The International Cricket Council has become the latest sports body to ban transgender players from the elite women’s game if they have gone through male puberty.
The ICC said it had taken the decision, following an extensive scientific review and nine-month consultation, to “protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players”.
It joins rugby union, swimming, cycling, athletics and rugby league, who have all gone down a similar path in recent years after citing concerns over fairness or safety.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that not many users on Lemmy follow Cricket or understand it fully. My comment isn’t going to cover if the decision by the ICC is correct (or otherwise) but to provide a little insight into the men and women’s games
Speed / pace is a noticeable difference between the sexes. I don’t believe there are any current female players that consistently bowl pace over 120km/h. In contrast, male pace bowlers generally try to meet a consistent speed of 135km/h for the same role. The upper bounds for men is roughly 160km/h and maybe only one or two pro players globally can do this.
There are enough men’s bowlers who can bowl at 150km/h. At this speed an average batter would find it difficult to see the ball. Arguably batters in baseball receive faster pitches but at 150km/h+ including the ball bouncing makes it incredibly difficult to face.
The batting is also different but it might be harder to explain to a non-cricketing audience why this is.
To add extra weight to this comment. It is a common tactic to attempt to “bounce” a batter out, which basically means bowling with enough speed at such a short length that it comes towards the body, and especially, the head. If a batter is unprepared, it usually requires getting out of the way because trying to play a shot is likely to end up with you getting out or struck by the ball.
The ball is much harder and denser than a baseball and even a famous up and coming professional, international, batter died when he failed to get out of the way and was struck in the head.
Basically, there is a very real safety concern for players when it comes to something like this.
Cricket is like Blurnsball, right?
it’s slowly becoming that, yeah.
This isn’t about male bowlers though. The physiology of transgender people changes very quickly after starting Hormone Replacement Therapy. Do you have data on transgender women and bowling in cricket? Because data relating to male bowlers is not applicable.
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In theory trans women are superwomen and then in reality they’re weaker and derpier than the top female athletes and all of this is just a scare tactic because these theories havent played out in the real world at all.
On the sports angle, esports looked like it would finally be the place for me to be a fan because the athletes are relatable to me. But no, they got bought up by the Saudis, so all I get for relatable media is drag queens and furries or whatever.
Sport is the most boring show on TV by far, and yet the actors are paid insane amounts. The fandom is the most toxic bullshit out there and the show runners encourage it.
Cancel sport already, it’s really dumb.
As one of the characters in (the book) Jurassic Park says, “the two most boring things in the world are sports and fashion.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. But I do have a lot of family members who are athletic, and some have gone as far as olympic competitions. So, I can’t really say they have no valid right to enjoy their sport. And those family members are the most kind and welcoming people, they are absolutely appalled by all this bigoted negativity toward trans athletes, and are smart enough to see if for the fascist malarky it truly is.
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Why did my comment get removed? Lol Men are biologically stronger and faster than women that’s the truth. biologically born men will have an advance in women sports and ruin it for women.
Example “Serena williams lost to 203rd man”
My comment isn’t meant to X-phobic or ill intended. Be open to debate and not censorship on lemmy.
Studies have shown that after around 2 years of HRT the strength of trans women level out to the average of cis women. The only things that really stay the same are things like bone length /bone density, and it’s not like there are no cis women with dense bones that are tall.
Edit: taken from another comment of mine:
found a more recent study that states endurance things like running and swimming level out by around 2 years, with most things level out after about 4 with the exception of upper body strength. Which is still declining in trans women past that point
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/clinem/dgad414/7223439
So the 1 year that is recommended is too soon for trans women athletes to start competing, but for endurance sports like racing and swimming it should be fine by 2 years. Other sports may need more time, but also we shouldn’t be delaying the lives of trans people for so long. We need to find a good middle ground because it’s not like exceptional cis women don’t exist in those same sports.
This is all also completely ignoring that if a trans women starts hrt before puberty then there is no real difference. So the real solution is to let trans teenagers transition.
Aren’t their trans women who don’t take HRT?
Trans women aren’t biologically men.
Some trans women are different to most biological men.
There are a lot of trans people who don’t go through transition.
Those are not the trans people being spoken about I’m sports discussions though. Pretty much every sport that allows, or has previously allowed, trans people to compete in the division fitting their gender has had regulations around HRT and maintaining target hormone levels for a period of time before being allowed to compete.
How are they not?
Because hrt changes our biological characteristics. I have breasts and a hip curve of a cis woman. The trans man I know is growing hair like a cis man and is getting voice cracks like a pubescent boy.
We’re much closer to being intersex than our biological sex
I don’t think all trans women take HRT, though, right? I imagine most trans women normally go that route, but not all. Maybe the rules can be changed to specify that trans women can compete in women’s sports if they have been on an HRT regiment for long enough, or something.
