this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2022
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Feminism
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What's dumb about this, exactly? There are significant differences in strength, speed, flexibility, etc. between biological males and females. That may be an inconvenient truth for those who want to change their social gender (which I 100% support, btw) but it's nonetheless true.
And if you're going to have separate leagues to promote fair physical competition (which may or may not be a good idea, I'm agnostic on the matter) then investigating a person's biological sex is going to be part of the process sometimes. Based solely on the article, it sounds to me like the administrators here did it in a very sensitive and privacy-preserving way.
So, sincere question - what do you think is the problem here?
They don't heckin' care about that. Ask black women that have been harassed in competitive settings because they don't adhere to the eurocentric notion of womanhood.
For children who are transitioning, they are not allowed to go on hormones until they are an adult. They would be on puberty blocking drugs, or would have gone through puberty as the sex they were assigned at birth. In the case of the former, they would not receive any benefits from their body operating with an increased amount of testosterone. For the latter, well, I highly doubt someone would be able to pass themselves off as the other sex having gone through puberty.
For adults, in order to have enough of an appearance of the other sex, you would have to be on hormones for quite some time. There's a wealth of literature out there to show that it does not take very long being on hormones for these differences to completely disappear, even when the child went through puberty of their sex assigned at birth. There are testing protocols which exist where you can confirm that they have estrogen levels high enough to confirm they have been transitioning for an adequate period of time. All of this is entirely irrelevant, however, when it comes to children.
To be clear, my statement was directed at people who do not understand how transitioning works and are not experts in the field. This has been addressed adequately and understood at a professional level for quite some time. The problem is the layperson who has no understanding and does not wish to educate themselves attempting to debate something of which they are ignorant.
I don't think any of that answered my question.
not sure what you were asking then
You said that "this" is "dumb shit," and I asked what the problem was here. Your reply didn't address this specific incident at all.
"This" was referring to what happened in the article. A bunch of parents worried that a seemingly cis girl was secretly trans and had a competitive advantage. As I stated above, the biological differences in sex hormones that allow people who have a primary sex hormone of testosterone to pack on more muscle to their frame, grow larger lungs, etc. are pretty noticeable when it comes to an age where this matters. However, they don't reveal what sport this was, and in most sports the sex divide in performance has been almost completely erased when you compare by weight class instead, making this investigation even more questionable in the first place.