People never talk about the counter-examples such as this, trans women do not necessarily win in somekind of biology is destiny way.
I’d also question whether her physiology is so much more different from most women’s, than Michael Phelps’ physiology is from most men - or Usain Bolt’s for that manner. I am also not sure that lifetime of physical training would give me anything like the physical skills of the Williams sisters.
<snip>
She slowed down, when compared to her pre-transition self, but shot up the rankings when compared to the ensemble of women swimmers rather than the ensemble of men swimmers.
<snip>
<snip>
I'm also not sure you can compare pre- and post- transition performance on an equal basis. Top level sport is psychological as well as physical. For all we know the relief of transitioning may be a far bigger effect than any physiological differences as a result of male puberty.
I took what Leorning Cniht says to mean that her actual times slowed down post-transition, but even those slower times put her higher in the rankings than athletes assigned female at birth. I suppose there is a question whether her better performance than athletes assigned female at birth is due to the physiological legacy of male puberty, or the psychological effect of having transitioned. I don’t know how that could be evaluated.
<snip>
She slowed down, when compared to her pre-transition self, but shot up the rankings when compared to the ensemble of women swimmers rather than the ensemble of men swimmers.
<snip>
<snip>
I'm also not sure you can compare pre- and post- transition performance on an equal basis. Top level sport is psychological as well as physical. For all we know the relief of transitioning may be a far bigger effect than any physiological differences as a result of male puberty.
I took what Leorning Cniht says to mean that her actual times slowed down post-transition, but even those slower times put her higher in the rankings than athletes assigned female at birth. I suppose there is a question whether her better performance than athletes assigned female at birth is due to the physiological legacy of male puberty, or the psychological effect of having transitioned. I don’t know how that could be evaluated.
That was my point. It's fundamentally not possible to measure.
@Leorning Cniht why does it have to be about Thomas having an advantage due to being trans rather than simply being talented? We also cannot assess whether or not her hypothetical cis twin would have some other kind of advantage that Lia would not, eg a natural lack of lactic acid production a la Michael Phelps. Given that a cis female twin would not be an identical twin, they would be highly likely to differ physiologically. Twins aren't clones, not even identical twins.
This is part of the transmisogyny - that trans women can't be good at things without it being categorised as unfair, or stolen from cis women in some way. Trans women are not allowed to win things.
People never talk about the counter-examples such as this, trans women do not necessarily win in somekind of biology is destiny way.
I’d also question whether her physiology is so much more different from most women’s, than Michael Phelps’ physiology is from most men - or Usain Bolt’s for that manner. I am also not sure that lifetime of physical training would give me anything like the physical skills of the Williams sisters.
Yes, Lia Thomas lost some swimming races, and this was ignored, but when she won one, this became the unacceptable face of trans sport. My memory is that some swimmers still supported her, but of course, the Republicans seized on it as a culture war trophy.
What was it that Lord Coe said, biology trumps gender? So athletics may follow swimming towards bans of trans women. It's all scientific, you see.
One is inclined to think, given the timing, that they were right who said that the position of the sporting bodies was that trans people were allowed to compete, but not allowed to win.
One is inclined to think, given the timing, that they were right who said that the position of the sporting bodies was that trans people were allowed to compete, but not allowed to win.
Pretty much. Billie Jean King proved it's talent and skill not gender or biology that makes the difference back in 1973 anyway.
Coe also said that fairness trumps inclusion. Hang on, I thought that inclusion was about fairness, but I guess he means that exclusion is the royal road to super athletics. I suppose the sports authorities have been all over the place in the last few decades, until they settled on testosterone as the magic stuff. However, when trans athletes followed the rules on this, they were told that the rules have changed, as follows, you have to have not gone through male puberty, to take part in women's events, and as a coda, you are not allowed to avoid male puberty. It's science folks, but not as you know it.
Coe also said that fairness trumps inclusion. Hang on, I thought that inclusion was about fairness, but I guess he means that exclusion is the royal road to super athletics. I suppose the sports authorities have been all over the place in the last few decades, until they settled on testosterone as the magic stuff. However, when trans athletes followed the rules on this, they were told that the rules have changed, as follows, you have to have not gone through male puberty, to take part in women's events, and as a coda, you are not allowed to avoid male puberty. It's science folks, but not as you know it.
