late to this conversation, but just wanted to say as much as I don't like how the washington state initiative was worded, I believe it was worded that way because washington has leaned hard into self-ID so finding a way to verify someone is actually a female isn't as straightforward as it seems. in You can change the sex on your birth certificate with no indication it was amended, for example, so therefore they couldn't rely on birth certificates.
"It’s basically impossible to know what they were thinking when they drafted this". Really?? You know some old Republican dude thought it'd give him a great reason for inspecting the inside of teenage girl's panties. Why do we have to pretend that's not their main aim in life??
Yeah, conservatives fight Title IX because it mandates equal resources in an area ill-suited for it. But you’re wrong about them not caring about girls’ sports, especially through college. I think they care more about girls’ sports than liberals do - that is, they care about the actual teams and players and competition while liberals care about the symbolism of having equally divided up resources. This is because they have more and bigger families than liberals do, and they support their kids of both sexes doing sports because sports teach teamwork, cooperation, etc. And it’s not just a youth sports thing, some of these girls grow up to play ball in college (e.g. my sister-in-law). Sports families are sports families, and they definitely skew red (which is a shame, there’s a fair amount of good in this culture).
Just go to a tween or high school girls’ soccer or softball game in DeSoto County, MS, and you’ll see what I mean - there’ll be tons of parents and grandparents and cousins supporting the teams and probably 80% of those folks voted Trumpx3. I know, because I go to those games when I visit. They’ll be out there in 100 degree weather!
So yeah, I think the concern about competitive fairness is genuine - it affects their kids!
I don't think that there is any actual evidence that conservative people care about girls sports more than liberals do.
Whenever people talk like this they are just making a fictional type of liberal, that they over index based on some NYC media-type person, and they absolutely forget that there are tens of millions of normal liberals living normal lives all over the place.
Yet another poorly thought out piece that snakes its way through an argument that in the end completely misrepresents reality.
“Progressives fight for society and equality, while conservatives fall back on traditionalism” ( or something like that). And concludes with the idea that conservatives never care about women or women’s sports”.
So let me get this straight… Talirico not only utters claims of there being 6 sexes, but votes that way in the state legislature, but in a statewide race where polling includes voters in less progressive areas- he’s the guy with the genuine and sincerely held belief that “ where safety issues matter, he believes biological boys shouldn’t participate in girls sports.” And! That he misspoke about his idea on the number of sexes - he now (took a biology class?) believes there are only 2! And Matt considers that sincere. But that if the heritage foundation puts out a piece on title ix that suggests pragmatism vs hard and fast rules prevail- that means they don’t care about girls sports and never have!
No - why not dig like 1 inch deep and look into specific examples that probably serve no one’s interest. In Connecticut there was a high school ( Darien) The school had 1200 students. 610 girls and 590 boys. In fall sports ( football soccer volleyball swimming etc) it turned out that 300 girls signed up for various sports and 298 boys. But!! The ratio had to be 6.1:5.9. So they got sued and had to eliminate boys volleyball so as to comply.
If a conservative says “that’s crazy- to cut volleyball-“ does that make them disingenuous about supporting girls?
But to adopt this idea suddenly that today’s democrats are pro-women misses out on a lot of ideas.
Choosing to protect Muslim ideology is hardly pro-women. Choosing to ignore the consequences of men in women’s sports is hardly pro women. The “there aren’t that many” is ridiculously dumb. If enes kanter, who Matt knows his motives -and 5 other nba players infiltrate the wnba is it a “smart” take to dismiss their presence as “only 6 which is not many?” If your daughter misses out on a scholarship because only 2 boys ran the 400 meter faster and took her off the podium- does that not matter? It was only 2.
But this gender identity nonsense is exactly on display when Matt knows enes isn’t actually trans. Does he know the motives of everyone who claims that? Prisoners who choose to suddenly be trans and sent to a female prison- he knows their identity? And then talirico- it’s only unjust if safety comes into play? Yes - he understands there’s a reasonable objection because these people have different bodies. But it doesn’t matter in non-contact sports? But he’s pro women right?
Politicians are often insincere.
But Matt - to prop up Dems and diss republicans is so off the mark on this issue.
My conclusion: Dems are insane and conservatives pragmatic.
What's missing in this conversation is any discussion of what it is that makes it important to have woman's sports reserved for women. And I think it's because the truth is a bit uncomfortable as it reveals most people -- even in blue cities -- internally think of the salient distinction to be between biological men and women.