This makes me wonder, is there anything in place in these sports keeping a man from just claiming to be a trans woman to have an unfair advantage? I do hope they find a way to integrate trans women into women’s sports, but I think there is some stuff that needs to be ironed out.
There already are requirements for trans women to be taking HRT before competing against women. I believe the current one is 1 year. No cis man would want to take HRT that would cause them to grow boobs so that argument is moot.
Edit: imo 1 year is too soon. From a study I read 2 should be good for endurance sports, and 3-5 should be good for others. It’s not right to delay the lives of trans people any further then they’re already being delayed and it’s not like exceptional cis women don’t exist
Plus this all gets solved if we let trans teens transition since these differences happen during puberty
Thanks for clearing that up. I always wondered about the requirements/qualification for that as I don’t really follow sports too much, myself.
yes they are.
Sorry if my English is a bit weird. If they have the chromosomes (XY), then yes.
Trans women and trans men are significantly closer to being intersex.
Being a man is not xy chromosomes. It’s a social construct normally situated around expressing masculinity in general, with no clear foundation. If you’re referring to male/female, this is also a social construct that fails to account for chromosomes outside of the xx/xy chromosome binary.
Hormones are the biggest genuine factor when it comes to sports and transwomen have generally the same athleticism as ciswomen due to HRT; and vice versa with men.
No, chromosomes are not a social construct. They are physical structures in cells that carry genetic information and play a fundamental role in biological processes, including determining an individual’s sex. The concept of chromosomes is grounded in biology and genetics, not social constructs.
You can spin it all you want, but women are getting destroyed in sports by transwomen because they have physique of a man like bone structure and muscle mass.
chromosomes are not a social construct
True, they exist in the physical world! But what chromosomes mean to us is indeed a social construct. Who cares what some little dingle in your nucleus says? People who follow socially constructed divisions in society based on this arbitrary physical thing, that’s who. 💝
but women are getting destroyed in sports by transwomen
Can you PLEASE share a source for this? No one will source this claim but it keeps getting upvoted
Last time my comment got deleted… I don’t know if it were the link or something else.
Just search for it on YouTube “Five Times Trans Athletes Beat Thousands Of Women In Their Sports”
… your source is a YouTube video listicle??
EDIT lol it’s 3 minutes of text on still images and some of the most transphobic shit
Our conceptualization of chromosomes and how we relate them to being “man” or “woman” is a social construct. This is what I was referring to.
Transwomen are heavily taken out of context by the media in sports and I have yet to see any actual evidence that transwomen shouldnt be allowed in sports for women. Hormones play the most significant factor
Any actual evidence
Getting first place or breaking records in women’s sport suddenly should be clear as day.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/21/transgender-weightlifter-breaks-womens-record/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/5/transgender-swimmer-lia-thomas-smashes-womens-reco/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/24/terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-transgender-sprinter/
https://nypost.com/2023/03/30/male-powerlifter-enters-womens-event-breaks-record/
Laurel Hubbert is 45 years old, far from her “prime.” Regardless, even if someone wins a tournament just because they’re trans doesn’t conclude they had an advantage.
I cannot find any direct sources from Avi Silverberg. Many of the sources that exist present Avi as a male who just pretended to be a woman to protest against trans inclusion in sports.
Megan Cortez-Fields is literally in highscool sports getting death threats. The two races she won she didn’t even win by big margins: https://ramapoathletics.com/documents/2023/11/18/2023_Cougar_Splash_Results_-_Final.pdf
In your terry miller / andrya yearwood link a doctor, Joanna Harper, directly agrees with me about hormones being the biggest factor. Chromosomes are not really important. I don’t believe trans individuals should compete with others of their gender without also having the same hormones.
Almost every athletic success any trans woman has is like this: not particularly outstanding compared to other women in the same sport, and not even close to the stats of men. The media just intentionally skews it to reinforce the confirmation bias of bigots. There are hundreds of sporting events everyday.
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XY are male right?
So males can give birth according to you
That’s a “rare” (or should I say “exclusive” since multiple family members have it?) mutation, being like “only XX females can give birth right? Shows link Checkmate transphobes!” isn’t really proving anything. It’s a genetic mutation.
It’s as close to saying “people that can’t feel pain are superhumans” when they’re usually the opposite and have to live life in fear of constantly hurting themselves, sometimes severely, and being unaware of it.
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Tell me you didn’t read the link without telling me you didn’t read the link. The case study is from a woman who was born with a vagina and ovaries and gave birth but upon a genetic test was revealed to have XY chromosomes.
(here’s the part where you pretend to have read it all along in your response)
Social construct is the separation of gender from sex. In many languages it doesn’t even make sense because fe/male is used for animals or wo/men for humans while gender and sex are represented by single word.
