I was very confused why anybody would be against sports physicals, since they can avoid things like hernias and other seriously dangerous situations.
Then I realized this was about people being shit towards transgender athletes and it makes sense now.
transgendered
Please try to avoid this. It’s both incorrect (the correct word is transgender) and offensive, as it’s othering/implies something that happens to a person instead of what they are. Thank you!
https://time.com/3630965/transgender-transgendered/
https://www.lgbtqandall.com/lgbtq-terms-to-avoid-and-what-to-use-instead/
Good to know! Thank you!
I’ve edited my original reply.
Thank you!
Hated playing penisball in gym class. Horsecock Harry and Donkey Dick Dave had way too big of an advantage.
I mean, you play the hand you’re dealt. I’m still good mates with Harry.
looks like you also play with the dick you are dealt
You saw the chart. Time to shut down the Junior Penis Fencing League.
Cock-swordfighting is strictly adults only
Viagra down
En-Guard
But what sports will they have on Epstein’s Island now?
another of life’s great pleasures ruined by a middling beurocracy
Flatworms in shambles
In school my PE teacher used to check we were wearing boxers, and he’d count us in to the shower.
This is even more weird.
yeah we had kids skipping showers so my pe teacher decided he had to stand and take attendance while watching everyone shower….
seems like, not a great thing to do in present times.
but my metal shop teacher, who never made girls do anything and gave them all automatic A’s, was caught with CSAM and his own creeper camera shots on his classroom computer… i guess the cops traced it to him in class….
he gave the boys access to a bunch of torches and shit and completely ignored them while talking to all the girls all class.
i liked melting stacks of nickels with an acetylene torch a lot.i liked melting stacks of nickels with an acetylene torch a lot.
Should have melted the teacher’s “nickels” instead
if i knew then what i know now, yes
Kinda related, I was looking at roller derby earlier and the sign up for this womens team said you had to meet the definition from some national (maybe international?) Roller derby org.
I checked expecting the worst and it was a long list that essentially boiled down to “as long as you aren’t a cis man you’re fine”. Real sports dont care at all.
It’s really funny because the quintessential “women’s” sports, roller derby and softball, have been extremely trans inclusive on every team I’ve ever seen.
Derby is 100% the most inclusive sport I can think of. It’s basically the queer sport.
Huh. There was an American Dad episode where Hailey and Steve join a woman’s roller derby team and that was basically the storyline.
Thank goodness the mandatory ‘cleanliness inspection’ after the showers in gym class by the gym teacher isn’t used for information regarding which sports team we can play on. It’s a private inspection and only good little boys are invited.
…wait
I mean we had penis inspection day in elementary school with the gym teacher, I don’t see how this is any different
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not?
Tanner scale.
Complete bullshit thing that is commonplace in 1900s health and psychology fields.
Edit: the tanner scale itself isn’t complete bullshit. The use of it usually was.
Could go either way. Lots of people joke about it, but it has been happening since at least the mid ‘90d. The gym teacher at my middle school made post-class showers mandatory, distributed the towels (instead of letting students grab them from a stack or something), and intentionally threw the towels high so the boys had to reach up to grab them.
post-class showers mandatory
Yeah, so did mine. Turns out, mandatory is more of a suggestion than a “rule”, persay.
Ick.
So much ick.
They’re joking… Or in Texas…?
You what?
Your gym teacher violated your classes…
This just made me realize we kinda always did in a way. I remember having to go to the doctor for a physical before I could play sports. “Turn head and cough.”
To be clear, I’m not in favor of prohibiting trans kids from sports. Just musing that I did in fact have to have my genitals inspected to play sports in school.
They were checking for a hernia, not checking your genitals.
What kind of school was that? We never had an examination before sports
In the US many schools require students go to a doctor to get a “physical” before they can do a number of school activities. A physical is just a standard healthcheck to make sure there aren’t any health concerns (and that may involve checking reproductive organs).
Public school in Texas.
Physicals are very common
Aha but if they don’t have balls to cushion my head, then how will we play the Turkish Uzun Eşek my good sir?
Checkmate.
(NOT AI)Should boys and girls play on different teams, or should all sports be open to anybody who wants to play?
I’m reference to the trans sports bans we already had a lot of data on this. That data showed that after at least 2 years of HRT virtually all advantage a trans woman might have had from going through a male puberty is gone.
It’s not about separating sports by gender, it’s about the only way to enforce a trans sports ban being genial inspections and them being wholly unnecessary because we already had protocols for this. The average person just didn’t know they existed so when chuds started crying “men in women’s sports” people latched onto it even though it doesn’t happen.
By the time trans women are allowed to compete with cis women it’s either a group of prepubescent kids in which case what advantage? or they’ve been on HRT for long enough that they no longer have any advantages compared to their cis peers.
The post is about kids though, not men or women. Kids’ sports are already heavily segregated by age because kids entering puberty can gain a massive physical advantage with just 1 year of growth. A kid who goes through 2 years of puberty as a boy and then transitions to a girl could have 6 inches of height and 60 lbs of extra body mass over her peers.
2 years of HRT as a requirement would effectively shut her out of high school sports (puberty 13-15 as a boy, transition to girl, 15-17 HRT, graduate high school)?
This conversation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You also have to remember that things like puberty blockers exist that would delay the onset of that male puberty and with them those kids could start HRT and effectively go through a female puberty.