Ultimately, there are a fixed number of spots that go to players so no matter what the qualifications are to play for the women's team the same number of people get to play. The only sense it matters at all is how it affects those who see those athletes. Do little girls go "that's someone like me" and feel inspired or not?
And the truth is the people at the very top of sports will always be different from almost everyone else. They will have a lucky combination of genes and determination. If it was really the case that people thought of "identified as female" as the salient category it really wouldn't matter that some were trans-women and others weren't.
But that doesn't seem to be the intuition that lots of people have and while you can ask people to use different pronouns etc you can't ask them to change what categories feel the most salient to their own identity. Maybe what people find salient will change in the future but for now that's a fact we need to accept.
Having said all that, we don't necessarily need to use the same rules for a low stakes fun activity as we do for the top competitive athletes.
A person's chromosome configuration doesn't necessarily correlate with whether the person is anatomically male or female (which I assume is the relevant characteristic for sports purposes). There are several conditions in which a person with X-Y chromosomes develops as anatomically female. As Claude explains, "In typical human development, the "default" body plan without androgen signaling is female — the presence of a Y chromosome doesn't automatically produce male anatomy. It's the successful cascade of SRY expression → testis formation → testosterone/DHT production → functional androgen receptors that produces male-typical genitalia. A disruption anywhere in that chain can result in female-typical anatomy regardless of the underlying karyotype."
"It’s basically impossible to know what they were thinking when they drafted this" As is common in policy based referenda (which is why government by referenda is bad actually)
> An even more egregious example comes from Washington state, where conservative activists have put a trans sports initiative on the ballot that would require affirmative sex verification in order to participate in girls’ school sports. This is not the standard practice even in the many red states who’ve adopted rules on this topic, and by creating new barriers to participation, the new rule would likely generate fewer opportunities for girls to play sports. It’s not entirely clear to me why the Washington initiative is written this way
I dunno, maybe it was written that way, because these people don't really like women's sports, will do anything to win a culture war, and they might be obsessed with sex / genitals and are perverts. Like who in their right mind would want genital inspections for kids? In Washington and most states a simple Dr's note or Medical record from your PCP should be sufficient. As always the crazy comes out because the Republicans have basically let the fringe crazies take over their party.
I don’t think it makes my opinion matter more and I have a transgender daughter who is beginning to play youth sports. It might be fair to say I have more skin in the game than many commentators and less than others, like those actually in the game.
I live in the progressive bubble that is Portland, OR though I come from Ohio in times when it was more purple. I also run a youth sports program serving thousands of families.
All that said, I’m happy to see the Democratic Party becoming more sensible about this and in a way, I am happy for the GOP to be showing some of its truer colors - so we can have a healthier discussion about this issue. I think many in the GOP actually hold the more sensible position more Democrats are adopting, and that those pushing for stricter measures “against” girls are likely to cause a rift in the larger coalition.
It’s disappointing to see the two “sides” not seek connection where their Venn Diagram overlaps rather than highlighting differences and that’s politics for you, especially online.
I do think that if folks manage to really make it so transmen are competing in women's sports, that's going to prompt its own backlash? Maybe they'll get barred due to limits on testerone/other treatments, but like, no one's particularly happy about Mack Beggs?
Chess is sex segregated despite no physical element, only two women have been able to compete with men and they were sisters (the third sister was 6th best female player of all time).
In most sports elite women can't compete with 15 year old boys but in a large share of athletic events modern women athletes today would easily beat the best men in the world in the 1930s. There are lots of reasons why people have improved over the last 90 years but it is baffling that it is bigger than the gender gap.
P.S. applies to age too, the over 70 marathon record is faster than the Olympic records at the first few Olympics.
This 15 year old boys trope is a little misleading. In Soccer, national teams often train against elite U-15 boys teams and have lost in some cases but this is similar to the fact that men's elite teams often train against college teams and also have notable losses. If 5 average WNBA bench players showed up to your neighborhood courts, I don't think they will lose a game against any of the regulars.
I don’t think the USWNT would beat a team of 15 year olds that trained regularly. I played elite college soccer, and played scout team against one of the best women’s college teams in the country (who had a number of USWNT and others) and never lost. By never lost, when we start off 11 v 11 we would score 6 or 7 before we started constraining the game so they could work on their plans for advancing the ball or press triggers.
The field is too big and men are just too fast, even with a bit of coordination you can switch fields and put the ball where women cannot hope to get it.
I'm a bit confused by your example. You an elite COLLEGE football player played against an elite female COLLEGE team and won decisively. This is quite different from an elite female team competing against a random US high school team (not a state champion level team but just your typical high school that practices regularly and has a middling record).
