You call that fairness and safety?
USA Boxing to allow transgender women to compete against female boxers under certain conditions from 2024 after introducing new policy
That is, USA Boxing to allow men to punch women.
USA Boxing has adopted a ‘Transgender Policy’, which will allow male boxers who transition to fight in the female category from 2024.
One, it’s unfair, and two, it’s dangerous.
But it’s only unfair to women and dangerous to women, so it doesn’t matter.
USA Boxing announced the policy on Friday, saying in a statement: ‘The purpose of this policy is to provide fairness and safety for all boxers.’
Bullshit. That policy can’t possibly provide either fairness or safety for women boxers.
The administrators of combat sports need to be safety safety minded, more than any other category.
I can imagine most women refusing to participate in this bullshit. It’s sickening.
You’d think this is something that would never had to be said (because it would never be true). And yet we live in a world where we have to say it. And we are going to need to say it again and again.
Satire from The Babylon Bee (Dec 6, 2023)
Look on Youtube: there are plenty of videos showing women being smashed by men in various martial arts, to the undisguised glee of the male narrators as well as of the male commenters.
^ A growing youtube genre. Videos are often titled “Arrogant Karen gets humbled” and similar, putting the blame on the woman.
Yes, it’s combat sports, but there are also weight classes, so you’re not going to get giant men dominating smaller women as we’ve seen in cycling, weightlifting, rugby, etc. They’ll be almost exactly the same weight. They’re also only allowing post-op trans women with controlled hormone levels.
There is almost certainly still an advantage even with all that, and probably a large one. In the past I’ve said it should be up to women in these sports if they want to go against trans women. I’m disappointed to see that was allegedly the policy in a recent martial arts tournament where women pulled out, saying it was not being treated as optional for them. That is disgusting.
Maybe you could only allow trans women to fight a weight class or two up? But, I don’t know, this is starting to get ridiculous. How many trans boxers are there? If it’s hardly any, then I think it’s just a shame they don’t have a place. We can add “not naturally a women” to “not naturally athletic”, etc., as a reason why women’s sports isn’t for some people.
If there are a whole bunch of them, then they can fight each other. They can regulate their own fights, and we can all enjoy the spectacle of burly pre-op trans women complaining they should be able to fight trans women who have been been on puberty blockers since 11 and had their testicles removed at 16.
A couple other thoughts:
This is amateur boxing, not pro boxing, so they’re wearing headgear and have other protections.
I almost wonder if the policy is their attempt to effectively circumvent the pro-trans stuff the IOC, etc., is pushing on them while pretending to comply. You have to have been post-op and have been on hormones with documented low testosterone for 4 years. You also have to be over 18. So who is going to apply to?
If you have some 20-year-old boxer, is he going to put his career on hold for 4 years to do this? And all that to return to amateur boxing with no opportunity to go pro? I guess maybe, if they think they can get an Olympic gold medal out of it (but better time it right, as if they start right after one Olympics, they’re effectively out 8 years).
It seems unlikely that a 16-year-old would get castrated and start on hormones looking to hit the Olympics at age 20. Probably very few cases of people doing this just to score a gold medal. So probably would apply more to boys who really think they’re girls rather than boys looking to cheat. How many of those people are there who are also interested in boxing? Probably not many.
So while this policy is not good, I think it’s going to have the effect of screening out almost all men who’d like to try women’s boxing.
Better to just ban them, but maybe they felt their hands were tied, and they figured this was the next best thing.
Skeletor, thanks for voicing a lot of my thoughts on this. In particular, the weight-class division aspect. As you note, it’s probably not enough to be definitive, but it may be enough to prevent the kinds of travesties we’ve seen in swimming, etc.
@Skeletor #7 and #8
Why all this hand-wringing about what criteria should be used to allow men to compete against women? Men shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports, full stop. There is absolutely and utterly no reason to allow it under any circumstances. The men who call themselves trans women have a perfectly good men’s division to compete in, just as they have always had. Get out of “angels dancing on the head of a pin” territory, and simply keep women’s sports for women. Men have plenty. Women’s sports are fewer, with less money already. Don’t let men cheat and steal what little women have been able to win in the last 50 years.
So cheating is fine as long as it’s not too many. What’s your number then? How many women are you willing to lose to cheating men before you say “Hang on, that’s too many!” Shall we apply this “a ittle bit of cheating is fine” principal across all sports, and let a few dopers and game-throwers have their way? Shell we return Lance Armstrong’s titles to him? And Ben Johnson’s Olympic gold? Sounds like you’d be fine with that. If not, wht not?