This whole argument of “gender vs sex” is ridiculous and always has been. Biology is what matters, not what words you use to refer to yourself or others.
You_irl
I’m definitely not a conservative Republican, far from it. I love how people immediately jump to conclusions on here based on one statement.
I don’t give a damn what bathroom you use.
IMO this is like arguing whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable.
The word you’re looking for is biologically.
Thanks
Why did my comment get removed?
Probably a biased mod who gets mad whenever a discussion doesn’t go their way.
Brand new user totally understands how things work here. Alternatively, recently banmed user totally understands why they got banned. BIASED MODS!!!
Why did my comment get removed?
Hmm I wonder
Simply because there is a huge difference, biologically, between a cisgender man and a transgender women who is on HRT.
You can argue that there is still residual advantages remaining after transition, that’s fine. But to call them men is both plainly incorrect, and also offensive.
Just make it third category.
- female sports won’t get affected
- fairness will increase
- fans can watch their own "cup of coffee "
- possible pretenders will no longer be motivated by easy winning
It’s own category with like 5 people in each sport. Great idea.
What is the alternative though that won’t ruin female’s sports that was built as part or followup of female’s emancipation ?
Some sports do it based on what kind of puberty you went through.
As a significant number of the physical advantages come through going through male puberty.
That could be a good start.
Which sports do that?
A quick Google gave me this:
Several international governing bodies including World Athletics, World Aquatics and World Rugby have restricted trans women who had undergone male puberty from participating in the female category
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_sports
Oh i misunderstood i though you said that if someone is born one sex but get to transiaion by chems in puberty they are allowed.
No, it depends which puberty they go through.
You can trigger whatever puberty you want by taking hormones/medication.
The one where trans women play in the women’s league and trans men in the men’s. If it causes any sort on unfairness we would have seen it by now.
That is what tons of folks fights against. But i agree it makes sense. However, is taking testosteron considered doping for females or is it OK? Like why other “chems” are not allowed?
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The testosterone for trans men is just to get to the levels that average cis men have, I’m pretty sure they test for excess testosterone. Some medication is allowed for sick athletes that is considered doping for anyone who isn’t sick, like the therapy for increasing blood oxygen levels which is a common form of doping but is a valid treatment for some illnesses.
Medication for sick people seems kinda different thing to me than being healthy and chumming chems to gain muscles.
So testosterone for female( born) athletes should be allowed until they reach avg male(born) level? Is that really a thing we want to introduce into sports ? Will steroids also count as getting to avg male upper muscle mass ? Where is the line? Won’t that make female athletes either obsolete or force them to chems chumming which then can cause them health issues given that most of them propably don’t plan to transition and might want start families etc?
For trans men they get like an injection of testosterone, they aren’t getting it to play sports, it’s medication for dysphoria. I haven’t said anyone else other than trans men should be taking it and definitely nothing about steroids.
Imo we should get rid of the distinction by gender and just use weight classes, or whatever attribute is appropriate for a given sport.
Avg Joe can weight about or even less than avg Jane but he still outperforms her in physical activities. It’s gonna be quite hard. But i can see it working as one of the many params in complex evaluation formula which never will be finished in sense every year someone will come up with exceptions and new paralela.
That’s true for grouping by gender as well, probably even more so. Genetic lottery means some will always be better at a given sport than others of the same gender putting in the same effort. But it’s so engrained in our thinking that we don’t even perceive it as a problem, instead we tell those with physical disadvantage that they were just not made for a certain sport.
So we are far from competing with perfect here, and being able to pick other attributes to group by should enable us create much more evenly matched groups. I mean, right now we just use one deciding factor for everything and call it a day. And that’s before we get into the whole gender discussion.
Regarding the actual formulas, I think we just need to find good tradeoffs between fairness and practicality. Of course even a perfectly fair system will fail if it doesn’t work in practice, but I think we can do much better than just using gender in pretty much all cases.
You’ve just killed all of women’s sports by relegating them to the bottom tiers, congratulations.
This is just a complete non solution to the problem and effectively just ends up with trans people being banned from sports altogether.
“Trans” sports teams/leagues (whatever that means) can’t really exist at the amateur local level anywhere but the biggest citiess due to there being not a lot of trans people, and even less trans people who want to play sports.
The struggle to even get enough trans guys or trans girls to form a team for football or whatever would be a challenge in and of itself, and then this team would pretty much have to fly across the country (or possibly to a different country altogether) to even play a match.
This is not a reasonable solution for anyone but the people who want to ban trans people from sports.
The second issue is that this is just fear mongering and not an actual issue to be solved but that’s being argued all over this thread already.
What is your suggestion than?
Does he have to have a better suggestion in order to point out how yours isn’t viable?
