Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Isn’t it “crossing” not “distance” ie as in transparent, transport, etc
So “crossing” between two genders (and I’m aware that cross-gender can have a specific meaning but can never keep the precise details of the lingo straight*)
* obvious I didn’t mean “straight” in a non-binary sense…
I guess that is another translation - I was always told it was far and near
I suspect that trans meant what I think and then some overeducated Cambridge lawyer made up “cis” (according to your theory) based on trying to prove how clever they were
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
And there are indeed some people who don't like the term because they don't feel the "gender assigned at birth" context is well-understood.
“Sex” is observed at birth from secondary sexual characteristics and “recorded” -not “assigned”.
“Gender” is a social construct which some people believe in, some people don’t. Gender identity belief is a belief system recognised in U.K. law - as is the obverse “that it’s made up nonsense.”
“Gender” says boys should be masculine and girls feminine.
So some feminine boys and masculine girls have had medical intervention to “fix” that - which as Cass has pointed out for many may be a terrible mistake.
Some will persist in a “gender identity” at variance with their biological sex (which cannot be changed, you will die the sex you were born) and transition is beneficial.
Clinicians simply do not know which children will persist and which will not - many turn out to be same sex attracted and have internalised homophobia.
I mean - is observation of secondary sexual characteristics at birth the only criteria for sex? Because many young children have secondary sexual characteristics at birth that change (such as those with internal gonads) and in the past doctors used to give unconsented to surgeries to children with atypical secondary sex characteristics to make them fit more into their understanding of typical sex characteristics. Assigning them a sex, you might say.
Gender in no way says boys should be masculine and girls feminine - that's patriarchy. Gender can mean multiple things, depending on the context (you can perform gender, you can feel and understand your gender, your gender can be policed) - but when it comes to an individual it generally means their own understanding of self in relation to their assigned gender at birth. Many trans women are not feminine; many trans men are not masculine. They are not not trans because of that.
Biological sex can, to a degree, be changed. We have discussed this previously, so I won't go on at length, but much of what we consider "biological sex" is just the way the body processes and exhibits characteristics based on the hormones the body is processing. If you give someone assigned male at birth feminising hormones, it does not take that long for their body to start acting like the body of someone assigned female at birth, and visa versa. Transwomen start growing breast tissue more like cis women, have fat redistribution more like cis women, have hair and skin more like cis women, have hormonal cycles more like cis women, etc etc. Transmen start having acne more like cis men did through their puberty, they will get "bottom growth" and hair will start growing in areas that are less common in cis women and more common in cis men (the online joke is "no one warned my I'd get hair growing out of my ass"), their voices crack, etc. etc. Sure - your chromosomes don't change, and your sex organs don't change completely (but they do change) - but a lot of "biological" change happens.
We have a good understanding of young people and desistance - the vast majority of young people who take puberty blockers wish to continue on to cross sex hormones and the vast majority of trans people who take cross sex hormones or have gender affirming surgery say the experience was a positive one. The rate of regret amongst people who take these routes is typically recorded as between 2-5%. This is remarkably positive in medicine and, if anything, suggests to me that we gate keep trans healthcare too much because, if we were giving out trans healthcare willy nilly, the regret rates would be much higher (we can compare this regret rate to abortion, pregnancy, knee operations and see that these things have much higher regret rates and no serious people out there demanding we limit access to those things because of that).
You cannot change large gametes into small gametes, or vice versa. Your sex is fixed throughout life. You may modify some secondary characteristics, but that’s all.
As Cass points out, we simply do not know the rate of desistance because, scandalously, almost all the NHS Adult Gender clinics refused to cooperate with York University - and if their record keeping is as poor as Tavi’s they won’t know either.
In any case, desisters are unlikely to remain in contact with clinicians who they may think have harmed them.
So your definition of sex is only based on the size of gametes the body produces? Because that isn't what doctors test for when they assign a sex at birth, is it?
Pretty sure the test is winkle vs no winkle, as per Blackadder...
The issue at hand is that not everyone accepts the concept of gender and assigning of sex. Its a complicated old story for a small percentage of humans. For the vast, vast majority its really easy.
Sport, refuges, healthcare and prisons are the sticking points for a lot of people. Sport is the one I feel strongly about. Its about fairness. You can argue that genetic advantage within a sex (or gender if you must) is unfair. It is. Michael Phelps is almost designed to be an incredible swimmer, most fast bowlers in cricket are tall, as are basketballers, marathon runners tend to be slight of frame and you can go on and on. The issue is for sports where physique is important (i.e. almost all) a transwoman will have some legacy of the time that their body was behaving as a man. If you decide age 18 to transition the 'damage' damage is mostly done. That cannot all be reversed by hormone treatment.
And you know what, thats a bit harsh on transwomen who also want to do sport. But its massively more unfair on ciswomen (and I loathe that term with a passion) to let transwomen who have the attributes of male puberty then compete against them.
Recent studies suggest otherwise and that transwomen on HRT may actually be at physical disadvantages compared to ciswomen: again to show my citation
And fairness in sports is a contested idea - because fairness for who? I wonder if Michael Phelps was from Africa and had all the same atypical traits if it would be accepted; it isn't when African cis women happen to have atypical conditions that put them at an advantage. When you start policing bodies like this what becomes the typical body, what becomes the "standard" for acceptable cis woman? Some African athletes might say that sports organisations defer to whiteness more than anything substantial.
And these "sticking points" are not based on evidence of an issue. There are not a lot of transwomen excelling in sports. There are not a lot of transwomen causing issues in refuges or on hospital wards. In these environments and circumstances trans women fall more in line with their cis women counterparts than their cis male counterparts. So why is the issue trans women? Bigotry. The dislike or distrust of a group not based of evidence of wrongdoing but a gut feeling that they must be up to something is just bigotry, pure and simple.
I've just been to a talk by Prof Harold Thimbleby about parallels between NHS digital health and the Post Office scandal. Much of the talk is in his free book at https://www.harold.thimbleby.net/booklet/
He was involved in investigating a miscarriage of justice at the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend where >70 nurses were accused of misconduct when paper records disagreed with the IT record. Turned out that the IT record had deleted a bunch of data. There are obvious parallels with the Post Office scandal and he's now involved in the campaigns over the presumption in common law that computer systems are accurate.
It is an absurd and unjust law and that presumption needs to be removed. There is a whole industry of reporting and fixing software bugs for obvious reasons, systems are not always well designed, or accurate as business models evolve and new parameters are brought in.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
This is true, but then that's an argument for not having a separate female category at all. If women are not fast enough to qualify for the 100m final against men then so be it. Sport isn't fair.
But, for whatever reason, we have chosen to have female competitions in most sports. So there has to be a dividing line between who qualifies as female and who doesn't. Accepting that there will be a small number of people for whom this dividing line will be complicated - intersex, unusual chromosomes, trans, etc - where it actually ends up is always going to leave some people aggrieved about what side of it people lie on.
Accordingly, I would seek to keep the qualification as simple as possible. The current attempts by athletics to use testosterone levels seem to be needlessly complicated. Allowing people to self-certify as female damages the integrity of a female category at all - but any attempt to include some trans people and not others, runs into issues with complication and arbitrariness.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
The Scottish Greens have been accused of prioritising ideology over protecting children after the party again refused to endorse an expert report into gender healthcare.
Patrick Harvie, who until last month was a Scottish government minister, claimed that a Holyrood motion welcoming the Cass Review and recognising it as a “valid scientific document” was not “supportable” by his party....
All other parties, including the SNP, endorsed Hilary Cass’s report at Holyrood. However, all seven Green MSPs voted against the motion, with Mr Harvie claiming that transgender people were having their “very existence refuted”....
Brian Whittle, a Tory MSP, asked Mr Harvie whether he would now seek to listen to “alternative experts” on climate change after he refused to accept the findings of Dr Cass, a widely respected consultant paediatrician.
“You don’t get to choose your experts just to fit your ideology,” Mr Whittle said. “Especially when it’s the health of children at stake.
The Cass report is not a scientific document - it did not go through peer review, even if it did review some peer reviewed studies. The Cass report is, at best, a policy document written by a healthcare expert and, at worst, a clear attempt to ignore the growing consensus that transgender healthcare, including for young people, is not a threat and has positive impacts. We saw Cass only the other day talking about how "other methods" such as antidepressants, antianxiety medication and therapy "had not been tried" with young people expressing gender dysphoria and wanting to transition which is a) not true and b) beside the point because you can be both trans and depressed at the same time!
Do you know what peer review means? This is absolutely a scientific document - its a review of lots of research. You just don't like it because it doesn't ape your world view.
Peer review means it going through the scrutiny of other people with expertise (peers) reviewing the work before publication. Which the Cass report didn't go through. Some people argue if it needed to, but I would personally say if you want to call the Cass report "science" it needs to have gone through some form of peer review.
Rubbish. Utter drivel. The paper I am writing at the moment is not science yet because it's not been submitted to peer review? You just don't like it because it has a different view to yours.
The scientific method requires that things that are published go through peer review to check that the methodology makes sense, the results are real, and that the experiment or scenario within the paper itself is repeatable...
Peer review prior to publication is something required by convention, rather than something required by 'the scientific method' itself.
The Cass report includes discussion and analysis of a number of scientific publications, though comes to few conclusions about them other than that they are far from definitive.
It also includes a great deal of narrative writing on sociopolitical issues, as well as the state of knowledge in the field.
It's certainly not a scientific paper in the accepted sense. And its own conclusions are far from definitive, either.
Agree. I've written plenty of reports for funders (often made public) that are not peer reviewed. Many of them get more exposure than the papers - I've had the reports picked up by BBC/ITV etc but not the papers (I normally will package the same research up in a peer reviewed paper too, with a slightly different angle/more analysis).
The Cass review is a report. Whether it's called scientific is largely semantics.* It summarises the evidence** and then, due to the lack of evidence, goes further into recommendations based on the authors' best guesses/feelings about the right way forwards. The reviews that were carried out and the primary qualitative research and upcoming secondary healthcare data analysis follow the scientific method and are cautious about concluding anything where the evidence is not there. The report does (and should - no one would have been impressed if Cass had simply said "we don't know, more research is needed) go beyond what has a sound basis in scientific evidence.
* Take my reports mentioned above - they report on science, but I'm not sure I'd call all of them scientific reports - some were a bit too broad brush and narrative for that, I think. I also think it's not that important a distinction. ** Imperfectly, but I think that's inevitable.
Which is great but my issue is that @148grss is trying to diminish the Cass report as not scientific, therefore not of value, can be ignored etc. Which is very wrong indeed.
It reminds me of those who decried that the covid vaccines where not tested fully because the times scales were quicked and overlapped. Its a position that someone doesn't like the report therefore will attack it, rather than discuss what is says and why they believe that the conclusions are wrong.
I have done that too - but the point started with the Scottish Greens saying they didn't think the Cass review was a "valid scientific document". I explained part of why I agreed with that sentiment - that it wasn't peer reviewed. Cass is not a specialist in transgender healthcare in young people, and is a specialist in children with disabilities; her publications are about children with disabilities, primarily Rett's syndrome and autism. She is out of her expertise when discussing transgender healthcare; from my point of view it would be reasonable to have experts in that field if not part of the report then at least be part of the scrutiny of the report - that doesn't seem to have been the case. That is why I was talking about the validity of calling the report a "scientific" one, because that was the nature of the conversation.
There have been over 9 publications from the Cass review that have received journal publication and were peer reviewed. https://adc.bmj.com/pages/gender-identity-service-series has the final 9 papers, but there were also some peer-reviewed protocols. However, you're right, the Cass report itself was not peer reviewed. But whether something is peer-reviewed or not does not make it not scientific. While peer-reviewed publication is the usual approach, lots of science is done and reported in other ways. But it's still scientific.
Cass does come from a different field, because of the polarised nature of discussion in the field. The review extensively consulted clinicians who are in the field, as well as those personally affected. And those 9+ publications were peer reviewed.
So, sure, one can point out that the review was not peer-reviewed and Cass comes from a different field, but most of the work was peer-reviewed and the work had input from those within the field. The conclusions of the review are controversial. I'm not saying they're necessarily right or wrong. But I think it's unhelpful to mischaracterise how the review was produced or to describe it as being not scientific.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
So why do we celebrate their achievements?. Might as well genetically screen and give the 'fittest' a medal and sportswear contract at birth.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
And there are indeed some people who don't like the term because they don't feel the "gender assigned at birth" context is well-understood.
“Sex” is observed at birth from secondary sexual characteristics and “recorded” -not “assigned”.
“Gender” is a social construct which some people believe in, some people don’t. Gender identity belief is a belief system recognised in U.K. law - as is the obverse “that it’s made up nonsense.”
