It really depends. Go listen and to his interview with Adam Connover where he uses him as a foil to spout off a lot of nonsense about trans people and their agency.

What is his “nonsense”? It’s reasonable to not allow people to cross their biological gender league. He’s seen how biological males have absolutely destroyed in biological female leagues.

He kept repeating that trans women were “confused gay men” on the basis of one very shoddy Swedish research paper, as if that was somehow authoritative.

That was in regards to using puberty blockers on children, I believe. The study stated that many children that believe themselves to be trans ended up simply being gay, and that this lack of certainty (as well as the fact that we don't think of children as rational consenting entities for most things) makes the issue of using puberty blockers controversial.

I could be wrong, but I am almost positive that this is what was being argued.

That matches with what I remember, and I don't understand why that's a controversial thought here. Changing gender is a big deal, it can wait a few years so you're sure.

A big issue is that the longer you wait, there longer your body has permanent effects from puberty. Someone who is ultimately right in their convictions about themselves then has to wait longer through something irreversible.

I think the purported advantage of puberty blockers is that they help “waiting a few years so you’re sure” while taking the path that’s the lesser of evils.

If you're trans and going through puberty, "a few years" can literally ruin your life.

But how do any of us know we are making the right call here? This is one of those wickedly complex problems where there is no right answer. It just sucks for everybody involved, nearly every decision you make can have a horrific outcome and the effects are permanent.

You can't be that surprised that in a situation like this, most people would tend to be very conservative (not republican conservative, but careful, do no harm, don't rock the boat kind of conservative).

No, puberty blockers don't cause any permanent body changes: that's the whole point. They delay the decision. You can still go through a male or female puberty once you're older.

Most people are "conservative" on this issue because they have no idea what they're talking about, just like every almost every other issue related to trans people.

I don't want to wade in, but puberty blockers do have long-term effects, so they're not just a cureall.

Or you can transition once you've reached an age where your body is not in a constant state of flux. When I was young, I intensely wanted to be female. As I got older, it turned out to be a result of curiosity. If I was young today, I'd be far more likely to be going through some hormone regimen because of a childish curiosity.

That "constant state of flux" is what makes your body into a prison that you have to inhabit the rest of your life. Every single trans person I've met desperately wishes that they had transitioned earlier. I transitioned relatively early, and I'm still intensely jealous of trans teens who are getting proper treatment today. My older friends who've transitioned in their late 20s-40s regard their lives as being hopelessly ruined. And some of them repressed their trans feeling for a while, only to have them come back later with vengeance. But you never hear about those people in these arguments.

My mom said something similar about "curiosity" to try and convince me that I couldn't be trans. As it turns out, what she meant was "when I was your age, I wanted to cut my hair short." Likewise, pretty much every story I've heard like this turns out to be either obvious lies meant to discredit trans people, or something that would have been easily sorted out by a psychologist. Eg. I've heard of gay people wishing they were another gender so that they wouldn't get bullied for their orientation. No decent professional would mistake that for genuine dysphoria.

But even supposing that your psychologist was incompetent, you still would have socially transitioned in some capacity before you ever started hormones. This almost certainly would have let you know if transitioning was really right for you. And even if it didn't, and you went all the way to starting estrogen, you could always stop if you didn't like what it was doing. Estrogen works very slowly. I've been on it for three years, and I know cis men whose boobs are bigger than mine. If I changed my mind, I could easily start living as a man again.

It's absolutely unfair to impose life-ruining misery on trans teens because of the off-chance that it might do a fraction of the same harm to a cis person.

That’s not what it was. The guy was venting about how irritating he finds trans people.

Uh thats exactly what it was about... For 20 minutes Mr flamboyant Adam tried to spout bullshit about how it should be perfectly acceptable to give children, who don't even know themselves or bodies, incredibly powerful psychoactive drugs that drastically alter their behavior

Except he's actually had trans people like Eddie Izzard on and they got on just fine, so this is obviously wrong. He takes issue with trans females competing in female sports.

And it's not like he's alone in this- the authoritative bodies charged with protecting the sports are starting to think the same thing.

That's also a valid view, even if it's insensitive. You can be annoyed by whomever you like.

Right. My comment was just that I found it to be low quality content. It was like something you might overhear from a table of not-so-bright senior citizens at a Denny’s.

And you're welcome to that opinion, just as he's welcome to his. That's kind of the point here. Opinions are valid, even if they're stupid.

I was responding to a comment that introduced the transphobic comments, simply to attest that I had heard the episode and that the skinny guy who is on that episode with Rogan was venting/ranting in a way that I found very dumb.

Rogan himself was holding back from joining in, and I think some of the commenters here mistook my comment as critiquing Rogan for being transphobic, which I did not observe. It was the skinny guy (whose name I don't know).

(I don't want to wade in here really, but I have to take exception to your statement: Stupid opinions are not valid.)

Stupidity and validity being decided by whom? If you believe someone's opinion is stupid, you may not consider it valid, but that changes nothing about the actual opinion. Remember, Newton had a series of "stupid, invalid" opinions about physics and astronomy, and now look at us.