Trans people should be allowed in the sports of their gender provided they’ve been on HRT consistently for some time
The length can be argued but 2-3 years seem to be enough.
However those sport associations claim they had researches done and conclusions were that it is not fair due to difference in physical abilities and it brings health risk for female athletes.
2-3 years doesn’t change lung size or bone density. There is a lot of stuff that doesn’t change once it’s developed.
Just make a separate league
Two categories:
- Women
- Open
Perfectly fair and simple.
It’s already the case, most sports allow for women to play in men’s leagues… But they don’t. And trans women would suffer the same way cis women would in men dominated categories (or would they? Depends on the sport I guess, nobody would complain about trans women in F1 Academy I bet)
nobody would complain about trans women in F1 Academy I bet)
Fox news was complaining about a trans woman getting a participation medal in the London Marathon, which is a mixed event anyway. Never underestimate how much these people hate trans people.
Right, I’m sure they’ll find a dumb excuse to hate on us.
You say that, but trans women are banned from playing in women’s chess. https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/38210181/fide-bans-transgender-women-women-chess-events
Yeah I forgot about that… They’re just so hateful haha there’s no reason remaining
Exactly.
women as females or identifier ? Open is males + trans females + trans males ?
Identity is irrelevant. The separation exists so that women get fair competition.
Women as in someone who was born as, and always has been, biologically female.
Open means everyone, unrestricted.
I see so in other words keep it stricly male and female category and let female to enter male category by choice.
Then we are where se are with people lobbing for change.
So, do transgender leagues get the same amount of resources as male and female? There’s no way they’re going to bring in as much money as male or even female leagues.
Female leaves done bring as much as male leagues either. So male leagues sponsors female leagues. So i guess nope, as male and female leagues do not either.
I think it’s simpler. Have two categories: one for the weaker gender, one that is open for anybody. First category is needed only for sports and hobbies where there are differences between the groups, and the decision whether it matters can be derived statistically. If there’s only one category and a significant majority of the top players are from a single gender group, they need a second category.
Then again, I’m not sure what this means if we start to apply this logic to other things. For instance, 73% of NBA players were black, 0.4% asian in 2021, but that doesn’t seem like something that needs fixing.
I’m not sure i follow. So you basically suggest to keep male and female categories but rename them? Or do you suggest to devide female category to stronger and weaker ?
Default to one category, separate if statistics show that one gender group is significantly stronger. Some sports have already established that knowledge, so they can have 2 categories as is. Male and female are fine names.
So status quo more or less, but underlining that gender groups have differences in some things. That seems to be unclear to some people.
Well that;s how we got male and female categories. But now we got in between who are apparently weaker than males but can often easily top females. Obvious decision would be to go for certain win.
There are obviously people who misuse it unjustly to get to the top. Where is the line to become weaker? Would you lower rewards for weaker category to motivate folks to move to stronger one, wouldn’t that make females left at the tail all the time ?But now we got in between who are apparently weaker than males but can often easily top females.
They have the burden of proof to irrefutably show that they are on the same level as the women. I don’t know and don’t have to know how they can do that. If they cannot do that, they go to the default category or come up with something else to do with their life.
In priciple i agree but … i can imagine that it’s pretty simple to just give weak performance on the test day then win every competition ever after but just sightly ahead of females.
God I thought it said the international criminal court
Fuck this. Sports are games, they shouldn’t be taken this seriously. Like, for example, Micheal Phelps has webbed feet and freaky monster lungs but nobody’s banned him from swimming events for that. Every human is different, people need to fucking accept that sports can never be totally fair and realize that’s not what this is about.
By this logic, we should all go back to open division sports, which is what historically led to a de facto exclusion of women from all sports because, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of them were unable to be competitive in divisions that had men in them.
Most sports actually have an open division. People tend to just call it the men’s division since, as you point out, women get completely zoned out by men in sports. High school boys dominate leader boards when compared to Olympian women.
While I won’t deny there is a biological difference that impacts performance there’s also a systemic societal difference that doesn’t help.
In general women are not given the same support, whether from family, schools, coaches, research or funding, to become top athletes.
It’s certainly much better that it has been in the past now days and it’s getting better, but even just people saying “women aren’t as good as men” is something that sinks into the psyche of women who want to compete.
It’s akin to men from poorer nations who can’t afford resources, time and training, having a hard time competing against “richer” nations who invest more into it
How about adding a third category instead: a free for all category where all genders are welcome to compete and can use as much steroid as they want.
While I think people should be allowed to do anything they want with their bodies, I understand that sports leagues don’t want the athletes to push boundaries and destroy their bodies with stupid amounts of steroids.
I’ve always said baseball needs to just say fuck it and let guys go nuts. I want to see someone throw a 108mph fastball that gets clobbered 550ft.
