You know, I never thought about the fact that quidditch, a game that J.K. Rowling came up with herself is non-gendered. Yet she goes onto social media and screams about how we can’t let trans women compete against the pure and innocent cis girls. Fuck off Rowling.
As I understand, she’s a trans-excluding radical feminist, so within her world view that is probably coherent:
- Ideally, sports should be non-gendered, like quidditch, because everyone has equal chances anyways.
- Where there’s biological differences or social reasons why women have no chance when competing with men, a women’s league should exist, to give women an opportunity for publicity, prizes etc…
Like, the above makes sense, as much as it ever will do. And factually, trans people do blur the line here and point out the fault in this arbitrary system. I can understand having a brainfart, that if only those trans people wouldn’t exist, we wouldn’t have that concept challenged.
But trans people do exist and trans people are fucking fantastic for feminism literally everywhere else. Blurring those lines means that all those systems where cis men are privileged get put into question just as much. It’s so stupid to get hung up on sports and gendered bathrooms.
Yeah it’s absolutely true that there is nuance here and it’s not an easy question to answer. How do you both keep the integrity of sport and also allow trans women a place to compete? It’s a conversation that involves a huge range of factors including the specific sport’s physical demands, the level of the competition, and the stage of transitioning, among others.
The big problem is that it’s a conversation that can only happen in any constructive way if everyone involved in the conversation unequivocally accepts trans people’s personhood and their right to be respected for who they are. And most of the time we see his play out in public, including from the TERF-in-chief, that isn’t the case. Rowling isn’t interested in a nuanced conversation and arriving at an ultimately fair outcome. She’s interested in persecuting trans women, full stop.
Yeah it’s absolutely true that there is nuance here and it’s not an easy question to answer. How do you both keep the integrity of sport and also allow trans women a place to compete?
Current evidence suggests that trans women have effectively no physical advantage after I think it was 6 months of HRT. But I’ve also seen some articles suggesting that there isn’t an inherent physical strength advantage between men and women to begin with. Basically men typically start with more muscle but men and women typically build muscle similarly.
And honestly if there actually are small advantages to be had for one gender vs another, imagine how cool it would be to have a team span between big burly people doing big burly things and small nimble people darting around between them, and the tactics one could do by changing up where they place which strength and how many of a given strength to have on the team
Current evidence suggests that trans women have effectively no physical advantage after I think it was 6 months of HRT
It varies by sport, which is why I mentioned that as one of the factors. At least according to a study referenced by Mia Mulder in this video, in middle-distance running trans women retain a 12% advantage over cis women after 2 years of hormone therapy. (And frankly, that video as a whole is an incredible overview of the subject of trans women’s sports.)
imagine how cool it would be to have a team span between big burly people doing big burly things and small nimble people darting around between them
So, uhh… You know this is already a thing, right? Even when the entire team is cis men, in a sport like rugby you have the forwards who are huge walls of muscle, and wingers tend to be smaller and faster. I don’t actually follow it, but I suspect gridiron may have an even higher degree of this…I guess you could call it positional dimorphism. While soccer has much less. This comes about due to the different nature of those sports.
The insistance on trans supporters to have mtf trans compete against cis women begs the question, are the TERF the enemies of the trans community, or vice-versa? Most TERFs I know have nothing against trans people per se, but hate that this century long fight for women’s rights is being syphoned away. Look at reproductive rights in the USA, as a prime example. You can’t just say “trans rights are human rights” and think everything is solved for women. I think TERFs have a point: feminism and trans rights are both important but orthogonal, yet the former seems to have been thrown under the bus in many ways.
but hate that this century long fight for women’s rights is being syphoned away
This is a TERFy transphobic lie. It relies on the assumption that giving rights to trans women is necessarily taking away cis women’s rights.
Yet here we are, cis women complaining about trans women in sport, gender neutral bathroom not allowing women from having a space separated from men (cis or not).
But my main point was the people’s attention more than women losing rights. And the fact is, that the only time you ever hear about feminism… Is when a TERF says something transphobic.
I’m not hear to defend a behaviour but merely to shade some light on “all TERFs are transphobic”.
trans-excluding radical feminist
I’m amused to see we can categorize idiocy. (I don’t have anything against feminism itself btw.)
Comparing a fiction sport to actual sport? That a nice shortcut.
Sports is based on biological differences.
Isn’t Usain Bolt’s leg unfair towards other player, by that logic?
What about cis-women, who have testosterone in their body?
Do we also ban them?
I’m more concerned about how other roles in Quidditch are basically fighting for like 30 minutes while having no practical impact to the result of the game
Nailed! You perfectly described the weird feeling I had for more than a decade and yet couldn’t figure out what.
I played the game boy game quidditch and it was fine in practice as weird as the rules sound