Not only that, but even if you took puberty blockers to avoid it it doesn't help. You have to have completed your transition by the age of 12. I'm pretty sure that's pretty much impossible. It's a bit like "Credit will only be offered to customers over the age of 75 accompanied by a full set of great-grandparents"
Well, I thought some kids avoided puberty by means of blockers, but I'm sure they would be ruled out. It's amazing really, the rules on testosterone were set up, trans athletes complied, but, sorry, we didn't mean that, sorry, fuck off.
Well, I thought some kids avoided puberty by means of blockers, but I'm sure they would be ruled out. It's amazing really, the rules on testosterone were set up, trans athletes complied, but, sorry, we didn't mean that, sorry, fuck off.
That's the thing - their wording was "must have completed their transition by the age of 12". Their *justification* goes on about male puberty, but that's the wording of the actual rule.
I mean, the simpler solution would be to categorise sport by something other than gender. E.g. height combined with percentage muscle mass would probably work, this would also have the advantage of nerfing the advantage of quite a lot of forms of doping at the same time.
There is also a racist dimension - this kind of gender policing has historically been used as a weapon against Black women and other women of colour. Gal Dem has quite a few articles on this. Here's one:
@Leorning Cniht why does it have to be about Thomas having an advantage due to being trans rather than simply being talented?
We have measurements of how talented a swimmer Lia Thomas is, measured against both a representative ensemble of male college swimmers, and against an ensemble of female college swimmers. Pre-transition, she was a reasonable middle-of-the-pack college swimmer. Post-transition, she started winning races by significant margins.
So what are the possibilities?
1. Lia's natural ability was psychologically suppressed when she was competing as a man, but flourished when she could be her true self
2. Lia developed significantly as a swimmer during her transition, for reasons unrelated to her transition, and in a way that no other swimmer achieved
3. Having been through male puberty gives Lia an advantage
I'm not sure there are other possibilities that fit the data.
(And yes, Lia Thomas lost some races, too. It's not unusual for swimmers to have bad days, for all sorts of reasons.)
Schuyler Bailar is in some sense Lia Thomas's opposite number - he's a trans man who swam as a woman in high school, then transitioned and swam as a man in college. Nobody cares about him competing, because nobody thinks that having been though female puberty gives a man an advantage. It's a bit harder to compare his pre- and post- transition performance. He finished his college swimming career with a reasonable (but not standout) performance, and it looks to me as though his performance pre-transition was comparatively quite a bit better than that. So I could easily describe him as a talented swimmer who lacks the advantage of male puberty.
This is part of the transmisogyny - that trans women can't be good at things without it being categorised as unfair, or stolen from cis women in some way. Trans women are not allowed to win things.
No, it isn't. I'm sorry you feel that way, but that's not at all what I'm doing.
There are two questions here. The first question is to what degree Lia Thomas (or someone else in a similar position) gains an advantage from having been through male puberty. That's a factual question. It's one we can't measure directly, but we can make reasonable inferences if given a large enough ensemble of trans athletes.
We don't have many trans athletes, so the data is somewhat scant.
The second question is whether it matters. That's more of an opinion, but I think it's easy enough to argue that if the advantage found in the first question is scant, then it clearly can't matter at all. There's a more interesting argument to have if it's found that the advantage, in this particular sport, of having undergone male puberty is significant.
I don't identify specifically as a man and I'm uncomfortable having to out myself like this. I'm also a trans person pointing out a specifically anti-trans type of prejudice, just one that happens to be specifically aimed at trans women in this instance. I would claim that I am merely pointing out the transmisogynistic ideas that trans women themselves have identified as being part of this debate. Deciding that trans women are wrong in considering this to be transmisogyny is different to pointing out things that trans women have said is transmisogynistic. Neither me nor Louise are Black but we have both pointed out that Black women are particularly impacted by this, because that's what Black women have said and demonstrated. That's not inappropriate. It *would* be inappropriate if we decided that those Black women were wrong about their increased vulnerability to racist and transmisogynistic rhetoric.
