Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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“transphobia” does not necessarily refer to hate or fear of trans people. It can also mean not giving equal value to trans people’s lives, just like racism doesn’t necessarily have to mean “hating” people of different races but can also mean “not considering their lives as important as yours.”
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what about the unfair disadvantage Fox would be at if forced to compete against men? Fox may have muscle strength and bone density that puts her in the upper part of the spectrum among her fellow women, but where would she rate among men? She would probably be at a disadvantage. If the concern here is with having “men beating up women,” why is nobody interested in what would happen if trans women were forced to compete against men? One reason nobody is interested, of course, is that the people raising this issue think trans women are men, so while they profess concern with “male violence against women,” male violence against trans women is not considered to be part of that.
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Beggs is a man. That is how he sees himself, and how others see him. But the “chromosomes are everything” crowd forces him to compete as a woman. Both Beggs and his female competitors may want to see Beggs allowed to compete in the league of his choice, but the “protect women” crowd, who believe in segregating sports based solely on genders assigned at birth, won’t let him. As a result, Beggs (a man) dominated female wrestling.
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“Peer-reviewed science does not support these claims. Rather, it finds that athletic performance results from a complex interaction of many factors, not just hormones or chromosomes.” In fact, the assumption that cisgender women will always be hopelessly outmatched by their cisgender male counterparts is one that might prove faulty in practice.
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If there are additional qualities, like muscle mass, they are still qualities correlated with chromosomes. If being “chromosomally male” makes me more likely to have certain physical features that would make me strong in fights, what matters is still whether I do have those physical traits rather than whether I am “chromosomally male.” If the relevant traits go beyond weight, then we should create a category that incorporates the other traits as well. But the fundamental principle should not be: have the Women fight the Women and the Men fight the Men. It should probably be something more like: have people who are relatively evenly matched compete against each other, whenever that is possible.
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Until we begin these discussions by caring about the experiences of everyone involved, rather than just a subset, it will be impossible to have a discourse on gender and sports that is rational and free from bigotry.
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it’s fair to argue that responding to an influx of trans athletes by abolishing gender categories in sports altogether is itself unfair—just as proposing to “solve” the “problem” of disputes over gendered bathrooms by switching to fully unisex bathrooms would imply that it was better to abolish the ladies’ room altogether than to let trans women use it. Even if the gender binary is inherently unjust and irrational, abolishing gender just as trans people start to find more acceptance would be its own kind of problem.