but there is always the possibility of someone better, at any point, isnt that what we teach our kids?
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Those are the views of someone who has never faced the financial imperative to seek aid in pursuit of an education. At a minimum many athletes train comparable hours to a full time job and view it as a means to an end. This doesn’t make them bad people, to the contrary these are disciplined student athletes sacrificing in the hopes of being elite enough to have their educations paid for (or in the case of Penn gain an admissions advantage).
I am not offering an opinion on how to “solve” this because frankly I don’t have one and I value all involved. However diminishing the motivations of either side just doesn’t seem right to me.
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It is a good reason, but as the cost of education has spiraled upward, youth sports and most importantly successful participation in them have become too focused on the possible benefits beyond the sport…not from the participation in playing it. The financial focus on youth sports is unreasonably high in the US.
As @helpingthekid73 points out, sports should be played for fun. They can be upset by the rules and what they perceive as unfair, but those are issues they can’t control, and shouldn’t impact their interest/participation in doing something they enjoy.
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“Should” is a “challenging” word given you are talking about students who have already invested a decade plus of training in their young lives based on a set of rules. No matter how strongly I believe in my values I don’t believe I have the right to impose them on others in a fairly spontaneous manner without mutual discourse and respectful compromise.
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Blame the game…not the participants.
Height is certainly an advantage in swimming, but the benefits of testosterone far exceed just making boys taller and has been very well documented. It’s the whole reason the IOC requires testosterone suppression for trans athletes to compete. I think people who don’t follow swimming, don’t appreciate just how different the results are for men and women. Looking at pre-covid as many athletes struggled with pool time, the 2019 NCAA Women’s 50 free winner and current NCAA record holder is a full second slower than even the men’s B cut. Many high school boys would beat her, and pretty much every single male sprinter swimming Division 1.
If you divided based on height, there would be no competitive women in swimming.
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Not true, we spent a great deal of time working on this (not sport, but still training) and have understood that it is never a guarantee and that there is always a possibility of someone better)
This was actually my quote so as not to confuse the casual reader.
And blame no one, instead find an equitable and respectful decision while not misquoting others😀
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We have 2 kids that played high level competitive sports, albeit team vs individual sports, so I understand the conflict between a “fair” playing field and allowing trans to fully participate in their interests.
On one side it is quite clear in any sport involving a high degree of physicality, a male especially after puberty, has a huge natural advantage. My kids looked enough alike in HS (before my son hit full puberty) that you could put a wig on him and he could pass for his sister. Every year there was a family day game where the women’s team would play the parents and siblings. Son routinely hit it over. When my D suffered a pretty serious pre-season injury, the joke was we could dress up her brother with a wig and makeup until she was back – we are talking about a state championship caliber team that was nationally ranked in the top 10.
On the other hand, fairness can be a nebulous concept. We readily accept that some athletes are just naturally physically superior. We also have come to accept that some participants are unnaturally advantaged through wealth through personalized coaching and training. Trans are in the unique position of changing their natural physical state through artificial medical means. I doubt if many (if any) people would deny their right to participate in their chosen sport.
The question is under which gender category. The controversy is focused on male to female trans participating in the female category. If it is really about competing/participating and asking cis females to “suck it up” and accept trans, I would ask why not ask trans to “suck it up” and participate in the male category? There is a huge marginal difference between “places” at the top vs places in the middle and bottom (except for DFL). I must say it would bother me for a middling formerly male athlete to shoot to the top in the female category or set unassailable records by cis athletes.
There would be less displacement if a “no cut” rule were implemented for trans male to female to compete in the male category. If it were about competition and participation and not winning, this would achieve that. Trans want to win and almost always choose the weaker category if given a choice. It is hypocritical to tell cis that winning isn’t the point but allow trans to affirmatively choose the category where they are more likely to win.
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Taking that logic further, should there be separate women’s sports? I mean, if it’s only for fun, why not just have coed teams for everything? Of course, no women would ever win anything, but that doesn’t matter, right?
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You say that athletes should just participate for fun and not be “upset by the rules and what they perceive as unfair.” Is that just for cis women or does it apply to the trans athletes as well? How about a rule that said trans athletes can participate in women’s sports but their results are not counted in the determination of the outcome in competitive events? Or they participate in an open category? Or their results are categorized differently? After all, the trans athletes should just be participating for fun, right? But it turns out that both cis and trans athletes want to compete and win. My kids were never into competitive sports, but reading about women swimmers practicing so hard to shave a few milliseconds off their time makes me think that equitable solutions have to be worked out in each sport, and there are a lot of interests to balance here.
While I was typing my post, @BKSquared posted, and I agree with this:
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Why can’t that trans swimmer enjoy recreational swimming instead? He had 3 years of male college competition; does he really need to take all the women’s records too now? He can have plenty of fun as a recreational swimmer
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I don’t think it should be controversial that people want to compete on a fair playing field. There is nothing wrong with people who are playing their sports with a competitive spirit.
Youth sports should be for fun. Sure. But fun means different things to different people. Olympians are impressive folks, and their drive to win is part of why.
The question is how to mesh that with a modern understanding of gender, and all the things people can do to improve their performances and change their bodies’ natural states. I don’t know where a person can draw a line - when do “supplements” (or heck, caffeine) stop being ok and start being improper enhancements? I don’t see the bright line rules applying well anymore - in gender or biology overall, the gray area seems to have arrived.
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Then there is also the issue of taking the 5th year of NCAA eligibility which resulted from the pandemic. They swam for 3 years as a man, there was no competition for year 4 so they hung around for year 5 just to be able to swim as a woman. Maybe the NCAA should have said you get a 5th year if you stay on the same team but they didn’t because who in a million years would have seen this coming? Why choose to delay graduation for an additional year of a sport if your goal is just to “participate” or “have fun”?
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There’s no lack of hypocrisy in our world today. So what’s the big deal with another one? 
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That the suggestion of playing sport for fun is so viciously attacked says everything about how toxic sport has become. Sadly.
I am as familiar with sport as anyone. I hear these romanticized tales of people working so hard to shave off milliseconds for X event. It sounds like they are just not that good. In a sense, they are trying to overperform to their level of talent.
Do they not realize how many kids get sports scholarships without working that hard? If an athlete hasn’t sufficiently benefitted from the fun and camaraderie, and was counting on scholarship, that’s on them, not us.
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You mean like Larry Bird? I mean, he was the first to admit that he was below average athletically and that he had to work harder than others to achieve what he did. Would you have told him that basketball was just not the right sport for him?
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Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
and
“College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/guidelines
As the recent posts have been dominated by a handful of users, I have put the thread on slow mode. My hope is this will allow other users to join the conversation and prompt the more exuberant users to be strategic in postings.
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Let’s use preferred pronouns please.
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That jumped out to me as well.
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