Yeah the speed difference and the size the field would be too much for the women- who have a technical advantage- to overcome. Seven a side or small field? Probably. Full field? No.
We’re talking about 20-30 yards of space that NWSL teams give other teams because they can play that narrow against other women that you can’t even give teenagers
Yes if your neighborhood court includes current, former and future NBA players then the WNBA players will struggle but the set of those parks is quite limited and does not change my main point that elite women athletes are not frequently being trounced by male high school schlubs. This is not to deny real differences in performance but unless we are talking about the elite or future elite athletes I don't think that performance differences should be. the main rationale for our decisioning.
There's an amusing set of videos floating around where the hosts ask normal schlubs if they could beat an elite female athlete, and some normal schlubs say they could, and then they do the competition and the male braggarts are trounced. I've seen one with tennis, and one with runners, and one with weightlifting, and some other sports I don't remember.
This is not to deny what other commenters say. A good high school soccer team will beat the best women, a good teenage boys' hockey team will trounce the best women, top high school boy runners can beat the women's world records. But training and skill matter too.
so if you ever hooped for a mediocre high school team you probably scrimmaged against your local university women's team. and it was never close. (A WNBA team against a mediocre boy's high school basketball team would be closer...the WNBA team would have better shooters but rebounding and physicality would be significant advantages for the boy's team.). Dunking isn't everything but there have been 39 dunks in the entire history of the WNBA, almost all of them by Griner. Every high school team has a bunch of dudes that can dunk. So does every pickup court I've ever been on.
It is physically related in chess, but not in the way you would think: women/girls are sexually harassed out of the open league. The separate women's-only competitions are just additional tournaments, and don't have big prize money, but they were created to attempt to encourage women's interest in the game in a safer environment. However, women play and are ranked in the open league, and it has had 44 women as grandmaster; the women's category supplements this.
"P.S. applies to age too, the over 70 marathon record is faster than the Olympic records at the first few Olympics."
Fascinating! 1896 Olympic marathon winning time 2:58. current over 70 record 2:54 (current world record 1:59:30).
Imagine Sebastian Sawe competing in the 1896 olympics. He'd have gone back to the hotel, showered, changed and sat down to dinner before the next guy even finished.
For what it is worth, as a non-politically aligned person reading these 400 plus comments, I will just say that I see nothing even remotely close to a leftist consensus emerging. This issue is both insignificant in actual impact and debilitating in terms of political solidarity.
As long as this continues, I suspect the right will continue to pour salt on this wound.
You say sex segregation is probably unnecessary in middle school but typically needed in high school. This is the current nuanced (or what you call “wishy washy”) take floating around the center left. Consider for 5 minutes what this actually looks like in practice, and how it damages not just girls but the children it is trying to protect. How do you tell a boy he can play on the 8th grade girls' soccer team, but not the high school team? You tell him he's a girl until puberty? No boy is a girl. Letting him live inside that lie for a few years as an impressionable child, then yanking it away right as puberty hits, would be incredibly damaging.
Your “wishy washy take” is the whole problem in miniature. Republicans were right that males playing in female-only sport is wrong. Democrats were right that this is a wedge issue R's use to win elections. But the wedge only works because it points at something real. Males are in female-only spaces and children are being unnecessarily medicalized. The R's are right about the wider problem too. At its core the Dems are wrong (morally, scientifically, politically).
You read Sand, Talarico, Acton and Turek as moderating. I read a hedge on sports, maybe a hedge on the children, and nothing else. You call sports the low-stakes question, but it is the same question. Either the law can turn a male into a female or it can't, and sports, spaces, services and children's medicine all follow from the answer. This issue will not go away until the entire edifice of a "civil rights" movement to legally recognize a male as a female, or vice versa, is put to rest.
We can treat all people with dignity and respect, regardless of identity, but this doesn't mean we need to allow males access to female-only services and spaces at any age or under any circumstance.
It is not possible, fair, or desirable to write laws that allow some males into female-only spaces based on appearance or surgery. Can you imagine having laws that assess a person’s appearance or level of cosmetic surgery as a gatekeeper to a “civil right?” This is fundamentally unfair and discriminatory. Either males have a civil right to access female-only spaces or they do not. I argue they do not.
I recognize that there are folks uncomfortable with their bodies (and this can be for many reasons, not just a trans identity). However, society should not sacrifice women's privacy or safety at the altar of accommodating them. As it stands, many public spaces now offer "third spaces" for families or others who need more privacy. Where this is not possible or prohibitively expensive, people need to use the public accommodations that accord with their sex.
