• @[email protected]
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    366 months ago

    If a 5ft trans woman who started transitioning when she was a teen faces off against a 6ft cis volleyball player, should the cis woman be not allowed to compete?

    What about cis olympians? They all have natural advantages that make their ability to compete at high levels possible, why are you not calling for them to be banned? Britney Griner is a giant at nearly 7ft, surely she shouldn’t be allowed to compete when she has such a innate advantage over your average cis woman, right?

    • Flying Squid
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      6 months ago

      Didn’t you read what they wrote? The men would always win. I’m a 5’9" 180-pound cishet man and if I play basketball against Britney Griner, I will definitely win. For sure.

      Oh, they meant professional sports? Well I guarantee you that there’s literally no possibility that Britney Griner could beat the worst player out of the ~550 men in the NBA. No possibility. Britney Griner is definitely worse than all of those 550 men. Because she has a vagina.

      Edit: The blatant sarcasm in my post was undermined by a mod deleting the post I was replying to. Oh well.

      • @[email protected]
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        6 months ago

        It kind of borders on delusion if I’m being honest.

        Remember when everyone was completely losing their shit about Laurel Hubbard, the trans powerlifter who had qualified for the olympics? Remember how everyone was claiming she was going to smash records and take the gold etc.?

        Now, what did we see in reality? Laurel Hubbard didn’t even place. She got beat out by her cis competitors, she broke no records, she fell within the same range of ability as cis women.

        Where does this fact leave people’s theory about “the men will always win”?

        Edit: I see now you were being sarcastic. In any case I’ll leave the response as is, since people do think like that. Changed it to be a less pointy, lol.

        • Flying Squid
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          106 months ago

          Yes, very much sarcastic. I am always annoyed by this ‘men will always beat women in sports’ talking point.

          • @[email protected]
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            66 months ago

            The problem with sarcasm here is that most men believe they can play tennis on par with the Williams sisters. At least according to some survey I saw years ago.

            • Flying Squid
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              26 months ago

              I don’t think I can play tennis on par with the Williams brothers. 92-year-old John Williams and his brother Jerry, who may or may not be alive, but who is apparently younger than him. And even if he was dead, he’d still probably beat me at tennis.

              I assume Serena or Venus Williams would just serve the ball at such a speed that, when I fail to hit it back and accidentally stand in its way, it will go straight through my skull and embed itself into the wall behind me and she’d just win by automatic forfeit.

        • @[email protected]
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          46 months ago

          Now, what did we see in reality?

          We saw a middling to low level male power lifter make the Olympics at 43. That’s insane.

          • @[email protected]
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            6 months ago

            No, we saw a trans woman who had radically altered her biological make-up through use of female hormones, train rigorously, and then perform within the same range as cis women, ultimately failing to place and looking at retirement.

            And now we see you in denial about that factual reality because you simply can’t get over your hate. You’re letting your emotions rule your thinking on this.

            Also, you’re not even correct about the age being some massive barrier, Lidia Valentin also competed in olympics at 36, going so far as to weigh in for the subsequent Olympics and only ultimatelt retired due to an injury.

            It’s irrational to ban people based simply on their status of being trans as trans people vary widely in their physical ability and biological make-up.

            • @[email protected]
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              6 months ago

              Eh…I’m all the words according to Lemmy. The crowd here seems to all be 13-22 year old ultra liberals. I’m liberal, just not hardcore bleeding edge jump of the left cliff liberal.

              • @[email protected]
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                6 months ago

                Liberals are just conservatives that haven’t taken their mask off yet. We are progressives, and leftists, and I’m older than you think

      • @[email protected]
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        46 months ago

        Britney Griner is definitely worse than all of those 550 men.

        You understand the WNBA all stars would be beat handily by an 8th grade all star team right? It wouldn’t be close.

        • Flying Squid
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          16 months ago

          Do I understand that your imaginary scenario is true?

          No, I really don’t.

          • @[email protected]
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            16 months ago

            This is why this debate is stupid. The people having it are arguing against people who have actually played sport their whole lives. I watched an 8th grade travel team decimate what I thought was our very good team. They had a kid show up that was over 6 (in 8th fucking grade) that could play above the rim. He was unstoppable. That kid would easily be a starter in the WNBA and would smash Griner back to Russia. Get 15 or so of those kids and put them up against any WNBA team you want to put together and they’d win handily.