I think that gender specific leagues need to go the way of the dodo but while they’re here they’re essentially weight/strength classes and most transwomen are more fairly matched against AMAB men than AFAB women.
Ideally, we could just realize that having multiple league levels based on body type would be much more equitable.
most transwomen are more fairly matched against AMAB men than AFAB women.
Source?
And backing up your claim, thank you!
I just want you to know that the study that was posted is trash. Here’s link to a comment on that same study by 3 professors from the same journal https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-023-01928-8
And here’s a quick TL;DR from the conclusion of the comment on the study is that the original study’s scientific basis is dubious at best, it hasn’t been properly peer reviewed, despite not being properly peer reviewed this article is being shared and used as a basis for shaping policies.
That doesn’t surprise me, but I wasn’t aware of that. Thanks!
No worries at all. I know this is a really sensitive subject and it’ll basically require a change in how we view sports leagues and gender to resolve.
Not only do I think this study is complete non-sense, but 3 other professors at the same journal published their comments and concerns with this study and how it’s being spread around as though it’s fact when in truth, the “science” in it is rubbish.
Here’s a link to the article in PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37726582/
PubMed unfortunately doesn’t have a transcript, but you can read the transcript here (or click on the link next to DOI in PubMed that I linked above): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-023-01928-8Here’s TL;DR from the conclusion of the comment on the study is that the original study’s scientific basis is dubious at best, it hasn’t been properly peer reviewed, despite not being properly peer reviewed this article is being shared and used as a basis for shaping policies.
And besides, even if the original study were true, wouldn’t transgender athletes would be winning at a rate higher than their prevalence in sports? Considering about 1% of people are transgender, they should win 1% of the time, but that doesn’t happen, because any advantage is entirely fictitious.
And even if there was an advantage, there are lots of people who have a biological advantage. That’s just a part of sports that’s impossible to eliminate because we’re not all robots running on the exact same hardware and software.
You aren’t factoring in how many people win as a %. Only like .01% of people compete at the top level of sports, if 1% of people are Trans it’s going to take a while to actually hit someone that is both talented enough to be relevant and trans.
It really depends on the sport imo. Trans women may retain some more muscle and some parts of the skeleton are largely unaffected, but muscle elasticity, hip rotation, flexibility, and endurance all end up being more dependent on hormones than birth sex in the long term. How much these things matter varies a lot from sport to sport, and the current system is not sufficient to balance these traits even among people of the same sex. Multiple leagues based on broad body types sounds reasonable, but I have no idea how complicated the rules would have to be to make it completely fair, given we already accept a great deal of unfairness currently.
I’d look to wrestling as an example - it manages to have several leagues of weight classes that participate… but yea, it’d be a pretty big change.
As a trans woman who works out but doesn’t really do sports because people make them suck, I have to say that I don’t think that study is correct based of my experiences. Trans women often have lower testosterone than cis women after being on hrt for a while (2 years max typically, but it can be sooner). When I started hrt, literally only about 2 weeks later I noticed massive muscle atrophy and I literally couldn’t even help my father move heavy furniture that I doubt I would have had a problem with before. After that I decided to start lifting and it’s been a few months since then I am still not as strong as I used to be.
Petite women compete against tall women all the time though
That’s why I think weight/strength classes are the way to go - we arbitrarily divide sports in half by gender and it makes most body types uncompetitive.
The problem is that there’s too much money on the line. If certain performance enhancing drugs (like testosterone) are allowed, every athlete will be required to take them if they want to compete at the highest level. Athletes are known to favor short-term gains over long-term health consequences, and they’re pressured by their environment to do so as well.
Capitalism ruining good things, as always. In the case of trans men on testosterone, though, who cares? I feel like that just levels the playing field for them generally. And as a trans woman? Estrogen has fucked up my body’s ability to build muscle if anything. These arguments all boil down to excuses.
Even on estrogen, the power level is nowhere near equal to born women. I personally think that the only fair solution is to have separate trans divisions, but there’s the question whether there are enough contenders for that. Even women often have problems, I know a kickboxing slender woman who constantly complains about not being able to find competitors and always having to compete at a severe disadvantage.
Says who? Why segregate sports in the first place? Why can’t they just exist for the sole purpose of fun? Does it really matter if trans people have a advantage? Are you that afraid of trans people succeeding? Is any of this really enough to justify dehumanizing trans+intersex people and shunting them out of another public space?
Why is it dehumanizing to have a separate division? Is it dehumanizing for women to have a separate division?
You can do sports for fun, but not the one with the money behind it. The one without the money behind it is not the one you can see in broadcasts, it happens elsewhere. Because broadcasts cost money, and so those are interlinked.
So, the whole topic is only about the one with the money behind it, aka the one not done for fun.
