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Transgender golfer challenging LPGA "female at birth rule"

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Rickard

Member
color-dinosaur.gif
 
Slavik81 said:
Since it's impossible to effectively evaluate what's an unfair advantage on a case-by-case basis, the only clear option is to choose a policy and stick with it.

Of course, as other people have addressed in the thread, the policy they've "chosen" doesn't make a lot of sense if you dial it back. Any reasonable policy on this matter would have to account for the existence of both F2M and M2F transgender individuals and balance the need for a sensible, non-discriminatory policy against the need to maintain competitive balance. The policy as spelled out doesn't do that -- it'll throw competitive balance to the wind (among other things) if it forces F2Ms to compete as women, and be outright discriminatory if it disallows them altogether.

If you want to look at what an organization that's had to carefully weigh these factors against one another eventually came down to, the IOC eventually ruled that all transgender athletes could compete in their transitioned gender, with a waiting period to maximize the effects of hormone treatment required to preserve competitive balance. The sensible path to take here is to accept the broad consensus that competitive advantage will be minimal at best, take the less discriminatory path, and let everyone compete in their manifest gender after a reasonable period to ensure hormone treatment has fully taken effect.
 

Zzoram

Member
I think more studies should be done into whether or not male to female athletes have a competitive advantage. IIRC intersex individuals competing as women are proportionally over-represented in the olympics compared to their occurance in the general population, suggesting that they may have a competitive advantage.

As for the LPGA, maybe they could adopt a "if female for 5 years" rule or something to make sure the transition is complete. Until studies suggest otherwise, it would be reasonable to assume a man that just became a woman wouldn't have time to undergo much of the muscle changes and likely be stronger than she would be in 5 years.
 

Future

Member
If the TG individually has taken sufficient hormone treatment that changes their competitive advantage towards a sex, then they should be allowed to play for that sex. I.E. If a MtoF still has more male physical attributes, she must play in the male league. Of course this could be hard to prove. Also if you are FtoM and are loading up on testosterone, doesnt the fact that they are taking testosterone break league rules?

I guess it is also possible just to have everyone compete in the male league. Since the competitive advantage usually always favors men, you can't really gain any other advantage
 

Shanadeus

Banned
Future said:
If the TG individually has taken sufficient hormone treatment that changes their competitive advantage towards a sex, then they should be allowed to play for that sex. I.E. If a MtoF still has more male physical attributes, she must play in the male league. Of course this could be hard to prove. Also if you are FtoM and are loading up on testosterone, doesnt the fact that they are taking testosterone break league rules?

I guess it is also possible just to have everyone compete in the male league. Since the competitive advantage usually always favors men, you can't really gain any other advantage
Would it be a rule break if you had taken testosterone for medical reasons in the past?

If not then I suppose that would be the case that could be made for transitioning people using testosterone.
 
Zzoram said:
As for the LPGA, maybe they could adopt a "if female for 5 years" rule or something to make sure the transition is complete.

Right. This is what the IOC did and it seems like a very reasonable compromise -- it recognizes and addresses the competitive balance issues without denying people the ability to compete as their manifest gender or creating any kind of silly double standards.
 

Future

Member
Shanadeus said:
Would it be a rule break if you had taken testosterone for medical reasons in the past?

If not then I suppose that would be the case that could be made for transitioning people using testosterone.

Assuming testosterone enhancement is against league rules, I assume theyd have to monitor her levels and make sure they arent above a "norm."
 
NewGamePlus said:
Also, there's no medical consensus on how to precisely define sex.
That, I am sad to say, is complete nonsense. Sex is easily definable. The person who wrote that article brought up genetic abnormalities and thought it was proving some point.

Oh and this transgender person is an idiot and should be treated as such.
 
seriously, if there truly is a competitive advantage, some people would be making a lot of money by changing gender. i mean, it's free money, right? why wouldn't people be all over it like anything else profitable? maybe because it's not?
 

Emerson

May contain jokes =>
There are some physical gender differences which are not reversible by hormone therapy. It's unfair to other competitors to allow her to play in the LPGA. Unfortunate but true.
 

Shurs

Member
The Faceless Master said:
seriously, if there truly is a competitive advantage, some people would be making a lot of money by changing gender. i mean, it's free money, right? why wouldn't people be all over it like anything else profitable? maybe because it's not?

Gender transition isn't free.
 
