No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
I'd argue it's the opposite and that except for previously notable exceptions mentioned before like Archery, probably Curling (because, c'mon, Curling), it's not. In top level athletics, men will destroy women in most sports.
If you want to open it to all and set no limits, Inkstain, you are essentially saying in the vast majority of sports, a women will rarely, if ever, appear in the top groups again.
There is an argument to that being okay. Merit is merit, after all. That's what you're saying, though.
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I mean, have we seen any reason to believe that the International Olympic Committee hasn’t already found a good answer?
Active levels of testosterone are the reason most cis men have a performance advantage, so when we’re talking about treating an athlete differently despite their having a testosterone count in the single digits, I can only imagine it’s because people don’t realize how much a person’s body changes.
The only immutable bits are a person’s skeleton and their organs. That’s it. Trans women are taller than cis women on average, but other than that, what? Are we worried that slightly larger lungs and a slightly thicker skeleton are somehow a bigger benefit than a negative when an individual has to cart it around with the muscle mass and fat distribution of a cis woman?
Is it a good answer though? I posted a few times earlier in the thread, but I don't think testosterone levels is a particularly good indicator of ability. At least that's not what I am getting from the studies I found, including the study commissioned by the IOC, even though that study somehow comes to a different conclusion.
I'm trying to parse the IOC study, but I'm having a hard time telling whether they are comparing more than high and low testosterone levels among cis women.
Because, yeah, there might not be a huge difference in high/low counts within the cis-normative female range, but the average cis man produces 3 times the amount of testosterone, and that discrepancy accounts for why cis women only have 1/3 to 2/3rds the upper body strength of cis men. If that's the primary contributor to the performance differences between competitors, why not use that? It can't help but be a better metric than "gender assigned at birth".
Two things I guess stood out to me. One, just looking at normal variations for females or males (so not overlapping), there was very weak to no correlation to performance. You would think that you would see some correlation for the small variations, if large variations are supposed to have a large effect. Although, it’s always possible the relationship is highly non-linear.
Second, there are cases of females with abnormally high testosterone because of a condition, who also don’t seem to be way outside the norm (for females) in terms of atheletic ability. But this is a very small sample size (elite athlete with high testosterone imbalance).
Jebus314 on
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
I'd argue it's the opposite and that except for previously notable exceptions mentioned before like Archery, probably Curling (because, c'mon, Curling), it's not. In top level athletics, men will destroy women in most sports.
If you want to open it to all and set no limits, Inkstain, you are essentially saying in the vast majority of sports, a women will rarely, if ever, appear in the top groups again.
There is an argument to that being okay. Merit is merit, after all. That's what you're saying, though.
Simply put: No.
Until we *actually* see that happening, it's a transphobic panic position.
Until we *actually* see that happening, it's a transphobic panic position.
Simply put, what is no? You're saying that women can compete on the same level as men in the vast majority of sports? That's something that's actually Google-able, btw.
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Transwomen aren't men, so this question is irrelevant.
I wasn't discussing transwomen, I was talking more about the broader topic.
That being said, it's clear your position is on the moral end of the spectrum and that's fine. I personally don't know enough about the science side to debate this aspect of it, so, I won't challenge you further on it .
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I'm saying that I'd estimate there maybe 10,000 professional athletes in the U.S. who are women. There are 85,000 college scholarships available each year to female athletes. About 3.5 million girls play HS sports. About 50% of female children play some sort of sport each year.
I highly doubt there are that many transwomen with biological similarities to men who are just waiting for their chance to take all those spots the moment we lower the gates and encourage them to participate in women's sports.
If our attempts to be inclusive and stop being so gross to trans people as a society starts to look like it actually is driving ciswomen out of sports, we can adjust on the fly, but I'm not super worried about it.
There's very little to no advantage when it comes to anyone assigned female at birth, or those on anti-testosterone therapy. So that's a moot point.
If the athlete has functional testicles that's a different story, which makes the U Sports policy a bit odd. The mention of "still following the anti doping rules" makes me think we don't have the whole story though.
Hey remember this? I looked up the policy and it's "HRT can't be blanket required but if you can show there's an impact it's fine to require it. Just don't bother at the casual level."
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
It won't drive ciswomen out. You're just asking for steroids. Probably in the men's league too. I mean if you're not testing anyone why couldn't cismen hike up their testosterone?
Easy answer: gender is a social contruct and is self-identified. Problem solved.
We already have plenty of examples of what we do with athletes who are born with particularly strong and fast bodies. Mostly we just celebrate them, *occasionally* at younger ages we encourage them to play up to prevent the risk of injury to similarly-aged but much-smaller children. That's about it.
So your answer is that those of the female sex would essentially not have any high level sports?
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
Would you insist that all school sports teams include both men and women perhaps?
But then again, what about the school team which has a girl who is genetically a boy but doesn't wish to have surgery or take hormones. Does she count in the girl player column or the boy player column?
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I think at the high school level you can play whatever you want. As was said earlier, at that low skill level it probably doesn't actually matter.
Here is something I've been thinking about, directly relevant to this topic. Now, caveat, I have some problems with the analysis in this model, but it is directly relevant to Feral, Inquisitor, LoisLane and other's points.
For those that don't know, I'm a pretty enthusiastic boulderer. I tend to watch much of the competitions at the professional level in the way that people watch football or soccer. One thing that surprised me early on is that they separate male and female climbers. I was puzzled by this, because it didn't make intuitive sense. The more competitions I watched, the more surprised I became because I noticed a pattern repeat over and over- the male professional climbers tend to be incredibly tall, and the females incredibly short. "Of course," is the immediate response "being taller gives one a significant advantage in climbing at a professional level, and since men are taller than women on average, we should separate them for fairness!"
This is data pulled from a site where people can log personal information (height, weight, gender) and the highest level they climb at.. Now, this data did include females and males, but let's ignore that part and focus on the fact that there are disadvantages both to being too small as well as to being too tall.
To interpret this graph, the x-axis is height, and the y-axis is how hard of a problem they completed. I'm most familiar with Bouldering, so focus on the orange line and you'll see that someone who is very short (5 feet) on average can only complete a V7....just like how someone who is extremely tall can only on average complete a V7.
