Self-congratulation is it?
Man who identifies as woman says it’s all a big mistake.
Those who support these moves sometimes argue that segregation between trans and cisgender women in sports is regrettable, but necessary for fairness.
It’s not “segregation.” That’s a loaded word in this context, and it’s not the right one in any case. Women and men are already separate categories – women and men. That’s not “segregation,” it’s reality.
Also, I don’t say keeping men out of women’s sports is regrettable. I don’t think it’s the least bit regrettable; what’s regrettable is not doing that. What’s regrettable is letting William Thomas and Rhys McKinnon steal all those wins from women.
They argue that the performance gap is so large that a cisgender woman would be unlikely to ever win against a trans woman.
No, that’s not what I argue. There’s no such thing as “cis women” for a start. I note that men have massive physical advantages over women, and the rest follows from that.
Fina argues that they have found an approach that “emphasis[es] competitive fairness”. But this can only be true if you ignore that trans women like Thomas will now be required to race against men with whom they could never effectively compete.
Tough. shit. They decided to “transition”; it’s their problem. It’s certainly not the problem of the women they want to compete against. Women don’t exist to take the consequences of men’s mistakes.
Any suggestion that it’s fairer for Thomas, an elite athlete before and after her transition, to compete with men who win with times 25 seconds faster than her, than for her to compete with women who are behind by a second, is a farce. It can only be justified by arguing that trans women have no right to expect competitive fairness at all.
Trans women put themselves in a bind by transitioning. They’ve been dealing with it by cheating women. There’s nothing fair about that. I really don’t care whether or not they can compete in the future. I don’t think it’s important.
The comments of Fina representatives are full of self-congratulation. They call the move “only a first step towards full inclusion”, “comprehensive, science-based and inclusive”, and say that it “protect[s] competitive fairness”. But these claims are false.
Wait til you hear the claims of trans women!
The awkward facts are that Thomas was not an elite athlete before transition (462nd ranking), and was not one second ahead of the opposing women after.
@1: Is he 25 seconds slower than he was before he started doping?
I think Will Thomas counted as elite, in the sense that top college swimmers count as elite, even if they are not the ones to vie for a World Championship. In 2018, Thomas won the 1000 free in a dual meet in an impressive time, breaking his personal best and the pool record and moving from 7th to 4th in the Ivy League rankings. That’s not small potatoes.
https://swimswam.com/will-thomas-sets-pool-record-penn-hosts-west-chester/
Gee, it sounds almost like he is admitting men have a physical advantage over women. Who would have thought?
Where are all the trans men crushing records in men’s events?
At what point in “transition” does one become “a woman”? There must be some sort of cut-off.
As of today, each time I am accused of transphobia, I shall reply with “You do realise I’m trans.”
iknklast @ 4
It really does, doesn’t it? Reminds me of a joke:
Judge: Do you wish to be tried by me, or by a jury of your peers?
Defendant: By you, Your Honor; I’d rather not be judged by a bunch of thieves.
What amazing tone deafness!
It’s fascinating how the trans subject seems to limit people’s ability to reason from known implication. Of course, there’re also people who are just plain misogynists, but I’m more interested in how people who aren’t shit can fall for this rhetoric.
Your average progressive reading this argument will not perform the mental calculation that goes from “women who are behind by a second,” to “Thomas is only a second faster than the fastest woman,” to “that’s unfair to the fastest woman.” Never mind reasoning that if he’s faster than the fastest woman, than he’s faster than every woman, and if he’s faster than all women, then that’s unfair to every woman. (To an extent, even many those on the sane side of this are also lax, because if he’s faster than even one woman, then it’s unfair to that woman. That should be enough to warrant no change; i.e., no male inclusion.) Correct me if I’m wrong, but “every woman” is more than “Lia Thomas”, right?
I’ve talked to people like this. The fairness question was at first entirely focused on the “poor transwoman”. (The way this mental construct hinders right thinking is makes a good case for not complying with any of this Orwellian language.) Shifting focus to the women (and girls) to whom including a sex-confused male would be unfair got me a depressingly familiar reaction. Most here have seen it online if not in person. It’s what happens when a theist encounters a substantive challenge to his or her faith claims: temporary shutdown, then floundering in cognitive dissonance.
When women make this argument the other way round, we’re told that winning isn’t everything, life’s not fair, and they just need to try harder.
Suck it up, Buttercups.
Similarly, the TRA’s always argue that transgender people are the tiniest, smallest, most abused minority on earth, and hence deserve special treatment and everyone else bending over backwards to accommodate them, and then practically in the same breath declare very loudly that “at least one in every 1000 births is a transgender person!” by conflating developmental disorders with “true transgenderism”–and of course, this by way of demanding access to opposite-sex private spaces and sports because they claim to be ubiquitous.
You can’t have it both ways, TRA’s. Pick an argument and stick with it. You’ll still be wrong, but you’ll at least be consistent.
Re: ‘conflating developmental disorders with “true transgenderism” ‘: and conflating transvestites and gender non-conforming people of any description whatsoever with “true transgenderism”. Anything to inflate the numbers, widen the umbrella.
Sort of like religions. Like, they still count me a member of my church, though no one there knows who I am because I haven’t been there since I was eleven. Like Tom Flynn, who tried to get excommunicated, but the Catholic Church overlooked his mortal sin of blaspheming the Holy Ghost in order to keep their numbers up. Like the Mormons, who baptize dead people.
And like the pollsters, who inflate the numbers of ‘scientists’ who believe in God by polling an organization that includes people who aren’t scientists but just contributors, and by including high school science teachers, many of whom had only the barest bones of science in college. I’ve talked to many a science teacher who tells me “oh, it’s so nice to talk to an actual scientist. I never quite knew what I was doing while I was teaching!” (I have a friend with a degree in English Lit who was put into teaching Physics after the school district had to reinstate him because the courts didn’t agree his being HIV positive was a good reason to fire him…they didn’t have any English classes needing teachers).
Yes, just another way in which they are like religion