The ongoing panic over trans women in women's sports

[markpkessinger]

The next time you hear someone blathering on about trans women (i.e., people born biologically male) competing in women's sports, and how they are denying opportunities to female athletes, please share with them the article to which I've linked near the bottom of this post, published by the city of San Francisco's Office of Transgender Initiatives, which takes a look at the actual numbers. Among the takeaways:

• Out of over 500,000 NCAA athletes, there are fewer than 10 (ten!) trans athletes. That's less than 0.002% -- that is, two thousandths of one percent!
  
  
• Trans women competing in women's sports is NOT new. And in many of the cases of trans women who have competed in women's sports, having been born biologically male didn't ultimately lead them to victory. A couple of examples:
  
  - In 1977, Renee Richards competed in women’s tennis as a trans woman and reached the doubles final in the US Open; however, she did not win. Richards and her doubles partner Betty Ann Stuart lost the finals to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stove. Stuart, Navratilova, and Stove were all cis-gender women.
  
  --In 2021, Laurel Hubbard competed in weightlifting at the 2020 Summer Olympics. Despite widespread media attention, she won no medals.
  
  
• A 2024 study, funded by the IOC and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that trans women athletes may actually have several _disadvantages_ when competing against cisgender women athletes. Among its findings:
  
  -- Transgender women performed worse than cisgender women in tests measuring lower-body strength
  -- Transgender women performed worse than cisgender women in tests measuring lung function
  -- Transgender women had a higher percentage of fat mass, lower fat-free mass, and weaker handgrip strength compared to cisgender men
  -- Transgender women’s bone density was found to be equivalent to that of cisgender women, which is linked to muscle strength
  -- There were no meaningful differences found between the two groups’ hemoglobin profiles (a key factor in athletic performance)
  
  
• Contrary to the claims that trans women are keeping cisgender women from sports opportunities, in reality the current trans panic has created a climate that has excluded cisgender females on the basis of false accusations of being trans.

This entire issue has been nothing more than a phony culture war issue ginned up by the political right. It affects a vanishingly tiny percentage of women athletes!

https://www.sf.gov/trans-women-in-sports-facts-over-fear

More in the article. Well worth the read!

[BlueTsunami2018]

1. It's only there because it works politically.

They don’t actually care about any of this but if you can rile people up about it and get their votes with the scare tactic, you bet your ass they’re going to use it.

[MichMan]

2. Any data on K-12 sports?

[hunter]

4. It pisses me off that I have to pay for gendered school sports.

School should be a place where children learn that physical activity is healthy and fun.

It shouldn't be a meat grinder sorting kids out for the benefit of the gambling and sports industries, and I include here the hopelessly corrupt and pathetically nationalistic Olympics.

It shouldn't matter at all that a kid is transgender in school sports. If it does that sport should be banned or restructured.

I was a skinny squeaky highly reactive autistic spectrum klutz in grade school. Sports was a misery. I can't even imagine what kind of guts it takes for a transgender kid to play or what kind of horrors they are subjected to.

I really didn't know what sports was about until I started playing recreational co-ed softball in college. It was all friendly. Winning was fun but that's not why we were there.

[GenThePerservering]

3. There's also the reality that more than a few cis-gender

female athletes are significantly stronger than 'average' cis-gender women. Heredity plays into muscular strength as well as training, so one is looking at a spectrum, not some binary myth.

[Ilsa]

5. A political ad for Brad Raffensburger here in Georgia

highlighted "...men playing in women's sports." They actually said men routinely outperform the women at these events. They used a photograph of a very large masculine man in the women's team picture.