So, I’ve had moments in the past where I might have spent 30 seconds thinking about this subject but ultimately I don’t give a fuck about competitive sports so my analysis usually ends up being, all competitive sports should be banned because competitive sports are dumb. Which is admittedly a neanderthal take.

But yeah, now the global athletic showdown is going down and seemingly everyone in my immediate vicinity keeps clutching their pearls and I guess I’m sick of not being able to advocate for trans comrades appropriately and articulate a proper response.

So what’s a better response besides, “who cares?” Am I missing something? Like, if all things were equitable, what would or should competitions look like?

Help me out. I honestly have no idea.

  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    Dividing team sports only on weight class would mean there’d be no professional women in sports, cis or trans. Testosterone is a performance enhancing drug for a reason.

    what, you think being on testosterone at any weight regardless of training means that all professional sports at every weight would be dominated by men? i disagree with that. i think that’s just an echo of the misogyny inherent to the way we currently organize sport.

    In recreational sport it does and doesn’t matter, since most recreational co-ed leagues have a minimum amount of women you have to have on the field at once to keep things balanced. Idk if a quota rule would make sense at the pro level, and that would still be using the western european rendering of gender.

    this is already nonsense as a rule because of enbies and the broad set of possibilities that exist biologically among humans. there are no male and female, those are flattened abstractions. i recently watched an enby friend have to navigate this concept for a rec league; they had to decide whether to misgender themselves as a woman because of a quota rule. i think maybe that’s not a good idea.

    regardless, there are sports where it would make sense to divide by weight and sports where it wouldn’t, as I said. but the important thing is that division by gender and/or sex is nonsense. otherwise, why aren’t all women’s sports leagues being dominated by AFAB enbies who inject T? by your reasoning, wouldn’t that be an obvious and unfair accessible advantage in professional sport?

    • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      If you’re injecting T I don’t think pro sports leagues let you compete in the women’s division.

      You’re also putting words in my mouth and creating ridiculous comparisons, I’m not arguing untrained cis man with testosterone vs trained woman with IOC defined woman levels of testosterone. You also didn’t address the soccer example.

      I don’t think I’d beat Serena Williams at tennis. But if there’s no gender in sport, the top 200 tennis players in the world who actually make a living off of tennis would be 99% men. I think even Serena Williams said something like that. The battle of the sexes in tennis was an old alcoholic vs a pro woman, and even that was pretty close. I think it’s sexist to say “women, you can do sport for fun at the low levels, but men you can actually go pro and take it more seriously”.

      If you don’t believe this then you don’t believe in sexual dimorphism and we’re not having a serious discussion. At that point there’s no point of trans women lowering their T levels, or transmen going on T because clearly it has no effect. Why do you think baseball players roided up? It’s not to have smaller testicals, it’s to make ball go farther with the extra T.

      Professional men and professional women both train at their sport for their job. Pro women soccer teams lose to U18 boys teams because of the testosterone, and those U18 have less training and experience.

      In weightlifting the male and female records at every weight class differ by a lot. In athletics the records are all pretty different. The only completely equal events women can win at high levels are shooting and ultra-marathons. And idk maybe curling or breakdancing and not-as-directly-physical stuff like that.

      I’m arguing currently professional equally fully trained pro men vs women. Or equally trained men and women at any level really. Abolishing gender in every league tomorrow would mean women wouldn’t really have opportunity to compete. Every coed league has the quota rule because otherwise there’s be a group of cis guys plus one woman taking games too seriously and crushing everyone, and that wouldn’t be fun really.

      You don’t sound like you follow any professional sport or know much about performance.