The International Cricket Council has become the latest sports body to ban transgender players from the elite women’s game if they have gone through male puberty.

The ICC said it had taken the decision, following an extensive scientific review and nine-month consultation, to “protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players”.

It joins rugby union, swimming, cycling, athletics and rugby league, who have all gone down a similar path in recent years after citing concerns over fairness or safety.

  • HubertManne@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    this is not an idea, its just facts plain and simple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_athletics# your physical strength idea only works if you put forth the idea that pretty much every competition is reliant on it. strength speed endurance. its all men. its not about willingness to be an athlete its just about having a doable categorization. This is why combat competitions besides having seperate mens and womens also have weight classes.

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        We’re talking about sports here - men, on average, have more muscle mass than women, on average, have. So in most sports men will have a higher average and peak performance than women with otherwise the same physiology. This isn’t to say that men are better than women, they simply have a higher physical capacity in this regard.

          • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            That’s not my idea, no - but different sports are biased in different ways. Something like a shot put is all about raw muscle mass while billards is all about fine motor control and spacial reasoning. No skill is more valuable than another but certain sports and competitions emphasize different things.

            In most competitive sports, men do have an edge because they’re sports that men were traditionally good at.

              • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Just to clarify, transmen are almost never an issue people care about. This debate is usually focused on transwomen who may have even gone through puberty before transitioning.

                If we accept that cismen have more muscle mass than ciswomen and that transitioning, physically, is a gradual process then there are two questions 1) after transitioning will transwomen ever be indistinguishable from ciswomen when it comes to sports and 2) how quickly does that happen.

                We’ve only got a few pretty flawed papers to go by but they say that ciswomen and transwomen will always be distinguishable when it comes to sports. If those papers are wrong then it’d still be good to know how long it takes and what factors effect it (I.e. it’s likely that someone who fully went through puberty will take longer to adjust to the new hormones).