The Socialists, led by Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, included plans to limit participation in female sports to “people with a female biological sex” in a policy document decided on at the party’s congress over the weekend.
The decision to also remove Q+ from a plan to protect sexual and gender minorities from the impact of social inequality sparked fury from LGBTQ+ activists and politicians from Left-wing partners of Mr Sánchez’s minority government.
The passing of a transgender rights reform in 2023, allowing anyone to change their official sex simply by stating their wish to switch, caused a bitter rift within Spain’s ruling Left-wing forces.
Carmen Calvo, the former Socialist deputy prime minister, said at the time the reform would “destroy the powerful battery of equality legislation in our country”.
Pathetic display from so-called socialists
Ignorant passerby here, and genuinely want to change my mind, but how exactly is it fair for a trans person to compete against a biologically female person?
If we go back to the original reason for this sexist devide, it stems from a fundamental biological difference between two genders. How we identify ourselves has little impact on these biological differences no?
Furthermore I was listening to a podcast recently and they were talking about how the greatest female tennisplayer to have ever lived is would be ranked 2 or 3 thousand in a unisex world ranking. Seeing a worldrecord being set by someone working within the confines of the female body is impressive, seeing that same record broken by someone without the same constraints just devalues the other persons achievement.
Equating transgender women with cisgender men is biologically inaccurate.
Biological and genetic differences are always contributing to why some athletes are better than others. Also: the science on trans athlete performance is mixed and unclear.
It’s a complicated issue, but I’d sooner reevaluate our attitudes and culture around competitive sports before resorting to creating a lower class of person. Maybe we take these things too seriously.
To expand on this, maybe we just have tiers of competition regardless of gender (like leagues) and people play where the competition is kept even. It might stratify so that there is more mixing of genders in the mid range and trans athletes may also fall into that range (but again: science isn’t clear).
Two points:
Top-level sports isn’t fair. Most famous athletes are outliers in terms of height, weight, muscle mass, etc. Some, like Phelps, have genetic or developmental differences that give them a pretty significant advantage.
I must admit that the legal definition of ‘transwoman’ varies from country to country. In India, where I live, a person can legally change their gender without any medical intervention, and such people might have a physical advantage over cis-women. But in the vast majority of countries, they have to take hormones and / or do surgical procedures that reshape their body to be more ‘feminine’. Once they do that, they have no significant advantage over cis-women.
Maybe mine is a weird way to explain it, but here it is. It’s up to the rules to decide what is an unfair advantage and what is not. You can make sports categories based on gender, or body weight. You could theoretically make them according to muscle mass, or maybe even blood androgen concentration. But here the rules only say “men and women”; if you think some people might still have an unfair advantage under that scheme, that’s okay, but going down the lazy path of leaving basically everything unchanged exept you restrict some women from participating in “women’s” sports is the worst possible way to handle it. It alienates people by refusing to grow beyond an outdated model.
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So a few things;
A) on the professional level sports ain’t about fair. It’s about who has the biggest natural advantage and enough money and time to develop the skills to make use of that advantage. Take the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps who has genetic mutations, plural, that mean we’re likely to never see anyone ever break his records.
Now that’s just the professional level, and a less than professional level sports are about fun, not fairness; and in a team game it’s about teaching social skills over fun.
B) post bottom-surgery on hrt trans people, either main direction, have no biological advantages. In mixed leagues there are trans women that are far below cis women, and there are trans men far below cis men. This scare mongering that trans women specifically would have this massive advantage simply isn’t represented in the real world where trans people have competed with cis people directly.
C) You want the secret to athleticism? It’s not sex, it’s t level. Testosterone is literally the magic key for sports. Trans women that no longer produce as large amounts of t (see. Above) consistently under perform cis women with high natural t levels. To preempt this as well, bone density isn’t fixed. The Joe Rogan scare mongering on women’s boxing is that trans women supposedly have higher bone density than cis women. This can be true, sometimes, but most often it’s not. Estrogen attacks bone density, and does so ridiculously quickly when you have elevated levels from any source. It takes just 3 years on average for your bone density to drastically change when your hormones balance changes.
