I like sports. Even soccer.
That’s why I oppose “transgender women” — biological men, for those playing at home — competing in women’s sports. The physical advantages that men, transgender or not, have over women make such athletic contests inherently unfair.
Worse, from a marketing standpoint: unexciting.
And sometimes dangerous.
Look, women are better than men at a lot of things. Maybe
The problem is one of uncompetitive competition, not hatred of transsexuals. It’s no more anti-trans to forbid men from competing in women’s sports than it is anti-men to limit girls’ sports to biological girls.
“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans,” WNBA star Sophie Cunningham told ESPN. “And I’m like, ‘I never once said that.’
“I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest,” Cunningham explained. “And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
What about the reverse? That is, “transgender men” — biological women — competing in men’s sports?
There doesn’t seem to be a big controversy about that. Why not?
It just hasn’t happened, I figured. But I discovered that yes, it has.
Without sparking much controversy, I note. And why? Because in this scenario the transgendered person is at a disadvantage. Punching up, so to speak. Trans men going against bigger, stronger, faster competitors (biologically likely to be, at least) and yet they’re still willing to suit up.
That’s what I love about sports.
This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “My Sporting Double-Standard”
I don’t know what “fair” would really mean here. On the one hand, if biologic males are allowed to compete as women, then over time the competition will be equalized, as most or all of the biologic females are displaced. On the other hand, we haven’t previously ensured that more able biologic females be excluded or handicapped, nor that less able biologic females be augmented.
What I do know is that fairness has never been the real objective, that sports have attracted our attention as spectators for the same reason as does any other display associated with reproductive fitness. Human beings are interested in things correlated with reproductive fitness because that interest correlates with our reproducing; we are culturally and perhaps genetically evolved to have that interest. We are naturally interested in men whose attributes have a positive correlation with reproductive fitness, and naturally interested in women whose attributes have a positive correlation with reproductive fitness. (Our filters aren’t great, though, as they developed in an era in which physical ability had more relative significance, and doping wasn’t much of a thing.)
Most of our sports have an open league, dominated by males. That’s fine if our interests are solely with men. It wouldn’t be fine if we had a peculiar interest in redheads. And it isn’t fine if we have a peculiar interest in biologic females, rooted in their reproductive significance. But we do, so we’ve had leagues just for biologic females.
Our understanding of why we have had these restricted competitions has been subverted by decades across which many women have rebelled against being treated as biologic females, whose social positions would be strongly determined by their potential rôles In the reproductive process.
These women have been acutely aware and resentful of the burdens of that rôle, and demanding that these burdens not be social imposed and be lifted by society when biologically imposed. But these same women have generally been slow to recognize the perks as such; so they’ve wanted places reserved for women when open competition would displace them.
However, rebelling against seeing men and women biologically amounts itself to transsexualization. And, setting aside reproductive interest, society has never had more reason for reserving spaces for women than for reserving spaces for redheads. (Some, but not much.)
So the turkey buzzards have come home to roost. Unfortunately, young women who were never themselves part of the aforementioned craziness are amongst those now finding themselves beaten — sometimes very literally beaten — by biologic males competing as women.
And let us explicitly note the absolute perversity of replacing competitions once implicitly intended to exhibit reproductively fit biologic females with competitions that will exhibit people who are plainly reproductively unfit — eunuchs and the like.
One of the earliest stories I read about transgender men was about a female wrestler. She was allowed to compete against other women because she hadn’t fully transitioned. She was taking male hormones and still allowed to compete because the prescribed drugs were for ‘medical reasons’. The physical effects of the hormones gave her an advantage over other women. In my opinion they were performance-enhancing drugs and should have disqualified her. As for transgender men, there was another story about a woman who went from being one of the best swimmers (against women) to one of the worst (against men) after her transition to male.