I want to precede what i’m going to talk about here with a pretty emphatic statement of ignorance; I do not know science, I don’t know what makes athletes tick or how they develop. I don’t know what hormone levels contribute, I Don’t know ranges of natural vs unnatural levels - I don’t really know much of anything. All of that said, the comfort that I can draw when it comes to the discussion of trans athletes is that, for all of the advances in science and medicine, nobody else seems to either.
I tend to stay away from the subject of politics because, like with science, I don’t really know enough about policy and what people are allowed to do with positions of power to appropriately have conversations with people who might, but the result of politics and culture becoming indistinguishable has been that a lot of very uneducated people can give a lot of very uneducated takes based on vague feelings, and ultimately, i’m no different. My cultural take on trans people is a pretty simple one; they are not a threat in any meaningful way. That sentence is going to come up a lot, but I want to linger on it here - i’m sure that there have been cases of trans people exploiting mentally ill youth, or men lying about being trans in order to gain access to women to prey upon them, but these cases are largely the minority, and acting as if they aren’t in order to drum up fear about something that is perceived as new and misunderstood only serves to scapegoat the real problems in society, both politically and culturally. Men largely do not need to pretend to be trans in order to victimize women in bathrooms because, as it turns out, assault is already a crime, and the people who prey upon children, once again, are largely men with positions of authority over them and not transgendered people. It’s a boogeyman that the right wing of politics has trotted out in order to regurgitate their same bigoted talking points they put out against gay people - they prey on children, they are a threat to our society’s values, and I think that the only people who are not bigoted who even come close to falling for this rhetoric are hte ones who have never met a gay or trans person, because it turns outt hat once a normal, dumb person is able to contextualize right wing boogeymen as people and not as concepts, the idea that real people are prowling locker rooms and summer camps is an unbelievable as it actually is. While the Trans Bathroom and Acknowledging Trans People in Education fights continue, another branch of anti trans culture has begun to become more prominent is one that has always remained as a light simmer - Trans Athletes, look out ya’ll, there are men who are turning into women in order to win competitions and it’s unfair to women to have to compete against them. It’s not a massive talking point, but it is there, and it’s so annoying.
There are a lot of people who have pointed this out, this is not an original point, but let’s get the very surface observation out of the way - this line of thinking is so aggressively misogynistic in multiple ways. The first, and most obvious, way is the idea that men are, inherently, better at sports than women with minimal training - that an ordinary man could transition to become a woman and immediately beat out women who have been training solely because men are stronger and bigger and better. I use the idea of an ordinary man and not an athlete of equal level because there is the next level - the suggestion that trans people are going into competition for the sole purpose to gather wins and to victimize women. I Find this incredibly hard to believe for two reasons; one, transitioning solely to victimize women is a net zero when it comes with an unbelievable amount of cultural stigma and criticism (Despite the insistence of the right wing of politics, trans people are not universally accepted and praised - they are disproportionately criticized and scrutinized by pretty much everybody), and two, the idea that mediocre male athletes are transitioning to women’s sports in order to succeed is laughable because of the decades of suppression of women’s athletics. In 2023, we can pretty definitively say that, yes, male athletes are better than their female counterparts at most sports, but this is pointing the frame of reference at right now and projecting the conclusion of superiority across all of time - We don’t know what the gap might be if women were not barred from participating in sports, culturally steered away from it, and improvement meeting just about every fiscal and social barrier you can. Men’s athletics has had billions of dollars pumped into it, athletic sciences have been dedicated to forwarding human improvement, and opportunities were largely never kept from men like they were for women, so the idea of inherent advantages is completely soured by decades and centuries of social context - on a smaller scale though, men have largely forced women into being a subsection of sports worthy of scorn and ridicule. Women are not allowed to be interested in sports without climbing hills, the idea of viewing women sports is viewed as laughable and their inclusion in more even sporting events like Professional Wrestling is often regarded as a token inclusion rather than with legitimate interest; the idea that a male athlete, mediocre or otherwise, is AT ALL incentivized to transition solely to win in female sports is so ridiculous because the amount of opportunities given to mediocre male athletes likely outpaces opportunities given to exceptional female ones many times over. All of this is to say that the trans athlete discussion has no reason to assume that male athletes are the ones transitioning, thus the belief is that any regular man, with minimal training, can beat female athletes because of the inherent advantage of being male - which is exceptionally stupid and misogynistic before it even gets to being transphobic.
