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A modest proposal to solve the trans sports issue (and maybe also all other gender issues in human society)
(Warning: controversial and lizard brain pilled. I’m not sure how much I actually believe this, I just want to have some fun speculating)
Recently, despite the massive blue wave in the midterm election, there was one conservative victory: the state of Washington (a very blue state!) passed a ballot measure that banned trans girls from competing on girls’ sports teams. This has triggered a quick lawsuit, and I have to think it’ll get struck down, but we’ll see. At any rate, it shows what a controversial issue this still is.
My proposal: stop segregating girls and boys sports teams all together. “Separate but equal is inherently unequal.” We already make them take classes together, and in fact mix genders in almost every activity now, even the Boy Scouts! Separate male and female bathrooms are also quickly becoming a thing of the past. And women are now proudly welcomed into every branch of the military, even front-line infantry. Also, kids are fully expected to play together during elementary school sports, as well as most adult rec leagues. So why are middle and high school sports this one, weird exception where everyone wants segregation?
I think that if we’re being honest, there’s one clear reason: it’s because the boys are too much better than the girls. We make the separate girls league so that the girls can win and feel good about themselves. It’s to give them self-confidence.
But isn’t that anathema to sports? Or at least, to competitive sports where there’s tryouts and tournaments and stuff? It feels wrong that the same league which says “you must do everything to be the very best and win” also says “but we’ll make a special, easier division to give out more trophies to the weaker players.”
At a stroke, this instantly solves the transgender issue. Everyone plays on the same team. No need for “vagina inspection day” or however the hell Washington was planning to do it. (And if you ban trans girls from the girls team, then where are they supposed to play? I guess they just don’t get to play sports at all?)
You might ask, but wouldn’t this stop girls from playing sports? No, I don’t think so. They’ll still be on the team, they’ll still practice and compete. It just might stop them from being starters, because they’re probably not good enough for that. But that’s the same problem that most boys have, too. It’s not some fundamental human right to have a starting spot on the varsity basketball team.
But what about the girls’ self-confidence? Wasn’t that the whole point? Well… here’s where things get extra spicy. (Translation: deranged, half-baked, hot takes.)
I believe that a lot of problems in our current society are caused because women have too much self-confidence, and men have too little. The girl who was the star of her girls’ field hockey team gets a full-ride scholarship to Harvard, then gets recruited into a hedge fund, where she is quickly promoted to make diversity quotas. So she becomes an extremely confident, ego-tripping, “girl-boss,” with immense power to make bad decisions that damage the world, or at least her company. She makes life hell for her subordinates, and loses all attraction to any normal men. She advocates strongly for feminist programs that benefit women like herself: more money for girls sports, no trans girls allowed in girls’ sports, and more female executives.
Meanwhile, her male equivalent? Well, he diligently played sports throughout his teen years, and was objectively better than her, but not good enough to make the Varsity team. Certainly not good enough for any college to offer him a scholarship, or even really care. So he goes to his local state university where tuition was cheap. He struggles to date anyone there because he looks bad compared to the football players and celebrities. He graduates, gets a perfectly normal job, but struggles to get promoted because “they have too many men in management already.” He tries and fails on all the dating apps. He stops giving his opinion on politics, because he’s scared of getting cancelled or shouted at by angry feminists.
Mixing up the girls with the boys would change all of this dynamic. The boys would get a big shot of confidence as they realize just how big and strong they are. The girls would stop getting fake confidence at winning a separate league, and really appreciate the boys for what they are. The colleges would open up far more spots to boys, so the gender ratio there would balance out. The boys would get laid a lot more, boosting the birth rate. And then they’d go on to get better jobs and be more active in politics, thus restoring reason and logic in our society.
Am I right? Tell me how any of this could possibly be wrong.
edit: see my response to people saying that the male league is technically "open" here: https://www.themotte.org/post/4074/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/497696?context=8#context
The ideal solution technically is an ELO/MMR system like literally any other competitive environment ever, the issue however is that this is just impractical with sports. They don't play enough games to get a solid baseline, especially not when the teams are set in place so bad teammates can be carried by good ones and vice versa.
Because how sports are set up right now is inherently unfair, everyone knows it and no one seems to care about this issue except in the one limited circumstance of trans athletes. But trans athletes are not an actual issue, they mathematically can not be.
Even if every single trans athlete was an elite player that their cis counterparts can not match, the amount of people they displace from sports if they are allowed to join is only .5-1% of the population. Meanwhile 99% of the population is already displaced and that's because most men and most women are not allowed to do sports in a meaningful competitive manner already. Only the top most genetically gifted people are able to. Most people already have no chance.
Some sports are more blatant than others, basketball for instance is very obvious. The average height of a basketball player is 6'6, this is well over the 99th percentile. People say that men's sports are open to everyone, but that's not true. Men's basketball is not even open to the average man, it is only available to the genetic freaks who tower above everyone else. Likewise the WNBA is six feet. The average WNBA player is taller than the average man. The WNBA is not open to the average woman, only the genetic freaks who tower over everyone else.