(rpmisms and hnbroseph both make excellent points! I want to add that "Stupid opinions are not valid." is, of course, just my own stupid opinion, eh? Combine that statement with "Opinions are valid, even if they're stupid." and you have a logical self-referential paradox, eh?)

perhaps it's a category error to apply the notion of 'validity' to opinions.

The purpose of puberty blockers is to delay body changes until the teenager (not "child") is ready to decide. They don't cause permanent changes like actual hormone therapy, and trans teenagers can always go through a "natural" puberty later if they change their mind. On the contrary, denying a trans teenager puberty blockers causes permanent changes to the body that are likely to cause massive distress and take many years of therapy, training, and surgeries to correct. Many trans people regard having gone through puberty as literally having ruined their lives.

His views on the topic lack nuance. First, you need to determine that the presence of male-to-female trans athletes is indeed a significant problem in a given discipline. Then, we as a society have to decide whether or not we want to do something about it, which is not necessarily a given. For example, are you aware that the top 30 male marathon runners are all from Kenya and Ethiopia? It sucks for Europeans that we apparently just can't compete at the highest level, but most people would probably argue that this is just the way it is. Finally, the actions that should be taken will depend on the sport in question.

Case in point: Rogan talks a lot about fighting. But in that particular case, we already discriminate by weight. So it might be possible to make things more fair by giving a weight penalty to male-to-female fighters that want to compete in the women's league.

The whole point of female leagues is, that females don't become overpowered by males. So the decision you are talking about is already made. If one starts to introduce biologically males back into the female league one could arguably instead remove the female league and introduce a unisex one. This would be more coherent with your reasoning in my eyes.

The purpose of female leagues is to allow women can participate in sports. If all sports were unisex, then pretty much all competitive athletes at every level would be men, denying women access to an important part of culture and social life. This is pretty exactly what you advocate doing to trans women, who could not possibly compete against cis men.

Trans women are rare, and transition dramatically reduces muscle mass and other attributes related to performance. In fact, trans women typically have a lower testosterone level than cis women due to hormone treatments. There's absolutely no reason to believe that allowing trans women to participate in sports would prevent cis women from being able to compete. Trans women have been allowed to participate in women's Olympics events since the early 2000s, and not a single one has won a gold medal. You use the term "biological males" to refer to two completely different sets of people, which is dishonest and despicable.

The decision about female leagues was made at a time when transsexuality wasn't socially acceptable and hence did not factor into it.

My point is, there are options to explore besides an outright ban. For example, a trans woman that goes through HRT will lose some of the advantages of her birth sex. However, she might still enjoy the advantage of the male frame, hence my suggestion of an additional penalty.

A unisex league as you suggested could also be a posibility, and one could think about introducing not only weight classes, but testosterone classes as well.

But again, the female leagues were established because of the physical differences between men and women. Yes, some trans people who undergo some medical interventions have some of their physical sporting attributes brought closer into line with the opposite sex, but it’s not all attributes and it’s not all athletes. It’s exceedingly complicated.

The reality is that female leagues was a cultural hack that worked well enough in the 20th century. But in a world where we recognise that neither sex not gender fit neatly into binary categories, it is impractical to assume that we can fit people into two sporting categories.

testosterone is highly variable even at the individual level to the point that I think this particular metric would difficult to implement.

Before the higher level of testing, there were plenty of rumors that fighters would overtrain (or cycle on steroids) to the point of plummeting their testosterone levels to be given a TRT exemption. By the time their baseline levels recovered by fight day, they could still be on TRT

I feel like you're picking one thing you feel strongly about and disagree with to discredit the entire show. I don't agree with a lot of what Rogan believes, but I feel this is an unfair characterization of him and his show.

Connover was doing a lot of hemming and hawing as well I recall

Yes because he’s not an expert on trans issues, he’s a comedian, which Rogan knows, but chose to use him as a foil for his equally misinformed stances.

Connover, to his credit, went so far as to provide additional context for his defense of trans people’s agency post-interview:

https://www.adamconover.net/adding-evidence-to-the-discussio...

Multiple commenters have stated his stances are misinformed. Are his stances misinformed or is he simply poor at arguing for one of the many stances people can take on trans issues (issues which, if everyone is honest, are pretty complex)?

The stance that it is wrong that there should only be male and female sports leagues AND that trans people should automatically be included in whichever their identification maps to, is a completely defensible and not misinformed stance. It may be wrong, but so might the opposite stance held by trans activists (which is also likely completely defensible and not misinformed).

I listened to that episode by accident (autoplay). He was just venting ignorantly about his prejudices toward trans people. It was honestly quite an ugly spectacle. It was the kind of commentary one might overhear from a table of not-so-bright senior citizens at a Denny’s.

There has to be conversation. There are some who just want to shut it down with 'bigot-transphobe' type spit-words. Gotta let it grow. Transcend the offended feeling.

Not sure why you characterize my comments that way. I was just mentioning how I reacted to it, not calling for it to be shut down.

I guarantee you have had a take of similar nature (not necessarily against the same identity) at some point in your life.

We all have some dumb opinions. I appreciate it when people help me develop awareness of my own.

Correct, that episode was so bigoted and off putting that I decided not to listen to any more.

Hearing someone vent/whine about the orientation and life choices of others is just not my cup of tea.

It was the kind of commentary one might overhear from a table of not-so-bright senior citizens at a Denny’s.