Shurs said:
Gender transition isn't free.
but even the prospect of making "easy" money should be luring a bunch of people, right? anything for a dollar and all that...

some people with money could even front the money on promising prospects and split the profits from the gains made after.
 

tiff

Banned
The Faceless Master said:
seriously, if there truly is a competitive advantage, some people would be making a lot of money by changing gender. i mean, it's free money, right? why wouldn't people be all over it like anything else profitable? maybe because it's not?
It's probably because most people are happy with their birth gender and don't want to undergo such a huge change in their identity just for a shot at making some money.
 

Shanadeus

Banned
The Faceless Master said:
seriously, if there truly is a competitive advantage, some people would be making a lot of money by changing gender. i mean, it's free money, right? why wouldn't people be all over it like anything else profitable? maybe because it's not?
I'm sure that there are a bunch of alternative methods of gaining competitive advantages that these people would chose over a sexual reassignment that is dangerous and not at all guaranteed or proven to give you a competitive advantage.
 

Vamphuntr

Member
charsace said:
I'm sorry, but she shouldn't be allowed to compete. She will have physical advantages.

I agree with that but at the same times aren't all athletes cheating by doping themselves with steroids and whatnot? When you watch documentaries like ''Bigger, faster, stronger'' where they upfront tell you that pretty much all olympics athletes and professional sports athletes are using drugs to enhance their performance, I find it hard to argue that she has unnatural advantages. Granted I don't know if in golf they use performance enhancing drugs.But they do cheat nature in certain ways. Take Tiger Woods for example, he had eye surgery to improve his eyesight, this does indeed give him an ''unnatural advantage''. I'm no expert on the changes going on in her body when she undergows hormone replacement therapy either but this was my 2 cents.
 

Holepunch

Member
Shanadeus said:
I'm sure that there are a bunch of alternative methods of gaining competitive advantages that these people would chose over a sexual reassignment that is dangerous and not at all guaranteed or proven to give you a competitive advantage.
Vamphuntr said:
I agree with that but at the same times aren't all athletes cheating by doping themselves with steroids and whatnot? When you watch documentaries like ''Bigger, faster, stronger'' where they upfront tell you that pretty much all olympics athletes and professional sports athletes are using drugs to enhance their performance, I find it hard to argue that she has unnatural advantages. Granted I don't know if in golf they use performance enhancing drugs.But they do cheat nature in certain ways. Take Tiger Woods for example, he had eye surgery to improve his eyesight, this does indeed give him an ''unnatural advantage''. I'm no expert on the changes going on in her body when she undergows hormone replacement therapy either but this was my 2 cents.
So basically what I'm getting out of this is "Everybody cheats, fuck it."
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
TheExecutive said:
That, I am sad to say, is complete nonsense. Sex is easily definable. The person who wrote that article brought up genetic abnormalities and thought it was proving some point.

It does prove a point. The point is that it's very easy to classify the vast vast majority of people in one of two sexes; and there's an extreme minority of people for whom it's very difficult to classify, requiring us to either create additional classifications or rethink the boundaries of our existing ones.

That extreme minority includes people with genetic disorders including XXY syndrome as well as people who are genetically a given sex but born with "incorrect" primary or secondary sexual characteristics. For these people, it's difficult.

Oh and this transgender person is an idiot and should be treated as such.

You don't think that's a little rude? The sum total of what you know about her case is the article in the OP. You're not a sports official. You're a psychologist or psychiatrist. You're not a sociologist or anthropologist. You're not in the top, I don't know, 50 million people worldwide in terms of being able to evaluate her claims. That's not to say you can't discuss it, but do you really think such a callous and flippant attitude demonstrates an understand of the subtleties at work here?
 
Emerson said:
There are some physical gender differences which are not reversible by hormone therapy. It's unfair to other competitors to allow her to play in the LPGA.

So why has the IOC officially allowed this for literally every Olympic sport, including (as of 2016) golf?
 
charlequin said:
So why has the IOC officially allowed this for literally every Olympic sport, including (as of 2016) golf?

Those East German and Polish (wo)men are spinning in their graves right now. They should have just pulled the transcard back then.

Cold-blooded, IOC, cold-blooded.

ps - I say let the person play! It's not as if there's a reason to follow the LPGA at the moment. Give us some spice with our ladies golf for once.
 

