Given that racists and slavers used the “natural physical strength” of black people to justify putting them on hard labor and some medics still think that blacks has higher resistance to pain, I wonder if when black athletes started to join mixed race sport teams, some racist would have used the same “biological advantage” argument that now transphobes use against trans athletes to claim it was “unfair” for black to compete against whites to justify segregation.
I mean, none of the trans people I’ve met are people I would describe as natural athletes. I’m sure they exist but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of overlap in the two categories which likely skews any sort of analysis of the subject.
It’s such a hilarious non-issue. There aer so many other things we should be worried about.
Exactly. It’s harmful to both women and the LGBT+ movement.
We should all just get on board with allowing discrimination based on sex at birth in women’s sport competitions.
And then we can really focus on discrimination where it matters. Drag competitions aren’t hurting anyone.
No, we need the exact opposite of this but for the same reason.
We should ignore it as an issue because it’s literally not an issue. The minuscule number of people it will affect don’t warrant national discussion nor legislation. But we should also not cede ground to transphobic bigots that want to use this as precedent “that assigned sex at birth” is relevant in some venues. Next stop is bathrooms and gyms.
More over, scientifically this isn’t even a metric that makes sense. What about intersex folk? Their assigned sex at birth inherently doesn’t fit in to a binary. It also ignores the numerous cis women who naturally have higher testosterone levels. I get why its an easy solution as transphobia is rampant and dangerous in other areas of life, but thats not a good reason to make inherently flawed laws.
The issue is that exceptional people win. And you can’t allow people to compete, but then tell them it’s not okay if they win.
I’m cool with anyone competing in men’s competitions, but sports set aside for women at birth should keep that standard. The same logic applies to Oscar Pistorius, who shouldn’t have been allowed to compete in the Olympics. If you win a competition with artificial legs, it’s hard to argue that the artificial legs aren’t an advantage.
If it’s ok for anyone to compete in men’s events, it should also be ok for anyone to compete in women’s events.
Women’s cycling races in Chicago area would tell a different story…along with women’s swimming (Lia Thomas)…and other cases.