Expertise
Man who calls himself a woman explains how wrong it is to think men playing on women’s rugby teams would be a danger to women.
“Well, frankly, I think [the leaders of World Rugby] had their minds made up, before they called the meeting,” Harper said. “It would have been nice to have seen a trans woman rugby player there, but I doubt it would have made any difference.”
Would it though? Would it have been nice? Suppose you’re on a committee working out legislation on rape; would it be nice to have a rapist there?
The use of “trans woman” works so well to disguise this absurd “include the aggressors in the conversation” bullshit. It wouldn’t sound so persuasive to say “It would have been nice to have seen a man who wants to play rugby on the women’s team there” – but that of course is in fact what he is saying. If we’re going to talk about rules to keep men from playing on women’s teams, we have to include men who want to play on women’s teams in the discussion – that’s the claim. Stupid, isn’t it.
Harper is very comfortable dismissing the possibility of harm to women.
“This idea of a 20 to 30% risk that they floated out, in increased risk, for trans women tackling cisgender women, this was based on cisgender men tackling cis women, and so, it doesn’t apply to trans women,” said Harper. “I would admit that there is probably some theoretical risk of, as a group, of transwoman tackling cis women. However, just talking about that misses a very important point, and that’s that very few tackles in a match in a tournament in the world are made by transwomen. And if you talk about a percentage increase in risk, you shouldn’t be talking about it in terms of tackles, but rather in terms of of matches or tournaments or leagues. And if we look at it in terms of a match, it’s very seldom the case that there’s even one transwoman on the field.”
So it’s okay because it won’t happen all that often. Cool. So then adults should be allowed to play on children’s teams as long as injuries are rare? An occasional broken neck is fine?
“One of the things that we note in that paper is that if you look cross-sectionally at the data, you can see that the trans women in these groups, prior to starting hormone therapy, have substantially reduced strength and muscularity when compared to cisgender males,” she said. “To understand that, you need to go beyond this idea of hormones and to look at the population of trans women. If you look at trans women as a population group, trans women are far more likely to starve themselves so they can look like models than to build muscle. That’s the population they’re studying as opposed to athletic trans women.”
So…these men who say they are women want to look like models? And play rugby? But on the women’s team? And because they starve themselves to look like models they won’t be a risk to women if they force their way onto the women’s teams?
Weird argument.
Also fatuous, because even a very thin man still has the many male physical advantages that make it unfair for him to play on the women’s team.
First, it is lying with statistics to say look at the overall for the increased risk, because what the overall shows us (if we’re honest, and he isn’t) is that women are not at increased risk on teams where there are no transwomen. The proper question to ask is not whether the bulk of the women are at risk from transwomen, but to look at the impact on teams where there are transwomen. No, a transwoman playing on one team is not putting players at risk on teams they never encounter, any more than putting gorillas on male football teams would put men at added risk from gorilla’s additional strength on teams they never encounter. The proper way to look at this is whether the presence of transwomen leads to additional risk for those players they encounter, and it sounds like what the leaders of World Rugby did.
Then there is the nice little shift. Transwomen lose muscle mass compared to cismen. Yeah, so? They are not asking to play on men’s teams, they are asking to play on women’s teams, so the muscle mass needs to be compared to women…and they still have a very distinct advantage.
In addition, a lot of TRAs are asking (oh, forgive me, they are demanding) that the definition of a woman be anyone who claims to be a woman, and they shouldn’t have to undergo hormone treatment or surgery to be considered a woman, because they already are one…and at least some are arguing this is how the sports should be. So it’s disingenuous to claim things based on surgery and hormones when you are screaming for those regulations to be removed. (To be honest, I don’t know if this exact trans woman is demanding that.)
So, according to this argument, there needs to be an upper limit on how many Trans Identified Males are allowed to play women’s rugby. That assumes TWA not W.
@iknklast;
If this particular transgender individual isn’t arguing that regulations should be removed, others will eventually step in. Once TIMs are classified as “a type of woman,” every restriction against their full participation in anything women do will be treated like a Jim Crow law. Because that’s essentially what it would be.
Ratchet ratchet ratchet.
One wonders why men who are apparently physically unsuited to play rugby against stronger men feel they must, at any cost, find a way to play anyway. Just do something else!
This is fabulous:
Rugby players. Did we mention rugby players? These rugby playing trans women would be the not athletic type? That makes zero sense.
It’s so brazen it’s almost funny, isn’t it.
