Cut From Yahoo News:
LAUSANNE, Switzerland - Transsexuals were cleared Monday to compete in the Olympics for the first time.
Under a proposal approved by the IOC executive board, athletes who have undergone sex-change surgery will be eligible for the Olympics if their new gender has been legally recognized and they have gone through a minimum two-year period of postoperative hormone therapy.
The decision, which covers both male-to-female and female-to-male cases, goes into effect starting with the Athens Olympics in August.
The IOC had put off a decision in February, saying more time was needed to consider all the medical issues.
Some members had been concerned whether male-to-female transsexuals would have physical advantages competing against women.
Men have higher levels of testosterone and greater muscle-to-fat ratio and heart and lung capacity. However, doctors say, testosterone levels and muscle mass drop after hormone therapy and sex-change surgery.
IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said the situation of transsexuals competing in high-level sports was "rare but becoming more common."
IOC medical director Patrick Schamasch said no specific sports had been singled out by the ruling.
"Any sport may be touched by this problem," he said. "Until now, we didn't have any rules or regulations. We needed to establish some sort of policy."
Until 1999, the IOC conducted gender verification tests at the Olympics but the screenings were dropped before the 2000 Sydney Games.
One of the best known cases of transsexuals in sports involves Renee Richards, formerly Richard Raskind, who played on the women's tennis tour in the 1970s.
In March, Australia's Mianne Bagger became the first transsexual to play in a pro golf tournament.
Michelle Dumaresq, formerly Michael, has competed in mountain bike racing for Canada.
Richards, now a New York opthamologist, was surprised by the IOC decision and was against it. She said decisions on transsexuals should be made on an individual basis.
"Basically, I think they're making a wrong judgment here, although I would have loved to have that judgment made in my case in 1976," she said.
"They're probably looking for trouble down the line. There may be a true transsexual — not someone who's nuts and wants to make money — who will be a very good champion player, and it will be a young person, let's say a Jimmy Connors or a Tiger Woods, and then they'll have an unequal playing field.
"In some sports, the physical superiority of men over women is very significant."
Former Member
My thoughts are...
It should be WHAT you are...NOT...what you WANT to be or THINK you are....
Originally posted by gull80
It's not about passing judgment on someone who's "different," nor is it about political correctness. It's about a very basic concept--gender and what defines male vs. female.
It seems to me that it is about whether a post-operative transexual should be excluded from competing as a female, which I see as a much more serious issue than people making personal judgements.
I don't think it should be at all about the definition of male and female, segregated competition based on sex is just a means to an end not an end in itself, it is the actual end/goals that we ought to be concerned with.
Personally I can't get that worked up over the issue at the Olympic level because I see it as so extremely unlikely to ever actual occur, in swimming at least. What really concerned me was the suggestion that transexuals be excluded at the masters swimming level of competition. To me excluding people goes against the things I like best about masters swimming and I just don't see the positive ends that are being served. If we accept "makes me uncomfortable" as a valid reason for excluding people we have to get rid of swimmers with body piercings, followed by gay and *** swimmers, followed by the women who are faster than the men, followed by... We are all entitled to feel uncomfortable but "makes me uncomfortable" is not sufficient reason for exclusion.
Originally posted by swimr4life
I respectfully disagree. Performance enhancing drugs DO truly effect performance.
Lefty was right, by definition a performance enhancing drug enhances performance.
It is CHEATING. Swimming regularly, eating a healthy diet, taking vitamins are not cheating. Comparing vitamins to steroids is not a valid point.
By definition cheating is breaking the rules, if the rules permit a male to female transexuals to swim as a female then that is not cheating. My point is that the status quo is not an end in itself, the rules were designed to serve goals. Steroids are not banned because they enhance performance, they are banned because they have adverse effects on your health and we don't want people to have to ruin their health in order to be competative.
As a thought experiment, it would be interesting to think about how we would react if a hypothetical supplement was created that had performance enhancing effects but no adverse side effects. Would we treat it like steroids or vitamins?
Likewise, it is interesting to consider the basic motivation behind separate mens and womens competitions and awards. If we have separate competions for women because they are not as tall or as muscular wouldn't it be better to have height and weight classes instead? There was a thread started on April Fools about FINA introducing additional regions and/or catagories which was met with howls of protest about trying to make everyone feel good by winning at something. Strangely no one brought up that having separate male and female catagories has exactly that purpose, women would be discouraged if they had to compete with males at the very top levels of competition. Obviously there is more overlap at lower levels like masters.
