Should trans women be allowed to take part in womens sports?

Or we could... Y'know, actually debate the matter ourselves with facts and figures from primary sources rather than typing "why is transes evil" into YouTube and pasting whatever shows up without even watching it first?

(Yes, I'm being facetious, I know that's not what you typed. I also know that you hadn't watched the video you pasted earlier, 'cos you told me so over PM.)

EDIT:
This comes across meaner than I intended. It's early, and my eldest woke me at 0300 this morning.

 

I can come in with some Proper Research if you promise you'll at least skim over it with an open mind. It'll be later today, though, 'cos I've actual work I'm supposed to be doing now!

 

I mean... every part of the potato plant is poisonous, except the tubers... if you harvest them at the right time. And don't store them too long...

Then I suggest you dig deeper into their credentials, because even if you subscribe to the most conservative of interpretations sex is not binary: it's estimated that as many as 0.05% of babies are born with "ambiguous genitals" and are assigned a sex pretty much at random, and if you add in other nondimorphic sexual characteristics it could be as high as 1.7%.

Those might sound like small numbers, but there are, what, eight billion people on the planet? That's 4,000,000 people whose sex could not be properly determined at birth, and 136,000,000 who exhibit nondimorphic sexual characteristics. Biologically, I'm not talking about gender at all here. If a biologist tells you sex is binary, they're either lying to you or need to hand in their gun and badge diploma.

This ain't a new thing brought about by the "trans agenda," either: the term "intersexuality" was coined in 1917. By a geneticist. The earlier term "hermaphrodite," no longer used to refer to humans, can be found in documents as far back as the 12th century.

(Yes, yes, I know, I know, I'm supposed to be working...)

 

Okay, today has been an absolute bollockache, but I did promise. This is going to be a bit of a half-arsed effort, I'm afraid, but you're welcome to apply for a refund on your entry fee if unsatisfied.

First, vis-a-vis the whole YouTube-algorithm-echo-chamber problem, I'll start with a bit of mythbusting. Bear with me on this one, some of this stuff might sound obvious - and none are an attempt at strawmanning, I'm not saying anybody here believes any of 'em, but they come up commonly in these discussions so best deal with 'em now.