Because trans people are their gender, and because intersex and nonbinary people exist too and we all deserve to have access to the same opportunities as others. That means the big, televised sports too. Gendered divisions don’t give cis women a fair chance at a national platform either, comparatively and oftentimes unduly sexualize the players. If it’s really about fairness every single team should have a certain distribution among height/weight classes if not among genders as well. There is no reason I see most sports can’t be coed either if this is practiced. It’s almost like it was never about fairness in the first place… 🤔
That means the big, televised sports too.
I never said otherwise.
If you want any given game to be fair every single team should have a certain distribution among height/weight classes if not among genders as well.
That works for a team sport, but what about sport for a single person, like kickboxing/grappling/tennis/etc?
I couldn’t agree more. The one thing “SPORTS” means is, everybody gets to particpate. EVERYBODY. That’s what the word “sports” means. It does not mean only the people are are “straight” get to play. Or only the people who are the physically strongest. It is about interest in participating and having opportunities for everyone to be able to play regardless of their sexual or gender identity.
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Oh I’m american I barely know what cricket is tbqh. I just hate how people like me are being discriminated against and excluded from healthy, mainstream pursuits like this especially. Pretty much the holy grail of trans representation because it’s the most dangerous-to-conservative-sensibilities kind of visibility we could have. Like, gods forbid fit trans people do something so normal on TV
Women should be allowed to compete in women’s leagues. There could be some argument if the sport gave heavy advantage to people who had high testosterone during their teens, but that is not the case in cricket. This shouldn’t be a discussion.
Not sure how familiar you are with the sport but the fastest bowled delivery in the men’s game is over 100mph. In the women’s game the fastest is just over 80mph.
Couple that with the fact that women have slower reaction times (men’s are faster although some may argue the difference is negligible), and men have greater muscle mass (to hit harder and further), the playing field isn’t exactly level.
Not sure if you’re familiar with transition as a concept? Because your uncritical comparing men to women without even considering that transition might have an effect implies you aren’t.
indeed, I think even the top transfem olympian did not rate compared to the top ‘natural’ (I use that word only to distinguish, not to disparage) women.
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Cricket isn’t on that list. What is the relevance? Genetic differences are significant somewhere else?
And “men who pretend to be women” are not what transgender is about. Saying so is very shitty.
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If it isn’t that big of a deal, you are free to compete in the open division like everyone else. (The division commonly known as the men’s division as women don’t bother even trying.)
Damn straight the reason why people play sports is to have fun.
It’s makes me sick these commentators are their hiding transphobia in their “competitive arguments”.
We don’t need to have these invasive requirements to test someone’s hormones just let people play their gender identity. No human deserves to be excluded from having fun when they only got one life.
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It’s worth noting that “scientifically a male” is genuinely a more complicated phrase than it might initially seem at first, because trans people generally do more than just socially transition, changing their name and clothes. Sex differences are primarily mediated through sex hormones, and radically changing one’s hormonal profile, as happens with hormone therapies, causes very real biological effects. A trans woman, while being stronger than your average cis woman, will lose a meaningful amount of muscle due to the lack of testosterone (and will also generally develop better cardiovascular health, again due to the lack of testosterone). Depending on the sport and the individuals in question, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that there are cases where some amount of residual muscle doesn’t necessarily confer a particularly large benefit such that a blanket ban is warranted.
Depending on the sport and the individuals in question, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that there are cases where some amount of residual muscle doesn’t necessarily confer a particularly large benefit such that a blanket ban is warranted.
Agreed. That said, I’ve yet to see a major sport league that bans transgenders in women’s divisions without at least some empirical research existing that demonstrates an unfair advantage.
I mean both chess and pool have recently banned transgender women from competition.
So the push is not purely an evidence-driven one. In fact there is a very loud political faction trying to remove transgender women from all events, from the highest levels all the way down to park fun-runs.
My bad, I actually wasn’t aware of that. That’s fucking ridiculous.
Isn’t that ridiculous, given that women have empirically proven to be better swimmers in most cases that most men. And I’m certain the reason for banning transgender women from chess is because they realize these people are smarter than the average bear. And more likely to outclass their opponents every time. And you know what? They’re right about that.
Can’t pretend I’m particularly familiar with the specifics, but to be clear, I do think it is absolutely possible, and indeed likely, that there are situations where a genuine advantage is present, and I think the line really needs to be drawn by each individual sports body.
I understand the idealism of wanting there to be no real restrictions, but you need some regulations, if only to prevent the bad-faith asshole who decides to identify as a woman for the day of a competition. As time passes and more studies are done, we’ll be able to draw more evidence-based lines that more accurately balance accessibility and fairness.
