Comment by JuniperMesos
3 hours ago
> Males who transition to female are not males. They are female/women. It is already not permissible for men to compete in women-only sports.
This is precisely the point of contention. The people who want women's sports leagues to be able to legally or socially-acceptably bar transwomen want this precisely because they do not consider trans women to have the meaningful female characteristics that justify having a female-specific sports league to begin with.
I'm personally ambivalent on this point, and it's because I don't actually care about women's sports one way or the other (I barely care about men's sports). But if you do care about women's sports, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that you might have good reasons to want to restrict trans women from participating for the same reasons you want to restrict cis men from participating.
I understand the point of contention should be that but sadly when we dig into these discussions it often becomes clear that’s not what it is actually about. So frankly, I won’t sit here and stand for this user saying these women aren’t women.
They can talk about physical advantages/fairness in sports in good faith without erasing their identities and saying “it’s a fact that biology says they’re not women,” which is wrong. That’s just ignorance and/or transphobia, not a healthy discussion about advantages in competition.
“Men in women’s sports” is often convenient cover for many people to participate in erasure without copping to the fact that they’re just uncomfortable with trans people simply existing (or worse). Most of them, especially men with media reach/political clout constantly talking about it, are not passionate about women’s sports in the slightest and couldn’t care less if the playing field was level. So we can’t sit here and pretend that’s what this discussion is really about.
It’s very similar to when incels said “it’s about ethics in gaming journalism” during gamergate. Yeah, some people care about that legitimately, and there is a legitimate discussion to be had, but that wasn’t what the movement was actually about in any real sense. It just gave them a palatable reason to project to more reasonable people.