Skeletor, even controlling for height and weight the male retains an advantage in musculature. The match is still rigged. Looking for all these arcane ways to counter the advantage of being male can be solved by one much simpler balancing rule: have male fighters only fight other male competitors. No faffing about with trying to quantify the percentages here and there with oddball handicaps – men can fight women that weight 7.5 kg more than them, or if he has weights on his arms to slow his punches down, or is not permitted to initiate grapples – this is just an exercise in avoiding the problem by stacking half and quarter measures.
The problem is that humans have sexual dimorphism, and so sex is the criterion that must be addressed. I wouldn’t even bother asking the women if they are open to letting men into their league, as this makes it an active decision on the part of the female competitors and hence turns public opprobrium on them should they say no. As you note, the women will likely report the same as you’ve seen with taht martial arts tournament – pressure will be applied to the women. The sports administrators need to grow a fucking spine and make a goddamn competition that is fair to the women – which can only be done by barring men.
I must take issue with one thing you said.
Trans women do have a place – the male/open division.
Some sports have weight classes. I am leery of introducing weight classes (or height classes or whatever) into sports that don’t have them simply to paper over the idea of men competing against women. Women’s basketball is not the same thing as “short people’s basketball”; a tall woman should be able to compete in the women’s league, a short man should not. A large woman can compete in women’s rugby; a slight man cannot. Safety and competitive fairness of the sport itself is only part of reason for the existence of women’s sports, and those other reasons (opportunity, anti-discrimination, encouragement) have not gone away.
Sackbut, that is exactly it. First of all, as mentioned above, even with weight classes, men retain an advantage. Also, even slight, short men have dicks they could swing around in women’s faces unasked when they are naked together in the locker room. If they have them cut off, well, they still have eyes to ogle naked women. The reality is that women need these spaces, apart from men, that are theirs. Men have had that forever, and still do have it, even if they pretend they don’t. There are still men’s clubs, such as the Masons, that don’t admit women. And there are women’s clubs associated with some of them (such as the Masons) that require men to be present at every meeting.
The deck is stacked against women, and weight classes won’t restack it to their favor, or even to equity.
Trans identified males fail to meet the first and most basic requirement to compete in sports leagues intended for girls and women; they are not female. Nothing can change that, and screwing around with irrelevant issues like weight or testosterone levels does nothing to change that brute fact. To nonetheless continue banging on about “inclusion” just shows what little regard for women those who do so have. All this does is pander to these men who claim to be women. That the procedures and “treatments” they’ve submitted themselves to render them unable to make the cut in men’s sports is not anyone else’s problem. Nobody is under any obligation to fix this non-issue; that’s on them and their own decisions about their personal “gender journeys.” No woman should be required to give way to any man who has chosen to do this to themselves; reduced athletic performance is one of the destinations of that journey. They should have read the fine print in the brochure before they booked their tickets.
It is disgusting that sports administrators are so eager to create special, custom loopholes in order to force these men into women’s sports as some sort of twisted consolation prize for their own choices. Men can never be women, and they should never been allowed to participate in women’s sports. “Inclusion” is bullshit; they never belonged in the first place, and no amount of drugs, hormones or surgery can change that. If these men love physical activity so much, there’s nothing to stop them from finding an activity to enjoy on an amateur level where they can make the cut alongside men, or pursue on an individual, non-competitive basis. But somehow, removing the possibility of winning in the women’s division is “bigotry” and “transphobia” and any attempts to keep women’s sports for women only are dutifully, and inaccurately, portrayed in the media as across the board “bans” on trangender athletes. Nope, just a ban on men in women’s sports. Sounds obvious when you put it that way, which is why transactivists are always desperate to avoid truthful, plain language. It also shows how much we have been ill served by captured media, which goes along with the activists’ con job.
If these individuals can’t handle the fact that they are men and will always be men, and that they are not women and can never be women, that’s their problem, not ours. That they’ve been able to turn this into something that anyone takes seriously is more a measure of the power of male entitlement than the justice and truth in their “cause.” Rather than forcing their way onto women’s sports teams where they aren’t wanted and don’t belong, they should be finding good therapists who can lead them towards a healthy self-acceptance that lies within the bounds of material reality.