“Gender” says boys should be masculine and girls feminine.
So some feminine boys and masculine girls have had medical intervention to “fix” that - which as Cass has pointed out for many may be a terrible mistake.
Some will persist in a “gender identity” at variance with their biological sex (which cannot be changed, you will die the sex you were born) and transition is beneficial.
Clinicians simply do not know which children will persist and which will not - many turn out to be same sex attracted and have internalised homophobia.
I mean - is observation of secondary sexual characteristics at birth the only criteria for sex? Because many young children have secondary sexual characteristics at birth that change (such as those with internal gonads) and in the past doctors used to give unconsented to surgeries to children with atypical secondary sex characteristics to make them fit more into their understanding of typical sex characteristics. Assigning them a sex, you might say.
Gender in no way says boys should be masculine and girls feminine - that's patriarchy. Gender can mean multiple things, depending on the context (you can perform gender, you can feel and understand your gender, your gender can be policed) - but when it comes to an individual it generally means their own understanding of self in relation to their assigned gender at birth. Many trans women are not feminine; many trans men are not masculine. They are not not trans because of that.
Biological sex can, to a degree, be changed. We have discussed this previously, so I won't go on at length, but much of what we consider "biological sex" is just the way the body processes and exhibits characteristics based on the hormones the body is processing. If you give someone assigned male at birth feminising hormones, it does not take that long for their body to start acting like the body of someone assigned female at birth, and visa versa. Transwomen start growing breast tissue more like cis women, have fat redistribution more like cis women, have hair and skin more like cis women, have hormonal cycles more like cis women, etc etc. Transmen start having acne more like cis men did through their puberty, they will get "bottom growth" and hair will start growing in areas that are less common in cis women and more common in cis men (the online joke is "no one warned my I'd get hair growing out of my ass"), their voices crack, etc. etc. Sure - your chromosomes don't change, and your sex organs don't change completely (but they do change) - but a lot of "biological" change happens.
We have a good understanding of young people and desistance - the vast majority of young people who take puberty blockers wish to continue on to cross sex hormones and the vast majority of trans people who take cross sex hormones or have gender affirming surgery say the experience was a positive one. The rate of regret amongst people who take these routes is typically recorded as between 2-5%. This is remarkably positive in medicine and, if anything, suggests to me that we gate keep trans healthcare too much because, if we were giving out trans healthcare willy nilly, the regret rates would be much higher (we can compare this regret rate to abortion, pregnancy, knee operations and see that these things have much higher regret rates and no serious people out there demanding we limit access to those things because of that).
On the subject of young people receiving gender affirming care, this 2024 paper is fairly interesting.
As you might expect, it makes the usual arguments about improved mental health outcomes for adolescents, citing 10 papers published in the past decade that have provided evidence that this is the case, along with some interesting discussion on the validity of said studies. But this is available elsewhere.
Why this paper is interesting is that it goes on to discuss the question from the question of biomedical ethics, concluding that while adolescents have varying degrees of autonomy, this is an argument for medical supervision and informed consent rather than outright restriction of gender affirming care to adolescents.
Indeed, it may be *unethical* by our common understanding of medical ethics to deny treatment to adolescents. Cruel and unusual punishment, so to speak. I have read comparatively few papers that come at the question from a philosophical angle rather than a purely biological one.
I personally see the trans issue as an ongoing debate between cartesian dualists and those who believe biology is destiny. The mind is not the body, and vice versa. Not to get Leon all excited, but I expect we'll see similar arguments in AI ethics in the next few years. Assuming we develop "thinking machines", do they have rights and autonomy because of this or do we deny them those rights because of their (lack of) biology?
I would tend to agree with the position that it is unethical by modern medical ethics to deny treatment to adolescents. It would be wrong to force a child into the closet over their sexuality, it would be wrong to force a young person to carry to term / terminate a pregnancy against their will; and I think it is clearly wrong to assume that young people do not understand themselves enough to say that they would like, specifically, puberty blockers and HRT.
As for the philosophical discussion, it is interesting to note that those who do argue that biology is inherent to womanhood are out of step with the feminist movement and what feminism has itself said and done for much of modern history. Dr Grace Lavery has a great article in the LA Review of Books that discusses this through the lens of three of the big "Gender Critical" authors / activists:
In the “spirit of Judith” I’m having a delightful artisanal blonde beer on the terrace of my gargano hotel in the heart of the Foresta Umbra listening to the toe tapping jazz etc etc
Also I am listening, astonished, to an intensity of birdsong I’ve rarely heard. It’s like dawn chorus in rural England 40 years ago. But this is mid afternoon
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
Really they should be raised on State farms by 'experts'
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
So why do we celebrate their achievements?. Might as well genetically screen and give the 'fittest' a medal and sportswear contract at birth.
For the same reason that people seek to go to the highest mountains - humans are wired to notice the unusual and that which stands out.
The mistake in sport is to mix it up with Protestant notions of "work ethic" and "merit". Just enjoy the spectacle of the exceptional.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
And there are indeed some people who don't like the term because they don't feel the "gender assigned at birth" context is well-understood.
“Sex” is observed at birth from secondary sexual characteristics and “recorded” -not “assigned”.
“Gender” is a social construct which some people believe in, some people don’t. Gender identity belief is a belief system recognised in U.K. law - as is the obverse “that it’s made up nonsense.”
“Gender” says boys should be masculine and girls feminine.
So some feminine boys and masculine girls have had medical intervention to “fix” that - which as Cass has pointed out for many may be a terrible mistake.
Some will persist in a “gender identity” at variance with their biological sex (which cannot be changed, you will die the sex you were born) and transition is beneficial.
Clinicians simply do not know which children will persist and which will not - many turn out to be same sex attracted and have internalised homophobia.
And then there is the legal definition in the Equality Act: A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.
The problem with the 2010 act is that, at the time, “sex” and “gender” were virtual synonyms - and greater clarity would be helpful as the EHRC have pointed out.
Are we living in a land Where sex and GENDER are the new Gods? Yeah!
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
This is true, but then that's an argument for not having a separate female category at all. If women are not fast enough to qualify for the 100m final against men then so be it. Sport isn't fair.
But, for whatever reason, we have chosen to have female competitions in most sports. So there has to be a dividing line between who qualifies as female and who doesn't. Accepting that there will be a small number of people for whom this dividing line will be complicated - intersex, unusual chromosomes, trans, etc - where it actually ends up is always going to leave some people aggrieved about what side of it people lie on.
Accordingly, I would seek to keep the qualification as simple as possible. The current attempts by athletics to use testosterone levels seem to be needlessly complicated. Allowing people to self-certify as female damages the integrity of a female category at all - but any attempt to include some trans people and not others, runs into issues with complication and arbitrariness.
You could just have weight categories, or something similar, and not segregate by sex at all. Height categories for sports like basketball? I also think, in certain situations, this would lead to more egalitarian outcomes - because women's sport is underfunded and methods like title 9 in the US (whilst improving the investment into women's' sport) has still not met investment parity. If men and women play on the same team in a team sport, for example, it could give women access to more resources than usual. Would this require people to rethink how sports work, would this require a period of time to adjust, would it require thought and consideration? Sure. But if "fairness in sport" is the real aim - then it makes much more sense than just saying "this group of atypical people can't compete, but this group of atypical people can compete"
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
So why do we celebrate their achievements?. Might as well genetically screen and give the 'fittest' a medal and sportswear contract at birth.
For the same reason that people seek to go to the highest mountains - humans are wired to notice the unusual and that which stands out.
The mistake in sport is to mix it up with Protestant notions of "work ethic" and "merit". Just enjoy the spectacle of the exceptional.
I'd love to see an openly juiced Olympic category. Any performance enhancing drug is allowed, no matter what quantity or how fatal it might be. The results would probably do more to stop doping in pro sport than any amount of banning!
I see that we are off topic on trans this morning.
If anyone wants a nice non-controversial 20 minute video with lunch, here's (a very good) one exploring "What is the "Correct" Speed Limit?" in cities !
I'm attracted by the approach of looking at systems safety through the lens of kinetic energy (0.5 * m * v-squared) carried by a vehicle as indicating the possible damage in a collision.
That is one angle. Another is how can we prevent accidents (or collisions) in the first place. There are four schools between me and the fish and chip shop. Three of them on roads with a 20mph limit and one on a dual carriageway (40 or 50mph, I think) yet I've not heard of any schoolchildren being hit, in part because they use subways, zebra crossings and lollipop men and women, not to mention the green cross code. In my experience as a pedestrian, it can be harder to cross the road when traffic is slower, because there are fewer large gaps between cars.
And the video maker is a little disingenuous when pointing to the dangers of larger and larger cars, and higher speed limits, and then explicitly excepts 100 tons of tram bombing along at faster speeds.
My suggestion would be to look at casualty and accident statistics and then take best practices from the safest countries, not cherrypick the Netherlands because they ride bikes.
Thanks for the comments, though - it's always good to hear different views.
TBH I think you rather perhaps mischaracterise and miss some of the points. The channel is called Not Just Bikes, because it is precisely *not* about just bikes; Jason Slaughter is an urbanist who prefers public transport to bikes - he's on record about that, repeatedly.
It's about making cities pleasant places to live and draws on experience from all over the world.
He draws on the Netherlands because there there has been a thought through and developing approach there for a number of decades. For example involving a 30-year review and maintenance cycle applied to streets, separation of transport modes into their own networks, streets designed to implement a desired speed limit rather than working backwards from the 85th percentile of how fast vehicles travel and so on.
Compare that to here, where future needs are often not taken into account, infra is plonked in and not routinely reassessed 1-3 years to address details that do not work, funding packages are a couple of years, and road maintenance is an endless succession of filling potholes with Weetabix. Most LHAs I have been in contact with do not actually know what they have installed even when they have explicit legal duties relating to it, and when given a Freedom of Information request reply with "we do not hold that information".
I think trams and larger cars are very different categories - trams are predictable, run at intervals and do not deviate from their tracks. Motor vehicles dart everywhere and anywhere essentially at random, unpredictably.
In the video there seem to be plenty of statistics quoted - even from the UK. We have plenty of statistics here about lower speeds reducing collisions and casualties - as would be expected when we have been doing it for 3 decades. Such general stats help us avoid mistakes through anecdata.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
This is true, but then that's an argument for not having a separate female category at all. If women are not fast enough to qualify for the 100m final against men then so be it. Sport isn't fair.
But, for whatever reason, we have chosen to have female competitions in most sports. So there has to be a dividing line between who qualifies as female and who doesn't. Accepting that there will be a small number of people for whom this dividing line will be complicated - intersex, unusual chromosomes, trans, etc - where it actually ends up is always going to leave some people aggrieved about what side of it people lie on.
Accordingly, I would seek to keep the qualification as simple as possible. The current attempts by athletics to use testosterone levels seem to be needlessly complicated. Allowing people to self-certify as female damages the integrity of a female category at all - but any attempt to include some trans people and not others, runs into issues with complication and arbitrariness.
You could just have weight categories, or something similar, and not segregate by sex at all. Height categories for sports like basketball? I also think, in certain situations, this would lead to more egalitarian outcomes - because women's sport is underfunded and methods like title 9 in the US (whilst improving the investment into women's' sport) has still not met investment parity. If men and women play on the same team in a team sport, for example, it could give women access to more resources than usual. Would this require people to rethink how sports work, would this require a period of time to adjust, would it require thought and consideration? Sure. But if "fairness in sport" is the real aim - then it makes much more sense than just saying "this group of atypical people can't compete, but this group of atypical people can compete"
I think a weight limit in rugby, for example, might be necessary to make it safer.
It's worth thinking about that idea. It would be interesting to see how performance in various sports related to height or weight, and if any sex differences went away when controlled for height/weight.
But I don't think the purpose of sport is to have a fair contest. The purpose is to have an exciting spectacle and to celebrate the exceptional victor.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
So why do we celebrate their achievements?. Might as well genetically screen and give the 'fittest' a medal and sportswear contract at birth.
For the same reason that people seek to go to the highest mountains - humans are wired to notice the unusual and that which stands out.
The mistake in sport is to mix it up with Protestant notions of "work ethic" and "merit". Just enjoy the spectacle of the exceptional.
I'd love to see an openly juiced Olympic category. Any performance enhancing drug is allowed, no matter what quantity or how fatal it might be. The results would probably do more to stop doping in pro sport than any amount of banning!
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
So why do we celebrate their achievements?. Might as well genetically screen and give the 'fittest' a medal and sportswear contract at birth.
For the same reason that people seek to go to the highest mountains - humans are wired to notice the unusual and that which stands out.
The mistake in sport is to mix it up with Protestant notions of "work ethic" and "merit". Just enjoy the spectacle of the exceptional.
