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Notes -
Contra deBoer on transgender issues
I don't think you're merely asking us to be "kind"
I’ve long been a great fan of Freddie deBoer. He’s a consistently thought-provoking and engaging writer, courageous in his willingness to step on toes and slaughter sacred cows, worth reading even when I (often) disagree with him.
One of many areas on which I disagree with Freddie is in our respective stances on trans issues. Some years back, he posted that he was sick of people in the comments of his articles bringing up trans issues even though the article itself had nothing to do with the topic, and announced a blanket ban on this specific behaviour.1 He subsequently posted about the subject in more detail, explaining why (in contrast to his more iconoclastic opinions on progressive issues like racism, policing and mental health) he supports the standard “trans-inclusive” paradigm more or less uncritically. In March of last year, he posted an article titled “And Now I Will Again Ponderously Explain Why I Am Trans-Affirming”.
To be frank, I found the article staggeringly shoddy and poorly argued, especially for such a typically perceptive writer: it was a profound shame to see him fall victim to exactly the same errors in reasoning and appeals to emotion he so loudly decries when progressives use them in other political contexts. I intended to write a response to that article but never got around to it, and then the moment had passed. Last week he published not one but two new articles on the topic, so now I have a second chance to strike while the iron is hot. In some cases I will respond to Freddie’s arguments directly; in other cases I think it will be illuminating to contrast what Freddie wrote on this topic with what he has written on other controversial political issues in the past, to illustrate how flagrantly he is failing to live up to his own standards and committing precisely the same infractions he has complained about at length in other contexts.
“No one is saying” and what a strawman is
Freddie repeatedly asserts that various complaints that gender-critical people might have about trans activists are completely unfounded and invented from whole cloth, that no trans activists are saying what gender-critical people accuse them of having said, and that if any trans activists are saying these things then they’re only a small radical fringe and they don’t matter.
In 2021, Freddie wrote an article titled "NO ONE SAYS" & What a Strawman Is", describing a rhetorical trick in which a person opposing him on some political issue will insist that “NO ONE SAYS” a thing Freddie disagrees with, Freddie will cite examples of people saying that exact thing - but rather than concede the point, the person will simply move the goalposts:
Freddie might claim that no one is trying to obliterate the distinction between men and women; no less than a once-august publication like Scientific American argues that sex is a “spectrum” and that the idea of there being “only” two sexes is “simplistic”. Freddie might claim that no one in his experience has ever scolded him for saying “birthing person”, but that is the official language advocated for by the UK’s National Health Service. Freddie might insist that no one wants you to stop calling your kids boys or girls, but here’s a fawning article in the New York Times about parents doing exactly that, and another from the BBC.
Note also Freddie’s claim that linguistic prescriptions like “birthing person” and “chestfeeder” are largely confined to “the parts of our culture that have aggressive HR departments”. This might come as a surprise to Freddie, but some of us actually have to work in companies with aggressive HR departments - we aren’t all lucky enough to be self-employed freelancers pulling down six figures a year, beholden to no one but ourselves. It’s very strange for a self-identified Marxist who expresses such profound outrage about the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat to be so blasé about the obnoxious ideological hoops that ordinary working people are made to jump through as a condition of continued employment in a precarious economy.
For emphasis: Freddie, someone is in fact saying! And in many cases these “someones” are far more powerful and have far more influence on our culture than you or anyone in your circle of like-minded Brooklyn activists. When the fifth-largest employer in the entire world is demanding that its staff exclusively use “birthing person” in place of “mother”, what some Brooklyn activist believes is beside the point.
Female sporting events
I also find it hard to square Freddie’s claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female altogether with his apparent belief that trans women competing in female sporting events is entirely fair and legitimate. How can such a policy possibly be justified without ignoring the indisputable biological reality, consistent across time and space, that the average male person is stronger, faster and more resilient than 99% of female people? No less of a once-respectable institution than the American Civil Liberties Union describes the claim that “Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes” as a “myth”. When a respected organisation like the ACLU, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, asserts that male people are collectively no stronger than female people - the only way I can describe the claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female people is that it is a shameless insult to the reader’s intelligence.
Scepticism for me, but not for thee
A recurrent problem throughout the article is Freddie assuming that any criticism of trans-inclusive policies is a criticism of trans people themselves. No matter how many times a gender-critical person might assert “I’m not worried about trans people using this policy to hurt people - I’m worried about bad actors who are not themselves trans or suffering from gender dysphoria taking advantage of this policy to hurt people”, Freddie continually insists that criticising policies intended to be trans-inclusive is functionally the same as criticising trans people as a group. This is precisely the same kind of facile reasoning he’s so elegantly skewered in other political domains - the notion that opposition to this or that policy necessarily implies hatred of black people, or the mentally ill, or what have you. But he’s guilty of it himself, admitting elsewhere in the article that certain trans-inclusive policies pursued by the radical fringe of the trans activist lobby are short-sighted and counterproductive. So we find ourselves in the curious position in which Freddie can criticise this trans-inclusive policy without that bringing his support for trans rights into question - but if gender-critical people are sceptical or uneasy about that trans-inclusive policy, the only reasonable explanation is that they’re crypto-conservative fundamentalist Christians motivated solely by disgust and hatred of trans people.
For example, Freddie admits to scepticism about outré neogenders (“I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age”), that a lot of the linguistic prescriptions trans activists make are preposterous and counterproductive (“I think making people believe that you want to get rid of the term “mother” is about as politically wise as punching a baby on camera”), that it’s wrong to act like medically transitioning will solve all of a trans person’s problems (“And I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments - things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems”) and even that some medical practitioners are being overly aggressive about pushing minors to transition (“Can I see understand [sic] some concerns with overly-aggressive medical providers pushing care on trans-identifying minors too quickly? I guess so.”) These topics, apparently, reside within the Overton window: one is entitled to raise concerns about them without being accused of being motivated by malicious hatred of trans people as a group. Why are these concerns legitimate to express, and not: the unintended consequences of abolishing single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms; male rapists with intact genitalia being incarcerated in female prisons; convicted sex offenders coming out as trans and changing their names in order to evade child safeguarding policies - or any other of the litany of reasonable-sounding objections gender-critical people have raised over the last decade or so? No idea.
The bathroom question
A large chunk of both articles is dedicated to the question of whether it is appropriate to allow trans women to use women’s bathrooms:
I personally am not a diehard advocate for sex-segregated bathrooms, and can see the merit in making all bathrooms gender-neutral. Of all the components of trans activism going, gender-neutral bathrooms is perhaps the one I find least objectionable. That being said, I find the argument for sex-segregated bathrooms easy to understand (even if I don’t necessarily share it), and admit to being surprised that Freddie doesn’t get it, so I will try to aid him in understanding it.
A blanket policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is intended to minimise the risk of female people being raped or sexually assaulted by male people in bathrooms. While a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is enforced, a person who sees an obviously male person enter a women’s public bathroom could reasonably assume that that person was up to no good, and take appropriate steps to rectify the situation (such as notifying a security guard). Under a trans-inclusive bathroom policy, one is no longer supposed to assume that a male person entering a women’s bathroom is up to no good, because they might identify as a trans woman.
While Freddie is correct that, under a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms, there is nothing stopping a male rapist from simply walking into a women’s bathroom, a trans-inclusive bathroom policy makes it dramatically easier for such people to get away with committing an opportunistic rape, as bystanders will be less likely to intervene if they see a male person entering a women’s bathroom for fear of being accused of being transphobic. The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
If a woman is in a public bathroom and an obviously male person walks in, there is no reliable way for her to tell if that person is a harmless trans woman just minding her own business, or a rapist exploiting well-meaning inclusive policies for malicious ends. The fact that the person has a penis is not dispositive in one direction or the other (as Freddie acknowledges not all trans people may wish to medically transition); nor that they are bearded and wearing jeans and a T-shirt (because “trans women don’t owe you femininity”, and a trans woman presenting as male does not in any way undermine her trans identity).
[image in original post]
For the reasons outlined above, there is no way to reliably distinguish between trans women and cis men on sight2. Hence, there is functionally no difference between “bathrooms intended for women and trans women” and “gender-neutral bathrooms”. Like Freddie, I am not aware of any hard evidence that making bathrooms gender-neutral in a particular area resulted in an increase in the rate of rape or sexual assault. I understand the gender-critical opposition to gender-neutral bathrooms without necessarily sharing or endorsing it. Even if the concerns about how this policy might be exploited by bad actors are in fact unfounded, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse everyone expressing those concerns of being transphobic. I think it’s especially unfair to accuse a gender-critical person of saying they think all trans women are rapists when, in my experience, gender-critical people go to great lengths to emphasise that they are concerned about bad actors who aren’t trans taking advantage of these policies for malicious ends, rather than trans women doing so.
Overstating the importance of the issue
In his second article from last week, Freddie complains that gender-critical people have vastly overstated the significance of the trans issue, elevating it to the status of “the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc” when trans/NB people make up at most 2-3% of the American population. I agree that, in the scheme of things, trans issues receive a vastly disproportionate share of column inches relative to their import. Where I differ from Freddie is placing the blame for this state of affairs solely at the feet of gender-critical people.
As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 39 separate days3 in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days dedicated to celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQ+) - in contrast to Black History Month, which famously falls on the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar, despite black Americans making up 13-14% of the US population. President Joe Biden gave a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, while Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren made the frankly bizarre campaign promise that her pick for education secretary would have to be personally vetted by a transgender child. There has hardly been a single political issue in the last ten years that hasn’t been framed as “how might this affect trans people?” or “what does this mean for the struggle for trans rights?” in the popular media, no matter how tangential the connection - everything from Black Lives Matter to the war in the Ukraine to gun violence in schools to the cost-of-living crisis to Covid to AI to the Israel-Palestine conflict to Brexit and even climate change (“[exposure to secondhand smoke] can exacerbate the respiratory stress that LGBTQI+ populations may experience from air pollution and chest binding, which is a common practice among transgender men to achieve a flat chest”)
It’s a bit rich to demand that Americans spend more than one-tenth of the calendar year celebrating trans people, “centring their voices” and putting their trials and tribulations at the forefront of their consciousness - only to then turn around and say “umm why do you even care about this, it’s such a tiny issue lol” when some of them offer even the mildest pushback. You brought it up.