Can I pop my host hat on for a minute as we're quite shorthanded and say this kind of call-out is something that we really prefer that people don't do here for exactly the reason that it can make people feel pressured into outing themselves?
There's an issue that Pomona has touched on here but it hasn't been openly declared, so I'll do it.
If it were possible - it probably isn't, for political and practical reasons but bear with me - to conclude that trans women overall have a statistically-significant advantage over cis women even after the IOC guidelines on hormone levels have been met, then I have to ask, so what? Lots of categories of women have statistically-significant advantage. Tall women are statistically going to be better than short women at basketball. Women with high untrained VO2-max (genetic) will statistically trash women without it in any sport. And so on, or so I believe although I have no data to hand to prove that's true.
If there exists a category of women who have undergone to one degree or another a testosterone-based puberty, and have gained some advantage from that (not proven but also not relevant for my argument) then my question is, so what?
Advantage is inherent in sport. The question is whether or not an advantage is unfair. To claim that trans women have unfair as opposed to fair advantages is to claim that we are cheating. And there's no basis for that other than to claim that we are not who we say we are. Trans women are women. Our endocrinological history isn't any more of an unfair advantage than the genetics that gave Sharron Davies wide shoulders.
I'm open to arguments that in the age of professional sports and large prizes for success, men might pretend to be women in order to take the prize money. It hasn't happened in 20 years of the current IOC rules largely because suppressing your testosterone to that level would be hell for a cis man. It would induce gender dysphoria and by the way, welcome to our world.
Now, you might argue as many have done, that to allow people-who've-undergone-testosterone-based-puberty to compete would result in trans women and lying men destroying women's sport. Davies and her ilk - her ilk are gender-criticals and other fascist movements but anyway - are presenting that very argument now. Cool that it hasn't happened in two decades of the current rules though, I wonder how we got away with that?
Also trans people are such a small percentage of the population anyway, surely it's not a statistically significant enough number to be a real problem.
Also trans people are such a small percentage of the population anyway, surely it's not a statistically significant enough number to be a real problem.
Pretty much but the arguments of our enemies are based around the binary gender-essentialist lie, so that doesn't wash with them.
They hope to convince people that trans women competing as women is the same as cis men competing as women and therefore cis women will never win because cis men would beat them. It's both transphobic and ridiculous. But transphobes are working from a position of hatred rather than reality.
The point about unfairness has always bothered me, since sport is inherently unfair. A kid at school was much better at football than me! Boo hoo. I suppose it gets hooked onto binary sex, and some kind of narrative that women are hard done by. So what, is a good reply. But the bigots are obsessed with "sex classes", underpinned by essentialism and rank behaviourism. Or, you are your genitals.
I mean, I would agree that women face discrimination within sport - just that this would include trans women, as it would also include eg Black women, or disabled women. The idea of 'sex classes' in terms of societal class division is not, in itself, wrong as such - the problem comes when sex is considered the only class division that matters or even the only one that exists. In reality, sex is mutable and also often not even known by the individual (if we're talking about chromosones), so our understanding of what sex means has changed and it's generally less important than gender in terms of day to day experiences for most people. Certainly, gender as a social class division seems pretty uncontroversial to me.
I'm curious what Bailey, Bindel et al would say about the Womanist movement and the separation of Black women from the mainstream white feminism that ignored the sexism specifically faced by Black women, and the concept of misogynoir. Misogynoir and transmisogyny are extremely closely-linked terms.
*For those outside the UK, the Equality Act protects people on the basis of many characteristics including race, disability etc and doesn't just refer to trans people. So the transphobic gay and bi people in the LGB Alliance (despite the fact that most members are straight…oops) would be equally affected.
As far as I am aware, he has not put out a statement saying he is going to repeal the Equality Act but that he is going to review it and change the language in relation to the definition of sex. Do you have a link to his proposal because the one you have provided is to a twitter thread that discusses a review (I am especially interested as I lecture in disability studies so refer to the Act regularly)
Right wing chatter is that both Truss and Sunak intend to stop puberty blockers for trans kids. Yes, politicians are well versed in medicine, we all knew that.
