One of the very worst contributions to the trans sports debate is an article like this: a journalist who admittedly knows little and cares less about sports, who nonetheless is comfortable expounding authoritatively about why other people have the wrong attitude about sports. It even incudes old chestnuts like implying that men who "pretend" to care about girls' high school sports are, I don't know, either bigots or perverts, or both.
This really isn't that hard. There are many people--especially people who have or had daughters playing high school sports--who think that girls' sports are valuable, and recognize that after puberty girls on average aren't competitive with boys on average (seriously, if you've ever been to a cross country meet where the girls and boys teams race together, it's not a subtle difference). And fairness matters! Even if you're not a bigot, or consumed with the delusion that your daughter is going to compete in the Olympics, or for a NCAA team.
Journalists who find this to be such an alien concept should perhaps ask themselves, do I really have anything valuable to contribute to this debate?
Fairness matters to me cuts a multitude of ways though that makes this issue really difficult for me. Fairness matters on who's included in the we as much as it does who gets the trophies and stands on the podium.
I suppose if you don't believe in the concept of gender that there's a wide range of social codes for who's included in girls and boys this all gets very easy. If all we're concerned with is competitive fairness based on sex well this is easy. Medicalized trans girls will basically never ever make cuts by some point in high school after they start altering their hormonal mix and won't ever get back in in NCAAs, olympics or even your town's 5k or marathon. At which point they lose access to a wide range of social opportunities, scholarships, honors etc.
I don't have a clear sense of answers for how you would go about making sure all the ideas of fairness are being supported by the school. Unserious intramural sports aren't the same thing at all. This is just a different kind of unfairness that at the margin there are less opportunities provided by the state for already outcast people.
I've supported trans girls in sports not so much as a pro-trans issue, but because I think the problems "caused" by trans girls in sports are mostly just highlighting this professionalization problem, which is a problem for everyone. Fixing it by kicking trans girls out is just a bandaid. We should fix it by instead focusing on participation rather than competition. And once we fix that, whether trans girls play in girls sports will be a non-issue.
I coach sports in middle school in a school based track and cross country team and an elementary basketball all comers club. By middle school the difference between boys and girls is profound. Like it’s easy to forget this if you just watch but when we put in the times they’re notably different in events where .1 seconds is notable they have several second gaps.
I think there’s a significant difficulty in that as I understand it trans advocates goal is normalcy and sex sports advocates is competitive fairness and these aren’t really able to be aligned. Personally I tend to think while trans advocates don’t love this as a solution having categories for trans women and trans men wouldn’t impact many sports very much. Yes i recognize it would pose difficulties for team sports and it does mean trans boys and girls have a lower level of absolute opportunity than cis boys and girls for many things. Also the anti-trans position that trans girls should just play with the boys doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. If by high school a trans boy has been supplementing testosterone or a trans girl has been suppressing it for years you’re back to the root of the boy/girl problem. It’s not competitively fair. Even if you think not literally accepting that trans girls are girls is bigotry this seems better than the status quo in my state which is no even acknowledging their existence at all.
I think this is a good article about an important topic, but I think it's really hard to effectively address it for someone like the author, who admits to not caring about sports outcomes ever. Lots of people, far too many, are over invested in their kids youth sports outcomes for the reasons in this article. But even more just want their kids to win, or just have strong views about the importance of fairness in sports, which they connect with a (philosophically unsophisticated) view about trans participation.
I am confused by your closing couple sentences, “Those rules, however, ought to be separated from the conversation about who gets to play recreational sports as a child.
By default, this category should include all children. Defending its existence is in the interest of everyone.”
Like, no one is advocating to bar trans kids from sports - just for them to participate in leagues aligned with their sex at birth.
If we should care less about competition and more about simple participation anyways … what’s the problem? Seems to me that trans children athletes can have their cake and eat it too
Easily the most poorly crafted and wrong column I've read at The Arguement. Simply someone who doesn't like sports who sought a route to criticize those who do. I am progressive or liberal or whatever describes a lifelong Democrat who lives in a deep blue coastal city and supports the disadvantaged. Yet I enjoy watching and playing sports and have raised kids who play them. The underlying issue is akin to the debate over the undocumented - fairness. People can be sympathetic to the plight of someone struggling with gender identity or someone escaping awful war torn poverty but also recognize the issue of fairness as problematic. And if you somehow think pre-pubescent boys and girls are the same athletically you are in a nice protective bubble that is outside reality.
