mormont

Well, not in height. And whether she in practice had any other advantage would depend on many other factors, some of which (but not all of which) are influenced by sex at birth. But the point is that regardless of which of them have the advantage, it's always the trans woman and never the cis woman who would be banned. So the ban is ban for being trans per se.

In many cases, it is, though: it's specifically trans athletes that are banned. The exclusion is solely for those who have additional height, etc. because they are trans, and not for cis women who also happen to have that physiological advantage. (Indeed, those women are likely to be celebrated and sought after.) That makes it a ban because they are trans per se: the supposed advantage is an ostensible reason, which is not to say that it's necessarily a cynical pretence, but it is to say that it isn't the actual criterion on which those athletes are being excluded. As others have pointed out, a trans basketball player who is 5' tall would be banned in many places despite having no advantage. As for the rest of the thread, I think the posts here show what I was saying is true - we all have strong feelings about this, that go beyond what you'd expect for the scale of the actual issue. That's also a pretty good reason to reflect before posting: we want a civil discussion, and that's harder to have when emotions are high.

One could: I think I was pretty clear that this is not directed at any one view, but the discussion in general. I have strong feelings about these issues because I have trans friends, work with young trans adults, and have strong views about the rights of young adults in general to control their own lives and take their own decisions. At the same time, I grew up in and live in the same society as everyone else: until I was an adult, trans folks were the butt of playground jokes and nothing else, gender roles were firmly defined and straying from them got mockery at best and made you a target for physical bullying more often than not, and not conforming to your gender assigned at birth was portrayed as inextricably linked to sexual perversion. These were prejudices literally beaten into me at times, and I've had to work to counter them - they still exist in me, at some level. If that's not the culture you grew up in, then I'm glad. A lot of the young adults I work with grew up questioning that culture, and I'm happy for them. But those people generally lack the same genetic advantages that are being considered unfair when they arise as a result of being trans women.

That's not really what I'm saying: what I'm saying is that it's a best naive to pretend that our views on the former are not influenced by our views on the latter (which are in turn a product of wider issues we have as a society with gender, sex, sexual attraction, presentation, and so on). Any discussion of inclusion of trans athletes that doesn't reckon with those factors is incomplete.

This is... unconvincing, as an argument. Lacking any actual evidence that Hubbard, or anyone else, changed sex just to gain an advantage, we're left with the fact that trans athletes (in some sports) gain a natural advantage from their birth and upbringing - but so does everyone else competing at that level. And there's little evidence that the advantage trans athletes have, where they have any, is so disproportionate as to require direct bans to preserve the integrity of women's sport. (Indirect bans, of course, such as limits on testosterone levels, affect some AFAB competitors.) More relevantly to the thread, like the puberty blockers argument, or trans criminals, this is a problem presented and treated out of all proportion because of the wider political context and it cannot be divorced from that context. It's a proxy, of sorts, for the discomfort we as a society feel about the existence of trans folks, a discomfort we have felt (and still do feel) about other minorities too. But in the case of trans folks, that discomfort is linked to deeper issues with our society's conflicted and difficult attitudes to gender, sex (in both senses) and privacy. We're unsettled when we're forced to think about those, and the existence of trans folks pushes those issues to the forefront. In other words, when we argue about puberty blockers, or sports, etc. we're not solely arguing about that. We're working out some feelings about the existence of trans folks and their place in our society. If we truly accepted the existence of trans folks, these arguments would be minor, or non-existent, and regarded as fixable problems or ones we can live with, instead of how we currently treat them.

Scot, protest is a legitimate tool, and no, it doesn't have nuance. But nuance isn't always useful or good. Different tools are suitable for different purposes. Nuance alone would not have won universal suffrage.

Scot, I'm not sure you understand the difference between a protest and a debating society.

The Liefeld joke indicates some element of time travel, since it would last have been funny twenty years ago.

Well, yes: it answers it by avoiding it.

The quoted is not my 'mind', though. It's not an opinion, it's an observation. With respect to that observation, if the facts change, the facts change. If a medicine does show evidence of harm, the consideration then - made by far more qualified folks than you or I - would be about a balance of the harm versus the benefit. Again, it's not unusual for that to happen, in fact it's commonplace. I'm going to try not to be rude here. But there are, we can agree, numerous medical interventions that have weak evidence and many that show evidence of harm, and we're not discussing those. Do you accept, then, that it's not solely the weakness of the evidence or the possibility of evidence of harm that is making you ask that question, and making you so curious about whether these particular interventions cause harm, or should be approved? As I've said repeatedly: there's no point in pretending that this is a medical discussion when it is in fact a political one.

Lobotomies, with respect, are an even worse example. Nobody doubted that lobotomies caused irreparable harm. If there's no lack of examples, it's hard to understand why the first two comparators that come to your mind are not very comparable. As for the Cass review and puberty blockers, I quoted previously the actually worrying finding, which is that most of the (very small number) of under-18s being prescribed them were older, with the most common age being 15. There's a suggestion that this was done purely because protocols required they be on puberty blockers for a year before being prescribed gender affirming hormone treatments. No arguments there: if that's true, it's bad medical practice. Drugs should be prescribed on medical need, not to fulfil an administrative requirement. But I'll repeat, since it's not been mentioned in this thread yet - the Cass review did not find any evidence that puberty blockers were harmful. Prescribing a medicine where the evidence of benefit is weak, but there is no evidence of harm, is not as unusual as some people seem to imagine. Take this study, for example: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmjopen/2024/02/15/poor-quality-clinical-data-informing-nice-decisions-on-treatments-in-over-half-of-cases/ What is unusual is that this is a controversial area of medicine. But let's not pretend that it is controversial because of the weakness of the evidence base. Rather, more is being made of the weakness of the evidence base because the area is politically controversial.

[mod] OK. folks. Let's be clear. One may legitimately argue about whether a particular person, or post, or opinion is or is not 'anti-trans'. But to argue that there is not a substantial anti-trans movement in the world today is straight up gaslighting a group who are currently being oppressed worldwide. It's needlessly offensive to most users and that is why I have my mod hat on. It isn't going to be tolerated as a statement. Simple as that. We would not tolerate that sort of statement about prejudice faced by any other group, and we're not tolerating it about trans folks. ETA - and the other thing about having the mod hat on: that means if you want to discuss this, take it to PM. It's not open to discussion in thread. [/mod]

There certainly is a lot of disinformation about what the Cass report says, but you would agree that a large chunk of that disinformation comes from the anti-trans side? As I said when the report was published, if the report has a flaw, it is that Cass was - at best - naive about how the report would be received and used. It was commissioned for political purposes and is being used for political purposes. Largely, ones that are unsympathetic to the idea that trans people should have dignity and equality. I believe Hilary Cass when she says she wants to see more services and more support for trans kids. But nobody's interested in discussing what care trans kids should receive - only what they shouldn't get. As is the case with so many issues about young people, sadly.

I think it's important also to note that the Cass Review does not conclude that puberty blockers are an unsafe treatment. We know this because they have said so, explicitly. https://thekitetrust.org.uk/our-statement-in-response-to-the-cass-review-report/

Any chance we could get the conversation back to contemporary UK politics?