Most female-only spaces are not female-only due to the law enforcing them to. Laws, by their nature, must minimize the role of human judgement and specifically articulate criteria. Most reasonable people can tell the difference between someone who genuinely lives as a different gender and a man in a dress who wants to use a women's restroom for trolling or perverted reasons. Human judgement is better than law at answering hard questions like this unless the stakes are very high.
I played on the only coed high school soccer team in a single-gender league. The league was very casual and we sucked, so no one cared. Even Matt's "let trans girls play in middle school but not high school" heuristic will be wrong sometimes. A middle school aged travel league aimed at getting kids scholarships or to the pros (as much as I hate them) should probably be sex segregated; a high school club sports team, where the main goal is socialization and fun, shouldn't be. Which is why I agree whole-heartedly with Matt that the Obama DOE decision was a travesty.
I agree that female-only spaces were generally enforced by human judgment and norms that supported a woman's right to eject. In fact, you've described the world I want back. A woman saw a man in the women's room and then could get him removed. Importantly, the law backed up her right to eject him. But the law has taken human judgment away. In California, for instance, men can access female public accommodations by declaration alone, and the woman who exercises the judgment you're describing is committing an act of discrimination. My argument would be that self-ID abolishes women's right to eject the man, and since we cannot reasonably make a law that allows for some males, based on appearance or surgical history, to access female-only spaces, we need to make the law based on material reality.
On sports we may agree more than you think. If a league is explicitly coed, great. The problem was never boys and girls playing together. But where I think we disagree is that I don't think it's ever a good idea to let some boys play in the wrong category. It’s not good for the girls and it confuses the boy.
I experienced more sexual harassment in middle school than in high school, and a lot of the female athletes complaining about the transgender athletes have brought up feeling sexually harassed. So to me, to even conceive there is an exception to be made in middle school means you haven't listened to what the girls have been saying.
My understanding from having previously looked into the Washington initiative is that all students are already required to undergo a medical exam; defenders of the initiative say they just want doctors to note the student's sex on a form, and that in 99% of cases this will be obvious & require no additional examination. I don't know if that's true but it sounds plausible to me.
There is some fair criticism in this piece about how the initiative is worded, but you're making it sound like the conservative movement wants to force all female student athletes to undergo genital exams, and this shows the conservative movement wants to destroy women's sports. This is very uncharitable & not up to the standard I've come to expect from Slow Boring.
Especially since, doing an SRY test is one of the methods of sex determination that the state will accept. It's a cheek swab and highly accurate -- there can be cases where the SRY has translocated to the X chromosome so it's more accurate than karyotyping.
I agree. It's disingenuous (though perhaps politically effective) for people to make wild claims about the process of sex verification, given that verifying that everything's copacetic down there is SOP for pediatric wellness checks starting with the first one post-birth. It's going to be in their medical records already. The doctor can, in fact, just note it on a form.
Maybe people who haven't raised children in the last couple of decades aren't aware of that, but those of us with kids should be. Argue against things on the actual merits, people. Don't fearmonger!
late to this conversation, but just wanted to say as much as I don't like how the washington state initiative was worded, I believe it was worded that way because washington has leaned hard into self-ID so finding a way to verify someone is actually a female isn't as straightforward as it seems. in You can change the sex on your birth certificate with no indication it was amended, for example, so therefore they couldn't rely on birth certificates.
"It’s basically impossible to know what they were thinking when they drafted this". Really?? You know some old Republican dude thought it'd give him a great reason for inspecting the inside of teenage girl's panties. Why do we have to pretend that's not their main aim in life??
Nice piece.
Being an old person as well, though , I wondered about Renee Richards, who played in the US open after transitioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Richards
Yeah, conservatives fight Title IX because it mandates equal resources in an area ill-suited for it. But you’re wrong about them not caring about girls’ sports, especially through college. I think they care more about girls’ sports than liberals do - that is, they care about the actual teams and players and competition while liberals care about the symbolism of having equally divided up resources. This is because they have more and bigger families than liberals do, and they support their kids of both sexes doing sports because sports teach teamwork, cooperation, etc. And it’s not just a youth sports thing, some of these girls grow up to play ball in college (e.g. my sister-in-law). Sports families are sports families, and they definitely skew red (which is a shame, there’s a fair amount of good in this culture).
