The Socialists, led by Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, included plans to limit participation in female sports to “people with a female biological sex” in a policy document decided on at the party’s congress over the weekend.
The decision to also remove Q+ from a plan to protect sexual and gender minorities from the impact of social inequality sparked fury from LGBTQ+ activists and politicians from Left-wing partners of Mr Sánchez’s minority government.
The passing of a transgender rights reform in 2023, allowing anyone to change their official sex simply by stating their wish to switch, caused a bitter rift within Spain’s ruling Left-wing forces.
Carmen Calvo, the former Socialist deputy prime minister, said at the time the reform would “destroy the powerful battery of equality legislation in our country”.
Pathetic display from so-called socialists
Ignorant passerby here, and genuinely want to change my mind, but how exactly is it fair for a trans person to compete against a biologically female person?
If we go back to the original reason for this sexist devide, it stems from a fundamental biological difference between two genders. How we identify ourselves has little impact on these biological differences no?
Furthermore I was listening to a podcast recently and they were talking about how the greatest female tennisplayer to have ever lived is would be ranked 2 or 3 thousand in a unisex world ranking. Seeing a worldrecord being set by someone working within the confines of the female body is impressive, seeing that same record broken by someone without the same constraints just devalues the other persons achievement.
Equating transgender women with cisgender men is biologically inaccurate.
So a few things;
A) on the professional level sports ain’t about fair. It’s about who has the biggest natural advantage and enough money and time to develop the skills to make use of that advantage. Take the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps who has genetic mutations, plural, that mean we’re likely to never see anyone ever break his records.
Now that’s just the professional level, and a less than professional level sports are about fun, not fairness; and in a team game it’s about teaching social skills over fun.
B) post bottom-surgery on hrt trans people, either main direction, have no biological advantages. In mixed leagues there are trans women that are far below cis women, and there are trans men far below cis men. This scare mongering that trans women specifically would have this massive advantage simply isn’t represented in the real world where trans people have competed with cis people directly.
C) You want the secret to athleticism? It’s not sex, it’s t level. Testosterone is literally the magic key for sports. Trans women that no longer produce as large amounts of t (see. Above) consistently under perform cis women with high natural t levels. To preempt this as well, bone density isn’t fixed. The Joe Rogan scare mongering on women’s boxing is that trans women supposedly have higher bone density than cis women. This can be true, sometimes, but most often it’s not. Estrogen attacks bone density, and does so ridiculously quickly when you have elevated levels from any source. It takes just 3 years on average for your bone density to drastically change when your hormones balance changes.
D) this type of discrimination leads to false accusations, harassment and death threats more than preserves any integrity in sports. The Olympic boxer Imane khelif is a cis woman. XX. This trans hysteria has tainted her win, because she doesn’t look woman enough, whatever that means. Many cis women that don’t fit the local stereotype of “woman” are harassed because of people freaking themselves out about the trans Boogeyman. This type of harm outweighs any and all harm to sports, period.
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Biological and genetic differences are always contributing to why some athletes are better than others. Also: the science on trans athlete performance is mixed and unclear.
It’s a complicated issue, but I’d sooner reevaluate our attitudes and culture around competitive sports before resorting to creating a lower class of person. Maybe we take these things too seriously.
To expand on this, maybe we just have tiers of competition regardless of gender (like leagues) and people play where the competition is kept even. It might stratify so that there is more mixing of genders in the mid range and trans athletes may also fall into that range (but again: science isn’t clear).
Two points:
Top-level sports isn’t fair. Most famous athletes are outliers in terms of height, weight, muscle mass, etc. Some, like Phelps, have genetic or developmental differences that give them a pretty significant advantage.
I must admit that the legal definition of ‘transwoman’ varies from country to country. In India, where I live, a person can legally change their gender without any medical intervention, and such people might have a physical advantage over cis-women. But in the vast majority of countries, they have to take hormones and / or do surgical procedures that reshape their body to be more ‘feminine’. Once they do that, they have no significant advantage over cis-women.
The broader issue is discrimination, and if one class of people should be allowed to be singled out and discriminated against.
Isn’t that the whole point of women’s sports though? To exclude a class of people (men) so that others (women) have a chance to compete on their own?
But maybe that idea itself is flawed. Most high performing long distance runners come from Ethiopia and Kenya, do we create a whites only league?
There are physiological differences contributing to these things too. Why does gender have to be special?
Conversely: why do we segregate men and women for things like chess? There’s no difference in ability there.
Maybe those ideas are what’s outdated and wrong, and we don’t need to erase a certain kind of person. Ignoring that trans people exist isn’t as helpful as finding ways to include them