Transgender Thread.

  • Thread starter Com Fox
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How many Genders do you think exist?

  • 2 (Male and Female)

    Votes: 207 49.5%

  • 3 (Male, Female and Intersex)

    Votes: 18 4.3%

  • More than 3

    Votes: 50 12.0%

  • Don't care

    Votes: 143 34.2%
  • Total voters
    418
Exorcet
Male/female classification is flawed anyway because within the male/female categories things can be just as unbalanced as male vs female. It's why there are weight classes in some sports. I think this has come up before in this thread.
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Would be interesting to see different height classes for basketball. Imagine a basketball league made up of people under 5'5".
 
Dennisch
"And that is a BRILLIANT touching of the net by player A!!"
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i
 
Exorcet
Alternatively just drop the entire male/female thing and come up with a score that rates biological ability. People with similar scores are put in the same class no matter their sex. Male/female classification is flawed anyway because within the male/female categories things can be just as unbalanced as male vs female. It's why there are weight classes in some sports. I think this has come up before in this thread.
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RESHIRAM5
If only we could go this approach. Granted might be more difficult in established team sports. (I have no idea how something like Soccer could do away with the outdated Male/Female system). But individual sports can definitely go this route
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I have no idea what possible selection criteria could be devised to make mixed individual sports fair. Take something like weight lifting - you'd end up with 150kg+ females going up against males under 67kg. It would look utterly absurd.

Mixed gender individual athletic sports would become a joke.

"We welcome you to the Olympic 100m mixed gender Group 23 final. Lined up on track now are the 6 fastest women in the world and 4 below average men who are not as fast as the men in the Group 22 final coming up later. Enjoy!"..........Followed much later in the event by:

"We welcome you to the Olympic 100m mixed gender Group 1 final. Lined up on track now are the 10 fastest men in the world. Enjoy!"

Interest would eventually focus only on the fully open category - "the best of the best" - who would all be male. Females in elite sport would be finished.
 
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Daz555
Exorcet
Alternatively just drop the entire male/female thing and come up with a score that rates biological ability. People with similar scores are put in the same class no matter their sex. Male/female classification is flawed anyway because within the male/female categories things can be just as unbalanced as male vs female. It's why there are weight classes in some sports. I think this has come up before in this thread.
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It's different for every sport. There are some sports where women are nearly as good as men, and in some very specific kinds of endurance tests they might even be better. But in many sports, the differences are huge, and sometimes extremely obvious. It's why I brought the basketball example up, because women hardly even exist that are tall enough to be in the same height class as men.

Height is not really any kind of an advantage in sprinting though, so there's no need to adjust for that in that sport. And as you get to longer and longer distance running, the male and female groups come closer and closer to each other in capability.

The adjustment would look different for volleyball than for shot put, and different for hurdles than for swimming.
 
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Danoff
It's different for every sport. There are some sports where women are nearly as good as men, and in some very specific kinds of endurance tests they might even be better. But in many sports, the differences are huge, and sometimes extremely obvious. It's why I brought the basketball example up, because women hardly even exist that are tall enough to be in the same height class as men.

Height is not really any kind of an advantage in sprinting though, so there's no need to adjust for that in that sport. And as you get to longer and longer distance running, the male and female groups come closer and closer to each other in capability.

The adjustment would look different for volleyball than for shot put, and different for hurdles than for swimming.
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The only notable example I could find in endurance sports where females have a consistent advantage was in endurance swimming (especially in cold water). The other endurance area where women certainly compete with and beat men fairly regularly is in the sport of ultramarathons.
 
Daz555
I have no idea what possible selection criteria could be devised to make mixed individual sports fair. Take something like weight lifting - you'd end up with 150kg+ females going up against males under 67kg. It would look utterly absurd.
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One simple one could be past performance. In last year's competition Man A lifted 150 lbs, and so did Woman B. They'd be in the same class. I'm sure the ranking process could be a lot more complicated, but I don't know exactly what it would consist of. It would likely take a few iterations to get right.

If the competition looks different than it does with the traditional male/female divide, that's fine. It's not supposed to produce a certain look, but maximize the field of competition.
Daz555
Mixed gender individual athletic sports would become a joke.

