There you go lying again I have not shamed any trans child

Keep lying it's all you do

My point is that there is no reason to ask a lot of questions about people in cases where it is extremely unlikely that we need the answers.

So let's say your belief that 1-10% of high school sports are competitive is completely wrong and it's closer to 90-99% are competitive, then I assume you would be supportive of bans in 90-99% of the cases. Same if 50% of the schools are deemed to be competitive.

It seems to me that this claim of being agnostic is false, it's similar to the proponents of the heartbeat bills for abortion. You claim there is a line but the practical effect of your line results in no cases of exclusion. Just like the heartbeat bills advocates that don't advertise they are pushing a 6 week period for abortions.

I will admit that either you don't understand hs sports at all or I don't understand conceptually how you draw your line at the state championship or u18 level. A team goes undefeated all season but then exclusions occur in the state finals?

I haven't noticed any mocking or shaming here.

My claim wasn't that only 1-10% of hs sports were competitive - I wasn't making a descriptive claim or defining "competitive" at all. I was making the normative claim that the majority of sports played at the highschool level should be inclusive. For example, the grade 9 baseball team playing other regional schools might well be called "competitive" in that they have rules and refs and play their hearts out, but it isn't close to the top echelon of highschool sports and so inclusion dominates in my mind.

Well, all lines are sort of wrong by their nature. If you want to draw yours a little lower - grade 10 say - then it is the exact same issue that a trans person works hard in grade 9 and then kicked off the team in grade 10. One can always question whether the line should be a little higher or a little lower, one can always point out the arbitrariness of person going from just one side to just the other side of a line. The only people who have the luxury of no lines are the black and white absolutists.

High school sports are inclusive. You just need to compete in the proper category. These categories include things like age, weight, and if you have a y chromosome.

There's a current that if you aren't competing for something "important" then it really doesn't matter and it's ok to have an unfair situation. But "important" is in the eye of the beholder. Recently, the World Baseball Classic was held. Many thought that these games were unimportant exhibitions. That MLB players should not participate because it would somehow damage the "real" games coming up in the season. And oh boy did you hear it when a few of the players got hurt in these games. But if you watched any of the games, you would see that to the only people that mattered, the players, these games were very, very important. Even those that suffered major injuries said they would not change a thing.

What does this have to do with high school sports? You might say not much. But I say it's an excellent example of how outside people have no idea, and no right, to say how important a competition is to the participants. I find your whole premise that only 1%-10% of high school sports to be elite enough where a level playing field is needed.

The margin for being ok at a sport and being great (for the level you are at) is very thin. The difference in potential athletic ability between boys and girls is vast. That is why we have different categories.

Yes, the life of a trans-kid is tough. And inclusion is usually better than not. But sports are a zero-sum game. Every win for someone is a loss for someone else. Every point scored is a point given up. Everyone that gets more playing time gets it at the expense of someone else. People are ok with this, it's how it works. But they are not ok when the scales are tipped with unfair advantages. You'll notice that no one complains (at least on fairness grounds) if a trans boy wants to be on the football team. Think about why.



"The only people who have the luxury of no lines are the black and white absolutists." This is an amazing sentence.

Ah yes. It's inclusive, except you're excluded if you're transgender.

Nonsense. A healthy game can be fun for everyone involved.

No one is stopping transgender athletes from competing.


Fun for everyone and zero-sum are not mutually exclusive.

I agree with that. My point is that you may be around one trans child playing a sport per school. Only a % of those will be playing a sport that seriously affects others and a % of those will dominate it enough to make a difference and a % won't even become an issue.

But the ones that do will be on the evening news .

I mean, the fact that you have to play these word games says it all.

We both think there’s a tradeoff to be made between parity and inclusion. You just want to set the line so absurdly low that no trans kid gets to play any sport past the fifth grade. You then have the chutzpah to go on a kind discourse about how great sports are and how important they are for kids.

Is this self-parody? Because it's really good if it is.

Trans kids are free to play in the appropriate category all the way through high school. This isn't hard.

I made no mention on how important sports are for kids. I did allude to how important sports can be to kids. Hopefully you can use some of your cleverness to figure out the difference.

