There's... a lot to unpack about how that post was written, but I'll just deal with the question at the end so we don't get into to many arguments. Taller, sure, because bones don't shrink easily. But stronger or faster? Not nearly as much as you seen to think. The hormone therapy needed will almost certainly reduce muscle mass, plus it will change the body's weight distribution. T has shown measurable affects on strength and speed, (though there apparently is some dependence on distance tested for the speed thing,) so reducing T levels usually brings athletes into "expected" performance levels. While there are a handful of exceptions, (because every person is different,) the vast majority of trans women competing in various sports at all levels are not dominating their respective competitions.
I think another question is how many born males, who meet the Smallchief characteristics, are going to go through the process required in order to compete as women. It is a really big, life altering deal. I am not aware of any with those characteristics who have done it. The NCAA has had a policy on this for a number of years, and I have not seen any complaints about it in women’s soccer.
The thought of someone going through the absolute societal hellfire and shitstorm that would be headed their way because of the way our culture and society treats transgender individuals, non-binary individuals, gay individuals, and uses feminizing adjectives as attacks on masculinity is really hard to get my head around. I'm sorry, I'm not going to get up in arms about it until someone can actually point to it happening. The argument is like all the repressive legislation (Patriot Act, North Carolina's HB2, Georgias recent voting restrictions) that is phrased as being "common sense", but in reality is based on unfounded fear. Solving a problem that does not exist.
It's always amusing when anti-trans people make this argument. As noted by others, no man is going to go through the societal discrimination just so they can compete in women's sports. However, I'll also add, conversion therapy is a very expensive and painful process, both mentally and physically. Being trans isn't just about slapping on a dress and some make-up and calling yourself a woman. Anyone that wants to go through the process is going to have to convince doctors that they are legitimately trans, will have to pay for all the meds, doctor visits, etc, necessary to properly manage the therapy, etc, etc. WTF would someone do that just to make $30k a year playing in NWSL?
I don't know if I want to enter this discussion, because I figure that i'll be preemptively slammed if I dare to introduce my point of view, but why do you assume that anyone mentioning this argument is trans-phobic and he doesn't advance it in good faith? Maybe @Smallchief could have expressed his point differently, but isn't the women's right to compete in a fair field a legitimate worry, considering how much discriminated women are in sport in the first place? I honestly didn't perceive a malicious intent in @Smallchief's words. And frankly, I don't think his argument is "some male top-player could decide to change his gender only to compete in NWSL", at least that's not what I have read; it seems to me that his argument instead was "what if a man, who competed at high or medium level in a sport (soccer for instance), happens to want to go through that hard process that you so well described, independently from the wish to "break" a women league, but then, after that, expresses the wish to play their sport again in a women's league"? This, by the way, is exactly what happened with Brazilian volleyball player Tifanny Abreu, who competed for long at high level in men's volleyball, and then, after her gender transition, started competing in women's leagues. Now, the outcome of this case seem to demostrate your point, @Yoshou, because in the end Abreu was cleared to play with women, but it wasn't after some discussions (and mostly not raised by trans-phobic men, but by female volleyball player who had to play against her). In fact, my intention was not to make a different point from yours about the general question of trans-gender players, but to question your honesty in answering to @Smallchief: you have put words in his mouth that he hadn't said, thus ridiculing him. He wasn't claiming that a player would face the process of changing his gender just to play in NWSL, he was just wondering what happens if someone who changes his gender for completely different and personal reasons happens to be a former high-level player of the game.
In law10's defense against some of the other posts made here, I think they were attempting to describe a situation where someone had already transitioned for non-sporting reasons and then saw this new policy, thus newly viewing NWSL as an opportunity, as opposed to describing a situation where someone was using transitioning as a means to bring their physical skills into NWSL. The only reason I read law10's post that was because of the phrase "former male", which made me think the transition already happened. Now, saying "former X" is basically the same as deadnaming someone - while it may be factually true about their past, it's consciously making the point to emphasize the past they moved away from more than acknowledging their present. That's just some of the unpacking I tried to sidestep in my previous post, but... uh, there you go. Ah, thanks for bringing that up! I had totally forgotten about that, but yeah there hasn't been any major problems I've been aware of with NCAA athletes transitioning. Granted, most of what I've heard from NCAA is usually track & field - I don't think I've heard of trans soccer players, so that may speak a bit to the strictness of the policy or social differences between the sports, so I don't know what the lack of complaints there fully means. Still, it's entirely true that this sort of thing hasn't been an issue yet. ==EDIT== And now I see that @blissett has ninja'd me, also taking the softer read of Smallchief's theoretical situation. Blissett also asked about keeping the "fair field" for women, who are discriminated against in sports already. That's what I was attempting to say in my earlier post - doing hormone therapy to the point of being able to compete usually does even the playing field for the most part, as it were. Of course, there are always exceptions, as I mentioned, but it's really not a big problem. As we've seen with the NCAA basketball tournaments this March, simply giving women's sports better treatment is a much bigger and more real problem than the occasional trans women joining in and "dominating" the game.