[image in original post]
Medical transition of minors
Social contagion via social media
On the controversy over underage trans people discovering a transgender identity and/or undergoing medical transition, Freddie writes:
It’s fascinating contrasting the passage above with an article Freddie published in 2022 about the recent phenomenon of social media-addicted teenagers suddenly “discovering” that they suffer from dissociative identity disorder (“DID” for short, popularly known as “multiple personality disorder”), an exceptionally rare condition in which a person has multiple distinct personalities (called “alters”). Freddie unequivocally asserted that most or all of these teenagers are either mistaken (honestly confusing the symptoms of some relatively banal personality trait or mental illness for an exotic psychosis) or actively lying; that this is bad for the teenagers themselves; and that the adults who ought to know better but indulge these teenagers anyway should be ashamed of themselves. He even went so far as to argue that dissociative identity disorder may not even exist, citing as evidence (among other things) that certain people only “discovered” they had it after being charged with a crime. How this observation ties into the transgender debate is left as an exercise to the reader (but here are a few hints).
I really cannot fathom how Freddie can reconcile his position in the DID article with his position on trans teenagers: the cognitive dissonance is simply astounding. Freddie insists that gender-critical people need not be concerned about teenagers receiving hormones or surgical interventions, as the rates at which these are occurring are “low” and “vanishingly rare” respectively - but I would be very surprised if the number of teenagers claiming to suffer from DID (even if they aren’t receiving any medical treatment for same) is greater than the number coming out as trans, which does not in any way alter Freddie’s opinion that the former is a concerning trend. He talks about “a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder… suddenly bloom[ing] into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves” and does not accept for a moment the explanation that “expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had” - but simply refuses to connect the dots with the other thing that awkward teenagers with smartphones and burning need to differentiate themselves started “discovering” about themselves en masse all over the Western world about ten years ago (which resulted in an over 5,000% increase in referrals among female minors to the UK’s centre for transgender children - in the space of less than ten years). And the standard explanation offered for why so many female teenagers are coming out as trans is word-for-word the same as the standard explanation for why so many teenagers are claiming to suffer from DID!
Imagine, if you will, two female teenagers:
Alice is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she has dissociative identity disorder and multiple “alters” (having given no indication that she experienced like this at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a therapist, and perhaps later to a psychiatrist who will prescribe her powerful antipsychotic medication which comes with a host of side effects.
Barbara is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she is a trans boy called Brandon (having given no indication that she was dissatisfied with her gender identity at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a physician who specialises in gender issues who will prescribe her hormones (which come with a host of side effects) and recommend that she undergo top and/or bottom surgery.
Freddie looks at Alice and says: this is concerning, and Alice will suffer as a result - I don’t care that I’m not Alice’s parent or healthcare provider, I still think it’s concerning and I’m entitled to say so. Freddie looks at Barbara/Brandon and says: nothing to see here - it’s a private matter for Brandon, Brandon’s parents and Brandon’s healthcare providers, “I don’t understand why this element of medical science has become everyone’s business to a degree that is simply not true in other fields”, and if you think this is concerning then you’re a bigot. No matter how much a gender-critical person might insist that they are motivated by concern for Barbara/Brandon’s welfare which is just as authentic as Freddie’s for Alice - no, they’re really just a closeted conservative Christian consumed with hatred and disgust for trans people. I truly do not understand why Freddie is entitled to his opinion on Alice (despite not knowing her personally), but no gender-critical person is entitled to their opinion on Barbara/Brandon.
Let’s take it a step further:
What reasonable person would look at the scenario described above and not immediately conclude “Alice has erroneously come to believe both that she is trans and suffers from DID because of her social media consumption”? But Freddie would have us believe that the two phenomena are entirely unrelated. The fact that Alice discovered that she was transgender and had DID at exactly the same time, that she did so immediately after spending far too much time in online communities in which both DID and being trans are glamorised - this is all just a big coincidence. Freddie absolutely reserves the right to say that Alice will suffer as a result of her erroneous belief that she has DID, but anyone (outside of Alice’s parents and healthcare providers) who does the same of her belief that she is a trans boy has outed themselves as a cruel, malicious bigot.
Some of the passages from Freddie’s DID article are almost painfully on-the-nose:
Incidentally, the scenario described above (in which Alice comes to believe that she is both trans and has DID) is not an armchair hypothetical. I took a quick scan of the #dissociativeidentitydisorder tag on TikTok and noticed that many of the individuals posting content under that tag describe themselves as transgender in addition to claiming to have multiple alters. Transgender patients who also claim to suffer from DID is apparently a sufficiently common scenario that it was discussed at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in September 2022. What to do in the event that there is disagreement among the “alters” about whether or not to undergo medical transition? WPATH’s elegant solution: use a smartphone app to allow the alters to vote in turn and come to a collective decision.
Self-regulation of medical bodies
Stories like the above are precisely why so many gender-critical people don’t share Freddie’s optimism in the ability or willingness of the “medical community to change their standard of care as new data comes available”. By asserting that “I am certain… that I don’t want the government getting involved in these medical decisions. Ron Desantis does not get a say, sorry”, Freddie is committing himself to a position in which the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to effectively self-regulate and will never require outside interference from governmental bodies.
That’s a remarkably high level of confidence to have in any medical body governing any kind of medical treatment. Of course we would all love to live in a world in which medical bodies can self-regulate and no outside interference is necessary, but - well, medical scandals happen, and sometimes the government getting involved is an act of last resort after self-regulation fails. I’m not saying that the bodies governing healthcare for trans minors are any worse at self-regulation and course-correction than the average medical body (whether in oncology or orthopaedics or whatever); but I’m definitely saying I don’t think I have any good reason to believe that these medical bodies are better than average, and certainly not so much better that Freddie’s unshakeable confidence in them can be rationally justified.
To use an example of how medical bodies’ self-regulation can and does fail, the Irish surgeon Michael Neary conducted unnecessary hysterectomies and other surgical procedures on over a hundred women over a thirty-year period. Several nurses blew the whistle at various points in his career, to no avail; an internal investigation conducted by three consultants found no evidence of wrongdoing and recommended that Neary continue working in the Lourdes Hospital. It was only after a judicial inquiry brought by the ministry for health and children (i.e. the government) that Neary was finally struck off the register, five years after the internal investigation found he’d done nothing wrong. If the government hadn’t gotten involved (as a measure of last resort, the ability of the medical bodies in question having demonstrably failed to self-regulate and course-correct), it’s entirely possible that Neary would have ruined dozens of additional women’s lives before retiring on a tidy pension. Or consider the more recent example of Lucy Letby, a serial killer working as a nurse who murdered at least 7 newborn babies: the NHS Foundation Trust attempted to handle the matter internally (even forcing doctors who’d raised the alarm about Letby to personally apologise to her) and were extremely resistant to involving the police. It was only after alerting the police (i.e. the government) - nearly two full years after members of staff had raised the alarm following Letby’s first confirmed victim - that Letby was finally removed from her position and later arrested, charged and convicted.
To clarify: I’m not saying that governmental intervention into transition for minors is currently necessary. However, the suggestion that we can confidently assert that no such intervention will ever be necessary is preposterous. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that the medical bodies governing medical transition for minors are invulnerable to the kinds of social dynamics and institutional failures that have afflicted every other kind of medical body,4 and doctors as a profession (as the examples above illustrate) are notorious for closing ranks and circling the wagons at the first whiff of a potential scandal. To simply declare by fiat “the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to self-regulate and course-correct, governmental oversight or intervention is not necessary and never will be” is shockingly naïve. He touched on a similar point in his article from March of last year:
All true. The difference being that, in my experience, whistleblowers who call attention to substandard practices at dialysis centres, radiology labs and pharmacies are not generally accused of lying, being right-wing agitators or being bigoted against marginalised members of society - all accusations hurled at Jamie Reed, even well after her claims of misconduct were largely substantiated by no less than the New York Times.
This unqualified confidence in a class of medical practitioners is all the more baffling coming from Freddie, considering he himself found it entirely credible when one of his readers described how her therapist used their sessions as an opportunity to hector and guilt-trip her about her white female privilege in the style of racial grievance politics popularised by Robin diAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. If therapists are vulnerable to allowing their faddish political opinions override their duty of care to their patients, why not endocrinologists, surgeons and so on?
But I suppose the mere suggestion that endocrinologists who work with trans teenagers are just as fallible and prone to ordinary human error as anyone else makes me a cruel, malicious bigot who hates trans people.
Parental input into their children’s transition is more controversial than Freddie seems to think
As an aside, do you know who besides gender-critical people is a cruel, malicious bigot? If we were to be even a little bit consistent about this, Freddie himself. I’m not the first person to note that perfectly reasonable and level-headed individuals with impeccable progressive bona fides (such as Jesse Singal) have been smeared as bigots by no less an insitution than GLAAD simply for arguing, as Freddie does, that the parents of trans children should have some input into what medical treatments their children do or don’t undergo. The official stance of many pro-trans organisations is that “trans kids know who they are” and that any attempts to gatekeep their access to “gender-affirming care” (including by their parents) is denying them lifesaving medical treatment, no different from denying insulin to a diabetic.