D) this type of discrimination leads to false accusations, harassment and death threats more than preserves any integrity in sports. The Olympic boxer Imane khelif is a cis woman. XX. This trans hysteria has tainted her win, because she doesn’t look woman enough, whatever that means. Many cis women that don’t fit the local stereotype of “woman” are harassed because of people freaking themselves out about the trans Boogeyman. This type of harm outweighs any and all harm to sports, period.
The broader issue is discrimination, and if one class of people should be allowed to be singled out and discriminated against.
Isn’t that the whole point of women’s sports though? To exclude a class of people (men) so that others (women) have a chance to compete on their own?
But maybe that idea itself is flawed. Most high performing long distance runners come from Ethiopia and Kenya, do we create a whites only league?
There are physiological differences contributing to these things too. Why does gender have to be special?
Conversely: why do we segregate men and women for things like chess? There’s no difference in ability there.
Maybe those ideas are what’s outdated and wrong, and we don’t need to erase a certain kind of person. Ignoring that trans people exist isn’t as helpful as finding ways to include them
Just, this. Haven’t anyone risen the point that in boxing there is segregation by weight? And in some sports by age? Also, clearly, black people in general have genetic superiority in (i think) explosive force and inferiority in swimming because of muscle fiber density.
However, wouldn’t segregate athletes by “race” be called racist? Why doing so by “sex” isn’t “sexist”?
Why aren’t athletes segregate by testosterone levels, however way this should be measured? Or height? Or weight? Or foot length? Or age? Like, poor post-35 athletes, they can’t have a fair race against 20-somethings, they have a natural disadvantage. Or, I don’t know, just “marks”, and let compete people with similar marks together, and let’s see what people in different marks or categories have to offer. Anyone know whether if in boxing lighter fights are like faster or more agile than heavier?
All this biologicist criteria of “poor women” is bullshit. Yes, where there is a clear T gap and this gives cis women a fair competition and representation, and it has value, but it is taken to the absurd like with chess, as it’s been already said.
Outside of sports, the definition of a “biological women” is also racist and eurocentrist. Like, european cis-women tend to have more hair than east-asian men. And african/black women tend to muscle up way easier than white men. Also, height difference betwen “sexes” isn’t a thing in the Andes, it’s just not real. And taking andinian people, they may be shorter in height and may not run as fast as a whitie, but take that race to 4000 m above sea level and let’s see who can endure half a marathon and is “naturally superior”.
I am really fed up by racist and patriarchal arguments trying to hide behind a science with overfunded biases.
As an egalitarian, I also inherently dislike divisions in competition based on demographic. Here’s my understanding of why they exist (though my stating the justification here doesn’t mean I tacitly agree):
Chess: currently, only about 40 of the 1600 grandmasters are women. To attain a balance, we ought to be encouraging women to play chess. Women-only competitions are a great way to do this. (There are almost no transgender chess grand/masters, so the same logic ought to apply here – I don’t understand any reason other than bigotry to exclude transgender women from such tournaments)
Sports: I think it comes down to a Schelling division. Now sure, there are other genetic advantages, perhaps race or leg length or height or other aspects influence one’s athletic ability too – top basketball players are generally many standard deviations above average height. However, those are spectra – ranges – so there’s no obvious place to split into two categories. There are basically only two obvious, bright-line, ostensibly binary dichotomies that people tend to believe categorize humans: (a) sex, and (b) disabled status (see: paralympics).
Now, imagine there was a genetic allele that causes humans to be 9 feet tall. About half of humans get this allele. Then obviously we’d add a new category for these super-tall humans, just so that less-tall humans would have the option to compete in sports.
Some sports make divisions on a spectrum, like heavy-weight, medium-weight, light-weight boxing and so on. But these are pretty arbitrary, certainly not Schelling points, so it’s less common for sports to use these divisions.
Now, I often find myself thinking, shouldn’t those certain cis men who happen by nature to be less able than a typical woman be permitted in the women’s category? My gut answer is yes – but the problem here is that there’s just no way to measure someone’s natural capacity for ability. There’s no bright-line, Schelling-point way to sort out these less-capable cis men. It sucks.
Valid points and I fully acknowledge my oversimplification. I just wanted to express that some of these alternate paths might be more fruitful and easier to solve than just having an apartheid society.
I like the idea of gender essentialism ≈ apartheid