Transgender MEGATHREAD

[viper37]

Bull. You're assuming males are automatically bigger and stronger than females, and even if we were to take that as a given, that problem could be sidestepped with something like weight classes in wrestling. I wouldn't want to take a tackle from either Venus or Serena Williams, and they're tennis players, not NFL linebackers. Shoot, you should see the girls that made it through tryouts for my high school's field hockey team- half of them could pretty easily bowl the football team right over. Point being, declaring yourself as transitioning MTF to play against women isn't the "easy button" that you and some others are making it out to be.

Serena Williams could not compete against Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer.
At this level, it makes a huge difference.  Even amongst teen, it will.   Not that some women can't beat men on some sports, but at similar level of training and aptitude, the males will perform better.

There's reason why sportsfights are seperated between weight classesé

[Sheilbh]

Reading a really interesting LRB article (reviewing Female Husbands: A Trans History and Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from 19th Century France) and it opens with a great story:

James Allen was working for a London shipwright when he was killed by a falling piece of timber in 1829. He had been married to his wife, Abigail, for more than twenty years. The medical students who performed the autopsy declared Allen's body anatomically female, but the coroner continued to call the deceased 'he' because 'I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.' The marriage certificate convinced the coroner to ignore Allen's anatomy: social gender trumped biological gender. The rest of the community agreed. Allen wore trousers, had a wife and was called James. He was 'sober, steady, strong and active'. Of course he was a man. Only after Allen's death, as news of the autopsy spread, did some people begin to express different opinions: they'd always noticed his lack of facial hair, they said, and oddly high voice. But, even then, for every person who feminised Allen in retrospect, another insisted on his masculine traits - a face roughened by a life spent outdoors, large hands hardened by decades of work as a groom and sawyer.

[Berkut]

Solution:

Pass a law that defines two broad categories of athletic groupings.

Category #1 is unrestricted. Anyone can play, doesn't matter what their anything is (except for age groupings).

Category #2 is restricted. You can play in category two only if you are cis-female, or you get an exemption from your local sports organization. Said exemptions is defined, by law, as being some kind of sport specific evaluation of your ability to compete in that sport, at that level, based on your actual physiological profile at the time the exemption is asked for, broadly based on there being some accepted median range of size, speed, or whatever relevant, objective, and reasonable measures that sport might consider for maintaining competitive balance.

And write into this theoretical law the demand that said exemption MUST be granted to anyone meeting the criteria, but only for those who are actually undergoing or have undergone medical transition to female (in order to exclude this from being a way for males who simply cannot compete in the first category from competing in this category instead).

That gives an avenue for legal redress if someone thinks they are being excluded by the Evil Anti-LGBT folks.

Now, if you don't get the exemption, because in point of fact you are outside the median range of competitiveness for the traditional womens sport, it's not like you cannot play sports - you can play in the unrestricted division, at whatever level your talent allows.

[Berkut]

Reading a really interesting LRB article (reviewing Female Husbands: A Trans History and Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from 19th Century France) and it opens with a great story:

James Allen was working for a London shipwright when he was killed by a falling piece of timber in 1829. He had been married to his wife, Abigail, for more than twenty years. The medical students who performed the autopsy declared Allen's body anatomically female, but the coroner continued to call the deceased 'he' because 'I considered it impossible for him to be a woman, as he had a wife.' The marriage certificate convinced the coroner to ignore Allen's anatomy: social gender trumped biological gender. The rest of the community agreed. Allen wore trousers, had a wife and was called James. He was 'sober, steady, strong and active'. Of course he was a man. Only after Allen's death, as news of the autopsy spread, did some people begin to express different opinions: they'd always noticed his lack of facial hair, they said, and oddly high voice. But, even then, for every person who feminised Allen in retrospect, another insisted on his masculine traits - a face roughened by a life spent outdoors, large hands hardened by decades of work as a groom and sawyer.

I like how if someone noticed something that was anatomically TRUE, they were "feminizing" him in retrospect. I suppose the coroner who noticed he had a vagina was doing that as well.

