GB Olympic cycling chief joins calls on UCI to tighten transgender rules

And I would ask the question why should non-trans females have to accept that they may come second best to a trans female? It's not like non-trans males have the same threat from trans males really is it?  
 

Non-trans females are making thier voices heard now. Unionising against what they see as unfair. It's now up to the governing bodies to allay those fears. I don't see why non-trans females have to give up anything, especially when it's livelihoods at stake. 

sparrowlegs wrote:

And I would ask the question why should non-trans females have to accept that they may come second best to a trans female? It's not like non-trans males have the same threat from trans males really is it?  

Really?  And what would you say if Fiona Kolbinger was Trans?

Pretending it's one way traffic is convienient for anti-Trans people and if you don't want to be part of that group a bit more nuance is required.  Funnily enough it's not a one way or binary argument. 
For all the fuss about Lia Thomas she got her arse handed to her in several events as well as the one she won, but that doesn't fit the media and right wing narrative so it doesn't get a mention. 

Is Fiona Kolbinger trans? No. If she was trans, she'd be trans. Bringing Fiona's name in to this only serves to diminish her achievements.

Show me a current trans male that's competing and winning against non- trans males in physical sports. 

You cling to this "nuanced" argument like the exceptions prove the rule when they don't. 

Lia Thomas did lose a few races but she's also won so again, I don't get your point. Go ask the non-trans females that competed against her how they feel. More and more are talking about the intimidation being brought on them if they criticise Lia. 

This. People get caught up with testosterone levels, when theres many other advantages of going through male puberty.

I am saying that this natural predisposition as evidenced by the relative ease of breaking female world record, shows that it is incredibly unlikely that the advantages diminish.

So, I've been thinking about this as I have felt the same way as you, but then I factored in the size of the competition pool. 

There are so many more men competing than women, that any man reaching the top say 10% of male competition, would - given a level playing field - potentially equate to a far higher percentage of female competition. 

Taking the tour de france as a base example. The best 100 male and female riders in the world are chosen to race in their respective events. 

The male competition pool is 10000, the women's say 1,000. That means, to make the start, a male needs to be in the top 1% of male athletes, where as to make the women's team, you only have to be in the top 10% of female athletes. 

In a long winded way, the point I'm making is that an athlete like Emily Bridges could potentially absolutely clean up in women's competition without it necessarily being indicative of an unfair advantage (when compared against her male performances).

Does not seem fair...

Bridges performance at the recent British University track champs suggests still competitive against men - won the men's points race. And there was the junior male 25 mile TT record too.

Would any elite female athlete have won against the men uni racers?
What incentive is there for any trans woman (biological male) who wants to compete against women to put in an honest performance, when holding back (as you said sandbagging) helps to 'prove' that they don't retain an advantage?

Why should any women athletes have to be guinea pigs for this?

As others have said, in sport, you can have fairness or inclusiveness - choose one, as both seem impossible to achieve.

And that must have been done whilst meeting the 5 nmol/L limit on testosterone too!  
Piss take or what?

MsG wrote:

in sport, you can have fairness or inclusiveness - choose one, as both seem impossible to achieve.

You can't have fairness. Sport is, by its nature, unfair. You can only choose which unfairnesses you're going to go with.

I think the "unfairness" of having biological females compete against biological females is more preferable to most people. 

And we can understand that you think that, just as we can understand that others in different places in the 'debate' think differently. But we should understand those for what they are: feelings; choices; value judgements - not fact-based assessments. Anyone who claims to know 'the fair approach' has made a fundamental error, because there isn't one - only a range of possible compromises between different people's values.

Would you also agree that on the other side of the debate there is also feelings and choices at play rather than fact based judgements?

sparrowlegs wrote:

Would you also agree that on the other side of the debate there is also feelings and choices at play rather than fact based judgements?

Yes - in fact that's what I wrote above.

But is it also not "we have an existing - fairly arbitrary - compromise which we've settled on as 'fair' / 'how it is'. But now a minority want to change all of that.  And it turns out that as always the people who have to compromise are the smaller (in terms of number of competitors / opportunities) and less priveledged half of the existing majority"?

Personally I see no reason why we can't have a change - after all sports are all about arbitrary rules. (Trivial example but it depends on how you ride your bicycle too in cycling - the "tuck" has long history!) It's clear that it's going to come at a similar type of cost (feelings of exclusion) to those most affected (cis women) so this needs care.

chrisonatrike wrote:

But is it also not "we have an existing - fairly arbitrary - compromise which we've settled on as 'fair' / 'how it is'. But now a minority want to change all of that.  And it turns out that as always the people who have to compromise are the smaller (in terms of number of competitors / opportunities) and less priveledged half of the existing majority"?

Personally I see no reason why we can't have a change - after all sports are all about arbitrary rules. (Trivial example but it depends on how you ride your bicycle too in cycling - the "tuck" has long history!) It's clear that it's going to come at a similar type of cost (feelings of exclusion) to those most affected (cis women) so this needs care.

Yep - agreed with all of that - the current situation is arbitrary, any alternative would also be arbitrary, and which you find acceptable depends on the feelings and values you bring to the table. Proceeding as if this is an argument about what is 'the truth' about what is fair is misguided and unproductive, because it's basically just people shouting 'Boo!!' at each other's values (and doing so repeatedly and ever louder).

mdavidford wrote:

MsG wrote:

in sport, you can have fairness or inclusiveness - choose one, as both seem impossible to achieve.

You can't have fairness. Sport is, by its nature, unfair. You can only choose which unfairnesses you're going to go with.

if I understand your point, it is that unless the competition is between genetically identical competitors (say, identical twins) riding identical bikes then there is some unfairness, because the advantages are not purely down to training and dedication, instead they are down to the gifts they were born with.

However since that would narrow the field of competition somewhat, we go with something of a compromise, and use very broad categories, in this case male and female, on the assumption that they account for most of the genetic "unfairness".

Some sports also categorise by weight, height, age, and so on.

So maybe cycling should abandon sex as a category, and use other metrics instead. Maybe eventually a formula could be arrived at, some combination of age, size, weight, etc, that categorised the field into groupings that were more or less on an even footing. The categories would be gender/sex blind, so males and females, of whatever stripe, could all be found in each category depending only on the size, weight, age or whatever metrics were applied.

The strange thing is that transfemales would now have lost hold of the very thing they sought after - to be categorised as females. All that would be achieved is the elimination of sex as a category. A very dog-in-a-manger success.

There is the slight riddle of "trans" depending on the existing categories which this seeks to challenge.  Essentially it's a redefinition of man and woman but it then becomes slightly recursive when trying to explain in terms of the current definition.  The least of it is the language and grammar (English assumes a male / female distinction - it's probably the simplest Indo-European language to change - although some languages don't emphasise gender in the grammar).  Our culture has - like it or not - a ton of dependencies on this and related concepts.

Languages and cultures change constantly of course, sometimes radically. We've managed to cope with e.g. "doctor" not fixing a sex or gender.