The largest college sports governing body in the country made the change following President Trump’s executive order banning trans girls from girls’ school sports.
I’ve been deeply frustrated by the progressive stance on trans people in professional sports.
Anyone who began medical transitioning after puberty will have reasonably notable physical differences from cisgender people in their appropriately gendered sport. It’s similar to doping, but something their body was doing naturally with incorrect hormones that didn’t reflect their gender.
I certainly don’t feel good about it, but I do think there is a very viable argument to disqualify those kinds of trans people (who medically transitioned after puberty) from competition. The debate becomes much more nuanced as you consider different sports where physical differences between gender matter less. Rugby, weightlifting; trans folks are out. Target shooting, chess, darts; no problem. It’s a debate to be had sport by sport, league by league. The whole issue should have been messaged that way from the beginning.
Queer advocacy groups taking a broad “all or nothing” civil rights stance on this was a HUGE mistake. It’s an argument they were destined to lose, only affected a minuscule number of athletes, and wasted so much time and effort that could have been spent on other battles for trans rights. US Democrats take their cues on queer issues from those queer advocacy groups, so they rolled with it and got trampled.
I really want to have a conversation with queer strategists and Democrat policy leaders to understand why this was the hill they decided to make trans rights die on.
I mostly agree. But at the same time, unmedicated humans are not strictly male or female either. Bodies vary a lot. So there are women out there with an advantage over other women because their bodies are more male than the average. So determining who is fair to compete against who by chromosome isn’t really fair either. What they need is some better measure of advantages earned by genetics vs hard work. Then there should be categories of competition based on that. The middle categories would have overlap between men and women. That would really allow more people to fairly compete.
Completely agree.
The whole point of women’s sport leagues is because it’s unfair to have them compete against men. Trying to impose fairness with something designed to be unfair is folly.
“The whole point of having negro sports leagues is because it’s unfair to have them compete against whites. Trying to impose fairness with something designed to be unfair is folly.”
Followed by:
“There’s no rule saying that negroes can’t play in the National League.”
Boycott NCAA
Someone in another thread said there should be a separate league for trans athletes. I asked which specific sport the league would be in since there are not enough trans athletes in any one sport to make a league.
They said they didn’t care. And that’s part of the problem.
I refer broadly to these as policies as “banning trans people in sports” for this exact reason. It is a de facto ban on our inclusion at all.
Cowardly and shameful
Their choice was lose federal funding. which means a lot less under privileged people going to college or banning trans from sports. Also federal funding means not only money for tuition but also helps to fund university research and development labs. Also for contracts, where the government purchases goods or services from universities for government use
So does it suck. Hell yes. Which do they give up though, all of the above or trans in sports?
You lose federal funding and colleges have to make harsh cuts.
