Replies to post #467154 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[newmedman]

nah, let her go.. It's getting interesting between me and constance with all the sex talk.... (still no calls LOL) She wouldn't know what a tranny was from her granny.

[Zorax]

Trans women generally take hormones and hormone suppressants that stop the growth of facial hair and other male attributes. If they begin that regime as teens, they'll be pretty much like biological men once they're grown.

That's a wee bit confusing there. Just that line seems backward. Aren't they suppressing to be more female when grown?

[fuagf]

One earlier Renee Richards mention

" Let's not get hysterical. Trans women generally take hormones and hormone suppressants that stop the growth of facial hair and other male attributes. If they begin that regime as teens, they'll be pretty much like biological men once they're grown. As long as they follow up with surgery. But nowadays, it seems, not all are willing to do that.
For a more nuanced take on all that:
She's a Transgender Pioneer, But Renée Richards Prefers to Stay Out of the Spotlight
https://www.si.com/tennis/2019/06/28/renee-richards-gender-identity-politics-transgender-where-are-they-now "

The Trans Swimmer Who Won Too Much

[...]

The focus on testosterone seemed, to many, straightforward: on average, men have testosterone levels around fifteen times that of women, and the competitive advantages of taking testosterone—at least exogenous testosterone, a steroid—were well established. But the research concerning endogenous testosterone, the kind that the body makes naturally, was less settled. There is a gap between the range of testosterone levels in men and the range in women—one researcher described it to me as a “chasm”—but there is enough variability among élite athletes to create some small degree of possible overlap between sexes, and researchers have not been able to establish a definitive causal relationship between individual testosterone levels and athletic performance. Bodies produce differing levels of the hormone, and have differing abilities to make use of it; comparing the testosterone levels of eight cisgender runners or swimmers of the same sex before a race does not tell you who will win it.

At the same time, hormone-replacement therapy may not counteract all the competitive advantages a body might gain during testosterone-driven puberty. It may not fully reduce the difference in lean body mass or in grip strength, for instance, or change the width of a pelvis. And so, while some people maintain that there is not enough evidence to justify rules requiring testosterone suppression, others insist that such rules don’t do enough.

At the same time, hormone-replacement therapy may not counteract all the competitive advantages a body might gain during testosterone-driven puberty. It may not fully reduce the difference in lean body mass or in grip strength, for instance, or change the width of a pelvis. And so, while some people maintain that there is not enough evidence to justify rules requiring testosterone suppression, others insist that such rules don’t do enough.

[...]

The letter was leaked to the Daily Mail, and conservative outlets gleefully reported on rifts between Thomas and her teammates. Some published photos of Thomas from before her transition and referred to her using the name she had gone by then. Video of Thomas’s performance at the Zippy Invitational went viral. The father of one of Thomas’s teammates suggested to Fox News that trans athletes stood between his daughter and her Olympic dreams. “Lia is going to go to the N.C.A.A.’s, and she’s going to take down Katie Ledecky’s record, she’s going to take down Missy Franklin’s record, and it’s not because she is an exceptional woman,” he said.

In fact, Thomas’s top time in the five-hundred-yard freestyle is a full ten seconds slower than Ledecky’s, and Franklin’s record is also well ahead of Thomas’s best. It’s possible that Thomas will best them at the N.C.A.A. Championships,...

[...]

Joanna Harper is a nationally ranked master’s runner. For a long time, she competed alongside men. But, in 2004, she decided to begin hormone-replacement therapy and compete in the category of her gender identity, as a woman. She began taking a drug to suppress her testosterone, plus a small dose of estrogen. She was startled by how quickly and comprehensively her body changed. She had expected to add a minute or two to her ten-thousand-metre time, but, in less than a year, she was running a full five minutes slower than before. Within two years, she was doing roughly as well against women as she had done before her transition, running against men.

