People whose bodies don't match their inner identity confuse the hell out of people who are fortunate enough -- or limited enough -- not to experience such a fundamental inconvenience. The spectrum of acceptance varies from absolute rejection of the concept to full embrace and acknowledgement, with a substantial proportion in the "yes, but" category. Conditional acceptance often comes down to sports.
Sport is held up as the ultimate pure contest of strength and skill and whatever methods of cheating haven't been detected yet. The winner is the winner because they were the best at managing all aspects of this. Thus, competitors need to be on as equal a basis as possible at the outset, to fairly prove which one is the best.
Gender has played a role in the modern era for as long as I can remember. In the 1960s through the '80s, we would hear about Soviet women athletes whose gender ID was suspect. We swam in a sea of anti-communist propaganda at the time, but you could see that some of their competitors looked suspiciously bulked up. At the time, it was presented as artificially induced rather than full gender substitution, but the qualities that conferred the advantage were considered "male."
Women who crossed sports barriers to perform surprisingly well against men threatened the masculine pride of insecure men. They inspired women striving for equal rights and respect outside of conventional subservient roles. They achieved high rankings in their own competitions. Things remained compartmentalized.
As the concept of transgenderism became more prominent, the people who transitioned male to female mostly did not infringe on the sacred ground of sport. Aside from tennis player Renee Richards, it just didn't happen to happen, at least not that the public heard about. Now it's all the rage. Or so it seems.
Opponents of transgender people in general latch onto the sports issue because they know it's an easy sell to a general public who mostly doesn't want to think about transgenderism at all. People who might be sympathetic to some theoretical person who transitions, or who might know one personally and haven't rejected them outright for being just too weird, dig their heels in when it comes to athletics, because boys are automatically more strong and dangerous than girls. That makes up a huge percentage of the "yes, but" category. A boy in a dress is still a boy, right?
Most sports sort competitors by age and gender. I don't know about a lot of them, but having competed in bike racing and fencing I know that in a mixed field of riders, for instance, the women would blend with the men. And in fencing, when we held mixed open tournaments, women would likewise defeat male competitors. We didn't have a lot of those tournaments, and I don't remember if men consistently won overall, but I do remember that you had to fence every bout with no assumptions about your superiority. In the artificial world of pretending to stab each other to death, male or female anatomy didn't automatically convey super powers or their opposite. Overconfidence was pretty universally deadly.
So far, this just applies to cis women competing against cis men and taking what they get without complaint. But when a person identified as male at birth decides to surrender as much of that advantage as medical intervention strips away by transitioning, they become unclassifiable. Competing in a mixed field, they just end up where they end up. If it's a top place and they just beat out a cis female competitor, she might protest, but if it's just a mid-field showing it doesn't seem like a huge issue. But in a pure female category, most of us can't say with confidence how much advantage a formerly male body conveys. We depend on our experts to tell us.
Because trans athletes are so rare, there have been few detailed studies of their relative performance before and after transition. Age alone makes a huge difference, so we would need years of data about thousands of people, cis and trans, to determine what the average change might be, and where the extremes are.
It only matters because we place such significance on our games. As a lifelong athlete who wasn't much of an athlete I can tell you that a lot of factors go into success or failure. At my best, I was far below the top in the sports I pursued in my haphazard way. I decided to direct my energy to practical purposes like bike commuting, and less overtly competitive activities like hiking. Gender identity doesn't matter at all to me in those arenas. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I don't follow sports. But it does matter, a lot, in the way that it influences people's political decisions.
The other angle that opponents use to target transgender participation in athletics connects to their fixation with bathrooms. What do we do about trans female athletes getting naked with "normal" women and girls?
Just growing up in what was considered normal circumstances in the 1960s and '70s, I was no fan of locker rooms in general. I don't know how much ogling other people did in there. I do know that you're going to see things and show things whether you want to or not. But how much of a person's comfort or discomfort around other people's nudity is externally induced? How much are we taught to feel awkward before we ever encounter it in real life?
Sexual feelings are complicated. The locker room concept either predates this awareness or accepts that anyone in there is likely to feel things, get ideas, and perhaps make arrangements to explore them. That could be equally true about your precious girls discovering that they really enjoy seeing each other naked in the purely segregated and strictly protected changing room. Same goes for your manly young men admiring each other's physique in their own male-only domain. And no one seems to speak up about the trans male in the boy's locker room. No one seems to make a public spectacle of statistics about trans male competitors kicking ass against "normal" opponents.
Most of the time, the opponents of transgender recognition and acceptance present it as a perversion, a subterfuge by which a scheming dude gets to look at naked girls or women. How far would such a person go to gain this access? Hormone replacement therapy? Lose muscle mass? Grow breasts? If you want to get with the ladies, just try good personal hygiene and a pleasant personality.
The creators of the pervert poser character say that this infiltrator of women's protected spaces only needs to declare intent and make minor changes to qualify for a pass. Grow long hair, move a little swishy, wear women's clothing... but if the intent is heterosexual gratification of some kind, the deception will fall apart sooner or later. The perv can't collect the payoff by remaining in character. That perv is not a true transgender female. If the goal is sexual assault, there are many other, easier places to commit that, as the number of sexual assaults will attest.
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