World swimming bans transgender athletes from women's events
By: NBC News
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Link copied June 19, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC By The Associated Press
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — World swimming's governing body effectively banned transgender athletes from competing in women's events on Sunday.
FINA members at the organization's extraordinary general congress voted 71.5% in favor of its new "gender inclusion policy" that only permits swimmers who transitioned before age 12 to compete in women's events.
"This is not saying that people are encouraged to transition by the age of 12. It's what the scientists are saying, that if you transition after the start of puberty, you have an advantage, which is unfair," James Pearce, who is the spokesperson for FINA president Husain Al-Musallam, told The Associated Press.
"They're not saying everyone should transition by age 11, that's ridiculous. You can't transition by that age in most countries and hopefully you wouldn't be encouraged to. Basically, what they're saying is that it is not feasible for people who have transitioned to compete without having an advantage."
FINA's new 24-page policy also includes proposals for a new "open competition" category. FINA said it was setting up "a new working group that will spend the next six months looking at the most effective ways to set up this new category."
Pearce told the AP that the open competition would most likely mean more events but those details still need to be worked out.
"No one quite knows how this is going to work. And we need to include a lot of different people, including transgender athletes, to work out how it would work. So there are no details of how that would work. The open category is something that will start being discussed tomorrow," Pearce said.
The members voted after hearing presentations from three specialist groups — an athlete group, a science and medicine group and a legal and human rights group — that had been working together to form the policy following recommendations given by the International Olympic Committee last November.
The IOC urged shifting the focus from individual testosterone levels and calling for evidence to prove when a performance advantage existed.
FINA said it recognizes "that some individuals and groups may be uncomfortable with the use of medical and scientific terminology related to sex and sex-linked traits (but) some use of sensitive terminology is needed to be precise about the sex characteristics that justify separate competition categories."
In March, Lia Thomas made history in the United States as the first transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship. She won the 500-yard freestyle.
Other sports have also been examining their rules.
On Thursday, cycling's governing body updated its eligibility rules for transgender athletes with stricter limits that will force riders to wait longer before they can compete.
The International Cycling Union (UCI) increased the transition period on low testosterone to two years, and lowered the maximum accepted level of testosterone.
The previous transition period was 12 months but the UCI said recent scientific studies show that "the awaited adaptations in muscle mass and muscle strength/power" among athletes who have made a transition from male to female takes at least two years.
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"It's what the scientists are saying, that if you transition after the start of puberty, you have an advantage, which is unfair," James Pearce, who is the spokesperson for FINA president Husain Al-Musallam, told The Associated Press."
Perhaps common sense and fairness will prevail going forward.
On this issue you and I are in agreement.
I think biological males have a natural advantage over biological females with most athletic competitions and I agree with this ban.
I also think no one under 18 should be encouraged or allowed to go through any medical/physical gender transitioning.
My personal opinion on this issue is that if you are born male and then decide to go ahead and become trans or whatever, you play with the boys, period. If you are born female and become trans or whatever then you have the choice, still compete with females or try your luck playing with the guys.
The simple fact of the matter is that generally males are naturally bigger, stronger, and faster which when you are doing something that relies on physical prowess as a big part of determining success, generally males have a natural advantage over females. Allowing people who transitioned from male to female after they have already gone through puberty and allowing them to participate in female sports is bullshit and puts the rest of the athletes at an unfair disadvantage. South Park actually had a pretty good episode addressing this issue.
And furthermore, what goddamn parent is going to allow their children to transition before they are 12? That is just shitty parenting through and through. Every time I hear people talk about teens or preteens being transgender I just roll my eyes. They are teenagers or younger, they don't know what they are. They change their mind about shit at the drop of a hat and are extremely impressionable. We need to keep that in mind when discussing this, we don't allow kids/teenagers to do a lot of things because we understand they are not responsible enough or ready to do them properly. I absolutely do not think kids/teenagers are responsible or ready to to really understand their gender identity and as such we should basically ignore anything they have to say about it.
They still have a lot of growing and developing to do and they are going through a lot of mental and physical changes. I think it is a terrible idea to allow people who haven't gone through or are in the middle of going through puberty to get reassignment surgery or start taking hormone blockers etc. That cannot be healthy and probably has some serious negative effects for the person doing it. Children need to be allowed to develop naturally and let biology take its course. If they get into their 20s and still feel like they are really a man or woman or whatever, then okay, fine, you do you. But that is after they have already become who they are biologically meant to be. Keep all this transgender shit away from kids and teenagers.