I'd love to see an openly juiced Olympic category. Any performance enhancing drug is allowed, no matter what quantity or how fatal it might be. The results would probably do more to stop doping in pro sport than any amount of banning!
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
In the “spirit of Judith” I’m having a delightful artisanal blonde beer on the terrace of my gargano hotel in the heart of the Foresta Umbra listening to the toe tapping jazz etc etc
Also I am listening, astonished, to an intensity of birdsong I’ve rarely heard. It’s like dawn chorus in rural England 40 years ago. But this is mid afternoon
Wonderful
Is it merely wonderful, or is it actually brilliant
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
I mean I'm not going to come near the trans discussion with a barge pole (!) but what a stupid post to put on social media. Soz but it's related by marriage to all the "bloke in a dress" posts.
You and I don't have a particular dog in the fight so why make smartarse comments about it all. In public. On social media. I mean you're barely old enough to be on Facebook as it is.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
Really they should be raised on State farms by 'experts'
In the “spirit of Judith” I’m having a delightful artisanal blonde beer on the terrace of my gargano hotel in the heart of the Foresta Umbra listening to the toe tapping jazz etc etc
Also I am listening, astonished, to an intensity of birdsong I’ve rarely heard. It’s like dawn chorus in rural England 40 years ago. But this is mid afternoon
Wonderful
Is it merely wonderful, or is it actually brilliant
I’m going for wonderful. I’m also trying to remember if English woodlands ever sounded this fervent, even 30 years ago
I guess this is what you get with primordial forests in a fertile upland with lots of southern sun
I will add a negative tho: the weather is maddening in a weird way. As soon as the sun is out it feels like Ibiza in June. When it goes it’s london in March. So you are constantly shedding or gaining layers
One side of the argument in this thread reminds me of the Shakers: "The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, more commonly known as the Shakers, are a millenarian restorationist Christian sect founded c. 1747 in England and then organized in the United States in the 1780s. They were initially known as "Shaking Quakers" because of their ecstatic behavior during worship services.
Espousing egalitarian ideals, women took on spiritual leadership roles alongside men, including founding leaders such as Jane Wardley, Ann Lee, and Lucy Wright. The Shakers emigrated from England and settled in Revolutionary colonial America, with an initial settlement at Watervliet, New York (present-day Colonie), in 1774. They practice a celibate and communal utopian lifestyle, pacifism, uniform charismatic worship, and their model of equality of the sexes, which they institutionalized in their society in the 1780s. They are also known for their simple living, architecture, technological innovation, music, and furniture." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers
(Except for the "architecture, technological innovation, music, and furniture", which seem to be missing.)
I'm guessing you don't know very many trans people, Jim ? Among those of my acquaintance, talented musicians are over-represented.
In the “spirit of Judith” I’m having a delightful artisanal blonde beer on the terrace of my gargano hotel in the heart of the Foresta Umbra listening to the toe tapping jazz etc etc
Also I am listening, astonished, to an intensity of birdsong I’ve rarely heard. It’s like dawn chorus in rural England 40 years ago. But this is mid afternoon
Wonderful
Wish You Were Here came to Ledbury circa 1977/8. They were filming after school just as we were waiting opposite the Market House for the Midland Red bus home. It wasn't Judith but Chris Kelly presenting. A bunch of us went over and started chanting "Clapperboard, w***, w***, w***!". When we watched it back they had unfortunately removed the natural soundtrack.
We were more a BBC Holiday '77 kind of a family. I had a bit of a thing for Anne Greig.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
This is true, but then that's an argument for not having a separate female category at all. If women are not fast enough to qualify for the 100m final against men then so be it. Sport isn't fair.
But, for whatever reason, we have chosen to have female competitions in most sports. So there has to be a dividing line between who qualifies as female and who doesn't. Accepting that there will be a small number of people for whom this dividing line will be complicated - intersex, unusual chromosomes, trans, etc - where it actually ends up is always going to leave some people aggrieved about what side of it people lie on.
Accordingly, I would seek to keep the qualification as simple as possible. The current attempts by athletics to use testosterone levels seem to be needlessly complicated. Allowing people to self-certify as female damages the integrity of a female category at all - but any attempt to include some trans people and not others, runs into issues with complication and arbitrariness.
You could just have weight categories, or something similar, and not segregate by sex at all. Height categories for sports like basketball? I also think, in certain situations, this would lead to more egalitarian outcomes - because women's sport is underfunded and methods like title 9 in the US (whilst improving the investment into women's' sport) has still not met investment parity. If men and women play on the same team in a team sport, for example, it could give women access to more resources than usual. Would this require people to rethink how sports work, would this require a period of time to adjust, would it require thought and consideration? Sure. But if "fairness in sport" is the real aim - then it makes much more sense than just saying "this group of atypical people can't compete, but this group of atypical people can compete"
I think a weight limit in rugby, for example, might be necessary to make it safer.
It's worth thinking about that idea. It would be interesting to see how performance in various sports related to height or weight, and if any sex differences went away when controlled for height/weight.
But I don't think the purpose of sport is to have a fair contest. The purpose is to have an exciting spectacle and to celebrate the exceptional victor.
Taking this away from trans for a moment; that is one reason why I quite like the Paralympics. A good spectacle, and many of the victors are far more exceptional than 'normal' athletes. But also very, very hard to be 'fair' in terms of categories.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
I've just been to a talk by Prof Harold Thimbleby about parallels between NHS digital health and the Post Office scandal. Much of the talk is in his free book at https://www.harold.thimbleby.net/booklet/
He was involved in investigating a miscarriage of justice at the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend where >70 nurses were accused of misconduct when paper records disagreed with the IT record. Turned out that the IT record had deleted a bunch of data. There are obvious parallels with the Post Office scandal and he's now involved in the campaigns over the presumption in common law that computer systems are accurate.
It is an absurd and unjust law and that presumption needs to be removed. There is a whole industry of reporting and fixing software bugs for obvious reasons, systems are not always well designed, or accurate as business models evolve and new parameters are brought in.
It was the Law Commission that decided on the presumption that computers were right until proved otherwise.
The Commissioners may have their excuses, but I think it would be appropriate if they were all banged up untilsuch time as they could prove their innocence.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
I see that we are off topic on trans this morning.
If anyone wants a nice non-controversial 20 minute video with lunch, here's (a very good) one exploring "What is the "Correct" Speed Limit?" in cities !
I'm attracted by the approach of looking at systems safety through the lens of kinetic energy (0.5 * m * v-squared) carried by a vehicle as indicating the possible damage in a collision.
That is one angle. Another is how can we prevent accidents (or collisions) in the first place. There are four schools between me and the fish and chip shop. Three of them on roads with a 20mph limit and one on a dual carriageway (40 or 50mph, I think) yet I've not heard of any schoolchildren being hit, in part because they use subways, zebra crossings and lollipop men and women, not to mention the green cross code. In my experience as a pedestrian, it can be harder to cross the road when traffic is slower, because there are fewer large gaps between cars.
And the video maker is a little disingenuous when pointing to the dangers of larger and larger cars, and higher speed limits, and then explicitly excepts 100 tons of tram bombing along at faster speeds.
My suggestion would be to look at casualty and accident statistics and then take best practices from the safest countries, not cherrypick the Netherlands because they ride bikes.
Thanks for the comments, though - it's always good to hear different views.
TBH I think you rather perhaps mischaracterise and miss some of the points. The channel is called Not Just Bikes, because it is precisely *not* about just bikes; Jason Slaughter is an urbanist who prefers public transport to bikes - he's on record about that, repeatedly.
It's about making cities pleasant places to live and draws on experience from all over the world.
He draws on the Netherlands because there there has been a thought through and developing approach there for a number of decades. For example involving a 30-year review and maintenance cycle applied to streets, separation of transport modes into their own networks, streets designed to implement a desired speed limit rather than working backwards from the 85th percentile of how fast vehicles travel and so on.
Compare that to here, where future needs are often not taken into account, infra is plonked in and not routinely reassessed 1-3 years to address details that do not work, funding packages are a couple of years, and road maintenance is an endless succession of filling potholes with Weetabix. Most LHAs I have been in contact with do not actually know what they have installed even when they have explicit legal duties relating to it, and when given a Freedom of Information request reply with "we do not hold that information".
I think trams and larger cars are very different categories - trams are predictable, run at intervals and do not deviate from their tracks. Motor vehicles dart everywhere and anywhere essentially at random, unpredictably.
In the video there seem to be plenty of statistics quoted - even from the UK. We have plenty of statistics here about lower speeds reducing collisions and casualties - as would be expected when we have been doing it for 3 decades. Such general stats help us avoid mistakes through anecdata.
Agreed on road maintenance. Potholes, faded road markings, a plethora of signs that serves to hide important information from all but the fastest of speed-readers, to which can be added changes to the Highway Code (and legislation) that are not properly communicated to road users.
Driving does seem to be getting worse. There are lots who do not know how to use mini-roundabouts, for instance. When seat belts were made compulsory, there was a huge advertising campaign. The recent hierarchy of road users, viz drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, does not seem to be well understood and might even be misconceived if it encourages riskier behaviour. More should be done to publicise these changes, but also to review them.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
And there are indeed some people who don't like the term because they don't feel the "gender assigned at birth" context is well-understood.
“Sex” is observed at birth from secondary sexual characteristics and “recorded” -not “assigned”.
“Gender” is a social construct which some people believe in, some people don’t. Gender identity belief is a belief system recognised in U.K. law - as is the obverse “that it’s made up nonsense.”
“Gender” says boys should be masculine and girls feminine.
So some feminine boys and masculine girls have had medical intervention to “fix” that - which as Cass has pointed out for many may be a terrible mistake.
Some will persist in a “gender identity” at variance with their biological sex (which cannot be changed, you will die the sex you were born) and transition is beneficial.
Clinicians simply do not know which children will persist and which will not - many turn out to be same sex attracted and have internalised homophobia.
I mean - is observation of secondary sexual characteristics at birth the only criteria for sex? Because many young children have secondary sexual characteristics at birth that change (such as those with internal gonads) and in the past doctors used to give unconsented to surgeries to children with atypical secondary sex characteristics to make them fit more into their understanding of typical sex characteristics. Assigning them a sex, you might say.
Gender in no way says boys should be masculine and girls feminine - that's patriarchy. Gender can mean multiple things, depending on the context (you can perform gender, you can feel and understand your gender, your gender can be policed) - but when it comes to an individual it generally means their own understanding of self in relation to their assigned gender at birth. Many trans women are not feminine; many trans men are not masculine. They are not not trans because of that.
Biological sex can, to a degree, be changed. We have discussed this previously, so I won't go on at length, but much of what we consider "biological sex" is just the way the body processes and exhibits characteristics based on the hormones the body is processing. If you give someone assigned male at birth feminising hormones, it does not take that long for their body to start acting like the body of someone assigned female at birth, and visa versa. Transwomen start growing breast tissue more like cis women, have fat redistribution more like cis women, have hair and skin more like cis women, have hormonal cycles more like cis women, etc etc. Transmen start having acne more like cis men did through their puberty, they will get "bottom growth" and hair will start growing in areas that are less common in cis women and more common in cis men (the online joke is "no one warned my I'd get hair growing out of my ass"), their voices crack, etc. etc. Sure - your chromosomes don't change, and your sex organs don't change completely (but they do change) - but a lot of "biological" change happens.
We have a good understanding of young people and desistance - the vast majority of young people who take puberty blockers wish to continue on to cross sex hormones and the vast majority of trans people who take cross sex hormones or have gender affirming surgery say the experience was a positive one. The rate of regret amongst people who take these routes is typically recorded as between 2-5%. This is remarkably positive in medicine and, if anything, suggests to me that we gate keep trans healthcare too much because, if we were giving out trans healthcare willy nilly, the regret rates would be much higher (we can compare this regret rate to abortion, pregnancy, knee operations and see that these things have much higher regret rates and no serious people out there demanding we limit access to those things because of that).
On the subject of young people receiving gender affirming care, this 2024 paper is fairly interesting.
As you might expect, it makes the usual arguments about improved mental health outcomes for adolescents, citing 10 papers published in the past decade that have provided evidence that this is the case, along with some interesting discussion on the validity of said studies. But this is available elsewhere.
Why this paper is interesting is that it goes on to discuss the question from the question of biomedical ethics, concluding that while adolescents have varying degrees of autonomy, this is an argument for medical supervision and informed consent rather than outright restriction of gender affirming care to adolescents.
Indeed, it may be *unethical* by our common understanding of medical ethics to deny treatment to adolescents. Cruel and unusual punishment, so to speak. I have read comparatively few papers that come at the question from a philosophical angle rather than a purely biological one.
