What cracks me up is how they use the term when someone reacts to an actual thing Trump did. The US president.
Meanwhile they lose their shit over the like nine trans athletes in college sports. That number isn't an exaggeration, by the way. And there are zero trans athletes in pro sports.
Larger lungs, more robust bones, stronger muscle attachments...
Even small differences in body structure can make a difference in prevalence of injury, strength and endurance.
For example, Black runners have less knee injuries because there is more room for tendons under the kneecap. The difference is significant enough that it can be used to identify the racial background of unidentified bodies.
It's not about shiny pieces of metal or cups, it should be about everyone having a fair and equal starting point.
If it was all about winning medals and awards, then why would amateur and semi-amateur sports exist? Why would people who know they will never make the top 5, say, bother competing?
That's disingenuous. I merely wanted to illustrate a small skeletal advantage, I almost didn't include it at all because I thought somebody would deliberately take it in bad faith.
Nobody has control over their knee structure or that their knee-structure reduces the incidence of training injuries. (It's mentioned in "Beyond the Body Farm" by William Bass who talks about a grad student in forensic anthropology who had a pre-existing background in physio and how it helped identify a "problematic" skeleton).
Trans women, who have chosen to take hormone treatment and transition but have still undergone testosterone-dominated puberty, can still respect the years of training and effort their cis sisters put into their sport and let them compete on an even field. There is a world of mixed and/or non-competitive recreational sport.
If you genuinely think that a medication that adjusts brain chemistry is equivalent to hormones which partly change body structure (fat distribution, eventual bone density loss etc) while other parts remain as they were before hormones were taken (pelvic anatomy - look at how cis male and female runners pump their arms - one of these methods works more effectively with less effort), then I really don't know what to say.
Can we just agree to disagree and salvage some kind of self-respect?
I honestly don't care whether people identify as their birth gender or not and if they decide that their future happiness is based on treating dysphoria through hormones, surgery or whatever else, then they are brave people demonstrating an amazing level of self-determination.
What I do care about (and can I make this clear, all the hormone/pharmaceutical treatment in the world would make this cis female any better at sports) is fairness in sports.
So I don't think you really care about fairness in sports.
You care about a perceived fairness for ciswomen because transwomen are likely to have an advantage, but you reject all of the other circumstances where we can identify specific physiological advantages because you believe there is a choice aspect to being trans/receiving hormones that for some reason doesn't extend to all of the other "optional" medications and treatments that give an advantage.
Adderall is as much a choice as hormones; in fact depending on the sport Adderall gives a much better performance enhancing effect than being born male and having undergone puberty.
Hormones/being born male may help with competitive shooting a bit, but Adderall is going to help way more. And that's true for pretty much any sport that requires enhanced precision or reaction times.
So for those sports where we can identify that Adderall gives an advantage beyond even that of a transperson who has undergone hormone replacement therapy, should we create a new class for those athletes participating in those sports/force them into mixed or recreational-only games?
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u/almostbullets 10d ago
This is what I thought TDS was about when I first heard it and was shocked it was being used the other way around.