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Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

nytimes.com

431–440 of 960 posts

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades. > Puberty blockers alter hormones dramatically during critical growth phases. Which is generally the goal. It is of course not possible to retroactively have allowed puberty to progress as though the blockers had never been taken, but it is possible to cease the blockers and allow it to resume, again, as is done…

> It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to. The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window. Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are dif…

It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. If the "correct" age is what we see today, then there's thousands of generations of humans who had puberty naturally occur "too late" yet we're all still here to talk about it. If the "correct" age instead is when it used to occur, then everyone should go on puberty blockers for a few years to avoid this unnatural surge of precocious puberty.

> I don't understand what you're trying to claim, but ceasing the medications does not reverse the changes they made during critical teenage growth windows.

Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes. For young trans people, access to blockers can save them from a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of a puberty they did not want. Likewise, blockers can save a cisgender child from unwanted consequences of a puberty happening too early.

That doesn't mean "until adulthood", it could just be a few years. But even then, I think blockers are a compromise to appease people who doubt the ability of trans kids to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy. I think trans people should be able to go on cross-sex hormones basically at will, but certainly after no more than a cursory chat with a therapist.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Olympics, it appears trans athletes are still a minority among the group of athletes who are excluded because of sex characteristics. Most of the athletes impacted by the ever-stricter testosterone limits in the Olympics are cis women. Such a league would include cisgender former Olympic athletes who had to undergo forms of HRT in order to qualify. When discussing trans people in sports, the most salient conte…

Is anyone worth listening to seriously suggesting that informal childhood sports are somehow equivalent to programs that can define academic or professional careers? Edit I’d add that T screening in sports exists primarily to find dopers, not people trying to pass.

I don't see how your question follows from the rest of the discussion, or in what specific ways you are suggesting people argue to be equivalent. Both K-12 sports and Olympic sports are understood to be sports.

To restate myself, sports during childhood are much more important than elite world championships. Almost everyone I know did a sport with peers during our formative years, myself included. Meanwhile, nobody I know was ever close to qualifying to be an Olympic athlete, and I feel certain the same is true for most of the people in this thread.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#433
post #399

The only reason is topic is even on the table is the sheer amount of political grifters riding the trans “panic” for many years, trying to rile up a mob. This is a non issue, and online trans investigators and people like jk Rowling so far managed to only hurt multiple (assigned at birth) women in sports, whos looks don’t conform with traditional femininity.

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Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#434

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Transition changes biology. We don't yet have the technology to fully reverse the effects of male puberty, so there can be reasonable debate about trans women who transitioned after puberty, but early transitioners have no meaningful advantage. Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female. This is also true for many cisgender intersex women with XY chromosomes. Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chro…

People with a diagnosis for that syndrome are specifically allowed by the new rules

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#435
post #427

My two cents as a transfem athlete: The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned. There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man fo…

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No it's because in almost every sport, male sex development bestows significant performance advantages.

This is easy to see even with a casual glance. Look at the world records for any sport with measurable and comparable metrics, like times for swimming, running, etc. The difference between the most elite female and male athletes is stark.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#436
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Have you considered that due to their education and research those people may know more on the subject than you do? Regret rates for transition remain notoriously low (within 2%) with main reasons for regret stated to be transitioning too late or environmental lack of acceptance or support. Besides, despite some orgs claiming there is a "transgender trend", we are just not seeing this in the data.

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Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is absolutely possible, and it has been done in cisgender children with precocious puberty for decades Precocious puberty is a condition in which puberty happens earlier than it's supposed to. The goal of puberty blockers in precocious puberty is to delay puberty until the correct age and physiological growth window. Puberty blocker in precocious puberty are also not used to induce hormonal profiles that are dif…

It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years. If the "correct" age is what we see today, then there's thousands of generations of humans who had puberty naturally occur "too late" yet we're all still here to talk about it. If the "correct" age instead is when it used to occur, then everyone should go o…

> It's unclear what age puberty is "supposed to" happen. The age of onset of puberty has gotten substantially younger, even just over the past couple hundred years.

The change over the past couple hundred years is measured on the order of a couple years at most.

This has nothing at all to do with hormonal intervention until adult ages. Once someone reaches adulthood the window for a lot of changes has closed.

> Puberty blockers do not themselves induce changes. They block hormones whose job is to trigger release of sex hormones which would induce changes.

You're either not understanding, or trying to avoid an inconvenient point: Once blocked during critical periods, many of those changes simply cannot happen at a later date.

Puberty cannot be delayed until adulthood and then resumed as if nothing happened.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#438

My two cents as a transfem athlete: The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned. There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man fo…

This is one of the rare problems where there exists no good solution to the issue.

Even without taking transfem athletes into consideration, there still remains a problem for women's sports in that sex (not gender) is not fully black and white, male and female, and some high-performing female athletes show signs of intersex, which has caused this entire hysteria about checking for penises.

How do you ever come up with a sane way to deal with this? (apart from events that are genderless like shooting)

Then we have sports that needn't be gendered because of physical differences, but are anyway, e.g. esports.

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#439

My two cents as a transfem athlete: The attention this topic receives is disproportionate considering how rare we are, especially close to the Olympics level. Most of us do sports for fun/friends and don’t care how they rank us, but would be sad to be banned. There might be more “biological advantage” nuance with people just starting their transition, but by this many years in it feels silly. I registered as a man fo…

> but would be sad to be banned. Enforcing the existing and long-standing sex-based classification is not a ban; competition within one’s own sex category was always and remains permitted.

This kind of argument was not persuasive when Alito deployed it for his pedantic dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County [0, specifically p. 17], and it remains not persuasive now.

[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf

Re: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

#440
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not Human Olympics?

Why not ignore gender labels and go by chromosomal configuration? There could be XY and XX [1] olympics. And then there should be X, XYY, XXX, XXXY, XXYY, and all the other possibilities [2]. There is more complexity than the binary in the expression of sex in humans. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_huma... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

Really, there should be separate categories for people with more than the regular amount of arm hair. Also separate categories for short people, tall people, lazy people, people who wear glasses, people with blue trousers, and of course, for sketch artists and quantitative traders.
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