Hello,
Just a friendly reminder to be careful with Twitter and to try and run things back to their source, if possible. I can't find the full text for this yet but Sky News have quoted a lot if it. It sounds like he's put out the text for a speech he is making today
link to Sky News containing transphobic statements
Right wing chatter is that both Truss and Sunak intend to stop puberty blockers for trans kids. Yes, politicians are well versed in medicine, we all knew that.
It's not unreasonable to ask questions about puberty blockers, or about any other medical treatment. But the way to answer these questions is with data, and with a rigorous longitudinal study looking at patient outcomes, not with anecdote, or with speculation.
Needless to say, neither Truss nor Sunak is interested in responsible science.
Right wing chatter is that both Truss and Sunak intend to stop puberty blockers for trans kids. Yes, politicians are well versed in medicine, we all knew that.
It's not unreasonable to ask questions about puberty blockers, or about any other medical treatment. But the way to answer these questions is with data, and with a rigorous longitudinal study looking at patient outcomes, not with anecdote, or with speculation.
Needless to say, neither Truss nor Sunak is interested in responsible science.
Evidence based politics seems to be anathema universally.
The model seems to be "come up with an idea and lie your ass off to persuade enough people to go along with it."
The closure of the Tavistock clinic is inspiring a deluge of hostile material in the right wing press. They have been gunning for the Tavi, and now they can let rip, although the NHS is opening other clinics. Expect a wholesale attack on trans people in the coming period, combining the hard right and hostile feminists.
It someways, I’d rather they’re distracted by the tavi closure and don’t notice that it is intended to be replaced by multiple centres.
Well, ironically, the Tavi can't cope with thousands of referrals. I suppose the real bigots dispute the existence of gender identity itself, there's only sex. I'm waiting for bathroom bills in England.
I'm currently looking at potential countries to move to (probably via applying for asylum) and it's so tiring and depressing in so many ways. Aotearoa has precedent in terms of a British trans person claiming asylum, but I'm also hugely unlikely to be granted residence due to disability reasons - even if you have refugee status, you have to apply separately for residency. Trans healthcare is also not as good as in the Eurozone, and I would like to be able to eventually get EU citizenship.
I'm currently looking at potential countries to move to (probably via applying for asylum) and it's so tiring and depressing in so many ways. Aotearoa has precedent in terms of a British trans person claiming asylum, but I'm also hugely unlikely to be granted residence due to disability reasons - even if you have refugee status, you have to apply separately for residency. Trans healthcare is also not as good as in the Eurozone, and I would like to be able to eventually get EU citizenship.
Do you have to take such a big step? Things look grim, but hopefully the Tories will be gone in 2 years. Surely, Labour will not be as vindictive.
There is no guarantee that Labour will get in, and it doesn't seem like they are interested in actually having different policies in most areas let alone trans rights.
Move to Scotland and vote "Yes" to independence in the referendum next year. Then you'll be in a nation with a non-Tory government seeking to be in the EU, one which even within the severe limitations of devolution is already moving towards gender recognition that Braverman wants to stop by anyway possible (as though the Attorney General of England and Wales has any say in what happens in Scotland).
Scotland's the preferred emergency escape route for many of us. The only reason I'm still in England is my family's here, but I can pack the car and be across the border in two hours if I have to.
Yes, that's how many of us are thinking right now. Of course, there's the risk that the Tories just take back devolved powers or that the SNP's transphobes become dominant, and then it's out of the frying pan. Ireland, then citizenship, then EU freedom of movement is my backup plan.
And few in the trans community have confidence in Labour being better on trans rights. Starmer's signalled a willingness to throw us under the bus that's pretty disturbing and his most vocal transphobes in the PLP attack us without sanction.
The problem is that many of us can't just move - British citizens are free to work and live in Ireland, but it has a nightmarish housing market and insufficient trans healthcare availability, and you would still have to support yourself financially. For those of us reliant on disability benefits and council housing, there aren't a lot of options. Banking on Scotland becoming independent and joining the EU seems like quite a risk if you can only move there by doing a council house swap (I don't even know if someone in England could do that with someone in Scotland).
