http://sports.yahoo.com/golf/blog/devil_ball_golf/post/Golfe...
This is apt to make some of you absolutely incensed, but "fuck the drummer".
Physical competition is one area where I think us "made" women should cut genetic women a little slack. I just don't think we should compete with them on a physical basis. A case in point is that the other day, Hindi my roommate,went bike riding with me. I am 63 years old ladies and not that active, well a little active but certainly not athletic. Well she is half my age and is taller than me by 3 inches. She can usually ride faster than I can but "dawdles" in deference to my delicate condition. Well, we rode 12 miles on relatively flat terrain, and while I was slightly tired, I was OK. Hindi, on the other hand decided to race ahead of me in the last mile, and I let her. When she got out there a ways, I kicked it up a couple sprockets and did not let her pull away any more than about 100 yards. I'd been pacing myself all along. I wanted to have fun, not make it a competition.
My bike is a Trek 7100 ladies with front and seat suspension and proper fenders (42 lbs); by no means a high performance road bike. LOL
So, we get home, eat dinner and she is conked out in bed by 8:00 PM. I sat up until midnight. I think she was dipping into her reserves a lot more than I was. I wonder what it would be like if I went out and did conditioning rides for 6 weeks? Well, with the snow coming on, it just ain't gonna happen.
So, my point is, we ought to cut our smaller cousins a little slack here. Besides I am much more put out that I can not fit in a size 2 skirt and 6"heels, with a pneumatic bra. :(
Gwendolyn
Comments
I disagree
There's also your parting point -- which I'm sure is not the point you meant for me to take from your statement, but I will elaborate on the one that seemed to speak to me.
You believe we should "cut some slack" for genetic women in sports, but what about the lack of slack-cutting for us if we're not totally passable? When that starts to happen, then I'll consider it a two-way street.
Yes, men are better at sports in general due to the biochemical makeup that lends them strength, speed, and size. Women are better at distances due to better stamina, reflex, and pain tolerance. So the sports field is pretty evenly matched. Transwomen have the strength, speed, and size for awhile, but when the hormones have their way with us, we end up losing the greater portion of the strength and speed. We keep the size (unfortunately), and gain a bit of the reflex and stamina without getting the pain tolerance.
Sporting is not an area that is ever really evenly matched. It can be close, but we don't truly WANT an even match -- a tie is viewed by most folks as just as bad (if not worse) than a loss. But we do want different abilities to play against each other and see which person comes out on top. Whether by her or his raw physical ability, or what may be inferior ability but superior use of the ability she or he has.
What about those of us that are intersex?
Caster Semenya, for example... she has the superior size, speed, strength, reflex, stamina, and pain tolerance. All of the above, if you will... should she be banned from sports because she needs to "cut some slack" for either men or women who aren't the same? No. Even the suggestion is absurd.
Edeyn Hannah Blackeney
The Infamous Intersex Transgender Asian Lesbian Atheist Chick of the Ozarks
Changing my mind.
It's not my intention to start a flame war here. I already wrote a reply, but I either forgot to double click or I got gagged.
I had my point of view on all this, but with your reply and the three below this, I am seeing some other points of view, and that is what I wanted. I am interested. I am intersexed but to an unknown degree. I hope to get the blood test next summer; but I am certainly not to the degree of some.
I am no where near as strong as I used to be. But I seem to still have plenty of stamina if I don't go crazy with sprints.
No, Hindi is a very fit young lady.
Gwendolyn
The fact...
That Ms Richards was an also-ran in the men's circuit but fairly competitive in the women's circuit isn't good evidence for there being no innate advantage. In fact, disregarding the putative effects of surgery and hormone therapy, most male musculoskeletal systems are quite different from most female versions of the same, and may present either advantages or disadvantages in particular athletic situations.
The true point is one of social justice. Are there people we wish to systematically discriminate against as a society? I suspect not for most civilised people. Native Kenyans have obvious genetic advantages in the field of long-distance running; does that mean that Kenyans shouldn't be allowed to compete? Caster has a fairly obvious "male" musculoskeletal system, but doesn't respond to male hormones. Is she to be stuck in a sort of limbo? Able to compete "fairly" with no one?
Modern athletics competition at the professional or Olympic level is comprised almost entirely of those with innate genetic advantages. Every athlete at those levels is a "freak," and no one of "average" genetic ability has any chance whatsoever of equalling their accomplishments, no matter how much they train and how many "performance-enhancing" drugs they take. The drugs complicate the picture, but only that. The general outlines of the problem are clear.
Here's the 1946 men's Olympic weightlifting team, for example:
Here's Melanie Roach -- mother of three, so her genetic gender seems fairly clear -- of the 2008 women's team.
