Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was among more than a dozen college athletes who filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Thursday, accusing it of violating their Title IX rights by allowing transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, details the shock Gaines and other swimmers felt when they learned they would have to share a locker room with Thomas at the championships in Atlanta. It documents a number of races they swam in with Thomas, including the 200-yard final in which Thomas and Gaines tied for fifth but Thomas, not Gaines, was handed the fifth-place trophy.
Thomas swam for Pennsylvania. She competed for the men’s team at Penn before her gender transition.
Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title in any sport, finishing in front of three Olympic medalists for the championship. By not making the final, the lawsuit mentions that Florida swimmer Tylor Mathieu, who was not a plaintiff, was denied first-team All-American honors in that event.
Other plaintiffs included athletes from volleyball and track.
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The Economist looked at and has a perfectly reasonable solution.
The short version is that gender may be fluid, but biological sex isn’t.
They propose two categories, biological female by sex and Open.
Kinda like it used to be.
That’s not reasonable it’s just a new form of segregation. Stating that we (trans women) are both equal to women but seperate which has been ruled unconstitutional and discriminatory.
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How is that solving the problem at all?
To be fair, the problem was equal but separate
The short version is that gender may be fluid, but biological sex isn’t.
It literally is (since people change sex everyday), and even if we pretend it isn’t, it’s blatantly not binary either, but a spectrum, and a socially constructed one at that.
All this “perfectly reasonable” solution is, is more of the same old ignorant transphobia, with some added misogyny for good measure.
How many times today did you change your Y chromosome to X or vice versa?
the same number of times that was the deciding factor on their physiology (zero)
Men tend to have a physical advantage, and that is just biology.
But the problem with thus line of thinking is it opens a massive can of worms. Like for example all of the best long distance runners in the world come from a handful of tribes in Kenya, where they have thinner calves and ankles than other people. And this is statistically a much bigger advantage than the advantage trans women get. So should we ban Kenyans from competing since they have a biological advantage too?
Or even simpler stuff like height. Tall people have advantages in so many sports. So if you’re only 150cm because of your biology, you’re never going to be a pro basketball player for example. Does that mean we need to do something about this, since it’s so unfair?
I think you’ve nailed it here. There is so much focus on the genetic advantage a trans woman has in women’s sports, but at the elite level genetics already plays a determinative role. It’s in every sport. I saw a video the other day on powerlifting. Sure, we all know that weight classes are important, but this video was about femur length. The guy with the world record for squat, in his weight class, has very short femurs, and the video showed the physics of how this gives him a purely genetic advantage in the squat over others who have trained just as hard and are just as strong. At the elite level where everyone is training hard and has good diet and coaching, the difference between winning and losing often comes down to genetic variation. It’s not just purely physical advantages either. At the elite level, psychological fitness is also critical to success and psychology is also profoundly influenced by both genetics and early childhood development, which are not under the individual athlete’s control. On top of that there are economic disparities. On average, a person from a very poor family is much less likely to end up as an elite level skier or hockey player.
There are so many genetic and social factors that contribute to success in elite sports that I don’t think the women who are complaining about trans athletes have much credibility.
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So just get rid of women’s sports?
In my hypothetical setup, I guess so? Are you concerned that no one would engage with anything less than the ‘top class’ of ability which would mean in many sports women would mostly be marginalised? Because it’s a fair concern
I have no clue how to resolve this
I think the first step needs to be asking why we do this and what we want. We have women’s sports because (cis) women generally cannot compete sufficiently with (cis) men. But what are we trying to accomplish? I would say in middle school and high school our goal should be inclusivity. So trans men and women should be able to compete in their identified genders.
On the other hand in college and the Olympics inclusivity is probably not as important for adults competing at some of the highest levels. So I am more willing to accept some limits, but I’m certainly not well versed enough to know where to draw that line.
It’s very easy to resolve, most kids that participate in sports are themselves (shockingly) also kids and will not have gained any advantage if allowed to transition early enough. Even a year or two of puberty is going to shed away very quickly.