It is an interesting story, but I see it as interesting in BOTH aspects - how we can as a society define sexuality, but we cannot change actual physiology just by wishing it were so. His "masculine" traits were not at all actually masculine by their nature - any women who identified as a women who worked outdoors doing "rough" work would have those exact same traits. And if we called her a "man" because she had rough hands and a weathered face, we would very rightly be called out for THAT.

But it is a biological fact that cis women do have less facial hair, and do have a higher voice, along with a host of other physiological and psychological differences. Some of those we have the power to change now, which is great.

[Josquius]

Solution:

Pass a law that defines two broad categories of athletic groupings.

Category #1 is unrestricted. Anyone can play, doesn't matter what their anything is (except for age groupings).

Category #2 is restricted. You can play in category two only if you are cis-female, or you get an exemption from your local sports organization. Said exemptions is defined, by law, as being some kind of sport specific evaluation of your ability to compete in that sport, at that level, based on your actual physiological profile at the time the exemption is asked for, broadly based on there being some accepted median range of size, speed, or whatever relevant, objective, and reasonable measures that sport might consider for maintaining competitive balance.

And write into this theoretical law the demand that said exemption MUST be granted to anyone meeting the criteria, but only for those who are actually undergoing or have undergone medical transition to female (in order to exclude this from being a way for males who simply cannot compete in the first category from competing in this category instead).

That gives an avenue for legal redress if someone thinks they are being excluded by the Evil Anti-LGBT folks.

Now, if you don't get the exemption, because in point of fact you are outside the median range of competitiveness for the traditional womens sport, it's not like you cannot play sports - you can play in the unrestricted division, at whatever level your talent allows.

Glad you put the exemption stuff in otherwise its a non-solution of basically just doing everything the anti-trans people want with leaving things mostly as they are today but with some renaming, I've seen that a lot.

This broadly works, though there's a lot of unanswered questions in it and it sits a bit dodgy that the burden of proof heavily lands on the girls to prove themselves; they've likely already had enough trouble with this shit to begin with. I really think there should be an assumption of good faith in this stuff, at low levels at the least. Someone wants to enter the olympics then damn right they should face tests, but if you just want to join a local amateur cricket team?... It'll really serve to dissuade people from taking up sport.

Also there's the unresolved grand problem at the core of all this, key to providing an answer but which few seem to want to address, of just who counts as a cisgender woman?
Science no longer regards sex as a simple binary, we now know its binomial, and we can only expect in the future more and more people to be aware of the fact if they don't sit at a neat extreme.
This is something experts have grappled with for decades so I don't expect anyone here to have a good answer and I couldn't begin to guess where one lies.

[Tonitrus]

Kind of how, as Berkut just suggested, if one wants to toss the entire gender-based sports "structure" out...then perhaps the best alternative is a more general-skill-based/weight-class ranking, depending on if it is team-based, or a single-person sport.  Team-based might be something like Baseball's AAA-etc. system.  I think many high schools do this too (at least in Washington state they seemed to), where "larger" schools, with more resources/population were in one class/league, and the lesser schools in a lesser one.

And one went into tossing the whole Best Actor/Actress system in the Oscar's/etc. as well, but not cut the total awards in half, some kind of translation there might be needed as well.

[Josquius]

Kind of how, as Berkut just suggested, if one wants to toss the entire gender-based sports "structure" out...then perhaps the best alternative is a more general-skill-based/weight-class ranking, depending on if it is team-based, or a single-person sport.  Team-based might be something like Baseball's AAA-etc. system.  I think many high schools do this too (at least in Washington state they seemed to), where "larger" schools, with more resources/population were in one class/league, and the lesser schools in a lesser one.

And one went into tossing the whole Best Actor/Actress system in the Oscar's/etc. as well, but not cut the total awards in half, some kind of translation there might be needed as well.

There you have the consideration of which factors are the most important.
I mean; sure with top level boxing its simple with weight matters, all that muscle. But with high school baseball how would you do it?

I must say I do like the thought of a <190cm basketball league.
Of course the 189.9cm guys would just dominate but...hey ho.

