Hey all,
So I’m looking to take an active step here to understand better some things that my straight/white/cis/middle-aged male brain has had a tough time wrapping itself around, particularly in the gender identity front.
I’m working from the understanding of physical sex as the bio-bits and the expressed identity as being separate things, so that part is easy enough.
What’s confusing to me though is like this. If we take gender as being an expression of your persona, a set of traits that define one as male, female, or some combination of both then what function does a title/pronoun serve? To assume that some things are masculine or feminine traits seems to put unneeded rigidity to things.
We’ve had men or women who enjoy things traditionally associated with the other gender for as long as there have been people I expect. If that’s the case then what purpose does the need for a gender title serve?
I’ll admit personally questioning some things like fairness in cis/trans integrated sports, but that’s outside what I’m asking here. Some things like bathroom laws are just society needing to get over itself in thinking our personal parts are all that special.
Certainly not trying to stir up any fights, just trying to get some input from people that have a different life experience than myself. Is it really as simple as a preferred title?
Edit: Just wanted to take a second to thank all the people here who took the time to write some truly extensive thoughts and explanations, even getting into some full on citation-laden studies into neurology that’ll give me plenty to digest. You all have shown a great deal of patience with me updating some thinking from the bio/social teachings of 20+ years back. 🙂
I agree with Ada. The competitive sports issue is fraught and often used in bad faith as a rhetorical wedge in discourse. Also, given its vanishingly small practical relevance to the vast majority of trans people, in nearly every case it is legitimately “in the weeds.” But to avoid leaving you hanging, and since I’m rather partial to weeds, I’ll bite.
First, can we say the prohibition of anabolics in competitive athletics has succeeded in eliminating them?
The answer is relevant because popular arguments against trans athletics tend to hinge on athletes’ hormonal advantage in womens’ athletics being unfair on account of prohibition, which can only be true if the prohibition itself is fair, which can only be true if the correct answer to the question above is unequivocally “yes” (because unenforceable restrictions are effectively a handicap to rule-followers alone, which is demonstrably unfair and unjust).
I suspect most with even passing familiarity would admit that prohibition in sports has, at best, only made the use of anabolics and other PEDs a more complicated and expensive logistic of elite programs, and that their use persists to a certain degree in virtually every competitive tier. There are of course numerous potential topical implications here (and of course the complication of intersex athletes like Edinanci Silva or Caster Semenya) but since the popularly established rhetorical crux is fairness based on hormones, we must attend to the reason hormones introduce unfairness to a sport.
My opinion is that arguments against trans athletics are disingenuously filling a grievance against what is, in reality, a preexisting unfairness in most sports that fans often prefer not to talk about.
Steroids or other enhancements are of course still a problem. The reasoning that they substitute chemical advantage over dedicated training and hard work is still sound though. To be fair it’s something of a one-issue and one-sided dilemma so far as I can think since I can’t think off hand of any particularly differentiating trait that’s so heavily influenced by hormones other than muscle mass. Most sports it wouldn’t make a hugely notable difference one way or another, trans or cis.
I think it’s more a case of regardless of gender, cis/trans or intersex that just trying to make things as competitively fair as possible is the goal. There are plenty of people of any gender that excel beyond their peers through natural talent and hard work. As mentioned I’m sure the prevalence is such a miniscule thing that it hardly counts as an issue, but a lot of sports of the type I’m thinking have weight classes for a reason. There are few women who would be suited to compete in boxing, weightlifting, wrestling or the like against someone well past 200 pounds regardless of their gender. Most other aspects of competition like speed, balance, coordination, endurance and such are pretty well indifferent to physiology.
No, that’s not the goal of most people having this conversation.
The majority of conversation currently in the media is driven by transphobia, being portrayed as “fairness” to make it palatable.
If it were about fairness, the discussions would be about real world sporting outcomes, and the lack of any evidence showing sustained advantage by trans folk in literally any sport…
But the discussion isn’t focused there, because that wouldn’t support the arguments of the people that are interested in transphobia rather than fairness. Those folk talk about things that can’t easily be tied to real world sporting outcomes, but sound unfair. “Muscle mass”, “bone density” and “testosterone is a steroid” are all examples of that. None of that matters.
The only things that matter, are real world sporting outcomes, and the consequences of excluding incredibly marginalised and vulnerable folk. If the conversation isn’t about either of those things, it’s not a helpful conversation
Ok, to clarify I was speaking for me, not the larger media discussion.