It is unclear to me how much of the prepubescent sports thing is sociological. A notable part of it definitely is if you look at throw like girl experiments. When I start basketball club there's a difference but a lot of it is about politeness. But there is a non-zero difference amongst elementary cross country runners but it's hard to dismiss the boys are told to go play outside more explanation.
By going immediately to a somewhat stretched economic explanation, I think you’re vastly undervaluing what people actually say. People have issues with kids under 18 transitioning to a different gender. If you take that at face value, and don’t treat that like some irrational thing that needs to be explained away by economic forces, I think you’ll get a better understanding. We may disagree with that, but it’s probably better to just listen to people and not assume they have some hidden motivation for what they’re saying. They think it’s weird. They think the completion is unfair. That’s about as deep as that rabbit hole goes.
Articles like this are always hilariously incomprehensible to read coming from a subculture that is exactly like this except for academics instead. Like where do you people get so much time to worry about sports, don’t you have math homework to do?
Of course, but there’s clearly wide variation in emphasis. There are a finite number of hours in the day, and academic extracurriculars are just as capable of eating them as athletic ones.
100% agree with this article. Critics are missing the point. The biggest problem in youth sports is money, not trans kids. The author is arguing that even if it is “unfair” (debatable) at the youth level, the benefits of participating in sports in a way that aligns with your gender identity is worth it at a societal level. At the elite level, of course the stakes are higher and there probably needs to be sport-specific rules about participation, which ultimately requires more research about what truly constitutes an unfair competitive advantage.
I really don’t think most of the worry is about elementary school kids. In the kids sport I know best (hockey), teams are often mixed until the Bantam level when the boys are getting bigger and stronger and checking is permitted.
One of the very worst contributions to the trans sports debate is an article like this: a journalist who admittedly knows little and cares less about sports, who nonetheless is comfortable expounding authoritatively about why other people have the wrong attitude about sports. It even incudes old chestnuts like implying that men who "pretend" to care about girls' high school sports are, I don't know, either bigots or perverts, or both.
This really isn't that hard. There are many people--especially people who have or had daughters playing high school sports--who think that girls' sports are valuable, and recognize that after puberty girls on average aren't competitive with boys on average (seriously, if you've ever been to a cross country meet where the girls and boys teams race together, it's not a subtle difference). And fairness matters! Even if you're not a bigot, or consumed with the delusion that your daughter is going to compete in the Olympics, or for a NCAA team.
Journalists who find this to be such an alien concept should perhaps ask themselves, do I really have anything valuable to contribute to this debate?
Fairness matters to me cuts a multitude of ways though that makes this issue really difficult for me. Fairness matters on who's included in the we as much as it does who gets the trophies and stands on the podium.
I suppose if you don't believe in the concept of gender that there's a wide range of social codes for who's included in girls and boys this all gets very easy. If all we're concerned with is competitive fairness based on sex well this is easy. Medicalized trans girls will basically never ever make cuts by some point in high school after they start altering their hormonal mix and won't ever get back in in NCAAs, olympics or even your town's 5k or marathon. At which point they lose access to a wide range of social opportunities, scholarships, honors etc.
I don't have a clear sense of answers for how you would go about making sure all the ideas of fairness are being supported by the school. Unserious intramural sports aren't the same thing at all. This is just a different kind of unfairness that at the margin there are less opportunities provided by the state for already outcast people.
Great article (mostly because I agree with it).
I've supported trans girls in sports not so much as a pro-trans issue, but because I think the problems "caused" by trans girls in sports are mostly just highlighting this professionalization problem, which is a problem for everyone. Fixing it by kicking trans girls out is just a bandaid. We should fix it by instead focusing on participation rather than competition. And once we fix that, whether trans girls play in girls sports will be a non-issue.