If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this bill in the state of California which would make a parent’s decision to “affirm” their child’s gender identity (or not) a factor in custody disputes (at the time of writing, it has passed both houses but not yet been signed into law). In the eyes of the state of California, all other things being equal, a parent who expresses misgivings about their child’s desire to medically transition is a strictly worse parent than a parent who uncritically and enthusiastically endorses that child’s desire. See also the publicly-funded British charity Mermaids, who were caught sending a chest binder to a journalist posing a 14-year-old teenager, even after being explicitly told that the girl’s mother had forbidden her from wearing one.
Obviously, Freddie, you would be very insulted if you were to be smeared as a bigot for expressing the “standard, not-particularly-interesting progressive” opinion that parents should have some say in what medical treatments their children undergo. Please recognise that this “not-particularly interesting” opinion of yours is in fact very controversial in the trans activist space. Please try to understand how gender-critical people feel when you smear them as bigots for expressing what seem to them “standard, not-particularly interesting progressive” opinions, such as “it’s bad when sex offenders falsely claim to be trans women so as to serve their sentences in women’s prisons”.
Detransition
In his article from March, Freddie had this to say about detransitioners:
For the record, the existence of detransitioners does not undermine my respect for trans people. I have trans friends who I respect. If they decided that they wanted to revert to being cis, I would support them in that decision absolutely. The existence of people who transition and then come to regret their decision does not challenge my belief that adults are entitled to transition in the first place, any more than (to use a banal example) the existence of people who undergo tattoo removal challenges my belief that adults can get tattoos if they want to.
The detransition phenomenon is important to highlight in the interests of informed consent. If an adult is considering undergoing an elective medical procedure (or series of medical procedures), their healthcare practitioner should proactively make them informed about the statistical outcomes of that medical procedure, which includes the proportion of people who undergo that procedure and later come to regret it. This goes double for surgical procedures which have a high risk of complications. It goes double-double for highly invasive procedures which will irreversibly change large parts of a person’s body and permanently sterilise them. And it goes double-double-double when you’re proposing to do the above on minors.
If our collective attitude towards medical transition was sensible and depoliticised, the paragraph above would be a complete no-brainer. Instead we find ourselves in a culture in which medical transition is routinely presented as a silver bullet which will erase a trans person’s problems in one fell swoop; in which even the expected downsides of successful transition are downplayed and minimised by healthcare practitioners; and in which distressed parents are browbeaten with emotionally manipulative slogans like “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” In this environment, it’s perfectly reasonable to push back on the soft-pedalling of medical transition by pointing out that a significant proportion of those who transition later regret their decision, and that prospective transitioners ought to take that fact (among others) into account when making their decision.
If anything, the term “detransition” downplays the severity of the situation. A “detransitioner” has not simply pressed Ctrl-Z and reverted their body to factory settings - the changes they have made to their body are generally irreversible and will completely change the course of their life. Michael Neary’s victims were furious upon realising that they were denied the ability to have further children for no good reason at all - the idea that medical professionals would downplay the magnitude of the decision to transition is unconscionable.
The “Fox News Fallacy”
In his article about multiple personality disorder, Freddie described what he called the “Fox News Fallacy”. I will quote from it at length:
And what does Freddie have to say about gender-critical people who are (among other things) concerned about trans teenagers for many of the same reasons that Freddie is concerned about teenagers claiming to have DID? Well, he
One might think the breadth of criticisms directed towards trans activism and the range of people expressing them might give Freddie pause - surely not all of these people are just bigoted lapsed Christians motivated by animalistic revulsion of trans people? But no - no matter how many people express reservations about this or that component of transgender activism; no matter how measured, restrained and thoroughly researched their criticisms might be; no matter what point on the political spectrum they may reside on (including no less than the Communist Party of Great Britain, who in another world Freddie might consider fellow travellers); even if they are atheist materialists who object to gender ideology specifically because they consider its quasi-mystical dualistic character something of a cultural regression - everyone who is even a little bit more sceptical on the trans issue than Freddie must in fact be a closeted Christian who thinks that trans people are “wicked” and “against God’s plan”. There’s no other possible explanation that merits serious consideration, apparently.
__
1 For the record, I don’t blame him for finding this behaviour tiresome, I think the people melodramatically accusing him of hypocrisy for “censoring” them should chill out, and as it’s his Substack, the moderation decisions he enforces on it are entirely his prerogative. To anyone who says that my only beef with Freddie is that he won’t let me talk about this stuff in the comments of his articles about something unrelated, I would like here to reiterate: I have never complained about him forbidding people from bringing up trans issues in the comments of his articles, and completely respect his decision to ban people from doing so.
2 To better disambiguate between genuine trans women and cis bad actors was the root of my proposal to make incarcerating trans women in women’s prisons conditional on their being first assessed by a psychiatrist experienced in gender issues. Freddie doesn’t even touch on the prison issue at all, I suspect because he recognises a losing battle when he sees one.
3 Not including the unofficial “Trans Day of Vengeance”, which coincides with April Fool’s Day.
4 To bring it back to another of Freddie’s older posts: medical bodies are institutions, which means they are exactly as subject to the Iron Law of Institutions as any other institution.
Neither the average male nor the average female is competing in/winning at high-level sporting competitions.
Alright, let do this again:
The actual observed evidence, unless anyone can show me otherwise, is that trans women have no competitive advantage. Competitive advantage means winning more often, and if you win more often that shows up in stats. Sports stats are among the most obsessively collected and analyzed numbers in our society, no one has ever been able to show me a simple t-test showing that trans women win more often than cis women. No matter how many anecdotes you have and how strong your intuitions are, there's a straightforward statistical definition that's easy to test, and it doesn't support the idea of an advantage.
How is that possible in the face of your strong intuitions about the average man and the average woman? Well, you need to be able to picture population distributions in your head. Like this:
Take the population distribution of males and the population distribution of females, you'll see the mean for males is higher wrt most types of athletic performance. Ok.
Now:
Make a new distribution by picking out the ~.2% of the male population that are trans women.
-Does this population have the same mean athletic ability? I would guess not, there's plenty written on innate brain differences between cis men and trans women, no surprise if those affect the body and maturation as well. Also if you believe in social contagion, boys who are already 'soft' and not 'winning' at masculinity are more likely to fall to being trans as a good alternative. Also today lots of trans teens are taking puberty blockers and not going through the average male puberty in the first place. Strong correlation with autism which has a strong correlation with being an indoor kid. Etc. etc. etc. -Does this population have the same variance in athletic ability? Absolutely not, it's 500x smaller and has a strong selector on the people in it being similar to each other, both of which are going to shrim the variance and reduce the extremity of the outliers.
Now, put that population on HRT for 2+ years, which is the minimum many professional sports organizations require. Does this shrink all the bones in a way that completely reverses teh effect of male puberty? No. Does it atrophy muscles and do lots of other shit that moves the population average on athletic ability downward? Fuck yes it does. Does it also further decrease variance? Probably, since it's a huge biological intervention that moves everyone in the same direction.
Now, compare this tiny modified population to the population of all females.
-Is the mean for the trans women population on athletics still higher than for the female population? Who the fuck knows. We've never really measured it precisely enough to say, we know it's not the same as for the larger male population anymore.
But who cares? The average person isn't winning professional athletic competitions, the most extreme outliers in the whole population are winning them. So:
-Is the most extreme outlier for the trans women population higher than the most extreme outlier for the female population? Keep in mind that the female population is 500x larger, leading to the most extreme outliers being many standard deviations further out for the female population than the trans women population. And wherever the mean for the trans women population might be, it probably has a lower variance as well for the reasons we talked about.
So there's a lot of strong reasons why the strongest outliers in the female population would be better than the strongest outliers in the trans women population. It's pretty straightforward stuff if you think in terms of population distributions, and most importantly, the male average vs the female average tells you almost nothing useful about this question.
Now, is it still possible, after all that, that the trans woman outliers are better than the female outliers? Sure, anything's possible.
And if that were true, we'd expect one of the 20 billion anti-trans pundits to have done a simple t-test on win/loss records showing that advantage, and publicized it at some point in the last 15 years we've been arguing about this.
Absent such a test and in the face of all the reasons to expect otherwise, my money is on 'no advantage' until someone shows something more persuasive than an anecdote and intuition.
Anyway: you use this sports stuff as evidence taht trans activists are inherently claiming there's no difference between men and women, because they're claiming trans women don't have an advantage over cis women in sports. But it should be blindingly obvious that these two facts are only logically related if you assume that there's no difference between trans women and men. Which you may believe, but the activists don't! For the good reasons I've shown here, and more!
So there's really nothing to this part of your claim.
I'm not sure if averages will necessarily be enlightening, because we can easily imagine a multimodal distribution. On one hand, transition doesn't necessarily lead to removal of all biological sex differences, on the other it's a medical procedure that can have negative health effects impacting athletic performance. Both seem very plausible.
If, as an exaggerated toy model, transition half of the time does nothing, half of the time completely cripples the patient, we'd observe it averaging out, but half of transwomen would easily dominate.
We don't need to look at averages when we can look at individuals. If we take a specific individual and compare their relative performance before and after, that tells us what transition did in their case. If Lia Thomas or Laurel Hubbard go from average in the male division to record-breaking in the female division, then clearly transition doesn't guarantee to nullify the sex advantage, and therefore shouldn't allow competing in the female division. It doesn't matter if even 90% of transwomen are average and some have health issues - the women competing against Thomas or Hubbard still got robbed.
That's all very possible!
And if it were true, it would show up in win/loss records!
To be extremely clear, the form of my argument is this:
Intuitions that trans women athletes must have a huge advantage because the average man has a huge advantage over the average woman are wrong. We have no idea what the trans woman distribution looks like, and the relevant measure is the outliers rather than the average. So we should acknowledge our state of ignorance about that and have really weak priors about whether there will be any advantage and in which direction.
