As long as she meets
Yup yup yup that’s all fine, this mediocre male swimmer can pretend to be a woman and compete against women so that he won’t be mediocre any more, no problem whatsoever. Nobody will be harmed except women so full speed ahead guys.
Penn swimmer Lia Thomas will be allowed to compete at the 2022 women’s swimming and diving championships as long as she meets the NCAA’s current testosterone thresholds.
This despite the fact that everyone knows testosterone is not like a lamp or a food processor – it doesn’t just stop when you switch it off. Most of the benefits of male puberty are permanent, and women don’t have them. The NCAA knows this, so it’s just saying “Fuck women, we don’t care.”
They only make a big deal about testosterone because it’s the one thing they can at least make a gesture towards changing. You can’t swap out a higher-capacity male heart for a smaller female one. Same for the lungs. You can’t have your optimized-for-running male pelvis and hipbones reconfigured to the optimized-for-baby-delivery female kind. You can’t strip your entire skeleton of the fast, dense male muscle mass that coats it and lay down female muscle in its place. You just can’t make a male body female.
Ophelia,
While of course you’re right, I fear that TRAs will take our words and say: “Aha, this is why it’s so crucial to make sure that TiM kids won’t go through male puberty — that way, they won’t develop secondary sex characteristics and strength that disqualify them from the female sports where they belong!” Scary thought.
Artymorty,
You could do a transplant. Maybe that will be the next trans surgery thing.
Arty – or to put it another way, because they know it’s the one thing that won’t make any real difference. It’s the one thing they can tweak, and because it is, it doesn’t make enough difference to matter, so they still get to cheat. It’s so infuriating.
@3: Good point.
If gender-affirming heart and lung transplants become a thing, it will probably be among non-athletes. Still a horrifying idea.
Penn swimmer William Thomas will be allowed to cheat at the 2022 women’s swimming and diving championships as long as he meets the NCAA’s current testosterone thresholds.
So it looks as though they’re setting the limit 2-5 times higher than the typical female range and at the same limit that would be the maximum for a woman to avoid a doping charge. All while ignoring that the advantages of much higher testosterone have already been embedded by male puberty as others have noted. Nice way to treat women with contempt.
GW@2
Sounds disturbingly reminiscent of the creation of castrato singers.
@8 — quite.
Incidentally, in 2008 I read the following in M. M. McLaughlin’s article “Abelard as Autobiographer”, note 17: “A similar case of castration, with psychological symptoms very much like those displayed by Abelard, is discussed by S. Ferenczi, Further Contributions to the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1927), p. 78 ff. On this problem, see also Misch, III, 553, and note 85, citing a recent medical opinion that this trauma would, ‘in all psychological probability’, gravely undermine the emotional life and intensify any depressive, hypochondriac, or other neurotic tendencies.”
Little did I imagine, in my worst nightmares, that just a few short years later, there would be whole groups advocating to perform such procedures on thousands of little boys.
Sackbut:@ #8:
Precisely. Have a listen to the renowned Alessadro Moreschi singing ‘Ave Maria.’ At a guess, I would say that the permission of the boy sopranos lined up by eager family and promoters to become castrati was not sought before their testicles were removed.
It was fashionable to prefer listening to them in preference to coloratura sopranos, the nearest female alternative.. That I would guess was because good boy sopranos were more readily available than were good coloraturas. I also read somewhere that women averse to getting pregnant sought castrati for lovers and husbands; I would guess because the sex act could go on and on without their male partner climaxing, and if they wanted children, there were plenty of eager studs available. (It was, after all, Mediaeval Italy.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjvfqnD0ws
Omar@11
If I recall correctly, castrato singers were described as having a strong and (ironically?) virile sound. Opera roles written for them were male characters. Some countertenors can cover some of those roles, and there are a very few male natural sopranos, but often enough the roles are transposed and sung by a tenor, or else sung by a woman. Also, the music for these roles imply that the castrato range extended toward the bottom of the tenor register, lower than coloratura sopranos typically are capable of singing. I mention all this to say that castrati were not interchangeable with coloraturas, but had a different place in the musical world.
I am informed that countertenors are mainly natural baritones singing falsetto; in my book the classic modern example being Alfred Deller. Link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trOXaDeFeD4
Let’s say they divide all classes into various testosterone levels, and completely eliminate sexed divisions. In this scenario, if the current rules against doping applied, Willy would still be competing against other males. What about weight classes? Height classes? Adam’s apple classes? On and on ad absurdum.
For those who missed it on April Fools’ Day 2014:
…the surgical solution was surprisingly unpopular with the choral scholars….
What is the NCAA threshold? I have not found one in the current rules, or any requirement for regular or random testing. Just “one year of hormone supressing medication”.
Omar@13
Most of the countertenors I knew were tenors who developed their falsetto, but it’s complicated; there are vocal production techniques that may or may not be falsetto, and people disagree about it. Not all countertenors are falsettists. Deller was a groundbreaking singer, as was Russell Oberlin. Look up James Bowman, Steven Rickard, or Andreas Scholl for some other examples.
twiliter@14
The classes would still disadvantage women, because they measure things like height and weight, not all the various other metrics that illustrate the advantages of androgenization.
Let’s remember, too, that crawling through the weeds about male performance advantage is sidestepping the main reason women’s sports exist: to provide sports for women, not to provide sports for people with smaller frames and lower lung capacity and all that. The performance difference is part of the rationale, but not all of it.
But, of course, if any of the women have trimetazidine in their systems, they are banned from swimming.
@Sackbut #18 – just think how much money athletic departments could have saved if only a Supreme Court case had ruled that women are not disadvantaged in sports, they “just need to try to harder” and struck down Title IX.