No one is harmed
South Dakota lawmakers killed a bill that would [have] required trans student athletes to compete according to their sex assigned at birth.
That is, their physical sex as opposed to their “gender identity.”
“We’re thrilled with the committee’s decision,” said Libby Skarin, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, in a statement. “No one is harmed by allowing transgender people to compete consistent with who they are. The committee’s motion to kill this bill sends a clear message of inclusion and acceptance for our transgender friends and neighbors and that there is no place for discrimination like this in South Dakota.”
Hmm. Is it true that no one is harmed by allowing transgender people to compete consistent with “who they are” in their heads as opposed to their bodies? Is it true that no women or girls are harmed by being forced to compete with male bodies?
A Senate Education Committee hearing preceding the vote Thursday morning streamed live online. Some SB49 proponents, like Family Heritage Alliance director Norman Woods, said that supporting the bill wasn’t about “valu[ing] one student group over another” but about preserving “a basic standard of fairness.” Other proponents, like South Dakota Catholic Conference executive director Christopher J. Motz, used their time before the committee to undermine trans identities and gendered self-determination.
“Being a male or female is a physical reality,” said Motz. “To be male or female doesn’t proceed from one’s inner experience. It comes through one’s physical body.”
Even executive directors of Catholic groups can be right sometimes.
I suppose those women who were injured by Hannah Mouncey would agree that no one is hurt?
OH it was just a broken leg, no big deal.
Mouncey did what, now? I missed that story. Off to Google I must go.
There are so many physiological differences between men and women* that there simply cannot be a level playing field wherever male-bodied athletes compete against women.
For starters, the wider pelvis of a woman means that she cannot run as efficiently as a man, all else being equal, which is the main reason – maybe the sole reason – that in all categories for running, whether sprints, middle- to long-distance, and extreme endurance races, the world records are held by men.
Pound-for-pound, males are physically stronger than women, which is why all world records in disciplines such as weight-lifting, across all weight groups, are held by men. In fact, across all sports which rely on physical strength and/or endurance, the records are invariably held by men.
So how the Hell can anybody claim with any degree of honesty that allowing male-bodied athletes to compete directly with women preserves ‘a basic standard of fairness’?
*No, I’m not talking about genitals. My obsession is under control.
Ehhhh, a trans kid who’s never experienced male puberty really shouldn’t be expected to play with boys. If puberty was blocked for them and they don’t have male secondary sex characteristics, they won’t have the size or muscle mass of a teenage boy. If they’ve been on estrogen, they’ll very likely be short and will be shaped like a teenage girl with the corresponding muscle mass. They can’t be expected to keep up with young men.
The issue is more nuanced than “AMAB kids should play with boys”. AMAB adults who went through male puberty and have the size and muscle mass of an adult man competing against people who went through female puberty though and are therefore significantly smaller and weaker? Get out of here.
#4, which is why I specifically stated ‘male-bodied’ in my comment.
Puberty blockers are another problem area altogether. Yes, I understand why they’re prescribed, but my concern is whether it is necessarily the right thing to do given that the blockers (or at least some of them) do more than just stop the development that we usually associate with puberty, ie. changes in sexual characteristics, and that the long-term effects of using them could be seriously harmful. It has been reported that at least one group of blockers developed for use in cases of precocious puberty, where a child starts puberty at an unusually young age, are being issued to pre-teens and teens developing at the usual age despite not being trialled for use in children of that age. The children being given those blockers are effectively unwitting guinea pigs.
When pre-pubescent children are given blockers, the retardation of development extends to the brain, which would usually go through significant maturation itself during puberty but is prevented from such development along with the rest of the body. This means that when the use of blockers ends, the individual, who may well be in their late teens by this time, is still mentally at about the same age as when the treatment began. Quite simply put, healthy 18-year-olds should, all else being equal, have better thinking and reasoning abilities and so be better able to make better informed and rational choices than their 12-year-old selves could, but this appears not to be the case for those on blockers.
Briefly put, it has been noted that whilst a large proportion of children who are given blockers go on to some form of transition, a similar proportion of those not given blockers go through puberty and lose the feelings of being a diifferent gender once their adult body and brain has developed and do not go on to transition. Long-term health and mental issues have also been noted in significant enough numbers to cause concern among medical professionals, and they are calling for more testing before the use of blockers becomes widespread. Note that their objective is to prevent potential harms being done to children, even though they are being labelled transphobic by trans activists.