[Jacob]

Came across an article a while ago about a mother who'd regularly allege that girls on teams playing against her daughter's team were trans. She'd demand that they be taken off the team, as this was in US state with a ban on trans girls in HS sports. She'd typically focus on girls with short hair and/ or star players just before a match. This - as you can imagine - was frequently pretty traumatizing for the cis- girls who just wanted to play, and who suddenly had their gender identity publicly questioned. The mom was active in some sort of "keep trans girls out of girls sports" movement, so she'd have a bit of political and social media heft behind her too, IIRC.

Given the politically charged nature of this topic, I think we shouldn't be surprised to see more of this.

I don't have a strong sense of how frequent and harmful false allegations that cis- girls are trans- are going to be with bans on trans athletes vs how frequent and harmful trans- girls participating is going to be to cis- girls in things like high school sports, but if we're looking at protecting children we should consider that as well, IMO.

So say there are laws to exclude trans girls from girls sports at a high school level, how is it handled and enforced?

Does every girl participating require some sort of doctor's note on file to certify they're cis before they can join the soccer team (or whatever)? Or is it okay to train with the team, but their cis status just has to be verified before competitive matches against other schools? Or do we just rely on trans girls self-identifying and not joining, knowing they're not wanted? If we do, how should we handle allegations that someone is trans and have somehow slipped through the exclusion net? Who makes those calls - teachers, coaches, the school board, the girl's family doctor, some other medical professional, some sort of special body in charge of certifying authentic cis status?

How do we deal with intersex athletes?

Given how high school athletics is a pathway to college and pro-athletics, are we going to make sure the high school standards for being cis- match up with those at higher levels? Or are we okay with athletes who could potentially qualify for college scholarships using whatever rules the college has being denied the opportunity to train and compete because the high school's criteria are more stringent?

[Berkut]

Kind of how, as Berkut just suggested, if one wants to toss the entire gender-based sports "structure" out...then perhaps the best alternative is a more general-skill-based/weight-class ranking, depending on if it is team-based, or a single-person sport.  Team-based might be something like Baseball's AAA-etc. system.  I think many high schools do this too (at least in Washington state they seemed to), where "larger" schools, with more resources/population were in one class/league, and the lesser schools in a lesser one.

And one went into tossing the whole Best Actor/Actress system in the Oscar's/etc. as well, but not cut the total awards in half, some kind of translation there might be needed as well.

There you have the consideration of which factors are the most important.
I mean; sure with top level boxing its simple with weight matters, all that muscle. But with high school baseball how would you do it?

I must say I do like the thought of a <190cm basketball league.
Of course the 189.9cm guys would just dominate but...hey ho.

If you went with a completely non-gender, strictly some kind of measurable height/weight kind of classes....that would be the end of women's sports.

Because the thing is, a 5'7", 150lb boy, on average, is going to be stronger and faster than a 5'7" 150lb girl.

[alfred russel]

The men's Olympic entry standard for the marathon is 2:11:30 (though there are ways to get in without meeting the standards). The world record for a women's marathon is 2:14:04.

Using 69kg weightlifting at the 2016 olympics (a weightclass that exists for both genders), the last place male had a total of 296 kg (excluding those that didn't get a qualifying score). The gold medal woman was 261 kg.

I can't dream of running as fast or lifting as much as a world class woman, but women would basically be excluded from top level competitions without separate divisions.

[Sheilbh]

I like how if someone noticed something that was anatomically TRUE, they were "feminizing" him in retrospect. I suppose the coroner who noticed he had a vagina was doing that as well.

Well the coroner didn't - the coroner ignored the fact that he had a vagina - and isn't that the right phrase given that people commented on it in retrospect.

It is an interesting story, but I see it as interesting in BOTH aspects - how we can as a society define sexuality, but we cannot change actual physiology just by wishing it were so. His "masculine" traits were not at all actually masculine by their nature - any women who identified as a women who worked outdoors doing "rough" work would have those exact same traits. And if we called her a "man" because she had rough hands and a weathered face, we would very rightly be called out for THAT.