My only real point here is just to say that this phrase “biological/scientific male” is way way messier than a simple binary category like that might suggest. A huge amount of tissues in the body of some level of sex differentiation, and that differentiation also varies a lot based on the stage of development that their exposed to hormones. A trans person isn’t going to change their skeleton with hormones, but there are other things that do meaningfully change to get closer to the other sex. A trans woman’s breasts, for instance, are genuinely just as “biologically female” as any cis woman’s.
Cricket is as a fun as baseball.
Downvote this foo!
Or don’t, I’m not your mama.
I thought I told you to get rid of those sideburns! …“But Mr Burns I don’t think know you what sideburns…”
I’ve had it with your attitude! You’re outa here!!
Appropriate then, that the issue is dicks
Not all trans women have
I’d be mad except… it’s fucking cricket.
Cricket is the second-most popular sport in the world.
I’ve literally never seen a game of it, and know nothing about it, but this affects a lot of people.
Like baseball but slower.
Get that terf garbage out of here.
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The ultimate reason it’s wrong to ban transgender people from competing in athletics competitions is that the implication is that testosterone can be considered a performance enhancing drug – even if the athlete in question is well within hormonal levels of any other cisgender athlete in the same sport.
If that’s the case, then it opens the door to banning other athletes for exceeding the testosterone limit, and guess what? Cisgender women with African heritage naturally produce more testosterone than the average woman world-wide. So banning transgender athletes leads to potentially banning African women which is obviously racist and wrong to do.
Also, poly cystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is a condition that affects about 1 in 10 women and a very common side effect of PCOS is elevated testosterone levels. So 1 in 10 women would be banned for medical reasons outside of their control. And banning people for a medical condition is ableist and obviously wrong to do.
And, ultimately, sports aren’t fair. We try to make them equitable by making the rules universal, but biological advantages are just part of sports. If we start banning athletes for hormones, why not ban athletes for being taller than average? Why not ban athletes for having better vision than average? Or better peripheral vision? Or faster reflexes? If only the absolute average, or below average people were allowed to compete then nearly half of all people would be unable to compete.
Plus, the vast majority of athletes say that they don’t want transgender people to be banned from their respective sports.
And not to mention that it’s just rude to exclude transgender athletes, and if it were truly such an advantage to be transgender then why aren’t transgender people winning tournaments left and right? About 1% of people are transgender, so if transgender people are winning 1% of all tournaments then that would mean that they’re exactly on exactly equal footing with their competitors. But I suspect that less than 1% of tournament winners are transgender which means that transgender people are actually at a disadvantage, which again, is fine because sports are inherently unfair as I outlined above.
At the end of the day, transgender athlete bans hurt everyone, and anti-transgender jerks are just making a big stink about it because it sounds reasonable on it’s face to uninformed people and so it’s a good wedge issue to bring up. Anti-transgender people don’t care about the sports they’re “trying to save”, they just hate transgender people and want to see them suffer, and anyone who entertains their non-sense is complicit (probably unknowingly) in that suffering.
So please, those of you who are reasonable, shut down any discussion of transgender sports bans.
Your argument is “there is natural variation therefore we can’t set limits” could be missing the nuance that there can be a much larger impact from puberty changes than current hormone levels
Another commenter below shared this study that describes the effect of make puberty as being much more impactful on explosive strengthb than current testosterone levels.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289906/
What are your thoughts on this?
From your link
Harper analyzed self-selected and self-reported race times for eight transgender women runners of various age categories who had, over an average 7 year period (range 1–29 years), competed in sub-elite middle and long distance races within both the male and female categories. The age-graded scores for these eight runners were the same in both categories, suggesting that cross-hormone treatment reduced running performance by approximately the size of the typical male advantage.
That reminds me of the swimmer Lia Thomas who placed 6th and 2nd before starting HRT. Raced against men after starting, which dropped her down drastically. Then when she raced against women she resumed being a top 10 athlete, winning her race (didn’t even brake female records mind you, just won her race).
The study has some bias imo. For starters most studies I’ve looked at say 2 years is when the strength levels start to even out, while most measurements from this one are from a year. The major exception being a study from 2004 that only looked at mass not strength.
When this study does look at strength it very specifically looked at grip strength and leg strength (this is where I got suspicious of bias). Trans women have larger hands due to our skeletons being forged during male puberty, which could account for the differences in grip strength (easier to grip/more muscles being used when there is more hand to use). And as for the part looking at thigh and quadriceps strength: every cis woman I know has significantly stronger legs than they do their upper body and that is for both the ones that go to the gym and the ones that don’t. It is completely possible (and not even mentioned which is where the feeling of bias comes from) that HRT has less of an effect on leg strength than it does upper body/core. If cis women who go through an estrogenized puberty have stronger legs than arms then it stands to reason that trans women would loose less muscle mass in their legs than their arms.