As for ‘AMAB’, that’s fine if you are talking about intersex or other foetal development abnormalities resulting in ambiguity over the sex of a child. Transgender people are not ‘assigned’ their sex at birth, and when they or their allies used the AMAB label they are doing so because ‘assigned’ sounds like an almost-random, toss-of-a-coin action and is used to elicit sympathy, whilst admitting that in the vast majority of births, ie. those showing no sexual ambiguity, sex is confirmed according to sex-specific markers doesn’t have the same emotional power. It is a deliberately dishonest tactic intended to muddy the waters. It might convince people who don’t think too deeply about what they’re told, but some of us see it as the manipulative tactic it is.
Not sure what ‘Ehhhh’ means, mind.
“Even executive directors of Catholic groups can be right sometimes.”
I have heard that I should use that fact as reason to immediately abandon my position regarding sex. In other words, if a designated bad group adopts a position, I need to adopt the opposite immediately. This reasoning brought to you by the same people that criticise many conservative positions as – wait for it – reactionary.
Not that I’m defending Catholicism. They are wrong on so so many issues, but that does not mean we automatically assume everything they say is the wrong position. We consider it, and come up with reasons why it is wrong or (occasionally) right.
I didn’t suggest puberty blocking is thoroughly tested. It isn’t. I’ve never seen a case of someone using puberty blockers who wasn’t well aware of that either. People consent to it because the suicide statistics associated with trans people freak them out even more.
AMAB refers to male gender, not sex. Someone who is assigned male at birth is biologically male. That’s not an assignment. It’s just the genitals they have.
It remains a terrible idea to use sex alone as a means of determining what sports team a child plays on just as using self-identification as a means of determining what sports team a kid plays on is unreasonable.
thewaterisfine,
“I didn’t suggest puberty blocking is thoroughly tested. It isn’t. I’ve never seen a case of someone using puberty blockers who wasn’t well aware of that either.”
I have seen footage of a …doctor I think, talking young children into asking for puberty blockers on the basis of the most asinine of analogies I have seen in years. She was proud of it, and the audience she was addressing applauded her. This blog also featured a story about a doctor in England iirc fined for prescribing puberty blockers to minors without parental consent recently. Both of these call into question whether informed consent could possibly have been obtained, due to the youth of the people involved.
And in general, there is a push for GPs to prescribe blockers the moment a child has doubts or confusion about their sex / gender.
Well, yes, but then nobody said “AMAB kids should play with boys” until you did so…?
Have to correct you on that last point, AoS. Women are beating men in extreme endurance races. Jasmin Paris is the latest:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/18/ultrarunner-jasmin-paris-montane-spine-race-winner-mens-record-express-milk
She beat the men’s course record by more than twelve hours. Along the way, she was expressing milk for her baby daughter.
I think women may have a physiological edge in extreme sports. But other than those, of course, your point stands.
thewatersfine,
But “male” is a sex, not a “gender.”
And children aren’t being assigned a gender by their doctors at birth. What happens is, their sex is observed. Obstetricians don’t then issue instructions on raising the child according to sex stereotypes.
Excellent point, Lady M. Neither my obstetrician nor my pediatrician told me that I needed to dress my son in blue, make sure he played only with appropriate toys, and that playing the same games as his girl cousins was to be discouraged if not forbidden. Which is good, because I did none of those things, and would probably have changed doctors immediately had they told me…or even suggested…to do those things.
Gender is strictly societal in the construct; sex is biological.
Oh, and on that above comment? Since I’m an Ecologist, I am an expert… ;-)
Lady M. Thanks. I stand corrected.
thewatersfine, if you are suggesting that pre-pubescent children, often pre-teens, are fully aware of the meaning and implications of drug trialing, that they have the intelligence to fully comprehend the reasons behind the need for trials and the potential consequences of using drugs off-licence, and further that they have the cognitive reasoning abilities to be able to make an informed choice about using such drugs and the understanding of the severity of the long-term health risks – physiological and psychological – to their future selves when very few adults are so well informed, then I respectfully suggest that you don’t understand children.
Pre-teen and teenage children don’t even understand that the way they feel about themselves now is not necessarily the way they’ll see themselves in five or ten years. I would hazard a guess that not a single person here will say that at that early age they knew themself as they know themself now.