Your post sounds like it is responding to me, but I never said the word you quoted: important. Nor did I suggest it really doesn't matter. Precisely the opposite, it is because I think youth sport matters and because I think it is important to the participants that I think we should be generally inclusive of trans people so they too can partake in this experience. I'm not sure why you are jumping to "outside people", but I personally think that the shared teamwork and camaraderie and dedication and hard work and love of the game etc etc etc are all parts of why this experience so important - including to trans kids.

This paragraph applies just as well to to the tallest kid on the basketball team, or anyone else with a nature or nurture advantage. Sports are inherently unfair with people of very varying abilities. Some lose. Some win. Some make the team. Some don't. These are all just baseline features of the sport and making this point doesn't advance that we should exclude trans kids.

You keep making versions of this point like everyone hasn't figured out already that trans girls are allowed to play on boys teams. We know that. The "hard" part, apparently, is figuring out why that isn't a sufficient solution for many trans kids.

Cool man, let us know when you’re capable of having an honest conversation instead of this doublespeak.

Excellent example of people at the top just handing down policies without a thought as to the actual problem at hand or toward how changes will be implemented.

"For older students, especially at the high school and college level, the Department expects that sex-related criteria that limit participation of some transgender students may be permitted, in some cases, when they enable the school to achieve an important educational objective, such as fairness in competition..."

The cynic in me says that this just means the change has absolutely no teeth.

There aren't any transgender kids in middle-school sports because the issue doesn't really start to manifest until around high school anyway. Kids in middle school don't think like that.

But in high school, these new trans girls aren't going to be allowed to compete on the ground of fairness for reasons that are obvious.

In short: this changes nothing.



I'll admit that it's been a long time since I was involved in youth sports, but my own experience as a kid who played baseball, basketball, and football in school, and then coaching youth football when my own kids were that age is that it's still very competitive and people take it *way* too seriously.

I am a giant IRL. My parents were forced to produce a birth certificate in a 5th grade baseball game because the opposing coach flipped his **** at the clearly-not-a-5th-grader being allowed to compete against his boys. I never had more fun in my life than playing football in 7th and 8th grade, just bowling kids over 3 at a time. I had absolutely ZERO hops in basketball and couldn't hit a layup to save my life, but it didn't matter because I was enormous. The most embarrassing video that exists of me is of getting my own rebound like 8 times in a row and bricking every attempt during an 8th grade tournament. I didn't even try out for basketball in high school, despite the coaches practically begging me to. Didn't matter because I almost lost my leg in football freshman year, but the football season leading up to that incident was also great fun.

Point in all this is what most of you already have the common sense to realize. All the boys who end up wanting to play on the girls' team are going in with the same relative physical advantages I had in comparison to the rest of the people in my peer group. Unfortunately for me, I just kinda sucked at the actual skill part of the game. But in purely physical situations, I was capable of doing some serious damage to those smaller than me. This is a shitty situation for the real little girls who want to play sports. As someone else said, the most physical girls are going to just barely match with the weakest of the boys. What does that mean for the weaker girls?

This is why we have the girls' teams to begin with.

Sports aren't separated by sexuality. Sports are about biology. If your brain is telling you to chop your dick or your tits off as soon as the law allows, great, go for it. But we separate our sports groups based on your actual sex, not what your brain thinks you are.

When you speak of boys who want to play on the girls' team, is that your way of saying that transgender people don't really exist?

I assume he is suggesting that they are boys because that's what he said.

If you know that, why do you constantly speak of excluding trans kids from sports? It would be much more accurate to say not allowing trans girls to join teams where they would have a huge advantage.

If you don't allow a 14 yo to join a kindergarten tee-ball team, is that excluding him?

Yes? That’s how those words work. You’re excluding 14-olds from the team.

I didn't say "from the team". Is it excluding him from participating in sports in general?

"From the team" is very clearly implied by the sentence construction. Is English your second language?

It's this weird thing conservatives do when they're out of ideas: they pretend to not understand how to use ordinary words in everyday speech.

Either he's talking about boys playing on a girls' team, which no one else is, or he's calling trans girls boys as a way to imply that they're not really trans.

Could there be a third option?

Do we have to drag these posts out? If there's another option, say what you think is going on. Tell me what I'm missing.