UK Politics: Russian Adventures in Toryland

[Week]

The "we need more information crowd" sure do a lot of talking about a subject never cared about or discussed and spin some pretty 'scary' hypotheticals (boxing? Gtfo) that align themselves with bigots. You may not view yourself as a bigot -- bully for you -- though your arguments enable more bigotry and not safety or fairness.

Focusing these bills on 'fairness' in sports and not in the broader discussion where they are pushed - in concert - with other anti-LGBT legislation (depending on where you are it differs though never* exists in a vacuum) is myopic -- at best.

*Nowhere that I'm aware of in the states or UK at least.

I.e - funding women's sports, equal pay between men's and women's sports, etc. Etc 

[Spockydog]

In other, tax-avoiding news:

Sounds very much like she is not fulfilling any of the requirements for non-dom status.

At the heart of this issue is the Sunaks' claim that India is her 'natural home.'

So, first of all, when does she plan to return there? Because she has been resident here for nine years.

She has three homes in the UK, one in California, none in India. The fact that they do not ever go on holiday to India is relevant, too.

That she has her children educated in the UK is also a factor, apparently.

Seems to me the only connection she has to her 'natural home' is millions and millions of un-taxed pounds.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, I'm pretty sure it torpedoes any lingering Prime Ministerial ambitions for Sunak.

[lessthanluke]

37 minutes ago, Week said:

The "we need more information crowd" sure do a lot of talking about a subject never cared about or discussed and spin some pretty 'scary' hypotheticals (boxing? Gtfo) that align themselves with bigots. You may not view yourself as a bigot -- bully for you -- though your arguments enable more bigotry and not safety or fairness.

Focusing these bills on 'fairness' in sports and not in the broader discussion where they are pushed - in concert - with other anti-LGBT legislation (depending on where you are it differs though never* exists in a vacuum) is myopic -- at best.

*Nowhere that I'm aware of in the states or UK at least.

I.e - funding women's sports, equal pay between men's and women's sports, etc. Etc 

Why are you assuming people didn't care about stuff beforehands? I personally am very involved in womens sports, can't speak for everyone of course.

[lessthanluke]

1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

Well, that's easy.
If Point A is "it's black and white, trans women can't be allowed to compete in women's competitions"
Point B must be "it's black and white, trans women can be allowed to compete in women's competitions"

I have seen lots of people state Point B personally and if you say anything to the contrary you're a transphobe. 

Basically Week in this thread.

In the end I think the drama and outrage is overplayed. The number of trans athletes who will also have elite level sporting genetics will be so small to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. 

I'd like the rules themselves regarding test levels etc to make more sense and be far more clear cut but in the end as above I don't think its going to have a massive affect on women's sports.

Maybe I'm wrong of course and trans athletes will start to dominate but I doubt it.

[Pebble thats Stubby]

I think the issue with Trans people in professional sports is complicated.

In principle they should be allowed to compete with their gender.

In practice it's not simple.  Trans Women have a perceived advantage over CIS Women.  weather they have an actual advantage that is unfair is another matter.  It needs to be examined and reassessed as new data emerges.  and I think it will vary from sport to sport.     

I do think any advantage needs to be proved to be an unfair advantage (ie more than the advantage of good genes) before Trans people are banned or handicapped from competing.

[BigFatCoward]

26 minutes ago, lessthanluke said:

 

In the end I think the drama and outrage is overplayed. The number of trans athletes who will also have elite level sporting genetics will be so small to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. 

 

Emily Bridges would have been interesting.

She set national records as a junior, and the difference between men and women in cycling performance is still massive (hour record for women is 48.4 km compared to 55.1 km for men). 

She was still competing against men until very recently even while transitioning and with her testosterone under the prescribed limit. 

[Heartofice]

37 minutes ago, lessthanluke said:

In the end I think the drama and outrage is overplayed. The number of trans athletes who will also have elite level sporting genetics will be so small to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. 

I'd like the rules themselves regarding test levels etc to make more sense and be far more clear cut but in the end as above I don't think its going to have a massive affect on women's sports.

Maybe I'm wrong of course and trans athletes will start to dominate but I doubt it.

Of course it is over played, and it's unlikely it will ever have a big enough impact on any one sport to distort the sport as a whole, but it still affects people on an individual level. Females who start losing out on competitions they've worked so  hard for because someone came in with an unfair advantage akin to doping. 

