That trans male swimmer is now an advocate for trans rights and has used his platform for much more than swimming.
I think it’ll be running events.
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This story is garnering attention because it is unusual. There are relatively few trans athletes competing and in most cases it isn’t controversial at all. In many states where there has been a rush to ban trans women from competing lawmakers haven’t been able to cite a single instance where it is been a problem (in some cases they haven’t been able to identify any trans athletes at all). The idea that we have separate competitions for trans men and women is laughable - they wouldn’t be able to field enough athletes to compete. Lawmakers can't cite local examples of trans girls in sports | AP News
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Bet some of the men on Penn’s team do as well😀
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Over the summer, there was another trans athlete, Laurel Hubbard who competed in weightlifting at the Olympics at 43 years old:
It is interesting, just looking at the title of each article, one from NPR, the other from ESPN.
And a trans woman on the Canadian soccer team took home an Olympic gold medal.
These competitions are not about recognizing overcoming adversity, economic deprivation, social stigma, or anything except time in performance. I really am not interested in the swimmers backstory; no doubt there are poor abused swimmers out there who have overcome far more than this athlete. We don’t give first place to the best sob story, it is for the best performance. In this case, a performance that resulted from 22 years of testosterone and a dramatically unfair advantage.
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why are you commenting on the trans soccer player. They are actually nonbinary and was on the womans team competing as a woman before the olympics.
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My mistake, the soccer player was biologically female at birth and chose to compete in that presumably easier category for the gender assigned at birth rather than their new gender identity stated as “nonbinary transgender”
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What about leagues by size for middle school, high school, and college?
It would make a lot of sense, too - because a 13 year old boy can be 5’0 or 5’7, same thing for the girls… No need to look at trans or nonbinary or intersex or anything. Just have Under 5’2, under 5’5, etc rather than Under 12, U14, etc. , and two groups in college. So okay it’d make two women’s teams at colleges but this way no one would lose.
This system already exists for boxing and works fine. 
So let’s play this out: one day a trans woman will break a world record in her sport. Going forward, what difference will that make to the sport? Probably not a lot. Biological women are realistically not going to be able to ever best that time, and will keep on competing anyway. Commentators will report the world record and the next best time in the same breath. People will make of it what they will. For those who care, they will treat the record like it has an asterisk after it.
If there is a flood of trans women who compete at that level (and that is so unlikely for reasons noted above), then there will be naturally an understanding of who has those top times. Adjustments can be made so cis women have a way to compete in their sport.
If that is the worst case scenario, that doesn’t sound so horrible. People are capable of nuanced thinking. They can acknowledge trans and cis women athletes at the same time.
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Think about this statement.
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I did when I wrote it. Very carefully.
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And it expresses exactly why trans women should not be competing with biological women.
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It comes after the part where I say that if the unlikely happens, that if trans women flood the sport ….
It will all be ok. There isn’t a catastrophe here. We can handle a little ambiguity and complexity. We really really can.
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The cases that are working their way through courts are in Connecticut and Idaho. In CT, there are two trans runners who are/were winning the state track titles and the girls who would have won (and broken the records) are coming in third and fourth claim they have suffered monetary damage because they did not get scholarships because they didn’t win the state championships.
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what if it isn’t a solo sport but a team sport? Will there then ever be a woman’s sport that can win without 4-6 trans athletes if any team has that many? What about countries sending teams to the Olympics? Will the testosterone testing be out the window and all teams basically mixed (with a heavy lean toward male)? Really, I’m not discounting any country’s desire to win and I don’t trust all to limit athletes to those who are trans from the women’s teams.
There doesn’t seem to be a requirement in the NCAA that the trans athlete has physically changed. In the Olympics for the weight lifting event there was a 5 year requirement and I’m not sure about the soccer player.
I don’t know. Pulling back the focus a bit, these conversations are also taking place re: performance enhancing drugs, and other tech-driven enhancements people can and are making to their bodies now. It is a brave new world on lots of fronts.
PED’s are illegal in most professional sports and athletes are tested for them. Although the drug technology will likely always be ahead of the drug testing technology, many/most are caught sooner or later.
And most people attach an asterisk to the records of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens due to their use of PED’s, as an example, even though they were elite baseball players in their era. They’ve both been denied Hall of Fame (HOF) induction because of their PED use.
This current HOF cycle of voting is their last chance, after 10 years, to be voted into the HOF, unless they get voted in at much later date by an player alumni committee, which is kinda an asterisk in it of itself.
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Of course, there is controversy with the definition of “biological women” when someone like Caster Semenya shows up and is good enough to win.
Gender-based sports divisions work fine and are easily understood with respect to 99+% of the population. But occasionally, a member of the <1% is good enough at the sport to lead to questions and controversies about how to handle their situations.
Biological definitions are easy to determine…XX or XY. The difficulty arises when you substitute gender for sex.
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