Absent strong priors based on ability, the way to figure out whether someone has an unfair advantage in a game is to look at whether they win that game significantly more often than chance. This is the type of sports record that shows up on ESPN 5 times a minute and is generally easy to access.
Since no one has ever demonstrated a statistical advantage in win/loss records and we have weak priors about innate ability, we should assume then null hypothesis for now and let trans women compete. If that leads to gathering enough data to demonstrate an unfair advantage some day, then we'll have a legitimate reason to revisit that decision.
So 2 responses.
1 is 'I disagree'. There are a trillion local and regional sports records for a trillion things, records get broken literally every day by cis athletes. The question is whether trans athletes break them more often than than would be proportional. Furthermore, it doesn't matter what men's division you were in, it matters whether the women's division is a fair contest with you in it. If they win every contest they ever go to and no one can compete with them, that's probably unfair. If they won one competition once and then lost every other competition, well, it seems like cis women are competing against them just fine and there's not a problem. (Thomas broke no records for example, just had one good meet)
2 is 'Yeah anecdotes aren't data, for all I know something fucky was going on in those situations and the optimal policy precludes those situations. I already talked about sports requiring 2 years of HRT as a fine thing that needs to be part of the conversation, did those anecdotes have 2 years before competing? Did they go of it before competition? Maybe weightlifting is a sport where it's actually not fair and a statistical analysis would show that, if so then maybe you have a ban there but don't need one in soccer or tennis. Etc. If we took away entire demographics rights because of 2 anecdotes, we'd be in a lot of trouble as a society. 2 white men have ever committed insider trading, maybe white men can't be trusted with high-level positions in corporate America. Etc.
I disagree. The situation is that normally ineligible people are demanding special allowance, on the basis of arguing that they have a way to nullify the impact of the property that makes them ineligible. The onus is on them to prove that it's really nullified. If we don't know either way, we play it safe.
Doesn't need to. If the transwoman only makes 3rd place, then the woman in 4th lost the bronze medal. If that's due to an unfair advantage, that's bad and she was treated unfairly.
But not by mediocre cis athletes.
Hubbard and Thomas perform better than before, by a lot. This shows that transition gave them an advantage.
This isn't a rights issue, there is no right to compete in the women's division with a male body. Cis men don't get to, and no one has a problem with it. The question is whether transwomen should get a special allowance.
Not at all. The situation is that women want to play on women's teams.
Obviously, if we try to argue about what is 'the situation' in these terms we're just going to pointlessly fall to the semantics which we disagree about.
So lets just say: the freedom-maximizing position is to let anyone play on any team, we only diverge from that when we have a very good reason to (which is why there are men's and women's leagues), we currently don't have good evidence that trans women need to be excluded from women's teams.
Typically the onus is on the person wanting to penalize or exclude someone to provide proof, that's the concept behind 'innocent until proven guilty' and the like. It's a good rule of thumb.
I'm talking about 'unfair' in terms of 'not possible to compete against'.
If they didn't come in first, obviously other women can compete against them.
You're talking about some kind of metaphysical 'fairness' where you have decided that being good at something because you were born male and then transitioned is 'unfair', but being born female and really talented at it is 'fair'. I think that's always going to end up being weird and arbitrary and impractical to use as an actual standard, it just falls into promoting personal prejudices that will be different for different people, it's never going to be enforceable because it's not based on any consistent standard beyond 'I don't like this'.
And it's not relevant to the actual competitors. What's relevant to them is whether the matches they're in are competitive.
They're not mediocre cis athletes. They're exceptional trans athletes.
If they were mediocre trans athletes, then the exceptional trans athletes would have broken their records by even more!
That's the point, if the actual trans athletes that exist are fair competition, then that's all that matters. Maybe if the trans population were 500x larger than it is, it would throw really exceptional athletes that no cis woman could ever compete against, and it would be unfair to let them in the same league. But we're not in that world, as far as any statistical data can tell us.
Again, you have some personal intuition that if someone has a rank in the men's division then transitions they should have the same rank in the women's division. But that's just an arbitrary weird thing you made up. It doesn't affect whether the women's division is a fair and competitive environment, and there's no obvious reason why we should care about it - or, more importantly, why we should restrict people's rights based on it.
Sports divisions are based on biology, and the people in question aren't biologically female. I don't want to play semantics games about what "woman" means, that's missing the point.
The proof is easily given though: We have male biology. The burden of proof now shifts to the affirmative defense of "in this case the effects of male biology don't apply".
We have good evidence that male need to be excluded from female competition. We would now need evidence that these particular kind of males do not.
No, fairness is a function of the game, and if the premise of the game is that male advantages aren't allowed, then any kind of male advantage is unfair. It wouldn't automatically be unfair for a male to compete against a female as long as it's in the open division, however.
They were mediocre athletes, then they transitioned and became exceptional. This proves that they have an advantage from transition, because they're mediocre on their own talent. This is not just "personal intuition". It improved their ranking, so it gave them an advantage.
Exceptional trans athletes would be exceptional athletes who are trans, like Caitlyn Jenner.
Allowing certain mediocre athletes to perform exceptionally based on advantages that the division is supposed to exclude is not fair. Competitive is a separate matter.
And the reason we care about excluding it is the same we have women's divisions to begin with.
Like I told you, there are no rights being restricted, and if you disagree, you should explain which rights are restricted how, not just assert it.
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You say "not at all" but nothing you say actually changes that they were "normally ineligible" to play in female teams with attempts to change that only recently (despite attempts to promote female sports going back to Title IX).
Your attempt to leverage semantics in your favor (e.g. via the word "penalize" vs "exclude") doesn't actually defeat the basic claim about the status quo.
Even if they were uncontroversially considered women - and they aren't - they were/are still ineligible.
Yeah that's why my literal next sentence was saying this is pointless semantic games and we should use an empirical metric instead.
I've been suggesting win/loss record statistics as an unambiguous and definitive empirical metric here, so we can ignore all teh rhetorical games and just decide the matter on facts. I'd love to get more engagement on that actual proposal.
Per your claim, the situation of fact is that we don't have good evidence, so we need to decide what to do as a default until we attain it, whether the burden of proof is on excluding or allowing transwomen in. You are the one who started rhetorical games about "women on women's sports", weaponizing the ambiguity of "woman", with regards to that.
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All this is probably true for typical transwomen. But transwomen athletes are not a random selection of typical transwomen, they are much more likely to be outdoor kids that like winning and being strong and agile. Successful transwomen athletes are also not a random selection of transwomen athletes, they are much more likely to have transitioned later in life and gone through at least some of the average male puberty, or have a body that is much less susceptible to HRT, or both, simply because these traits are what makes them more likely to win.
And I know the answer to this is "So what? Successful ciswomen athletes have also won the genetic lottery, or they wouldn't have won against equally diligent women athletes. East African ciswomen runners already dominate Olympic marathon rankings, how is it different from East African transwomen dominating them instead?"
Right, they're the outliers from that distribution I'm having you picture, that was the whole point.
That's why I'm talking about the variance and range of that distribution, trans athletes are pulled from the positive tail of the overall trans distribution.
The idea you should have in your head is that the cis woman population throws outliers, the trans woman population throws outliers, and if those two sets of outliers fall into generally the same range of ability for whatever reason, then competition between them is fair.
if
You know, being a mod and seeing the moderation queue makes me wonder how the previous ones didn't have a nervous breakdown from the sheer number of spurious and pointless reports.
This one caught one for "low-effort", and while a laconic dismissal isn't a robust rebuttal, in this case it's clearly obvious that you're disputing a load-bearing aspect of @guesswho 's claims, and both of you have discussed your concerns in more detail. Someone following up a string of high-effort comments with a low one will not be scolded for it.
To the person who reported this, come on, you lose the right to complain about being dogpiled and unfairly reported if you're going to engage in frivolous reporting yourself.
At the very least, I have personally done the same if without the mods at the time taking umbrage, and so have many others. So from precedent and enlightened self-interest, I don't see anything here worth complaining about.
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Yeah, if. That's why I'm inviting anyone at all to provide data, if they're so sure they're obviously correct.
I am glad we've identified the crux of the disagreement. You expect that two different groups of people should have broadly equivalent results because they represent two wider groups of people, one of which is doing their best to resemble the other, if the opposite isn't proven. Most people arguing with you, including me, expect that two different groups of people should have broadly different results, because they have different origins and the athletic results of transwomen depend on how much they resemble their natal sex physiologically, again, if the opposite isn't proven. Neither side really has any data, so both sides resort to "obviously-ing" they way out.
I do not claim that they will obviously have similar performance.
I claim that the other side's reasoning is deeply flawed, and we're actually at a state of ignorance about relative performance.
I claim that there's a simple empirical metric that we can use to determine fairness, that's easy to measure and calculate, and we can use that to answer the question just as soon as anyone bothers to measure it.
I claim that absent any current evidence or valid logic to expect unfairness, we should default towards liberty and freedom and granting rights for now.
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You're making several extremely large leaps in logic here. As far as my understanding goes, this claim was first made in a Dutch paper from the 1990s, which examined slivers of the brain taken from deceased trans women. The study found that the volume of the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis in transsexual women’s brains was more like that in females than males. It was only later that critics pointed out that these results were hopelessly confounded by the fact that the trans women in question had been on HRT for years if not decades, meaning it's impossible to tell if these observed similarities were present from birth or came about as a result of HRT. The findings from the Dutch paper have never been replicated. Even Dr. Joshua Safer, quoted in the ACLU article I cited in the OP to justify trans women competing in female sporting events, has described the findings as the "weakest data" and admitted that they've never been reproduced.
If you have better evidence that trans women's brains look more like female brains than male, I would love to see it.
But even granting this, you can't just leapfrog directly from "trans women's brains look more like female brains than male brains" to "ergo, trans women are systematically weaker, slower and less resilient than the male average". Those are two completely different claims.