Wiktor

Member
I rember that when I was working in Scotland couple years back I sometimes passed alongside a golf course and there was this big sign at the entry : "Dogs and women not allowed" :lol
 

iamblades

Member
As unfair as it may seem, there is no way for a transgendered person to compete fairly under the current system.

It's unfair to female athletes and it undermines doping controls if you let someone who used to be a man compete against women or you allow someone taking hormones to compete period. There is just no way to ensure a level playing field.

People just need to accept that one consequence of undergoing a sex change is that you are banned from organized athletic activities. Being unfair to a tiny handful of people is preferable to being unfair to everyone.
 

Kellhus

Neo Member
iamblades said:
As unfair as it may seem, there is no way for a transgendered person to compete fairly under the current system.
This.
I don't even think it is unfair. If we allow male to female transgenders to compete in a female league, which is generally accepted to be less competitive than the male leagues, then we might as well allow steroids, human growth hormones, and whatever they come up with next. Before long top athletes will have a life expectancy of 30 years because of all the shit they pump in their bodies. That's alright though, because we'll keep breaking records.
 

Slavik81

Member
charlequin said:
Of course, as other people have addressed in the thread, the policy they've "chosen" doesn't make a lot of sense if you dial it back. Any reasonable policy on this matter would have to account for the existence of both F2M and M2F transgender individuals and balance the need for a sensible, non-discriminatory policy against the need to maintain competitive balance. The policy as spelled out doesn't do that -- it'll throw competitive balance to the wind (among other things) if it forces F2Ms to compete as women, and be outright discriminatory if it disallows them altogether.

If you want to look at what an organization that's had to carefully weigh these factors against one another eventually came down to, the IOC eventually ruled that all transgender athletes could compete in their transitioned gender, with a waiting period to maximize the effects of hormone treatment required to preserve competitive balance. The sensible path to take here is to accept the broad consensus that competitive advantage will be minimal at best, take the less discriminatory path, and let everyone compete in their manifest gender after a reasonable period to ensure hormone treatment has fully taken effect.
To be clear, I was not supporting their current policy, as you seem to believe. I was only disagreeing with the notion that any decision can be made by measuring at a single individual's skill.

They need a good, consistent policy. That policy may not necessarily be their current policy. I don't feel I have enough information to comment on what that policy should be.
 

Cheerilee

Member
IMO, the PGA shouldn't discrminate against anybody, and anyone of any race or gender should be allowed to compete.

But the LPGA is inherently discriminatory, set up because it's believed that women can't compete at the same level as men. Simply being unable to compete at PGA levels shouldn't mean you're allowed to play in the LPGA, otherwise men would join. You have to be there because your gender isn't giving you an equal chance. If your eligibility to enter the restricted league is questionable, you shouldn't be allowed to enter. But if it can be proven that, after a measurable point of change, being a transgender offers no physical advantage over women, then the LPGA should accept them.

Basic idea, if you can't hack it in the PGA and then you go transgender, you can't join the LPGA even if your physique matches LPGA members. You can only join the LPGA when you can't hack it in the LPGA either. If you are a PGA star, you can join the LPGA when you have the body of an LPGA star. People cry foul when a man who played weekend golf with his buddies becomes a woman and suddenly "discovers" that she has become a professional athlete.
 
iamblades said:
People just need to accept that one consequence of undergoing a sex change is that you are banned from organized athletic activities.

Except that, again, you're not: you can participate in the Olympics and all other lesser competitions governed by IOC eligibility rules. This has been true for six years now (including four whole Olympic games) and has yet to produce any meaningful problems of fairness for anyone.

Slavik81 said:
To be clear, I was not supporting their current policy, as you seem to believe. I was only disagreeing with the notion that any decision can be made by measuring at a single individual's skill.

Yeah, I was using that more as a jumping-off point, I didn't intend to suggest you necessarily disagreed with what I was saying there.
 
OuterWorldVoice said:
Where does this line draw? Endomorphs? Exomorphs? Races?

There are actually interesting questions about race & performance in sports: http://www.slate.com/id/2260314/

(However, these racial differences are probably TINY compared to male-female differences.)

With regards to the OP, I'd say that there's reason to believe that having-previously-been-male gives a big enough competitive advantage, so it shouldn't be allowed. I don't know what the debate is about.
 

Zoe

Member
DiatribeEQ said:
Soon as his surgery is complete and the pole's been chopped down & the hole dug, then she should get 100% access to the LPGA.