Because it is a common trope among those that are anti-trans and it isn't something that is peddled by who have even a modicum of understanding of what it means to be trans. Making the argument that a man could just choose to become a woman to compete in a sport is one that is based on ignorance and is a common scare tactic used by anti-trans because it "sounds resonable" to people that don't understand trans people. See SiberianThunder's posts, who does a far better job of explaining what happens during hormone therapy than I could. Of course it has happened in the past. It shouldn't be shocking that a transwoman who has trained to a high level could compete with women and it isn't necessarily because they have an inherent advantage due to being born male. The argument being put forward is that a transwoman would have a competitive advantage over ciswomen and, over time, transwomen would push ciswomen out of the sport . In Tifanny's case, she's the only transwoman in her league. If this were a legitimate concern, the other clubs in the Brazilian leagues would have already started loading their clubs with transwomen, but, so far, that has not happened. There is probably a reason for that, don't you think? It's an obvious answer tho. A person that is a high level performer in a sport as a man would, in all likelihood, be a high level performer in that same sport as a woman. That isn't necessarily because she has an advantage over ciswomen. It's because she has developed the discipline and skills necessary to become a top level athlete regardless of her gender.
But that's not at all what @Smallchief said. That's something that you introduced on the base that it's a common argument made by others. See what @SiberianThunderT posted basically at the same time as myself: That was the problem to me. Not your claims about parity between trans-women and cis-women, that I don't question (and I anyway wouldn't have the technical competence to do) but the fact that you answered a post by assuming that it was dishonest. That's in turn not an honest assumption, in my book. Yes, the exact same reason that you mentioned earlier: that someone in general doesn't change gender just to get an edge in competitive sport, so I don't see how you see it possible to "pack" the teams with random transwomen who were once playing volleyball in men's leagues. Don't you see that, to demostrate your point, you're using the exact same reasoning that you were shaming just some minutes before? So, the fact that volleyball teams in Brazil weren't filled with transgender women doesn't "show" in any way that the fact that there was one in a single team wasn't "a legitimate concern": it could have been legitimate indeed instead. It was shown that there wasn't any unfair advantage? Good, excellent! And probably for the very reasons that you mentioned in your post, that a person that was disciplined and skilled in the men's game can most probably transfer that discipline and that skill in the women's game also. But posing the question was legitimate in the first place,
It has happened. Renee Richards, born Richard Raskind, in the 1970s had sex-change surgery to become a woman and then played professional tennis. Richards had moderate success as a professional tennis player although she was in her middle 40s. If you don't think this situation is going to happen again, you've got your head stuck deep into the sand. Denial is not a river in Egypt.
As a former serious tennis player (and still pretty serious for my age group), I am well aware of this. From everything I remember about this, it got plenty of publicity at the time but fizzled as an issue in terms of fairness. In the grand scheme of professional tennis history, it simply is not a big deal and certainly is not evidence of a significant fairness issue. One other comment: I believe it will be a very long time before enough data are in, on this question, for one to reach reliable conclusions about whether there will or will not be a significant effect and, if there is, what the effect will be.
1. Was she taking testosterone reducers and other hormone modifiers that would be required for her to play professionally now? 2. So there were women who were better than her? 3. In the 44 years since the ruling that paved the way for her to participate in the US Open, how many transwomen have played in the US Open? Surely if your concern were valid the US Open is now dominated by transwomen and not a single ciswoman has won since?
Jonathan Tannenwald @thegoalkeeper 5m @NWSL announces that JP Dellacamera and @alywagner will call Friday's Houston-Chicago game on CBSSN, and the final on big CBS. @jennhildreth and @LoriLindsey6 will call the other TV games. @Pilla_Talk will be the sideline reporter for all the TV games.
Sky Blue FC has rebranded, effective immediately, as NJ/NY Gotham FC. Their goal is to tie their geographic identity to the NYC area while keeping NJ roots, to make it a globally appealing club. Fan feedback led them to Lady Liberty imagery.STORY: https://t.co/q62YAaFWFs pic.twitter.com/bU9oXFLpwA— Jeff Kassouf (@JeffKassouf) April 6, 2021 Sky Blue FC has rebranded to the New York Cosmo-err I mean NJ/NY Gotham FC.
Sorry for my European ignorance, but isn't Gotham City just an imaginary town from Batman's comics and movies?
Growing up in Nassau County, Gotham City was NYC From Wilkipedia: Nicknames of New York City Gotham: first used by Washington Irving in his satirical periodical Salmagundi (1807) and made popular as the location of Batman comics, first specified in 1940.[17] So, Why Do We Call It Gotham, Anyway? So, Why Do We Call It Gotham, Anyway? | The New York Public Library (nypl.org)
Thanks, you learn something new everyday. I was the typical guy mentioned at the beginning of the article, where they say that "For some, the term Gotham City is forever tied to the Batman comic universe". The most funny part, to me, was where they mention that Gotham originally meant "Goat's town"!
I hope they're able to play at Red Bull Arena this season. Would suck to get rebranded and have to play at Montclair.
Hopefully they ditch the clunky NJ/NY lead-in. The first year of MLS the Red Bulls were the NY/NJ MetroStars. After one year, they went to MetroStars. Hopefully next year it'll just be Gotham FC.
Obviously the Bat symbol will be applied on the kit or Wayne Enterprise sponsor and Batman is the mascot.
I have to think they knew exactly the callback they were invoking by adopting the NY/NJ part of the new moniker... I'd honestly be surprised if they changed it again. It sounds like the new brand was created with some amount of fan input, which could explain why that dual-state thing even showed up, because I doubt execs would try that gimmick willingly precisely because of how it was viewed as a flop when the Metrostars tried it.