Agreed but there are no great options, at least since Brexit before which we had a choice of reasonably trans-affirming countries we could move to by right. Routine emigration is (now) something for the rich, or at most the young, healthy and highly-skilled/educated.
I hope there are potential allies reading this and getting a sense of how bad things are looking for trans folk. My gut feeling is it's too late to do much though. There's been such an onslaught over the last 6 or 7 years that overcoming that momentum feels impossible now. A few days ago someone counted up the number of anti-trans articles there's been in the Daily Mail in the preceding week. What do you think peeps? 1? 2? 5?
In one way, I am not shocked, as the tidal wave of transphobia has been clear to see in recent years, an unholy alliance of hard right, bigots in Labour and SNP, and the hostile feminists, and of course, Guardian writers. But I am still aghast that people are looking to emigrate. How the hell have we got here? I also feel fear, as the US shows a possible trajectory, towards proto-fascism.
So I live in Scotland, I'm not trans but my partner is genderqueer and despite what Alan says I really do fear for my partner - that if they walked out the front door in gender affirming clothing they might well be attacked or abused or we might be targeted in our own home.
This is because of the green light the 'predator narratives' stoked by the newspapers and other media have given to attack people like my partner. Thanks to our media and badly moderated social media, the thugs can feel morally pure, like vigilantes, if they attack people they take to be trans in any way ( by the way, this to some extent affects any gender nonconforming people - it doesn't matter if you're cis, it matters whether some bigot can say they thought you were trans and then they bash you.)
Yes it's great that our Scottish government has finally found its spine and may pass a still-flawed version of self-ID and that they haven't jumped on the Daily Mail bandwagon but the problem is that the media's moral panic doesn't stop at the border. People in Scotland still to a great extent read the same newspapers and consume the same broadcast channels that stoke hatred and fear of trans people and our own homegrown media isn't any better. The Scotsman, Evening News, Herald, Courier and even The National all carry the anti-trans panic. The pro-Indy 'National' used to be one of the worst because it gave columns to actual Putin-fans who pushed left wing transhobia.
The trans-haters tried taking over the SNP by grassroots organising but luckily their glorious leader who was kicked out for other things, got high on his own supply and decided to start his own party Alba and lots of then left to join him. Based on all that election winning hatred of trans people and 'women know your place' - they got 1% of the vote and the only reason any of them are left is because their MP defectors haven't had to face the electorate yet.
But this doesn't mean the SNP or other parties except our Greens are a safe place for trans people -they aren't. Lots of trans people and some allies in the SNP were harassed - really quite seriously - had to leave their homes, call in police (yes that happens regularly and never makes the headlines) - and nearly all the trans party members I knew of have resigned and left to join the Scottish Greens (who unlike the Green Party of England and Wales really do take trans people's rights seriously to the best of my knowledge). The Scottish Greens are in government so that's something.
But I know indy isn't a magic wand and that Scotland still isn't safe. We just have to keep doing our bit as allies where we can. Maybe writing to our representatives about whether it could be made easier for trans people to move here, if they thought it relatively safer, is something we could do as allies.
I'd like to echo that lots of people don't see how bad it is. If you ever wondered what you'd have been doing in the 1930s - look at what you're doing now. The putinist dictators are already in power and going to war in the East. The minorities they scapegoat are under sustained media and political attack here. Are we ready and able to give people asylum? Would we step up to protect and help trans folk if we saw them being attacked or abused? Would our churches? Are we making our voices heard that what's happening is not acceptable? Or are we busy attacking trans people because when they shout 'Fire!' we reckon they haven't said it nicely enough?
I think about my partner's safety a lot. Yet they're not a soldier or a firefighter doing a dangerous job. They're not going into burning buildings, they're not rescuing people at sea. I just want them to be able to dress in the way that makes them feel happy and at home in their own skin and to be able to go on a bus or stand at a bus stop or go into a shop or a pub without the danger that someone transphobic will hit them. My partner is severely visually impaired and can't hit back. That's where we are.
