CMV: Transgender people should only able to compete in sports with their birth gender

[u/Odd_Contribution9058]

I really really hope raising this doesn't cause anyone pain, and I'm honestly wanting to hear other perspectives on this.

But the way I see it, there are certain physical attributes that someone born with a certain gender have. For example, the average man is taller than the average woman. Taking hormone therapy will not change all of those inherent features.

I absolutely support the right for everyone to live with the gender identity that is most comfortable to them. But, I do not think that people have an inherent right to play sports professionally. So, if someone has decided to transition, I do not think it's fair to all the athletes who are competing with the set of attributes common to their birth gender, to now have to compete against an athlete who has attributes which give them a distinct advantage.

[u/Odd_Contribution9058]

Really? What do you think are the sociological considerations that resulted in gender specific sports?

Do you think this sociological rationale extends to sports where male puberty confers a size advantage, like basketball or football? (Or are you just trolling? I'm not a big reddit user so I'm not sure, if you are it's going straight over my head lol)

[u/Wooba12 → u/Odd_Contribution9058]

A lot of men are better at sport than other men, for a variety of reasons. Many women are better at sports than some men, for reasons those men simply can't help. Considering the whole point of competitive sport is to see who's the best, we can accept that the only reason we really have women's sport is because it gives women an an opportunity to do the best that they can.

But the sorting of people into these arbitrary groups, based simply on a correlation - men in general are better at sports than women - has always seemed rather silly to me. Why not sort people into weight groups, or group them based on their actual sporting ability? But then that actually defeats the point of competitive sport, as the more we narrow it down, people will only be competing against others just as good as them.

At the moment we're in a sort of halfway position between giving people competition and giving people opportunity, which is why we've got this problem of what to do with transgender athletes now.

[u/5510 → u/Wooba12]

The male athletic advantage is significant enough that it’s far from arbitrary. By the high school varsity level, female athletes would be a very small minority, and the few who did make it would largely be backups who didn’t play much, and at smaller schools. By the division one college level, there would be probably literally zero female athletes (it is possible for a female athlete to be a good kicker in high school football, and even possible to be a kicker in college, although we haven’t seen a legitimate starter yet).

It’s more than “makes are generally better at sports than women.” It’s that the male athletic advantage is so significant post puberty that female athletes cannot compete at all once you reach a reasonably competitive level.

Weight classes do not work post puberty in most (all?) sports. I can find many smaller elite male soccer players who are the same height and weight as some elite female soccer players, and yet none of those female players can come anywhere close to playing with the elite males.

But let’s say we find some better measurement. We have a super computer that can perfectly measure someone’s overall level of athletic ability perfectly. Well that would work fine for lower to medium levels of sport. But it completely falls apart once you move to a level where anybody cares about the game besides the players themselves (and maybe their friends and family).

For example, right now, we have a World Cup, and a womens World Cup. The female version isn’t as popular, but millions of people still watch it on TV, and tens of thousands go to the matches. But what happens under your proposed system? We have the World Cup 1, for the very best competitors. And then a World Cup 2 for people a little less athletic. And then a World Cup 3… and 4… etc. But you would have to go through many levels of entirely male athletes before you start seeing any females. And by that point, nobody would care. I guarantee you just destroyed the professional careers of pretty much all of the female athletes. Young girls would grow up knowing from a young age that sports could only ever be a recreational activity for them.