As you can see, performance drops off on both ends of the model...but what about if we look at the "average" height of men and women. Let's use Inquisitor77's 5ft4 median for women and 5ft9 for men....and it looks like at both heights the "average" performance is a V8, slightly better than someone who is very tall or very short, and this doesn't seem to explain why men and women are separated at the professional bouldering level, if height can not only impose disadvantages, but also that the median height for men and women doesn't seem to affect their skill
But! (and this is Feral's point) What if we only look at the elite- the 1% of the 1%. The bleeding edge of competition. Data is hard to come by, but Watts et al. in 1992 in their paper "Anthropometric profiles of elite male and female competitive sport rock climbers" measured a variety of indices from male and female finalists and semi-finalists in Sport climbing (the blue dots in that graph).
The authors of this paper found differences in height between men and women at the highest levels- male finalists were on average 179cm(+5.2cm) and females were 162cm(+-4.6cm). This turns into 5ft10 inches for men and 5ft3inches for women. Notably, this is about "median height" for males and females and tracks with the graph above- that is, these are in the grey box and represent the highest performance.
BUT
The differences between males and females in height doesn't seem like it would predict a vast difference in skill! Something else must be driving this!
"Aha!" you might say, "I know grip strength is different between men and women! I bet that's why they are in separate categories!"
And, yes, grip strength was higher in male finalists vs female finalists. However, one important caveat is that when the ratio of grip strength to body mass was compared to this value from males and females in general, female rock climbers score in the 90th percentile whereas male climbers score in the 40th percentile. That is, female rock climbers have lower grip strength per mass than males, but stronger grips than females in general. Another important caveat is that females were lighter than male climbers, but yet had higher body fat percentages.
This sort of gives us a bit of a biological basis for separating males and females. Mermier et al in their 2000 paper titled "Physiological and anthropometric determinants of sport climbing performance" determined that body fat percentage and grip strength per pound were the only factors they found (out of quite a lot of measurements) that had a positive effect on climbing success.
However, their data also combined men and women, and didn't separate their analysis by gender. One important thing is that Mermier et al used "average" climbers, not top athletes, and I want to make a point here. The "average" male climber in Mermier's study had a grip strength/mass of 0.65 while the "average" female climber had a ratio of 0.49. But if we go back to the paper looking at the elite climbers, the best of the best female climbers had a ratio of 0.65, almost equivalent to that of the "average" male climber. "Elite" male climbers have a ratio of 0.78.
What do I infer from this? Well, Mermier et al make a very salient point that grip strength is trainable, and that's abundantly clear here. Most of the other measurements between "elite" females and "average' females are very similar, with only body fat percentage and grip strength being very different between these two groups.
The other point I want to make is that this only sort of explains the difference in climbing abilities between men and women. Out of 30 metrics measured by Mermier, only two of them contributed to climbing success, and I'm not completely convinced that grip strength to body weight can explain why we should separate male and female climbers. It seems pretty clear that there are differences other than a 0.13 kg/kg ratio of grip strength between average and elite male climbers. If grip strength alone explained climbing success, then all male climbers would need to do to succeed would be to train grip strength, and that is not an argument I think anyone would make to explain the differences between the world's best climbers and someone like myself.
So what am I trying to say?
Well, for starters, I think that there isn't a good reason to separate male and female professional climbers, and the disparities in male and female competitive routes seems to be largely artificial. It's anecdotal, but male competitive routes tend to have larger reaches, whereas female routes tend to have more finesse moves, and it's generally argued that this is due to differences in height between males and females. We've dashed that notion pretty thoroughly (height was included in Mermier's model, as well as the graph above), and don't have enough evidence to say that these routes should be different to compensate for grip strength or body fat alone.
But that's my point- I'm pretty sure we can find little bits of reasons at the bleeding edge where males have an advantage in certain areas (running, as described above), but in other areas we might find that the differences are largely artificial. What is the solution here?
I'm not sure, but I'm largely unconvinced that gender-segregating most competitive sports by gender is accurately biologically based, and I think we could very easily find egalitarian ways to have mixed competitions.
One fun thing from Mermier's study (which is free, by the way) is that the range of grip strengths in average climbers basically overlapped between males and females. The weakest men had a ratio of 0.39 and the weakest females had a ratio of 0.33, with the top end having a larger gulf (0.95 for men, 0.65 for women). Once again, though, professional male climbers had an average of 0.78 (+-0.06), which is well below the max ratio reported for men, so I'm not convinced this one metric explains anything at all.
It won't drive ciswomen out. You're just asking for steroids. Probably in the men's league too. I mean if you're not testing anyone why couldn't cismen hike up their testosterone?
All high-level men’s sports are completely full of PEDs already, but that’s a whole other story.
Easy answer: gender is a social contruct and is self-identified. Problem solved.
We already have plenty of examples of what we do with athletes who are born with particularly strong and fast bodies. Mostly we just celebrate them, *occasionally* at younger ages we encourage them to play up to prevent the risk of injury to similarly-aged but much-smaller children. That's about it.
So your answer is that those of the female sex would essentially not have any high level sports?
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
Would you insist that all school sports teams include both men and women perhaps?
But then again, what about the school team which has a girl who is genetically a boy but doesn't wish to have surgery or take hormones. Does she count in the girl player column or the boy player column?
Girl because she is a girl. I don’t see why this has to be problematic.
I think at the high school level you can play whatever you want. As was said earlier, at that low skill level it probably doesn't actually matter.
Eh, I'd agree that players who identify as female should definately be allowed on the boys team, but a lot of school budgets aren't going to stretch to like 3 teams for every sport (The level where your best 16 year old girls in a sport can compete with your remaining 16 year old boys) . They aren't playing for money, but girls and women have a right to play sports and to be on teams and get time on the field.
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
I'd argue it's the opposite and that except for previously notable exceptions mentioned before like Archery, probably Curling (because, c'mon, Curling), it's not. In top level athletics, men will destroy women in most sports.
If you want to open it to all and set no limits, Inkstain, you are essentially saying in the vast majority of sports, a women will rarely, if ever, appear in the top groups again.
There is an argument to that being okay. Merit is merit, after all. That's what you're saying, though.