(And leave us older trans people who are no longer teenagers who might have gone through a full puberty to have that advantage not participate in sports, and leave kids alone to transition and participate in their chosen gender.)
Either way this is a problem that resolves itself if trans people are allowed to accept and be themselves when they figure it out, which would be a lot more possible if people actually took the time to understand us.
Also genetic advantages like Micheal Phelp’s lungs and body have always been a part of sports. So if we happen to want to play sports we’re still women playing sports with a genetic disadvantage in every way that matters to us like having babies. (sports are the last thing on most of our minds)
Either way stop making trans people the center of your political battles. We just want to live without you fucking up our lives. We aren’t anything that matters to the vast majority of instances. We are the rare exception. Go figure out that they’d rather you argue about us than about the actual issues like health care, abortion, union rights, civil rights, etc.
But the thing is, it’s the actual athletes that make up the league that have a problem with this.
You’re only looking at it from your side and not from theirs
The vast majority of women don’t mind. And you don’t speak for us or get to decide if women and trans women are on different sides about anything. Because we literally are women.
I agree the vast majority don’t.
These ones do, the problem could be solved easily enough with separate locker rooms.
And I’m not trying to speak for anyone, so watch your fucking self it’s right there in the article.
But why seperate, why differentiate just to alienate a kid trying to live out their lives?
First of all, the person in question was in their 20’s at the time. She is 25 now and it happened 2 years ago.
Secondly, I never said to alienate anyone. Give the women that are uncomfortable their own locker room.
I do not see the issue here.
The only place would not be allowed is that locker room and that does not affect her in any meaningful way.
Yes, she has to deal with the fact that those people are uncomfortable around her, but that is just part of life.
Let’s try this another way, if the way to make the problem go away is just to allow someone else to have another locker room and not share it, why shouldn’t we do that with how easy it is?
If tomorrow the separate locker was build then it would be another thing. It’s not about seeing a penis (and maybe not even that) but “that is not a woman”. And that is the only problem. In their minds a trans woman is not a woman.
There is already another room. The men’s locker room.
How often are men and women competing at the same time, so that might change something.
Maybe just use shifts then?
I don’t care about what the reason is.
The people asking for it are the ones isolating themselves, and honestly I just see that as a good thing.
Our lives would all be way better if bigots isolated themselves.
Edit: better gots to bigots
It’s not that they shouldn’t be allowed to compete, I think there needs to be a greater restriction on who and how they compete.
This whole thing started because of Lia Thomas who was a competetive male swimmer from the age of 5 until they completed hormone treatment at the age of 22.
They had the benefit of male puberty and trained as a male. That’s going to make a difference.
Now if you take a child who has not yet hit puberty, put them on blockers, then allow them to transition with hormones and surgery, you’re going to end up with a completely different athelete.
It’s good that the sports organization recognizes that trans atheletes need to be on hormones for a set period of time before being allowed to compete, but there needs to be a policy addressing WHEN they started the hormone treatment.
Starting after puberty has completed should be a non-starter, or at the very least a different category of competition.
I have a name you should look up: Caster Semenya. She has too much natural strogens but she was born a girl. And the same kind of claims were made against her. “She is not a real woman”, “she is actually a man”, …
My understanding is that if the athlete is correctly undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) the biological advantage is significantly reduced if not removed. I am sure there are exceptions though.
Edit: Everything below
After looking through some studies it seems like Trans fem athletes do maintain some advantage, or atleast the current wait time is not enough for the edge to be eliminated.
Best example I could find https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/current-treatment-period-may-be-too-short-to-remove-competitive-advantage-of-transgender-athletes/
I mean, the question is what’s fair both to trans women and cis women. Competing against competitors with an advantage and being excluded are both unfair. Absolutely eliminating advantage isn’t the standard that minimizes unfairness, it’s a balancing act between competing interests.
I’m not sure sports have found exactly the perfect balance, and it may vary a bit by sport, but it doesn’t seem to be wildly off in favor of trans women.
The issue to me is, that trans woman do not perform sufficiently well to displace people from the Sport in the high level. If you are shit at the sport and lose to a trans woman you may rage at her for being not “normal” but that’s a you issue.