14 minutes ago, Pebble thats Stubby said:

I do think any advantage needs to be proved to be an unfair advantage (ie more than the advantage of good genes) before Trans people are banned or handicapped from competing.

The starting point is whether events and sports are already separated out by male and female, due to males inherent advantages. The question then becomes whether hormones can reduce the participants advantage to an acceptable level or not. I don't think there is data to suggest it does entirely. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Again this is answered in my post. If you use this logic you would simply remove all categorisation by sex and weight and males would win every sport for the rest of eternity. Obviously we don’t do that. 
 

This mindset is the problem. Men wouldn't win simply because they're men and women are weaker. Men on average do have a size and strength advantage, but skill is still the most important feature. I've seen really good women's basketball teams roast men who were cocky and thought just because they rolled the ball out there meant they were going to win. 

[Heartofice]

3 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

This mindset is the problem. Men wouldn't win simply because they're men and women are weaker. Men on average do have a size and strength advantage, but skill is still the most important feature. I've seen really good women's basketball teams roast men who were cocky and thought just because they rolled the ball out there meant they were going to win. 

Really that is the wrong question to ask, and it's why it's kind of confusing the question. If you put a bunch of professional female athletes up against total amateur males then yeah good chance they will win, though not always, like when the women national teams lose to school boys, on numerous occasions.

https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-women-s-national-team-lose-70-to-team-of-15yearold-boys-a3257266.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-4389760/USA-women-s-team-suffer-5-2-loss-FC-Dallas-U-15-boys.html

But if you start putting them all together on the same level, professional against professional then you are handing a massive advantage to the men. Even possibly the greatest female tennis star of all time, Serena Williams admitted she'd lose to Andy Murray 6-0, 6-0 in about 10 minutes, she's aware of the disparity in size and power of the mens game. 

It's not about mindset, its reality. We are talking about how to set up organised sports in a fair way, not how some professional female athletes might just be able to beat a bunch of guys who don't even try.

[BigFatCoward]

One of the eye opening things for me about how much advantage men have was when we (the boys football team) played the girls team at hockey In school.

During the warm up when we were watching them we were shitting ourselves, they were so much more technically proficient than us. We honestly thought we were going to get humiliated. We beat them 7-1.  And this was at 15 when we weren't fully developed and mostly they were. 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

30 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Really that is the wrong question to ask, and it's why it's kind of confusing the question. If you put a bunch of professional female athletes up against total amateur males then yeah good chance they will win, though not always, like when the women national teams lose to school boys, on numerous occasions.

https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-women-s-national-team-lose-70-to-team-of-15yearold-boys-a3257266.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-4389760/USA-women-s-team-suffer-5-2-loss-FC-Dallas-U-15-boys.html

But if you start putting them all together on the same level, professional against professional then you are handing a massive advantage to the men. Even possibly the greatest female tennis star of all time, Serena Williams admitted she'd lose to Andy Murray 6-0, 6-0 in about 10 minutes, she's aware of the disparity in size and power of the mens game. 

It's not about mindset, its reality. We are talking about how to set up organised sports in a fair way, not how some professional female athletes might just be able to beat a bunch of guys who don't even try.

The mistake here is going to the professional level. That's such a tiny percentage. The larger issue is allowing trans athletes to participate at lower levels, where they just want to feel included and not made to be some weird outsider. It's going to be rare for a trans woman to deny a cis woman an opportunity to compete. And again, the people most loudly opposed to this are in general transphobic. Here in the US a lot of conservatives all of the sudden became experts in women's college swimming after Lia Thomas had some success (never mind that she got beat by other women at nationals). Was it because they cared about the sport? Absolutely not.

[Heartofice]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The mistake here is going to the professional level. That's such a tiny percentage. The larger issue is allowing trans athletes to participate at lower levels, where they just want to feel included and not made to be some weird outsider. It's going to be rare for a trans woman to deny a cis woman an opportunity to compete. And again, the people most loudly opposed to this are in general transphobic. Here in the US a lot of conservatives all of the sudden became experts in women's college swimming after Lia Thomas had some success (never mind that she got beat by other women at nationals). Was it because they cared about the sport? Absolutely not.

Why is it different as you go down the levels? If an amateur is competing against another one who has an unfair advantage due to male puberty, what is the difference?

I think the reason sports comes up so often is because it's one obvious area where the issue of ideology over reality starts to break down, and you start to see a number of incoherent arguments, which is why conservatives and the right like to bring it up so often. The same thing as asking Keir Starmer 'what is a woman', because something that should be relatively simple to answer is something he suddenly trips over himself to avoid saying the wrong thing.

