Your disliking every one of my posts ever since I called out your singular-
they gripe, with my linking to the Oxford English Dictionary editors supporting this use, is petty. So I’ma return the favour.
What science? Herdfan's position is that testosterone levels result in unfair advantages.
No. His position, ever since the PRSI shitshow, has been steadfastly in the camp of:
no trans girl and no trans woman should be permitted to compete, side by side, with any cis girl and any cis woman, respectively — forever.
His position, as he steadfastly contends, is his
belief. His
belief is not founded in anything better than a cisnormative “tradition”. His
belief does not account for official policy addressing equitable competition practices. His
belief does not account for the immanent plasticity of bodies and their organs being changed, most of them constantly, by hormones, especially
exogenous hormones (i.e., intramuscular injection of anything from testosterone to insulin changes bodies). And his belief is not borne by applied experience.
No. His belief (and based on your thumbs, it sounds like yours, as well) is: endogenous hormones, once entered into the bloodstream, fixes everything inside the body into place permanently and, therefore, a trans girl or a trans woman who has experienced even a moment of endogenous production of testosterone, pre-disqualifies her
in perpetuity from competing alongside her cis counterpart(s), while trans boys and trans men will never, ever be able to compete alongside cis men. Likewise, a trans person who only experiences a single, exogenous puberty are also “gaming the system” and should not be allowed to compete with other folks with the same gender, because reasons (“chromosomes!” “unnatural!” “a threat!”)
Impressively, this is a micro-step up from the “chromosomes are destiny” rhetoric being debated in state supreme courts of the past twenty-give years to regulate and prohibit trans people from everyday participation in the public realm (including depriving them of the right to
any marriage with
anyone). But his belief is still a woefully antediluvian framework based not on the science of endocrinology and trans medicine, but on a cisnormative “tradition”.
Not only is this cisnormative belief the expression of a cognitive laziness to further justify the policy and law of segregation to benefit trans people negatively, as well as people with intersex bodies (which it does, keep reading), but its reductive framework of consequential implementation also fails to account for that aforementioned plasticity and, likewise, fails to account for the
orthodox of fixity which claims
all women’s bodies — cisgender and transgender —
to be a geography over which social orders must impose their heavy-handed regulation (disproportionately, by [cisgender] men, and also by the cisgender women who back them). This imposition is exercised in the name of “protection”, but this isn’t the case at all.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t be seeing the Dutee Chands and Caster Semenyas of cisgender women being 86’d from competition from other cisgender women, and likewise, we wouldn’t be seeing draconian U.S. state laws 86’ing trans kids from interscholastic competition from their cis counterparts. This same heavy regulation over that geography is central to what reproductive justice strives to challenge and redress. This is further why
it is no minor coincidence that trans health and reproductive health are two sides to the same double-helix of reproductive justice and reproductive health.
But back to bodies.
There is one organ in the body which sex hormones
do set into place by a certain age, and that organ is the skeleton. Growth plates in bones tend to set in place by no later than 18 (more commonly, it’s age 16). This, along with the developmental impact of hormones on vocal chords (a soft tissue, but consequential for obvious reasons), is
the reason why medical specialists and medical ethicists now concur that
trans kids who have voiced as trans whilst still kids have a right to agency over their body’s developmental future — that being, a single, consensual puberty on a trans person’s terms.
For the transgender kid who is able to experience their puberty
on their terms, this means their body will develop much the same as cisgender kids of the same gender. This means, additionally, that successive cohorts of trans kids with agency over their — and this is key —
one and only puberty are indistinguishable from their cisgender counterparts, especially after that puberty.
This quiet, but unavoidable fact mortifies
cisgender rights activists (CRAs) like TERFs (there are too many) and MRAs (such as tshrimp on PRSI and Herdfan). This material fact is the high-octane political fuel supercharging state-level legislation to
abolish trans kids from participating in athletics,
abolish trans kids from access to school washrooms and change facilities, and worse,
abolish physicians from delivering informed patient & parental consent on health care for trans kids.
Why?
See above:
that zeal to regulate — plain English: “control” — the geography of the body of women’s (and, shocker, kids’) bodies.
[This material fact is also worrisome to trans folks because domestic violence not only remains a pandemic to all women, but it becomes an additional risk factor to trans women and another specious legal defence for domestic abusers who hurt or kill women can use to rationalize their violence (see: “trans panic defences”).]
This Machiavellian reasoning to criminalize trans health care for trans kids is because CRAs believe trans kids must endure and survive a non-consensual,
endogenous first puberty (the same puberty which has silenced probably millions of of trans people over the decades who ended their lives successfully then and there). That way, not only are they made to suffer, but they will also become
more readily identifiable by cisgender people as trans people reach adulthood and, consequentially, are rendered vulnerable to further overt segregation and prohibition against their participation within the public sphere (including not only, you guessed it, athletic competition, but also access to relief and change facilities, as well as other materially consequential circumstances like being hired to an over-the-table job). Further, that
coerced visibility (as a CRA sees fit) aids to fuel the fire of prohibiting trans people — trans women in particular — from washroom and change facilities because, in the political mind of the CRA, readily observed masculinized features on a trans woman,
ipso facto, equals “sexual predator”. (And that history is long, ugly, and still being made.)
As CRAs get deprived of the usual canards of being able to distinguish and single out
all trans people (
something trans people were warning about a decade ago), they get more terrified and they become more infuriated. This also makes them more violent.
Why?
