Lia Thomas Record setting trans swimmer controversy

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Your views on “fairness” are not the be-all and end-all. Can you explain why it is cheating to be trans but an identical cis person is not cheating? Because so far it seems like all you have done is assert your personal prejudices. Why not segregate based on skin colour or sexuality?

Mack Beggs is the most prominent trans man in sports. Although there aren’t exactly many trans women, either. Like all this hatred is for a woman who just swims for her university.

Simply put Lia Thomas' masculine physique puts women swimmer's at a significant disadvantage.

Because biological males and females who have passed through puberty as such development distinct physical traits unique to their sex. Females develop wider hips and males develop wider shoulders.

The problems is that these average out ,giving people who went through puberty as males a distinct advantage allowing them to develop stronger chest, back and arm muscles supported by naturally wider bones in the upper chest area.

An immediate glance at pictures of Lia gives the impression her upper body mass seems almost double that of many females and considerably larger than genetic female swimmers. Lia is also supposedly 6 foot 1 inches high which is large even for males. An imposing figure and intimidating to be up against in any sporting event even if you're male.

If a drug was ever to be developed adding a few inches to athletes or widening their shoulders compared to the typical athlete in their class, they would be banned. Simple as, no exceptions.

Entering athletics against a class of opponents with an advantage said opponents can never achieve is cheating.

Last edited by Nades on 02 Jun 2022, 6:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

No, but it means you will no longer be able to make a living if you're competing against Phelps, unless he's on your team. Then your performance is irrelevant, which is what the swimmers here are describing.
Let's take a different example: I wouldn't be happy if I had to fight in a boxing match against Vladimir Klitchko. But it would also be not considered fair, he's half a foot taller than me and 40 pounds heavier. We're not in the same weight category.
Maybe it makes more sense to seperate sports by broad physical category, like weight, which accounts for size and bone and muscle density/mass, rather than gender assigned at birth.

For Lia Thomas, and other trans women, that might however result in exclusion because they could be statistical outliers among self-identifying women, without much competition in their weight category.

And regarding the bigotry: isn't that circular reasoning here? If you're against the inclusion of transwomen into women's sports, you're a bigot, and we shouldn't exclude people because of bigotry.
So no exclusion because of people who are argueing against inclusion.
Under what circumstance would exclusion be acceptable, then?

Since Mack Beggs has been mentioned -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mack_Beggs
Try an image search - he looks pretty ripped to me.

Would this exclusion be considered acceptable?

Yes it would. If he was born female then he developed as a female through puberty so it's still fair if he competes against only females, even if he completely obliterates them every single time.

Excluding an unusual problem with the sex chromosomes that muddied the water to an extent, the rules need to be kept clear with sport.

At amateur level, there just shouldn’t be exclusion. We need to encourage everyone to do sport. Of course in contact sports there might be safety considerations that would require weighting, but in the top category you’re always going to run the risk of coming up against someone who is much stronger than you.

At professional level, I’d suggest going the Paralympic route. Find a way to fairly discriminate between competitors that isn’t just “sex assigned at birth”, which is clearly unsuitable. Blood testosterone levels seems to be a better measure. In less physical sports you might not even need to keep a gender distinction at all - many sports already see men and women compete together.

Yes, there are a few sports in which sex assigned at birth doesn't indicate a statistical advantage, but not that many. Endurance sports, mainly, as far as I know.

I think separating by sex assigned at birth very much is an attempt to discriminate fairly, with the addition of further categorisation by weight in contact sports. - at least, I can understand why someone would assume that's a reasonable way to discriminate, given certain statistical distributions of physical characteristics.
Self-identified gender however isn't a reasonable categorisation for relevant physical characteristics, I think.

I understand that self-identification is the only method of determining one's gender - there's no way to measure what gender one should feel more fitting. But people have different priorities and there are incentives for some that appear more important to them than what pronouns they are being referred to with.
Sorting out how to mitigate risks for abuse of self identification needs to be discussed, not shut down, or we won't be able to run a society in which we also have the necessity to discriminate under certain conditions.

Whether sports however is so important that it requires that discrimination is another matter, but the solutions pointed at make it appear that it isn't, but the solutions aren't implemented yet....

Based on what wal says, you are a bigot.
I take a more reasonable/rational position.

I embrace "diversity of thought", not *limited* to the diversity of thought that has been vetted by only one side of the political divide.

That sounds reasonable to me.
There could be micromanaging competitions using weight/height/age classes, as in boxing competitions, I guess.

Both trans inclusion and trans exclusion are philosophies found among people of many different political philosophies - conservative and progressive, liberal and authoritarian, socialist and capitalist.

Embracing "diversity of thought" doesn't mean accepting unscientific, irrational, and bigoted views, particularly those which are actively harmful to society such as advocating for prejudicial discrimination.

All this could be solved by allowing trans people to transition before puberty.

The same people who want to keep trans people out of sport are the same who would cry bloody murder if a prepubescent trans child were allowed access to hormone blockers.

Knowingly or unknowingly, their double combination of "you can't compete in women's sports because you're too strong" and "you can't have access to hormone blockers during the time they are most effective" is excluding transwomen from sports.

That is a misrepresentation.
If trans men want to compete in sports I don't think anyone would have a problem with that.
The problems occur when there is an advantage as a result of male physiology.
There would be minimal concerns with any sports that don't require physical strength.

It isn't a case of discrimination.
It is a case of fairness in *some* sports.

You mean 12 year olds or younger? That's completely insane. They don't even know what sexuality is at that age.

Feeling like you're in the wrong body isn't about sexuality.

Sexuality is about who you are sexually attracted to.

If you are going to make an argument you need to use the correct language and terms. Imagine if you were debating cricket and calling an LBW something it wasn't. No one would listen. If you want people to listen, engage with the topic.

Bad debating. I'm marking you down.

I've got no strong feelings on this, but you're bad debaters here.

Using the word "cheating" is counterproductive.

In a competition cheating is when one schemes to win by bending the rules. It's premeditated.

The decision to swim with the women's team wasn't made so that the rules could be flaunted. There was no sneaky, "ha ha, if I do this I'll win".

I'll give an example of cheating. Deliberately taking performance enhancing drugs. That's pre-meditated.

This person feels that they are a woman and wants to swim with women. They do it because they love swimming and they are following all the set rules to a T. The motivation isn't, "I wasn't winning in the men's team, maybe I should compete with women so I can win." The motivation was, "I love swimming. How can I be who I feel I am and still keep swimming?"

Imagine if you had to stop one of your special interests one day. How would that make you feel? That's how Lia feels about swimming.

Whether that's fair on the other women is another matter entirely. But it's not cheating.