Just go to a tween or high school girls’ soccer or softball game in DeSoto County, MS, and you’ll see what I mean - there’ll be tons of parents and grandparents and cousins supporting the teams and probably 80% of those folks voted Trumpx3. I know, because I go to those games when I visit. They’ll be out there in 100 degree weather!
So yeah, I think the concern about competitive fairness is genuine - it affects their kids!
I don't think that there is any actual evidence that conservative people care about girls sports more than liberals do.
Whenever people talk like this they are just making a fictional type of liberal, that they over index based on some NYC media-type person, and they absolutely forget that there are tens of millions of normal liberals living normal lives all over the place.
so since this was a whole conversation below:
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/who-s-q-lgbtq-study-shines-light-queer-identities-n1121521
in a nutshell, the contemporary use of "queer" is a Tumblr thing by under-35, heterosexual women. Social media, what a disaster.
Yet another poorly thought out piece that snakes its way through an argument that in the end completely misrepresents reality.
“Progressives fight for society and equality, while conservatives fall back on traditionalism” ( or something like that). And concludes with the idea that conservatives never care about women or women’s sports”.
So let me get this straight… Talirico not only utters claims of there being 6 sexes, but votes that way in the state legislature, but in a statewide race where polling includes voters in less progressive areas- he’s the guy with the genuine and sincerely held belief that “ where safety issues matter, he believes biological boys shouldn’t participate in girls sports.” And! That he misspoke about his idea on the number of sexes - he now (took a biology class?) believes there are only 2! And Matt considers that sincere. But that if the heritage foundation puts out a piece on title ix that suggests pragmatism vs hard and fast rules prevail- that means they don’t care about girls sports and never have!
No - why not dig like 1 inch deep and look into specific examples that probably serve no one’s interest. In Connecticut there was a high school ( Darien) The school had 1200 students. 610 girls and 590 boys. In fall sports ( football soccer volleyball swimming etc) it turned out that 300 girls signed up for various sports and 298 boys. But!! The ratio had to be 6.1:5.9. So they got sued and had to eliminate boys volleyball so as to comply.
If a conservative says “that’s crazy- to cut volleyball-“ does that make them disingenuous about supporting girls?
But to adopt this idea suddenly that today’s democrats are pro-women misses out on a lot of ideas.
Choosing to protect Muslim ideology is hardly pro-women. Choosing to ignore the consequences of men in women’s sports is hardly pro women. The “there aren’t that many” is ridiculously dumb. If enes kanter, who Matt knows his motives -and 5 other nba players infiltrate the wnba is it a “smart” take to dismiss their presence as “only 6 which is not many?” If your daughter misses out on a scholarship because only 2 boys ran the 400 meter faster and took her off the podium- does that not matter? It was only 2.
But this gender identity nonsense is exactly on display when Matt knows enes isn’t actually trans. Does he know the motives of everyone who claims that? Prisoners who choose to suddenly be trans and sent to a female prison- he knows their identity? And then talirico- it’s only unjust if safety comes into play? Yes - he understands there’s a reasonable objection because these people have different bodies. But it doesn’t matter in non-contact sports? But he’s pro women right?
Politicians are often insincere.
But Matt - to prop up Dems and diss republicans is so off the mark on this issue.
My conclusion: Dems are insane and conservatives pragmatic.
What's missing in this conversation is any discussion of what it is that makes it important to have woman's sports reserved for women. And I think it's because the truth is a bit uncomfortable as it reveals most people -- even in blue cities -- internally think of the salient distinction to be between biological men and women.
Ultimately, there are a fixed number of spots that go to players so no matter what the qualifications are to play for the women's team the same number of people get to play. The only sense it matters at all is how it affects those who see those athletes. Do little girls go "that's someone like me" and feel inspired or not?
And the truth is the people at the very top of sports will always be different from almost everyone else. They will have a lucky combination of genes and determination. If it was really the case that people thought of "identified as female" as the salient category it really wouldn't matter that some were trans-women and others weren't.
But that doesn't seem to be the intuition that lots of people have and while you can ask people to use different pronouns etc you can't ask them to change what categories feel the most salient to their own identity. Maybe what people find salient will change in the future but for now that's a fact we need to accept.
Having said all that, we don't necessarily need to use the same rules for a low stakes fun activity as we do for the top competitive athletes.
A person's chromosome configuration doesn't necessarily correlate with whether the person is anatomically male or female (which I assume is the relevant characteristic for sports purposes). There are several conditions in which a person with X-Y chromosomes develops as anatomically female. As Claude explains, "In typical human development, the "default" body plan without androgen signaling is female — the presence of a Y chromosome doesn't automatically produce male anatomy. It's the successful cascade of SRY expression → testis formation → testosterone/DHT production → functional androgen receptors that produces male-typical genitalia. A disruption anywhere in that chain can result in female-typical anatomy regardless of the underlying karyotype."