One of the major criticisms of the excesses of the modern trans activist movement is that self-ID has radically changed the profile of what the typical trans woman (and trans woman athlete) looks like. Thirty years ago, when coming out as trans was rare and stigmatised, I wouldn't find it too hard to believe that the average trans woman was a frail and delicate little thing. Nowadays, when the category includes hulking thugs like Karen White and Fallon Fox? Not so much. This is pretty much exactly the criticism that so many female athletes are making of trans-inclusive policies in sports: while we might be sympathetic towards including a trans woman who has been dysphoric since prepubescence, who never underwent a conventional male puberty and has been (and will be) on HRT for her entire life - that sympathy vanishes when a towering Liam with a five o'clock-shadow who's been through puberty realises that he can't score a gold in the male leagues and opportunistically starts calling himself Lia.
Many, but not all. See this article about disc golf, in which the Professional Disc Golf Association officially required that trans women athletes "bring their blood testosterone levels down below 10 nmol/L", but in practice the competition was essentially run on the honour system, allowing males who had gone through puberty and who had not suppressed their testosterone in any way to compete alongside females. See also the Ladies' Gaelic Football Association, whose policy on transgender women does not mention HRT or testosterone levels at all as conditions for competing.
Perhaps not to the extent that you believe:
I'd like to respond to your argument in full, but there are so many half-baked or outright faulty assumptions and leaps of logic just in these three points, that I suspect it's built on foundations of sand.
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This type of thinking and rhetoric based on the absence of evidence is never going to convince anyone to change their view (in both directions). But I'm going to argue this onus is on the pro-trans side, not anti-trans, to provide the statistical evidence.
I could just as easily stake the claim that the actual observed evidence is that trans-women have an observed competitive advantage and that no one has ever been able to show a simple t-test that trans-women don't win more often than cis women. Surely one of the 20 million pro-trans pundits would have done a simple t-test on win/loss records showing there is no advantage?
The default view should not be that there is no advantage or that there is an advantage, if you had absolutely no bias and knowledge of the world around you the default view should be "I don't know." You can't pretend that your view on this topic is entirely based on statistics if you have a default position. Absent any statistical tests, you can't accept or reject the null hypothesis that the two populations are equal.
This brings up a greater point about the formation of knowledge. Is most people's knowledge of the world based entirely on statistical reasoning? No, and I highly doubt yours is either. Statistics can be used to aid in the formation of, support of, or contradiction of an argument. But most people don't have statistical facts or knowledge and yet somehow have opinions and an understanding of the world around them. Most knowledge is built intuitively and empirically through personal experiences. If your goal is to convince people of your perspective you cannot simply point out they haven't provided "any" statistical evidence and then fail to provide any of your own.
So what should be the default position on the advantage of trans-women over cis women? I said earlier it would be that "we don't know" if we have no knowledge of the world, but the fact is people have intuitive knowledge about the world. Thus the default view is that trans-women do have an advantage over cis women. The topic in the trans issue in women's sports is whether trans-women should be allowed to compete in women's sports, and the default position for a reasonable person is that trans-women have an advantage, and this is the majority view.
In 2023 a Gallup poll found 69% of Americans already oppose allowing transgender athletes in sports, up from 61% just 2 years ago. You are not going to convince most, if not any, of these people to support the inclusion of transwomen in women's sports by saying they haven't provided you with some evidence. Some sports organizations have created very specific criteria to allow trans-women to compete, but with the way the trends are going people are eventually going to create their divisions/competitions where only biological women are allowed to compete. Athletics is an area of human endeavor that can only exist due to public support, and if the people don't want trans-women in women's sports then they shouldn't be allowed in women's sports. Given the trends in public support and the fact that female athletes are now refusing to participate in competitions against trans-women athletes, I'd say it really should be the pro-trans side to provide the evidence to convince people to the other side, not the other way around.
By the way, why haven't there been any t-tests (or any other kind of statistical comparison) done to show any proof in either direction? Here are a few reasons:
Also, your reasoning is flawed. From your initial premise:
Win rates for male athletes is the same as win rates for female athletes because they compete in separate distinct categories. There are not enough male-female cross-competitions to do a statistically valid comparison of win rates where the genders face each other. The only types of sports where you can do a comparison are competitions where you compete based on some kind of recorded value (such as finish times in racing or swimming, weights lifted in weightlifting, etc). These are competitions where physical advantages directly translate to victories because those competitions are about the factors that have measured physical advantages.
When it comes to the physical advantages of trans-women to cis-women, there are so many different studies showing all the different advantages trans-women retain even many years into their transition. I'm going to link to this article by a rugby coach with a master's in sports and exercise science which I think does an excellent job at compiling the scientific literature on strength differences between men and women and between trans-women and women. He also provides some interesting points to consider beyond the physical differences.
To summarize some of his points:
There are literally examples of trans-women completely blowing out female records in the competitive sports I brought up earlier. Lia Thomas broke female swimming records. [Laurel Hubbard's] previous records before transitioning in 1998 were a 135 kg snatch and 170 kg clean & jerk, for a total of 300 kg. 21 years later in 2019, she has hit a 131 kg snatch, and 154 kg clean & jerk in competition for a total of 285 kg. That is a 5% decline in performance. When there is a 30% strength difference between males and females in Olympic weightlifting, that doesn’t bring her much closer." Also Laurel Hubbard is more than twice the age of her competitors and has won gold medals in several competitions despite these differences. The only reason we don't see complete blowouts in every single competition is due to these organizations trying to restrict entry for the competition to some testosterone threshold or some other metric.
We should also be asking, would these trans-women have had anywhere near the level of success they had if they hadn't transitioned? Would they be able to achieve the same win rates, medals, scholarships, accolades, etc as a man? The answer is clearly no, with trans-women showing increases in their relative rankings after transitioning. This seems to suggest an unfair advantage to trans-women athletes.
Trans athletics in women's sports is an absurd concept anyway. Athletes should compete and strive to be the best in a field competition where the rules apply equally to all participants. These sports organizations can keep trying to come up with whatever arbitrary criteria to try to limit or even out the playing field for an extremely tiny slice of the population (whether it's at least X years of HRT therapy, or testosterone levels in the blood or some other measure or mixture of measurements) but what this does is highlight the difference between cis-women and trans-women. In the event they apply restrictions such as testosterone levels in blood evenly, now they may discriminate against actual cis-women and are barr the cis-women who may potentially be the best in the world. This happened in track-and-field, where Caster Semenya, a biological female with naturally high testosterone, is no longer allowed to compete unless she somehow brings her testosterone levels down. Congratulations, these organizations have now barred actual biological women from competing in the name of fairness, and the competition is entirely worse as a result. Edit: @Tanista pointed out Semenya is likely intersex so I have removed this example from my argument since intersex is another topic of discussion entirely. There are examples of other genetic anomalies such as Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia that impact XX chromosome individuals which result in higher testosterone levels, so I think my general point about changing the competition criteria to something beyond if someone is a woman stands. Which begs the question, what is a woman? You can come up with measurements of tens or hundreds of different factors and try to restrict the subset of trans athletes that are allowed to compete against women to create a measurement such that the trans athletes are winning at the same rate as the women but will the end result even be a valid competition that people will care about and support?
At this point, the criteria for participation in women's sports is no longer whether the participant is a woman or not. I doubt these organizations wouldn't let a cis-man who met the arbitrary requirements for trans-athletes compete. Female sports is a discriminatory competition. You don't allow cis-men to compete in women's sports even with a self-imposed handicap because men are not women. So this argument really should boil down to are trans-women actually women and that is a debate that is still ongoing. I believe the whole conversation about trans-women in women's sports has been a huge negative to the movement in support of rights for trans people, and if you wanted to strategically raise public support for trans people, you would concede this point and argue for trans people on other grounds. Since the debate is ongoing, society shouldn't venture into the unknown and allow trans-women into women's sports, they should take the road of precaution and exclude them instead.
By the way, nothing is stopping trans-women from competing in men's sports. I am not particularly saddened if a categorically tiny percentage of the population like trans-women are not allowed to compete in women's sports because they are still allowed to compete in men's sports (as men's sports is just regular sports, it's just that women don't compete in them because they can't win). Trans-women can't win versus cis-men? That's too bad, but it's not like short people are regularly beating tall people in basketball, or people with no legs are winning versus people with legs in a race. Also, disabled people actually do have their own leagues and competitions so if trans people really wanted a fair arena of competition they should just have a trans-people-only competition. The trans athlete population is too small? Disabled people face the same restriction but you don't hear them complaining about the small size and scope of their competition, because they realize and accept they are a separate distinct category from people without disabilities. Similarly, trans women are a categorically different group from women.
Just to re-iterate the issues I have with your line of thinking, I'm going to apply your logic to disabled people to show why that sort of thinking is flawed. Where are the t-tests showing that non-disabled people are advantaged over disabled people? Guess you can't conclude someone with all their limbs would have an advantage over someone missing an arm or a leg without some statistical evidence. Now, this should sound like an absurd conclusion, because intuitively and empirically you know that someone with all their limbs should be advantaged over someone who isn't absent of any statistical backing. If I wanted to convince you that there is no difference, the burden of proof is on me to provide that evidence, not on you to bother with the leg work of gathering data, doing the actual analysis, and then presenting it to me to convince me that I'm wrong.
We have separated competition by gender for a reason. We even see gender separations in things like e-sports (one could argue e-sports does have a physical factor but let's just assume there isn't one for now), chess, and other competitions so the physical/biological differences are not the sole factor of consideration. Whether or not trans-women should compete in women's sports is not just about the physical advantages but also the cultural aspect of allowing trans-women in women's spaces in highly intimate settings such as locker and shower rooms. Other people have addressed this point already so I'm not going to dive deeper on this one.