Should this person compete with women sports?
Or this one?
These?
Should this person compete with men?
Or...
Or...
Not sure. I think more examples would help me decide.
Haha
She is gorgeous. Full discloser, she transition at around 16.
But neither should Lia Thomas have been competing against cis-women.
I never trusted that person. It all seemed set up and fake. There is no way they were on hormones.
The thing is, it illustrated the issue with trans-women competing in women's sports. Lia Thomas has an obvious physical advantage over her competitors.
And she did take HRT, and was tested to make sure her testosterone was low enough to compete. But she went through puberty as a male, and it shows.
I still don't believe that person was trans. Maybe so...I would say that people should not be able to compete if they decided to change yesterday. The only thing it looks to me this Lia did was put on a woman's swimsuit.
There is no comparison to people that have actually transitioned.
Her hormone levels were tested. She qualified under the rules at the time.
And was the impetus for a change in the rules.
It still just seems all too convenient for me.
And that right there highlights the biological difference between men and women. Again, if you were born male you play with the boys, I don't give a fuck how much you feel like a woman, your genes say otherwise and your body will develop as such.
That's why I posted it.
Its important. I do not want my girls to play against the boys at ages 10-12-15. I do not want then to feel like they are bench warmers, or not good enough to see field time. It is a confidence issue. I want my girls to be confident, I want them to know they are the shit and walk into a room knowing it.
But, much as I love them I will be the first to say that I would have destroyed them on the soccer field, baseball field, football field, or court at that age. Once you get to about 8 or 9 years old things change, and the boys leagues are a lot tougher.
She can compete with me at any time.
In what sport?
Not all sports are equal even between just men and just women.
Some men are 5'5 and small while others are 6'5 and close to 300 lbs.
Should all sports have height and weight requirements as to who can compete against who?
Someone that is all legs is going to have a running advantage over someone 4'9. Should all runners have to compete with people the same height?
What woman would want to compete with Brianne of Tarth....
Many sports do (e.g. boxing) because it simply makes sense. But of course not all sports should have such a requirement; sharp-shooting, for example, strikes me as something that can be done by any gender, any weight, etc.
I just think it is all ridiculous. Like I said earlier, a runner that is 6'5 is going to have a natural advantage over a shorter one.
Like wise with swimming. Of course someone that is 6' is going to have an advantage over 4'8.
Look man, marketing is a big part of all of this. No one is going to watch a dwarf basketball league.
Men and women have been competing against each other in equestrian for decades.
And height/weight classes aren't appropriate for all sports, because within sports, athletes with different body types don't always have the same role. If you're playing basketball and you're the shortest on the team, you're probably a guard and not a center or forward. Being shorter (to a degree) doesn't mean you can't compete; it influences your role in competition. If you're a short volleyball player, you're probably a back row player rather than a blocker.
And in some sports, women will have an advantage. A trans-woman is still unlikely to compete well on the balance beam in gymnastics, because she will likely retain a higher center of gravity than a cis-woman.
I think each sport will have to come up with its own rules, based on good science to determine whether trans athletes have a biological advantage.
People take sports way to seriously.
Basketball most immediately comes to mind for me. Overall, yeah height and weight are a plus in basketball. But... being shorter and lighter also makes you faster, you can get that extra step that gets you the open look. Shaq was massive and great in his own way, Steph is about a foot shorter and 150lbs lighter but is without a doubt the better player. It is a sport where you can hone certain skills that mitigate the physical differences.
Other sports though, you cannot mitigate those differences much and thus the differences in sexes becomes much more pronounced.
Maybe. I think society in general does, but I think it's up to each individual to decide how seriously they take their hobby. My dad takes golf seriously, and that keeps him active and healthy in his mid-70s, so good for him.
They didn't want women in golf for the longest time.
One of our high school girl's team's best players was 4'11". Of course there were taller girls, but she was a point guard, and nobody would have considered playing her at any other position. Good ballhandler, fast, agile, thought fast on her feet. She wasn't going to block many shots or make many rebounds, but she got the ball to the players in position to score, and was a pretty good shooter, herself.
She and I played Little League baseball together in middle school - the only 2 girls in the league, before softball was organized in our town. And she made All-Stars then. But although we both started for our team when we were 12, the boys passed us up in the next few years. She stopped growing at 4'11", I stopped at 5'0". The boys were just way bigger and stronger than we were by the end of middle school, so we were lucky that a softball league formed.
