The Socialists, led by Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister, included plans to limit participation in female sports to “people with a female biological sex” in a policy document decided on at the party’s congress over the weekend.
The decision to also remove Q+ from a plan to protect sexual and gender minorities from the impact of social inequality sparked fury from LGBTQ+ activists and politicians from Left-wing partners of Mr Sánchez’s minority government.
The passing of a transgender rights reform in 2023, allowing anyone to change their official sex simply by stating their wish to switch, caused a bitter rift within Spain’s ruling Left-wing forces.
Carmen Calvo, the former Socialist deputy prime minister, said at the time the reform would “destroy the powerful battery of equality legislation in our country”.
Pathetic display from so-called socialists
Ignorant passerby here, and genuinely want to change my mind, but how exactly is it fair for a trans person to compete against a biologically female person?
If we go back to the original reason for this sexist devide, it stems from a fundamental biological difference between two genders. How we identify ourselves has little impact on these biological differences no?
Furthermore I was listening to a podcast recently and they were talking about how the greatest female tennisplayer to have ever lived is would be ranked 2 or 3 thousand in a unisex world ranking. Seeing a worldrecord being set by someone working within the confines of the female body is impressive, seeing that same record broken by someone without the same constraints just devalues the other persons achievement.
Maybe mine is a weird way to explain it, but here it is. It’s up to the rules to decide what is an unfair advantage and what is not. You can make sports categories based on gender, or body weight. You could theoretically make them according to muscle mass, or maybe even blood androgen concentration. But here the rules only say “men and women”; if you think some people might still have an unfair advantage under that scheme, that’s okay, but going down the lazy path of leaving basically everything unchanged exept you restrict some women from participating in “women’s” sports is the worst possible way to handle it. It alienates people by refusing to grow beyond an outdated model.
Equating transgender women with cisgender men is biologically inaccurate.
The tests assessed body composition, lung function, cardiopulmonary exercise testing, strength and lower body power.
Among the results was a determination that the trans women athletes had decreased lung function compared to the cis women athletes.
In addition, the bone density of the trans women athletes was found to be equivalent to that of the cis women. Bone density is linked to muscle strength.
The researchers say their findings “reveal notable disparities in fat mass, fat-free mass, laboratory sports performance measures and hand-grip strength measures between cisgender male and transgender female athletes.
“These differences underscore the inadequacy of using cisgender male athletes as proxies for transgender women athletes.”
Two points:
-
Top-level sports isn’t fair. Most famous athletes are outliers in terms of height, weight, muscle mass, etc. Some, like Phelps, have genetic or developmental differences that give them a pretty significant advantage.
-
I must admit that the legal definition of ‘transwoman’ varies from country to country. In India, where I live, a person can legally change their gender without any medical intervention, and such people might have a physical advantage over cis-women. But in the vast majority of countries, they have to take hormones and / or do surgical procedures that reshape their body to be more ‘feminine’. Once they do that, they have no significant advantage over cis-women.
-