Isn't Semenya's specific intersex condition one that only affects males? She would be a case of "treated as a woman but actually male" that all of trans activism hinges on.
You're right, I haven't done my research here properly. I wrongly assumed she was a genetical outlier (which she is, but for different reasons than I thought).
But if Semenya is categorically trans-women then that would serve as a point of example of extreme outliers. Hard to say if Semenya can be considered a trans-women though, it seems intersex is a more appropriate description which is a separate category from trans-women. Goes to show there is some space for nuance outside just the trans-women vs women discussion. Regardless I'm going to remove it from the overall argument since it was built on false premises.
What's interesting is that this fact wasn't mentioned in any article I came across mentioning Semenya and I had to specifically search for it after you pointed this out.
I thought she was a biological woman too until very recently. It seems to be a widespread - a cynic would say deliberately so* - misconception.
Sure. My point is that Semenya is the closest thing to a case of "we treat them like a woman despite being biologically male" (I think a lot of people might still want to refer to them with "her" despite knowing she has a male DSD) and that's what the entire trans movement hangs on. And why they appropriate intersex people as the thin end of their wedge.
* After all, Semenya has been in a PR and legal battle to compete.
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I know this isn't actually the point you're making, but funnily enough the world record for completing a marathon in a wheelchair is more than forty minutes faster than completing it on foot. The ability to passively gain momentum by rolling down slopes rather than running makes a big difference.
That is interesting, probably wasn't the best example I could've used then. Actually, I do remember reading an article or watching a video about how athletes with prosthetic legs can have an advantage over regular runners due to the design of the prosthetic leg reducing the amount of physical effort to move a certain distance and increasing the rebound from the springiness on the leg portion. My post was getting a bit long by this point though and this is beside the point so I just left it out.
If it was an uphill race they would be very likely to lose though.
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This is just incoherent, and I can't fully tell which parts of my disagreement comes from my values, my understanding of the factual situation, or only my ability to perform gradeschool/undergraduate math. By my best guesses:
For pure math:
0.2% is not 50x smaller than the baseline, it is 500x smaller. You've stuck with 50x throughout the rest of the comment, so maybe it was just a typo for 2%? I honestly can't tell, because 0.2% is in the neighborhood of Canadian Census data, while 2% is within the range of other reports.EDIT: Fixed, thanks.For factual disagreements:
49x (or499x?)overperformance by trans athletes as "not the most extreme outlier". For an analogous situation, I'd say that Finland outperforms China at producing elite athletes, because it has 100x the Olympic medalists per capita. A fair application of your argument would say that China has twice the medals therefore it outperforms Finland.You're right, when I was googling I first got the 2% number for trans identification among teens and thought 50x, but that includes non-binary. The overall percent of trans women is more like .2%. So yes, it should have been 500x throughout, meaning my argument is an order of magnitude stronger than I was saying.
(other numbers say maybe it's more like .4, so 250x smaller instead of 500x. Proportionally not a big change to the argument either way since we're talking about number of standard deviations, I don't think the difference between 500x vs 250x population size adds another standard deviation to the outliers)
So I am kind of moving fast and combining two ideas there. As I said, I'd expect the variance to be smaller because the population is more homogeneous. But more importantly, the smaller population means the range covered by the outliers in either direction is much smaller, which is the central argument I'm making about how good athletes from a population are vs. the average member of that population.
This is a great analogy.
Should Finland and China have to compete in different leagues, because Finish athletes are just so superior to Chinese athletes that it's unfair for them to compete against each other?
Well, given that China beats Finland the majority of the time, it seems really weird to say Finland has a huge advantage over China.
Again, per capita athletes is not a meaningful measure to this conversation. We're not pitting the entire cis population against the entire trans population to see who makes the most athletes.
What matters is the actual trans athletes vs the actual cis athletes. They are the ones that we care about having a fair competition between.
It doesn't matter if China needs a billion people to produce athletes good enough to compete against the athletes Finland can produce with only 5 million people. As long as the actual athletes in the competition are evenly matched, it makes sense for them to compete against each other.
Same here. Even if it takes a population of a million cis women to throw a set of athletes who are equivalent to what a population 2,000 trans women can produce, who cares? Since that is the actual ratio in the populations, if we end up with a set of athletes from the two populations who are on equal footing and can compete fairly against each other, then there's no reason not to let them compete.
You do dismiss (hypothetical) 499x overperformance by trans athletes as irrelevant? I thought my interpretation was absurd and expected a rebuttal, not agreement. I'm honestly not sure where to go from here.
I spent a long time explaining why the operational definition I want to use is what actual matters to athletes and fans on the ground and is therefore the best metric to use. I spent a lot of time examining your analogy to the olympics and pointing out why it supports my position.
You could, you know, explain your metric in more detail, and argue for why it's better, if you believe it is.
Remember, the issue at stake here is not 'which population is innately better at sports' but rather 'should trans women be allowed to play in women's sports leagues'.
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Reports (so far):
Hey! I use lots of drugs when it comes to my walls of texts, if my ADHD meds count. It's not a crime.
This is almost certainly not ChatGPT either, it's not remotely as good at making isolated claims for rigor.
Logical incoherence isn't a violation of the rules by itself, even if paired with activism, and that's a claim I'm utterly disinterested in investigating unless someone has an automated theorem prover that's great with natural language. As far as I can tell, this argument is coherent. It's empirically terrible, and an exercise in demanding that you have to be logically compelled to believe something unpalatable instead of simply summing up the evidence, but that's not the same thing.
Feel free to make a counterargument. So far no one's got past misunderstanding the math or naked incredulity.
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This sounds like it's just a matter of time. The base rate of trans is low.
It feels like talking to someone that never wears a seatbelt in a car. They haven't died. They insist they are safe. They were even in some fender benders and came out fine. They also say they drive more carefully than people that wear seatbelts.
Is it safe for them to not wear a seatbelt? They are standing right in front of you, it's hard to deny that they are still alive and fine.
My dad was like this for a long time, I don't think we ever convinced him. At some point he got a ticket from a cop for not wearing a seatbelt and that seems to have worked. I guess that part of the analogy doesn't translate very well.
I’m not 100% sure I follow, but I think that analogy relies on the conditional probability. As in, the level of evidence required to convince your seat belt denier is really likely to remove him from the pool of people you can ask.
If trans woman athletes have, as might be expected, a massive advantage over their AFAB peers—that’s not going to remove @guesswho from the pool of observers. It might result in bans, in the collapse of women’s sports as a meaningful carve out, but then we’d be talking about those. The absence of this evidence is, then, evidence of absence.
Or are you saying those just haven’t happened yet due to low sampling, and in ten years, we will be attending the funeral? I guess that makes sense.
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I do not understand what your analogy is referring to here.
The same is true of the person that has not died in a car accident from never wearing a seat belt.
No Seatbelt person argues 1 they drive more carefully cuz they don't wear a seatbelt and 2 they drive less because of a fear of car accidents.
These are magnitudinal changes. Its unclear if the magnitudes are great enough to outweigh the very obvious base effect. Your chances to observe how big the magnitudes are is going to be screwed, because the rate of deadly car accidents and superstar athletes is very low to begin with.
The basic problem is how do you know that a very very low probability event has increased in probability. In my case I'm talking about a rare car accident being more deadly as a result of not wearing a seatbelt. In your case we are talking about a rare superstar female athlete being better at their sport from their former time as a male.
It feels a bit like a pascal mugging.
In both cases it feels like its impossible to prove the argument wrong. If there was a specific mtf trans person that went on to dominate their sport you could rightly point out that its rare for anyone to dominate a sport, and that this is just a single anecdote. If there was a specific car accident that killed someone who wasn't wearing a seat belt wearer then the no seat belt wearer could come up with a litany of excuses as well, super rare circumstances, it might have killed them even if they had worn the seatbelt, etc etc.
At some point in the case of super rare events it feels useful to a fall back to logic and physical reality. We mostly know the physics of car accidents, and wearing a seatbelt makes you safer. I acknowledge that due to selection effects it may be the case that the average no-seatbelt wearer might not actually be in any more danger than the average seatbelt wearer. I still advise you to wear a seatbelt in the car. We mostly know the biology of male and female bodies, and having a male body gives you inherent physical advantages. I acknowledge that due to selection effects it may be the case that the average mtf trans person might not actually have any advantages over the average woman. I still advise we not allow them in sports.
Does my argument about seatbelts convince you that people who don't wear a seat belt are just as safe? Probably it doesn't. But I do feel that the structure of the argument can lead to believing a lot of absurd things. I actually know of some cases where this type of argument has convinced me. Related to cars, but Child Safety seats lead to fewer living kids. Car accidents with kids are super rare, so child safety seats don't save that many kids, but the inconvenience of such seats in most cars leads to a lot of people not having third kids. The result is unintuitive and a bit absurd, if you don't think so then did you oppose child safety seat laws before learning about it? I'm a pretty strict libertarian and even I wouldn't have bothered to oppose child safety seat laws.
Then whats my problem with your argument when I buy it in a different context? I do feel, quite strongly, that the burden of proof rests firmly on the side of those trying to get us to believe absurd and unintuitive things. On the child safety seat thing, I still put my own children in child safety seats, and would do so even if the law did not mandate it. Logic and physics win out over statistics and reality.
But I'm not talking about a super rare event?
Trans athletes exist. More than enough to do a statistical analysis on.
In sports that are competitions between two people, the average win rate must but 50%. Do trans athletes in those competitions win statistically more than 50% of the time?
In swim meets with 2 trans and 48 cis competitors, we would expect the trans athletes to place in the top 5 ~20% of the time. Do they place that often, or more, or less?
In women's baseball, what's the average RBI of cis vs trans hitters? What's the spread?
Etc. None of this is low probability stuff, it's normal sports records of the type you could see at any moment when you turn on ESPN.