The second level of it being misogynistic is that it relies on the belief that male and female sports are segregated because of the skill and ability gap, that if women did not have women’s teams, they could not participate in sports based on merit, so a man who transitions is stealing a spot on the women’s team that they are lucky enough to even have. Once again, in 2023, the male and female segregated teams probably do exist for that reason, but once again, i have to urge you to not assume that the modern day norms have always been that way and are not reflective of decades of cultural influence. It’s not terribly difficult to find stories about women at the high school level wanting to try out for sports teams because they didn’t have a split, there was just the team, and for those women to be rejected on the principle of them being women which eventually lead to the forced inclusion of women and eventually dedicated women’s teams out of necessity. It’s one of the most devious ways that a Patriarchal society works - Men deny women access to equal opportunities, Women are forced to settle for or create their own individual opportunities, Men don’t support them and culturally shame them for existing, some years go by and people who don’t remember the origins are able to laugh and say that the only reason women’s only spaces exist is because they can’t hang. It’s so sinister and evil; I remember the most ghoulish example of this being an argument that women don’t support women only spaces by using the decline of the gym line Curves, which offered a space for Women to work out without the preying eyes of men, and how it exhibited that women were seeking male approval with their gazes. Ignoring the obviously gross implication that women reject their spaces because they seek objectification, and without going into the radfem hole of women seeking objectification and even assault because it means they are a desired commodity in patriarchy, it doesn’t take a very long time to find that a lot of Curves locations shut down because men complained that they were discriminatory, that they were being excluded based on them being men. It’s the most evil way a patriarchal society acts - They create an environment that is harmful to its lower class, the lower class seeks refuge, the society is mad that refuge exists, that refuge is dismantled, and the society says “See, you don’t really want refuge, if you did, you’d have it”. It’s just a horrific loop that feeds itself and harms everybody, even the ones who benefit from it because they don’t develop any awareness of their own issues, leading to the male loneliness epidemic being laid at women’s feet. Once again, all of this is to say that if someone is transitioning to participate in women’s sports, they have to navigate cultural scorn, the status of a social pariah, fewer opportunities being offered, next to no mobility within the sport, all for the sole purpose of winning where they wouldn’t in men’s sports… Not only is this hard to believe on the basis that there seems to be zero incentive, but it’s hard to believe because where are all the trans athletes?
This is where I inject a little bit more insight because, unlike most people who talk about sports as a cultural issue, I have actually seen sports and have at least a fundamental understanding of what is and isn’t significant. Despite seeing a ton of these stories about trans athletes that are usually sensationalized by headlines like “Trans person beats 300 women in race” and then you click on the article and it was an 800 person marathon where the trans person came in 500th place and the 499 ahead of them are biological women, I’ve failed to see any kind of serious trend of trans people at the top of female sports in any way that is significant. One might read that sentence and argue with it on principle; Just one trans person taking a spot from a biological women is a crime, and is worth dying on the hill to fight for, and with those people, there is no arguing with them because they are essentially hypersensational zealots who get off on aggressively arguing on principle alone, which is such an amazing thing to be able to be because you are not rooted in reality or trends, you only ever need to argue about ideas that sound good against people who usually have more nuanced opinions. My stance on trans athletes in women’s sports is, I feel, a pretty simple one - unless there is a way to discern an undeniable advantage that is attached to them being trans, then a trans person winning a race or playing soccer is little more than a skill issue. The big problem that I have with talking about trans athletes with people who don’t know sports is that they observe female sports as a monolith, and take one hypothetical trans person potentially doing well in a race at the high school level and project that across all potential trans people at all levels of competition, and it’s so annoying because in order to explain to them why it’s so stupid, you have to get them to understand that sports and athletes are not a monolith and that skill gaps and massive performances and advantages are integral to the medium. If we split athletics into 4 levels, High School, College, World and Professional, you could segment them into a pyramid of sorts; at the professional level, there are the fewest participants, and because the level of skill is so high, there are far fewer tiers of greatness that can exist - the worst professional football player is much closer to the best professional football player than he is to the average citizen. As you go down, you get a large field and larger gaps between the best and the worst - at the high school and college levels, these gaps are often so large that you need extreme context to be able to distinguish legitimate prospect and someone feasting on weak competition. Take College Football - Alabama plays Vanderbilt in September 2022, winning 55-3. To some, you might say, hey, this is impressive, but to college football fans and anybody who understand, they know that even though Vanderbilt is part of the SEC along with Alabama, they are an absolutely dog trash football team that hasn’t fielded a winning team since 2013. These kinds of gaps are everywhere at the collegiate level, and going down to the high school level, the gaps would be even more broad, and it is up to scouts for universities to be able to gleam whether or not someone who, hypothetically, wins a race by 10 seconds is actually that good, or if they are competing against absolutely dog trash competition in a nowhere town; if this athlete who wins by that much doesn’t translate that excellence to the national high school level and then the college level, then what good is that advantage? Is that a meaningful skill gap or is that just a demonstration that someone even 1% good at a thing can gap people who are 0% talented, and that doesn’t up to competition when the field is bigger? To me, that is a meaningless skill gap, and for me to actually believe trans women have a significant advantage in sports enough to advocate for action to be taken, you would need to have either so many trans people that a trend is undeniable or enough trans people who are so far ahead of the curve set by biological women that there is no feasible way that this falls into the realm of the understood and acceptable skill gap that exists in these sports; that they have an advantage solely by being trans. To my knowledge, this has not happened at any level, and all arguments over it are based entirely on principle and fearmongering and not any actual evidence.