I had to laugh at the Daily Mail decrying the new play about Joan of Arc, "I, Joan", on at the Globe. In this play, Joan is portrayed as non-binary, which everyone knows is bad, cos Joan was a woman, and everyone knows what that is, don't they? Then I noticed other right wing pundits chiming in, so its standard anti-trans nonsense being whipped up. You see, theatre is about the imagination, but its very bad to imagine someone being trans or non-binary. Incidentally, Joan is played by a non-binary actor. I would like to see it, but am still wary of crowded places.
...of course Joan might have been trans... they didn't have the vocabulary for it back then...
Of course, one of the main charges against her at her trial, was dressing as a man. There is a lot written about this, ranging from discussion of so-called holy transvestites, some of whom were saints avoiding rape, to contemporary claiming of her as trans. So the play is not all that outlandish or new, except to the Daily Mail and others, involved in the culture wars. Taxpayers' money is financing this woke rubbish!
Comments
I’d also question whether her physiology is so much more different from most women’s, than Michael Phelps’ physiology is from most men - or Usain Bolt’s for that manner. I am also not sure that lifetime of physical training would give me anything like the physical skills of the Williams sisters.
I took what Leorning Cniht says to mean that her actual times slowed down post-transition, but even those slower times put her higher in the rankings than athletes assigned female at birth. I suppose there is a question whether her better performance than athletes assigned female at birth is due to the physiological legacy of male puberty, or the psychological effect of having transitioned. I don’t know how that could be evaluated.
That was my point. It's fundamentally not possible to measure.
This is part of the transmisogyny - that trans women can't be good at things without it being categorised as unfair, or stolen from cis women in some way. Trans women are not allowed to win things.
Yes, Lia Thomas lost some swimming races, and this was ignored, but when she won one, this became the unacceptable face of trans sport. My memory is that some swimmers still supported her, but of course, the Republicans seized on it as a culture war trophy.
What was it that Lord Coe said, biology trumps gender? So athletics may follow swimming towards bans of trans women. It's all scientific, you see.
Pretty much. Billie Jean King proved it's talent and skill not gender or biology that makes the difference back in 1973 anyway.
Not only that, but even if you took puberty blockers to avoid it it doesn't help. You have to have completed your transition by the age of 12. I'm pretty sure that's pretty much impossible. It's a bit like "Credit will only be offered to customers over the age of 75 accompanied by a full set of great-grandparents"
That's the thing - their wording was "must have completed their transition by the age of 12". Their *justification* goes on about male puberty, but that's the wording of the actual rule.
https://gal-dem.com/athletics-war-of-transphobia-and-misogynoir-black-african-women-losing/
All women lose out when invasive and degrading gender policing is promoted but the more marginalised you are the more likely you are to be affected.
We have measurements of how talented a swimmer Lia Thomas is, measured against both a representative ensemble of male college swimmers, and against an ensemble of female college swimmers. Pre-transition, she was a reasonable middle-of-the-pack college swimmer. Post-transition, she started winning races by significant margins.
So what are the possibilities?
1. Lia's natural ability was psychologically suppressed when she was competing as a man, but flourished when she could be her true self
2. Lia developed significantly as a swimmer during her transition, for reasons unrelated to her transition, and in a way that no other swimmer achieved
3. Having been through male puberty gives Lia an advantage
I'm not sure there are other possibilities that fit the data.
(And yes, Lia Thomas lost some races, too. It's not unusual for swimmers to have bad days, for all sorts of reasons.)
Schuyler Bailar is in some sense Lia Thomas's opposite number - he's a trans man who swam as a woman in high school, then transitioned and swam as a man in college. Nobody cares about him competing, because nobody thinks that having been though female puberty gives a man an advantage. It's a bit harder to compare his pre- and post- transition performance. He finished his college swimming career with a reasonable (but not standout) performance, and it looks to me as though his performance pre-transition was comparatively quite a bit better than that. So I could easily describe him as a talented swimmer who lacks the advantage of male puberty.
No, it isn't. I'm sorry you feel that way, but that's not at all what I'm doing.
There are two questions here. The first question is to what degree Lia Thomas (or someone else in a similar position) gains an advantage from having been through male puberty. That's a factual question. It's one we can't measure directly, but we can make reasonable inferences if given a large enough ensemble of trans athletes.