Since 1946, the selection process has been refined, and the training regimens enhanced, to the point that modern female athletes look bulkier than most male athletes did back then, yet Melanie is just five-foot-one, weighs a hundred and seventeen pounds, and can "clean and jerk" 250 pounds, well over twice her body weight. How many "normal" men can do the same?
In the 2008 Olympics, Liu Chunhong (at a hundred and fifty-four pounds) set a women's record of nearly three hundred and forty-eight pounds for a clean-and-jerk. In 1932, Karl Hipfinger set a new male record (in the middleweight class -- up to 165 pounds) of a tad more than three hundred and eight pounds.
The difference is that in 1932, the average weightlifter (or golfer, or whatever) was just that, just someone who liked a particular sport and did it in their spare time. These days, athletes are "scouted" (that is, screened) and then sent off to training camps where their full-time "job" is to become the best that they can be.
With proper screening, they can be very good indeed, but just looking at Melanie Roach, you can see that her hips -- for only one example -- are not typical of most women. That's screening for you.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Renee Richards
Was an "also ran" in tennis as Richard Raskind because prior to admitting being transsexual to herself, he pursued his medical career more strenuously and only played tennis as a hobby. Post transition, she decided to make a go of tennis professionally partially because of being denied the ability to pursue her medical career the way she used to do.
The point I was making had nothing to do with her prowess before or after transition, but in the reported loss of "masculine" traits and increase in "feminine" traits associated with sporting.
I don't disagree...
...but the totality of her life doesn't make a good case for either side of the argument in mere regard of physical prowess. She had extraordinary advantages and luck, not least of which was an attractive appearance and the success with which she integrated into "country club" world of professional women's tennis. It's not too much, I think, to suggest that her notoriety and exploits paved the way for the acceptance and later success of Martina Navratilova when she came out as a lesbian, and indeed they were good friends. Renee was actually her coach for a time. After Renee, other sexual minorities had a much easier time of it, although (funnily enough) Martina was accused in the press of the time as being too "mannish" for women's tennis. You can't win for losing in some circles.
As for masculine traits, Renee had a noticeable lack of masculine bossing about the skull to begin with, and her frame was fairly light as well, so she'd fit fairly well into the general class of women all along. It's entirely possible that some part of "his" transsexualism was based in biology as well as psychology. But it's also the case that "Richard" was an outlier in the general class of men, so it's hard to argue a general case from that single (and exceptional) example. Perhaps some part of the reason she didn't do all that well in the men's game was that she wasn't properly "equipped," as well as the press of her medical practice.
She wrote two books about her experiences, Second Serve, and a later retrospective, No Way Renee: The Second Half of My Notorious Life. Both are well worth reading. The last is available on Amazon.com for a penny, plus shipping. The first is a bit more dear at a buck fifty. ABEbooks and other online used book markets also have them very inexpensively in good or very good condition, or US$20 if you want a first edition hardback of Second Serve in excellent condition, US$7.50 or so for a similar copy of No Way, Renee. One rarely sees the best bargains on Amazon.com if you want anything exceptional, as amateur sellers put things up there with an inflated idea of value, or (perhaps less charitably) hoping for a sucker. ABEBooks is generally closer to the actual market.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Second Serve....
...was also made into a TV movie with Vanessa Regrave.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Serve
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091913/
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
Personally
I think it's more than the genetic differences. I've had similar experiences and it always seems while the younger set seem to be faster, any one of the older set or of the older way of life background just can't keep up with us in a long haul.
I helped a co-worker load his furnace wood the other day with his grandsons and they lasted one wagon load out of all three trips. They were just burnt right out after just a smidge of hard work. I loved it because it was a nice day, I was helping a friend and it was just something I grew up doing, I hadn't done it for years.
I think it's a case of we're just used to just doing...and that's lacking from a lot of people these days.
I'd have to say there'd be a huge difference between what you call hard and what they'd call hard.
Bailey Summers
A different viewpoint
I think we would have to agree to disagree. Personally, I admire Lana Lawless and the small group of other athletes like her trying to compete competitively as the women they are knowing the story often will only be about their pasts not their skills. Each one of them pays it forward for the next one of us that wants to compete at sports with our sisters. The Olympics and most sports seem to have taken the sensible line in setting criteria based on medical advice (i.e. 2 years post-op) and it does make me proud to be British knowing she could compete in the Ladies Golf Union here. Heck, if she loses her case she should consider the Ladies European Golf Tour as it least they won't change the rules if she starts to win things.
I also thought the NY Times reported it a more balanced way (from both perspectives) in its article.
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Well your experience is hardly scientific
So is the person you are riding against a couch potato? Out of condition? Is she on chemotherapy? What?