Because it means they can’t make any material distinction of trans people somehow being: A) dangerous, B) impostors, C) regressive, D) advantageous, E) freaks, and F) easy to talk about derisively. That’s because: A) we’re not, B) we’re not, C) over all, we’re not (but then you have the Caitlyn Jenners and Blaire Whites), D) we’re not, E) we’re not (unless, just like cis people, we individually
choose to be in the company of consensual mutual partners), and most importantly F) impossible to talk about derisively, because it becomes impossible for CRA people to know whether the person they’re feeding the trans shit-talking to is themselves trans. Increasingly, we
are hearing cis people in the flesh make clowns of themselves (with the cis person having no clue they’re being seen exactly as what they are).
And yes, CRAs are hella mad, and that’s because they’re getting hella scared of being seen as the clowns they are — clowns, but dangerous clowns. Have a second look at those state legislatures, those
Times of England opinion screeds, and the
state imprisonment of trans people in Cameroon.
And once more, back to bodies and, more to the point, athletic competition.
The five main physical components which drive sporting competition, especially in the Olympics, are: speed, strength, duration, precision, and technique. Each sport typically demands one over the others, and sometimes, two or three, side-by-side (like football, curling, and figure-skating). Much of what CRAs decry is their belief, one they’ve willed into a falsifiable truism, that
all trans girls and
all trans women have “strength advantages” over, respectively,
all cis girls and
all cis women, and competition is, therefore, unfair.
Empirically, even with much more data to be collected, we already know that isn’t necessarily true.
If we have established how hormones can alter the mostly plastic morphology of the human body (skeleton after 16 excepted) — and the science community have widely established this to be the case — then this means unspecific “advantages” conferred to a past of having access to testosterone
which are no longer a factor curtails the plastic advantages of having that T in the body. This means
muscles change (including, yes, that important muscle called “the heart”). It means lung capacity changes because of changed diaphragm size. It means glutes and quadriceps and abdominal muscles change. It also means other soft tissue resiliency and production (like blood) changes. The actual number of cells may not change, but their morphology does.
Does this mean a trans woman who competes in, say, the high jump, has an advantage over her cis competitors for having experienced an endogenous first puberty? It can, yes,
unless of course she isn’t tall (which, even for trans women who experience
two puberties — one endogenous, one exogenous — this can certainly be the case, depending on what the instruction manual for her body, her
genome, spelled out to do for her first, endogenous puberty (up to and including having had a very late onset of that first puberty and missing out on a lot of that vertical growth window, ending when the bone growth plates locked up)).
Does this mean a trans woman who competes in, say, weightlifting, has an advantage over her cis competitors in the same weight class for having experienced an endogenous first puberty? If the parts of her body being used for that competition — namely, her muscles — have lost their mass, then probably not so much. (Note the qualifier here is
mass, not nuclei, so let’s not keep shifting the goalposts here.) Fixed skeletal height also isn’t an advantage. One evidentiary case example relates to weightlifter Lauren Hubbard, because it happened
to Lauren Hubbard: in 2018,
she broke her elbow during competition (check out that picture and clip). This was because her muscles, which in the past might have provided the torsional strength to counteract direct stress placed onto her bones, were diminished from before the start of her second puberty. She didn’t factor this into the mix, and so she tried to lift at a weight she may have lifted successfully before second puberty, but her body was operating with a new set of rules. Consequently, she paid for it in an injury which nearly ended her aspirations. But she went through the work of rehabilitation, re-learning, and being coached on that re-learning effort. As it is, Lauren was ranked below the top three women — all cis, I might add — of her weight class during Olympic qualifiers.
Does that mean a trans woman who competes in, say, long-distance running has an advantage over her cis competitors for having experienced an endogenous first puberty? So far, that hasn’t been the case at
any competition level. That‘s likely because having a smaller skeletal frame confers a competitive advantage, and a decreasing, but still substantial number of trans women are going to have inherited a larger skeletal frame from a first puberty. As more trans girls experience only
one consensual puberty, their participation in long distance competition might increase. Who even knows. Is it unfair that larger-framed people can’t fairly compete in a marathon against small-frame counterparts? Probably, but you’ll find no political or legal action to change this. The closest we’ve seen to date is in middle-distance running,
such as the 400m hurdles, where
endurance, not height, is what wins the race (and on a personal note: having run both 110m high hurdles and 300m intermediate hurdles early in high school, I can attest the difference between the two is really different, as I couldn’t compete in the latter to save my life).
In the end, the presence of trans people in competitive athletics, as with the historic inclusion of other
categorically excluded people (note: that’s two links, with one more worth
reading, and I have all these journal articles saved, and can post them if you can’t reach them), further diversify and improve the overall pool of competition. It enriches the expansion of weight classes (like with
Greco-Roman wrestllng and weightlifting), duration classes (short-distance-to-long distance), and
technique classes.
What it
doesn’t do is “destroy” competition.
Trans people on
sport teams with regulatory bodies overseeing their qualification are already a thing, and as successive trans people who experienced only one consensual puberty, such as Mack Beggs (see link on Greco-Roman wrestling), enter their chosen sports, these numbers — and the quality of competition more widely — shall only increase. Meanwhile, the number of harried canards which CRAs invoke to marginalize, stigmatize, and exclude trans people from involvement and participation in the public realm, will only decrease until there’s nothing left they can say which won’t be seen by everyone else as anything other than hateful old crap premised upon discredited structural stereotypes from another time.
[EDIT: As a postscript, I’ll just add here, just as I did on PRSI, that Lauren Hubbard is at least the second
known trans woman to complete in an Olympics. The first, someone I used to know back in the ’90s, wasn’t voluntarily disclosed as trans when she competed a few years later, and in the end, she neither medalled nor placed. And amazingly, the sky didn’t fall.]
