Most Americans oppose trans athletes in female sports, poll finds
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Nobody opposes trans athletes in male sports for obvious reasons.
I doubt there are many if any trying to take advantage, but the fact is, the biology doesn't match up. And by definition athletic sports are physical..
It can be a touchy subject, but when you break it down to basics without needing to step on eggshells of PC it's not that hard.
Physical male identifies as a woman, perfectly fine. However those physical traits are physically there forever, regardless of identification.
Athletics as a whole has been divided by gender forever in athletic sports, for this very reason. I don't know why it should change now personally.
In general, because all nuance gets lost - I would say "sure, I support whatever the trans community wants for sports league rules", because the trans community needs all the support it can get, because as a society we're not uniform in our human rights, etc.
But when I think about bio-born males who are trans and are competing against bio-born females (weight-classes or not) - it seems pretty fucking unfair in most athletic events.
So, I guess I would propose that we redraw the categories. Instead of "Men's and Women's {SPORT}" we would have "Female and Unlimited {SPORT}".
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what we have now, women play in men's sports on occasion. Ironically, the names "female" and "unlimited" suggest being a woman is a handicap, which is probably why it was renamed to men's in the first place.
And by the time they've done that, their advantages are somewhere between slim and none. They usually fall within the ranges of other women -- and the top cis female athletes will always be at the extreme ends of the range anyway.
So it's a lot more complicated than just "men showing up at women's events", and surveys like this are heavily influenced by it being presented that way. That presentation has a lot less to do with people worrying about fairness to women in sport, and is mostly about harassing and marginalizing trans people. All trans people.
We could have a serious discussion about why women's sports exist at all, rather than just the open class. And that would bring up questions of just what makes women women -- it goes far beyond what's between their legs and even in their endocrine systems.
But I don't believe that the laws being passed to "protect female athletics" are anything of the sort. They don't even try to fairly present the current state of knowledge about genetics, hormones, and the results of legitimate scientific tests of the results of medical transition.
Right, for pro-level sports, you could have all sorts of metrics to qualify people into different competitive categories, regardless of sex. Formula 1 vehicles all have to meet extremely tight regulations, and motorsports in general could be an analogy of how to draw boundaries on metrics to elevate fairness.
And I agree that overall, this "issue" catching publicity (because of how it is presented, and the sorts of reactions it can provoke in people) seems designed to draw negative attention to trans folk. I want to say "aren't there way more important topics to be worried about?" but that's not for me to decide. Trans athletes aren't going to sit around and accept being marginalized when they want to compete like other athletes.
This is why even elite female athletes, with high testosterone, even when taking testosterone, even on steroids, even in the olympics, are physically competing on the level of high school boys. It is impossible to overstate the physical advantage that being a male provides. It is not about the current hormone levels.