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Pete Buttigieg Says Trans Athletes in Women’s Sports Raise “Serious Fairness Issues”

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Pete Buttigieg Says Trans Athletes in Women’s Sports Raise “Serious Fairness Issues”

12 comments
  • 🙄 Sports isn't about being fair though.

    • Well, no it is. Remember that fighters qualify for their weight categories

      • I think in the sense of "global elite athletics", no it by definition isn't fair. At all levels of sports funding is a significant entry barrier to elite competition. Biological advantages are everywhere too, irrespective of gender. Height, leg height, wing span, lung capacity, heart size, spinal curvature, basically every kind of biological parameter can create an advantage over someone else.

        Thats an advantage those athletes havent earned. You don't earn a biological advantage, you just have it. You don't earn being born to a wealthy family who can finance your strict comprehensive training regimen, you just are born to one. If sports is about fairness, that is to say like, a level playing field anyone can come along and work really hard and compete, then no sports is not fair. Some people will be better than others no matter how hard they work.

        Fairness in the sense of this discussion, is competition within your gender. Critics of trans inclusion are not objecting on biological grounds, they are objecting to a trans woman competing with cisgender women because they do not agree that she is a woman. These arguments about fairness are almost never applied to cis women with height or wingspan advantages. Just to trans women of any kind for competing at any level of competition.

        If fairness is the goal, then sports needs to be extensively categorized based on all the biological parameters that give you an advantage. Or else some kind of combined leaderboard where everyones advantage or handicap is accounted for. Athletics competitions for people with disabilities already implement a combined leaderboard system in this way.

        But no one is interested in actually being fair. They're interested in who does the absolute best. Who is the absolute best woman and who is the absolute best man. The disagreement is that trans women are women. There's nothing else they're concerned with precluding certain women from participating. They just disagree that trans women are women and therefore believe that in a "whos the absolute best woman at xyz" competition trans women should be excluded. To say that its a matter of fairness is demonstrably false.

        Oh, and also your comment breaks one of the rules of this community. I'm leaving it up because I think it presents an opportunity to educate on exactly why this belief is wrong. But further comments to this effect will be removed. Please follow the rules of this community.

      • Sure, there are degrees of fairness, but in the end the person with the most skill, natural advantage biologically for whatever reason etc is going to win. Sports cannot be entirely fair and I'd wish they'd stop using it as an excuse.

  • Unfortunately, this has been one of the better responses among the Democrats. At least he advocates for keeping the government out of this issue and that it should be determined by experts in the field, and that we shouldn't put blanket bans on sports because chess is obviously different than football.

    Frankly, though, I have little to no faith in either party to protect my rights. I can't shake the feeling that whether a Republican or a Democrat wins 2028 that our heads will still be on the chopping block.

    Looking at history, I don't think this will end up like the Civil Rights movement. I think our curse is that every 100 years, we have about 10-ish good years and come just shy of reaching social acceptance, then get successfully forced back into the closet and/or genocided with all our history erased, and then start to "reappear" in the public consciousness 75 to 100 years later to a public that thinks we're this new group that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. We simply don't have enough numbers to defend ourselves and no other groups will ever meaningfully try to defend us.

    • Not sure if this will provide you with any hope, but there's some good news as to our* numbers. While it may not seem like much, it's a massive jump generationally. In the US, out 2SLGBTQIA+ people are almost 10% of the entire population. Considering how many of our siblings are closeted, it's a pretty big boost.

      (*I discovered last month that my being enby counts as a 'trans experience' so I am tentatively trying out including myself.)

12 comments