I disagree pretty heavily with this post, and think that we can find a legion of athletic events where the gulf between male and female athletes wouldn't be significantly large enough to impact the differential success of one gender over another.
I would also perhaps push an argument that many of our institutionalized sports favor males over females inherently because they were explicitly designed to test things that are on the higher end of performance in men and not women, but that's something I don't have as much data for.
Back in my HS sports covering days, I covered a young woman who was simply an exceptional athlete. In terms of strength and speed and playing style, she reminded me of nothing so much as a particularly athletic teenage boy.
By the time she graduated (and granted, it was a small state, so that helped some of this), she was a 6-time state tennis champion, a bajillion-time state track and field champion in more events than I could mention, and had led the state girls hockey league in scoring five times. She won a lot of trophies, got a college scholarship to play hockey and that's the last I heard from her. I assume she went on to live a more or less normal life.
If this is the experience of a few trans girls out there, I don't see what the big deal is.
Easy answer: gender is a social contruct and is self-identified. Problem solved.
We already have plenty of examples of what we do with athletes who are born with particularly strong and fast bodies. Mostly we just celebrate them, *occasionally* at younger ages we encourage them to play up to prevent the risk of injury to similarly-aged but much-smaller children. That's about it.
So your answer is that those of the female sex would essentially not have any high level sports?
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
Would you insist that all school sports teams include both men and women perhaps?
But then again, what about the school team which has a girl who is genetically a boy but doesn't wish to have surgery or take hormones. Does she count in the girl player column or the boy player column?
Girl because she is a girl. I don’t see why this has to be problematic.
Can we just drop gender from this and focus on sex differences. Because I would really like to see more focus on whether the sex difference is insurmountable, surmountable in some sports(like climbing that was mentioned above), or there is anyway it can be surmounted in all sports.
Because I just can’t see it in head to head like boxing, running, or sports which require raw physical skill.
I’d also like to remind people that scholarships are on the line in US high school. So until we make college free we have to take that into consideration. Even the absolutely pitiable funds offered to women athletes are something.
I mean, have we seen any reason to believe that the International Olympic Committee hasn’t already found a good answer?
Active levels of testosterone are the reason most cis men have a performance advantage, so when we’re talking about treating an athlete differently despite their having a testosterone count in the single digits, I can only imagine it’s because people don’t realize how much a person’s body changes.
The only immutable bits are a person’s skeleton and their organs. That’s it. Trans women are taller than cis women on average, but other than that, what? Are we worried that slightly larger lungs and a slightly thicker skeleton are somehow a bigger benefit than a negative when an individual has to cart it around with the muscle mass and fat distribution of a cis woman?
Is it a good answer though? I posted a few times earlier in the thread, but I don't think testosterone levels is a particularly good indicator of ability. At least that's not what I am getting from the studies I found, including the study commissioned by the IOC, even though that study somehow comes to a different conclusion.
I'm trying to parse the IOC study, but I'm having a hard time telling whether they are comparing more than high and low testosterone levels among cis women.
Because, yeah, there might not be a huge difference in high/low counts within the cis-normative female range, but the average cis man produces 3 times the amount of testosterone, and that discrepancy accounts for why cis women only have 1/3 to 2/3rds the upper body strength of cis men. If that's the primary contributor to the performance differences between competitors, why not use that? It can't help but be a better metric than "gender assigned at birth".
Two things I guess stood out to me. One, just looking at normal variations for females or males (so not overlapping), there was very weak to no correlation to performance. You would think that you would see some correlation for the small variations, if large variations are supposed to have a large effect. Although, it’s always possible the relationship is highly non-linear.
Second, there are cases of females with abnormally high testosterone because of a condition, who also don’t seem to be way outside the norm (for females) in terms of atheletic ability. But this is a very small sample size (elite athlete with high testosterone imbalance).
Having a high T for a cis woman is anything above 70 ng/dL. Having a low T for men is anything under 280 ng/dL, and the average testosterone count for cis men goes all the way up to 1100. "Abnormally high" for cis women never even comes close to approaching the "male range"; if it does, that individual is intersex, and almost definitely has a deep voice and and beard growth matching whatever is normal for the men in their family.
And, taken from my experience and research, hormone triggers ARE highly non-linear. You might double the normal estrogen levels of a cisnormative male body and never notice, but once you cross a threshold for a month or two, your body basically goes, "wait, I'm a woman? better start shopping for a bra."
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I don't know much about rock climbing so I'll just ask: if the inequities are mostly non scientific and more cultural, then why haven't we seen a Jackie Robinson for female players? Clearly there would be a huge financial benefit to that player and like I said, I can't really see why a female couldn't be a point guard in the NBA, it's not necessarily a position that requires extremes of size or strength.
I think the positive press would also be huge for the team that takes on a female player. Mark Cuban famously said he'd draft Brittney Griner with a second round pick. Could you imagine the jersey sales? The attendance for her first game? The free publicity?
I'm not saying this as evidence that they can't, but more, why not?
Easy answer: gender is a social contruct and is self-identified. Problem solved.
We already have plenty of examples of what we do with athletes who are born with particularly strong and fast bodies. Mostly we just celebrate them, *occasionally* at younger ages we encourage them to play up to prevent the risk of injury to similarly-aged but much-smaller children. That's about it.
So your answer is that those of the female sex would essentially not have any high level sports?
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
Would you insist that all school sports teams include both men and women perhaps?
But then again, what about the school team which has a girl who is genetically a boy but doesn't wish to have surgery or take hormones. Does she count in the girl player column or the boy player column?
Girl because she is a girl. I don’t see why this has to be problematic.
Can we just drop gender from this and focus on sex differences. Because I would really like to see more focus on whether the sex difference is insurmountable, surmountable in some sports(like climbing that was mentioned above), or there is anyway it can be surmounted in all sports.
Because I just can’t see it in head to head like boxing, running, or sports which require raw physical skill.
I’d also like to remind people that scholarships are on the line in US high school. So until we make college free we have to take that into consideration. Even the absolutely pitiable funds offered to women athletes are something.
I think the Semanya case shows that dropping gender and focusing on sex leads you down all sorts of weird, unnecessary roads that will only serve to hurt and exclude intersex and transgender people.