Competitive sports are not inclusive, they are not fair, and they are basically impossible for the large majority of humans to participate in already. Men's sports do not include most men, women's sports do not include most women. 99% of the population is already displaced, so trans athletes barely even make a splash in the fairness discussion because the additional displaced is a basically invisible amount compared to the number who already have no access. They're a drop in the ocean of unfairness.
But no one actually cares about fairness in sports and therefore discussion of how we stop displacing 99% of the population from playing are nonstarters. They just want to see genetic freaks playing against other genetic freaks, and the trans sports discussion isn't about fairness, because again we already know no one gives a shit about that, and is instead a proxy for whether or not they're "really" their identified gender.
This argument is the wrong way around. Even if a random woman in the world is unlikely to win a particular competition, the winner of that competition is always a woman. That gives an opportunity to women that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Dozenshundreds of women won medals in the last Olympic Games. If the women's division didn't exist, that number would be in the single digits, perhaps 0. (I guess there are a few disciplines where women have a legitimate advantage, like gymnastics, and a few where gender differences aren't too pronounced, like archery.)If you're born female your chances of winning an Olympic medal during your lifetime are around 1 in a million. A small chance, and heavily influenced by circumstances of your birth, but it's not zero, so it's something that can motivate you to train hard and try to become the best you can be. That's what literally all female Olympians who did win medals did, despite their prior odds not being particularly high.
So the consequence of allowing males in women's sports isn't just that it reduces the number of spots available to women, but that it reduces each woman's chance of victory at the highest levels by several orders of magnitude.
If you sincerely believe that I suggest you join your local peewee football club, and see if none of the parents have a problem with it. Let's see how far you get with your argument that it doesn't matter if it's unfair for an adult to play, because most of the kids competing wouldn't have won anyway.
Or get Usain Bolt to compete in the Liechtenstein national athletics championship, despite being ineligible due to his nationality. I'm sure the Liechtensteiners won't mind one bit.
Or enter a 150 kg boxer into a featherweight competition.
Or a number of other situations we can imagine where people would be pretty upset if a person who does not meet the eligibility criteria nevertheless demanded to be included in the competition.
The true reason that we only talk about this in the context of transgender people, is that transwomen are the only group that is so entitled and egotistic that they demand access to spaces that were specifically created to keep males out. Even cisgender men respect women's spaces more than transwomen do.
There are virtually no adults trying to join children's leagues, and if there were, they'd get sufficient pushback from everyone else that it doesn't turn into a national discussion. If that wasn't the case, you bet we'd be talking about them too.
Not really. Everyone knows transwomen aren't really women; if they were, there would be nothing to discuss. The discussion is about what level of accomodation we should give to people who aren't women but would like to be viewed that way.
It's like asking if an adult with Down's syndrome should be allowed to participate in children's activities which they might enjoy because they're more fitting to their level of mental development. In that case the answer is probably “it's fine if it doesn't endanger the children or ruin their fun” but at no point is anyone confused about whether the Down's syndrome patient is actually a child or not. That means it may be more acceptable to include them in a fingerpainting competition than in a wrestling competition.
The same way for transwomen: what level of accommodation is due of course depends on whether you believe transwomen are simply women born in the wrong body or that you view them as egotistical sexual fetishists. But fairness enters into it, too: it matters whether the transwoman ruins things for the real women.
Okay, so like I said the discussion is a proxy for whether or not trans mtf people count under the category of "women" and not about whether or not 99% of women have any chance.
Now that's just not true. You can't just say "everyone secretly agrees with me, including the people whose words and actions indicate disagreement" so easily.
Which you even contradict yourself later here!
Exactly, some percentage of the population genuinely views trans women as under the category of women. There are genuine understandable theories in which this could occur, such as intersex neurological development is a leading theory for instance. But one also could go into the spiritual/metaphysical direction. Most people believe in some concept of souls or soul like idea, thus the idea of female oriented soul in male body is not some inherently irrational idea under many soul frameworks. And a person defining man/woman based off neurology or souls or whatever else can be valid disagreement.
You do the exact same thing though, here it is:
Your entire argument is centered around fairness, but you never really establish what you consider to be fair.
You missed a very key part of what I said. "everyone secretly agrees with me, including the people whose words and actions indicate disagreement"
Do you think there is a sizeable amount of people whose words and actions indicate disagreement with the statement "Height is an advantage in basketball"? I've literally never seen it, and if I were to ask 100 random people on the street I think every single one would agree in both words and actions.
This is not the case if you were to ask about trans identity. There is a large portion of the population (around 40%) with words and actions that indicate a genuine belief.
Thus it is completely true to say that everyone agrees with the basketball statement, because there is not any stated disagreement with it to be found! It is not true to proclaim everyone agrees on trans identities.
Now if you can find me a large group of people who contest height advantage in basketball, then I will concede that it's not "everyone" who knows sports can be unfair.
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