In Reply to: Good for Newsom for his trans athlete position. posted by HasBen on March 09, 2025 at 09:08:22
to be handled very carefully with all the nuance it requires and anyone who has a blanket answer either way is not paying attention.
There was a great segment on NewsHour this week about the effects of hormone therapy on males transitioning to female and how long their advantage carries on, and the list was really interesting. They studies different tasks where some of the advantages dissipate very quickly, while others linger a while and yet some others stay with the athlete a lifetime. So, once all the fears and politicking on this issue are set aside, I think we're going to find out that fairness dictates that there won't be a single answer that's valid for every sport and that we will have to develop a sophisticated set of metrics to see what range of deviation from a phsyical middle for female athletes will be considered acceptable in which sport.
Also focusing on trans athletes blurs the real underlying issue of deviation from a standard range as far as competition is concerned. We have had that South African runner and the Algerian boxer examples recently where those athletes were not trans but had a physical condition that gave them a testosterone advantage, which we're not addressing because we're fixated as a society on trans women as an extension of our moral panic about sexual identity.
I'm not sure if Newsom or Fetterman expresses this exact position, but like I said, I consider any blanket statement that does not take as its premise that we need to have definitive numbers on the testosterone advantage and how it curves along age lines to be hopelessly naive, politically manipulative, and fundamentally an emotionally driven position operating independent of facts.
Also anyone who attempts to take this particular issue and tries to leverge it into an across-the-board anti-trans rights agenda can f**k off.
PS: Also it is time that the left begin to adopt the same distinctions between sex and gender, being a man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine that they have been insisting that the rest of us observe and for once have some clarity of thought on socially constructed gender and physical attributes of sex. They are making things worse for everyone, and especially trans people by continuously muddling these terms up.