You make a lot of really good points and it’s probably one of the better arguments I’ve heard (focused on personal choices but it still doesn’t address the cheating issue on which it still fails). I do, however, point out that it’s funny, given what side you were on the debate on another issue, that you fall back on the science (as in that argument there is a lot of disagreement in a situation for which there are no good solutions). The selfish point also made me chuckle. The argument only works if the science really is settled on what’s the best treatment in a particular situation (which it isn’t)
Trans eligibility rules for girls sports.
- Thread starter dad4
- Start date
By “high end”, I mean the top level for that age group.
So, within U15 soccer, ECNL is high end for girls.
If there is some other term you prefer, use that. I am simply referring to whether it is one of the top divisions for that sport and that age group.
A problem with absolute rules is that it does not allow consideration of special cases. Some people are born with unusual genetics or developmental malformations that make the determination of gender difficult at birth. I believe this has been covered already in this or a similar thread so I won't bother with repetition.
Just because something is the top group doesn’t make it high end or worthy of high end treatment. Given all the complaints on these forums of the mixed level of play at ecnl it’s not ecnl. If the girls were to develop a true academy system geared at producing Uswnt players and pro athletes I’d be more open to the argument. But as it stands right now ecnl is just glorified kiddie ball.
You want us to call it the "top group", instead of "high end"? WTF. They mean exactly the same thing.
You're just quibbling over semantics because you have no argument to make.
I agree in principal but National Review has become nothing more than another right wing disinformation channel - sadly - so it is little use linking to it as a source of actual information.All good until…….
Female High-School Volleyball Athlete Suffers Serious Head Injury after Transgender Player Spikes ‘Abnormally Fast’ Ball | National Review
She is still recovering from long-term concussion symptoms, including problems with her vision.www.nationalreview.com
True, but I vetted it with other sources as well, below is the local news link…
Districts cancels girls volleyball games against school with trans player, cites safety concerns
Cherokee County Schools in North Carolina have decided to halt all future competition between one of its school’s female volleyball teams and the rest of the te
wtov9.com
kickingandscreaming
PREMIER
Ok, newby. Who are your comprehensive, centrist sources of absolute truth?
No my argument is ecnl isn’t top level ball just glorified kiddie ball. You’re problem is you can’t see that just because something is the highest level offered that doesn’t make it a top of the line elite product, as made evident be the constant complaints on this site about the level of play in ecnl. The girls don’t really have an elite level like the boys mls next academies. Again if they were to implement a truly elite system geared at training pros and uswnt I might feel differently about the argument. Because otherwise there’s very little distinguishing ecnl from the arbitrary line drawn against npl, ga or even flight 1 ball.
Here’s the issue I have with the volleyball story. I think safetyism is the strongest argument as far as youth soccer is concerned (not protect my daughters scholarship opportunities in ecnl because she’s “elite” but then I go and complain about how others in ecnl don’t deserve to be there because they aren’t elite). But we ignore safetyism in other contexts
when my son was 11 he was in the 80th % of height and went up against a team with a kid on it who was at least 140 and had the height of a full grown adult. That kid was bodying my sons teammates off the ball easily, injured 1 kid, was knocking the goalkicks down the field, was banging balls at my kids head in goal and was just shoving everyone out of the way on corners. We didn’t care about safetyism in that context. My son and his teammates just had to take their beating from the 1kid and they called it a lesson. The parents of course grumbled the kid had to be playing on false papers, but it’s just if not more likely that the kid was just an early bloomer.
if we care about safety, kids should be assigned based on their height and weight, not their age, given that we know how differently they develop
The NCAA does require hormone therapy dimwit.
No, it is not required in HS because HS sports is not important. The mere fact that people like you make stupid arguments that trans girls should not be allowed to play because transphobic ones might abuse the opportunity rather conclusively establishes that lessons in inclusivity are far more important and necessary than winning and losing HS games. And if a legitimately trans player gets a scholarship, good for her.
You don't understand what cheating is. When trans players are allowed to play in a league, they are doing so in accordance with the express rules of the governing body. That is not cheating. You are just making up nonsense excuses to rationalize how much you hate trans people without having to admit it.
What I find interesting about transphobes like yourself is that you almost always proclaim that you're "pro business" and "government hands off", yet here you are trying to tell people that private entities shouldn't be allowed to decide who can participate in their own leagues that they created and oversee. Am I right that you claim to be a "pro business" "conservative"? Do you think that the government should be "hands off" - except apparently when it involves the sanctity of children's sports which is just so important that the world will end if a trans girl wins a HS race in Connecticut?
I am going to make something very clear for you. Winning and losing youth sports is not important, especially compared to civil rights and inclusivity, which people like you keep proving time and again. At the college and professional levels, sports become more important, which explains why there are increasingly restrictive rules than at the youth level. Sometimes it turns out that even those rules don't work well, as the Penn swimmer situation seemed to bring to light, so they revise those rules to make them more "fair" in a way that addresses everyone's interests - not just the transphobic dads' who are irrationally scared shitless that their child might lose a race or maybe even a scholarship to a transphobic boy who is abusing the process by pretending to be trans.