She also played football in middle school, but she'd have been clobbered on the field if she'd played in high school.
No, but women have been in golf for ages. Mary, Queen of Scots was an avid golfer.
And that is what i am getting at. Again, I am not trying to knock the female sex at all, biologically you all are infinitely more important than we are, but it is just a fact that males are, generally, physically superior when it comes to strength, speed, and size. And it had to be that way from an evolutionary perspective, our job was to basically go out and die so that the females and children could survive and continue the species.
Once you hit puberty the differences really start to show, and there needs to be a divide.
450 years after the abdication of Mary Queen of Scots, a new book by St Andrews-based author Roger McStravick controversially suggests her famous links with golf may have been 'fake news'.
Honestly, I think it is a replacement for war. Humans love to compete, we NEED to compete. The ultimate competition was basic survival, when we got too good at that and it became boring we went to war. Now that war among humans can potentially be a planet killer, we have turned more and more to sports.
It lets us compete, even vicariously, and scratch that itch, but with few negative consequences. That is why we love sports IMO.
I looked that up, but can't read the article. I did read that one of the reasons she was suspected of being involved in the murder of her husband was that she was seen golfing not long after he was killed, rather than mourning as she should have been. He was an asshole, though, so he didn't deserve to be mourned.
Maybe that was the fake news?
Yeah, but her husband actually did treat her like crap. Got mad at her because she wouldn't name him king (which wasn't actually within her power), accused her of being unfaithful (he ran around on her, though), and murdered her friend and private secretary right in front of her while she was pregnant. Being blown up was a better end than he deserved.
Dude, come on, you are better than reductio ad absurdum. Look, it is just a simple fact that biologically, generally males are bigger, stronger, and faster that females. Not a knock on women by any means, it is just a fact. And as I said above, in sports those things make a HUGE difference between success and failure. Honestly I am already starting to see the difference at my daughter's 6 year old soccer games. They still have boys and girls playing together, but you can already start to see for the most part the boys being a little faster, a little more aggressive, and kicking a little bit harder.
At a certain point we have to have some basic rules in place to make the playing field more or less even. A division between the sexes is honestly the most basic step in fairness you can take in sports. Some sports, mainly the combat sports, do have weight divisions specifically because those physical differences are more pronounced and can adversely effect the health of the athletes. But other sports where less is on the line you don't really need any further limitations on who can play. In most other sports you can make up physical limitations in other ways, but overall when it comes to sports males have a distinct and undeniable advantage over females that makes combining the two unfair.
The first pic I showed earlier, should he compete with women or men? Or should he not be able to compete at all...
There are varying degrees as well. Not everything fits into a box.
What I am getting the gist of is it seems most people are talking about high school and college sports.
Play with the boys.
Agreed. Hence why I specifically used the qualifier "generally", there are no absolutes.
Yeah, in professional sports it'll never happen. I mean, Lebron James in the WBNA? At the professional lever we are looking at the peak of human physical conditioning, and the differences between the sexes are too obvious to deny. And those are also people at the top of their craft, high school and college sports are ore or less supposed to be for everyone, kinda, but its bullshit when one player or a team has an obvious advantage over everyone else because of their sex.
I think for the most part but this might spill into pro as well. Womens basketball comes to mind as a possible issue. Any sport where a person would have an unfair advantage actually.
Most of the people I showed pictures of were are at a peak in their transitions. To me that is when they should be able to join professional sports.
As far as young people, most are not like the one college swimmer. I think that one is pushing back trans rights.
I also have the opinion that one cannot decide one day and play a sport the next. It doesn't work like that.
I don't think it'll be an issue with pro sports. Frankly, females cannot play in the NBA, NFL(well, maybe at kicker), or NHL. Physically they just cannot compete. At that level we are talking about the cream of the crop when it comes to human physical fitness, and as great as some WNBA players are, Lebron will run right over them.
I don't watch basketball. My Grandmother was the fan. I gotta say though, looking at him, I think he could run over most people. Male or female.
He is an absolute beast. Frankly a physical marvel. Motherfucker is like 6'8", 6'9" and like 270lbs but he looks like he is only 215, maybe 220. You will never find a female equivalent, and the NBA/NFL is basically all Lebron James' with only small differences. Women just physically cannot compete at the pro level, but you take a dude like that and put him in the WNBA? Do we really wanna watch him score 150 points a night?