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Originally Posted by Bladesman87
One argument would be that for many trans people the therapies they've gone through would leave them at a significant disadvantage when competing with their sex assigned at birth.
Possibly. And I don't mean this flippantly, but there are a lot of things people can choose to do to themselves that might leave them at a competitive in sport.
I don't think sport owes them an adjustment to another playing field where they will be advantaged because they now find themselves disadvantaged.
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Then there's the issues about say having a trans man on an AFAB team when it comes to changing rooms (because part of being on a team is being a part of the camaraderie), or even just wanting to be part of a men's group.
I don't really see that as a big issue. If the person is accepted on the team to begin with, and they go thru battles and trials together to win as a team, I think they get over the change room thing pretty quick.
Sure some bigots won't but hetero men were forced to get over women (reporters) and gay men being in the change room with them and the implications that has for their privacy, and while some squawked at first, they pretty quickly learned to get over it.
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Another argument is the one I made about subjecting people to the humiliation of gender/sex inspections. Because that wouldn't apply just to trans people. If that were the policy then it would have to be applied to any man or woman for whom anyone raised the question. If someone says Serena William's looks too masculine, she's got to go through all the checks and the publicity with it. Someone says Christiano Ronaldo is a bit too androgynous, better check his junk and do some genetic tests. I don't know about you but I've always enjoyed the idea that if I join a club then I don't have to worry about someone wanting to pull my trousers down and check I'm definitely male. If you want to exclude trans people you still have to check all the a lot of other people to find out who's who.
Again not to be flippant but I don't think participation in sport without restrictions is a right.
I do believe 'a fair playing field' is the highest ideal one can attempt to bring sport unless we get rid of the competition nature of sport and change it to 'everyone gets a medal'.
If sport is simply about socializing and having fun then I totally agree with you.
However if Sport is about training and testing oneself at the highest levels of human achievement and proving that out through competition and it involves scholarships and big pay, etc, then a 'level playing field' must be the ideal pursued in my opinion.
You cannot, imo, pretend biowomen have a fair place to always compete and to test that ideal, to train life long to be the best, to pursue that scholarship or professional contract and then have a transwomen, switch in a day and wipe out their records and achievements and take those scholarships and professional jobs and pretend that is a level playing.
Sometimes choices (which I fully support everyone having truly) have consequences and perhaps the choice of becoming a transfemale at age 30 with all the male body development benefits that brings, cannot just walk into competition against biowomen. Perhaps it means competing based on biology against those who you share that with and whom you competed against for much of the prior 30 years.
We are asking the biowomen to take the cost of loss of competitiveness and inability to compete because of a transwomen choice because some are saying it would be wrong to have the transwoman loss competitiveness to biomen and maybe not have an ability to compete.
We are saying 'yes choice does have cost but to the biowomen. Not the Transwomen'.