And the whole thing is the camel’s nose under the tent. “But it would be only a tiny number of trans women!!” At first, maybe, but he obviously doesn’t know it would continue to be a tiny number.
As you say, there is also the plainly obvious point that while trans women i.e. men will still be rare in rugby matches, and so the uptick in injuries caused in tackles will be small, that is only true if we take the entire sport as an aggregate. If we look closer, specifically comparing matches that include trans women to matches that have none, we will see more injuries in those matches that include males. And if we look closer still at injuries caused per player, the difference between female and male competitors will be revealed and the obfuscation of zooming out to take the entire sport as an aggregate will be undone.
Worse than this in my mind however, arguments of this type are fundamentally flawed in another way: the argument admits that there is a diminishing return to the successful employment of this argument. That is, if the arguer succeeds in convincing people to let the risk factor take place on the basis that it is tiny, the risk factor increases and is possibly no longer tiny.
In this case, the risk being conceded is that permitting tackles between men and women in rugby will increase the risk of injury to women, but that this should be permitted to increase because that event will be much less frequent than women tackling women in rugby. But if this arguer were to have his way, that frequency would increase and so increasingly undermine the continued applicability of this exact argument.
Over time, “very few tackles in a match in a tournament in the world are made by transwomen” becomes “few tackles in a match in a tournament in the world are made by transwomen” becomes “a moderate number of tackles in a match in a tournament in the world are made by transwomen” and perhaps eventually “quite a few tackles in a match in a tournament in the world are made by transwomen” as teams rush to include more males for competitive advantage. And so the argument collapses, as it is not universally true but only circumstantially true, with the circumstance being the subject that the argument seeks to change.
We see it in other areas too. Conservative governments seek to close abortion providers for generally religious reasons, and one of the arguments they employ is that the measure being introduced won’t end abortion provision, but will merely make it less common; women will still have use of it, but might have to travel further. But if it becomes less common as they intend, they next time they employ the same argument, women are that much closer to being totally denied access to abortions, and the claim that abortions are still available becomes increasingly tenuous; the thing being argued for has undermined the circumstantial dependency of that class or argument.
@Holms,
Of course, if you take that argument to the logical extreme, eventually all players will be transwomen, at which point there will be no danger to “cis” women.
Sigh. Why aren’t people taught risk better in school? I find that few people outside of STEM (and many within it too) just do not understand risk, nor do they understand the difference between the two models
If the probability that a woman is injured in a tackle from a transwoman is 20-30% (as per World Rugby) then the demoninator is the tackle. In Harper’s formulation, it’s more complicated but the answer may not be what she expects.
Let’s propose an imaginary trans woman who had been a short, weedy man and transition made him lose muscle and even bone density to that of a woman’s (unlikely but this is a thought experiment). He’s still going to represent a risk to the women on the field. Because men’s and women’s rugby is played differently. Female physiology means that the style of play involves fewer head on tackles and shoulder tackles, and more tackles from the side. This actually increases the risk of concussion in women’s rugby.
Add our imaginary transwoman playing in a male style would be unpredictable to the women on the team because she would not attempt tackles (and other maneuvers) in the same way. And if she learns the style, she’s still a risk because biomechanical factors mean that women have a higher rotational speed of their head during a tackle. Rotational speed is very, very bad, as you might imagine. And all the hormones in the world won’t change that. Nice paper here
So, yes, the number of transwomen on rugby teams is small right now. Currently the top 30 women in women’s rugby average tens to hundreds of tackles per match. Let’s look at Jess Breach at number 30 in the 2018 Sevens – she made only 60 tackles in that entire tournament. If our imaginary trans woman made a similar number of tackles and taking the low end 20% risk per tackle, that means as many as 12 injuries could result from that tournament. And that is assuming one transwoman in the entire tournament.
Those 12 are excess injuries, i.e. the number of additional injuries incurred by having one transwoman in a tournament who made 60 tackles. The number 1 player by tackles in 2018 was Portia Woodman, who made a whopping 215 tackles. You do the math.
So Harper can go take a long walk off a short pier. Claiming that the risk has to be calculated as a function of number of transwomen in a tournament or league is not helpful to her cause because it underlines the disruption just one transwoman makes to injuries resulting from that tournament.
[…] a comment by Claire on […]
I don’t think most people are taught risk in school at all. I didn’t get exposed until statistics, but I did eventually get some decent training in risk because it is a key factor in environmental science. I try to talk to my students about it; they seem to get it; then they take a test, and they have forgotten everything they understood because they are only exposed to science three hours out of their entire week, and everything else is designed to override what I teach them, and what other science teachers (and statisticians) teach them. And it’s math, so they don’t wanta.