Yes, there will probably be a few exceptional female athletes whose biology sets them apart and makes it particularly difficult for their similarly-aged competitors and they will probably win some scholarships. That is part of sports. I don't think it's likely that they will be so numerous as to cause a major crisis that prevents ciswomen from reaping the benefits of sports.
Inkstain82 on
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I think at the high school level you can play whatever you want. As was said earlier, at that low skill level it probably doesn't actually matter.
Eh, I'd agree that players who identify as female should definately be allowed on the boys team, but a lot of school budgets aren't going to stretch to like 3 teams for every sport (The level where your best 16 year old girls in a sport can compete with your remaining 16 year old boys) . They aren't playing for money, but girls and women have a right to play sports and to be on teams and get time on the field.
No you just have the two teams (or four teams for JV) you have right now. Everyone plays on whichever they want.
I don't know much about rock climbing so I'll just ask: if the inequities are mostly non scientific and more cultural, then why haven't we seen a Jackie Robinson for female players? Clearly there would be a huge financial benefit to that player and like I said, I can't really see why a female couldn't be a point guard in the NBA, it's not necessarily a position that requires extremes of size or strength.
I think the positive press would also be huge for the team that takes on a female player. Mark Cuban famously said he'd draft Brittney Griner with a second round pick. Could you imagine the jersey sales? The attendance for her first game? The free publicity?
I'm not saying this as evidence that they can't, but more, why not?
Because they aren't *close* to good enough. Not even a little bit close. Being a point guard in the NBA requires *way* more strength and speed than you realize. Brittney Griner would have trouble making a men's college D-III team.
The closest thing I can ever recall seeing that wasn't an intentional sideshow was a couple of female professional hockey goalies. Manon Rheaume famously played a period for the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL in a preseason game as a pubilicity stunt. She and another woman whose name escapes me managed to make a couple of appearances in the ECHL, a minor professional league two or three levels below the NHL. Both were pretty bad, but not "guy on the street flails around hopelessly" bad.
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
I'd argue it's the opposite and that except for previously notable exceptions mentioned before like Archery, probably Curling (because, c'mon, Curling), it's not. In top level athletics, men will destroy women in most sports.
If you want to open it to all and set no limits, Inkstain, you are essentially saying in the vast majority of sports, a women will rarely, if ever, appear in the top groups again.
There is an argument to that being okay. Merit is merit, after all. That's what you're saying, though.
I disagree pretty heavily with this post, and think that we can find a legion of athletic events where the gulf between male and female athletes wouldn't be significantly large enough to impact the differential success of one gender over another.
I would also perhaps push an argument that many of our institutionalized sports favor males over females inherently because they were explicitly designed to test things that are on the higher end of performance in men and not women, but that's something I don't have as much data for.
I'm listening. What athletic events did you have in mind?
I don't know much about rock climbing so I'll just ask: if the inequities are mostly non scientific and more cultural, then why haven't we seen a Jackie Robinson for female players? Clearly there would be a huge financial benefit to that player and like I said, I can't really see why a female couldn't be a point guard in the NBA, it's not necessarily a position that requires extremes of size or strength.
I think the positive press would also be huge for the team that takes on a female player. Mark Cuban famously said he'd draft Brittney Griner with a second round pick. Could you imagine the jersey sales? The attendance for her first game? The free publicity?
I'm not saying this as evidence that they can't, but more, why not?
Because they aren't *close* to good enough. Not even a little bit close. Being a point guard in the NBA requires *way* more strength and speed than you realize. Brittney Griner would have trouble making a men's college D-III team.
The closest thing I can ever recall seeing that wasn't an intentional sideshow was a couple of female professional hockey goalies. Manon Rheaume famously played a period for the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL in a preseason game as a pubilicity stunt. She and another woman whose name escapes me managed to make a couple of appearances in the ECHL, a minor professional league two or three levels below the NHL. Both were pretty bad, but not "guy on the street flails around hopelessly" bad.
I mean that's my understanding but I'm just trying to understand the world where what Arch is saying "I'm largely unconvinced that gender-segregating most competitive sports by gender is accurately biologically based, and I think we could very easily find egalitarian ways to have mixed competitions." squares with the fact that there are no mixed competitions. Therefore, they should remain segregated.
No. Because that particular assertion is based on some very strong belief in some very, very counterfactual assumptions.
I'd argue it's the opposite and that except for previously notable exceptions mentioned before like Archery, probably Curling (because, c'mon, Curling), it's not. In top level athletics, men will destroy women in most sports.
If you want to open it to all and set no limits, Inkstain, you are essentially saying in the vast majority of sports, a women will rarely, if ever, appear in the top groups again.
There is an argument to that being okay. Merit is merit, after all. That's what you're saying, though.
I disagree pretty heavily with this post, and think that we can find a legion of athletic events where the gulf between male and female athletes wouldn't be significantly large enough to impact the differential success of one gender over another.
I would also perhaps push an argument that many of our institutionalized sports favor males over females inherently because they were explicitly designed to test things that are on the higher end of performance in men and not women, but that's something I don't have as much data for.
I'm listening. What athletic events did you have in mind?
Well, rock climbing for one. I will admit I don't have a solution! I'm not an athlete, and I don't have enough data on differences between men and women across a variety of sports to make a scientific call.
But I think that things like American Football seem designed by the very nature of the sport to cater to the types of physical attributes that have higher maxima in men. I don't have a good solution, I just think asking "how do we deal with trans individuals in our current salvo of athletic events" is focusing on the wrong part of the question. That is, we shouldn't be worried about how different genders and trans individuals perform in athletic events catered to peak male performance, but rather we should find ways to determine peak athletic performance that can be applied to all genders.
Like I said, I don't have an answer, but it seems like a problem that is more solvable, potentially.
Women tend to excel relative to men in sports where strength:weight ratio is very important, and too much extra muscle becomes a hindrance. See also gymnastics.
Although it's worth noting, for whatever purposes, that when I say "women" I mean "girls." Female athletes in these categories tend to peak in the 14-18 age group.