We don't have many trans athletes, so the data is somewhat scant.
The second question is whether it matters. That's more of an opinion, but I think it's easy enough to argue that if the advantage found in the first question is scant, then it clearly can't matter at all. There's a more interesting argument to have if it's found that the advantage, in this particular sport, of having undergone male puberty is significant.
My apologies, that was not my intention.
Can I pop my host hat on for a minute as we're quite shorthanded and say this kind of call-out is something that we really prefer that people don't do here for exactly the reason that it can make people feel pressured into outing themselves?
Thanks,
Louise
Epiphanies Host
If it were possible - it probably isn't, for political and practical reasons but bear with me - to conclude that trans women overall have a statistically-significant advantage over cis women even after the IOC guidelines on hormone levels have been met, then I have to ask, so what? Lots of categories of women have statistically-significant advantage. Tall women are statistically going to be better than short women at basketball. Women with high untrained VO2-max (genetic) will statistically trash women without it in any sport. And so on, or so I believe although I have no data to hand to prove that's true.
If there exists a category of women who have undergone to one degree or another a testosterone-based puberty, and have gained some advantage from that (not proven but also not relevant for my argument) then my question is, so what?
Advantage is inherent in sport. The question is whether or not an advantage is unfair. To claim that trans women have unfair as opposed to fair advantages is to claim that we are cheating. And there's no basis for that other than to claim that we are not who we say we are. Trans women are women. Our endocrinological history isn't any more of an unfair advantage than the genetics that gave Sharron Davies wide shoulders.
I'm open to arguments that in the age of professional sports and large prizes for success, men might pretend to be women in order to take the prize money. It hasn't happened in 20 years of the current IOC rules largely because suppressing your testosterone to that level would be hell for a cis man. It would induce gender dysphoria and by the way, welcome to our world.
Now, you might argue as many have done, that to allow people-who've-undergone-testosterone-based-puberty to compete would result in trans women and lying men destroying women's sport. Davies and her ilk - her ilk are gender-criticals and other fascist movements but anyway - are presenting that very argument now. Cool that it hasn't happened in two decades of the current rules though, I wonder how we got away with that?
Pretty much but the arguments of our enemies are based around the binary gender-essentialist lie, so that doesn't wash with them.
They hope to convince people that trans women competing as women is the same as cis men competing as women and therefore cis women will never win because cis men would beat them. It's both transphobic and ridiculous. But transphobes are working from a position of hatred rather than reality.
I'm curious what Bailey, Bindel et al would say about the Womanist movement and the separation of Black women from the mainstream white feminism that ignored the sexism specifically faced by Black women, and the concept of misogynoir. Misogynoir and transmisogyny are extremely closely-linked terms.
*For those outside the UK, the Equality Act protects people on the basis of many characteristics including race, disability etc and doesn't just refer to trans people. So the transphobic gay and bi people in the LGB Alliance (despite the fact that most members are straight…oops) would be equally affected.
Just a friendly reminder to be careful with Twitter and to try and run things back to their source, if possible. I can't find the full text for this yet but Sky News have quoted a lot if it. It sounds like he's put out the text for a speech he is making today
link to Sky News containing transphobic statements
https://news.sky.com/story/tory-leadership-race-rishi-sunak-vows-to-stop-woke-nonsense-and-left-wing-agitators-in-latest-pledge-12661643?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter
Edited to add - this might be a better link from Pink News - it still contains the offensive statements though.
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2022/07/30/rishi-sunak-trans-rights-equality-act/
Louise
Epiphanies Host
It's not unreasonable to ask questions about puberty blockers, or about any other medical treatment. But the way to answer these questions is with data, and with a rigorous longitudinal study looking at patient outcomes, not with anecdote, or with speculation.
Needless to say, neither Truss nor Sunak is interested in responsible science.
Evidence based politics seems to be anathema universally.
The model seems to be "come up with an idea and lie your ass off to persuade enough people to go along with it."
Well, ironically, the Tavi can't cope with thousands of referrals. I suppose the real bigots dispute the existence of gender identity itself, there's only sex. I'm waiting for bathroom bills in England.