"We welcome you to the Olympic 100m mixed gender Group 23 final. Lined up on track now are the 6 fastest women in the world and 4 below average men who are not as fast as the men in the Group 22 final coming up later. Enjoy!"..........Followed much later in the event by:

"We welcome you to the Olympic 100m mixed gender Group 1 final. Lined up on track now are the 10 fastest men in the world. Enjoy!"

Interest would eventually focus only on the fully open category - "the best of the best" - who would all be male. Females in elite sport would be finished.
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Wouldn't that be the case now then? Just about every sport has leagues or tiers or classes less than "the best". What is touted as the highest level of competition is often more popular sure, but the "lower" levels still managed to survive for a variety of reasons. When it comes to male vs female performance, that would vary by sport anyway.
 
Exorcet
Wouldn't that be the case now then? Just about every sport has leagues or tiers or classes less than "the best". What is touted as the highest level of competition is often more popular sure, but the "lower" levels still managed to survive for a variety of reasons. When it comes to male vs female performance, that would vary by sport anyway.
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In a mixed gender sports world, the top tier in just about every athletic sport anyone can name would end up being reserved for males only. Females would effectively be barred forever from the elite level - and the riches it offers. We'd never have got to see the greatness of Serena Williams for example - she would have simply spent her career lost to us - scrapping about among the ranks of the male players ranked outside the top 800, never qualifying for any Grand Slam tournament.

And those lower levels would also be dominated by males. There are 92 professional male football teams in England and 12 professional female teams. Do you think for a moment any of those females from the 12 clubs makes into any of the 104 professional teams in a mixed gender sports world?
 
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Daz555
We'd never have got to see the greatness of Serena Williams for example - she would have simply spent her career lost to us
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While I definitely see the point of losing females on top competitive sports as it could be hard to maintain a gender neutral field (also given its hard for Women leagues to pick off the ground in the first place). Given the old situation with Williams and that one Ref, I don't think specifically that, is a loss.
 
Daz555
In a mixed gender sports world, the top tier in just about every athletic sport anyone can name would end up being reserved for males only. Females would effectively be barred forever from the elite level - and the riches it offers. We'd never have got to see the greatness of Serena Williams for example - she would have simply spent her career lost to us - scrapping about among the ranks of the male players ranked outside the top 800, never qualifying for any Grand Slam tournament.
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Agreed.

For now, there does seem to be wide social interest in seeing individuals who went through puberty as females compete against others from that category to see who is the best. I don't really see anything wrong with that either.

The interest is not based on whether someone feels internally like a woman, or wants the world to call them a woman, or anything to do with how they view themselves or want others to view them at all. The interest is based on the physiology. I think the broad social interest is not in seeing individuals who went through puberty as males compete against individuals who went through puberty as females unless it makes no difference in the sport.

What I'm saying is that the appeal of female sports does not appear to be met by including transgender women in them. Nor does the appeal of male sports appear to be met by including transgender men in them, though the presumption is that they would generally be at a disadvantage.

Where does this leave transgender female athletes? A tough spot. Not generally well received in female sports, and due to hormone therapy, likely less competitive in male sports. But there are many disadvantages that athletes voluntarily give themselves so that they can participate in other aspects of their lives.

Danoff
Here's me speculating for a moment... the market demand doesn't exist because we want to see who is the best among the people consider themselves to be stereotypically female in attitude and personality. The market demand for female sports exists because we want to see who is the best among the people who are of a female body. And you have to go through puberty as a female to get one.
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Danoff
Would be interesting to see different height classes for basketball. Imagine a basketball league made up of people under 5'5".
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It would be crazy fast, dripping in epic ball handling, and incredibly athletic. There wouldn't be a shortage of awesome dunks either.
 
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Daz555
It would be crazy fast, dripping in epic ball handling, and incredibly athletic. There wouldn't be a shortage of awesome dunks either.
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Quite possible that it would be gender-agnostic in terms of ability as well. If you had a 5' 5" league, would women be on equal footing with men? I honestly do not know the answer. Basketball is an interesting combination of athletic abilities. The went-through-puberty-as-male group might be able to out-jump the went-through-puberty-as-female group slightly due to fast-twitch muscle fiber, but then they might lose out on endurance, or possibly even clear-headed accuracy.

I'd be interested to find out though!


Edit: The went-through-puberty-as-female group would have sheer numbers on their hands for this one. There are way more people that fit that description and end up under 5'5". That means probably a larger talent pool to choose from, and more likely to get a 6-sigma athlete.
 