I don't know much about rock climbing so I'll just ask: if the inequities are mostly non scientific and more cultural, then why haven't we seen a Jackie Robinson for female players? Clearly there would be a huge financial benefit to that player and like I said, I can't really see why a female couldn't be a point guard in the NBA, it's not necessarily a position that requires extremes of size or strength.
I think the positive press would also be huge for the team that takes on a female player. Mark Cuban famously said he'd draft Brittney Griner with a second round pick. Could you imagine the jersey sales? The attendance for her first game? The free publicity?
I'm not saying this as evidence that they can't, but more, why not?
For the same reason that say, Womens world cup soccer teams lose frequently to boys under 15 teams. The 'chemical' advantage of being genetically male is immense in many sports.
I think at the high school level you can play whatever you want. As was said earlier, at that low skill level it probably doesn't actually matter.
Eh, I'd agree that players who identify as female should definately be allowed on the boys team, but a lot of school budgets aren't going to stretch to like 3 teams for every sport (The level where your best 16 year old girls in a sport can compete with your remaining 16 year old boys) . They aren't playing for money, but girls and women have a right to play sports and to be on teams and get time on the field.
No you just have the two teams (or four teams for JV) you have right now. Everyone plays on whichever they want.
So you want almost all school sports to be only boys? I don't think thats going to fly.
Now
Boys Team 1
Girls Team 1
Boys Team 2
Girls Team 2
20 girls and 20 boys get a slot
In your plan
Team 1 - 10 boys
Team 2 - 10 boys
Team 3 - 9 boys, 1 girl
Team 4 - 6 boys, 4 girls
35 boys and 5 girls get a slot.
Sure, it's not this way in all sports at all ages, but for soccer, tennis and so on it absolutely is at the high school level.
tbloxham on
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I mean if the solution to "how do we include transgender/any gender people in sports" is "let's make new sports that don't focus on things males are good at" that seems to sidestep the actual issue.
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I think at the high school level you can play whatever you want. As was said earlier, at that low skill level it probably doesn't actually matter.
Eh, I'd agree that players who identify as female should definately be allowed on the boys team, but a lot of school budgets aren't going to stretch to like 3 teams for every sport (The level where your best 16 year old girls in a sport can compete with your remaining 16 year old boys) . They aren't playing for money, but girls and women have a right to play sports and to be on teams and get time on the field.
No you just have the two teams (or four teams for JV) you have right now. Everyone plays on whichever they want.
So you want almost all school sports to be only boys? I don't think thats going to fly.
Now
Boys Team 1
Girls Team 1
Boys Team 2
Girls Team 2
20 girls and 20 boys get a slot
In your plan
Team 1 - 10 boys
Team 2 - 10 boys
Team 3 - 9 boys, 1 girl
Team 4 - 6 boys, 4 girls
35 boys and 5 girls get a slot.
Sure, it's not this way in all sports at all ages, but for soccer, tennis and so on it absolutely is at the high school level.
No, you still have
Boy 1
Boy 2
Girl 1
Girl 2.
Now everyone who identifies as a girl plays on a girl team and everyone who identifies as a boy plays on a boy team.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
1) The idea that social, cultural, and institutional factors may play a role in the "competitiveness" (in both personality and impact) of women in traditionally-male sports is absolutely something that should be considered. There are likely a great deal of sports or roles within sports where women would at least be represented, if not thrive, if given the same opportunity from the cradle to the court.
2) A similar argument could be made that sports, having developed in a male-assumed, male-dominated manner, have evolved over time in such a way that they magnify the minute differences between men and women. Height, for example, is a strong factor in basketball, and the arms race for taller and taller players will skew gender outcomes towards men in that sport.
3) The rock-climbing story from Arch (great post btw) is a really good example of a relatively new sport where these factors can be examined firsthand. If rock climbing were measured "purely" based on, say, the ability to climb a particular natural rock formation as fast as possible, and that sport were not differentiated by men and women, it could very well be argued that men and women would be equivalent enough that no gender distinction were necessary. Different mountains will have different challenges and benefits, each of which could benefit people of different size and shape in various ways.
But if we take the idea at face value that a gender distinction was imposed on the sport prematurely, then it would also make sense that "men's courses" and "women's courses" would evolve differently over time (in particular, to highlight physical/skill distinctions that could be made within each gender, rather than across the human population as a whole). Which, with enough time and change, makes rock climbing "for men" a very different sport than rock climbing "for women". See: Figure skating, gymnastics, softball vs. baseball
4) Which goes to a thought that maybe we could just have new sports? Something that can be played at the professional level by both men and women, perhaps in different, but necessary, roles. I honestly have no idea what that would look like or where to start, but it's an interesting thought experiment. You can't separate the player from the game. So maybe we need a new game.
I think at the high school level you can play whatever you want. As was said earlier, at that low skill level it probably doesn't actually matter.
Eh, I'd agree that players who identify as female should definately be allowed on the boys team, but a lot of school budgets aren't going to stretch to like 3 teams for every sport (The level where your best 16 year old girls in a sport can compete with your remaining 16 year old boys) . They aren't playing for money, but girls and women have a right to play sports and to be on teams and get time on the field.
No you just have the two teams (or four teams for JV) you have right now. Everyone plays on whichever they want.
So you want almost all school sports to be only boys? I don't think thats going to fly.
Now
Boys Team 1
Girls Team 1
Boys Team 2
Girls Team 2
20 girls and 20 boys get a slot
In your plan
Team 1 - 10 boys
Team 2 - 10 boys
Team 3 - 9 boys, 1 girl
Team 4 - 6 boys, 4 girls
35 boys and 5 girls get a slot.
Sure, it's not this way in all sports at all ages, but for soccer, tennis and so on it absolutely is at the high school level.
No, you still have
Boy 1
Boy 2
Girl 1
Girl 2.
Now everyone who identifies as a girl plays on a girl team and everyone who identifies as a boy plays on a boy team.
OK, what if a girl thinks that the girls team is rubbish and she is good enough to play on the boys team. She goes out, and she's totally good enough to be on boys team 2 in the number 5 slot (we're playing a very boring sport here). Can she be on the boys team?
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
I think at the high school level you can play whatever you want. As was said earlier, at that low skill level it probably doesn't actually matter.