When I was in college, I found to my embarrassment that most women where far more athletic then I. I could not run long distances but can walk all day. I was never able to climb ropes in high school. And yes I had my full allotment of Testosterone back then. Of course since I am post-op the problem only gets worse. So based on my experience. Me, Me, Me, Me. I am at a competitive disadvantage so any woman athlete who goes against me will have to be handicapped.
How dare those big strong genetic women out muscle this poor post-op girl.
Kim
Male/female body types
As long as my true self was buried in my subconscious, I was just this skinny, waifish, short man, that always smiled like an idiot. I couldn't do foot ball because they killed me. In Baseball, the pitches frightened me too much. But, mostly I just did not like the testosterone laced, macho attitude of the athletes. I really liked to do fun things that did not feel like competition. So, I gravitated toward gymnasics, bike riding, climbing and other activities where I had a natural advantage.
No where were my differences highlighted more than in Basic Training in the Army. I was 135lbs and the DI looked at me when I got there, "What the fuck are you doing here"?
"I don't know, it wasn't my choice." That set the tone for the next 1095 (26,280 hours) days. I just did what I was told, and didn't say a word. As could be expected, when we did bayonette training, "You look like you belong in ballet !" Still, I did what I was told. In physical combat, I was always on the bottom. When it came to the rope climbing and the "Confidence Course", I just did it. I just locked my emotions down like I had been conditioned to as a child. It really pissed them off because, one of their goals was to break me down and mold me. Poor guys, they never met my step father; didn't have a clue.
So, I know lots of women now, and almost all of them are much smaller than me, except my room mate. In fact, we sometimes joke about her being more of a man than I ever was. She's edgy, aggressive, pushy, and I am mild, quietly confident, and as feminine as I posibly can be. I've thought about it a lot. My impressions about what a woman was were molded in the 50's, so now I am a mix of a 50's woman, and modest, mild Muslimah. Sometimes people say that my being that way does not fit in our society. Any T person ever felt like they belonged? I like the way I am.
I guess, everyone should just step back and let the woman compete.
Gwendolyn
Ability not karyotype?
It'll never happen, but here goes my 2p worth on the subject anyway...
Segregate athletes according to ability/skill/talent etc, rather than on karyotype. Among both genders (even excluding TG and IS) you'll find examples of strong and weak, with a fair degree of overlap. So instead of dividing sports into "male" and "female" categories, put people (of both genders) into broad categories based on ability/skill/talent. OK, so the 'top elite' category would probably be mainly male, but it would still be possible for a sufficiently skilled female to enter the category... and the 'very nearly top elite' categories would probably have more females. You proabbly wouldn't need to drop many categories to find a relatively even split. The point is that the configuration of the section of each athlete's anatomy between their legs wouldn't be taken into account - just their raw ability/skill/talent.
As for TG people, just measure their ability/skill/talent at intervals during transition and beyond. Allow them to train during transition but it's probably best to only allow competition at a static stage in the process - e.g. perhaps once hormone-induced changes are complete, before surgical reconfiguration if there's likely to be a significant wait, then once the reconfiguration's been done, after full recovery and medical sign-off.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
I've tried competing
In 20 and 40K time trial races in AZ. I won the 40K State championship in '99 when I was 50 YO. There was only one other (womyn) contestant. She was way ahead of me; we started 1 or 2 minutes apart so I couldn't tell too well. I think she caught up to a friend of hers who was having trouble and slowed down to ride with her. I was weaker, but won.
In 2000, I had an actual time trial bike (not very aero, tho). I had trained wrong the weeks right before the race and slightly injured my back while coaching my daughter's Y soccer team the Wednesday before. During the race my back was hurting and I was saying to myself "I don't want to do this, etc." I also got mixed up and got to the starting line late. I think I started ten seconds after the clock started and lost by 7 sec., but it was my screw up. I think it was fair to say that my opponent and I were evenly matched.
I tried last year, but being nervous and maybe my bad memory screwed up the 2 preliminary races I, at least, drove to. I was sick for the championship race. This year my training was bad, I don't know why, but I was weaker then last year. I completed one prelim race and was 3 mph slower than the next slower rider, a man. I was sick for the next and the championship race. I might have won by having no one else in my age group (60 to 64 YO) but the 65 YO womyn, in the next age group up, was very fit and probably rode 4 or 5 mph faster.
I started HRT in'91 with GRS in '92. It's possible I had a little male strength left in '99 and 2000, but there were other wimyn, my age, faster than I. This year I felt really old and out of shape. Physical size may help at gulf or tennis, but bicycling champions of both sexes are mainly small to medium sized people. At present, I think I am handicapped by the extra size and weight of my skeleton, internal organs, whatever, without the T driven muscles to move that much mass around. On the other hand, I think good training and not carrying lots of extra fat (that I had this year) are much bigger factors. I don't know what I'll do next year. I know a faster, very small, womyn who might be in my age group next year. The thing is, at our age, who's sick or injured or has an out-of-town funeral to attend can make more of a difference then who put in more miles of training.
