I know you're turning to me for scientific guidance, but I'm just so fucking done with this issue overall. To quote contrapoints: I have nothing left but rage.
I've been on this road before. I could give you some. In most ways, trans women match cis women of their height and weight. But there aren't a lot. Yeah, its a problem. But fucking NOBODY will even study it because of how hot this issue is right now.
But more importantly: There will never, EVER be a study that meets their standards. There's always SOME physical metric that has differences between trans women and cis women. It's become essentially an iteration of the multiple testing problem- if you keep on doing statistical tests, eventually something is going to land.
I don't fucking want to provide studies. I don't want to cut myself down. I don't want my defense of myself to be "oohhh look at me I'm just as weak and pathetic and infantile as cis women"
Is this fucking feminism? Really?
I'm fucking done. Call me the evil hysterical woman, but this entire conversation reeks of misogyny to its fucking core. Organized sports as we know them are made by men, for men, to celebrate male accomplishments and excellence. Cis women can and do equal or excel men in many, MANY physical metrics. But the arbitrary set of rules, the arbitrary set of bouncing balls and scoring systems, are all made to reward the physical abilities of men. We create spin offs and systems of score tracking and variations of the same things over, and over, and over again, to give the fragile little male ego more and more reasons to stroke itself.
Let's take a look at some whiny as piss men not being able to handle the thought that women could EVER be physically notable.
Olympic target shooting used to be mixed gender. A woman won one year. The next year, it was segregated. Not only was it segregated, but the scoring system changed so that the scores of men and women could never be directly compared again.
Last year, Donald Trump sat on stage with Riley Gaines, the transphobic swimmer who whipped up the vitriol about Lia Thomas, and bragged about how it wasn't fair she lost her competition because he, Donald Trump, a 78 year old out of shape wax sculpture of a man, was male. And that he could beat Riley. A trained D1 swimmer. And Riley took it, because it advanced her grift.
There's a now infamous poll that 1 in 8 men think they could beat Serena Williams in a tennis match. Its pretty old at this point, but I'm guessing that number is even higher now.
This entire conversation centers around "trans people crushing the dreams of female athletes" but oh my fucking god, are we not doing that as a society already? This entire fucking "debate" is just an excuse for more and more cis men to sit their, stroking their fucking egos on live television about how big and strong and powerful and fucking WHATEVER men are, and even the trace of maleness in trans women is enough to permanently make them some kind of ubermensch that destroys cis women by every metric imagineable.
I don't give two shits about saving sports, one way or another. I detested organized sports long before I transitioned. Ya wanna talk natural advantage, and how sports rewards exactly the kind of physical ability that a certain brand of cis man pushes themselves to? I have a very mild ankle deformity that means jogging for long periods of time is painful. My best mile time is over 11 minutes. And yet I don't see any of the fuckers that are "better" than me out there in the ocean, clinging to the bottom on a single breath for minutes, or up there with me on top of Whitney. Only one of those skills is celebrated.
Fuck me that was a tangent. My point is, I've long since realized that sports are a self propagating system for the egos of people with a very particular kind of physical prowess. The only exception to this is when its exploitative of people with that kind of extremely specific physical prowess, and leaves those it exploits in the fucking gutter. I don't need to start bringing up CTE, I know y'all know exactly what my take would be on that.
but what is sending me over the fucking edge is how I'm supposed to be the crazy one. I'm the delusional tranny for pointing out that we have lost the fucking plot entirely. This is recreation. Its entertainment. And we are using it to punish people. Fuck this.
I'm so sorry OP, but just don't engage in that game. If you need a calm, measured argument, try attacking the misogyny of it all. The only way to "fix" sports is to create more events that reward and celebrate the physical abilities of cis women: flexibility, extreme long term endurance, and fuck I'm not a sports person nor do I want to waste brainspace on more than that. We need a system for cis women, one that doesn't tell them "here, have this shittier, less viewed, less supported, less encouraged, less celebrated version of something a man is good at". Trans people would find some place in that and in theory, there would be nothing to complain about.
Jesus fucking christ, if I see one more male news pundit start talking about trans women in sports I'm going to straight up devolve into a misandrist.
