Comment by aaaja
5 days ago
The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, published a report on this recently. She examined the evidence and concluded that a protected female category is needed, at all levels of sport, to ensure fairness and - in contact sports - safety.
According to the research conducted for her report, the failure of governing bodies to exclude males from women's competitions has so far led to more than 600 female athletes losing out of 890 medals in 29 different sports - and this is likely to be a considerable underestimate.
Another adverse effect of male inclusion is that some female athletes, seeing the unfairness of this, will choose not to compete at all. Others will be displaced from qualifying for competition. By including males, governing bodies are excluding female athletes from what should be their own category.
The oft-repeated claim that it's just conservatives bringing up this issue is a false narrative, as is the incorrect assumption that this is being driven by "hate". Many people who have been speaking out on this - whether they're athletes themselves, UN officials, feminist activists, or simply just care about the wellbeing of women and girls - are doing so because they see the inherent unfairness and safety risks this imposes upon female athletes.
Just for you, and anyone else reading this, I actually went and looked up this report. For the record, you can find it right here: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/a79325-r...
Here's a snippet from the first few pages:
> Women and girls in sport, including female sports officials, are vulnerable to physical violence.5 When eligibility norms are deliberately violated and when the risk of injury to athletes is knowingly increased, the physical harms sustained can be characterized as “violence”.6
"The risk of injury is increased [...] can be characterized as violence". Really. People getting hurt in a sport is now violence against women. Ok.
But hey, they cited a source to back up this claim! It's got a footnote and everything! Let's check it out:
> 6 Submission by Independent Council on Women’s Sports
Well, that's pretty vague. I'm not an expert in reading academic papers so someone correct me, but what exactly is this citing? An email from an advocacy agency?
Just for amusment I went and looked up "Independent Council on Women’s Sports." just to see what kind of non-partial and independent academic body was making this submission
> The Independent Council on Women's Sports (ICONS) is an American anti-transgender advocacy organization that opposes transgender athletes participating in women’s sports. ICONS hosts an annual International Women's Sports Summit, where anti-transgender activists are invited to give talks over the course of three days. They also contribute amicus briefs and organizational assistance to anti-transgender legal cases, and their co-founder, Kim Jones, has infrequently hosted a podcast to discuss ICONS’ activities since August of 2022.
I don't want to make an argument from authority here, but this citation is not really compelling me to do further research.
I mean, the person making the claim is required to provide proof, right? Or is that not a thing any more?
Edit:
I looked further in the paper. The next good bit is here: "Female athletes are also more vulnerable to sustaining serious physical injuries when female-only sports spaces are opened to males,9 as documented in disciplines such as in volleyball,10 basketball11 and soccer.12"
What a scary sentence. Good thing it's got citations to prove it's worrying claims, let's check those out:
> Alec Schemmel, “Injured volleyball player speaks out after alleged transgender opponent spiked ball at her”, ABC 13 News, 20 April 2023
Wow, that sounds bad, injured by a spike, hey what's that funny word doing there, "alleged". Hmm, what could that be doing there?
> (of an incident or a person) said, without proof, to have taken place or to have a specified illegal or undesirable quality.
I'm glad we cited this definitive source where they claim they were hurt by someone who was transgender with zero proof whatsoever.
A bonus section! Here's another worrying section about the horrors of being a female athlete:
> Female athletes who may look “masculine” may be derogatorily described as lesbians.46
Ok, yes, that seems like a problem, but I wonder what else "female athletes who make look masculine" are called? Like, maybe they're accused of something else these days? Some other term is used to attempt to diminish their achievements and slander them? Weird they didn't mention that term.
As any other readers of this thread will be able to observe, your response is a useful example of how misogynistic attitudes stifle discussion on women's issues.
Instead of engaging with curiosity and open-mindedness towards an expert UN report on this issue adversely affecting women and girls, you chose shallow, snarky dismissal and sarcastic quips.
Your reflexive refusal to take women's safety and fairness in sport seriously speaks volumes about your view of women more generally.
Thanks for linking the report though, even if it was just to cherry-pick bits of it to lazily sneer at. It gives other readers an easier way to click through and engage with the content thoughtfully.
I was curious and open-minded enough to go and look up several layers of citations from the article you didn't even bother to link. It wasn't convincing.
It turns out that when people actually read your citations, sometimes they find out you're full of crap.
Arguing that women are in danger because one woman got hurt by another woman hitting a volleyball at her is ludicrously patronizing.
1 reply →
> your response is a useful example of how misogynistic attitudes stifle discussion on women's issues.
:100:
Also hiding behind "scientific" findings that there is a purported spectrum between men and women. Science has known that XY and XX configurations of chromosome 47 are the normal genotypes of male and female, respectively, and that any other configuration of these chromosomes (or a failure of the Y chromosome to activate) are disorders and not normative. Trisomy 47 (XXX, XXY, or XYY) is a genetic disorder just like trisomy 18 (Edward's syndrome) or trisomy 21 (Down's syndrome). The fact that some people's lived experience is a life with a genetic disorder does not make it normative or not a disorder.
Women (~50.5% of the population) need their own spaces, and it is devastating to them and society at large to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of small, vocal portion of the population who happen to consistently beat them in sports. The vast majority of genetic men claiming access to women's spaces have no genetic disorder, so invoking genetic disorders (as some do) to support them is a red herring, and there's no cut-and-dry science to apply (except to invoke their genotype which contradicts their claim).
The stance I'm taking on this almost definitionally adheres to "objective truth over subjective emotion" - something GP says they also hold to in a different thread.