Trans issues and/or fairness in sports
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I was watching the Olympics and thinking about trans inclusion issues. I'd be interested to hear some trans voices on these, @gwai posted one on the other thread: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/opinion/transgender-sports-science.html
There's no point in having a mind if you never change it, as they say. Generally speaking I've avoided these discussions as they seem to inevitably end up in the same positions.
Recently I've been thinking that the discussions tend to start in the wrong place. I think they undervalue the evolving nature of sports, the way that things change. There's no guarantee that Olympic sports will remain in the current format indefinitely.
Secondly, I've been increasingly aware that there are sports which will be increasingly difficult to justify in the future as they are leading to head injury and brain injury/disease. If these somehow migrate to being eSports then the physical attributes of individuals could be less important in the future whilst also being considerably safer.
Third there's the whole issue of body image and objectification.
Finally I've been thinking for a while that as a spectacle it is slightly odd that in some sports (swimming, sprinting) audiences want to see the very biggest and best, whilst in others (boxing, parasports) there's more of a concept that fairness means some effort to ensure competitors meet people of similar size. I'm not convinced that there couldn't be competitive and exciting all-gender track&field athletics if the competitors were arranged by size/weight (or perhaps even something like bicep size).
There's no point in having a mind if you never change it, as they say. Generally speaking I've avoided these discussions as they seem to inevitably end up in the same positions.
Recently I've been thinking that the discussions tend to start in the wrong place. I think they undervalue the evolving nature of sports, the way that things change. There's no guarantee that Olympic sports will remain in the current format indefinitely.
Secondly, I've been increasingly aware that there are sports which will be increasingly difficult to justify in the future as they are leading to head injury and brain injury/disease. If these somehow migrate to being eSports then the physical attributes of individuals could be less important in the future whilst also being considerably safer.
Third there's the whole issue of body image and objectification.
Finally I've been thinking for a while that as a spectacle it is slightly odd that in some sports (swimming, sprinting) audiences want to see the very biggest and best, whilst in others (boxing, parasports) there's more of a concept that fairness means some effort to ensure competitors meet people of similar size. I'm not convinced that there couldn't be competitive and exciting all-gender track&field athletics if the competitors were arranged by size/weight (or perhaps even something like bicep size).
Comments
I can't see any real justification in gender separation in disc golf. And having seen BMX bikes at the Olympics, I don't think that would be a poorer competition if there were all genders involved.
It seems to me they should just ditch the gender binary all together, and class athletes using some formula combing height / percentage muscle mass and testosterone range. You could call the classes whatever you want - in the paralympics they use letter number codes - but it is not beyond the wit of man to devise something more catchy, a colour division for example. Your algorithm comes out as a you compete in yellow division, it comes out as b and you compete in purple division etc.
From this paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21640629.2021.1990656#d1e353
Yes. This is a great example.
It was also noted that discussion around testosterone levels in female athletes always get particularly ugly when the athletes in question are women of colour.
It's easy to think of this as a problem, even a handicap. But I think it just requires some creativity and thought.
I enjoyed the Olympics volleyball. It was clear that the men's game was faster and more aggressive, however there were some real skills and exciting games in the women's game. I can't honestly see that an Olympic volleyball game where it is specified that half the players on each side need to be a smaller size would make the games worse.
I'm not a volleyball expert so I could well be proved wrong, I'm just trying to suggest that mixed gender games don't seem to me to be, philosophically, the problem that the Olympics seem to think it would be.
It's a netball/basketball variation, but korfball seems to do OK for itself, and has deliberately mixed teams.
But the people most affected are not in the Olympics and 99.99% never will be. I mean all the trans kids who can't play sports without pretending to be a different gender. And these children don't even necessarily have the advantage of having gone through AMAB puberty. Many of them haven't gone through puberty at all! Half these children don't care about winning even. They just want to play with their friends. The worst crime is denying those children the chance to play.
The behavior of aggressive parents at youth sports here in the US has been ghastly.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/newyork/news/youth-sports-leaders-alarmed-uptick-parents-aggressive-toward-referees-umpires/
https://www.parents.com/do-parents-need-silencing-at-youth-sports-games-8303953
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2023/10/15/parent-behavior-in-youth-sports-is-abusive-officials-dont-feel-safe/71194511007/
I've been listening to Tested as well - I really recommend it for anyone who's interested in these issues.
One point they made in episode 1 or 2 is that it's exclusively female-presenting athletes who are checked for high testosterone. Nobody is demanding that participants in the men's sports get checked.
This makes me think that the whole fuss is not really about unfair advantages at all - surely if high testosterone makes a big difference to athletic performance, the officials would care if a man had it too.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/boxing-complaint-1.7294151
The essence of most sports is that you try to out-compete your opposition. You are trying to run faster than them, or jump higher, or score more goals, or whatever.
You're not out to have a nice afternoon running around in circles, or scoring points based on how much you exceed your previous registered personal best*.
This doesn't mean that the competition has to be merciless and cut-throat, but competition is at the core of most sports, and even young children who aren't very good at whatever the sport is tend to be sensitive to whether a competition is fair.
I can point you to a number of occasions - both from my own youth, and from things I've been involved with recently as an adult - where a school has deliberately fielded their B or C team in competition against other schools, because their A team would ridiculously outclass the opposition, and that seems all fine and sensible to me. That doesn't work in district / regional leagues or something like that, though.
*You can do sports this way. Handicaps are perhaps most commonly used in golf, but they're easy enough in theory to apply to any sport where the competitors are mostly independent of each other. It's much more difficult to successfully handicap a soccer match, for example.
Speak for yourself. My sister-in-law plays hockey, and I've never heard her talk about the score or even about whether her team wins or loses. She loves playing hockey and she loves being in the company of the other women, whom she admires. She's dedicated to hockey practice, and they're all out there trying really hard and yes, competing, but it's really not at all about victory for her. It's about effort and teamwork and camaraderie.
"For when the one great scorer comes,
To write against your name,
He writes not that you won or lost,
But how you played the game"
Inscribed on the grave of this man in Eyam churchyard in Derbyshire. There's a picture of the grave on the linked page.