>Some states that introduced trans sports bans couldn't even cite a single person the bill would affect. Tenesee introduced their bill to ban a single person. Who wasn't even close to the top of her discipline. It's all political posturing.
This argument works in reverse as well though. People don't want to throw out the idea of gender to appease a select few.
There is a multitude of things that are simply unfair accidents of birth and there isn't a solid line where it's obvious something should be done. With gender issues there seems to be a lot of people with no dog in the fight who have extremely strong opinions but accomodations aren't always made on stuff like this because a few people are experiencing something unfair which they have no control over. It's not "hate", as many people would say, to want to have a conversation about it.
"Throw out the idea is gender" sounds like you have a very specific view of trans people as gender abolitionists. That's misreading gender as social construction. Social construction doesn't automatically advocate for abolishment, it merely points out that these things are not universal constants. Money is such a construct too, and I don't even have to be anticapitalist to point that out.
Also, I get your argument, but the entire premise of trans women stealing college sports trophies is false. It's a bit dependent on specific discipline and how well you manage to retain muscle (it's much harder, and once you lost it, it's gone for good), but generally HRT levels the playing field enough that the olympic comittee, who I trust much more on this than the local republican, does not object to participation.
Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.
I find it entirely unconvincing that a trans person would solely transition to cheat at sports. The GDR tried something comparable to this hypothetical and the female athletes unknowingly exposed to androgens seemed pretty unhappy about the outcome. So I don't see why you don't see any theoretical advantage on the same spectrum of "unfair accidents of birth". These supposed advantages certainly aren't severe enough that trans women beat cis women consistently.
>"Throw out the idea is gender" sounds like you have a very specific view of trans people as gender abolitionists.
I am not describing myself. I just understand the position of people that feel that way and don't like to just dismiss them as bigots as most seem to.
These people are definitely making a slippery slope argument but they also feel like they're already halfway down the slope. They aren't out there seeing an A and concerned about B, they see it as A, B, C, D, E then F and wonder when G will come.
The trans sports thing is F. They're more worried about G, H and I.
>Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.
That's my point. If all I ever wanted to do was play basketball but I can't because of [accident of birth], which accidents require accomodations?
You're talking about making exclusion an intervention, not a result of circumstances. Not disallowing trans people to compete is not an accomodation, it's the opposite. These are not actions of equal value.
It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball so more people down the height distribution curve can compete at the higher levels. That would be, with the same logic as the exclusion of trans people, equitable. But we kind of instinctively know it's wrong.
The reason we have women's sports in the first place is essentially a different form of "you have to be below 2m" in order to promote diversity in sports, so disallowing trans people doesn't seem like a much bigger step than disallowing 50% of the population.
Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.
> Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.
It is a problem - see https://shewon.org for an increasingly long list of actual women who have been pushed out of winning spots in their sports by men who identify as women.
> You're talking about making exclusion an intervention, not a result of circumstances.
That's a matter of perspective, a perspective that is the core of this issue. Everything you've said after that is all true if you agree with your priors but people aren't asking you to defend that part, they're asking you to defend your priors, that gender identity is what's important in the segregation of sports and not biological sex.
An enormous part of this discussion has to do with Title IX, generally considered a positive thing among women's rights advocates. It's language deals with sex, the biological term, of male and female (as do many laws).
> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Behind all the people on both sides of this argument about what's a man and what's a woman there's the legal issue that it likely (I'm being generous is not saying definitely) violates Title IX to allow males into female sports (in the areas where T9 has authority).
> It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball...
This is another framing situation. I'd argue that the better analogy would be weight classes in wrestling. Classes work really well in individual sports to sort people into competitive groups and it works because it's an objective measure.
Unfortunately, team sports like basketball don't have enough players to form a different team for every "height class" so biological females, who tend to be shorter for the majority of the distribution curve, are basically guaranteed excluded by accident of birth. So team sports are segregated by biology because almost an entire sex, 50% of the population, is excluded by the distribution curves of their biology so we now have "sex classes" in most sports to serve the two major distribution curves of humans. Getting rid of sex segregation in basketball and doing so by height instead would make a lot of sense if height was the only factor but there's an equivalent set of distribution curves for things like strength, weight, speed, et al. that it's much simpler to take the thing that those curves have in common, sex, and segregate by them. And back to the previous paragraph, that's why wrestling is still also sex segregated.
I understand that argument and, I think, the sex segregation is a logical solution to the sexual dimorphism of humanity.
I also understand the argument that the social issue of a male/female sexes not being neatly segregated into gender identities, that people generally (also not always) want to segregate themselves, socially, with those people who share a common identity and that includes sports, especially lower levels, that are generally much more social functions than athletic. What I don't see coming from this side of the argument is a defined set of rules that can replace the language of Title IX. Which is totally understandable because gender is exponentially more complicated and diverse than sex. I'm onboard with doing something about this but I've yet to see an understandable replacement for something like Title IX that uses gender over sex.
I have a bit of curiosity about the idea of "identity" being something worthy of segregation considering that gender identity isn't the only type of identity categorization.
This argument works in reverse as well though. People don't want to throw out the idea of gender to appease a select few.
There is a multitude of things that are simply unfair accidents of birth and there isn't a solid line where it's obvious something should be done. With gender issues there seems to be a lot of people with no dog in the fight who have extremely strong opinions but accomodations aren't always made on stuff like this because a few people are experiencing something unfair which they have no control over. It's not "hate", as many people would say, to want to have a conversation about it.