I’ll leave with this anecdote - 10 years ago, when Trans acceptance was even more murky than it is today, the boogeyman became real. Fallon Fox, a trans woman, debuted in MMA, and I can tell you that it was absolutely miserable to deal with. I Was much less “woke” on trans issues, I was far more of an edgy teenager who didn’t really participate in social issues, but even at the time, I thought that the discussion around Fallon Fox was misguided to the point of people wilfully being stupid. I understand why the idea of a trans person fighting women is so scary to dumb people; big scawy man puts on a wig and punches women for money, this is horrific, we need to ban this and protect women, etc. It’s easy to get there! It’s simple and it’s safe, you can make a monster out of somebody, and when pseudo intellectuals like Joe Rogan start talking about Bone Density, how men develop more dense and bigger bones than women and that means they hit harder and are unstoppable, it gasses up a lot of very stupid people who overblow the Fallon Fox phenomenon. To me, the discussion of Fallon Fox should have been centered around how far behind Women’s MMA was from Men’s because of how it was very much the wild west as late in the game as 2015. You can look up the video “MMA Soccer Mom” for yourself, where a regular looking woman fought then 0-0 future Bellator Flyweight Champion Illima-Lei Macfarlane and was knocked out in 10 seconds. Fights like this likely still exist for both men and women on tons of regional scenes, but they are almost never filmed; MacFarlane and this Soccer Mom’s fight WAS filmed, in 2015! Women’s MMA was very much still in the doldrums in 2012 and 2013, and the women Fallon Fox was fighting and beating, yes, they were woefully outmatched - not because Fallon Fox was so much better, but because these people sucked at fighting, and it was irresponsible to book any of them to fight professionally. The way you know that these women suck is because Fallon Fox eventually fought her only opponent with a wikipedia page, Ashlee Evans-Smith, and got decimated. Evans-Smith blew Fox out, went tot he UFC the next year, and posted a 3-6 record against all of the lower levels of the UFC’s Bantamweight division. Fallon Fox’s supposed inherent advantages couldn’t carry her past the objectively abysmal nobodies that were irresponsibly booked to fight professionally, but because she was winning dominantly, nobody except for me apparently had the take that maybe we shouldn’t panic unless this is actually a problem. I cannot argue on principle, even when I Want to my brain defaults to “idk but it’s just one case it’s not that big a deal” - these women that Fox beat largely did not have professional records, and after Fox would either not fight again or lose almost every fight afterwards. The fear of a trans athlete is almost entirely unfounded, at least today; this take is rooted in 2023, and if trans people were to be normalized and potential advantages were to be found that didn’t get reflected in results, I would expect there to be some level of optimization around it and see more trans people having advantages and results in women’s sports… however, this is an idealized world that would first have to destigmatize trans people in sports, which would likely not happen before destigmatizing women in sports, second trans advancement and optimization would come in lockstep with biological women’s advancement and optimization, meaning that these results would take decades to surface in any meaningful way.
It’s just a way to scare you into thinking that trans people are coming for you to replace your children with an agender blob so that they can control the population; don’t fall for it without applying even a little bit of common sense, because all common sense leads to this being stupid.
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