Edit: bias might be the wrong word here, maybe closer to an oversight than outright bias
Edit 2: found a more recent study that states endurance things like running and swimming level out by around 2 years, with most things level out after about 4 with the exception of upper body strength. Which is still declining in trans women past that point
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/clinem/dgad414/7223439
So the 1 year that is recommended is too soon for trans women athletes to start competing, but for endurance sports like racing and swimming it should be fine by 2 years. Other sports may need more time, but also we shouldn’t be delaying the lives of trans people for so long. We need to find a good middle ground because it’s not like exceptional cis women don’t exist in those same sports.
This is all also completely ignoring that if a trans women starts hrt before puberty then there is no real difference. So the real solution is to let trans teenagers transition.
Thanks for the detailed response! Interesting
That study is irrelevant and their findings don’t change anything about my answer. That study could say “African women have more lean muscle mass and are taller than the average athlete” and you wouldn’t be sharing that study around saying that African women shouldn’t be allowed to compete with other athletes because that’s racist and stupid.
And besides, taking an extreme example and comparing it to the average is dishonest. The best way to determine if transgender athletes are actually dominating in sports is their top level tournament wins. As I said, about 1% of people are transgender, so about 1% of tournament winners should be transgender if everything is even. Anything above, means an advantage and anything below means a disadvantage.
So where are all the transgender people absolutely dominating tournaments above the average of transgender prevalence?
You can’t show me that because it doesn’t happen, and even if it did happen, that’s just sports! You simply can’t ban people for a biological advantage in a hobby where biological advantages are literally everywhere. Height, vision, reflexes, agility, intelligence, etc.
Take a note on how the other user responded to my question. You instead responded with hostility, good luck convincing anyone if that’s how you engage with a genuine attempt to discuss the topic
I apologize if you’re not a transphobe, but you reposted a singular study whose findings are trash at best and outright bigotry at worst. I think it’s natural for me to assume you’re a transphobe trying to troll considering I specifically said:
…anti-transgender jerks are just making a big stink about it because it sounds reasonable on it’s face to uninformed people and so it’s a good wedge issue to bring up. Anti-transgender people don’t care about the sports they’re “trying to save”, they just hate transgender people and want to see them suffer, and anyone who entertains their non-sense is complicit (probably unknowingly) in that suffering.
So please, those of you who are reasonable, shut down any discussion of transgender sports bans.
Of course trying to continue the discourse would make me assume that you’re transphobic. You should have been more clear if that’s not the case. Regardless, it shouldn’t take away from my point. Again though, I apologize if you posted it from a perspective of honest discussion, but I hope you understand that this topic is often a target of trolls who seek to muddy the water by “just asking questions” in bad faith.
You don’t get to decide what people can and cannot discuss. And if someone replying was transphobic then maybe responding calmly and rationally would help change their mind. Just calling people transphobes does more to turn people away from your cause than just not replying
You’re just some person on the Internet arguing for the sake of arguing. For trans people these arguments are used to slowly erase our rights. Don’t demand civility from people you help oppres because you were board.
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IMHO, if fairness is the goal, then categories should be based on performance history alone. People should be competing with others of their class in the sport being played.
If I’m the best at tennis, I want to compete against the other best players, not the other best players with (or without) a peen or some other stupid grouping.
Yeah, something like weight classes in boxing/wrestling/MMA. Brock Lesnar vs Uriah Faber (yes, I haven’t watched MMA in a while) isn’t a good match for multiple reasons: Brock has way more muscle so he can hit a lot harder, but his muscles also make him a lot slower than Uriah who can use quick moves and grapples to his favor.
Women are naturally weaker than men, it’s a fact. A man can change on the surface (physically appearance) after becoming a woman, but his bone structure and ability to build more muscle is still there.
Your language betrays you, I don’t argue with transphobes.
Trans women out perform cis women in nearly all sports and need to be banned. Quit trying to blame this on transphobia and stop helping people cheat at sports.
African women out perform lots of athletes in nearly all sports, should they be banned from competing? No, of course not, that’s bigotry. Trans women don’t out perform cis women or there would be overwhelming evidence that they’re winning tournaments constantly over cisgender women. Where’s the evidence? Good luck finding it, because it doesn’t exist, because it’s not true.
And as I pointed out, sports are inherently unfair. It’s not cheating to have a biological advantage. It’s only cheating if you break the established rules of the actual game. Being more intelligent than your opponent in chess is not cheating, but moving a piece during your opponents turn is. See the difference? One is a biological advantage which is fine, the other is breaking a rule within the sport itself which is not fine.
I think that for us to move forward as a society we either need to drop leagues altogether (and just accept that female athletes in some categories will be vanishingly rare) or adopt body-type based leagues that are more fair in grouping up competitors according to their inherent bodily advantages.
