I'll guess it's the one that puts a made-up imaginary category invented in 1959 over sex.

Grunching most of this thread.

Obviously there is an extreme amount of tension between our traditional social norms of having female only sports participation, and our progressive re-education of what being female means. As with most human affairs, there is no absolute right or wrong answer. It is just a matter of coming to an equilibrium that works.

In other threads I have already articulated my belief that progressive attempts to redefine what gender is will ultimately fail, not because of any moral failing, but because they simply dont work and create more problems than they fix. But I could be wrong, and maybe we will find some equilibrium that works within the framework of progressivism.

Can you elaborate?

So it's important to a different point you wanted to make. OK then.

Meanwhile, I've not seen a good reason that Biden's policy should be a problem for anyone.

Oh I don't worry about that. Unlike some I don't find that you use selective reading to provide zingers or to win a point by being able to say "gotcha".

I'm commenting only on "Biden's middle ground Title IX rules on trans inclusion in sport" and nothing more than that. I just find it very curious that the new proposed policy tries to thread some mythical needle by saying "competitive" sports can place limits on transgender participation. This of course implies there are "non-competitive" sports and I find that odd.

This is really weird. The first quote is the one Bobo noted you completely fabricated my position on. You responded to that with two other questions, neither of which are the original but the first of which is just not even remotely on the same planet. Just because I speak in defense of trans people doesn't mean you can paint on any extreme "pro-trans" message you want onto me. My goodness.

I wonder if it would make more sense for people if it were phrased "highly competitive" sports instead. What I take from the policy is that it's aiming to remove the ability to make completely sweeping bans that are unnecessarily interfering in elementary schools efforts at inclusion and acceptance, while recognizing some kind of more stringent rules may be required at the highest levels for older kids.

I think you've largely been making the case of why I think competitive/non-competitive isn't quite the right framing for this issue. It's a spectrum, not a binary. As in, that grade 9 baseball team that plays other regional school is "competitve", they have rules and refs and the girls care about winning. But it is more like a spectrum in terms of the stakes, and in my mind this is sufficiently low stakes that the value of inclusion and having trans people also experience the tremendous values that come from sports outweights the slight relaxing to the purpose of rank-ordering people by sports skill level.

Exactly.

Boys plays baseball, girls play softball.

Although there are also men's fastpitch leagues.

As a general rule, elementary schools don't have sports teams. So it's kind of a moo point, yes? Of course there are tons of sports teams not affiliated with schools in those age groups, but Title IX doesn't apply to them.

I've played a ton of softball in my life in extremely competitive leagues.

Fastpitch or slow pitch? I didn't mean to exclude men's slow pitch. Men's fastpitch is a lot rarer.

Politics is often the art of threading a needle and making awkward compromises. Making an exclusion for highly-competitive sports seems pretty reasonable even if it's not always super clear where the definitions lie.

True, but the proposed policy doesn't say "highly-competitive" it says "competitive". And even if it did say "highly-competitive" that's a descriptor without meaning in regards to how advanced the teams are. Every organized sport I've ever participated in, from 7th grade football to college intramural basketball to men's league softball was "highly-competitive" at the time. If you're going to say that in this case we will define "highly-competitive" as being at an elite level, then I get back to the question that no one has answered - Why do we have different classifications in sports?

A sport is competitive if you select the best players or try to but would agree that does not apply to Grade School though . I played volleyball in Grade 9 and the best players made the team

Bobo already addressed this. At the lower end of the scale, for less competitive sports it's more important to focus on inclusion and getting more kids involved. For higher-stakes competitions, that's less of a motivating factor.

I think any sport where a scholarship may come into play needs to consider who is playing on the team. Colleges could potentially start scouting freshmen teams, altho varsity teams are going to get the majority of the focus. I think high school sports are definitely highly competitive especially because of scholarship possibilities, and therefore should have participants of "equal" abilities (meaning i wouldn't want someone who is born male having an unfair advantage over those born female in athletic competitions).

Grade school sports, as well as those in rec leagues and non-school sanctioned leagues, should be able to include anyone who wants to compete and has the skills to do so.

Could you define situations where it's "important to focus on inclusion and getting more kids involved"? Because I'm not seeing a whole lot of elementary school sports teams where Title IX would apply.

No-cut teams, JV teams, intramural teams, and etc. is how I’m interpreting it.

If the teams are not competitive why segregate them by gender in the first place? Why not have everyone play together?

Well, I gotta say I'm pretty surprised if this is true in a sports-mad country like the US, and I'm feeling a little silly if that's so. I just assumed that with it being so common here, that it would be the case south of the border as well.

No one's answered because we all know the answer and we know that you know this. Can we simply skip this part and get down to the point? Yes, there's a possible contradiction here. We separate kids by gender because boys tend to be bigger and stronger than girls. And yes, if you have someone that is transitioning/has transitioned, it's possible that we open up situations where a trans girl enjoys some of those advantages. That's why we see rules for certain world championship level sports, professional sports, collegiate sports, etc. In principle, I take no issue with that. What I take issue with is states deciding to use a sweeping ban to remove any possibility of a school deciding that they're fine letting transgender girls play on their grade 9 team, or the same at an elementary school that does happen to offer team sports, or intramural sports.

I've yet to see a good reason presented as to why Biden's policy proposal is a bad idea.

Oh, hey Lozen! You seem to have missed a couple posts again...

It's supposed to be a reasonable compromise, people would go through the roof if Biden proposed totally eliminating those categories.

After puberty, biological males should not be able to compete against biological females in sports. It's just not fair to the biological females and no amount of hormonal therapy can balance it.




Hormonal therapy does not take into consideration: Human growth hormones, bone density, muscle volume and density, natural testosterone that males under HRT still have an enormous advantage over biological females.