all 4 comments

[–]Femaleisnthateful 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I read this article (Quillette publishes some solid work on gender ideology). While I agree with it in full, trans athletes will never accept 'third space' teams. They - like all transactivists - want access to women's spaces and opportunities.

[–]Rationalmind[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Agree, that's why I thought the author's suggestion for opening men's sports, not women's sports, to trans athletes was an acceptable solution. The author of the piece I posted is an evolutionary biologist and managing editor for Quillette.

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Male sports are already open to TIMs coz sports are segregated by sex, not gender. Moreover, in many areas of sports - such as a lot of sports like the NFL, NBA, NHL and Little League - what is commonly seen as the "male" category is actually open to anyone of either sex.

Girls and women are absent from supposedly "male" sports divisions coz the physical differences between the sexes exclude us from making the grade against male athletes - not necessarily coz we are barred. Some "male" sports in the past did explicitly exclude females, and presumably today some still do. But making rules barring females is not usually necessary, coz biology has taken us out of the running in a de facto way.

Little League Baseball has been open to girls since 1973. But in the nearly 50 years since then, only 19 girls have ever made it to the LL Baseball World Series, compared to more than 11,040 boys.

As for allowing TIFs to compete on teams and in sports that are explicitly for one sex or the other, I can see problems in both cases. If a TIF isn't on testosterone, then she should be able to compete in/against other females. But if she is taking T, I think longstanding doping rules would exclude her from all sports - and that should remain the case. Allowing one group to dope on T coz of identity claims would open the door for other groups to demand the same right.