone makes the muscle difference and trans women block it... I'm not sure there's any difference in those levels either, but if it was such an advantage wouldn't it be super common to see athletes getting hemoglobin injections before competitions?
there is a special kind of joy derived from seeing people be MAD about this stuff.
The headline here in Texas is Mack Beggs, a trans man wrestler that, in high school, held a record of 32-0 against opponents in women’s wrestling. He used gender affirming care before competing, but was not on T at the time of the competition. That set off alarm bells around here, everyone I know who was “okay” with trans people coming out were offended at the notion of him competing against women.
To my knowledge, he competes somewhat successfully in college against men now.
There’s more to the story than I know, but this trans kids framing of the anti trans movement seems to be more broadly appealing that out right trans denial.
The trans athlete moral panic is something that I guarantee all of you will look embarrassing in 20-30 years
i look back at the way society treated gay people during my childhood in the 90s, and throughout my high school days in the early 2000s. The rhetoric from that time period has AGED horribly
the meltdown over trans athletes by the right wing is going to age horribly too
I will say that this argument goes away the minute we stop seeing women as ‘lesser’ and just have one league in every sport. MMA, Boxing, Baseball, Basketball, etc etc. just let men and women compete for slots on a team and see how that works out. I think it’d be a good metric of America. I’m all in favor of trans athletes competing, though I will say that I think sports would be more interesting overall if everyone could compete against everyone. After the Negro Leagues, I’m sure that we understand how much baseball benefitted by having us integrated, so I’m sure trans athletes will do much of the same.
BINGO
Hell no! Men are physically stronger than women so that would only lead to womens rights for a fair sports team being taken away, women getting injured more brutally in sports, and women not getting to any high up level in sports smh that's a dumb solution, women's sports isn't because we're lesser as people it's cuz we're not as physically strong!
I think this is where I have a hang up, too. If this is the case, yeah, why are there women's competitions and men's competitions? Why have weight classes in wrestling or fighting sports like boxing, mma, etc? Integrate everything and let the chips fall where they may.
I'm all for fully integrated sports.
I was the shortest, skinniest male kid in my class growing up and, most likely as a result of that, was very unathletic. I don't remember any of these right-wingers coming to MY defense whenever I was forced to play sports--sports that I didn't even want to play--against all the bigger, faster kids, and being treated like garbage just for not being very good at it. None of them called it unfair. None of them cared about what that was doing to my self-esteem or whatever. I'm sure they would've just told me to suck it up and deal with it if I were to complain. But now that they found out about the existence of trans people, suddenly they're so concerned about things being fair? What utter phonies.
Hell yea Steve! Love your rants!