Discussion about this post

User's avatar
James's avatar

Great article. Thank you for writing it. I consider myself a trans ally who was admittedly uncomfortable with trans women competing in women’s sports. I hadn’t found anything that helped me understand why trans women wouldn’t have a competitive advantage until I came across your article. I had previously read David French’s article (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/25/opinion/womens-sports-under-fire.html) on this topic and couldn’t think of a good rebuttal. Now I see the slight of hand. He talks about how the top cis men are so much better at sports than the top cis women and then applies it to trans women as if there’s no difference in sporting ability between the two. He acts as if socially transitioning is enough to gain entrance into women’s competitive sports.

The truth is that the organizations governing women’s sports have a much higher interest in protecting women’s sports than these conservative men and these organizations have been allowing trans women to compete for much longer than I’ve realized (conservative media makes it sound like women’s sports have only just started allowing trans women to participate as a cave-in to a woke mob).

I found the description of your bodily changes very interesting and illustrative - especially the part about shooting a basketball - not only do you have less strength, but your muscle memory that you built up over years now betrays you.

Thank you for your writing.

Expand full comment
Billie Hoard's avatar

I am very near (but it quite at) your footnote 5 I think. I hold justice to be more important than fairness. I am not against requiring particular hormone levels as such but I do think that those requirements ought to apply to all women who compete.

I also think that these requirements do raise trick issues regarding intersex women specifically and would be loathe to tell am I teraex woman that she would have to effectively medically transition or be banned from participating in women's sport (which id I recall correctly is what was done to Caster Semenya).

I think at the end of the day the system I would most support would be one in which sport is divided not by gender per se but by particular biological makers (height, hormone level, or whatever bio markers were deemed critical to performance in the sport) much like how boxing is divided by weight class. Certainly in that scenario cis women would predominate in certain categories while men would predominate in others but the official dividong criteria being something other than gender per se would make a difference.

Expand full comment
4 more comments...

No posts