JCC Transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52039832 - story of a homosexual 23 year old man here in the UK who is stuck in isolation with his homophobic strict Christian parents. There's also an interview with a 19 year old lesbian woman. These probably aren't the only two individuals in this situation.

 

I have to say, I do have some questions about how being trans in sports works. For instance, if you're FTM you'd be taking testosterone... and isn't that considered a banned performance-enhancing thing? Does that mean they ought to be banned for fairness? Or are they just catching up to the normal levels of T that AMAB people have?

As for MTF athletes, I do get why some people would think they have an advantage in sports where strength and speed are a factor. But does them taking estrogen mean that advantage is then removed? And also, it doesn't seem like only trans athletes are winning women's events, so is the advantage actually that big?

Like this is one area where I can kinda understand where the people making the decisions might be coming from, but I do think it might just stem from lack of information and understanding.

 

The sports issue is the one realm where, though some are greatly exaggerated, there are some legitimate concerns.

People don’t really seem to complain about non contact sports like biking or track and field. But a Woman transitioning to a man probably should never be in the same boxing ring or octagon as a man.

I’m actually really happy that there hasn’t been a female transitioning to male athlete that has tried to play football at a collegiate level.

 

why are you happy?

 

Yeah um I didn't say making rules against these was definitely right and that these athletes shouldn't compete. I said I don't know enough about the science and the rules of doping in these sports to know whether HRT is considered a performance enhancing drug, or whether it should be.

 

so this is fundamentally not true.

https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/...ransgender-woman-win-track-world-title-397473

There were plenty of people like you complaining about this

 

Because they’d be at an incredibly high risk of injury(as male players are already) and they physically wouldn’t be able to compete on the same level.

There are certain sports that, due to their nature, are meant to weed out certain physical attributes. Football is a sport that if you’re not 6 feet or higher(which very few women are) and have a comparable level of muscle mass with the athletes you’re competing against you are at a supreme disadvantage.

I think in the pursuit of trying to be all inclusive, you can put certain people at a high risk. That’s why, while transitioning should be socially accepted, boxing, mma, and football, are sports that transitioning athletes should avoid for the safety of everyone.

 

You realize there's a cis woman who plays college football as a defensive back, right?

And cis girls have been wrestling with boys for decades.

 

1. Yes I realized that.
2. I don’t think I mentioned wrestling. I wrestled and actually feel that’s probably the fairest sport in regards to any gender competing against any other gender.

——-
[mention]Lord Vivec [/mention]

What do you mean people like me?

And I don’t look at the criticisms they lodged against that athlete as valid. They complained about her competing, but she has a documented history of her taking medications to make the biological differences as minimal as possible.

Plus, it’s biking.

 

Do you think that cis girl should be banned from playing college football?

 

[mention]solojones [/mention]

No. Why would she need to be banned?

However, if there was an all female football league and Derrick Henry transitioned to a woman, I’d change my tune.

 

why?

 

Because I think he would pose an unrivaled danger to the other athletes due to his high level athleticism.

 

There really is no “science” involved in decisions about who can compete with who. Science can tell you that the average man is like x and the average woman is like y, but individuals are not averages. Also, at more elite levels, all athletes are outliers anyway.

The question is really at what point a competition becomes so one-sided as to be a foregone conclusion, and therefore unfair. There are many characteristics that can add to or subtract from one individual’s competitive chances against another. Differences associated with sex are some of these characteristics, but not remotely all.

So when you ask whether it’s fair for a man (cis or trans) to compete against a woman (cis or trans) in some athletic contest, you really need to know WHICH woman and WHICH man. Are you talking high school level? College? Olympic? Professional? Young adults or senior citizens? Someone with many rich sponsors that fund year-round, all-day practice with world-class coaches? Someone who has to hold down a full-time job and practice 2 hours a day in a vacant lot? Is one of the athletes Usain Bolt? Is another one Charlie Brown? Trans athletes specifically also come in a bewildering array of varieties: FTM, MTF, non-binary, on HRT, on low-dose HRT, not on HRT, pre-op, post-op, non-op, genetically predisposed to be 6’2”, genetically predisposed to be 4’11”.

There is no “scientific” answer to any of this, which is why there is no uniform policy for trans athletes in any arena.

 

My thought is, why do we care? It's as dumb as the bathroom debate. The trans woman might have a competitive advantage over the cis woman who's using the trendy performance enhancer. Boo hoo. The only reason it matters to anyone outside of the athletes is because of the billion-dollar profit-making machine telling us that "our" teams should win and "our" country's athletes should get the gold disks and that getting 0.1 seconds better on the 100m dash is an achievement of note. It's an extremely trivial part of the "debate" over trans rights that's overemphasized because opponents are grasping at straws. "What about muh watching sweaty people move a ball around?! "

 

Well, not entirely... there are multiple states who failed to get their school bathroom bills to stick that are now targeting high school and middle school athletes. Who cares whether Nowheresville Middle School has a trans girl on their track team? Nobody. They care if she’s in the girls’ locker room. Because trans girls are boys and all boys are rapists, I guess.

Idaho had a bill that got shot down. Ohio’s got one pending that is likely to pass, and there’s at least one more I’m not remembering rn.

But yeah, none of it has anything to do with the tiny percentage of athletes who are trans.

 

This is more of a criticism of all sports in general, not necessarily this issue. I don’t think anyone here was talking about eliminating rights, we were specifically talking about sports. If you’re going to be dismissive of the sports topic in general... then maybe don’t comment at all, right?

I’ll say this: Men hit harder than women. If anyone here has done MMA or boxing, these differences are not that hard to acknowledge.

Can Amanda nunes whoop my ass? Of course she can, but how many of the professional men of her sport could she beat? I think when we try to be over inclusive, it starts to border on eliminating men and women sports altogether.

 

Witness me, bitch

 

You are indeed visible.

 

Just a reminder, trans friends, Be Gay, Do Crime can wait until April 1. This is Trans Day of Visibility, so THEY CAN ALL SEE YOU. Get back to building that guillotine tomorrow!

Also, just because, Dr. Rachel Levine, the Pennsylvania Secretary of Health and a trans person. But not Dr. Rachel Levine, the Pennsylvania Secretary of Health, and a trans person. Because that means something else.

 

This information seems important in managing your personal risk: Coronavirus: Why do more men die of Covid-19 than women? It's not a little difference in the death rate, either. People get the disease in about the same numbers, regardless of gender. But men are anywhere from 10% to 100% more likely to die of it, depending on the country they live in.

All of that is interesting to know, but if you're trans, which part applies to you?

According to the article and some other opinions I've seen, most of the difference is related to behavior. Men tend to smoke and drink more, listen to authorities less, and wash their hands less. They're also less likely to go to a doctor at the first sign of illness. So if you want to live, take all those things, and do the opposite.

Some of the difference is related to hormonal and chromosomal dimorphism, however. So if you take HRT, that could have an impact on your survival chances. If you know your sex karyotype (and it's XX or XY), you can use that to calculate your risk level too. I suspect nobody knows what the significance of less common karyotypes like XXY or XYY is.

@Vaderize03 -- If you have a moment of your very valuable time to answer an obscure question: is there anything known about more familiar viruses related to covid-19 that would tell a trans or intersex person whether they're at greater or lesser risk from the novel coronavirus?

 

Sad day for our community

 

I know one guy whose surgery has been postponed 8 times now. I get that they’re turning OR’s into ICU’s and that it’s not necessarily desirable to have surgery in a hospital flooded with deadly viruses anyway. But still, this is not like a tummy tuck or a nose job. These are lifesaving surgeries for many people.