Eh, I'd agree that players who identify as female should definately be allowed on the boys team, but a lot of school budgets aren't going to stretch to like 3 teams for every sport (The level where your best 16 year old girls in a sport can compete with your remaining 16 year old boys) . They aren't playing for money, but girls and women have a right to play sports and to be on teams and get time on the field.
No you just have the two teams (or four teams for JV) you have right now. Everyone plays on whichever they want.
So you want almost all school sports to be only boys? I don't think thats going to fly.
Now
Boys Team 1
Girls Team 1
Boys Team 2
Girls Team 2
20 girls and 20 boys get a slot
In your plan
Team 1 - 10 boys
Team 2 - 10 boys
Team 3 - 9 boys, 1 girl
Team 4 - 6 boys, 4 girls
35 boys and 5 girls get a slot.
Sure, it's not this way in all sports at all ages, but for soccer, tennis and so on it absolutely is at the high school level.
No, you still have
Boy 1
Boy 2
Girl 1
Girl 2.
Now everyone who identifies as a girl plays on a girl team and everyone who identifies as a boy plays on a boy team.
OK, what if a girl thinks that the girls team is rubbish and she is good enough to play on the boys team. She goes out, and she's totally good enough to be on boys team 2 in the number 5 slot (we're playing a very boring sport here). Can she be on the boys team?
Yeah I'm probably fine with that. I think the only protected tier should be the tier that exists to ensure that people of a hormonal balance more consistent with a biological female have a space.
I had a fleeting thought of "oh that's a bummer for the boy who got cut from the team" but like, should that girl be held back from money/prestige/whatever because a boy is worse than her? No probably not. People get cut from the team all the time.
I think at the high school level you can play whatever you want. As was said earlier, at that low skill level it probably doesn't actually matter.
Eh, I'd agree that players who identify as female should definately be allowed on the boys team, but a lot of school budgets aren't going to stretch to like 3 teams for every sport (The level where your best 16 year old girls in a sport can compete with your remaining 16 year old boys) . They aren't playing for money, but girls and women have a right to play sports and to be on teams and get time on the field.
No you just have the two teams (or four teams for JV) you have right now. Everyone plays on whichever they want.
So you want almost all school sports to be only boys? I don't think thats going to fly.
Now
Boys Team 1
Girls Team 1
Boys Team 2
Girls Team 2
20 girls and 20 boys get a slot
In your plan
Team 1 - 10 boys
Team 2 - 10 boys
Team 3 - 9 boys, 1 girl
Team 4 - 6 boys, 4 girls
35 boys and 5 girls get a slot.
Sure, it's not this way in all sports at all ages, but for soccer, tennis and so on it absolutely is at the high school level.
No, you still have
Boy 1
Boy 2
Girl 1
Girl 2.
Now everyone who identifies as a girl plays on a girl team and everyone who identifies as a boy plays on a boy team.
OK, what if a girl thinks that the girls team is rubbish and she is good enough to play on the boys team. She goes out, and she's totally good enough to be on boys team 2 in the number 5 slot (we're playing a very boring sport here). Can she be on the boys team?
Yeah I'm probably fine with that. I think the only protected tier should be the tier that exists to ensure that people of a hormonal balance more consistent with a biological female have a space.
So trans women without surgery etc can't play on the girls team? Are they on the boys team now?
Posts
If you want to open it to all and set no limits, Inkstain, you are essentially saying in the vast majority of sports, a women will rarely, if ever, appear in the top groups again.
There is an argument to that being okay. Merit is merit, after all. That's what you're saying, though.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Two things I guess stood out to me. One, just looking at normal variations for females or males (so not overlapping), there was very weak to no correlation to performance. You would think that you would see some correlation for the small variations, if large variations are supposed to have a large effect. Although, it’s always possible the relationship is highly non-linear.
Second, there are cases of females with abnormally high testosterone because of a condition, who also don’t seem to be way outside the norm (for females) in terms of atheletic ability. But this is a very small sample size (elite athlete with high testosterone imbalance).
Simply put: No.
Until we *actually* see that happening, it's a transphobic panic position.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Transwomen aren't men, so this question is irrelevant.
That being said, it's clear your position is on the moral end of the spectrum and that's fine. I personally don't know enough about the science side to debate this aspect of it, so, I won't challenge you further on it
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I highly doubt there are that many transwomen with biological similarities to men who are just waiting for their chance to take all those spots the moment we lower the gates and encourage them to participate in women's sports.
If our attempts to be inclusive and stop being so gross to trans people as a society starts to look like it actually is driving ciswomen out of sports, we can adjust on the fly, but I'm not super worried about it.
Hey remember this? I looked up the policy and it's "HRT can't be blanket required but if you can show there's an impact it's fine to require it. Just don't bother at the casual level."
Would you insist that all school sports teams include both men and women perhaps?
But then again, what about the school team which has a girl who is genetically a boy but doesn't wish to have surgery or take hormones. Does she count in the girl player column or the boy player column?
For those that don't know, I'm a pretty enthusiastic boulderer. I tend to watch much of the competitions at the professional level in the way that people watch football or soccer. One thing that surprised me early on is that they separate male and female climbers. I was puzzled by this, because it didn't make intuitive sense. The more competitions I watched, the more surprised I became because I noticed a pattern repeat over and over- the male professional climbers tend to be incredibly tall, and the females incredibly short. "Of course," is the immediate response "being taller gives one a significant advantage in climbing at a professional level, and since men are taller than women on average, we should separate them for fairness!"
Except, here is a piece that directly tested that statement
This is data pulled from a site where people can log personal information (height, weight, gender) and the highest level they climb at.. Now, this data did include females and males, but let's ignore that part and focus on the fact that there are disadvantages both to being too small as well as to being too tall.
To interpret this graph, the x-axis is height, and the y-axis is how hard of a problem they completed. I'm most familiar with Bouldering, so focus on the orange line and you'll see that someone who is very short (5 feet) on average can only complete a V7....just like how someone who is extremely tall can only on average complete a V7.