I personally see the trans issue as an ongoing debate between cartesian dualists and those who believe biology is destiny. The mind is not the body, and vice versa. Not to get Leon all excited, but I expect we'll see similar arguments in AI ethics in the next few years. Assuming we develop "thinking machines", do they have rights and autonomy because of this or do we deny them those rights because of their (lack of) biology?
I would tend to agree with the position that it is unethical by modern medical ethics to deny treatment to adolescents. It would be wrong to force a child into the closet over their sexuality, it would be wrong to force a young person to carry to term / terminate a pregnancy against their will; and I think it is clearly wrong to assume that young people do not understand themselves enough to say that they would like, specifically, puberty blockers and HRT.
As for the philosophical discussion, it is interesting to note that those who do argue that biology is inherent to womanhood are out of step with the feminist movement and what feminism has itself said and done for much of modern history. Dr Grace Lavery has a great article in the LA Review of Books that discusses this through the lens of three of the big "Gender Critical" authors / activists:
Interesting link, thanks - I note it too mentions cartesian dualism! Which is for me what it comes down to. The mind is not the body and biology is not destiny.
I've read Judith Butler's 'Gender Trouble' and while I get the gist of it like all poststructuralist philosophy the language is a bit dense and intimidating. Supposedly their new book, 'Who's afraid of gender?' is a bit easier to read. It's on my list of things to get round to this year.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
And there are indeed some people who don't like the term because they don't feel the "gender assigned at birth" context is well-understood.
“Sex” is observed at birth from secondary sexual characteristics and “recorded” -not “assigned”.
“Gender” is a social construct which some people believe in, some people don’t. Gender identity belief is a belief system recognised in U.K. law - as is the obverse “that it’s made up nonsense.”
“Gender” says boys should be masculine and girls feminine.
So some feminine boys and masculine girls have had medical intervention to “fix” that - which as Cass has pointed out for many may be a terrible mistake.
Some will persist in a “gender identity” at variance with their biological sex (which cannot be changed, you will die the sex you were born) and transition is beneficial.
Clinicians simply do not know which children will persist and which will not - many turn out to be same sex attracted and have internalised homophobia.
I mean - is observation of secondary sexual characteristics at birth the only criteria for sex? Because many young children have secondary sexual characteristics at birth that change (such as those with internal gonads) and in the past doctors used to give unconsented to surgeries to children with atypical secondary sex characteristics to make them fit more into their understanding of typical sex characteristics. Assigning them a sex, you might say.
Gender in no way says boys should be masculine and girls feminine - that's patriarchy. Gender can mean multiple things, depending on the context (you can perform gender, you can feel and understand your gender, your gender can be policed) - but when it comes to an individual it generally means their own understanding of self in relation to their assigned gender at birth. Many trans women are not feminine; many trans men are not masculine. They are not not trans because of that.
Biological sex can, to a degree, be changed. We have discussed this previously, so I won't go on at length, but much of what we consider "biological sex" is just the way the body processes and exhibits characteristics based on the hormones the body is processing. If you give someone assigned male at birth feminising hormones, it does not take that long for their body to start acting like the body of someone assigned female at birth, and visa versa. Transwomen start growing breast tissue more like cis women, have fat redistribution more like cis women, have hair and skin more like cis women, have hormonal cycles more like cis women, etc etc. Transmen start having acne more like cis men did through their puberty, they will get "bottom growth" and hair will start growing in areas that are less common in cis women and more common in cis men (the online joke is "no one warned my I'd get hair growing out of my ass"), their voices crack, etc. etc. Sure - your chromosomes don't change, and your sex organs don't change completely (but they do change) - but a lot of "biological" change happens.
We have a good understanding of young people and desistance - the vast majority of young people who take puberty blockers wish to continue on to cross sex hormones and the vast majority of trans people who take cross sex hormones or have gender affirming surgery say the experience was a positive one. The rate of regret amongst people who take these routes is typically recorded as between 2-5%. This is remarkably positive in medicine and, if anything, suggests to me that we gate keep trans healthcare too much because, if we were giving out trans healthcare willy nilly, the regret rates would be much higher (we can compare this regret rate to abortion, pregnancy, knee operations and see that these things have much higher regret rates and no serious people out there demanding we limit access to those things because of that).
On the subject of young people receiving gender affirming care, this 2024 paper is fairly interesting.
As you might expect, it makes the usual arguments about improved mental health outcomes for adolescents, citing 10 papers published in the past decade that have provided evidence that this is the case, along with some interesting discussion on the validity of said studies. But this is available elsewhere.
Why this paper is interesting is that it goes on to discuss the question from the question of biomedical ethics, concluding that while adolescents have varying degrees of autonomy, this is an argument for medical supervision and informed consent rather than outright restriction of gender affirming care to adolescents.
Indeed, it may be *unethical* by our common understanding of medical ethics to deny treatment to adolescents. Cruel and unusual punishment, so to speak. I have read comparatively few papers that come at the question from a philosophical angle rather than a purely biological one.
I personally see the trans issue as an ongoing debate between cartesian dualists and those who believe biology is destiny. The mind is not the body, and vice versa. Not to get Leon all excited, but I expect we'll see similar arguments in AI ethics in the next few years. Assuming we develop "thinking machines", do they have rights and autonomy because of this or do we deny them those rights because of their (lack of) biology?
I would tend to agree with the position that it is unethical by modern medical ethics to deny treatment to adolescents. It would be wrong to force a child into the closet over their sexuality, it would be wrong to force a young person to carry to term / terminate a pregnancy against their will; and I think it is clearly wrong to assume that young people do not understand themselves enough to say that they would like, specifically, puberty blockers and HRT.
As for the philosophical discussion, it is interesting to note that those who do argue that biology is inherent to womanhood are out of step with the feminist movement and what feminism has itself said and done for much of modern history. Dr Grace Lavery has a great article in the LA Review of Books that discusses this through the lens of three of the big "Gender Critical" authors / activists:
Interesting link, thanks - I note it too mentions cartesian dualism! Which is for me what it comes down to. The mind is not the body and biology is not destiny.
I've read Judith Butler's 'Gender Trouble' and while I get the gist of it like all poststructuralist philosophy the language is a bit dense and intimidating. Supposedly their new book, 'Who's afraid of gender?' is a bit easier to read. It's on my list of things to get round to this year.
I read Gender Trouble at uni when I was writing about performance of gender in Discworld - at the time it didn't feel like the most difficult to access stuff, but I'm sure if I went back and read it now I wouldn't be able to understand nearly as much as I once did.
And yes, I've heard good things about their new book - another youtuber I enjoy, Philosophy Tube (Abigail Thorne), has had an early copy and is going to be exploring gender and stuff in her next video essay (excited!)
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
This goes one of two ways.
I think this one will end, HK style, with the crackdown working and the protesters peeling away. The difference with some other recent uprisings is that there is no contested election here nor a really credible alternative government since Sakashvili was defenestrated and imprisoned (and he's blotted his copybook with voters before anyway). So there's not really a case for the government itself being illegitimate. Nor is this autocratic government by one powerful man - it's a party with some quite grey characters. More like the CCP than say Erdogan or Luka.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Any hilarious jokes about racism, homophobia and antisemitism to share?
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Any hilarious jokes about racism, homophobia and antisemitism to share?
So:
I can post a picture of the Prophet Mohammed dressed as a terrorist, and that's free speech.
But if I make a gag about trans, that's suddenly completely unacceptable.
Get a grip. It's a belief. Beliefs can be - and should - be teased.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
This goes one of two ways.
I think this one will end, HK style, with the crackdown working and the protesters peeling away. The difference with some other recent uprisings is that there is no contested election here nor a really credible alternative government since Sakashvili was defenestrated and imprisoned (and he's blotted his copybook with voters before anyway). So there's not really a case for the government itself being illegitimate. Nor is this autocratic government by one powerful man - it's a party with some quite grey characters. More like the CCP than say Erdogan or Luka.
Depressingly, I think you're probably right. But it sucks.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Any hilarious jokes about racism, homophobia and antisemitism to share?
So:
I can post a picture of the Prophet Mohammed dressed as a terrorist, and that's free speech.
But if I make a gag about trans, that's suddenly completely unacceptable.
Get a grip. It's a belief. Beliefs can be - and should - be teased.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Doubling down, eh. Furry muff.
I think it is a characteristic (protected in law in some circumstances AIUI) and things can be in bad taste or asinine without it being "completely unacceptable". In your long and eloquent post on the issue you said it's about not being offensive. Your grandad facebook post failed this test imo.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
Trump's lawyer Necheles: Now you have a story about having sex with President Trump, right? Stormy Daniels: If I was making it up it would have been a lot better. Necheles: You make money working in the sex clubs- Daniels: I work in strip clubs, big difference... https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1788578896125763748
It seems to have escaped people’s attention that Rishi Sunak has finally fixed the weather. Surely this will impact the polls and we can expect an election announcement shortly.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Any hilarious jokes about racism, homophobia and antisemitism to share?
So:
I can post a picture of the Prophet Mohammed dressed as a terrorist, and that's free speech.
But if I make a gag about trans, that's suddenly completely unacceptable.
Get a grip. It's a belief. Beliefs can be - and should - be teased.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Doubling down, eh. Furry muff.
I think it is a characteristic (protected in law in some circumstances AIUI) and things can be in bad taste or asinine without it being "completely unacceptable". In your long and eloquent post on the issue you said it's about not being offensive. Your grandad facebook post failed this test imo.
And that's your view, and you're entitled to it.
But I am not picking on a trans person, as far as I can tell. I am poking fun at the idea that gender is *entirely* chosen, and that there's no biological element at all, by taking it to an extreme.
It's just an extension of the old "the logical consequence of animal rights is votes for clams" line.
Now, you can argue it isn't funny (and you might well be right). But I don't think you - or anyone else - can argue that I am targeting trans people and/or belittling them.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
So why do we celebrate their achievements?. Might as well genetically screen and give the 'fittest' a medal and sportswear contract at birth.
For the same reason that people seek to go to the highest mountains - humans are wired to notice the unusual and that which stands out.
The mistake in sport is to mix it up with Protestant notions of "work ethic" and "merit". Just enjoy the spectacle of the exceptional.
I'd love to see an openly juiced Olympic category. Any performance enhancing drug is allowed, no matter what quantity or how fatal it might be. The results would probably do more to stop doping in pro sport than any amount of banning!
The teams from the DDR wave hello. From the past, admittedly.
It seems to have escaped people’s attention that Rishi Sunak has finally fixed the weather. Surely this will impact the polls and we can expect an election announcement shortly.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Any hilarious jokes about racism, homophobia and antisemitism to share?
So:
I can post a picture of the Prophet Mohammed dressed as a terrorist, and that's free speech.
But if I make a gag about trans, that's suddenly completely unacceptable.
Get a grip. It's a belief. Beliefs can be - and should - be teased.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Doubling down, eh. Furry muff.
I think it is a characteristic (protected in law in some circumstances AIUI) and things can be in bad taste or asinine without it being "completely unacceptable". In your long and eloquent post on the issue you said it's about not being offensive. Your grandad facebook post failed this test imo.
And that's your view, and you're entitled to it.
But I am not picking on a trans person, as far as I can tell. I am poking fun at the idea that gender is *entirely* chosen, and that there's no biological element at all, by taking it to an extreme.
It's just an extension of the old "the logical consequence of animal rights is votes for clams" line.
Now, you can argue it isn't funny (and you might well be right). But I don't think you - or anyone else - can argue that I am targeting trans people and/or belittling them.
What's the difference between that and "the logical conclusion of equal marriage is legal bestiality". Would you understand why that is not okay?
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I've been making these gags on Facebook for a while:
Any hilarious jokes about racism, homophobia and antisemitism to share?
So:
I can post a picture of the Prophet Mohammed dressed as a terrorist, and that's free speech.
But if I make a gag about trans, that's suddenly completely unacceptable.
Get a grip. It's a belief. Beliefs can be - and should - be teased.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Doubling down, eh. Furry muff.
I think it is a characteristic (protected in law in some circumstances AIUI) and things can be in bad taste or asinine without it being "completely unacceptable". In your long and eloquent post on the issue you said it's about not being offensive. Your grandad facebook post failed this test imo.
And that's your view, and you're entitled to it.
But I am not picking on a trans person, as far as I can tell. I am poking fun at the idea that gender is *entirely* chosen, and that there's no biological element at all, by taking it to an extreme.
It's just an extension of the old "the logical consequence of animal rights is votes for clams" line.
Now, you can argue it isn't funny (and you might well be right). But I don't think you - or anyone else - can argue that I am targeting trans people and/or belittling them.
It is reducing the issue to joke = not serious status. Not a crime for sure but you are equating trans people's feelings with those of an animal in terms of sentience. You are perfectly at liberty to do food ofc but it does go against your earlier post on respect and tolerance.