She looked for scientific research into what she was experiencing—high-level transgender athletes were uncommon, but not unheard of; the tennis player Renée Richards competed on the W.T.A. tour as far back as the nineteen-seventies—but she couldn’t find any, so she did it herself. She looked for the race times of other competitive transgender female runners, and eventually was able to compare the times of eight women before and after transition. This was an admittedly small sample size: Harper was one of the eight subjects, and the study only considered long-distance running; it didn’t necessarily bear on performance in others sports. Still, the results were suggestive. Harper found that all eight women had an “age grade”—a measurement of runners that accounts for age and sex—largely similar to what it had been prior to their transitions. Harper’s study suggested that women who had undergone hormone-replacement therapy appeared to have no significant advantage over cisgender long-distance runners. It was published .. https://cgscholar.com/bookstore/works/race-times-for-transgender-athletes .. in the Journal of Sporting Cultures and Identities, in 2015, becoming the first peer-reviewed paper on the effects of testosterone suppression for trans female athletes.

[...]

A few days later, as Sports Illustrated subsequently reported, a former swimming champion and a Title IX lawyer named Nancy Hogshead-Makar organized a virtual meeting attended by more than two hundred and fifty people, including former Olympians, current collegiate swimmers and coaches, parents of Penn swimmers, and members of U.S.A. Swimming’s board of directors. The aim was to discuss legislation that would prohibit trans women from competing head-to-head with cisgender women in a number of collegiate sports, including swimming—perhaps even before Thomas had a chance to compete in the N.C.A.A. championships, in March. For a long time, Hogshead-Makar’s most notable causes had been equitable funding for women’s programs and the sexual abuse of women in sports. But three years ago, she had what she called an “aha” moment, when Congress was debating the Equality Act, which would ban both gender and sex discrimination—effectively, as she saw it, erasing the difference between the two concepts. She wanted a carve-out for competitive sports, insisting that Title IX was threatened from a legal perspective without it. Last year, she helped create the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, the stated aim of which is to find a “middle way” with regard to the participation of trans women in women’s sports. The group’s Web site touts the support of both Joanna Harper and Renée Richards, but none of the group’s members are trans, and its most famous member, Martina Navratilova, has angered many trans athletes and advocates with comments she has made in the past. (Harper told me that she has disagreements with the group’s positions, including on Thomas’s participation. She added, “I have not, however, formally withdrawn my name as a ‘supporter’ of the group. I think that more can be accomplished with dialogue than with debate.”)

It doesn’t matter that Lia Thomas is just one swimmer, Hogshead-Makar told me. To a lawyer, precedent is everything. “I’m not an expert on the science, but I am an expert in civil-rights law,” she said. The law when it comes to sports, she went on, “is we allow sex segregation because of biology. We don’t allow sex segregation for any other reason.” I suggested that the biology of sex differences between athletes was murky, and that the legacy effects of testosterone-driven puberty were not totally established or understood. She countered by sending me white papers by sports scientists, a PowerPoint presentation by a developmental biologist, and a statement on the significant role of testosterone in athletic performance signed by forty-one doctors and scientists.

[...]

Joanna Harper, like many people I spoke to, said that she wishes there were more robust, targeted scientific research on the performance of high-level trans athletes. Such research has been even harder than usual to produce during the coronavirus pandemic. She is now conducting a longitudinal study of trans athletes during their transitions, measuring as many physical changes as she can. But studies like that, by definition, take time. And Harper knows that some people are going to stoke panic and fear no matter what. “Every time there’s a successful trans woman athlete, the sky will fall tomorrow and it’s the end of women’s sports as we know it,” she said. “And it’s not,” she added, “it’s just not the end of women’s sports.” The same warnings were sounded when Renée Richards joined the women’s tennis tour, more than forty-five years ago, she reminded me.

In some respects, that era was just the beginning of women’s sports: it marked the launch of the Women’s Tennis Association, the passage of Title IX, and the first years that women were allowed official entry into marathons. (Early contestants were warned that their reproductive systems might be damaged by long-distance running.) These days, women’s sports, predicated on the idea of being separate but equal to men’s, are ascendent: interest is up, and opportunities are increasing. Still, the premises of the project are not simple. They demand not only a fight for investment and for respect but also continued, collaborative thought about what it means to be separate, and what it means to be equal.

https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-one-swimmer-became-the-focus-of-a-debate-about-trans-athletes

February, 2024 -- https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173799117