Sure - although the point is a woman at that point would not have worked outdoors doing that "rough" work. This is like the way pale skin for women was seen as more desirable (which lasts well into the 20th century in Western cinema). Obviously there were women working on farms etc but there were not female stable hands or shipwrights. It is precisely that there is that socially constructed gender and the coroner chose to prefer that over biological sex (as did many other contemporaries. A woman could not have a wife, could not do that job etc therefore Allen continued to be a "he" despite biological sex.

I'd also slightly distinguish sexuality. It is incredibly difficult to talk and think about sexuality and gender identity before those concepts really exist and there is a blurriness here of homosexual women using gender as a cover for their sexuality v women living a different gender for other reasons (some, no doubt, because it was easier and freer than being a woman; some probably because their gender identity didn't match their place in society). I can't remember the name but there is an incredible book about the letters between spinsters/maiden aunts in Victorian Britain - because after they reached about 30 at which point their irredeemable spinsterness had been confirmed it was socially acceptable for them to move in and live together. There are some letters that have survived that suggest incredibly close relationships that were quite possibly basically lesbian - but there are other scholars who dismiss it (on the routine ground that people just wrote letters like that to their same sex friends back then). But for women of that class there was an alternative - it may well be for working class/poorer women that actually being a man was an easier way to marry the woman they loved.

Although - my default assumption on any period drama is that spinsters/maiden aunts are living a very happy and fulfilling sapphic life that just isn't the focus of that show

There's a few really interesting stories in the review - I find the Female Husbands ones more interesting because they are poorer, more working class:

Female husbands expressed their masculinity through their choice of clothing, names, behaviours and, above all, their labour and their marriage status. As tavern keepers, soldiers, sailors, mountebanks, builders and itinerant tinkers, they rejected the belief that those born female couldn't do men's work. Husbands were not born, but made. Because most people believed that marriage could exist only between a man and woman, having a wife was just as convincing a proof of manhood as physical strength, a long stride and a tendency to drink too much and get into fights.

Some female husbands remained in stable unions for decades. Others, revealed to have been born female, moved to new places and continued to live as men, or were forced to dissolve their marriages, in some cases resuming female attire. The way women responded to their female husbands varied with the state of their relationships. Some wives pressed charges. In 1838, Henry Stoake, an oven builder from Manchester who had lived as a man since his late teens, was exposed by his wife of 22 years. Angry that he was holding back her housekeeping allowance, she sought a legal separation and tried to secure a claim to his assets by telling her lawyer that Stoake had been born female. (In fact, her revelation cast doubt on whether she was legally married at all.) Other wives stood by female husbands who ended up on the wrong side of the law. When George Wilson was arrested for vagrancy after fainting in a New York street in 1836 (there wasn't yet a crime of dressing as the other sex to charge him with), Elisabeth, his wife of fifteen years, fetched him from the police station to the house the couple shared with her father. Samuel Bundy, born Sarah Paul, a sailor, was jailed in 1760 on a charge of fraud for marrying a woman (his initial defence was that a shark had eaten his penis). Bundy was reportedly visited in prison by a dozen women to whom he had paid court; his wife refused to press charges and eventually he was released. Nine months later, living as a woman, Bundy married a man.

Female husbands troubled their communities because they proved it wasn't always straightforward to tell men and women apart, despite the notion of 'opposite sexes'. The consequences of this unease could be severe. In 1746, Charles Hamilton, an itinerant quack doctor in the southwest of England, was reported to the authorities by his wife of two months for 'pretending herself a man'. He was publicly whipped in four different towns, then sentenced to six months' hard labour. (By the time Hamilton's story surfaced in a Boston newspaper, he was reported to have had fourteen wives.) But many female husbands were supported by their communities, and press coverage could be sympathetic. James Howe began to live as a man in 1732, aged sixteen, and had been married for thirty years before his desperation at being blackmailed by a childhood acquaintance led him to reveal his secret. After his friends and neighbours learned that Howe had been born female, they took the news in their stride. The blackmailer was sentenced to four years in prison for extortion. A widely circulated account of the trial, Manion notes, portrayed Howe as 'a person of integrity – despite their gender ambiguity'.

[...]

