Transgender in Sports
How times have changed. When I was a kid there were only 2 genders. This was before we could talk about sex. Actually there were 4 genders when I think of it now. There were boys and girls and men and women.
There is a kind of physical transformation that happens at puberty (among many!) When I was 12 all of the biggest kids in the class were girls. When I was 15 all of the biggest kids were guys. I notice that males went through a boy to guy transition that the girls didn't. I can remember bristling at being called a boy when I was a teenager.
Guys later transformed into men while girls stayed as girls until they were women. (Ponders that but hurries on)
By the time I was very interested in girlfriends and sex I was dimly aware of homosexuality. Mom told me that my choir master was gay without having the words gay or homosexuality in our vocabulary. But what she said made a lot of things I'd already observed go 'click' and become clearer. But neither of us was very freaked out.
I recall that at the time there was a lot of fuss about a couple of books into human sexuality called the Kinsey Reports. They showed that homosexuality was a completely normal human behavior. Then had a 7 point scale that measured homosexuality and even found that an individual's rating on the scale could vary over a lifetime.
Those reports had a pretty big influence. Within 40 years gay marriage was legal in Canada. 20 years earlier it led IMHO to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. As our then PM, Pierre Trudeau, famously said "The State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation".
That's actually been a good working principle for getting along with people. Unless they are my sexual partner then what people do in their bedrooms with their partners generally isn't relevant to our common interest.
I first heard of gender dysphoria in a newsmagazine article in the 1980s about a kid in Manitoba who was the first to undergo medical treatment for the condition. As far as I could tell the treatment involved some testosterone therapy and also behavioral therapy for caregivers like accepting a preference for dresses for instance.
That caught my attention. As a child I knew several boys who far preferred girlish things like being pretty to boyish things like playing baseball. What also caught my attention was that the therapy worked. The boy went on to live quite contentedly as a girl.
The US military once had a policy re: gay soldiers. "Don't ask, Don't tell" in reference to sexuality. In general that worked pretty well.
That kind of attitude works very well in a cooperative environment where everyone prospers when we all work together in peace.
Sports are the antithesis of a cooperative environment. It's a very competitive environment even if the competitors are cooperative teams. Sports are played under very stringent rules. Rules like 'offfside" for instance; I'm still not sure what that means or who has an eye quick enough to detect it.
Most sports are gender oriented; they have a male/female split. One reason seems obvious; the biggest and strongest men are bigger and stronger than the biggest and strongest women.
This has its roots in the transformation at puberty where males have a growth spurt and become generally bigger than girls. In sports size matters. Size means longer bones and more muscle. Some sports measure the difference between winning and losing in milliseconds so small differences matter.
Where do transgender people fit in that male/female environment? In the hypercompetitive environment of sports many people are saying 'noplace'. They say that since a guy's physique is fixed at puberty then if they trans to female then they will take that male advantage with them in their competition with other girls which is not fair and against the rules.
The IOC gender rules were recently (March this year) updated specifically to exclude trans women using a genetic test of the y chromosome. This involves a genetic testing of all women participating in Olympic sports - no men will be tested.
One must recall that the percentage of women who are trans is very small. What exactly is the problem? I think the controversy has the issue upside down. The problem here is the hypercompetitiveness of sports.
Make no mistake, hypercompetitive sports are very big business. Right now Vancouver is dealing with a FIFA global soccer tournament.. There are lots of roads blocked. The city has lots of rich fans who are supposed to spend enough to justify the cost of putting on the show. Experience shows that it never does. Most of the city can't afford the tickets.
A deeper issue is the willingness to even propose that women have to certify that they are women to participate in elite sport. This idea is of a kind with forced birther states forcing women to submit menstrual records to prove they hadn't had an abortion. It is trying to force women to accept very intrusive surveillance as a norm.
I understand that a lot of people are horrified at the whole idea of trans people. Lots of people are horrified at the whole idea of gay people or even single people. (Remember 'childless cat ladies'?)
I think the best way to think of sport is to think of it as play and not business. The best sport is where we are happily playing without really thinking of winning. This impression formed early.
When I was 12 or so my parents would take Sister and I to gatherings of their friends. We kids would gather in the yard for a pickup game of baseball. The big kids would choose up teams of kids ranging from 5 to 12 . The fun wasn't about winning. The fun was measured by laughter and squeals of delight.
I asked an AI (Gemini) about this and the interesting response had nothing to say about whether transwomen are better at anything than ciswomen. On theoretical grounds it said that on the one hand trans women might have an advantage but on the other it would be a disadvantage. So in theory it would balance out.
Nobody seems to have done empirical studies about that. It's easy to see why because the number of trans people is very small so it's hard to get a good dataset. The other is that denying trans people the ability to compete and play together with the rest means we can never get empirical data.
Boxing might provide a solution. I don't know the sport well but I gather that the boxers are classified by weight so that each fight was between fighters of equal weight. This was supposed to even out the advantage that weight gave and encourage skill as the deciding factor.
I asked my friendly AI about that. I learned that there are actually boxing matches where heavyweight boxers compete with lightweight boxers.
That might work for field sports like running and jumping. Rather than classify competitors by gender (whatever that is) we might classify athletes as lightweight or middleweight or heavyweight.
Also a sport like football provides an example. Linemen are much heavier than quarterbacks and the team takes advantage of both.
What do you think?
I open the floor.
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.