Hugs and Bright Blessings,
Renee
Hugs and Bright Blessings,
Renee
The Problem
The problem isn't in whether or not it is fair for men and women to compete against each other. The problem is
1.) Why do we continue to support the myth that there are two genders when it's painfully obvious there are a huge number of genders, and,
2.) What is this obsession with "winning" when true winning is really all about the effort.
I believe sports should all be handicapped to a person's history in that sport. Then the person who wins would be the one who does their personal best rather than some "gifted" athlete whose only accomplishment was having the right parents.
My sports were football (the one with pads), basketball, tennis, track, golf, marathoning, volleyball, soccer, bowling, softball and many others. The ones I enjoyed the most were those in which I could gauge my own improvement.
Sports played to decide who is the best are bogus. Haven't we learned anything from Barry Bonds, Rosie Ruiz, Danny Almonte, Ben Johnson, Tonya Harding, The Spanish Paralymoics basketball team, and Diego Maradona.
Pure sport is wrapped in sportsmanship which involves playing your hardest within the rules. If you do that and the competition is weighted to make it even, everyone ones.
What we don't need is another meaningless "Stella Walsh" argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisława_Walasiewicz
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Personal handicaps
I used to race sailing dinghies a lot - several times a week as well as week long National Championships. A lot of the club racing was handicapped but not based on the helm's record but on the inherent performance of one class/type against another so the result was still dependent on the helms ability (mostly - sailing is all about playing the odds on wind/current states). However we also had personal handicap races which I never took seriously - I wanted to win on merit not by being given a start because I was crap sailor. I've always though golf handicaps are ridiculous for that reason. Personal handicaps will always be seen as patronising IMO. And that's speaking as someone who was always pretty rubbish at any sport I competed in.
I do agree that sport is as much about taking part as it is about winning. In a fleet of 100 dinghies very few are in with chance of taking the winners gun. I just loved the sensation of sailing, sharing with my life's partner, and the cameradie.
I think if you want to divide sport into male/female classes then the females should be restricted to born females. I know there are border-line cases but they are comparatively rare and the occasional problems are worth tolerating for the sport to continue. The other thing to do is simply abolish the divide and let everyone compete together. It is possible for a woman to beat a man - when Beryl Burton took the British women's 12 hour time trial record she beat Mike MacIntyre who took the men's record in the same event. Beryl beat Mike in a straight race and rubbed it in when she caught and passed him, offering him a sweet as she did :) However Beryl was a rare example of female athleticism and, special cases apart, the best men will always out gun the best women in any strength dependent activity.
Robi
"Born Females?"
There are a lot of "born females" around who were born as girls, raised as girls, and only discovered that they had a genetic anomaly that caused their XY karyotype to be expressed in what appears to be a female somatotype well after what should have been puberty. Are you saying that these women should be reclassified as somehow "male" during their teenage years or as young women, because their parents didn't think to rush out for genetic testing immediately after birth?
Caster Semenya is not alone. Should we dig up all the dead supposed female athletes of the past and strip them of their accomplishments posthumously if they "fail" a chromosomal screening?
This is *not* a matter of genetics, but of social justice. In a society which classifies (however falsely) people as one pole of a binary system, there will always be taxonomic problems, because the binary choice doesn't correspond to reality any more than does asking which "race" Tiger Woods is, Black or White? He only looks like one or the other to a racist bigot.
The "choice" itself is bogus, because there is no actual binary taxonomy to begin with. There are human beings who are fertile, and some of those have ovaries and uteri. We usually call them "women." There are others who can impregnate one of these so-called "women" using sperm grown within their bodies. We usually call them "men." But there are a lot of people who don't fit into those neat little groups. Should we invent new words for them, change societies everywhere around the globe, rewrite the Bible, the Koran, and every every book to exclude from these neat categories everyone who has not, in fact, proven their membership in the one class by giving birth, and the other by provably fathering a child? Never mind the uncomfortable fact that before genetic testing, there will be no provable fathers, and therefore men, at all. Poor Granddad. "He's" now merely GrandWhatchmacall'em.
Of course, this means that "Mother" Theresa and "Pope" Benedict XVI will have to be reclassified, as will the so-called Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but what the heck?
What about Billy Tipton, who gained some fame as a jazz musician? Should we now insist that "Billy's" reputation has to be re-written to include his birth name, Dorothy? Or is he just one of some new classification?
Cheers,
Puddin'
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
--- Hamlet Act 1, scene 5
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style