I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable.
There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans. There's a lot of gray area here depending on if and when they undertook HRT, sure, but labelling this as "intolerance" is not right in my book.
This division is arbitrary. The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete. Yet white males dominate male swimming whereas black males dominate male sprinting. There have been physiological explanations. Knowing that, why don't we split the competitions accordingly? It's easy to see that the whole premise of fair competition is very naïve: where do you stop? What are the criteria for determining if competitors are "identical enough"? Choosing these criteria will be a political choice. Transgender people in sports are disturbing the status quo, but they just made apparent the inherent instability of the thing.
Now i don't know about you, but when i personally do sports, for one i'm not good enough that physiological characteristics make the greatest differences: this problem mostly appears when we reach the limits, by "optimal training". Second, i'm usually playing for entertainment which means that i will mostly play to be part of a good game, show off and see nice skill displays, and share this experience with other people, some of them with different levels of training and physical capabilities.
I just wanted to say that this thread is imho unrelated to the issue of transgender and more to the fact that competitive sports is broken and the political struggle between professional and amateur sport.
what the hell, how is Men's and Women's sports categorization arbitrary? its clearly defined who plays in which category.
No, actually the reason is that it makes both watching and competing more interesting. A competition where women never got anywhere near first place would mean women would simply stop showing up (or vice versa). A boxing championship with no weight classes would mean no lightweight boxers would sign up.
On the other hand, with enough subcategories you can get to the point where some competitors win by default, or where you have championships of one or two matches.
So no, it's not arbitrary to separate competitors by some physical characteristics and not others. There are practical reasons to do so that are unrelated to the whims of organizers.
If we remove the gender division from, say, javelin throwing (random choice; current difference in world records there is currently 30% for reference). Now there won't be any (cis) women competing at the top level any more.
So somebody goes ahead and creates a women's division (or whatever you want to call it). Should we somehow forbid this? Or would it be required that they accept any transgender individual in any state of transition? And either case is just "back to square 1" - no cis women have a chance. I don't see how "let's remove the 'women' category in this competition in the interest of fairness to trans people" is improving things for anyone...
This is an interesting one.
I definitely find being told I have to accept that "trans women are women" off putting and like the Aesop's fable with the wind and the sun, it feels like the wind blowing and makes me want to hold on to that jacket tighter.
The way I see it, trans women are trans women, and trans men are trans men. They occupy a different category in my mind than either.
I'm trying to imagine how I would feel going to either bathroom as a trans person, and the only answer I can come up with is "riddled with anxiety".
It's a dangerous path you appear to be on - asking women, almost exclusively, to share their traditionally safe spaces with people they consider to be men.
Attacking people on these two points will be an attack that is almost exclusively on women, and society doesn't tolerate that.
Men, on the whole, aren't going to get bent out of shape if women come into their bathrooms or want to compete with them on the field. It's women who want the separate bathrooms, and women who want to compete athletically with other women.
Given the prevalence of sexual violence in our society and the difficulty of getting an appropriate response, I find this statement incredibly ironic. (Out of context, I admit, but it's hard to reconcile the two views.)
#MeToo is one source of evidence that society absolutely tolerates attacks on women.
[1] No citations - live your own life, do your own reading, make your own conclusions.
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> #MeToo is one source of evidence that society absolutely tolerates attacks on women.
Isn't that evidence that society doesn't tolerate these things? Once it was out in the open, society rushed to condemn it. Everywhere. Everyone.
It could only happen when society did not know about it. When it was kept secret.
Society absolutely does not tolerate attacks on women, as the #MeToo movement showed.
The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated.
The classic examples of these are bathrooms and athletics. Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity. It sure feels like intolerance when this choice is denied from trans people.
I don’t know your own personal views, but it’s certainly not the case that “the vast majority of people” are aligned with trans people on the above issues.