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Daz555
In a mixed gender sports world, the top tier in just about every athletic sport anyone can name would end up being reserved for males only. Females would effectively be barred forever from the elite level - and the riches it offers. We'd never have got to see the greatness of Serena Williams for example - she would have simply spent her career lost to us - scrapping about among the ranks of the male players ranked outside the top 800, never qualifying for any Grand Slam tournament.
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There is nothing stopping us from having multiple classification systems. You could have male/female/open divisions simultaneously. As for women being lost in the ranks in open sports, I'm not sure if that is destined to happen. They might be out of running for the top spot but there might still be interest in seeing how far they could go.
Daz555
And those lower levels would also be dominated by males. There are 92 professional male football teams in England and 12 professional female teams. Do you think for a moment any of those females from the 12 clubs makes into any of the 104 professional teams in a mixed gender sports world?
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I don't know, but I think numbers are playing as much of a role here as biological ability. If there is less interest in sports among women there is probably less chance of finding all the talent among women. I wonder if open competitions might end up balancing the divide and pulling the average performance of women a little higher. Or maybe it would do the opposite, I'm just thinking out loud.
 
Danoff
Quite possible that it would be gender-agnostic in terms of ability as well. If you had a 5' 5" league, would women be on equal footing with men? I honestly do not know the answer. Basketball is an interesting combination of athletic abilities. The went-through-puberty-as-male group might be able to out-jump the went-through-puberty-as-female group slightly due to fast-twitch muscle fiber, but then they might lose out on endurance, or possibly even clear-headed accuracy.

I'd be interested to find out though!


Edit: The went-through-puberty-as-female group would have sheer numbers on their hands for this one. There are way more people that fit that description and end up under 5'5". That means probably a larger talent pool to choose from, and more likely to get a 6-sigma athlete.
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I think it would be male dominated regardless. In the West we think of men having an average height of 5'9" or even more. Much of the planet is very different with average heights in males far closer and even below 5'5".

So I think males would still dominate a 5'5" or below mixed gender basketball league but that the best players would perhaps come from non traditional basketball ethnicities.
 
They...I mean...they just might actually be pedophiles.



I don't know of any other type of individual who would be so obsessed with kids' bits. ****ing perverts.
 
TexRex
They...I mean...they just might actually be pedophiles.



I don't know of any other type of individual who would be so obsessed with kids' bits. ****ing perverts.
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Don't know what happens over in the US but Politicians being creepy as hell came to light around a year ago in Australia. So sadly, I'm not surprised.
 
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RESHIRAM5
Don't know what happens over in the US but Politicians being creepy as hell came to light around a year ago in Australia. So sadly, I'm not surprised.
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There are more than a few examples here, but one in particular stands out for me.

Some background.

In the United States House of Representatives, there's an informal rule that the Speaker of the House (an officer of the legislature chosen by the majority party to schedule floor votes) may not schedule a vote on a piece of legislation if the bill isn't expected to garner a majority of the majority party's support. A simple majority is necessary to pass a bill in the House (the filibuster is a mechanism utilized in the Senate). With 435 voting members of the House, a party may have a majority with 218 voting members. A majority of such a majority is reached with 110 votes. If the entire minority party of 217 voting members supports a bill and a bare minority of the majority party supports a bill, with 108 votes, this rule holds that the Speaker may not bring to the floor such a bill that garners support from nearly three quarters (325 of 435, or 74.7%) of the House. It's insane. The filibuster in the Senate is a threshold of just 60%. It's an informal rule, mind, so the Speaker isn't required to follow it.

That's a lot of mostly irrelevant information. It's only relevant because of for whom it's named. The Hastert Rule is named for Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Speaker of the House until 2007 when the Democratic party gained a majority of voting members and selected Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as Speaker.