Bobbo -- No one cares. That's Matt's point. We need Dems to win elections.
it does like 99.9999% of the time.
"It’s basically impossible to know what they were thinking when they drafted this" As is common in policy based referenda (which is why government by referenda is bad actually)
> An even more egregious example comes from Washington state, where conservative activists have put a trans sports initiative on the ballot that would require affirmative sex verification in order to participate in girls’ school sports. This is not the standard practice even in the many red states who’ve adopted rules on this topic, and by creating new barriers to participation, the new rule would likely generate fewer opportunities for girls to play sports. It’s not entirely clear to me why the Washington initiative is written this way
I dunno, maybe it was written that way, because these people don't really like women's sports, will do anything to win a culture war, and they might be obsessed with sex / genitals and are perverts. Like who in their right mind would want genital inspections for kids? In Washington and most states a simple Dr's note or Medical record from your PCP should be sufficient. As always the crazy comes out because the Republicans have basically let the fringe crazies take over their party.
I don’t think it makes my opinion matter more and I have a transgender daughter who is beginning to play youth sports. It might be fair to say I have more skin in the game than many commentators and less than others, like those actually in the game.
I live in the progressive bubble that is Portland, OR though I come from Ohio in times when it was more purple. I also run a youth sports program serving thousands of families.
All that said, I’m happy to see the Democratic Party becoming more sensible about this and in a way, I am happy for the GOP to be showing some of its truer colors - so we can have a healthier discussion about this issue. I think many in the GOP actually hold the more sensible position more Democrats are adopting, and that those pushing for stricter measures “against” girls are likely to cause a rift in the larger coalition.
It’s disappointing to see the two “sides” not seek connection where their Venn Diagram overlaps rather than highlighting differences and that’s politics for you, especially online.
I do think that if folks manage to really make it so transmen are competing in women's sports, that's going to prompt its own backlash? Maybe they'll get barred due to limits on testerone/other treatments, but like, no one's particularly happy about Mack Beggs?
Two random observations:
Chess is sex segregated despite no physical element, only two women have been able to compete with men and they were sisters (the third sister was 6th best female player of all time).
In most sports elite women can't compete with 15 year old boys but in a large share of athletic events modern women athletes today would easily beat the best men in the world in the 1930s. There are lots of reasons why people have improved over the last 90 years but it is baffling that it is bigger than the gender gap.
P.S. applies to age too, the over 70 marathon record is faster than the Olympic records at the first few Olympics.
This 15 year old boys trope is a little misleading. In Soccer, national teams often train against elite U-15 boys teams and have lost in some cases but this is similar to the fact that men's elite teams often train against college teams and also have notable losses. If 5 average WNBA bench players showed up to your neighborhood courts, I don't think they will lose a game against any of the regulars.
I don’t think the USWNT would beat a team of 15 year olds that trained regularly. I played elite college soccer, and played scout team against one of the best women’s college teams in the country (who had a number of USWNT and others) and never lost. By never lost, when we start off 11 v 11 we would score 6 or 7 before we started constraining the game so they could work on their plans for advancing the ball or press triggers.
The field is too big and men are just too fast, even with a bit of coordination you can switch fields and put the ball where women cannot hope to get it.
I'm a bit confused by your example. You an elite COLLEGE football player played against an elite female COLLEGE team and won decisively. This is quite different from an elite female team competing against a random US high school team (not a state champion level team but just your typical high school that practices regularly and has a middling record).
Yeah the speed difference and the size the field would be too much for the women- who have a technical advantage- to overcome. Seven a side or small field? Probably. Full field? No.
We’re talking about 20-30 yards of space that NWSL teams give other teams because they can play that narrow against other women that you can’t even give teenagers
if your neighborhood court is West 4th or Rucker, 5 WNBA all stars aren't winning a game. This is very very neighborhood dependent.
Yes if your neighborhood court includes current, former and future NBA players then the WNBA players will struggle but the set of those parks is quite limited and does not change my main point that elite women athletes are not frequently being trounced by male high school schlubs. This is not to deny real differences in performance but unless we are talking about the elite or future elite athletes I don't think that performance differences should be. the main rationale for our decisioning.
There's an amusing set of videos floating around where the hosts ask normal schlubs if they could beat an elite female athlete, and some normal schlubs say they could, and then they do the competition and the male braggarts are trounced. I've seen one with tennis, and one with runners, and one with weightlifting, and some other sports I don't remember.