As you can see, performance drops off on both ends of the model...but what about if we look at the "average" height of men and women. Let's use Inquisitor77's 5ft4 median for women and 5ft9 for men....and it looks like at both heights the "average" performance is a V8, slightly better than someone who is very tall or very short, and this doesn't seem to explain why men and women are separated at the professional bouldering level, if height can not only impose disadvantages, but also that the median height for men and women doesn't seem to affect their skill
But! (and this is Feral's point) What if we only look at the elite- the 1% of the 1%. The bleeding edge of competition. Data is hard to come by, but Watts et al. in 1992 in their paper "Anthropometric profiles of elite male and female competitive sport rock climbers" measured a variety of indices from male and female finalists and semi-finalists in Sport climbing (the blue dots in that graph).
The authors of this paper found differences in height between men and women at the highest levels- male finalists were on average 179cm(+5.2cm) and females were 162cm(+-4.6cm). This turns into 5ft10 inches for men and 5ft3inches for women. Notably, this is about "median height" for males and females and tracks with the graph above- that is, these are in the grey box and represent the highest performance.
BUT
The differences between males and females in height doesn't seem like it would predict a vast difference in skill! Something else must be driving this!
"Aha!" you might say, "I know grip strength is different between men and women! I bet that's why they are in separate categories!"
And, yes, grip strength was higher in male finalists vs female finalists. However, one important caveat is that when the ratio of grip strength to body mass was compared to this value from males and females in general, female rock climbers score in the 90th percentile whereas male climbers score in the 40th percentile. That is, female rock climbers have lower grip strength per mass than males, but stronger grips than females in general. Another important caveat is that females were lighter than male climbers, but yet had higher body fat percentages.
This sort of gives us a bit of a biological basis for separating males and females. Mermier et al in their 2000 paper titled "Physiological and anthropometric determinants of sport climbing performance" determined that body fat percentage and grip strength per pound were the only factors they found (out of quite a lot of measurements) that had a positive effect on climbing success.
However, their data also combined men and women, and didn't separate their analysis by gender. One important thing is that Mermier et al used "average" climbers, not top athletes, and I want to make a point here. The "average" male climber in Mermier's study had a grip strength/mass of 0.65 while the "average" female climber had a ratio of 0.49. But if we go back to the paper looking at the elite climbers, the best of the best female climbers had a ratio of 0.65, almost equivalent to that of the "average" male climber. "Elite" male climbers have a ratio of 0.78.
What do I infer from this? Well, Mermier et al make a very salient point that grip strength is trainable, and that's abundantly clear here. Most of the other measurements between "elite" females and "average' females are very similar, with only body fat percentage and grip strength being very different between these two groups.
The other point I want to make is that this only sort of explains the difference in climbing abilities between men and women. Out of 30 metrics measured by Mermier, only two of them contributed to climbing success, and I'm not completely convinced that grip strength to body weight can explain why we should separate male and female climbers. It seems pretty clear that there are differences other than a 0.13 kg/kg ratio of grip strength between average and elite male climbers. If grip strength alone explained climbing success, then all male climbers would need to do to succeed would be to train grip strength, and that is not an argument I think anyone would make to explain the differences between the world's best climbers and someone like myself.
So what am I trying to say?
Well, for starters, I think that there isn't a good reason to separate male and female professional climbers, and the disparities in male and female competitive routes seems to be largely artificial. It's anecdotal, but male competitive routes tend to have larger reaches, whereas female routes tend to have more finesse moves, and it's generally argued that this is due to differences in height between males and females. We've dashed that notion pretty thoroughly (height was included in Mermier's model, as well as the graph above), and don't have enough evidence to say that these routes should be different to compensate for grip strength or body fat alone.
But that's my point- I'm pretty sure we can find little bits of reasons at the bleeding edge where males have an advantage in certain areas (running, as described above), but in other areas we might find that the differences are largely artificial. What is the solution here?
I'm not sure, but I'm largely unconvinced that gender-segregating most competitive sports by gender is accurately biologically based, and I think we could very easily find egalitarian ways to have mixed competitions.
One fun thing from Mermier's study (which is free, by the way) is that the range of grip strengths in average climbers basically overlapped between males and females. The weakest men had a ratio of 0.39 and the weakest females had a ratio of 0.33, with the top end having a larger gulf (0.95 for men, 0.65 for women). Once again, though, professional male climbers had an average of 0.78 (+-0.06), which is well below the max ratio reported for men, so I'm not convinced this one metric explains anything at all.
All high-level men’s sports are completely full of PEDs already, but that’s a whole other story.
Girl because she is a girl. I don’t see why this has to be problematic.
Eh, I'd agree that players who identify as female should definately be allowed on the boys team, but a lot of school budgets aren't going to stretch to like 3 teams for every sport (The level where your best 16 year old girls in a sport can compete with your remaining 16 year old boys) . They aren't playing for money, but girls and women have a right to play sports and to be on teams and get time on the field.
I disagree pretty heavily with this post, and think that we can find a legion of athletic events where the gulf between male and female athletes wouldn't be significantly large enough to impact the differential success of one gender over another.
I would also perhaps push an argument that many of our institutionalized sports favor males over females inherently because they were explicitly designed to test things that are on the higher end of performance in men and not women, but that's something I don't have as much data for.
In fact, I don't think I've ever met anybody bouldererer than Arch. He's one of the bouldest people I know.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
By the time she graduated (and granted, it was a small state, so that helped some of this), she was a 6-time state tennis champion, a bajillion-time state track and field champion in more events than I could mention, and had led the state girls hockey league in scoring five times. She won a lot of trophies, got a college scholarship to play hockey and that's the last I heard from her. I assume she went on to live a more or less normal life.
If this is the experience of a few trans girls out there, I don't see what the big deal is.
Can we just drop gender from this and focus on sex differences. Because I would really like to see more focus on whether the sex difference is insurmountable, surmountable in some sports(like climbing that was mentioned above), or there is anyway it can be surmounted in all sports.
Because I just can’t see it in head to head like boxing, running, or sports which require raw physical skill.
I’d also like to remind people that scholarships are on the line in US high school. So until we make college free we have to take that into consideration. Even the absolutely pitiable funds offered to women athletes are something.
Having a high T for a cis woman is anything above 70 ng/dL. Having a low T for men is anything under 280 ng/dL, and the average testosterone count for cis men goes all the way up to 1100. "Abnormally high" for cis women never even comes close to approaching the "male range"; if it does, that individual is intersex, and almost definitely has a deep voice and and beard growth matching whatever is normal for the men in their family.