[Week]

6 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The mistake here is going to the professional level. That's such a tiny percentage. The larger issue is allowing trans athletes to participate at lower levels, where they just want to feel included and not made to be some weird outsider. It's going to be rare for a trans woman to deny a cis woman an opportunity to compete. And again, the people most loudly opposed to this are in general transphobic. Here in the US a lot of conservatives all of the sudden became experts in women's college swimming after Lia Thomas had some success (never mind that she got beat by other women at nationals). Was it because they cared about the sport? Absolutely not.

Utah passed a law that essentially targeted one kid. These cases are few and the discussion is completely blown out of proportion -- again, by people who generally don't give a shit about "females"* in sports. 

Credit to you @lessthanluke -- one of the rare ones then. I'd say that each athletic association should deal with this themselves, with oversight/protections against discriminatory rules, but not legislated by a central government body.

*Christ, that's a pretty common red flag.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Not surprising, Germany's Womens' Nationalteam used to get pummeled by u17 (?) squads of Bundesliga clubs, before playing (and winning) tournaments. I think it was Birgit Prinz, who expressed her annoyance over the exact same thing. Technically the ladies were (much) better, but they were no match physically against those brats, of whom most would never play top level football. 

Anyway, that's however pretty much besides the point. Cis-women won't be competing against men (outside some charity exhibition events maybe), but against trans-women. There any potential disadvantage would be much smaller. Question is really how much, if it turns out insignificant no problem. If turns out to be significant... Well, I am sure they will be as happy week to have their shots of olympic medals (and thus sponsorship deals as few as there are) diminished, because having a level playing field in womens' sport (integrity of the competition) is irrelevant. And yes, week, if you can label everyone wanting to see more studies first a transphobe, then I feel free to lump you in with the it's just womens sports sexist crowd.

 

[Raja]

I think it's very easy to see who approaches this issue with nuance and is open to trans women & men competing in their respective categories as opposed to those who just use it to peddle their bigotry.

[cock_merchant]

I think if early transition occurred using puberty blockers and HRT then things get more fairer. But post puberty transitioners obviously have clear advantages.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

27 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Why is it different as you go down the levels? If an amateur is competing against another one who has an unfair advantage due to male puberty, what is the difference?

I think the reason sports comes up so often is because it's one obvious area where the issue of ideology over reality starts to break down, and you start to see a number of incoherent arguments, which is why conservatives and the right like to bring it up so often. The same thing as asking Keir Starmer 'what is a woman', because something that should be relatively simple to answer is something he suddenly trips over himself to avoid saying the wrong thing.

Lol, no. What's incoherent is making an issue that impacts a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of people a major talking point. The trans population is less than .5%. Among that population a minority compete in sports, and most of those who do suck. So ask yourself, are conservatives making this a front line issue because there's actually a problem, or because they know a huge portion of their base are transphobic and this kind of rhetoric activates them?

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

 So ask yourself, are conservatives making this a front line issue because there's actually a problem, or because they know a huge portion of their base are transphobic and this kind of rhetoric activates them?

I mean I basically answered your question. The reason conservatives bring it up is because it highlights the flaws in the ideology of the left and makes people on the left fall into massive traps which make them seem far more detached from reality than they would want. Trying to pin it all on transphobia is another very bad tactic and basically misses the point, but is straight out of the same playbook. 

[kiko]

I'm not even sure we can use some easy formula to level the playing field, like testosterone level must be under X for Y months. Not sure we know all the factors yet. Would be interesting to see how transgender women compete in women's chess competitions.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to just open women's comp to transgender women but still recognize the results of the non-transgender women additionally to the overall results. They do this kind of things in certain sports, where you e.g can become European champion in a race you didn't win but have been the best European in the rankings.

[Ran]

Speaking of tennis, Reneé Richards was a pioneering transwoman athlete in the 70s. She has personal experience and, like Caitlyn Jenner, is another transwoman who does not believe that most women who went through male puberty can really fairly compete with women who did not go through male puberty in most sports. We're a sexually dimorphic species, and that dimorphism becomes pronounced thanks to puberty, and it just so happens that many of the physical and structural features that are pronounced in males appear to have relevance to athletic achievement in many areas of sports. Testosterone is only part of the story.

That said, IMO, everything should be left to sports organizations to sort out. Government legislation is the wrong way to go about it.