This is not to deny what other commenters say. A good high school soccer team will beat the best women, a good teenage boys' hockey team will trounce the best women, top high school boy runners can beat the women's world records. But training and skill matter too.
I believe there are several hundred high schools boys that can beat the fastest women in the world times in running
so if you ever hooped for a mediocre high school team you probably scrimmaged against your local university women's team. and it was never close. (A WNBA team against a mediocre boy's high school basketball team would be closer...the WNBA team would have better shooters but rebounding and physicality would be significant advantages for the boy's team.). Dunking isn't everything but there have been 39 dunks in the entire history of the WNBA, almost all of them by Griner. Every high school team has a bunch of dudes that can dunk. So does every pickup court I've ever been on.
The facts here aren't particularly hard to find.
I agree, that's why I provided context, elite women's teams are not regularly losing to high school schlubs.
It is physically related in chess, but not in the way you would think: women/girls are sexually harassed out of the open league. The separate women's-only competitions are just additional tournaments, and don't have big prize money, but they were created to attempt to encourage women's interest in the game in a safer environment. However, women play and are ranked in the open league, and it has had 44 women as grandmaster; the women's category supplements this.
Chess, International Math Olympiad - who knew those nerds could harass their way to glory? LOL. So much copium.
the Polgar's wouldn't agree with you on that.
I don't believe that for a second.
Well, you're allowed to take more than a second to research the topic.
"P.S. applies to age too, the over 70 marathon record is faster than the Olympic records at the first few Olympics."
Fascinating! 1896 Olympic marathon winning time 2:58. current over 70 record 2:54 (current world record 1:59:30).
Imagine Sebastian Sawe competing in the 1896 olympics. He'd have gone back to the hotel, showered, changed and sat down to dinner before the next guy even finished.
I fear Matt waited for conservatives to do something stupid to write about this issue.
As a supporter of female excellence, my commitment is to create a context did them to compete and thrive
For what it is worth, as a non-politically aligned person reading these 400 plus comments, I will just say that I see nothing even remotely close to a leftist consensus emerging. This issue is both insignificant in actual impact and debilitating in terms of political solidarity.
As long as this continues, I suspect the right will continue to pour salt on this wound.
Just sayin’….
You say sex segregation is probably unnecessary in middle school but typically needed in high school. This is the current nuanced (or what you call “wishy washy”) take floating around the center left. Consider for 5 minutes what this actually looks like in practice, and how it damages not just girls but the children it is trying to protect. How do you tell a boy he can play on the 8th grade girls' soccer team, but not the high school team? You tell him he's a girl until puberty? No boy is a girl. Letting him live inside that lie for a few years as an impressionable child, then yanking it away right as puberty hits, would be incredibly damaging.
Your “wishy washy take” is the whole problem in miniature. Republicans were right that males playing in female-only sport is wrong. Democrats were right that this is a wedge issue R's use to win elections. But the wedge only works because it points at something real. Males are in female-only spaces and children are being unnecessarily medicalized. The R's are right about the wider problem too. At its core the Dems are wrong (morally, scientifically, politically).
You read Sand, Talarico, Acton and Turek as moderating. I read a hedge on sports, maybe a hedge on the children, and nothing else. You call sports the low-stakes question, but it is the same question. Either the law can turn a male into a female or it can't, and sports, spaces, services and children's medicine all follow from the answer. This issue will not go away until the entire edifice of a "civil rights" movement to legally recognize a male as a female, or vice versa, is put to rest.
We can treat all people with dignity and respect, regardless of identity, but this doesn't mean we need to allow males access to female-only services and spaces at any age or under any circumstance.
Which bathroom would you prefer the 40 year trans woman who has gone through HRT and presents as a woman should use?
Sports are segregated by sex, not gender, for competitive reasons. Not all women-only spaces are the same way.
In a normal public facility this is probably a non issue because how will people know.
But in schools and locker rooms everybody knows. So you either use a single sex bathroom or the one belonging to your biological sex
It is not possible, fair, or desirable to write laws that allow some males into female-only spaces based on appearance or surgery. Can you imagine having laws that assess a person’s appearance or level of cosmetic surgery as a gatekeeper to a “civil right?” This is fundamentally unfair and discriminatory. Either males have a civil right to access female-only spaces or they do not. I argue they do not.