By that logic, any man could get castrated and qualify. There needs to be some sort of regulation regarding the hormone treatments.
 

Drac

Member
For a sport called Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden, why is this an issue ? Why is there a woman division in the first place actually ?
*look at XiaNaphryz post* oh ok, nothing to argue then :D.

Now for the serious answer, the "sex at birth rule" should stick, ever looked at hammer throw ladies ? yes people aren't equal at birth, an expensive sex change operation shouldn't give you a "free" card to try your luck in an other league, amputation of a leg (in before stupid leg/penis jokes) on the other hand...
 

Gaborn

Member
Drac said:
For a sport called Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden, why is this an issue ? Why is there a woman division in the first place actually ?
*look at XiaNaphryz post* oh ok, nothing to argue then :D.

Now for the serious answer, the "sex at birth rule" should stick, ever looked at hammer throw ladies ? yes people aren't equal at birth, an expensive sex change operation shouldn't give you a "free" card to try your luck in an other league, amputation of a leg (in before stupid leg/penis jokes) on the other hand...

I... really think this misses the point unless you're suggesting someone is actually willing to trade their penis for the sole goal of winning in the LPGA. Seriously, what are some of you THINKING?



ruby_onix said:
Basic idea, if you can't hack it in the PGA and then you go transgender, you can't join the LPGA even if your physique matches LPGA members. You can only join the LPGA when you can't hack it in the LPGA either. If you are a PGA star, you can join the LPGA when you have the body of an LPGA star. People cry foul when a man who played weekend golf with his buddies becomes a woman and suddenly "discovers" that she has become a professional athlete.

REALLY? I'm honestly surprised that people are showing such little understanding of TGs. It's like some of you honestly think the idea here is to "cheat the system" by deciding to make a life altering transition all for a trophy and some money, like this is some sort of plot to become a professional golfer because they can't compete on the PGA level. I mean, seriously? REALLY?
 

Drac

Member
Gaborn said:
I... really think this misses the point unless you're suggesting someone is actually willing to trade their penis for the sole goal of winning in the LPGA. Seriously, what are some of you THINKING?

Way to read what you want, how about the thing that people aren't born equal ? If you can't make it professionally in your favorite sport rule set (in this case the legitimate sex at birth one) deal with it or just change sport. How many people dream of becoming sport champion but just plainly suck at it ? No one should receive special favor because of special condition.

Did I say this person had a sex change surgery for the sole purpose of wining the LPGA ? No. I'm just saying this person is being a dick because golf doesn't use the same gender differentiation for category as this person wants. Again, deal with it, this person could compete without complain in the man at birth category.
 

Slavik81

Member
charlequin said:
Yeah, I was using that more as a jumping-off point, I didn't intend to suggest you necessarily disagreed with what I was saying there.
Ah. Ok. After I wrote that, I was a bit worried that people might misunderstand my position. Thanks for reassuring me.
 
Legendary Warrior said:
It's probably because most people are happy with their birth gender and don't want to undergo such a huge change in their identity just for a shot at making some money.
you wouldn't cut off your dick or forego the ability to ever have children for the *chance* to make a couple million? :O
 

Gaborn

Member
Drac said:
Way to read what you want, how about the thing that people aren't born equal ? If you can't make it professionally in your favorite sport rule set (in this case the legitimate sex at birth one) deal with it or just change sport. How many people dream of becoming sport champion but just plainly suck at it ? No one should receive special favor because of special condition.

Did I say this person had a sex change surgery for the sole purpose of wining the LPGA ? No. I'm just saying this person is being a dick because golf doesn't use the same gender differentiation for category as this person wants. Again, deal with it, this person could compete without complain in the man at birth category.

"legitimate sex"? I think that's another hint where you stand. I agree with you actually about "dealing with it," as I said earlier as a private organization the LPGA is free to set whatever rules it wants. I'm just questioning the logic and reasoning behind these rules. saying a person should "deal with the rule" is non-responsive as to whether the rule is logical and useful to the sport, that is, whether the sport is benefited by this particular distinction or is not benefited. It's about the player only in the sense that this specific story is, the broader question is, does the rule make sense?
 
this is a difficult topic, has the population of transgender risen in the past few years or something? it seems this has been coming up often

I am not sure what would make this fair but I think the women who are currently playing LPGA should have a say... a vote as to how fairly matched they think this would be


XiaNaphryz said:

Whoooo dat?
 
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