• The millennials are trying to trans the kids! Let's turn to Wikipedia for this one, because lazy: "Roman emperor Elagabalus (d. 222 AD) preferred to be called a lady (rather than a lord) and sought sex reassignment surgery, and in the modern day has been seen as a trans figure." Have a shufti at the second paragraph, there, at least, 'cos it's interesting stuff. TL;DR: what we would recognise as transgender today goes back literally thousands of years, though the term "transgender" dates to the 1950s. Either way, it ain't new and you can't blame the millennials.
• Doctors are cutting babies' bits off because of the Trans Agenda! Funnily enough, there's a bit of truth here - but it's nowt to do with transgenderism. Remember when I said 0.05% of babies are born intersex, and the doctor picks a gender at random? What actually happens is a quick bit of surgery to remove the confusing bits - and, in the majority of cases, the child is assigned female. You've also got the mohels in Judaism, but they're not doctors so they don't count. Either way, nothing to do with the transes.
• Doctors are mutilating young children because they're gay/tomboyish/brainwashed! No. Until it became a focus topic of the Culture Wars, doctors could treat gender dysphoria in children by giving them puberty blockers - an unfortunately-named class of drugs which have been in use for decades and which delay, not block, puberty, and which are also used in cisgendered girls to counteract precocious puberty. They're entirely reversible, unlike the effects of puberty - which is why they were used, to give kids time to figure out what's going on before something irreversible happens. If they decide actually, hey, I'm not trans, they stop taking the blockers and go through puberty as normal and as whatever they were assigned at birth; if they decide they are trans then they keep taking the blockers and begin social transitioning (typically by changing pronouns, possibly changing name, wearing clothing associated with the gender with which they identify, and so on) and if and only if they go through that for several years and continue to say they're trans will they be considered for gender confirmation surgery when they have reached adulthood and not before.
• Transgenderism is a mental illness! I mean, if you're talking about gender dysphoria, then literally yes: it was added to the DSM-5 in 2013, replacing the earlier term gender identity disorder. It's literally a mental illness, but thankfully one we know how to treat: gender confirmation. The suicide rate among those with gender dysphoria who do not transition is sky-high; it's lower, but still high, for those who do, maybe because a bunch of right-wing mouthpieces suffering rectocranial inversion keep telling everyone who'll listen that they're monsters who literally don't deserve to use a toilet much less play sports.
• Transgender people regret transitioning! Very, very rarely. First, you already have to have lived for a period of time as the gender to which you're aiming to transition and can choose to stop the process at any time with zero consequences. If we're talking post-surgery, then here's a systematic review and meta-analysis (Bustos et al, Regret after Gender-affirmation Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prevalence, Plast Rconstr Surg Glob Open, 2021) which found the pooled prevalence of regret in the near-8,000-strong sample set was under or equal to one percent. 28 patients expressed minor regret, and 34 expressed major regret. So, sure, it's non-zero. D'you know the regret rate for cosmetic surgery among the general populace? As high as 10.1% (von Soest et al, Psychosocial Changes after Cosmetic Surgery: A 5-Year Follow-Up Study, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 2011).
• Schools are putting litter boxes in classrooms because the kids think they're cats! Just... put down the Daily Mail, will you? No.
• Sex is binary! We've covered that nicely above, so I don't have to do that one.
• Gender is binary! When has gender ever been binary? Androgyny, feminine men, masculine women, tomboys... you don't have to be trans to not fit squarely in one of two gender boxes. Some cultures literally have a third gender already (we're kinda behind in the west on that one): hijras in India, kathoeys in Thailand, khanith in Arabia - dating back to 600AD, that one. You go tell the Arabs in 600AD that they're woke, see how far that gets you.
• "They" is a plural pronoun! Ooh, I love this one: "you" was originally a plural pronoun. If you wanted singular, you used "thou." Better still, singular "they" predates singular "you!"
  
• It's all George Soros' fault! Okay, we're done with this bit, I think.

So, if you've read all that (god help you), we should be closer to an understanding: transgenderism isn't new, it's not a symptom of the collapse of western culture, it's not about chopping kids' bits off, puberty blockers are a delaying tactic to give kids (and their parents/carers) more time to work through their issues, the regret rate for surgical transitioning is literally one-tenth that of general cosmetic surgery, and it literally saves peoples' lives.

And emphatically yes, if YouTube is feeding you nothing but "bigwigs" who disagree with the above, then you are in a bubble and really, really need to broaden your horizons. The fact that you're saying you've seen multiple videos from multiple biologists who think sex is binary is horrifying: that is exactly against the overwhelming scientific consensus. Maybe give YouTube a break, try some reading?

If you can agree to the above, I'll put some time aside later this week to dive deeper into the whole transes-in-sportses issue, though I'll warn you now: you're going to be disappointed, 'cos it turns out to be very hard to study on the grounds that there aren't many transes-in-sportses in the first place. I do have a good story I can find for you, though: a female-to-male college wrestler who, because people got their panties in a twist about the transes in the sportses, was forced to compete with the girls. And dominated, because he was on a shedload of testosterone. Ironically, if the school board hadn't gone with "you will compete as the sex you were assigned at birth," he would have been competing with the boys and probably ranked low-mid table at best.

Anyway, ruminate on all that for a bit. I'm going to shut the office down and find a whisky.

 

This could be of interest: The situation of Women and LGBT+ Individuals in European Grassroots Sports, part of the SGS – Sport for all Genders and Sexualities programme.

I haven't read the full report yet, but this slide breaks down the cohort:



and this one suggests that it's trans women, rather than trans men, who are feeling most excluded from sports:



That shouldn't come as a surprise, I guess, as you're getting a double-whammy there: women, cisgender or otherwise, experience sexism in sport already - so as a trans woman, you're hit by anti-trans and anti-woman sentiments. Oof.