As a TS woman do I stand a chance against men?

Discussion in 'General Martial Arts Discussion' started by Maryreade1234, Aug 14, 2019.

  1. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    I linked a podcast to an interview with them on page one!
     
  2. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    Here is the interview!

     
  3. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    It seems as if this might be a mechanism to keep behaviour relatively uniform in seasonally-reproducing mammals: Neural Androgen Synthesis and Aggression: Insights From a Seasonally Breeding Rodent

    We don't know how much, if at all, this would apply to humans, other than the neuroendocrine system is probably more complicated than current models.
     
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  4. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

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  5. IronMaiden1991

    IronMaiden1991 Active Member

    As someone whose finally starting transition, I find the martial arts community can be quite daunting to be coming out in. I know Judo competition is going to be extremely difficult and a lot of people aren't going to 'get' it. Much of this article is why I was contemplating owning my own school somewhere in Manchester and doing self defense workshops in a similar vain to help others like me.

    This article talks about the rhetoric and frankly that is something I have encountered myself. I've met two openly homophobic members at the Judo club I know of (one is in a weird religious church and is a Holocaust denier so I don't take her seriously). It can be quite scary in tightly knit communities when you are being talked about like that when the people around you don't know. Makes me worry what they'd do on the mat in randori.

    It's nice to see others are doing the kind of work I want to do.
     
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  6. Mangosteen

    Mangosteen Hold strong not

    I hear this sentiment a lot on parts of the internet but i train with pretty openly transphobic people (club members have told them that they transphobia isnt cool but no active stance) and wonder how they would react when training with a trans-person - would the transphobic person set aside their transphobia?

    Martial arts are a great meeting point for people from lots of different walks of life, but i do wonder - would a racist/sexist/transphobic/other-hateful-person extends the same courtesy of setting aside their hate to improve together?
     
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  7. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    I think covid has shown that theirs a lot of very stupid people training and teaching in gyms.


    But also TS women, competing against CIS women without informed consent, is a safety issue, (especially in MMA) so there is a small grey area in the debate, even though the majority of it is quite black and white.
     
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  8. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    To be fair the OP was pretty wierd with her original question too.
     
  9. Mangosteen

    Mangosteen Hold strong not

    the east german doping prgram is interesting proof of concept of the advantage of going through puberty as a male - they basically subjected a lot of female teenage shot putters to lots of male hormones and it fundamentally altered their physiology; thicker bones for life, wider shoulder for life, changes in tendon strength, limb length, bone density ETC.

    Without infromed consent, its definitely a no go but i strongly recommend reading the sports gene - many female athletes are already non-presenting intersex or have hormonal profile that advantage them over other athletes.
    most people dont neatly fit into the binary of "sex" that we've made.
     
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  10. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    There was a really good radio 4 documentary about that, going into the difference between intersex conditions, and Trans athletes, it was whilst caster semenya was first banned from racing some distances but not others, I'll see if I can find it!

    Caster Semenya - Wikipedia

    Edit: found it

    BBC Radio 4 - BBC Inside Science, Sex, gender and sport - the Caster Semenya case and the latest Denisovan discovery

    " Dr Adam Rutherford discusses sex, gender and sport in light of the Caster Semenya case and the latest Denisovan discovery - a jaw bone form the Tibetan Plateau
    "
     
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  11. Unreal Combat

    Unreal Combat Valued Member

    "Transgender women’s performances generally decline as their testosterone does. But not every male advantage dissipates when testosterone drops. Some advantages, such as their bigger bone structure, greater lung capacity, and larger heart size remain. Testosterone also promotes muscle memory—an ability to regain muscle mass after a period of detraining—by increasing the number of nuclei in muscles, and these added nuclei don’t go away. So transgender women have a heightened ability to build strength even after they transition."

    You are pretty much always going to have some form of biological advantage over women, regardless of your identity, so you should compete against men unless another woman is ok with competing against you. Don't stealth compete against other women, that is cheating and would only do you (and trans people in general) more harm than good in the long term if you were caught out.
     
