Trans athletes rule

This community is not a place to debate the participation of trans women in sports.
Here's a digestible video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flSS1tjoxf0
Long story short the entire subject is being pushed by right wing lobby organizations to get people riled up about trans people and secure votes for the right. That's it. Do not fall for their bullshit.
- I haven't watched John Oliver's video on the subject yet but if I recall correctly, trans athletes don't even tend to place first in their own divisions. So the whole idea of them being "roided up naturally" is just plain silly. It's all just a right wing fantasy built to divide the left and supercharge conservatives on election days.
  
  They've been allowed to participate in the Olympics for over 20 years, and no Trans athlete has ever won a medal.
  
  Ayup. Pretty famously there's a swimmer that became a conservative activist named Riley Gaines. She was radicalised because she tied for fifth place with a trans woman named Lia Thomas in the NCAA. I think she was mainly just salty because she had to hold the sixth place trophy while Lia held the fifth place one during the photoshoot afterwards. Lia did go on to come first in a different event at the same meet (Edit: that Riley didn't even compete in), but that just goes to show that she had a favoured event that she was best at, like almost all swimmers.
  For what it's worth, Riley said that the reason she was radicalised was, and I quote from wikipedia:
  In 2023, Gaines said that Thomas shared locker room space with her while still intact with "male genitalia".
  Which is just inane. It's not like someone with a vagina can't sexually assault someone else with a vagina, having a penis doesn't make that easier.
  
  Yeah the motive is revealed in the methods. Conservatives never propose legislation that specifically addresses any advantage trans women have, instead opting for blanket bans. The science shows that trans women have very little if any advantage in sports, and in my sports we're actually at a competitive disadvantage. Hell, even the chuddiest of chuds could realize that trans women certainly can't have an advantage in all sports. Do trans women have an advantage in women's gymnastics? Have you seen the type of bodies that excel in that sport?
  I would be open to conversations of sports fairness if they came from a place of honest good faith, but they don't. The default stance should be equality first, with restrictions only introduced when absolutely necessary. Is it possible there's some sport that trans women have some massive advantage in? Well trans women should quickly dominate that sport's upper echelons. If you find such a sport, then maybe we can have the conversation about fairness. But even then, it should be limited to just what is absolutely necessary to ensure fairness, nothing more. For example, maybe some handicap system would be appropriate for an individual sport. But even then, such intervention should only be done if there is some enormous unfair advantage that trans women are systematically demonstrating.
  Instead, we just get bigots that talk about a trans girl "stealing" their spot in a sports competition, as if she doesn't have the exact same right to compete as any other girl. It's fundamentally about devaluing the humanity of trans people all together. Trans identities aren't to be respected, they're to be tolerated and humored at best, persecuted at worst. It's no different than the same instincts that kept sports racially segregated for generations.
  
  And they are under represented. I don't recall the numbers but the percentage of trans people in the overall population is much higher than among athletes
  
  Do trans athletes even exist in a statistically significant number to even warrant the conversation in the first place? I think I've only ever even heard of a trans athlete in SNL skits and shit like that. Granted, I don't pay attention to sports in general.
- Good to know. If I choose to change instances I’ll go to this one.

Transfemmes have every right to participate in sports that match their gender.
- Sports divisions kinda need to be overhauled anyway. Would be nice to have it based on the actual physical factors that affect a human's performance in a specific sport, instead of just 2 groups for everything with blurry definitions and a massive overlap in terms of said performance.
  
  Yeah, just stick with weight classes.
  
  Paralympics has such a system kinda. We could extend that system to the point where it includes people nowadays forced into "Olympic Games" or what ever they are called
- Trans mascs too
- Especially mud wrestling.

"the only sport i have an unfair advantage in over you is sumo wrestling, Bethany."
- Sumo is really the ultimate fair sport. There are no weight classes. Very few rules (setting aside the unwritten Japanese cultural traditions).
  Watching sumo, you quickly learn why every other fighting sport has weight classes.
  
  does that make it a fair sport or a really unfair sport? also I saw a YouTube video something along the lines of "where's the glory" in the thumbnail, it was REALLY interesting
  
  Would that not make it a fairly rich person's game? Their calorie intake is like 20,000 calories. Throw in the ability to train and eat while being able to afford that, Id find it hard for most people

Earth is stupid.

- Michael Phelps has an inate advantage but no one seems to give a shit. In a truly just world trans women would be allowed to seek excellence and be valued for their capabilities instead of shunned. For the record I don't really think trans women have an advantage over similarly matched cis women. I just think the notion of fairness in sports is inherently ridiculous.
  
  It does seem sensible to require some proof of some set time of hrt for trans athletes in top level competition, and that's about it. Once you've been on E for a while all studies I'm aware of show there really isn't any inherent advantage to being AMAB.
  And for any lower competition levels it doesn't really matter anyway since you can likely find cis women that are better than the men anyway, so who cares if some trans girl has some physical advantage while she waits for hrt to start or whatever.
- 🙄

Written by The Chaser?
- It's like the Australian equivalent of The Onion.

- What do you mean? There are loads of transphobes literally arguing that transfem athletes are transitioning so they can compete in women's categories because they're not good enough in men's categories.
  They said this about Lia Thomas endlessly. They're still saying this about her.