As children across the U.S. head back to classes and practices for fall sports, four more states are expecting their K-12 schools to keep transgender girls off their girls teams.
Kansas, North Dakota and Wyoming had new laws in place restricting transgender athletes before classes resumed, and a Missouri law takes effect at the end of this month, bringing the number of states with restrictions to 23.
Are there professional high school teams I don’t know about? Or are these laws specifically to keep kids from having fun playing sports with zero stakes?
Unfortunately, it’s not zero stakes with high school athletes looking to get scholarships and schools making money and funding from football. To say nothing of parental egos. If only it were as easy to sweep under the rug by claiming it isn’t worth caring about.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. So much of life is nearly divided up into make and female without thinking about what constitutes an advantage. Maybe basketball needs to be divided into two leagues for over and under 6’6". Perhaps hockey should be split by bone density. Or whatever, but my point is gender is a big dividing line for our society and we are attacking that line. It’s going to be messy.
I predict the eventual result is to no longer have gendered competitions at all. Which in some ways is good but would likely result in much lower participation by women in certain sports.
I support trans rights and IDGAF about sports, but I don’t see any clean way out of this mess. Something fundamental is going to have to change to answer this issue.
Maybe not split, but we should take this into account for scoring purposes. In powerlifting, your height (and thus weight) is the main determining factor in how much you can lift. We account for this by using weight classes, but that has the problem of either dividing up everyone so finely that many weight categories in local competitions only comprise of one athlete, or grouping too many people together that competition is no longer fair. There’s also the Wilk score (getting replaced last I heard due to some drama. Not sure what they use now), which calculates an overall score based on your exact weight and allows comparisons across weight classes.
So for other sports, we could have something similar to this Wilk score. In basketball for example, it could determine how much each basket is worth for each team based on the composition of the team. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it’s probably a lot better than dividing across gender lines, and would open up competition to people who enjoy the game but aren’t insanely tall.
Are there really zero stakes? Does the work a child does in K-12 not impact their opportunities post K-12?
Sex has been a long-standing issue in organized sport. The IOC has their own challenges with it, even.
Club sports, as opposed to organized sports, are more of the “for fun / zero stakes” type of sport IMO.
I wish the issue was more black and white, but holy cow is it a tough one when you dig your heels in.
It’s not zero stakes. Just put college scholarships aside for a second. Athletes put everything they have into their game. They make TONS of sacrifices to excel and win. Why don’t you ask the girls how they feel about competing against a trans girl? You and I have no skin in the game, so our opinions don’t matter much. Right? That’s the core message of DEI, that it’s our job to listen. So listen to the millions of girls who would be impacted by the decision.
If you think millions of girls in the US are impacted by trans people you’ve bought more propaganda you think. Much closer to dozens than millions but probably more accurately hundreds. I’m more inclined to protect the girls who would become suicidal because they’re being told they don’t belong in public but you do you.
I meant the non-trans girls who compete in sports. I think there are only about 1000 trans girls, but that number could be wrong. Both numbers are guesses. The point was that there are a lot of girls that could be impacted and they should have an active voice in the decision.
I know what you meant and there aren’t millions of cis girls impacted by trans girls. That number is a massive inflation to make the impact seem more worrisome. It’s called fear mongering.
That wasn’t my intent and I think you realize that but are still choosing to ignore the actual point, so you win.
I honestly don’t think there are that many trans people. Most of these states likely don’t even have a single trans highschool student in the entire state. Trans people are a minority of a minority. I feel like it should almost be a case by case basis.
I meant the non-trans girls who compete in sports. I think there are only about 1000 trans girls, but that number could be wrong. Both numbers are guesses. The point was that there are a lot of girls that could be impacted and they should have an active voice in the decision.
The latter.
these are laws specifically to oppress trans people and put a wedge between them and “the rest” by fearmongering and othering, from as early as they can possibly manage.
Even with big stakes, trans women in sports is not a “problem” it never has been, if it was they would be winning a lot more medals, I’ll tell you that. But they aren’t, because they don’t have any advantages over cis women just by virtue of being trans (if anything, they have significant disadvantages like being the target of so much hate).
This is 100% motivated by bigotry under the guise of “think of the children!!1”
Is it just winning that you call a problem? It seems unfair to an Olympic hopeful woman to be held out of the Olympics because a man who transitioned is better than you.
Here is the rub. It’s not the fact one’s sex is male that is the advantage. It’s male puberty. If a person never goes through a male puberty regardless of their chromasomal makeup you don’t get any of the advantages in sport that cis men have.
Trans people and the medical systems which have studied trans adults and kids and reached a level of confident diagnosis are fighting so which puberty one ultimately experiences is an option and not something you are forced to experience because people around you do nothing.
Most athletes are in their early twenties. If we managed to actually let medical and social service professionals facilitate trans kids in a handful of years you basically solve this problem.
Can’t believe you’re being downvoted a lot. Any trans woman person on medication for long enough will just simply not have the muscle mass they had before. It’s basic science.
I mean if people were really that concerned, which I imagine they aren’t and just want to discriminate, you could just ensure they took medication for several years above a certain amount using blood tests. Not sure if they do currently, but they should probably do that for testosterone too.
Then it gets even weirder because sports aren’t defined by gender anymore but by hormones, but maybe that actually makes more sense? As that affects what muscle you can build?
That doesn’t surprise me (though I can’t actually see any downvotes on kbin which I should, not that I don’t believe you, it’s just odd), people get so defensive of “muh gender” as if other people being trans is somehow an attack on their cis identity (an attack they’re making up of course, it’s projection). Reality has never mattered to them, they just want to punch down at someone to feel big.
If only they’d focus that energy on the people selling them these lies to distract them from the real threats society faces…
But that’s why divide and conquer is so effective - keep people low and powerless, then give them someone even more powerless to take their aggression out on, distraction achieved!