On topic, this is very interesting as it strongly implies we should expect proportional swing not UNS at the general election:
This table compares the notional 2019 election result with the May 2024 local elections and averages the constituency-level swing depending on the Con/ Lab lead in 2019...
I'd like to see similar analysis for swing to Labour in Lib Dem contested seats as that would give some clues on tactical voting propensity.
Yes and the small amount of regional polling reflects this. We also know Reform poll strongest in areas of Conservative strength so the swings in some of the safest Conservative seats are going to be amplified by the twin effects of the splintering to Labour AND the splintering to Reform (as we saw for example in the Clacton constituency polling earlier this year).
The YouGov England sub sample will be entertaining...
Yes, a factor we've not discussed much is the impact of huge Labour leads on Blue Wall areas where the figures were something like Con 50 LD 30 Lab 20. In normal times, neither LD nor Lab can hope to win it, but the LDs will normally make the keenest effort to get local council seats while the local Lab people will make a token effort and then head off to a marginal. Quite a bit of that LD 30 may well actually be Lab-leaning tactical voting which was already acquired at a previous election. But if the Con vote halves and the Lab vote goes up by half, you suddenly get a starting point of a 3-way marginal, with the Tories quite possibly third.
You then get understandable squabbling between the local Lab activists, who sense a chance for the first time ever and become enthusiastic to a level that would be frankly baffling to veteran Labour folk in safe seats, and the local LD activists, who are frustrated that their years of effort aren't seen to entitle them to the key "only we can win" slot. How that turns out is going to vary quite unpredictably by constituency, depending partly on levels of organisation and the quality of the candidates and their teams. In some places the tactical votes from *last* time will go into reverse.
The recent argument between Peter Kellner of YouGov and rival pollsters comes down to this issue. Peter is sceptical about tactical voting going into reverse, and assumes in the YouGov MRP that it will be further reinforced, so the party that was second last time is assumed to get a boost. Other pollsters are (so far) gingerly refraining from making assumptions about exactly what tactical voting will do.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
So why do we celebrate their achievements?. Might as well genetically screen and give the 'fittest' a medal and sportswear contract at birth.
For the same reason that people seek to go to the highest mountains - humans are wired to notice the unusual and that which stands out.
The mistake in sport is to mix it up with Protestant notions of "work ethic" and "merit". Just enjoy the spectacle of the exceptional.
I'd love to see an openly juiced Olympic category. Any performance enhancing drug is allowed, no matter what quantity or how fatal it might be. The results would probably do more to stop doping in pro sport than any amount of banning!
One exists/is proposed. I can't look it up at the mo but was discussed here a few weeks ago.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
How do women's refuges currently prevent potentially abusive women from entering a space? They will do a safeguarding check. Trans women have been going to women's refuges for all my life, using women's toilets and changing rooms, etc etc. The issues are rare - there is no pattern of behaviour that suggest trans women are a unique threat.
I'm gonna get out my citations again: recent studies show that trans women may be at biological disadvantages to cis women:
And that most advantages that may exist early in transition are just that, seen early in transition, and declines the longer that trans women are on HRT:
On topic, this is very interesting as it strongly implies we should expect proportional swing not UNS at the general election:
This table compares the notional 2019 election result with the May 2024 local elections and averages the constituency-level swing depending on the Con/ Lab lead in 2019...
I'd like to see similar analysis for swing to Labour in Lib Dem contested seats as that would give some clues on tactical voting propensity.
Yes and the small amount of regional polling reflects this. We also know Reform poll strongest in areas of Conservative strength so the swings in some of the safest Conservative seats are going to be amplified by the twin effects of the splintering to Labour AND the splintering to Reform (as we saw for example in the Clacton constituency polling earlier this year).
The YouGov England sub sample will be entertaining...
Yes, a factor we've not discussed much is the impact of huge Labour leads on Blue Wall areas where the figures were something like Con 50 LD 30 Lab 20. In normal times, neither LD nor Lab can hope to win it, but the LDs will normally make the keenest effort to get local council seats while the local Lab people will make a token effort and then head off to a marginal. Quite a bit of that LD 30 may well actually be Lab-leaning tactical voting which was already acquired at a previous election. But if the Con vote halves and the Lab vote goes up by half, you suddenly get a starting point of a 3-way marginal, with the Tories quite possibly third.
You then get understandable squabbling between the local Lab activists, who sense a chance for the first time ever and become enthusiastic to a level that would be frankly baffling to veteran Labour folk in safe seats, and the local LD activists, who are frustrated that their years of effort aren't seen to entitle them to the key "only we can win" slot. How that turns out is going to vary quite unpredictably by constituency, depending partly on levels of organisation and the quality of the candidates and their teams. In some places the tactical votes from *last* time will go into reverse.
The recent argument between Peter Kellner of YouGov and rival pollsters comes down to this issue. Peter is sceptical about tactical voting going into reverse, and assumes in the YouGov MRP that it will be further reinforced, so the party that was second last time is assumed to get a boost. Other pollsters are (so far) gingerly refraining from making assumptions about exactly what tactical voting will do.
I think this is complicated because there are a large number of anti-Tory voters who wouldn't vote for Corbyn in 2019, but will be quite natural voters for a Starmer-led Labour party.
Were they tactical voters last time? They might look like tactical voters, but not really be so.
On athletics in colleges and universities: For decades I have believed that MIT had it right. They have no professional teams, though they certainly could afford some. Instead, they encourage every student to participate, letting the students organize as they wish, and providing support, with facilities, transportation, and so forth. So they have many, many "club" sports.
As I understand it, that policy has had good effects on the health of their students. As you would expect.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
"But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge?"
Mrs J - very much a feminist and trans supporter - has what I think is a good answer to that. It is this: if a man wants to abuse a woman, there are sadly *far* easier ways for him to do so than pretending to be trans. This concentration on the supposed 'threat' from trans people, or people pretending to be trans, does rather help hide the actual abuse of women that goes on.
The Scottish Greens have been accused of prioritising ideology over protecting children after the party again refused to endorse an expert report into gender healthcare.
Patrick Harvie, who until last month was a Scottish government minister, claimed that a Holyrood motion welcoming the Cass Review and recognising it as a “valid scientific document” was not “supportable” by his party....
All other parties, including the SNP, endorsed Hilary Cass’s report at Holyrood. However, all seven Green MSPs voted against the motion, with Mr Harvie claiming that transgender people were having their “very existence refuted”....
Brian Whittle, a Tory MSP, asked Mr Harvie whether he would now seek to listen to “alternative experts” on climate change after he refused to accept the findings of Dr Cass, a widely respected consultant paediatrician.
“You don’t get to choose your experts just to fit your ideology,” Mr Whittle said. “Especially when it’s the health of children at stake.
The Cass report is not a scientific document - it did not go through peer review, even if it did review some peer reviewed studies. The Cass report is, at best, a policy document written by a healthcare expert and, at worst, a clear attempt to ignore the growing consensus that transgender healthcare, including for young people, is not a threat and has positive impacts. We saw Cass only the other day talking about how "other methods" such as antidepressants, antianxiety medication and therapy "had not been tried" with young people expressing gender dysphoria and wanting to transition which is a) not true and b) beside the point because you can be both trans and depressed at the same time!
Do you know what peer review means? This is absolutely a scientific document - its a review of lots of research. You just don't like it because it doesn't ape your world view.
Peer review means it going through the scrutiny of other people with expertise (peers) reviewing the work before publication. Which the Cass report didn't go through. Some people argue if it needed to, but I would personally say if you want to call the Cass report "science" it needs to have gone through some form of peer review.
Rubbish. Utter drivel. The paper I am writing at the moment is not science yet because it's not been submitted to peer review? You just don't like it because it has a different view to yours.
The scientific method requires that things that are published go through peer review to check that the methodology makes sense, the results are real, and that the experiment or scenario within the paper itself is repeatable...
Peer review prior to publication is something required by convention, rather than something required by 'the scientific method' itself.
The Cass report includes discussion and analysis of a number of scientific publications, though comes to few conclusions about them other than that they are far from definitive.
It also includes a great deal of narrative writing on sociopolitical issues, as well as the state of knowledge in the field.
It's certainly not a scientific paper in the accepted sense. And its own conclusions are far from definitive, either.
Agree. I've written plenty of reports for funders (often made public) that are not peer reviewed. Many of them get more exposure than the papers - I've had the reports picked up by BBC/ITV etc but not the papers (I normally will package the same research up in a peer reviewed paper too, with a slightly different angle/more analysis).
The Cass review is a report. Whether it's called scientific is largely semantics.* It summarises the evidence** and then, due to the lack of evidence, goes further into recommendations based on the authors' best guesses/feelings about the right way forwards. The reviews that were carried out and the primary qualitative research and upcoming secondary healthcare data analysis follow the scientific method and are cautious about concluding anything where the evidence is not there. The report does (and should - no one would have been impressed if Cass had simply said "we don't know, more research is needed) go beyond what has a sound basis in scientific evidence.
* Take my reports mentioned above - they report on science, but I'm not sure I'd call all of them scientific reports - some were a bit too broad brush and narrative for that, I think. I also think it's not that important a distinction. ** Imperfectly, but I think that's inevitable.
Which is great but my issue is that @148grss is trying to diminish the Cass report as not scientific, therefore not of value, can be ignored etc. Which is very wrong indeed.
It reminds me of those who decried that the covid vaccines where not tested fully because the times scales were quicked and overlapped. Its a position that someone doesn't like the report therefore will attack it, rather than discuss what is says and why they believe that the conclusions are wrong.
I have done that too - but the point started with the Scottish Greens saying they didn't think the Cass review was a "valid scientific document". I explained part of why I agreed with that sentiment - that it wasn't peer reviewed. Cass is not a specialist in transgender healthcare in young people, and is a specialist in children with disabilities; her publications are about children with disabilities, primarily Rett's syndrome and autism. She is out of her expertise when discussing transgender healthcare; from my point of view it would be reasonable to have experts in that field if not part of the report then at least be part of the scrutiny of the report - that doesn't seem to have been the case. That is why I was talking about the validity of calling the report a "scientific" one, because that was the nature of the conversation.
Hi
I'm just intrigued by this stance, given you are an admirer of Richard Carrier.
Richard Carrier's book on Jesus was not peer reviewed (he says it was, he is not telling the truth) Richard Carrier is not an expert in the ancient Middle East - he has a modest competency in Roman intellectual history. Richard Carrier has no training in mathematics. Experts in the field have reviewed his work and dismissed it as fraudulent.
Yet you accepted his work - not Cass'.
Why? Is it (genuine question) because you know more about this field, or because it matters more to you?
The Scottish Greens have been accused of prioritising ideology over protecting children after the party again refused to endorse an expert report into gender healthcare.
Patrick Harvie, who until last month was a Scottish government minister, claimed that a Holyrood motion welcoming the Cass Review and recognising it as a “valid scientific document” was not “supportable” by his party....
All other parties, including the SNP, endorsed Hilary Cass’s report at Holyrood. However, all seven Green MSPs voted against the motion, with Mr Harvie claiming that transgender people were having their “very existence refuted”....
Oh look! Another day, another meaningless fringe post about something which doesn’t really matter to the vast majority of people.
When will the older generation realise that this country is moving on and this issue, like so many of the culture wars, are irrelevant to our needs?
Well you’ll have a long time in the political wilderness to answer that one.
Have a nice day everyone.
xx
It is certainly true that the proper - evidence-based - care of troubled children, whatever the causes might be, of troubled and/or neglected children in the care or supervision of the state is something which has long been neglected, as 49 IICSA Reports and this report and many other reports on the care of children with special needs in homes attest.
It is precisely because people with concerns about the care of children in trouble have made a fuss that such reports have been written and there is perhaps the hope that something might be done to improve matters.
You on the other hand think this is an irrelevant matter which doesn't matter to most people and therefore should be ignored. You dismiss it as a culture war and, surprisingly, seem to think this airy hand-waving away makes you look good, progressive even.
Meanwhile back in the real world in the last week the President of the Family Division had to publicly warn the courts - and, frankly, everyone else - to be extremely cautious when dealing with Gender GP, an unregulated offshore provider of hormones because they had found - in the case before him - to have given without any proper assessment (negligence was the assessment of the medical expert) a 15 year old girl such high levels of testosterone that she was at risk of dying.
It will change no votes but it is the job of politicians to make sure that the laws and policies around matters such as these are based on the best possible evidence and it is the job of commentators, even on here, to raise such matters so that the vulnerable do not get harmed. Or ignored. Because the issues are too "difficult" or might involve people accepting that they've got things wrong.