In both these books, gender has more to do with habit than biology. According to Manion, female husbands knew that 'what makes a man is not the sex they are assigned at birth but the life they live.' In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued for a form of knowledge he called practical: one learns to become a swimmer by swimming. One might say that a person becomes a man by living as a man. Mesch proposes that gender isn't a label so much as a story, although judging by these accounts, it's not just one story but many. The stories trans people told about themselves often collided with the way others understood them. Family members, neighbours, employers, spouses, lovers, police officers and doctors could make or unmake the tale and the teller.

Trans people encounter resistance not only because they challenge widely held notions about gender but also because they threaten society's conformist tendencies. Dieulafoy, for example, found much more acceptance than Rachilde, because Dieulafoy's masculinity served the French imperial state. The press lauded them as an 'intrepid explorer' whose Persian expeditions added treasures to the Louvre. The same holds true for some of Manion's female husbands. Robert Shurtliff, an American soldier in the War of Independence, also known as Deborah Sampson, was celebrated for acting out of the 'purest patriotism' and without 'any selfish motives'. When the British soldier James Gray revealed that he had once been Hannah Snell, he was treated as a hero. By contrast, the deliberately perverse Rachilde, determined 'to be strange or nothing at all', was denounced, censored and pathologised. When a judge found Albert Guelph guilty of vagrancy in 1856, he claimed that he had 'harmed the entire community'.

As society's ideas about gender changed, so too did attitudes towards female husbands. After the rise of feminism in the 1840s, female husbands became associated with the growing numbers of women eager to vote, go to college and work in jobs formerly reserved for men. The press began to fret that a once eccentric phenomenon might soon become widespread. In 1883, the New York Times announced that 'many women ... if they had the opportunity, would select other women as husbands rather than marry men.' Although reports of female husbands remained rare, agitation about gender-crossing intensified. With the rise of sexology in the 1880s, doctors and journalists began to see female husbands as lesbians, that is, as more female than husband. Sex, now considered a fixed biological essence, began to trump gender: no longer a person successfully living as a man, the female husband was a deviant woman.

It is striking that it's only in the 1860s that there starts to be legislation against cross-dressing. It's interesting to which the extent to which biological sex has primacy is a relatively modern invention - in part to do with the rise of science but also the application of science to classify/characterise humans.

But it is a biological fact that cis women do have less facial hair, and do have a higher voice, along with a host of other physiological and psychological differences. Some of those we have the power to change now, which is great.

Sure - but I don't think anyone's disputing that. The thing that seems interesting to me is how important (or not) biological facts have been at different points.

[grumbler]

Trans-women excluded. Problem solved.

You already lost that argument in court in 1977.  Your problem is going to be squaring that fact with a system that allows fair competition.

[Josquius]

Sure - but I don't think anyone's disputing that. The thing that seems interesting to me is how important (or not) biological facts have been at different points.

Philosophy Tube did a video on a related topic recently.
Basic TLDW that its really weird our society places such gigantic importance on this one factor (sex) of who we are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koud7hgGyQ8

[Sophie Scholl]

I really wish Buddha was still posting here. I think these are important discussions, but at the end of the day, all of us only have second hand (or further removed) knowledge of the subject. It's like if someone asked me about child raising of which I have no experience. Sure, I have some opinions on it, but at the end of the day they will almost certainly be significantly less well informed than the ones of the parents on the forum.

Doesn't mean this shouldn't be discussed here, but I think it's something worth keeping in mind.

I'm kinda glad Buddha isn't giving some of the childish that appears to repeatedly show up around this topic here.

This. So, so much this. See you all in another few months. Maybe. 

[Razgovory]

Came across an article a while ago about a mother who'd regularly allege that girls on teams playing against her daughter's team were trans. She'd demand that they be taken off the team, as this was in US state with a ban on trans girls in HS sports. She'd typically focus on girls with short hair and/ or star players just before a match. This - as you can imagine - was frequently pretty traumatizing for the cis- girls who just wanted to play, and who suddenly had their gender identity publicly questioned. The mom was active in some sort of "keep trans girls out of girls sports" movement, so she'd have a bit of political and social media heft behind her too, IIRC.

Ugh.  I didn't think about that.