I believe the probability is actually ~0.8% (48C3 / 50C5)I assume you accidentally multiplied by 100 to get a percentage, saw "0.81..." and thought that it was a probability, and then came to 20%?EDIT: Sorry, I realise I misinterpreted what you said (I thought you meant both of them placing in the top 5) - You're right, please ignore this comment.
I should have said 'a trans athlete' rather than 'the trans athletes', sorry about that.
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Oh, maybe I misunderstood your whole original argument. There is often a trans talking point that studies one elite athletes have never been done, and that is mostly true because elite athletes are rare. Which is why I was talking about a whole rareness based argument. But in that case of just studying regular athletes, yes those studies exist (and they aren't hard to find), and yes transwomen have an advantage.
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577.full?ijkey=yjlCzZVZFRDZzHz&keytype=ref
Are you against transwomen participating in sports now? A ~10% advantage is nothing to scoff at. Though maybe I did this backwards and should have asked if you would pre-commit to changing your mind if you were shown a study with these results.
I don't blame you if the study doesn't change your mind. I think if the study had the opposite results I wouldn't change my mind either. I'd just be suspicious of the study and the industry of science. So don't interpret this as a "gotcha" post, I'm genuinely curious if this moves your needle at all.
So first of all, as I say in another reply, that's a measure of some specific atomic abilities, not of athleticism in general, which is the thing I specifically said we don't have a good measure of. I realize that's a mushy distinction and there's no real solid operational definition of 'athletic ability' beyond 'do they win more often at athletic competitions,' but that's my point... 'Do they win more often at athletic competitions' is the thing we actually care about here, and the data already exists in the form of actual results from actual competitions, so let's look at that.
But more importantly, my next sentence after that is
My argument doesn't hinge on the population average because that's not where competitive athletes are drawn from. It hinges on the positive tail of the distribution, which is why a lower population having a lower range of outliers is central to the argument.
We have a study. It shows trans people have a physical advantage. Physical abilities, much like mental abilities, are almost always a package deal. Just like knowledge tests can have g-loading, physical tests have an equivalent. It's why training camps for both baseball and American football often have athletes doing the same exercises for very different sports.
And this study doesn't move your needle at all?
If that's the case I just don't get the sense that a study would convince you, or anyone else really. Which is fine, I don't think I'd be convinced either by a study showing the opposite result. I would just find it too strange.
The study wasn't about the population average? The participants were people in the Air Force. Which is going to be a subset of generally more athletic people. But I've seen your objection elsewhere it's not the exact subset you claim matters. But then we come back to my seatbelt denier analogy. You can make the exact subset so tiny and specific that no study will ever convince you.
It looks like you are pretty busy in this thread. I'd say prioritize responding to anyone else over me. I mostly care not at all about this topic, it just happened to be at the top of the culture war thread today.
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Olympic level women's teams regularly skirmish against ordinary teenage boy teams, and still get absolutely demolished. Even the most extremely athletic females have difficulty competing against reasonably athletic teenage boys.
Ok, and? I would expect trans women also to not beat those teams, and I just explained why.
I would not expect a team of 11 fit adult males, some of whom may be currently on HRT, to get thrashed by a team of 11 fit teenaged boys.
One suspects you don't know many trans people.
But ok, we have different intuitions. If you were correct, again, there would be statistical evidence showing it. Which there's not.
No, you suspect I don't know many.
I'm tired of you refusing to engage when I criticise your arguments at length, only to retort with cheap potshots like this when convenient.
Your long response is open in another tab. I've responded to about 20 long replies in the last 6 hours, and I also have a job and stuff.
And it's not only a potshot. You'll note that I also make an empirical argument, and you're the one pretending it doesn't even exist.
If I reply to your one-sentence posts with 3-sentence replies, I don't feel bad about that use of effort. If you don't care to engage with anything other than the long effort posts, then wait till I get to it, don't snipe elsewhere around the discussion.
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I don't know why people in this particular debate are so obsessed with intuiting the answers to empirical questions. It is not the case that nobody has ever tried to measure the sport performance related effects of gender transition. Here is a BMJ meta-analysis from 2021 of 24 different studies. What do they find? Basically what you'd expect. 1-2 years on HRT decreases strength related performance pretty substantially. The study subjects retained some advantage over cis women but were significantly worse than cis men.
And trans women tended to be less strong than average cis-men even pre-transition.
Anyway I think the whole discussion is kind of dumb. Different athletes have all kinds of different advantages due to biological features. Is there some level of biological advantage at which point intra-group competition becomes unfair? Is the advantage a top trans woman has over a top cis woman larger than the advantage Michael Phelps had over his fellow Olympians? One can't help but notice that no one was interested in banning people from competing in sports due to biological advantage until the discussion was about trans women.
No, it only appears like it to you because previously there was a consensus matching the status quo, so no one talked about it.
Banning men from women's sports was accepted wisdom, and no one felt any need to disagree, until trans women came around.
You don't see anyone interested in banning teachers from murdering students - because it's already illegal. If Catholic Teachers For Murderism suddenly started arguing they should be allowed to kill students, there would certainly be a lot of disagreement, and not because they're catholic.
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Weight classes. Age classes in sports leagues for children (under-11s, under-12s and so on). Separate divisions for wheelchair-bound marathonners and on-foot marathonners.
If you think it's unfair to pit a heavyweight against a flyweight, a 17-year-old against a 10-year-old, or someone who can roll down a hill against someone who has to use their own feet like a sucker - congratulations, you understand how female athletes feel when asked to compete against male athletes.
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...
Presumably men with interest in high-level athletic competition (in the women's division, but nevertheless) would be unlikely to actively refrain from building muscle, engage in disordered eating, and/or be athletically disinclined -- which one might suppose would tend to place them more in the 'non-significant' part of the strength loss range, were they in this study population.
(Trying to apply a population level metastudy to a freakish subpopulation (high-level athletes, not transpeople) is probably a mistake, IOW)
On a personal note, I have one bicep much smaller than the other due to surgery related to a horrible accident a long time ago. With physio etc the strength difference between the two arms is indeed minimal -- but the surgeon at the time warned me that while I should make every effort to rebuild strength, the arms would probably never 'match' in terms of muscle size. This was 30 years ago, so 'LBM != strength' does not seem like a novel concept to the medical community. I wonder why the reviewers at the BMJ would not point this out to an author trying to elide the difference?
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On the contrary; plenty of people were banned from competing in sports due to biological advantage before trans women were even an issue. They were just called "men" and they were banned from women's leagues.
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That people argue this blows my mind. Do you genuinely believe that males do not have a substantial physical advantage over women, or do you genuinely believe that going on hormones for a year erases that advantage?
You dismiss the growing amount of "anecdotal evidence" of 40-to-50-year-old men suddenly "transitioning" late in life and taking up a sport and absolutely dominating professional female athletes 20 years younger than them who've been in the sport for years because... there aren't enough trans women athletes to have taken over the leaderboards in every sport, yet?
read the rest of the comment
I did, and to be perfectly honest, I found it to be a disingenuous mish-mash of conflated statistics to present an argument that you imply ("trans women aren't really better athletes than cis women") but won't commit to, just vaguely handwave at. For example:
While I don't find your "strong reasons" convincing, sure, let's suppose that the top 1% of female athletes are better than the top 1% of trans women athletes. The issue with trans women in female sports is not about how well the top 1% compete against each other, but how trans women athletes on average compete with female athletes on average.
It's not clear to me if you mean the mean for trans women athletes or trans women in general (you seem to be deliberately fuzzing it a bit here), but what do you mean by "measured it precisely"? Are you claiming we have not measured strength, speed, arm length, aerobic capacity, grip strength, or other measures of ability for trans women and women? I mean, I can Google up the studies, but I'm reluctant to do so because I don't think this is a genuine question.
You are using statistical outliers when convenient and ignoring them when not: for example, one of your arguments is that if trans women were better athletes than women, then they'd be winning all the competitions, and they're not. This completely ignores how many competitions there are, how few trans athletes there are, how relatively new policies allowing trans women to compete are, and of course, as I said, the observable reality of second-rate, aging, out-of-shape male athletes transitioning, switching to the women's league, and destroying women's records. Does that happen every time? Does every trans women reach the top of the league? No, but from what I have observed, they almost always rapidly ascend far higher and faster than any actual female athlete of similar condition and experience could.
I think you're having trouble following my argument, which is reasonable because it has a lot of steps and I don't know how well I explained it.
To clarify:
The populations I'm talking about are only all cis women and all trans women.
I am not talking about athletes as a separate populations. I'm saying that all athletes are outliers from teh two general populations I'm referring to.
My point is that, if the cis women population has more extreme outliers on athletic ability than the trans women population, then most of the cis athletes will be better than most of the trans athletes.
We have, to my knowledge, done a few studies on average performance among trans women on a few simple isolated measures and tasks (like sit-ups). We have not, to my knowledge, done measures of population variance in a way that lets us compare outliers between the groups, or have we measured athletic ability on a holistic way.
The claim is not that if trans women had an advantage, they would win every competition. The claim is that if they had an advantage, they would individually have better personal win/loss ratios (or whatever is the most relevant individual metric for a given sport) than average cis women in their league/division.
We can measure that right now, regardless of how many/few trans athletes there are.
I agree there are some anecdotes of trans women winning things. There are also anecdotes of cis women winning things, so that doesn't mean much without statistics. Nor are all anecdotes representative, that's why they're anecdotes; maybe something bad was happening in that handfull of famous cases that we want policy to avoid, but that wouldn't say much about the median case which we should be concerned with.
Golf clap for the well-played condescension, sir.
This does not follow. The female population is much larger; there will be more outliers and probably more extreme ones. That says nothing about how well the average female athlete compares to the average trans athlete. That there are a handful of exceptional female athletes who can beat most men (but not the top men) in a sport does not mean therefore that most female athletes can beat most trans women.