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  12. IronMaiden1991

    IronMaiden1991 Active Member

    People seldom let go of hatred. There's a girl at my Judo club who got banned from the sattelite location for constantly throwing around homophobia when two guys hugged. She annoyed them enough and the coach told them to just 'not take any notice' while she went on and on about 'sin' (she's in a wierd happy clappy church and believes the holocaust never happened and it's the christians who had the 'real genocide' so I take her opinions as a laughable) but she ended up annoying them enough that when randori came they basically took turns burying her in the floor till she shut up. She still goes to the other location as far as I am aware but I dont train there so its no problem for me.

    RE: Dead_pool, there is some more discussion going on proposing lowering the baseline T to 5 nanomoles per litre from the currently accepted 10 nanomoles to see if there is any impact on sport performance that would eradicate any advantage within reasonable parameters before we start having to put height categories and limb length categories on our athletes.

    I personally am interested to see if it is possible to truly eliminate this, but what does that say then for atheletes of different builds in the same event? How far do we actually take this?

    I don't think I'll compete again when I'm on hormones (I still have to finish gamete storage before I can take them and this covid lockdown slowed that massively)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 23, 2020
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  13. IronMaiden1991

    IronMaiden1991 Active Member

    Ok but let me challenge the compete against men thing with you're now disadvantaged against those men by having lost several of your natural advantages by transition. Trans women are noted to lose bone density in some studies, but also cardiovascular fitness as well as muscle mass and strength. In MMA and contact sports, that could have serious repercussions.

    And that assumes the trans person didn't go on blockers at a VERY early puberty stage and then progressed onto cross sex hormones and thus removed the chance of them developing the advantages you speak of.
     
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  14. Pretty In Pink

    Pretty In Pink Moved on MAP 2017 Gold Award

    Then perhaps we start an intersex division? Trans athletes only?
     
  15. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    The person with the disadvantage, should have access to all the information to make the decision about whether to compete, if a trans woman has to compete with Cis men, then they have the disadvantage but all the information, if a trans woman has to compete against CIS woman, then all the cis women have a disadvantage, and may not have access to all the information to make their decisions.

    And that's not even considering the intersex competitors who may not even know they are.

    One way out would be to change the men's division division into an open division, and the women's division into a protected division that has a criteria to be able to enter, the more the danger, the stricter the criteria.

    It's hard isn't it, because everyone's safety has to be balanced carefully against each others.
     
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  16. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    Intersex isn't the same as trans, by a long shot.

    The podcast I linked from the BBC goes into much more detail.

    Intersex - Wikipedia

    According to experts, around 1.7% of the population is born with intersex traits - comparable to the number of people born with red hair

    Its Intersex Awareness Day - here are 5 myths we need to shatter
     
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  17. Pretty In Pink

    Pretty In Pink Moved on MAP 2017 Gold Award

  18. Dead_pool

    Dead_pool Spes mea in nihil Deus MAP 2017 Moi Award

    Given how well covid is going, I think most of us have too!
     
  19. IronMaiden1991

    IronMaiden1991 Active Member

    Honestly, I wouldn't be against fighting anyone personally if I had to. Lets say in Judo, I have to beat a certain amount of black belts in a day for my grades at comp. If there's a shortage, I have no problem fighting anyone so long as the weight categories aren't an issue. I might struggle finding women in my weight (Im 74kg currently but will lose muscle) but at the end of the day, that's me.

    There's probably not a lot of trans athletes compared to cis ones, but I will say I think there's definitely ways to work this without it being problems.

    A trans category could be seen as exclusionary or potentially outing athletes publicly as opposed to keeping it private. It does become a bloody mess that however we resolve, will take time, but hey, they olympics has been allowing trans people to compete for over a decade now and it's not the conspiracy of 'men competing against women and taking over the podium' even in early days. I look forward to seeing where we are when I'm older.
     
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  20. David Harrison

    David Harrison MAPper without portfolio

    I think male and female needs to end as a way to categorize athletes. A more empirical way of categorizing is needed, based on testable biological markers other than chromosomes or birth certificates. Leagues based on pound-for-pound physical advantages rather than a binary male/female categories.
     
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