Dismissing such concerns by the use of an empty phrase such as "culture war" is the act of a coward. It is the same mentality that allowed the PO to claim a rotten IT system as "robust" without bothering to find out what was really happening and ploughing on even when they knew something was wrong.
Children with anxiety disorders, whether about their bodies or anything else, children with troubles, children with special needs, children who are abused or neglected need much much better from adults. You can choose to walk away if you want - not every battle is for everyone - but don't bloody well try to claim the moral high ground while you do so.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
"But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge?"
Mrs J - very much a feminist and trans supporter - has what I think is a good answer to that. It is this: if a man wants to abuse a woman, there are sadly *far* easier ways for him to do so than pretending to be trans. This concentration on the supposed 'threat' from trans people, or people pretending to be trans, does rather help hide the actual abuse of women that goes on.
It is not however an answer to the question. In fact it is a feeble answer because it is saying that we should not worry about risk "A" because there are so many other worse risks you face. And since you have so many other worse risks why should you worry about adding this one to the list.
See for instance Spain where in recent weeks a number of men accused of domestic violence against their female partners have legally changed their gender under their new self-ID law and specifically demanded to be given access to the domestic violence refuges where their wives/partners have taken refuge. Why anyone thinks this remotely acceptable is a mystery.
Though it shouldn't be I suppose. Men's capacity for believing that anything they want should be a given and damn the consequences for anyone else is not really a surprise to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
If trans women believe they are a female born in the wrong body they wont want to keep their penis as it is not what they believe they are https://fairplayforwomen.com/penis/
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
I don't know how anyone can watch that race and think that is acceptable. The biological girls may as well just quit, because they're only ever competing for the places behind transgender athletes. Gallagher must know it's wrong, and can't seriously believe they deserve the titles and records.
Back in the day you would have heard the same thing about ending racial segregation in sports - that the black athletes would have "unfair biological advantages" and this would be unfair to their white girls.
As I have said multiple times in this thread - if that was a cis girl, no one would care - it would just be an example of a young athlete who is better than her immediate peers - and we do not know anything about this girls transition (medical or otherwise) so it seems unreasonable to jump to saying she has a "biological advantage" when her running times are more in line with U18 women athletes then U18 male athletes.
Gallagher gave an interview to the New York Post and openly states it is their intention to start hormone therapy soon as they don't want to get anymore masculine. The school she's at immediately treats trans athletes as the gender they want to be identified as. It's not unreasonable for the biological girls to be concerned that they are in reality competing against a boy at this point in Gallagher's transition.
Thanks for an actual citation! So she actually said to her high school paper last year that she would like to start HRT - and the NYP links to that article - and does not comment on her current level of medical transition; but it does at least tell us she is unlikely to have been on HRT for a long time, if at all.
It also notes that in the 200m race she came second. So... did the girl who come first also cheat? Is she not a real girl because she beat a "biological male" who must surely have only won the 400m race due to unfair advantage? Or does that one not count as evidence of the supremacy of trans women in sports?
I don't think Gallagher cheats. She identifies as female and competes legally. It's just a fact that she'll be faster and stronger than the vast majority of biological girls of the same age. That she was beaten by one competitor in the 200 doesn't negate that fact. Whilst respecting the right of Gallagher to be who she wants to be, in this case it's also reasonable to understand the other competitors concern that physically, Gallagher is still a young man. There's no easy answer to this that will please both sides, and I think this is the first time I've dipped my toe in the trans debate. As a mid 50s bloke, someone being trans has zero effect on me, so I tend to just keep out of it!
One issue is that athletics, and indeed many sports, isn't fair; no matter how much an 'average' person puts in, they will never be able to win the 100m at the Olympics, or beat Michael Phelps in his prime. As a uni friend - a rather good Ironman triathlete - said: "Professional athletes are freaks." By dint of biological fate, they have an advantage over me, however hard I was to train. There is no fairness; however much effort someone puts in, however diligently they work, the chances of success are remote, and become remoter the higher you go in a sport.
So why do we celebrate their achievements?. Might as well genetically screen and give the 'fittest' a medal and sportswear contract at birth.
For the same reason that people seek to go to the highest mountains - humans are wired to notice the unusual and that which stands out.
The mistake in sport is to mix it up with Protestant notions of "work ethic" and "merit". Just enjoy the spectacle of the exceptional.
I'd love to see an openly juiced Olympic category. Any performance enhancing drug is allowed, no matter what quantity or how fatal it might be. The results would probably do more to stop doping in pro sport than any amount of banning!
The teams from the DDR wave hello. From the past, admittedly.
If trans women believe they are a female born in the wrong body they wont want to keep their penis as it is not what they believe they are https://fairplayforwomen.com/penis/
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
I am quite happy to call you by your chosen name and pronouns
However I think single sex womens places such as prisons and refuges should only be open to those that have had the surgery
I think womens sports should be biological women only but we open to new categories trans women and trans men.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
"But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge?"
Mrs J - very much a feminist and trans supporter - has what I think is a good answer to that. It is this: if a man wants to abuse a woman, there are sadly *far* easier ways for him to do so than pretending to be trans. This concentration on the supposed 'threat' from trans people, or people pretending to be trans, does rather help hide the actual abuse of women that goes on.
It is not however an answer to the question. In fact it is a feeble answer because it is saying that we should not worry about risk "A" because there are so many other worse risks you face. And since you have so many other worse risks why should you worry about adding this one to the list.
See for instance Spain where in recent weeks a number of men accused of domestic violence against their female partners have legally changed their gender under their new self-ID law and specifically demanded to be given access to the domestic violence refuges where their wives/partners have taken refuge. Why anyone thinks this remotely acceptable is a mystery.
Though it shouldn't be I suppose. Men's capacity for believing that anything they want should be a given and damn the consequences for anyone else is not really a surprise to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
On your first paragraph; I profoundly disagree.
As for your comment on Spain; do you have a linky for that? It'd be interesting to read more about that.
As for your last paragraph: I am surprised that you think that character trait/flaw is unique to men. It isn't; and it's odd that you phrase it as such.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
"But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge?"
Mrs J - very much a feminist and trans supporter - has what I think is a good answer to that. It is this: if a man wants to abuse a woman, there are sadly *far* easier ways for him to do so than pretending to be trans. This concentration on the supposed 'threat' from trans people, or people pretending to be trans, does rather help hide the actual abuse of women that goes on.
It is not however an answer to the question. In fact it is a feeble answer because it is saying that we should not worry about risk "A" because there are so many other worse risks you face. And since you have so many other worse risks why should you worry about adding this one to the list.
See for instance Spain where in recent weeks a number of men accused of domestic violence against their female partners have legally changed their gender under their new self-ID law and specifically demanded to be given access to the domestic violence refuges where their wives/partners have taken refuge. Why anyone thinks this remotely acceptable is a mystery.
Though it shouldn't be I suppose. Men's capacity for believing that anything they want should be a given and damn the consequences for anyone else is not really a surprise to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
On your first paragraph; I profoundly disagree.
As for your comment on Spain; do you have a linky for that? It'd be interesting to read more about that.
As for your last paragraph: I am surprised that you think that character trait/flaw is unique to men. It isn't; and it's odd that you phrase it as such.
As a man I completely agree with the last paragraph far too many of us do believe our word is law because we are male. My father is a prime example of that shit
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
"But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge?"
Mrs J - very much a feminist and trans supporter - has what I think is a good answer to that. It is this: if a man wants to abuse a woman, there are sadly *far* easier ways for him to do so than pretending to be trans. This concentration on the supposed 'threat' from trans people, or people pretending to be trans, does rather help hide the actual abuse of women that goes on.
It is not however an answer to the question. In fact it is a feeble answer because it is saying that we should not worry about risk "A" because there are so many other worse risks you face. And since you have so many other worse risks why should you worry about adding this one to the list.
See for instance Spain where in recent weeks a number of men accused of domestic violence against their female partners have legally changed their gender under their new self-ID law and specifically demanded to be given access to the domestic violence refuges where their wives/partners have taken refuge. Why anyone thinks this remotely acceptable is a mystery.
Though it shouldn't be I suppose. Men's capacity for believing that anything they want should be a given and damn the consequences for anyone else is not really a surprise to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
On your first paragraph; I profoundly disagree.
As for your comment on Spain; do you have a linky for that? It'd be interesting to read more about that.
As for your last paragraph: I am surprised that you think that character trait/flaw is unique to men. It isn't; and it's odd that you phrase it as such.
As a man I completely agree with the last paragraph far too many of us do believe our word is law because we are male. My father is a prime example of that shit
Yes; but IME that trait is certainly *not* unique to men.
If trans women believe they are a female born in the wrong body they wont want to keep their penis as it is not what they believe they are https://fairplayforwomen.com/penis/
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
I am quite happy to call you by your chosen name and pronouns
However I think single sex womens places such as prisons and refuges should only be open to those that have had the surgery
I think womens sports should be biological women only but we open to new categories trans women and trans men.
Unfortunately you are then in the situation of young people thinking "I'm not a proper transwoman unless I chop my knackers off" and I really don't think we want to encourage that at all.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
A woman is a woman you don't need any pretend crap at the front to pretend there is more than one type.
Couldn't agree more. Both cis women, and trans women, are women.
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
And there are indeed some people who don't like the term because they don't feel the "gender assigned at birth" context is well-understood.
“Sex” is observed at birth from secondary sexual characteristics and “recorded” -not “assigned”.
“Gender” is a social construct which some people believe in, some people don’t. Gender identity belief is a belief system recognised in U.K. law - as is the obverse “that it’s made up nonsense.”
“Gender” says boys should be masculine and girls feminine.
So some feminine boys and masculine girls have had medical intervention to “fix” that - which as Cass has pointed out for many may be a terrible mistake.
Some will persist in a “gender identity” at variance with their biological sex (which cannot be changed, you will die the sex you were born) and transition is beneficial.
Clinicians simply do not know which children will persist and which will not - many turn out to be same sex attracted and have internalised homophobia.
I mean - is observation of secondary sexual characteristics at birth the only criteria for sex? Because many young children have secondary sexual characteristics at birth that change (such as those with internal gonads) and in the past doctors used to give unconsented to surgeries to children with atypical secondary sex characteristics to make them fit more into their understanding of typical sex characteristics. Assigning them a sex, you might say.
Gender in no way says boys should be masculine and girls feminine - that's patriarchy. Gender can mean multiple things, depending on the context (you can perform gender, you can feel and understand your gender, your gender can be policed) - but when it comes to an individual it generally means their own understanding of self in relation to their assigned gender at birth. Many trans women are not feminine; many trans men are not masculine. They are not not trans because of that.
Biological sex can, to a degree, be changed. We have discussed this previously, so I won't go on at length, but much of what we consider "biological sex" is just the way the body processes and exhibits characteristics based on the hormones the body is processing. If you give someone assigned male at birth feminising hormones, it does not take that long for their body to start acting like the body of someone assigned female at birth, and visa versa. Transwomen start growing breast tissue more like cis women, have fat redistribution more like cis women, have hair and skin more like cis women, have hormonal cycles more like cis women, etc etc. Transmen start having acne more like cis men did through their puberty, they will get "bottom growth" and hair will start growing in areas that are less common in cis women and more common in cis men (the online joke is "no one warned my I'd get hair growing out of my ass"), their voices crack, etc. etc. Sure - your chromosomes don't change, and your sex organs don't change completely (but they do change) - but a lot of "biological" change happens.
We have a good understanding of young people and desistance - the vast majority of young people who take puberty blockers wish to continue on to cross sex hormones and the vast majority of trans people who take cross sex hormones or have gender affirming surgery say the experience was a positive one. The rate of regret amongst people who take these routes is typically recorded as between 2-5%. This is remarkably positive in medicine and, if anything, suggests to me that we gate keep trans healthcare too much because, if we were giving out trans healthcare willy nilly, the regret rates would be much higher (we can compare this regret rate to abortion, pregnancy, knee operations and see that these things have much higher regret rates and no serious people out there demanding we limit access to those things because of that).
You cannot change large gametes into small gametes, or vice versa. Your sex is fixed throughout life. You may modify some secondary characteristics, but that’s all.
As Cass points out, we simply do not know the rate of desistance because, scandalously, almost all the NHS Adult Gender clinics refused to cooperate with York University - and if their record keeping is as poor as Tavi’s they won’t know either.
In any case, desisters are unlikely to remain in contact with clinicians who they may think have harmed them.
So your definition of sex is only based on the size of gametes the body produces? Because that isn't what doctors test for when they assign a sex at birth, is it?
Pretty sure the test is winkle vs no winkle, as per Blackadder...
The issue at hand is that not everyone accepts the concept of gender and assigning of sex. Its a complicated old story for a small percentage of humans. For the vast, vast majority its really easy.
