QT: Can men compete in women's sports if they meet all the same requirements of transwomen?

submitted by FlanJam from self.GCdebatesQT

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[–]BiologyIsReal 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

For someone who admits not to know much about this topic, you surely make a lot of assumptions. You assume the current rules are fair. You assume even if they weren't fair, surely there must be a fair way to allow males in women's sports. Why do you think sports were seggregated by sex in the first place? Even sports that have a weight category, like box or weightlifting, are seggregated by sex. Men have an athletic advantage over women because of their sex. Higher levels of testosterone are a great part of why, but they are not the full picture. You've to consider other factors like height, skeleton, heart and lung sizes, etctera. Moreover, it doesn't matter if an adult male lowers his testosterone levels for a year to compete, this doesn't overide the effects that testosterone already had over his body.

Sports are about bodies, not "identity". There is not reason why trans identified males cannot compete with men. If for whatever reason they really do not want to compete with men who don't identify as "trans", they are free to create their own categories just like women created theirs. Either way, women do not own any male any spot in women's sports.

I didn't say Hubbard lost on purpose. In my thread about the Olympics I said he may have, but whether he did or not it's irrelevant. He already proved his male advantage by qualifying for the Olympics for the first time despite his age and circunstances. What you're not understanding is that when GC say trans identified males have an unfair advantage over women we don't mean that any male will defeat all women every time under any condition. We mean that males competing against women will perform far better in comparison that if they competed against fellow males (also, in contact sports, the presence of males increases the risk for female athletes's safety). That was the point of the article I linked: mediocre male athletes suddenly doing much better after "transition". If you read the stories of male athletes competing in women's sports you'll find that many of them fall within the following categories: males who are new to sport and become a rising star; males who struggled in the men's categories, but are much more successful once swicht categories; middle age males who compete against much younger women.

[–]Porcelain_QuetzalTabby without Ears 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

So you're saying women's sports are for women because women created it and stuff. Most of the other factors could be controlled by weight and maybe some other factors. I imagine something like a score for every athlete depending on their physical capabilities. You could then sort athletes based into brackets based on these scores.

So yeah. Hubbard proves that the current rules are bad and need to be changed. That's not something we need to debate over. The more interesting question is: if actually fair rules were implemented: should trans women and cis men following these rules be allowed to compete against women? And should they be excluded from such a competition until these rules are found?

[–]MarkTwainiac 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Like I said upthread, you seem to have little grasp of the differences in physical development of male and female humans not just during and after the puberty of adolescence, but in utero, infancy and early childhood - and all the consequences these differences have for sports performance from the get-go.

At six months, the hearts and crucial left ventricles of baby boys are 6-8% larger and stronger than those of baby girls. During the adolescence of puberty, boys' hearts grow to the point that they will be 25-38% larger than the hearts of girls and women of the same height and body weight. Males have much larger lungs and lung capacity; longer and stronger bones; skeletons that are shaped entirely differently to female skeletons; narrower pelvises, which affect how the every part of their lower bodies move from the hip sockets and femurs down to the toes and soles of the feet; bigger and differently shaped hands and feet; much greater grip strength; faster twitch fibers; quicker response and recovery time, etc. How do you control for those sorts of advantages?

There are thousands of ways that the bodies of male and female humans are different to one another. These differences give female humans some super powers. We can conceive, grow and give birth to new human beings, and we can provide human babies with breast milk that meets all their nutritional needs and provides them with immune benefits too, enabling them not just to survive but to thrive. Females have greater immunity than males, more endurance, and longer natural lifespans. But when it comes to sports, the same physical characteristics that give us super powers in reproduction and some other ways put us at a disadvantage compared to males. A huge disadvantage.

Also, the repeated claims that you've made about body weight don't hold up. Persons of the same body weight are not necessarily equally matched in strength or sports ability. The bodies of men and women who weigh exactly the same will still be different to one another in thousands of other ways. Also, the one time in many women's lives that we weigh the same as the men in our lives is when we are in the final phase of pregnancy.

[–]VioletRemihomosexual female (aka - lesbian) 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

same body height and weight

Weightlifting records.

Female 81-89 kg category: record is 293 kg total. Heaviest female weight category except "superweight".

Male 51-59 kg category: record is 294 kg total. Lightest male weight category, except "underweight".

I will just leave it here.