We aren't talking about Kleinfelter’s syndrome or Castor Semenya's condition.
Who the hell are you to tell someone else that their sport is not important? There are millions of kids to whom their sports are important. It’s not your place to decide for them that girls sports just don’t matter.
Who the hell are you to tell someone that civil rights and inclusivity are not important? There are millions of kids who think civil rights and inclusivity are important. In fact, so many people who think that civil rights and inclusivity are important that sports governing bodies have implemented rules allowing trans girls to play sports.
For the record, I also didn't say that youth sports isn't important. I did say that winning and losing isn't important at the youth level. If your child loses a U16 game to a team with a trans girls, whatever. If she doesn't make the HS soccer team and a trans girl does, it also means that she was worse than 20+ cis kids, so also whatever.
The problem with this argument is we can do it all day:
-Who are you to say ECNL matters but Flight 1 doesn't matter?
-Who are you to say that it doesn't matter if the trans kid has a safe and inclusive place to participate in?
-Who are you to say that the trans kids right to a scholarship is more important than my kid's right to a scholarship?
-Who are you to say that your daughter deserves to be in ECNL but there are others who are diluting the competition?
-Who are you to say that it's fair that my 11 year old kid has to be subjected to a kid who looks 16 banging balls at his head all day that he can do nothing about?
-Who are you to say that the 16 year old kid doesn't have any more right to play than your 11 year old kid?
Both sides in the dispute have legitimate concerns and interests, which is why it makes the issue difficult with no obvious solution. "Who the hell are you" is the laziest of lazy arguments.
Allowing XY athletes to enter into female events is not a civil rights issue.
There are real civil rights issues for LGBTQ people. Safety and workplace discrimination are still problems. Pushing XY athletes into women’s sports just makes it more difficult to make any progress on those.
Ten years ago, the popular image of gay rights was a happy young couple kissing on their wedding. Why do you want to erase that image and replace it with a picture of a dude stealing a girl’s trophy? (Yes, a dude. Because that’s what the photo is going to look like.)
GLangevinito
SILVER
When your argument descends into assumptions and personal attacks, you've already lost.
There is no serious debate that a woman who went through puberty as a boy will have physical athletic advantages. So how do you handle these cases? What is fair? Like it or not, whatever decision you make, you will be taking an opportunity away from a trans girl or a girl.
In my mind, trans girls can still compete at the highest levels of the sport - if they compete against individuals who went through puberty as boys. How is that not the fairest solution?
Because if they are on testosterone blockers, hormones or had the surgery, they can't compete on the same level either with a boy who is fully on testosterone at the current time. Yes, they have a certain advantage relative to most girls, but they certainly aren't on the same level as the boys. So that's not the "fairest" solution either because you are still shafting someone....in this case the trans kid. On an individual sports level you could mitigate against this by having them play like athletes, but still not everyone will be in the same place and given the rarity it would be hard to aggregate a team, let alone an "elite" team, even at the college level. One solution is to not allow them to switch until they have taken such measures, but 1) that has unintended consequences on encouraging kids to take that drastic step (which some have been recorded to regret) at an earlier age and 2) that's not going to satisfy some people on the ban side who'll (correctly) argue the trans athlete still has advantages by having to gone part way or wholly through puberty on testosterone.
Similarly, I note you have the opposite problem in reverse with FTM who are on testosterone. Given testosterone is a PED, it's not "fair" to have them play on the same team as other girls some will argue, but at the same time it's going to take them quite of bit of time to catch up with the birth born boys. If they go on testosterone after puberty, the birth born boys will always have an advantage over them.
Absolutely it is a civil rights issue. You and your compadres are taking the position that private entities should not be allowed to decide who may participate in their own leagues. You believe they should be prohibited by law from allowing trans girls and women from participating solely by virtue of the fact that they are trans. That is about as fundamental a civil rights issue as there can be. Claiming this is not a civil rights issue in the same post in which you disrespectfully refer to trans girls as "dudes" and accuse them of "stealing" when they are complying with league rules only reinforces that fact.
If you want to create your own transphobic kiddie league, go for it.
How does your absolute birth-gender rule handle situations like that?
"Most of the time when a baby is born intersex, doctors and the family decide on a sex, either male or female, and raise the baby as the gender expected of that sex. It’s pretty common for surgery to be done on the baby’s genitals and also for the child to be given hormones to make them fit into male/female categories as they go through puberty."
What is Intersex? | Definition of Intersexual (plannedparenthood.org)
An XX/XY standard does not, by itself, handle classification of intersex athletes.
My limited understanding is that most intersex conditions produce enough testosterone that those athletes cannot fairly compete as women.