Do you have to take such a big step? Things look grim, but hopefully the Tories will be gone in 2 years. Surely, Labour will not be as vindictive.
Yes, that's how many of us are thinking right now. Of course, there's the risk that the Tories just take back devolved powers or that the SNP's transphobes become dominant, and then it's out of the frying pan. Ireland, then citizenship, then EU freedom of movement is my backup plan.
And few in the trans community have confidence in Labour being better on trans rights. Starmer's signalled a willingness to throw us under the bus that's pretty disturbing and his most vocal transphobes in the PLP attack us without sanction.
I hope there are potential allies reading this and getting a sense of how bad things are looking for trans folk. My gut feeling is it's too late to do much though. There's been such an onslaught over the last 6 or 7 years that overcoming that momentum feels impossible now. A few days ago someone counted up the number of anti-trans articles there's been in the Daily Mail in the preceding week. What do you think peeps? 1? 2? 5?
It was 36.
This is because of the green light the 'predator narratives' stoked by the newspapers and other media have given to attack people like my partner. Thanks to our media and badly moderated social media, the thugs can feel morally pure, like vigilantes, if they attack people they take to be trans in any way ( by the way, this to some extent affects any gender nonconforming people - it doesn't matter if you're cis, it matters whether some bigot can say they thought you were trans and then they bash you.)
Yes it's great that our Scottish government has finally found its spine and may pass a still-flawed version of self-ID and that they haven't jumped on the Daily Mail bandwagon but the problem is that the media's moral panic doesn't stop at the border. People in Scotland still to a great extent read the same newspapers and consume the same broadcast channels that stoke hatred and fear of trans people and our own homegrown media isn't any better. The Scotsman, Evening News, Herald, Courier and even The National all carry the anti-trans panic. The pro-Indy 'National' used to be one of the worst because it gave columns to actual Putin-fans who pushed left wing transhobia.
The trans-haters tried taking over the SNP by grassroots organising but luckily their glorious leader who was kicked out for other things, got high on his own supply and decided to start his own party Alba and lots of then left to join him. Based on all that election winning hatred of trans people and 'women know your place' - they got 1% of the vote and the only reason any of them are left is because their MP defectors haven't had to face the electorate yet.
But this doesn't mean the SNP or other parties except our Greens are a safe place for trans people -they aren't. Lots of trans people and some allies in the SNP were harassed - really quite seriously - had to leave their homes, call in police (yes that happens regularly and never makes the headlines) - and nearly all the trans party members I knew of have resigned and left to join the Scottish Greens (who unlike the Green Party of England and Wales really do take trans people's rights seriously to the best of my knowledge). The Scottish Greens are in government so that's something.
But I know indy isn't a magic wand and that Scotland still isn't safe. We just have to keep doing our bit as allies where we can. Maybe writing to our representatives about whether it could be made easier for trans people to move here, if they thought it relatively safer, is something we could do as allies.
I'd like to echo that lots of people don't see how bad it is. If you ever wondered what you'd have been doing in the 1930s - look at what you're doing now. The putinist dictators are already in power and going to war in the East. The minorities they scapegoat are under sustained media and political attack here. Are we ready and able to give people asylum? Would we step up to protect and help trans folk if we saw them being attacked or abused? Would our churches? Are we making our voices heard that what's happening is not acceptable? Or are we busy attacking trans people because when they shout 'Fire!' we reckon they haven't said it nicely enough?
I think about my partner's safety a lot. Yet they're not a soldier or a firefighter doing a dangerous job. They're not going into burning buildings, they're not rescuing people at sea. I just want them to be able to dress in the way that makes them feel happy and at home in their own skin and to be able to go on a bus or stand at a bus stop or go into a shop or a pub without the danger that someone transphobic will hit them. My partner is severely visually impaired and can't hit back. That's where we are.
Of course, one of the main charges against her at her trial, was dressing as a man. There is a lot written about this, ranging from discussion of so-called holy transvestites, some of whom were saints avoiding rape, to contemporary claiming of her as trans. So the play is not all that outlandish or new, except to the Daily Mail and others, involved in the culture wars. Taxpayers' money is financing this woke rubbish!