Some people seem to think that lgbt activists want to make it so that any male athlete could just put on a wig, say “I’m trans now”, steal medals from women and then detransition the next day. (As depicted in that Futurama episode.)
Letting trans people who have medically transitioned for several years compete is a very different beast from letting anyone who claims to be trans compete.
Absolutely. It’s still a bit arbitrary, but at least there’s data and established history to back this up as a viable way for trans women to compete. It’s how we’ve been doing things in most major sports already, if they have any policy for trans athletes at all. It’s worked out fine, I have yet to see any example of a trans athlete that is blowing her competition out of the water, so to speak. All of their examples are heavily cherry picked and misrepresented to look poorly on the trans community, but at closer inspection are anything but that.
That said, there are still some problems. For one, focusing on T-levels ends up with people like Caster Semenya, a cis-woman with a condition that means she produces a bunch of testosterone, being barred from competing.
Emphasis on medically transitioned.
Some people seem to think that lgbt activists want to make it so that any male athlete could just put on a wig, say “I’m trans now”, steal medals from women and then detransition the next day. (As depicted in that Futurama episode.)
Letting trans people who have medically transitioned for several years compete is a very different beast from letting anyone who claims to be trans compete.
Absolutely. It’s still a bit arbitrary, but at least there’s data and established history to back this up as a viable way for trans women to compete. It’s how we’ve been doing things in most major sports already, if they have any policy for trans athletes at all. It’s worked out fine, I have yet to see any example of a trans athlete that is blowing her competition out of the water, so to speak. All of their examples are heavily cherry picked and misrepresented to look poorly on the trans community, but at closer inspection are anything but that.
That said, there are still some problems. For one, focusing on T-levels ends up with people like Caster Semenya, a cis-woman with a condition that means she produces a bunch of testosterone, being barred from competing.