Sport, refuges, healthcare and prisons are the sticking points for a lot of people. Sport is the one I feel strongly about. Its about fairness. You can argue that genetic advantage within a sex (or gender if you must) is unfair. It is. Michael Phelps is almost designed to be an incredible swimmer, most fast bowlers in cricket are tall, as are basketballers, marathon runners tend to be slight of frame and you can go on and on. The issue is for sports where physique is important (i.e. almost all) a transwoman will have some legacy of the time that their body was behaving as a man. If you decide age 18 to transition the 'damage' damage is mostly done. That cannot all be reversed by hormone treatment.
And you know what, thats a bit harsh on transwomen who also want to do sport. But its massively more unfair on ciswomen (and I loathe that term with a passion) to let transwomen who have the attributes of male puberty then compete against them.
Recent studies suggest otherwise and that transwomen on HRT may actually be at physical disadvantages compared to ciswomen: again to show my citation
And fairness in sports is a contested idea - because fairness for who? I wonder if Michael Phelps was from Africa and had all the same atypical traits if it would be accepted; it isn't when African cis women happen to have atypical conditions that put them at an advantage. When you start policing bodies like this what becomes the typical body, what becomes the "standard" for acceptable cis woman? Some African athletes might say that sports organisations defer to whiteness more than anything substantial.
And these "sticking points" are not based on evidence of an issue. There are not a lot of transwomen excelling in sports. There are not a lot of transwomen causing issues in refuges or on hospital wards. In these environments and circumstances trans women fall more in line with their cis women counterparts than their cis male counterparts. So why is the issue trans women? Bigotry. The dislike or distrust of a group not based of evidence of wrongdoing but a gut feeling that they must be up to something is just bigotry, pure and simple.
On athletics in colleges and universities: For decades I have believed that MIT had it right. They have no professional teams, though they certainly could afford some. Instead, they encourage every student to participate, letting the students organize as they wish, and providing support, with facilities, transportation, and so forth. So they have many, many "club" sports.
As I understand it, that policy has had good effects on the health of their students. As you would expect.
US college sports, from the outside, is nuts. I read somewhere that the Head Coach of the Michigan State University Football Team is the highest paid employee of the State of Michigan.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
"But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge?"
Mrs J - very much a feminist and trans supporter - has what I think is a good answer to that. It is this: if a man wants to abuse a woman, there are sadly *far* easier ways for him to do so than pretending to be trans. This concentration on the supposed 'threat' from trans people, or people pretending to be trans, does rather help hide the actual abuse of women that goes on.
You are trying to hide the problem though or dismiss it, we have seen it in spades up here and got the teeshirt even though every sensible person said it would be a disaster. Did not take long to blow up.
My mind is slightly blown - Government have accepted my legal amendments to ban Registered Sex Offenders from changing their name to avoid detection. Huge congrats to all the victims & survivors esp. @DellasLaw x @LDNVictimsComm@VictimsComm
If trans women believe they are a female born in the wrong body they wont want to keep their penis as it is not what they believe they are https://fairplayforwomen.com/penis/
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
I am quite happy to call you by your chosen name and pronouns
However I think single sex womens places such as prisons and refuges should only be open to those that have had the surgery
I think womens sports should be biological women only but we open to new categories trans women and trans men.
They tried that, funnily enough the men who think they are women didn’t want to compete with other men who think they are women - only with biological women. Puzzler, isn’t it?
If trans women believe they are a female born in the wrong body they wont want to keep their penis as it is not what they believe they are https://fairplayforwomen.com/penis/
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
I am quite happy to call you by your chosen name and pronouns
However I think single sex womens places such as prisons and refuges should only be open to those that have had the surgery
I think womens sports should be biological women only but we open to new categories trans women and trans men.
They tried that, funnily enough the men who think they are women didn’t want to compete with other men who think they are women - only with biological women. Puzzler, isn’t it?
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. .. https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
Watching this race, it came to me that you could remake every Competitive Dad sketch from The Fast Show with a trans ‘woman’ as the Dad, and an actual woman as the kids, and it would work perfectly
🚨BREAKING🚨
A trans-identified male dominated the Girls Varsity 400m at the Portland Interscholastic League Championship Semi-Finals yesterday.
Aayden Gallagher will now compete in the finals as a “girl.”
And? The record for under 18 400m for girls is like 50 seconds; for men it's closer to 45 seconds. That this girl runs 400 m in 56-57 seconds makes her, like, a good amateur?
I assume that OR, like many places that allow trans athletes to compete, have rules around when students can participate (from what I can find students have to have been transitioning consistently and cannot participate in the same year they started their transition). I have no idea how old this girl is - but this is a tenth grade competition, so she is likely 15-16. If she's on HRT muscle mass and strength typically is one of the first things to fall in line with new hormones (3-6months).
He’s not on HRT, so it’s literally a boy competing in the girls race
I couldn't find any information on if she was on HRT or not (that's why I said if) - can you give me a citation for that assertion?
His calves.
Can you see how this could be seen as just straight up misogyny and why people like me say that this policing of women's bodies is bad for cis and trans women? Are you saying any woman who has calf definition similar to this athlete is actually a man? You can "just tell" who is a trans or cis woman by looking at them?
This isn't policing women's bodies. It's straight up fairness. You cannot have a fair competition between men and women in sports that involve the deployment of muscle mass. There is a lot of generalisation but splitting sports between the sexes, while by no-means perfect, is the best way we have to create something of a level playing field (pun intended).
I'm someone who competed at a reasonably high level in sprint events when I was a teenager, trained with boys and girls my own age, and my lived experience (which is all that counts these days apparently) is that it would have been unfair for us to compete with one another in events that mattered.
We do not know if this young athlete is on HRT and, if so, for how long she has been. For all I know she could have never had a testosterone based puberty - she may have been on puberty blockers and got straight onto HRT. To say that you can tell this girl is "really a boy" just by looking at her is completely misogynist - in the same way that those who call Michelle Obama "secretly a man" is. Many cis women who do not conform to feminine beauty standards will be insulted by calling them men; many cis women have been harassed, in toilets and other public spaces, because they were considered too manish and people thought they were trans. It's all the same thing - policing women's bodies based on expectations of femininity.
We don't need to go into observed physical attributes. The original report notes that s/he is a biological male. The what-iffery is beside the point. Men should not be in women's races, and boys - post about 11 - should not be in girls' ones. Or, at least, should not be allowed to compete to win or to set records.
Transphobes call women who have been on HRT most of their life and have had gender affirming surgeries "biological males" - it doesn't mean anything. Again - we have no idea if this athlete even had a testosterone based puberty. She may have been on HRT for years, and it is known that muscle mass is one of the first things to fall within a typical cis women's range when trans women start HRT (as noted, 3 - 6 months). Calling her a "biological male" in reporting (reporting from right wing / "independent" news orgs) is, again, just transphobia
148grss, you have repeatedly made this point that maybe she’s been on HRT for years and not experienced a testosterone-based puberty. So, are you saying that these things matter? If she had only started HRT the day before, would it then be unfair for her to compete against ciswomen?
Are you (implicitly) proposing that transwomen should only be able to compete against ciswomen under certain circumstances relating to their transition and hormone use?
what is this ciswoman mince, can you not just say it as it is "woman". rather than using the bollox ( pun not intended ) PC crap.
A cis woman is a woman who isn't a trans woman; it's pretty simple. Cis and trans are Latin prefixes used to denote closeness to and farness away from (the usage for cisalpine Gaul in the Roman period to mean those Gauls on the Roman side of the Alpines, and transalpine Gaul for those Gauls on the far side of the Alpines from Rome, for example).
When you put it like that, isn’t the term transwoman transphobic because it implies distance from womanhood?
Language is weird - but the trans in this context is farness from assigned gender at birth.
Do you think that the practice of assigning gender at birth should be abandoned?
Surely it's outrageous for a parent to make assumptions about a child's religion, sexual orientation or gender until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves?
I think there is a difference between making an assumption and then forcing their kids. Most people are cis, most people are straight, etc. But if your kid comes out and you basically say "no" - that's a problem. Even if that child is "going through a phase" or "experimenting" - what's the issue with saying "sure, okay, keep talking to me and know I'm here for advice" rather than saying "no your not, I know you, that's not possible, no child of mine, etc!"
Firstly, it's a joke. Possibly a very poor one, but obviously a joke.
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Points 1-3 I will take.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
OK.
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
"But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge?"
Mrs J - very much a feminist and trans supporter - has what I think is a good answer to that. It is this: if a man wants to abuse a woman, there are sadly *far* easier ways for him to do so than pretending to be trans. This concentration on the supposed 'threat' from trans people, or people pretending to be trans, does rather help hide the actual abuse of women that goes on.
You are trying to hide the problem though or dismiss it, we have seen it in spades up here and got the teeshirt even though every sensible person said it would be a disaster. Did not take long to blow up.
No, I am really not trying to hide the 'problem', or dismiss it. Just point out the scale compared to the massive amount of abuse there is out there.
But if you are taking that attitude: can I ask why are you trying to hide and dismiss the problems that cause 99.9999% of all abuse by men of women? When do you mention and condemn them? Why are you so obsessed with this rare form of abuse?
If trans women believe they are a female born in the wrong body they wont want to keep their penis as it is not what they believe they are https://fairplayforwomen.com/penis/
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
I am quite happy to call you by your chosen name and pronouns
However I think single sex womens places such as prisons and refuges should only be open to those that have had the surgery
I think womens sports should be biological women only but we open to new categories trans women and trans men.
They tried that, funnily enough the men who think they are women didn’t want to compete with other men who think they are women - only with biological women. Puzzler, isn’t it?
If trans women believe they are a female born in the wrong body they wont want to keep their penis as it is not what they believe they are https://fairplayforwomen.com/penis/
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
I am quite happy to call you by your chosen name and pronouns
However I think single sex womens places such as prisons and refuges should only be open to those that have had the surgery
I think womens sports should be biological women only but we open to new categories trans women and trans men.
They tried that, funnily enough the men who think they are women didn’t want to compete with other men who think they are women - only with biological women. Puzzler, isn’t it?
If trans women believe they are a female born in the wrong body they wont want to keep their penis as it is not what they believe they are https://fairplayforwomen.com/penis/
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
I am quite happy to call you by your chosen name and pronouns
However I think single sex womens places such as prisons and refuges should only be open to those that have had the surgery
I think womens sports should be biological women only but we open to new categories trans women and trans men.
Unfortunately you are then in the situation of young people thinking "I'm not a proper transwoman unless I chop my knackers off" and I really don't think we want to encourage that at all.
You think you are a girl in a mans body? Why would you want a penis?
Comments
they were
So we are both right…
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/10/bjsports-2023-108029.abstract
And fairness in sports is a contested idea - because fairness for who? I wonder if Michael Phelps was from Africa and had all the same atypical traits if it would be accepted; it isn't when African cis women happen to have atypical conditions that put them at an advantage. When you start policing bodies like this what becomes the typical body, what becomes the "standard" for acceptable cis woman? Some African athletes might say that sports organisations defer to whiteness more than anything substantial.
And these "sticking points" are not based on evidence of an issue. There are not a lot of transwomen excelling in sports. There are not a lot of transwomen causing issues in refuges or on hospital wards. In these environments and circumstances trans women fall more in line with their cis women counterparts than their cis male counterparts. So why is the issue trans women? Bigotry. The dislike or distrust of a group not based of evidence of wrongdoing but a gut feeling that they must be up to something is just bigotry, pure and simple.
But, for whatever reason, we have chosen to have female competitions in most sports. So there has to be a dividing line between who qualifies as female and who doesn't. Accepting that there will be a small number of people for whom this dividing line will be complicated - intersex, unusual chromosomes, trans, etc - where it actually ends up is always going to leave some people aggrieved about what side of it people lie on.
Accordingly, I would seek to keep the qualification as simple as possible. The current attempts by athletics to use testosterone levels seem to be needlessly complicated. Allowing people to self-certify as female damages the integrity of a female category at all - but any attempt to include some trans people and not others, runs into issues with complication and arbitrariness.
Cass does come from a different field, because of the polarised nature of discussion in the field. The review extensively consulted clinicians who are in the field, as well as those personally affected. And those 9+ publications were peer reviewed.
So, sure, one can point out that the review was not peer-reviewed and Cass comes from a different field, but most of the work was peer-reviewed and the work had input from those within the field. The conclusions of the review are controversial. I'm not saying they're necessarily right or wrong. But I think it's unhelpful to mischaracterise how the review was produced or to describe it as being not scientific.