These kids don’t just decide one day they’re trans, almost all of them they’ve known for years. Most all of the suddenness comes from finally getting up the courage to come out if there is any. I knew at 8 that being a boy felt wrong but I didn’t have the words to express the problem I felt. Especially because the idea of being a girl felt just as wrong for different reasons. Those feelings only intensified as I went through puberty. I didn’t figure out nonbinary was something someone could even be until I was 26.
If there wasn’t such a stigma attached to all of this and people could just get the gender affirming care they need most of these “issues” wouldn’t exist.
Puberty blockers definitely are an option for the kids. The question is what are the sports teams supposed to do? Sports teams can’t force a kid to take puberty blockers.
What should the rules be for kids sports?
Ideally they wouldn’t need to force anything. These conversations could just happen openly enough and early enough that those decisions could be made in time for them not to be an issue.
But given that’s not the world we live in, generally what’s been done previously is monitoring by a doctor for things like serum testosterone levels like they already do for HRT regimens. That would unfortunately open the door for situations where a kid might not qualify depending on how early they might be in their transition but unfortunately as long as our mere existence as trans people is questioned and kids are told to wait and suffer through puberty for bodies that don’t align with their identity “just in case” they “aren’t actually trans” because “what if they regret it later?” then there’s not a whole lot we can really do about that aspect.
I believe the HRT Stat is only for people who have not gone through puberty, as detailed in the following passage from a research paper.
To date, the only established driver for the athletic differences between men and women is testosterone, first during puberty and then ongoing [5]. For example, higher testosterone levels along with lower estrogen levels during a typical male puberty result in larger physical stature. In addition, there are bone formation differences that relate to hormone levels in puberty, such as the widened pelvis that develops during a typical female puberty. Many hormone-related physical characteristics acquired during puberty are not reversed if hormone levels are changed later in life. By contrast, muscle mass, fat distribution, and red blood cell mass are among the physical characteristics that relate to an individual’s current testosterone levels. Such characteristics may indeed shift if hormone levels change.
That’s also compounded by the fact that there is very little data out there, relatively speaking, given the low rates of transgender people in the population (let alone athletes). Meaning that we don’t really have a full understanding of everything.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I know it’s not as black and white as either side wants it to be.
you linked a really good paper, i’m going to quote some other passages from it:
As those among us endocrinologists who focus on weight management and diabetes know well, for most of the population our biggest athletics-related concern is how to motivate people to participate. Transgender people are likely at greater risk of failing to participate in exercise than average, so that opportunities to motivate transgender people to engage in athletic activity would be anticipated to be a major health priority [3].
…
Typically, total testosterone cut points of 5 nmol/L and 10 nmol/L have been used with athletes mandated to have achieved those levels for some time period prior and to maintain those levels at all times going forward. Such thresholds are considered to be fair to transgender women because they are well above the 1.7 nmol/L target testosterone threshold in medical treatment guidelines.
…
The field of transgender medicine is filled with decisions based on fear of negative consequences rather than good scientific evidence. We in the endocrine healthcare community have much work to do to create an evidence base to help guide decision makers so that choices for transgender women in sport are data driven. In the interim, it is our responsibility to counsel those around us about the healthcare priority to encourage participation in sport and the importance of avoiding fear-driven policies. (emphasis mine)
we do have data that the existing transfemme population is not dominating cis women in any sport, and often, transfemmes on HRT have lower circulating testosterone levels than cis women (see citation from the paper above), especially wrt cis women in high end sports that tend to have higher levels of testosterone than average 💀
it may not be cut and dry, but there’s not that much compelling evidence that transfemmes should be excluded, which i would prefer to see if we’re excluding an entire demographic from sports. otherwise, it’s just discrimination
by the way, this paper also made me think of a number of significant reasons to include transfemmes in sports; among them being their physical and mental health, visibility, and mainstream acceptance. i believe these are all factors that should be weighed in a science-based decision about transfemmes inclusion in sports
(also, i think it’s good to note that nothing in this discussion warrants genital inspections lol)
You bring up a lot of valid points, however the main reason I brought up that quote from the article was to highlight that the concerns people have aren’t unfounded. There may be ways to mitigate it, but I think we can all agree this is still an evolving space.
Ultimately, women sports was created to provide a space for “women” to play sports. I put women in quotes because from its inception women sports was used to discriminate between people an in group (women) and an out group (men). So the question is, does “women” mean AFAB, post-op trans, people who identify as women, men? No matter how you slice it you’re going to be discriminating, the real question is, what group are you protecting?
It’s a magical mystery that we’ll never find out! Better ban trans people from public life!~
I’m not sure what that has to do with the question I asked.
Then you’re either being obtuse or disingenuous, which one is it? Why else would you be asking about boys and girls playing on different teams under a post saying genital inspections are wrong?
Because that’s the root of the issue. Genital inspections are a (terrible) way to determine someone’s gender. The reason why that is seen as necessary is that sports are segregated.
Wayne Gretzky, Lionel Messi, and Tom Brady should all have been banned from sports because they’re better than me but I wanna play too
It depends, but thankfully, there is a really simple test you can do. Just ask yourself: am I organizing a sports event that in any way excludes boys or girls, or men or women, who happen to be trans? Or people who are non-binary? Well, then simply cancel the event, because it doesn’t deserve to exist and should die. Human rights are more important than selling tickets.
I’m not sure what that has to do with the question I asked.
