In accordance with their expressed gender identity
We can add US Rowing to the list.
Replies are incensed. Not a single “Yay great inclusive awesome yay” to be seen.
Tip Jar
We can add US Rowing to the list.
Replies are incensed. Not a single “Yay great inclusive awesome yay” to be seen.
Rowing. Another sport that gives a huge advantage to upper body musculature – an area where men have a distinct advantage over women.
And since they don’t require any sort of medical intervention, only the say so of the bloke with the beard, it will be fully intact biological males outrowing the females.
So much for the argument that undergoing hormone therapy lowers testosterone, or that the athlete is no longer able to compete with males because of medical interventions. Nope, don’t need any of that. Men, jump right in, pretend you’re women long enough to win trophies, championships, and scholarships, and break world records. Once that’s done, you can go right back to being male, because you won’t have changed anything. You still have all your male bits.
Women, prepare to become secondary in your own sport.
The University of Washington proudly, and rightfully, boasts of having one of the top women’s rowing teams in the nation. Each woman on that team has damned well earned her place. Are we now saying goodbye to all of that?
Bloody hell, a sport that relies massively on leverage and strength. Males who have gone through puberty will have an enormous advantage, regardless of any testosterone suppression.
iknklast, while rowers do have good upper body strength, the real power comes from the legs. Lots of rowers cross train on road cycling.
Yes. And you’ll be happy about it, or else.
Rowing is a brutal sport, in the sense that the athletes often suffer multiple health issues, for years. Any woman who has made it to the elite levels has undergone years of painful training and competition. To have all that basically erased by some faceless committee is an incredible insult. As clamboy said: Each woman on that team has damned well earned her place.
Rowing is not only a brutal sport, but a very precise one. Competing at the same distances, with the same equipment, in the same conditions, over and over and over again, allows us to see with precision exactly what position in the men’s rankings a cheater in the women’s rankings would have. A competitive men’s time in a 2K, for example, would be a full minute faster than a women’s (i.e. 6:12 vs. 7:12).
The other, very important thing to consider about rowing is the status of women’s rowing at the collegiate level: there are more women’s teams than men’s, almost three times as many, and rowing offers more collegiate scholarships for women than any other sport. It’s one of the sports that was used to balance out participation.
Those two factors should make women’s rowing an enticing target for the male cheater: a mediocre men’s rower can easily win a free ride to college.
It’s getting harder to imagine how any parent could feel excited about competitive girls’ sports. I expect we’ll have a decade or so where there aren’t really any competitive girls’ sports, because there will be boys in all of them. The podiums will be all trans, with the girl part of the team just along for the ride, and visual support.
It’s really a mens’ backlash, isn’t it? Back in the day, sports were almost all for boys. Then those do-gooder feminists butted in and made legislation like Title IX, which said that it’s unfair for schools to spend so much more on boys’ sports than girls’, and money piled into girls’ sports, as boys’ sports were cut. Now the men strike back – taking girls’ sports away from the inside.
Once one girls’ boat has guys on it, the others will need them too to keep up. A wise college will earmark its girls’ rowing scholarships for beefy troons, in the name of winning.
A book I read about the mess that is US college sports had a section talking about Title IX. School athletic departments had “interesting” ways of dealing with the requirements of proportional access and funding. A number of low-visibility men’s sports (gymnastics, fencing) got cut or changed to clubs. And women’s sports were added. Rowing, in particular, was added, even in schools that were not located on a major river or lake. Just women’s rowing. It’s a sport that enrolls a large number of women, it doesn’t require a lifetime of prior skill, and it costs a fair amount of money, so the schools can show how much they are investing in women’s sports. There are now a number of inland schools that have women’s rowing teams of recent vintage (within the last few decades) that have no men’s teams, and some of them travel a fair distance to get to open water.
This history makes the US Rowing decision even more strange, to me.
Rob, I did some rowing on a calm lake, just a bit because the teenage crew I was supervising wanted to show off. But I did row for some minutes. My whole body hurt for two days. Of course, that could have been more the effect of digging rushes out of the lake and lifting them into a boat more than it was the rowing.
Bewildering that in the same document, they could still have the Mixed category. WTF is the point?
Oh iknklast I feel your pain. Rowing is fantastic whole body exercise. I tried out for a university team decades ago but the ‘social’ grade was practise for 3 hours five mornings a week with competition on Saturday’s. I knew people who did it competitively and two friends kids did it as well. As Papito notes, it’s a precision sport as well as a power sport. A very good women’s team might beat a very poor mans team, but it’s a ‘might’. Any given male with acceptable technique will beat a women of comparable fitness hands down.
What’s insulting is that when it comes to mixed fours (two men, two women), trans women can’t qualify as women. So USRowing knows what a woman is, but shows it cares more about the competition being fair for men than it does for women. If there’s a woman or women rowers who elect to sue USRowing for discrimination, I will be happy to help fund their legal costs.
JA – exactly. How on earth they can see that as logical is beyond me. Able to compete as a woman in the women’s category, but not compete as a woman in the mixed category – I don’t see a possible interpretation different from your own. They have conceded the argument, but gone ahead and done it anyway.
JA, Naif, that may be why it took them eight months to come up with a policy a child could have written in twenty minutes. It sure wasn’t because they were trying to protect women’s sports. (I do concede that there may have been some members wanting to protect women’s sports, but my experience is that those are shouted down quickly.)