And, taken from my experience and research, hormone triggers ARE highly non-linear. You might double the normal estrogen levels of a cisnormative male body and never notice, but once you cross a threshold for a month or two, your body basically goes, "wait, I'm a woman? better start shopping for a bra."
I think the positive press would also be huge for the team that takes on a female player. Mark Cuban famously said he'd draft Brittney Griner with a second round pick. Could you imagine the jersey sales? The attendance for her first game? The free publicity?
I'm not saying this as evidence that they can't, but more, why not?
I think the Semanya case shows that dropping gender and focusing on sex leads you down all sorts of weird, unnecessary roads that will only serve to hurt and exclude intersex and transgender people.
Yes, there will probably be a few exceptional female athletes whose biology sets them apart and makes it particularly difficult for their similarly-aged competitors and they will probably win some scholarships. That is part of sports. I don't think it's likely that they will be so numerous as to cause a major crisis that prevents ciswomen from reaping the benefits of sports.
No you just have the two teams (or four teams for JV) you have right now. Everyone plays on whichever they want.
Because they aren't *close* to good enough. Not even a little bit close. Being a point guard in the NBA requires *way* more strength and speed than you realize. Brittney Griner would have trouble making a men's college D-III team.
The closest thing I can ever recall seeing that wasn't an intentional sideshow was a couple of female professional hockey goalies. Manon Rheaume famously played a period for the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL in a preseason game as a pubilicity stunt. She and another woman whose name escapes me managed to make a couple of appearances in the ECHL, a minor professional league two or three levels below the NHL. Both were pretty bad, but not "guy on the street flails around hopelessly" bad.
I'm listening. What athletic events did you have in mind?
It would be nice if the biggest sports pushed/favored by society weren't so focused on physical attributes expressed much higher in men.
My thoughts on this are so biased by the sports I am familiar with...but which sports are more favorable to female body types?
I mean that's my understanding but I'm just trying to understand the world where what Arch is saying "I'm largely unconvinced that gender-segregating most competitive sports by gender is accurately biologically based, and I think we could very easily find egalitarian ways to have mixed competitions." squares with the fact that there are no mixed competitions. Therefore, they should remain segregated.
As far as I have been able to find by googling, women are arguably better at free diving and ultra-distance events, especially swimming.
Well, rock climbing for one. I will admit I don't have a solution! I'm not an athlete, and I don't have enough data on differences between men and women across a variety of sports to make a scientific call.
But I think that things like American Football seem designed by the very nature of the sport to cater to the types of physical attributes that have higher maxima in men. I don't have a good solution, I just think asking "how do we deal with trans individuals in our current salvo of athletic events" is focusing on the wrong part of the question. That is, we shouldn't be worried about how different genders and trans individuals perform in athletic events catered to peak male performance, but rather we should find ways to determine peak athletic performance that can be applied to all genders.
Like I said, I don't have an answer, but it seems like a problem that is more solvable, potentially.
Makes sense.
Women tend to excel relative to men in sports where strength:weight ratio is very important, and too much extra muscle becomes a hindrance. See also gymnastics.
Although it's worth noting, for whatever purposes, that when I say "women" I mean "girls." Female athletes in these categories tend to peak in the 14-18 age group.
For the same reason that say, Womens world cup soccer teams lose frequently to boys under 15 teams. The 'chemical' advantage of being genetically male is immense in many sports.
So you want almost all school sports to be only boys? I don't think thats going to fly.
Now
Boys Team 1
Girls Team 1
Boys Team 2
Girls Team 2
20 girls and 20 boys get a slot
In your plan
Team 1 - 10 boys
Team 2 - 10 boys
Team 3 - 9 boys, 1 girl
Team 4 - 6 boys, 4 girls
35 boys and 5 girls get a slot.
Sure, it's not this way in all sports at all ages, but for soccer, tennis and so on it absolutely is at the high school level.
No, you still have
Boy 1
Boy 2
Girl 1
Girl 2.
Now everyone who identifies as a girl plays on a girl team and everyone who identifies as a boy plays on a boy team.
2) A similar argument could be made that sports, having developed in a male-assumed, male-dominated manner, have evolved over time in such a way that they magnify the minute differences between men and women. Height, for example, is a strong factor in basketball, and the arms race for taller and taller players will skew gender outcomes towards men in that sport.
3) The rock-climbing story from Arch (great post btw) is a really good example of a relatively new sport where these factors can be examined firsthand. If rock climbing were measured "purely" based on, say, the ability to climb a particular natural rock formation as fast as possible, and that sport were not differentiated by men and women, it could very well be argued that men and women would be equivalent enough that no gender distinction were necessary. Different mountains will have different challenges and benefits, each of which could benefit people of different size and shape in various ways.
But if we take the idea at face value that a gender distinction was imposed on the sport prematurely, then it would also make sense that "men's courses" and "women's courses" would evolve differently over time (in particular, to highlight physical/skill distinctions that could be made within each gender, rather than across the human population as a whole). Which, with enough time and change, makes rock climbing "for men" a very different sport than rock climbing "for women". See: Figure skating, gymnastics, softball vs. baseball
4) Which goes to a thought that maybe we could just have new sports? Something that can be played at the professional level by both men and women, perhaps in different, but necessary, roles. I honestly have no idea what that would look like or where to start, but it's an interesting thought experiment. You can't separate the player from the game. So maybe we need a new game.
OK, what if a girl thinks that the girls team is rubbish and she is good enough to play on the boys team. She goes out, and she's totally good enough to be on boys team 2 in the number 5 slot (we're playing a very boring sport here). Can she be on the boys team?
Yeah I'm probably fine with that. I think the only protected tier should be the tier that exists to ensure that people of a hormonal balance more consistent with a biological female have a space.
I had a fleeting thought of "oh that's a bummer for the boy who got cut from the team" but like, should that girl be held back from money/prestige/whatever because a boy is worse than her? No probably not. People get cut from the team all the time.
So trans women without surgery etc can't play on the girls team? Are they on the boys team now?
What about intersex people? Boys team again?