Dennis Hastert spent 13 months in prison in 2015 and 2016 after pleading guilty to a bank fraud charge. Hastert had scheduled bank withdrawals to avoid federal reporting in an effort to conceal that the money he'd withdrawn was used to buy the silence of a man whom he'd molested as a high school teacher and wrestling coach in the 1970s when that man was a student and underaged. Hastert confessed to that molestation (the statute of limitations had long expired and he wouldn't be prosecuted) and it was alleged during the course of the fraud investigation that he'd molested three other boys as a teacher and coach.

ht_hastert_wrestling_yearbook2_BLUR_lf_150604_8x7_992.jpg
 
reason.com

Anti-LGBT Panics Are Bad for Everyone’s Liberty

Politicians respond to often unfounded fears with aggressive laws that interfere with individual and family choices.
reason.com reason.com
The year was 1952, and Sen. Clyde R. Hoey (D–N.C.) was investigating how many gay people worked for the federal government and whether these workers were a security threat. In what would eventually be called the Lavender Scare, the government launched a purge of gay and lesbian employees, aided by a 1953 executive order by President Dwight Eisenhower. The witch hunts soon spilled over into the private sector, as workers lost jobs that required security clearances.

The year was 1978, and California state Rep. John Briggs (R–North Orange County) was launching Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that would have required school districts to fire teachers found to have engaged in homosexual conduct. For a while it looked likely to pass. Then Ronald Reagan, who had recently finished serving as California governor, came out against it, rallying conservative opposition with an editorial in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: "Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this."

The year was 1987, and Sen. Jesse Helms (R–N.C.) was incensed by an AIDS education comic book intended to teach safer sex. So he introduced an amendment steering federal funds away from materials that "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities." It passed. A few years later, Helms would try to push through legislation urging states to enforce their sodomy laws—"in the best interest of public health."

The year was 2004, and one state—Massachusetts—had started legally recognizing same-sex marriages. President George W. Bush, facing re-election, called for Congress to pass a constitutional amendment "defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and a woman as husband and wife." The Republican Party added the idea to its platform. While the national amendment was never adopted, 11 states passed their own constitutional bans against recognition that fall.

The year is 2022, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is spearheading another moral panic. This one focuses on fears that activists are pressuring kids into prematurely identifying as trans or nonbinary, rushing them headlong into irreversible medical treatments.

The contours and players of today's LGBT panics are different, but the underlying conflict is not new. And while stoking that conflict may be good for certain politicians' careers—it is surely no coincidence that DeSantis is embarking on this crusade as his name is bandied about as a potential Republican presidential candidate—it is bad for individual liberty.

The New LGBT Culture Wars

DeSantis and allied lawmakers have barred Florida educators from any instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity with young students at all, and they have restricted how teachers can approach those subjects in the higher grades. Parents are authorized to seek financial damages from school districts if they believe teachers or staff are discussing LGBT topics inappropriately—and what's inappropriate is defined so vaguely that all sorts of unobjectionable conversations could prompt a suit. Some Florida schools have even started removing children's books like I Am Jazz from their libraries because they featured trans characters. It's not clear that the law actually requires such removals, but the possibility of lawsuits encourages districts to interpret the restrictions broadly.

Meanwhile, politicians in several states have introduced aggressive laws that attempt to stop minors from getting any sort of trans-affirmative medical treatment for gender dysphoria, even when parents and doctors support it. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton has declared that giving minors any such treatment counts as "child abuse" and Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered officials to start investigating families. One of the first targets investigated was a parent who worked for the state's own Department of Family and Protective Services. (Following a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, a Texas court has put Abbott's order on temporary hold.)

Contrary to their supporters' rhetoric, these laws aren't about preserving parents' right to shape their children's educations or protecting vulnerable young people from threats. After all, if you think families should make decisions about children's education and care, that means accepting that families will make different decisions. Rules like these don't establish a neutral position. They let one group of Americans tell another group of Americans that they don't get a say in what their kids are taught or what treatments they can pursue.

These differences cannot be resolved by the government, and certainly not by schoolteachers. Yet they play out as a seemingly unending, unresolvable fight over who controls the public school curriculum. And the laws that result just make things worse. In the abstract, people who support bills like the one in Florida may think they're keeping sexually explicit books out of the hands of small children. In actual practice, people who don't like gays are attempting to yank books like And Tango Makes Three, an utterly harmless story about a pair of male penguins who raise a chick.

The State Doesn't Own Our Kids, Even If They're Getting Hormone Treatments

There is a real social conflict at work here, even if these laws are ill-suited to resolve it. Many parents genuinely worry about the rise of radical self-identifications that go beyond male and female. When they see a parade of odd flags representing rare variations on gender identities and sexual orientations, they feel a sense of cultural fragmentation.