            That’s the point. Trans-women athletes are essentially testosterone doping. They’ve got more muscle mass, and a heavier bone structure. That doesn’t go away after the transition. The British Journal of Sports Medicine confirmed that.

            In non-competitive leagues, I could care less…everyone can play with everyone…it’s fine. When you’re talking about the Olympics and college sports where the girls have trained their whole lives for a given event only to be beat out by someone who got to take the equivalent of human growth hormones and testosterone is unfair.

            • @[email protected]
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              36 months ago

              Trans-women athletes are essentially testosterone doping.

              Are you seriously suggesting that trans women, the people taking anti-androgens to suppress testosterone production because testosterone is literally poison to them, are doping themselves with testosterone to gain an advantage in sports? Is that really a thing you believe?

              They’ve got more muscle mass, and a heavier bone structure. That doesn’t go away after the transition. The British Journal of Sports Medicine confirmed that.

              Why don’t we take a look at what the British Journal of Sports Medicine actually said:

              One of the most noticeable disparities between gender groups was in height and mass (table 1), with (cisgender men) and transgender women being taller and heavier than their cisgender and transgender counterparts (table 1). Body composition measures (fat mass % and fat-free mass %, table 2) between transgender women and cisgender women found no difference. However, transgender women are, on average as a cohort taller and heavier.

              So you’re partially correct in that trans women do, on average, have more mass than cis women, but only because trans women tend to be taller. Does that translate to an advantage in athletics?

              Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and (cisgender men). Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women.

              Apparently not. Trans women, despite being larger on average, performed worse than cisgender women. This is from your own source. Did you not actually read the study, or are you intentionally cherry-picking to misrepresent its conclusions?

              When you’re talking about the Olympics and college sports where the girls have trained their whole lives for a given event only to be beat out by someone who got to take the equivalent of human growth hormones and testosterone is unfair.

              Imagine a woman training her whole life for an event and being beaten by Brittney Griner. That actually happened, and I bet it was emotionally devastating.

              Imagine training your whole life, and then finding out that you were born with a permanent medical condition that will require taking drugs that reduce your athletic performance to below the average of your peers, and this condition will also make lots of sexist chuds want to ban you from sports entirely. I bet that would really be unfair, wouldn’t you agree?

            • Flying Squid
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              36 months ago

              You are welcome to believe that an 8th grader can beat Britney Griner in a basketball game, but just saying it doesn’t make it true and I’m not sure why you think otherwise.

              And you may not have noticed, but I haven’t talked about trans people in this discussion at all, since that wasn’t the point I was addressing.

              I directly said what I was addressing.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 months ago

      Okay? So what are the rules then? Only trans people that started transitioning before a certain age? Or has been transitioning for a certain number of years? Or should we measure bone density, muscle density, estrogen, testosterone, other various hormones, etc? What if they were a competitive athlete before transitioning? Is it transphobic to ask a person to prove they meet these requirements? Because apparently, based on the mods here, it’s transphobic to even consider that a person who was born a man might have a physical advantage over someone born a woman.

      It’s not like all athletes taking PEDs are better than all of their natural counterparts. But it does afford them an unfair advantage. So we ban their use. A trans person could have an advantage that is the result of them being born a man. This is real and has happened. The existence of that possibility is no different than the possibility an athlete would be superior as a result of PEDs.

      • @[email protected]
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        6 months ago

        Yes, the rules that have been in place about transition time have served fine since even before right-wingers politicized trans people’s existence.

        The irrational part is to try and create blanket bans based solely on the fact that an athlete is trans.

        It completely ignores the fact that trans biology falls on a very wide spectrum and is dependent on numerous factors. It doesn’t make sense to treat trans athletes as their assigned at birth sex because their biology is literally no longer that of their birth gender. It varies by degrees, but it is no more fair to ban a cis woman for being tall than it is to ban a trans woman for being the same height.

        So no, it is not transphobic to have rules and regulations specific to trans athletes when it comes to competitive level sports (whatever experts and committees decide is fair based on actual data) it is transphobic to just outright ban trans people based solely on that status and ignore the biological reality of the individual and whether or not they fall within the range of cis competitors (spoiler, most do).

        It’s really stupid for people to get this outraged about a tiny percentage of the population, an even smaller percentage of which actually compete at high levels.