I recognize that there are folks uncomfortable with their bodies (and this can be for many reasons, not just a trans identity). However, society should not sacrifice women's privacy or safety at the altar of accommodating them. As it stands, many public spaces now offer "third spaces" for families or others who need more privacy. Where this is not possible or prohibitively expensive, people need to use the public accommodations that accord with their sex.
Most female-only spaces are not female-only due to the law enforcing them to. Laws, by their nature, must minimize the role of human judgement and specifically articulate criteria. Most reasonable people can tell the difference between someone who genuinely lives as a different gender and a man in a dress who wants to use a women's restroom for trolling or perverted reasons. Human judgement is better than law at answering hard questions like this unless the stakes are very high.
I played on the only coed high school soccer team in a single-gender league. The league was very casual and we sucked, so no one cared. Even Matt's "let trans girls play in middle school but not high school" heuristic will be wrong sometimes. A middle school aged travel league aimed at getting kids scholarships or to the pros (as much as I hate them) should probably be sex segregated; a high school club sports team, where the main goal is socialization and fun, shouldn't be. Which is why I agree whole-heartedly with Matt that the Obama DOE decision was a travesty.
I agree that female-only spaces were generally enforced by human judgment and norms that supported a woman's right to eject. In fact, you've described the world I want back. A woman saw a man in the women's room and then could get him removed. Importantly, the law backed up her right to eject him. But the law has taken human judgment away. In California, for instance, men can access female public accommodations by declaration alone, and the woman who exercises the judgment you're describing is committing an act of discrimination. My argument would be that self-ID abolishes women's right to eject the man, and since we cannot reasonably make a law that allows for some males, based on appearance or surgical history, to access female-only spaces, we need to make the law based on material reality.
On sports we may agree more than you think. If a league is explicitly coed, great. The problem was never boys and girls playing together. But where I think we disagree is that I don't think it's ever a good idea to let some boys play in the wrong category. It’s not good for the girls and it confuses the boy.
which woman who asserts her boundary against sharing a bathroom with a biological male would you tell to just chillax?
I don't understand the point you are trying to make.
I'm pushing back on your insinuation that not all women-only spaces fundamentally reduce down to issues of consent and an imbalance of power.
I experienced more sexual harassment in middle school than in high school, and a lot of the female athletes complaining about the transgender athletes have brought up feeling sexually harassed. So to me, to even conceive there is an exception to be made in middle school means you haven't listened to what the girls have been saying.
My understanding from having previously looked into the Washington initiative is that all students are already required to undergo a medical exam; defenders of the initiative say they just want doctors to note the student's sex on a form, and that in 99% of cases this will be obvious & require no additional examination. I don't know if that's true but it sounds plausible to me.
There is some fair criticism in this piece about how the initiative is worded, but you're making it sound like the conservative movement wants to force all female student athletes to undergo genital exams, and this shows the conservative movement wants to destroy women's sports. This is very uncharitable & not up to the standard I've come to expect from Slow Boring.
The actual text of the bill is this: "relying only on one or more of the following: The student's
reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously
produced testosterone levels."
The bill explicitly says that just a note on a form is not enough, and the people saying it is are mistaken or lying.
But it *is* true that genital exams are not required: an SRY cheek swab counts as a chromosomal check and would be sufficient.
https://www2.sos.wa.gov/_assets/elections/initiatives/finaltext_3276.pdf?_gl=1*1vwcg3k*_ga*NzU2NzQ3OTY1LjE3NDk4MjUxMzI.*_ga_7B08VE04WV*czE3NTAxMTM0NTIkbzUkZzEkdDE3NTAxMTM0NTUkajU3JGwwJGgw*_ga_X6SDF160YQ*czE3NTAxMTM0NTIkbzUkZzEkdDE3NTAxMTM0NTUkajU3JGwwJGgw
Still a bunch of nonsense, there shouldn't be explicit burden of proof and requiring medical tests.
Especially since, doing an SRY test is one of the methods of sex determination that the state will accept. It's a cheek swab and highly accurate -- there can be cases where the SRY has translocated to the X chromosome so it's more accurate than karyotyping.
I agree. It's disingenuous (though perhaps politically effective) for people to make wild claims about the process of sex verification, given that verifying that everything's copacetic down there is SOP for pediatric wellness checks starting with the first one post-birth. It's going to be in their medical records already. The doctor can, in fact, just note it on a form.
Maybe people who haven't raised children in the last couple of decades aren't aware of that, but those of us with kids should be. Argue against things on the actual merits, people. Don't fearmonger!
i think this initiative may complicate the mass-screenings that make the sports clearance process easier for some families. But that's about it.