As for the philosophical discussion, it is interesting to note that those who do argue that biology is inherent to womanhood are out of step with the feminist movement and what feminism has itself said and done for much of modern history. Dr Grace Lavery has a great article in the LA Review of Books that discusses this through the lens of three of the big "Gender Critical" authors / activists:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gender-criticism-versus-gender-abolition-on-three-recent-books-about-gender/
In the “spirit of Judith” I’m having a delightful artisanal blonde beer on the terrace of my gargano hotel in the heart of the Foresta Umbra listening to the toe tapping jazz etc etc
Also I am listening, astonished, to an intensity of birdsong I’ve rarely heard. It’s like dawn chorus in rural England 40 years ago. But this is mid afternoon
Wonderful
The mistake in sport is to mix it up with Protestant notions of "work ethic" and "merit". Just enjoy the spectacle of the exceptional.
Where sex and GENDER are the new Gods?
Yeah!
TBH I think you rather perhaps mischaracterise and miss some of the points. The channel is called Not Just Bikes, because it is precisely *not* about just bikes; Jason Slaughter is an urbanist who prefers public transport to bikes - he's on record about that, repeatedly.
It's about making cities pleasant places to live and draws on experience from all over the world.
He draws on the Netherlands because there there has been a thought through and developing approach there for a number of decades. For example involving a 30-year review and maintenance cycle applied to streets, separation of transport modes into their own networks, streets designed to implement a desired speed limit rather than working backwards from the 85th percentile of how fast vehicles travel and so on.
Compare that to here, where future needs are often not taken into account, infra is plonked in and not routinely reassessed 1-3 years to address details that do not work, funding packages are a couple of years, and road maintenance is an endless succession of filling potholes with Weetabix. Most LHAs I have been in contact with do not actually know what they have installed even when they have explicit legal duties relating to it, and when given a Freedom of Information request reply with "we do not hold that information".
I think trams and larger cars are very different categories - trams are predictable, run at intervals and do not deviate from their tracks. Motor vehicles dart everywhere and anywhere essentially at random, unpredictably.
In the video there seem to be plenty of statistics quoted - even from the UK. We have plenty of statistics here about lower speeds reducing collisions and casualties - as would be expected when we have been doing it for 3 decades. Such general stats help us avoid mistakes through anecdata.
It's worth thinking about that idea. It would be interesting to see how performance in various sports related to height or weight, and if any sex differences went away when controlled for height/weight.
But I don't think the purpose of sport is to have a fair contest. The purpose is to have an exciting spectacle and to celebrate the exceptional victor.
("Enhanced Games: Lord Coe says athletes would be 'moronic' to take part in event where doping allowed")
You and I don't have a particular dog in the fight so why make smartarse comments about it all. In public. On social media. I mean you're barely old enough to be on Facebook as it is.
I guess this is what you get with primordial forests in a fertile upland with lots of southern sun
I will add a negative tho: the weather is maddening in a weird way. As soon as the sun is out it feels like Ibiza in June. When it goes it’s london in March. So you are constantly shedding or gaining layers
Among those of my acquaintance, talented musicians are over-represented.
We were more a BBC Holiday '77 kind of a family. I had a bit of a thing for Anne Greig.
https://twitter.com/rezawrecktion/status/1788211832936861950
Hey @Apple, I fixed it for you..
The Commissioners may have their excuses, but I think it would be appropriate if they were all banged up untilsuch time as they could prove their innocence.
Driving does seem to be getting worse. There are lots who do not know how to use mini-roundabouts, for instance. When seat belts were made compulsory, there was a huge advertising campaign. The recent hierarchy of road users, viz drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, does not seem to be well understood and might even be misconceived if it encourages riskier behaviour. More should be done to publicise these changes, but also to review them.
Things have been developing quickly over the past 2-3 weeks in Georgia, but in the last couple of days, they have progressed at an unimaginable speed. The ruling Georgian Dream party has employed various tactics targeting civil society, escalating to an extreme level. ..
https://twitter.com/EtoBuziashvili/status/1788278445224464886
This goes one of two ways.
I've read Judith Butler's 'Gender Trouble' and while I get the gist of it like all poststructuralist philosophy the language is a bit dense and intimidating. Supposedly their new book, 'Who's afraid of gender?' is a bit easier to read. It's on my list of things to get round to this year.
And yes, I've heard good things about their new book - another youtuber I enjoy, Philosophy Tube (Abigail Thorne), has had an early copy and is going to be exploring gender and stuff in her next video essay (excited!)
Secondly, everyone should be treated (and called) what they wish to be called. If you want me to call you "Janice" and "she/her", then I will obviously comply, because to do otherwise would be incredibly rude and disrespectful. This isn't complicated. I don't care what your views on "trans" are, you treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
Thirdly, it is - or should be - a free world. You want to wear a dress, or whatever, knock yourself out. And if a child wants to experiment, good for them. As a parent I would obviously be 100% supportive if my child said "I don't know if I'm really an [x]". Although, I always ask "what characteristic of [x] is it that makes you feel that way?"
Fourthly, this has nothing to do with changing rooms. Safe spaces for women exist for a reason: it's because people with penises will lie in order to access women's only spaces. The simple solution - which they've implemented brilliantly in the changing rooms in the Olympic Pool in Stratford - is private changing areas. We should have more of those, albeit it's a long road to get there.
Fifthly, sports is separated into men's and women's because there are certain physical advantages that come with XX rather than XY. It's not separated according to how you feel, but by the genetic advantages that accrue to a certain biological sex. Change the names if you like: it's the XX Tennis Champion, and the XY Tennis Champion, but it's nothing to do with how you feel or identify, and all about whether you have genetic physical advantages.
Had to check if this was a parody news account (no talking at the back there).
https://x.com/skynews/status/1788575440715600143?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
I can post a picture of the Prophet Mohammed dressed as a terrorist, and that's free speech.
But if I make a gag about trans, that's suddenly completely unacceptable.
Get a grip. It's a belief. Beliefs can be - and should - be teased.
But it sucks.
Doubling down, eh. Furry muff.
I think it is a characteristic (protected in law in some circumstances AIUI) and things can be in bad taste or asinine without it being "completely unacceptable". In your long and eloquent post on the issue you said it's about not being offensive. Your grandad facebook post failed this test imo.
Point 4 - trans women should be barred from refuges because it may be abused by cis men? Why? There is no evidence that trans women are more of a threat than cis women to other women, and they have more in common with cis women in terms of being victims of sexual abuse and being perpetrators of sexual assault. If an individual is a concern entering a refuge, that is fair and should be managed. A women's refuge wouldn't still allow in a same sex partner of an abused woman - so being a woman isn't the only qualification to get in to a woman's refuge.
Point 5 - The advantages are not related to chromosomal type, they are associated with the effect of hormones on the body, which you can change. Taking cross sex hormones make trans peoples' bodies more in line with the typical cis body associated with those hormones. I have already detailed some of the changes that happen and how long people have to be on hormones to experience those changes, such as muscle mass in trans women being more in line with cis women within 3-6 months of taking HRT. Also - cis women are being policed based on their testosterone levels and other things - not their chromosomal type. So women are policed in sports beyond sex - it is based on a "standard" woman that, itself, is restrictive to the right "kind" of woman.
Stormy Daniels: If I was making it up it would have been a lot better.
Necheles: You make money working in the sex clubs-
Daniels: I work in strip clubs, big difference...
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1788578896125763748
But I am not picking on a trans person, as far as I can tell. I am poking fun at the idea that gender is *entirely* chosen, and that there's no biological element at all, by taking it to an extreme.
It's just an extension of the old "the logical consequence of animal rights is votes for clams" line.
Now, you can argue it isn't funny (and you might well be right). But I don't think you - or anyone else - can argue that I am targeting trans people and/or belittling them.
NEW THREAD
Point 3 is where we get to a very difficult point.
I completely agree that many trans women are abused. I completely agree they should be protected.
But how do you prevent an abused from claiming to be a trans woman to gain access to a refuge? It's the same issue with prisons: non-trans abusers will - and have - used self ID to abuse women. This isn't about trans women being pervy. They are not. It is about sexual predators lying. How do you solve this issue?
Point 5, you are factually wrong. Even if you take hormones, you will still have a womb, and your body will still be using energy to keep the womb warm at the expense of the extremeties. Men, by contrast, don't have this. That's because women's bodies are designed to keep babies alive at the expense of a finger lost to frostbite.
You then get understandable squabbling between the local Lab activists, who sense a chance for the first time ever and become enthusiastic to a level that would be frankly baffling to veteran Labour folk in safe seats, and the local LD activists, who are frustrated that their years of effort aren't seen to entitle them to the key "only we can win" slot. How that turns out is going to vary quite unpredictably by constituency, depending partly on levels of organisation and the quality of the candidates and their teams. In some places the tactical votes from *last* time will go into reverse.
The recent argument between Peter Kellner of YouGov and rival pollsters comes down to this issue. Peter is sceptical about tactical voting going into reverse, and assumes in the YouGov MRP that it will be further reinforced, so the party that was second last time is assumed to get a boost. Other pollsters are (so far) gingerly refraining from making assumptions about exactly what tactical voting will do.
I'm gonna get out my citations again: recent studies show that trans women may be at biological disadvantages to cis women:
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/10/bjsports-2023-108029.abstract
And that most advantages that may exist early in transition are just that, seen early in transition, and declines the longer that trans women are on HRT:
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577
Were they tactical voters last time? They might look like tactical voters, but not really be so.
As I understand it, that policy has had good effects on the health of their students. As you would expect.
Mrs J - very much a feminist and trans supporter - has what I think is a good answer to that. It is this: if a man wants to abuse a woman, there are sadly *far* easier ways for him to do so than pretending to be trans. This concentration on the supposed 'threat' from trans people, or people pretending to be trans, does rather help hide the actual abuse of women that goes on.
I'm just intrigued by this stance, given you are an admirer of Richard Carrier.
Richard Carrier's book on Jesus was not peer reviewed (he says it was, he is not telling the truth)
Richard Carrier is not an expert in the ancient Middle East - he has a modest competency in Roman intellectual history.
Richard Carrier has no training in mathematics.
Experts in the field have reviewed his work and dismissed it as fraudulent.
Yet you accepted his work - not Cass'.
Why? Is it (genuine question) because you know more about this field, or because it matters more to you?
It is precisely because people with concerns about the care of children in trouble have made a fuss that such reports have been written and there is perhaps the hope that something might be done to improve matters.
You on the other hand think this is an irrelevant matter which doesn't matter to most people and therefore should be ignored. You dismiss it as a culture war and, surprisingly, seem to think this airy hand-waving away makes you look good, progressive even.
Meanwhile back in the real world in the last week the President of the Family Division had to publicly warn the courts - and, frankly, everyone else - to be extremely cautious when dealing with Gender GP, an unregulated offshore provider of hormones because they had found - in the case before him - to have given without any proper assessment (negligence was the assessment of the medical expert) a 15 year old girl such high levels of testosterone that she was at risk of dying.
It will change no votes but it is the job of politicians to make sure that the laws and policies around matters such as these are based on the best possible evidence and it is the job of commentators, even on here, to raise such matters so that the vulnerable do not get harmed. Or ignored. Because the issues are too "difficult" or might involve people accepting that they've got things wrong.
Dismissing such concerns by the use of an empty phrase such as "culture war" is the act of a coward. It is the same mentality that allowed the PO to claim a rotten IT system as "robust" without bothering to find out what was really happening and ploughing on even when they knew something was wrong.
Children with anxiety disorders, whether about their bodies or anything else, children with troubles, children with special needs, children who are abused or neglected need much much better from adults. You can choose to walk away if you want - not every battle is for everyone - but don't bloody well try to claim the moral high ground while you do so.
See for instance Spain where in recent weeks a number of men accused of domestic violence against their female partners have legally changed their gender under their new self-ID law and specifically demanded to be given access to the domestic violence refuges where their wives/partners have taken refuge. Why anyone thinks this remotely acceptable is a mystery.
Though it shouldn't be I suppose. Men's capacity for believing that anything they want should be a given and damn the consequences for anyone else is not really a surprise to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Seems a lot of transwomen think they are girls but not enough to get rid of it
However I think single sex womens places such as prisons and refuges should only be open to those that have had the surgery
I think womens sports should be biological women only but we open to new categories trans women and trans men.
As for your comment on Spain; do you have a linky for that? It'd be interesting to read more about that.
As for your last paragraph: I am surprised that you think that character trait/flaw is unique to men. It isn't; and it's odd that you phrase it as such.
https://x.com/SarahChampionMP/status/1788592345144766845
https://amp.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/03/swimming-world-cup-category-for-transgender-athletes-cancelled-after-no-entries-received
But if you are taking that attitude: can I ask why are you trying to hide and dismiss the problems that cause 99.9999% of all abuse by men of women? When do you mention and condemn them? Why are you so obsessed with this rare form of abuse?