Yes, intentionally misgendering a trans person is offensive and transphobic???
> The reason they have higher testosterone is because they are men.
This is needlessyly pedantic. My comment doesn't include the detail of _why_ they have increased testortorone because it is obvious.
Really, what I meant to express was something like "because their biological sex is male" but writing that is awkward and the most obvious/common interpretation of "because they are men" is transphobic.
This is needlessyly pedantic.
When writing my comment I don't want to have to insert several sentences explaining the nuance that I understand and respect the gender of trans women, but that this is one of those rare cases where we might need to treat them as their biological sex, because that is what determines things about their physical body, and their physical body is what matters right now. As such, I intentionally avoid vague phrases commonly used by transphobes today.
It may be a bit clumsy to refer to them as men, but that is actually the basis of why they are being excluded, because of their "man-ness". That's the underlying reason. I don't think it's transphobic to discuss that openly or to invent an explanation relying on "testosterone".
No we don't. If the criteria to compete is "you can have high testosterone or testicles but not both", that's not drawing a line between transgender women and cis women.
That's because the actual dividing line is a biological advantage. For cisgendered people this line is relatively cleanly drawn along gender, which leads to the names "men's sports" and "women's sports". However, there are groups of people for which this doesn't apply. Using it as an opportunity to call trans women men is needlessly insensitive in my opinion.
As for being insensitive to call someone a "man", i think you're conflating gender and biological sex. When someone is excluded from women's sport because they are not a woman, it's because of their biological background, not because of their avowed gender.
Sorry, I shouldn't have used a bad hypothetical about muscles and should have just explicitly said "intersex people". Regardless, here's a page that documents examples of what I mean, including in high-profile events like the Olympics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports
I would like to especially draw attention to this case:
> In 1986, Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño was dismissed and publicly shamed after failing a chromosomal test. She fought the ruling against her, arguing that she could not have a competitive advantage because her intersex variation resulted in her having no functional testosterone. Two years later, the IAAF gave Martínez-Patiño the green light to compete again.
Note how although she has traits unambiguously associated with the male biological sex, she was still allowed to compete as a women, and as a matter of fact the argument she made was that those traits did not give her an advantage.
The point I am trying to make is that the lines in sports are not as cleanly drawn between "men" and "women" as commonly assumed. There are people who are almost universally accepted as cis women banned from women's sports for reasons similar to arguments made about trans athletes. Humans just generally do not fit easily into binary categories when looked at as a whole.
EDIT: Actually, I think this page makes my point even cleaner, without the associated baggage of "well intersex people are partially men":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperandrogenism
> In 2011 the International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics), and IOC released statements restricting the eligibility of female athletes with high testosterone, whether through hyperandrogenism, or as a result of a disorder of sex development (DSD).
These people are unambiguously women, both by gender and biological sex, and are excluded from women's sports.
</EDIT>
> As for being insensitive to call someone a "man", i think you're conflating gender and biological sex.
That is basically exactly my point. I understand, at this point, that you are referring to biological sex. However, the word "man" can refer to either, and _usually_ refers to gender. Therefore, using the term with no clarification can easily accidentally mislead people into thinking you intend the opposite interpretation that you do. It's not a big deal, but it's worth avoiding in my opinion.
There is no shame in being of non-binary biology, so why do we only have competitive divisions for men and women when that doesn't properly accommodate the spectrum of people who actually exist?
While some provisions have previously been made for people who are not biologically female to compete in woman's sport, it is not particularly scalable. There will be continual difficulty deciding when it is appropriate to admit someone or not -- deciding biological sex in the vast majority of cases is much simpler. And if a person who isn't clearly biologically-female does dominate in a woman's division, the natural response will be to say that they have an unfair advantage and don't really belong; it's not obvious how to avoid that catch-22.
Re-read my above edit about hyperandrogenous women. These are biological women who simply have a medical condition that makes their body produce more hormones than normal, and major sports organizations like the IOC have banned them.
My point is that insisting we draw the lines across biological sex results in special cases like that, because the actual group of people we are trying to exclude is those with a certain biological advantage, and that group does not match up exactly with "biological men".
> And if a person who isn't clearly biologically-female does dominate in a woman's division, the natural response will be to say that they have an unfair advantage and don't really belong; it's not obvious how to avoid that catch-22.
Here's my answer: stop pretending they are "(biological) women's sports" and actually define the rules in relation to what you are trying to prevent (ex: set a max testosterone level). This instantly closes all loopholes because it directly addresses the problem rather than attempts to indirectly address it via the imprecise measurement of bio sex.
At least at the top level, this entirely solves the problem in my opinion. A bigger problem I don't have an immediate solution for is lower level of competition - it is obviously unrealistic to expect someone to get a testosterone test to play intermural basketball at their local high school.
Should women who inject testosterone be banned from sports?
There are arguments for and against.
So should a human born as a woman who happens to naturally have higher testosterone than is typical in other women, be excluded from women's sport? Of course not.
> "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men."
Really? That's offensive? The reason they have higher testosterone is because they are men. That doesn't mean we should stand in their way of living however they want, or demean them in any way. But we should not have to lie about their biological constitution as being the reason we deem it unfair. It's not their level of testosterone that makes it unfair, it's because they come by that level of testosterone by way of being a man... if a woman naturally has the same level of testosterone, it would be fair and she shouldn't be excluded.
Maybe the answer is just doing away with all gender based distinctions, have no sports leagues separated on the basis of gender at all. Of course, that has its own problems.