This debate is asinine.
Fuck it, let’s just abolish competitive sport until people can calm the fuck down about their stupid games. Maybe we could make the world better in general if we funnel some of that sporting money into something that isn’t totally pointless.
lol you point out that the amount of money put into sports could be used for other things. You suggest making the world better as a possible use case.
There’s nothing incorrect about any of this yet people got angry with you. It’s weird.
For some reason it’s a really contentious topic.
I support trans rights. I also acknowledge that this specific issue materially affects almost no one, and yet it’s one of the flashpoints of some of the most rabid transphobia. And I also acknowledge that given the current regressive laws that are taking effect, it would be infinitely more constructive to focus on… I don’t know, access to healthcare or anti-bullying policy.
Basically no one gets to be a professional athlete. Leagues have not grown in proportion to the population, and even before that, the dream of being a professional athlete was very unrealistic. Professional sports are inherently classist in that you must have consistent access to equipment, facilities, and a bonkers amount of time to devote to a (for almost everyone who tries) fruitless pursuit.
Nothing is better because of professional sport and basically no one gets to do it anyways. It seems like a deliberately divisive issue that is basically meaningless.
On the other hand, this specific reaction seems maybe like people are mad that college is stupidly unaffordable and athletics are a way to access college. Seems like post secondary education reform might be the better solution but wtf do I know.
imagine being so frightened by someone’s gender that you file a lawsuit over it
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If there’s any real debate to be had, it’s along the lines of male hormones and penises. Should either be present in a place which essentially only exists for the purpose of keeping those things out?
They are. Every sporting governing body I’m aware of requires trans women to be on hormone therapy for a minimum of 2 years before they can compete in the women’s category. This is completely in line with the medical community’s research into how long it takes before the benefits of being biologically male are counteracted by the hormone replacement.
The debate has been had in the medical community and has been resolved. Now random people who never gave a fuck about women’s sports before think they should have input when they have no qualifications, just because they have prejudices.
So the new doping would be not taking the full dose of hormone treatments.
Could be, but they would still be required to pass tests to prove their hormones are in the appropriate range, just like cis women have to do when tested for doping with testosterone.
I mean, that’s already covered by testing. Women’s and men’s sports have different limits, USADA isn’t as dumb as you think.
Unless you’re just completely unaware that such an agency exists, then you just don’t understand how competitive sports actually work.
I only care about the locker room thing. If some of the other competitors are uncomfortable with that then we should hear them.
That is something that is very personal to a lot of people.
In a bathroom is one thing, they have stalls and privacy, an open locker room is a completely different thing.
Other than that, idk enough to have an educated opinion, so I don’t care enough to have one.
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This will ENSURE that next time Riley Gaines will get First instead of Fifth! The ONLY thing holding her back was Lia Thomas being TRANS!
On this subject I’ve had mix feelings.
I get their point and I do not see this as a fair thing. Now that more people are coming out or transitioning should they try to make a different league or something?
Correct me, but we are yet to see a trans person winning anything or achieve a significant record anywhere. IIRC hormones do a big effect on anything but bones frame. And we are still talking potentional damage for M2F transitioners only, not F2M athletes or NB athletes.
Honestly, I think the whole perception of international competitive gendered sports like Olympics shall die. Sportsmanship on that level is toxic, many use drugs, costumes and hacks to somehow gain the edge. I see sports as a motivation for regular people to think of their health, not a gambling platform or a thing to boost national pride by injecting ‘winning horses’ with steroids, inhalers, whiskey.
Trans problem in sports is not a problem of trans people who do sports but another reason to redo sports and our perception of them.
Correct me, but we are yet to see a trans person winning anything or achieve a significant record anywhere.
The article itself has this to say:
“Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title in any sport, finishing in front of three Olympic medalists for the championship.”
I’d say that winning a Div1 title ahead of three Olympic Medalist is somewhat significant.
Trans athletes have definitely won some competitions. The news were sometimes difficult to miss.