And that right there is the failure of under-18 education on both sides of the Atlantic. I see it when I teach, wide-eyed graduate students wanting to cry because I wrote a simple regression equation on the dry-erase board.
Once a student yelled at me that he didn’t come into biology to do math. I had to stop myself from telling him that maybe he should have gone to law school instead.
Claire, I have a student right now who wants to meet tomorrow about her lab, who I spent an hour with on Friday. There is no regression analysis, just simple addition and division. It involves figuring the cost of meals from the groceries that make the meals. My mother could do that, and she was no great shakes at math. But now, the simplest of math…while we were collecting the data, I tried to walk them through the process of figuring price per pound for something that weighed, say, 13 ounces, and they couldn’t comprehend my explanations. It was…chaotic.
I once had a student drop my class, demanding to know what math had to do with Physical Geography. Uh, Physical Geography is a physical science, and all science is math-based. My students are astonished to discover that in Ecology, the math is more important than tree hugging and smelling the roses; it’s all about statistical probabilities and modeling, and that is nothing but math!
I love statistics, and thrived in multivariate statistics. My students can’t handle basic number line math.
Wow. Where did my blockquote go?
Oh, and one other thing related…the don’t wanta. Nobody asked me when I was a kid if I wanted to learn math, or wanted to learn vocabulary, or wanted to learn how to spell or how to write a complete sentence. They just told me I had to if I wanted to be educated. I guess it’s lucky for me I wanted to, but I know a lot of friends who didn’t want to and did it anyway.
Now we treat education as a consumer product, and it’s “what they want”. A lot of educational research is the biggest pile of stinking manure you could imagine, but it’s shoved at me as the “best way to do education”. And when I go to the original studies they are poorly done, not robust, minuscule effect sizes, and sometimes don’t even have results that match the conclusions. But in the end, it comes down to, but this is what the students want, so it is best practices. I was, seriously, told this summer that we should be allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge of mitosis using interpretive dance. Uh, I think not. There are a lot of good measures for teaching mitosis and assessing knowledge of it; interpretive dance is not one of them.
(Where your blockquote went – you accidentally put a / at the beginning as well as the end, which I guess = zero.)
Thanks, Ophelia. You do manage to save us from ourselves a lot, don’t you?
In a contact sport, damage is done by energy. Energy is potential energy (PE) and kinetic energy (KE).
Potential energy is mgh (mass x gravity x height). Mass is proportional to volume and volume is proportional to the cube of height. So we have m ~ h^3 and PE ~ h^4.
Kinetic energy is 1/2 mv^2 (one half mass x velocity squared). Velocity is proportional to height, so we have KE ~ h^5.
Men average 10% taller than women (70″ vs 64″). Plugging in the numbers, we get 43% more PE and 56% more KE for men than women.
What’s more, the human body is right on the cusp of being able to withstand the forces created by its own size and mass (it is forced to that point by evolution).
When I was in 6th grade (12 years old), we played a minimally structured game called “kill the carrier”. One boy grabs the ball and runs; all the others chase after him and tackle him. When he’s on the ground, he throws the ball in the air. Another boy catches the ball and runs–lather, rinse, repeat.
The following year (7th grade) some of the boys tried to keep playing the game, but after just a few weeks one of them ended up on the bottom of the pile with a broken ankle.
In the months from May to September, their bodies had grown too big to play a game like that without breaking bones. And that is exactly the time at which boys are growing bigger
than girls.
The differences that Harper is trying to minimize and dismiss are large and significant. They are the differences between bruises and fractures.
@Steven You’re not wrong about the physics but it’s not that simple. Biomechanically and physiologically, men and women are built differently. A man and a woman of the exact same weight and height are not identical. The distribution of weight in different tissues makes an enormous difference. Men typically have a higher bone density than women. They have larger skulls. They’re able to increase upper body strength more easily than women. Their muscle bulk builds more easily. Hormone use reduces that but does not change a male body completely to resemble a woman’s physiology.
This is an important factor missed in arguments about splitting sports by weight class instead of sex. It doesn’t matter how much a male falls within the distribution of height and weight, even if he is exactly the same as an average woman by weight and height, he will fall in the lower tail of the distribution of risk because of the factors I’ve mentioned above.
World Rugby is really in the crosshairs now, and some prominent female rugby players are not helping in the least talking about ‘confidence in their skill set’. This step is not even particularly relevant to men’s rugby, but it is existential for women’s rugby.