Above all, the increase in the number of younger people identifying as trans has led many adults to worry that children are recklessly altering their bodies based on passing fancies. Often, the worriers point to the experiences of detransitioners—people who once identified as trans and began the process of medical treatment only to change their minds and, in some cases, reaffirm their birth sex.

The existence of detransitioners does not discredit trans-affirming treatments. The dramatically increased acceptance of gay and trans people in the U.S. has undoubtedly made young people more comfortable with questioning their gender identities. And the science of identifying gender dysphoria is complex and still being heavily researched, so it is inevitable that a certain number of people who believe they are trans might eventually decide otherwise and have regrets. (A survey from 2015 of more than 27,000 transgender Americans found that 8 percent had at least temporarily detransitioned at some point. Just 0.4 percent of all those surveyed had done so because they had concluded that they were not transgender after all, as opposed to stopping because of pressure from others, because they found the process to be too hard, or because of harassment.)

None of that justifies political intervention, even when we're talking about minors. If you doubt that, consider the other optional surgeries that young people pursue. According to 2020 data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, doctors performed more than 87,000 cosmetic surgical procedures on teenagers.

It's considered controversial in some quarters to let teens get surgery to change their appearance. Certainly some adults would love for legislators to pass laws stopping minors from getting many of these procedures. But neither federal nor state governments have done so. As a culture, we accept that decisions about these surgeries are properly made by the teens, consenting parents, and medical professionals. You may think these are reckless decisions that the teens may someday regret, and probably some of them do. Some of them might go wrong, might not be as beautiful or as affirming as the teens hoped. But that isn't our decision to make, and embracing liberty means accepting that people will make decisions that we might not choose for ourselves. (And if the doctor commits actual malpractice, there are civil courts to resolve that.)
That doesn't change when the surgeries involve teen genitals rather than teen noses. Critics of these treatments believe youths are permanently disfiguring their bodies, but supporters retort that denying trans kids the treatments they want (not all of which are surgical) can lead to worsening mental health, even suicide. Either way, the stakes are higher—and that makes it more important that families be able to make these decisions without political interference.

Meanwhile, these bills and orders are written in ways that reject the medical science of gender dysphoria entirely. Arkansas' ban on trans medical treatment for minors is named the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act; it asserts that "most" of these "physiological interventions" are "unnecessary." The rejection is even more overt from those pushing for these measures. When they hurl the epithet "groomer" at those who oppose these laws, as DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw has from her personal Twitter account, they are suggesting that gender dysphoria is something that adults are foisting upon impressionable children. It's the modern version of the paranoid old idea that the LGBT community grows by recruiting the young.

The Government Doesn't Diagnose—It Punishes

The state is an expression of political will, not ethical medicine. The attorney general of Texas has no idea what treatments are best for kids who believe they may be transgender, but he has the power to investigate and jail parents for making decisions the government deems to be "abusive." And we have a lengthy history of child welfare agencies harassing families for behavior that offends officials but does not cause actual harm to children. In Chicago, for example, teachers have been known to call the state's Department of Children and Family Services to investigate them for abuse and neglect when they resist attempts to foist school changes or special education classes on their kids. One parent told The Hechinger Report she was investigated for letting her child go to school with a haircut he gave himself, telling her it could be considered "emotional abuse."

People who are serious in their belief in individual liberty and self-determination should reject any effort to shift these decisions from individuals and families to the government. The alternative—to give the state the power to dictate what is and is not legitimate medical treatment—means giving politicians control over our bodies. And we have centuries of experience with the ugly, authoritarian consequences of letting government dictate the limits of our self-ownership: telling us what we can say, what we can consume, what we can do with our bodies and our property.

Using modern medicine to change our genders may take self-ownership further than many people are used to. But if we're serious about liberty, the same principle applies.
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And here comes--oh ****ing come on! Of course it's ****ing Florida!

 
It's a good job I don't live in Florida because I recently replaced all of my hair with queer hair. It was a long operation, they have to do it per follicle, and now I have to use trans shampoo to maintain the queer.
 
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Moglet
It's a good job I don't live in Florida because I recently replaced all of my hair with queer hair. It was a long operation, they have to do it per follicle, and now I have to use trans shampoo to maintain the queer.
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It's much easier to just dye it.
 

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