But that’s really the thing. Sometimes it feels like there’s no problem before a trans athlete wins. Like how many competitions have transgender athletes taken part in throughout modern history? Thousands? And how many have they won? A handful?
I mean, almost nobody talked about this before the inevitable happened: A trans person happened to win a competition and it gained media attention. And when we consider that the Olympics has allowed transgender athletes to compete within their gender since 2003…
Seeing sports as a casual way to get exercise is fine on a personal level if you aren’t an elite athlete, but you can’t force that perspective on millions of people who enjoy competing or watching elite athletes compete. It’s a weird take to want to rewire sports to accommodate a very small minority of people, most of whom wouldn’t even agree with that perspective.
There were abolitions of slavery when most holding voting rights could lose something in the process. Sports are not even close. Reformating them can come hurtless if the focus is pushed somewhere else, like local friendly competitions where there’s no stakes. Americans like their local teams at baseball and football, why it’s impossible to limit them to make regular youth the primal category participating in that, so communities in reverse get more involved, not suoerstars?
Many sports throughout history were only segregated by gender once and because a woman fought to participate and beat the men.
This is all about the bruised egos of bigots. If they’d come 5th against a cis woman they’d be annoyed at themselves and try to do better next time, but coming 5th against a trans woman hurts because they see trans people as inferior (yet also superior, sound familiar? that’s because it’s one of the points from the fascism checklist), so them coming 5th is clearly her fault, and she must be persecuted to give her, and other trans people, the message that they aren’t welcome.
There’s actually already been trans women that were setting new records, far surpassing what was previously set. And because to be trans is too just identify… Well this happened https://nypost.com/2023/03/30/male-powerlifter-enters-womens-event-breaks-record/
NYP is not a very good source. But either way - maybe there should be a term limit for their transition or something? I don’t know. Abandoning sport competitions as they are now altogether seems easier than adjusting the time they eat hormones.
I mean by all means feel free to Google the name and post any link you want. I just grabbed the first thing that popped up.
Yeah this one is a mixed bag. Biological males can absolutely have an advantage in certain things. Simple as that. I mean look what happened with the Williams sisters.
This one is an absolute mess of a thing to have to figure out and, at the end of the day, I’m glad I’m some dude on the sidelines and not having to make the call on this one lol.
I feel the same way. I strongly support one side of this story, but the other side also has a valid point. So even when things turn out how I think it should be, it still has a nasty after taste.
I think we should preemptively start a Go Fund Me for the poor guy who has to make the choice.
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because it’s “exclusionary” or something. A lot of sports, specifically the Olympics, just doesn’t really care about it. I think the uproar over this really just goes to show the problem with sports as a whole. Rather than individuals.
What about race? Why can’t there be a non-Kenyan runners competition?
Regardless of where anyone sits on this topic, I need you to realize something that none of you are even aware of. By accepting the premise of the argument as “men are generally stronger than women,” you are immediately accepting that trans women are men. It doesn’t matter how you land the rest of your opinion. The fascists got you to accept their presupposition that trans women are just men.
I think we should defund all sports because it’s just bullshit and we should fund education and have that be competitive.
sports are only gender segregated because men can’t handle losing to women.
I guess that the premise that people approach this with is actually “women that went through puberty pre-transition are generally stronger than those who didn’t because of how their bodies developed through it”, but people are generally lazy and will say the sentence you typed, implying the one I did.
Their point is still valid, though badly executed throughout faulty wording.
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Just do a ranking system instead of segregating.
In 100m freestyle, the mens world record is 5 full seconds faster than the women’s.
Mens 8th place at the last Olympics was 3.6 seconds faster than the women’s world record.
This isn’t even close enough to consider ranking. There isn’t a control mechanism like in golf where the tee position has moved.
If you didn’t play any sports in your teens and 20’s then you shouldn’t take part in this conversation.
So the only people allowed to have an opinion are the ones that peaked in high school, nice.
Their point was dumb enough, no reason to try and out-dumb them by blatantly misrepresenting what they said.
If you’re a fucking moron you shouldn’t talk at all ^^^
If you didn’t invent HTTP you shouldn’t be posting on the Internet.