Besides, let’s look at the first paragraph of your reply to me again
(bolding mine) Do you see your own contradiction there? The kids are well aware of the risks of taking the drugs and so are making fully informed choices. The kids are being scared into taking the drugs by suicide figures associated with trans people.
Are they fully aware of the reasons each trans person had for comitting suicide? Were those suicides of pre- or post-transitional trans people? Were they on transitional hormones or surgically transitioned? Irreversibly transitioned and regretting it? Of course they don’t have that information, nobody does.
A thousand people comitting suicide might each have their own unique reason for doing so, maybe or maybe not linked to their trans status. To use them as a persuasive reason to start on blockers when counselling already confused and vulnerable kids is the most cynical, manipulative, dishonest thing I’ve heard so far in the entire debate on blockers. Scaring children into using potentially highly harmful drugs is illegal when it’s heroin or methamphetamine; why do you think it’s a good reason for getting them on blockers?
I may be repeating what someone else has said but the answer seems obvious. There can be men’s leagues, women’s leagues and trans leagues. I suppose there would have to be trans men leagues and trans women’s leagues. The way sports are venerated, this solution adds more sporting events so who could complain?
Oh, thewatersfine, please stop that dishonest AMAB bull. It is not a transgender term, it has been appropriated along with AFAB from intersex people who required a sex assigned to them because an incomplete birth certificate cannot be issued.
To repeat myself, AMAB/AFAB is useful to the trans activists because it plays into their victimhood narrative to suggest they were randomly assigned their fate at birth by mere guesswork.
Gender and gender roles are neither inate nor assigned at birth, they are taught and learnt, accepted or rejected, and are not immutable.
AoS, in reference to comment 14, I have been noticing some relationship between this trans- phenomenon and the repressed memories. Psychologists taking troubled children, and possibly (we don’t know for sure, but that one that was posted here not too long ago was horrifying) convincing them that their problem is that they have the wrong body, based on dubious, untested medical information. If we’re lucky, it will get debunked quickly and get us past this period before anyone is harmed irreparably. Or, it could end up like the repressed memories and some people could get hurt beyond repair. Let’s hope not.
iknklast, I was trying to make a similar point at PZs about using blockers off-licence on an age-group they hadn’t been developed for or tested on, and just to illustrate the point mentioned possibly the most infamous of all misused drugs, Thalidomide. Two responses were particularly telling.
One dismissed my concern by stating that no kids on blockers had grown extra heads, and that Thalidomide was irrelevant because it wasn’t a blocker and had been trialled, just not for long enough! Way to make my point for me and also to trivialise and show ignorance of the horrific legacy of Thalidomide.
The second simply said ‘Oh, won’t somebody think of the children!’, as if preventing harm to childen were a bad thing, but apparently it is wrong to consider long-term damages if it means one less transition to boost the trans numbers.
AoS, I have a friend who’s son has just transitioned to a daughter. The child is not yet 7. Their father died when they were 5 in a freak accident that was distressing to everyone. Then the mother (my friend) was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent chemotherapy and mastectomy. Now the child is suffering from anxiety (and possibly depression). The psychologist has diagnosed the child with…gender dysphoria.
I would have loved to be there at the session when the psychologist decided it was gender dysphoria. What did the child say to make that the diagnosis? Was it something vague and minor, like identifying closely with a mother who had a terrible year? Or did the child say something gender non-conforming, like, I have a doll I play with? Or was it, “No, I’m a girl!”? None of those things would seem to me sufficient to diagnose anyone, especially given the history of so much trauma at such a young age.
Six years old and diagnosed with gender dysphoria? Do psychologists get licenses to practice from cereal boxes (are psychologists required to be licensed?)? That is pretty damn disgraceful, if not outright mental abuse.
To put that in context, last year my youngest grandson, five at the time, went through a phase of insisting he was Sonic the Hedgehog. It lasted for 6 weeks or so, during which he wouldn’t so much as acknowledge his own name and would answer only to Sonic. Your friend’s son’s psychologist might well have diagnosed multiple personality disorder.
Interesting article on the IOC’s guidelines for trans athletes.
Gee, I wonder who the cyclist is.
https://medium.com/@Antonia_Lee/the-iocs-transgender-guidelines-are-unscientific-and-pose-a-serious-risk-to-the-health-of-both-5f5f808748e2
Lady M, I believe that’s known as ‘fudging’ the results. Definitely frowned upon in (genuine) scientific circles.