{"id":75244,"date":"2021-07-23T18:36:15","date_gmt":"2021-07-23T22:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=75244"},"modified":"2021-07-23T18:36:15","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T22:36:15","slug":"how-are-transgendered-athletes-even-permitted-to-compete-at-the-tokyo-olympic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=75244","title":{"rendered":"How are transgendered athletes even permitted to compete at the Tokyo Olympic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Gold Medal Question: Should Women’s Sports Even Exist?<\/h1>\n

By Charles Lipson
\nRealClearPolitics.com<\/p>\n

The Tokyo Olympics prompted the latest furor over transgender participation in women\u2019s sports. It came when New Zealand named\u00a0a transgender woman to its weightlifting team<\/a>. This athlete\u2019s participation raises questions far beyond this Olympics or that particular sport. The same questions arise whenever a transgender person competes at any level, from high school to world-class. When the winner takes the victory stand, biological women can\u2019t help but wonder if they were treated fairly. Transgender athletes respond, pointedly, that it would be unfair to exclude them.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s a woman,\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0they say.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a woman\u2019s event. So she should compete.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem with this debate is that it raises other fundamental questions:\u00a0Should we have women\u2019s sports at all? Why? What is the rationale\u2014and how compelling is it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/picture><\/a><\/p>\n

The answers to those questions provide an answer to whether transgender athletes should compete in women\u2019s sporting events.<\/p>\n

A century ago, the answers would have been obvious.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Men and women were separated for all sorts of reasons\u2014social, cultural, and biological. Mixed competition would have been unthinkable. Today, our norms about gender and sex are substantially different. The default is that men and women should be treated identically. Treating them differently, such as separating them in competition, requires a strong rationale, at least in liberal, Western societies.\u00a0Separate treatment violates deeply held modern norms<\/strong>, which oppose discrimination because of irrelevant criteria, such as race, sex, gender, religion, and national origin.<\/p>\n

We consider it a national disgrace that black baseball players were excluded from Major League Baseball until Jackie Robinson ran onto the field on April 15, 1947.\u00a0<\/strong>His race had no bearing on his skill as a ball player. Yet no one today would celebrate Rory McIlroy or Dustin Johnson \u201cintegrating\u201d the women\u2019s professional golf tour.<\/p>\n

Why the objections to McIlroy or Johnson on the women\u2019s tour? For the same reason golf courses provide separate tees for women, the same reason the WNBA uses a smaller basketball than their male counterparts, the same reason there are thriving women\u2019s leagues in tennis, soccer, bowling, and dozens more. It is not about the social construction of gender; it is about biological differences\u00a0that bear directly on performance.<\/em><\/p>\n

Biological males and females differ systematically in size, strength, speed, height, lung capacity, and agility. Acknowledging those differences is separate from respecting how any individual self-identifies.\u00a0<\/strong>Given our widely shared opposition to discrimination, those physical differences are the\u00a0only\u00a0<\/em>reason to permit separate events. If gender differences don\u2019t matter for a particular sport, then the rationale for separate events is weaker than our liberal ideal of non-discrimination.<\/p>\n

We would never permit, much less require, this kind of gender separation in chess tournaments.<\/strong>\u00a0It would violate our basic norms demanding equal treatment unless there are very powerful reasons to treat people differently. Those reasons and their persuasiveness will differ from sport to sport. They hardly matter for equine events like show jumping and dressage. They probably don\u2019t matter for target shooting. But they do matter for archery. Top male athletes pull their bows with\u00a0higher \u201cdraw weights\u201d than do top females<\/a>, so they can shoot arrows with flatter trajectories, less affected by crosswinds. The differences matter in golf, too. On the men\u2019s professional tour,\u00a0the\u00a0average<\/em>\u00a0drive is 295.5 yards<\/a>. On the women\u2019s tour,\u00a0even the longest hitter doesn\u2019t drive the ball that far.<\/a><\/p>\n

What about competition in the Boston Marathon, where male winners finish 10 to 15 minutes faster than women?<\/strong>\u00a0That difference is prima facia evidence that we should crown separate winners. A more interesting fact is that Kenyan men and women win the races nearly every year, consistently beating Americans and Europeans. Yet we would rightly consider it invidious racism to segregate marathons by race or national origin. So, why isn\u2019t it invidious sexism to crown separate men and women winners? The answer lies in our common-sense recognition that men and women have major physical differences.<\/p>\n

The Olympics certainly recognizes these consequential differences. In Tokyo, men and women will compete against each other only in equestrian events and one division of sailing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This kind of separation may not last forever. Social norms are changing. But, for now, we still hold separate sports competitions for men and women, and we do so\u00a0solely\u00a0<\/em>because of their systematic physical differences. If that is the only compelling rationale for separating sports by gender, then it should be the only rationale in determining transgender participation.<\/p>\n

The best way to resolve this issue is to step back and ask yourself: Is there any compelling reason to hold separate competition for men and women\u00a0in this particular sport<\/em>? The answer might be different for golf, shot put, target shooting, or dressage. If the answer is \u201cYes, there are strong reasons in this particular sport,\u201d then that same rationale answers the question, \u201cShould transgender women compete against other women in this sport?\u201d<\/p>\n

Put simply, if there are good reasons for holding separate competitions at all, then transgender women should not compete against other women.<\/strong><\/p>\n

___
\nhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/gold-medal-question-should-womens-sports-even-exist<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Gold Medal Question: Should Women’s Sports Even Exist?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}