I don't follow this issue closely enough to collect studies, or links, but this is one of the first hits when I searched "Trans women athletes studies." (Leaving out "studies," you mostly get articles by the ACLU and various news organizations claiming that either it's been "debunked" that trans women have an athletic advantage, or it's "unknowable.") Doing a little more digging, I see quite a few studies that measured more than just sit-ups.
And there is just... empirical observation.
If a trans women competes in a bicycle race and finishes third, she's #3 and you can easily say "See, two women beat her, so on average, they aren't better." Until you find out that this trans woman is 45 years old and just started bicycling competitively four years ago. Look, I don't want to dig up all the Jesse Singhal and Graham Linehan links because you'd dismiss them as motivated cherrypickers (and Linehan certainly is) but this is happening in sport after sport. If you actually wanted to do some sort of fair study, then you would have to factor in things like age and number of years in training which would pick up what I am claiming, which is that the advantage of trans women is such that a man who was a mediocre male athlete can fairly easily become one of the top 5% "female" athletes by transitioning.
All athletes are outliers from the general population.
There's no population of athletes with normal population dynamics over their athletic ability, because they're already selected to be outliers from the general population. There won't be a normal distribution of talent among athletes, they'll look like what they are, one tail of a different normal distribution (the general population).
When I talk about outliers and extremes, I'm talking about all athletes. Not just the best ones.
And my claim isn't that most cis women athletes can beat most trans women athletes. As I said a lot, no one has bothered to report on those statistics from actual competitions, so we are in a state of total ignorance on that question.
My point is just that talking about the average for the male population tells you basically nothing about what we're actually measuring here, which is outliers from the trans women population vs outliers from the cis woman population.
Ok, lets just settle on an operational definition here.
Is it your position that a world could exist in which no trans woman ever wins a single competition ever against her cis competitors, and yet it is still also true that trans women have an unfair competitive advantage that means cis women shouldn't have to compete against them?
Because that seems to be what is implied by you citing a case where trans women do not win yet still have an unfair advantage. So is this actually compatible with how you are defining fairness here?
If so, I think that's just incredibly silly.
Maybe there's some metaphysical sense in which it is unjust that a trans woman with fewer years of training can be competitive with a cis woman with more years of training (in this hypothetical).
But what actually matters for fairness is whether every competitor in an event has a reasonable chance to win.
If cis women can go to a million events and know that they will never win anything because the top spots are always trans women shattering all their records, that sucks and is unfair to them and unfun for everyone involved.
If trans women aren't over-represented among winners and cis women can easily win in competitions with them all the time, then the sport is healthy and everyone can have fun and no one is at an unfair disadvantage.
Anything outside of that fact is irrelevant, even if it annoys you.
You're stretching the definition of "outlier." In that the average person isn't very athletic at all, sure, but I'm not just talking about Olympic competitors, I'm talking about people who participate in neighborhood soccer leagues and the like.
If you were, then you'd stop making so many handwaving motions when we talk about comparing female apples to trans apples and stop pointing at female oranges.
No, we are not in a state of total ignorance on that question.
I am not sure if your phrasing is intentionally vague or not.
Do I believe it is possible that there could exist a (singular) trans woman who never wins a single competition against her female competitors, and yet it is still also true that trans women have an unfair competitive advantage that means cis women shouldn't have to compete against them?
Yes. Of course. No one claims that all trans women will be beat all women all the time.
Do I believe it is possible that there could exist a world in which no trans women ever win a single competition against female competitors, and yet it is still also true that trans women have an unfair competitive advantage that means cis women shouldn't have to compete against them?
Well, that would seem unlikely, but it's a meaningless hypothetical since we are observably not in that world.
It's not "some metaphysical sense" if their male physiology observably lets them compete at a higher level with less effort, conditioning, and training.
So if you or I competed against women, that would be fair, since women competing against us would have a reasonable chance to win? Or do you claim you would be able to beat any woman in any athletic competition?
So you believe we could only say it's unfair for trans women to compete against women if and only if trans women win every single time?
Trans women are over-represented among winners now. And women are not having fun because they're competing against men who can and have injured them (in contact sports) and are taking monetary prizes from them.
Trying to cast this as "Oh, you're just annoyed by trans women" doesn't work when you are studiously ignoring the facts you reference.
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About 57% of highschool students play sports. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/statistics-on-school-sports-how-many-students-play-sports-which-sports-do-they-play/2021/07
Why do you insist athletes in general are a stastical outlier? I don't think anyone understood you were arguing this because it's really hard to realize someone is arguing that a behavior the majority of people do is an outlier.
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People aren’t so concerned about the means and medians, they care about the outliers. The championships denied, the scholarships lost, but for a male competing against females.
In some contact sports there are also concerns about safety.
Oh, and they don’t want their daughters showering with naked males.
???
Dd you read the whole comment? The outliers being what matters was my point.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say there.
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Part of the problem is that the most visible people are the crazy extremely online types. Is Sam Brinton looking like such a great role model for nonbinary representation now? But these are the cases that most people hear about, because they get the most publicity.
And the crazy extremely online types are the ones with the most niche, extreme, and bizarre demands, and are not representative of the majority of trans people. But because nobody is willing to stand up and say "Yeah, this person is crazy extremely online, please ignore" because that would be bigotry and transphobia and policing and all the rest of it, then they aren't challenged and the tone of the debate is then set for ordinary people that "They want to dress up like clowns and teach three year olds that they're trans and secretly give hormones to underage kids".
Rowing back on the most extreme outliers by trans groups (and before anyone jumps in with "there is no one body that speaks for all trans people", there sure are a lot of bodies calling themselves Trans This and LGBT That willing to give media interviews on every topic when asked) would do more for calming down the debate than all the scolding about "that never happens, and if it does, it's a good thing".
Sure, I used the Westboro Baptist Church as a cudgel against Christians back in the day, I know the drill.
But, you know. I was like 20 at the time and didn't really understand how to argue honestly and fairly, but that was a scummy and dishonest tactic when I used it back then. It still is now.
If the only version of Christianity that anyone not a Christian ever encountered was the Westboro bunch going around, then hell yeah I'd be "they're not representative and in fact here's a list of how they're heretics in faith, doctrine, and discipline". I do that anyway for other arguments over historic and global Christianity.
But if every Christian said "Well, it's unfortunate that the extremists get all the publicity, but if we say anything about them then non-Christians will just use that as anti-Christian propaganda so we have to back them up" - then would you really be surprised that non-Christians got their views of Christianity from the crazy people? Would you not expect other Christians to explain why the Westboro bunch were not representative? Would you not take from their silence that maybe the Westboro lot were in fact closer to how Christians believed?
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But other Christians are willing to say "the Westboro Baptist Church is crazy and we don't believe what they are saying is true". This doesn't happen for trans issues.
Would you know if it does happen? How much time do you spend hanging out with trans activists, how sure are you that your media channels would promote examples of them being reasonable and moderate to your attention? Our media isn't designed for highlighting people being moderate and reasonable in full generality, let alone on adversarial culture war issues.
As someone who does hang out in those spaces some of the time, I can say that there is nothing like consensus among the trans community and trans activists on most of this stuff, denouncing others for making the cause look bad and being extreme/cringe is common, etc. It is true that this happens more within those like-minded spaces than in press releases, I suppose; in the middle of the culture war battle with bills on the ballot in many states, there is a lot of circling the wagons and presenting a unified front. I think Christians had a much more secure position from which to denounce their own members, and used it, which is good. But I don't think it's as completely one-sided as you may think.
Every mainstream Christian was opposed to the WBC, or near enough, and the ones who remember they exist still are. Most of their reasons for opposing them didn’t boil down to ‘they’re making us look bad’.
Can you demonstrate leaders of pro-trans groups, or simply prominent individuals within the community, opposing the fringe weirdos for reasons other than ‘making us look bad’?
WBC wasn't just making Christians look bad, they were actively harassing people and making their lives worse.
I expect I could find trans leaders denouncing, like, actual pedophiles who claim to be trans, or whatever, for that harm.
I don't think it's common for Christian leaders to denounce other Christians merely for being annoying or having bad opinions, which I think (?) is what we're talking about here?
But anyway, this is a bit vague. I'm going to be busy the rest of the week, but if you have a specific trans analogue to WBC you want to ask about ,I can see if I have time to look around.
Ok. What trans leaders have denounced child drag shows on the grounds of ‘kids don’t need to be seeing that’? I genuinely don’t know of any.
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Christians saying that the Westboro Baptist Church doesn't speak for them are blatantly obvious about it almost every time it comes up at all. There's no need for me to hang out at a church or a Christian subreddit in order to find out about Christians disclaiming any association with the Westboro Baptists. Why would I have to do something like that for trans activists?
While the media likes to promote controversy, that doesn't explain it. The media reports on the Westboro Baptist Church to stir controversy, but the media also shows Christians calling them a bunch of homophobic nuts. The media doesn't report on the WBC uncritically, nor does the media treat them as just another pressure group, no different from someone calling for farm subsidies.
The media does not behave this way for trans activists. Reasonable trans activists don't appear in the media calling extremist activists nuts, and the extremist activists are treated as perfectly normal, not objects for derision like the WBC.
There's a big difference between the media signal-boosting someone for controversy and signal-boosting someone out of sympathy.
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I've listened in IRL on the clique of trannies, non-binaries, and tranny-hags that infested a local bar's drop-in RPG night. A 3-minute sample got them calling some neighbor of theirs a disgusting bigot, and something to do with freeing palestine. Their games are also fuckawful. It drove all the non-terrible players to come on a different night.
Not exactly damning airtight evidence, just funny that I walk in on them right at that point. They...failed to win me over.
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