I coach sports in middle school in a school based track and cross country team and an elementary basketball all comers club. By middle school the difference between boys and girls is profound. Like it’s easy to forget this if you just watch but when we put in the times they’re notably different in events where .1 seconds is notable they have several second gaps.
I think there’s a significant difficulty in that as I understand it trans advocates goal is normalcy and sex sports advocates is competitive fairness and these aren’t really able to be aligned. Personally I tend to think while trans advocates don’t love this as a solution having categories for trans women and trans men wouldn’t impact many sports very much. Yes i recognize it would pose difficulties for team sports and it does mean trans boys and girls have a lower level of absolute opportunity than cis boys and girls for many things. Also the anti-trans position that trans girls should just play with the boys doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. If by high school a trans boy has been supplementing testosterone or a trans girl has been suppressing it for years you’re back to the root of the boy/girl problem. It’s not competitively fair. Even if you think not literally accepting that trans girls are girls is bigotry this seems better than the status quo in my state which is no even acknowledging their existence at all.
I think this is a good article about an important topic, but I think it's really hard to effectively address it for someone like the author, who admits to not caring about sports outcomes ever. Lots of people, far too many, are over invested in their kids youth sports outcomes for the reasons in this article. But even more just want their kids to win, or just have strong views about the importance of fairness in sports, which they connect with a (philosophically unsophisticated) view about trans participation.
I am confused by your closing couple sentences, “Those rules, however, ought to be separated from the conversation about who gets to play recreational sports as a child.
By default, this category should include all children. Defending its existence is in the interest of everyone.”
Like, no one is advocating to bar trans kids from sports - just for them to participate in leagues aligned with their sex at birth.
If we should care less about competition and more about simple participation anyways … what’s the problem? Seems to me that trans children athletes can have their cake and eat it too
It what sense would they both have their cake and eat it?
Easily the most poorly crafted and wrong column I've read at The Arguement. Simply someone who doesn't like sports who sought a route to criticize those who do. I am progressive or liberal or whatever describes a lifelong Democrat who lives in a deep blue coastal city and supports the disadvantaged. Yet I enjoy watching and playing sports and have raised kids who play them. The underlying issue is akin to the debate over the undocumented - fairness. People can be sympathetic to the plight of someone struggling with gender identity or someone escaping awful war torn poverty but also recognize the issue of fairness as problematic. And if you somehow think pre-pubescent boys and girls are the same athletically you are in a nice protective bubble that is outside reality.
It is unclear to me how much of the prepubescent sports thing is sociological. A notable part of it definitely is if you look at throw like girl experiments. When I start basketball club there's a difference but a lot of it is about politeness. But there is a non-zero difference amongst elementary cross country runners but it's hard to dismiss the boys are told to go play outside more explanation.
By going immediately to a somewhat stretched economic explanation, I think you’re vastly undervaluing what people actually say. People have issues with kids under 18 transitioning to a different gender. If you take that at face value, and don’t treat that like some irrational thing that needs to be explained away by economic forces, I think you’ll get a better understanding. We may disagree with that, but it’s probably better to just listen to people and not assume they have some hidden motivation for what they’re saying. They think it’s weird. They think the completion is unfair. That’s about as deep as that rabbit hole goes.
Articles like this are always hilariously incomprehensible to read coming from a subculture that is exactly like this except for academics instead. Like where do you people get so much time to worry about sports, don’t you have math homework to do?
Lots of kids do both.
Of course, but there’s clearly wide variation in emphasis. There are a finite number of hours in the day, and academic extracurriculars are just as capable of eating them as athletic ones.
100% agree with this article. Critics are missing the point. The biggest problem in youth sports is money, not trans kids. The author is arguing that even if it is “unfair” (debatable) at the youth level, the benefits of participating in sports in a way that aligns with your gender identity is worth it at a societal level. At the elite level, of course the stakes are higher and there probably needs to be sport-specific rules about participation, which ultimately requires more research about what truly constitutes an unfair competitive advantage.
I really don’t think most of the worry is about elementary school kids. In the kids sport I know best (hockey), teams are often mixed until the Bantam level when the boys are getting bigger and stronger and checking is permitted.
Oh look another reason for me to think the current state of youth sport is really bad