Steroids in themselves are a synthetic testosterone so it seems fair to compare the differences between cis men vs steroid users and the levels found in trans women vs cis women. Not being familiar with HRT to know if it ever truly stabilizes things to a more typical level with what would be expected in cis women is a part of it.
By all means, if you can enlighten me on how long or if that ever happens I’d like to hear it. There’s a reason why I only noted this part as a passing thing though, because I didn’t want to touch off any nerves when trying to learn more. Figured it better for a later discussion.
You say that, but the only reason you’re even talking about it is because of larger media discussion, and the things you’re talking about and questioning are the exact talking points raised in the media to drive the exclusion of trans folk.
“It seems fair…” is the problem.
If it were unfair, it would lead to systemic advantage by trans people in sports, but trans people under perform compared to their cis peers. There are less trans people at every level of sport than you would expect given their participation number. If there were advantage, you would expect to see over representation at higher levels for their participation levels, not under representation.
Which is exactly my point. You jump to “steroids” and “seems unfair” because it sounds reasonable. But it’s not. And as a result, you’re empowering the conversation that leads to the harmful exclusion of trans folk from community sports, and to the visibility of trans role models for young trans folk.
I just did, and you skipped over it, without acknowledging it, to talk about a topic I explicitly flagged as a side issue used to muddy the waters.
There is no evidence of trans folk having sustained advantage in any sport at any level. Trans people are under represented at every level, even after accounting for their reduced participation numbers.
This is an extremely outdated understanding of steroids. While forms of testosterone are often still used for performance enhancement, the vast majority of anabolics are not testosterone at all. There are a variety of different classes of anabolics and they are often used in junction with each other. But modern doping goes much further than just that, with all kinds of new drugs such as SARMS (selective androgen receptor modulators) acting upstream to androgen receptors, drugs which affect HGH or thyroid function, erythropoeitin (EPO) and other interventions to increase blood oxygen efficiency, beta-blockers and other drugs to enhance recovery and performance through other means as well as stimulants and other drugs to increase performance in the moment.
In general I would say it is best to avoid any discussion about performance with respect to gender because any level of sports where there is money and reputation at stake is going to involve more kinds of doping than you could possibly imagine and the performance of these individuals is entirely based on how well they can hide how much they are doping and avoid testing. As a fun little anecdote, about a decade ago the Olympics changed its policy on blood tests, allowing them to hold onto blood to be retested in the future as new techniques to detect doping were developed, and there is one year in which the gold medal for a specific weightlifting event is now in the hands of the 8th or 9th place individual as all other individuals have been disqualified since.
I regret that I have but one vote to give…
This makes for a lot of new considerations actually since I’m neither a doctor or a sports fan to keep up on such things in the least. It takes a lot of the chemical advantage issue off the table. One possible avenue would be to simple integrate the sports and let who wants to join.
As I’d mentioned in another place in the post, my thoughts are more with regards to mass-centric sports. Personally, I’m 6’3" and around 250 pounds currently, if I had the inclination to transition and then joined a women’s football league say (speaking in the American sense, not what we call Soccer) I’d be afraid of hurting someone, similarly with any other high contact sport like that. Obviously there are some particularly large women, a few of them have been in the WWE and similar ventures, but they’re rather the exception and weight classes exist in a lot of the types of sports that I think of.
FWIW there’s significantly conflicting literature on whether there is any biological advantage whatsoever due to hormones if you wait enough time after starting hormones (1 year seems to be roughly the point at which advantages disappear, but there’s vanishingly little studies on this) and importantly none of these studies take a deeper look at the population in world level competition sports. It would not surprise me in the least if individuals who make it to this level do not resemble non-athletes and thus may not have normal hormone profiles or other important biomarkers for which these hormones act upon. For example, myostatin related muscle hypertrophy is associated with a few specific genes and causes abnormal (excessive) muscle growth. The prevalence of mutations which contribute to this condition are higher among world class athletes (1, 2).
The hyper-focus on the effects of testosterone and the general distribution of size between the sexes is an extremely basic viewpoint of the issue at hand. Unfortunately, however, a basic viewpoint is all you need and that viewpoint can be extremely biased or skewed in order to push a polarizing viewpoint. It’s not hard to find other metrics which support this viewpoint, such as the disparity in performance at a world level between the sexes, but even a cursory examination shows that this performance disparity has been decreasing over time and is smallest amongst sports and competitions in which both sexes get equal treatment with regards to spotting and developing athletic excellence (and the social ramifications of doing so) starting at a young age.