No one here said a transexual should be excluded from going to a masters swim meet. It would be up to the meet director to choose whether they would be in a male or female category depending upon how much hormore treatment they received. The olympics is a lot more important as well as the NCAA's or the worlds. Also, I image while there are Jews, or Muslims or chirstians that don't expect homosexual practices, I image most of them would not interfer with the gay games or mainly master gay swim clubs.
Originally posted by exrunner
...
Maybe this is one of those situations where reasonable people of good faith can make principled arguments for either side...
Exrunner's post was thought provoking, I think where the discussion has been stumbling is failure to outline what exact principles people are operating from.
I've identified two principles:
1) Athletes should not have to harm their health to be competitive (e.g. take steroids)
2) Participants should have at least some hope of being competitive (e.g. the prospects of a woman medalling in Olympic swimming events if competing against men are pretty limited and this would discourage female participation in competitive swimming.)
The argument has been made that male athletes will have sex change operations in order to be able to win as women. I don't believe this and I don't think there is any evidence to support it. I also don't believe that women will be discouraged from competitive swimming by the prospect of all the medals being taken by transexuals as I don't think that is a realistic fear.
A third principle can be read between the lines of a couple posts: transexuals and sex changes are bad (immoral, unnatural, unhealthy, etc.). People who disagree on this principle can argue back and forth from now to eternity about swimming in the Olympics without getting anywhere. Better to just agree to disagree on this principle and move on.
Not yet discussed is the interest of the post operative, post hormonal treatment person who changed their sex due to gender dysphoria rather than competitive ambition. There is some harm to them in excluding them from competing as their post operative sex. There is also an effect on other transexuals analogous to the effect on women at large in the case of seperate competitions for men and women.
So far most of the concern has been about men becoming women and winning medals, for people who advocate swimming according to your chromosomes, are you comfortable about a female to male transexual who has undergone months of (male) hormone therapy competing as a women?
But back to the point, I don't see any hope of the discussion progressing if we don't start by defining what the principles we are using to make judgements are.
There are several problems with the arguments presented so far so let me clarify what I have seen.
1) There are many countries where Olympic athletes make millions of dollars, Euros etc. This includes swimmers. Just because Americans and English (GB) don't make significant money to justify a sex change doesn't mean the financial incentive is not there.
2) Even in Masters swimming I have seen men who were using steriods. Ever 5 years these men would gain 25 pounds of muscles, pimples on their backs, tearing of their muscles, all sorts of steroid symptoms. There is no money in Masters swimming (at least none I know of) so this steroid use was done for other weird reasons. Younger swimmers would do ANYTHING to win a Olympic Gold Medal.
3) Just like women using steroids, the strength advantage would last for many years. With some world class swimmers now swimming in 4 Olympics, this could give a lifetime advantage to transsexuals.
4) What is to say a state sponsored program of genetically altered or surgically altered athletes start dominating sports events? First Germany, then China, it can happen again. How about webbed feet and fingers? Gills?
This news event went over real nice at my work, NOT!!!!
Originally posted by Conniekat8
I said that ***I*** don't mix the two.
That's just what I do. Anyone else can do whatever siuts them.
For me, *my* religion and how I practice is a private spiritual matter, not open to discussion in this forum.
You clearly invited responses when you brought up your spritual beliefs. It didn't come up magically.
So many different issues being mangled together. I am going to set aside the "competitive advantage" argument, and ask a more basic one: should a transgendered person compete in their old sex, or their new one?
One viewpoint that has been brought up is to decide by genetics: Y chromosome is male. While that is a valid test, it is simplistic to think it is that simple. Environment means as much as genetics. Developing "male" or "female" depends on hormones released during development. Normally the hormone levels match the XX or XY genetics, but what about those cases where it doesn't?
I remember hearing about a brain pattern study. Men and women have different patterns. They found that some of the patients considering changing sexes had brain patterns consistent with the opposite sex (and not with their genetics).
So any of these standards (genetic, hormones, brain patterns) will work with the majority. But how do you deal with those, where the answer is not so clear cut? (I don't know. Just trying to point out that things are not as simple as some people are trying to argue.)
(As for chaos theory, one aspect is that you can have self-organization (order) in an inherently chaotic situation. So the presence of "chaos" or "order" is not proof or refutation of anyone's religious beliefs.)
mattson:
Good post. I think a person should compete in their sex because that cannot be changed. There is no such thing as your old sex or your new sex. A person's physical appearance, mannerisms and socialization can be altered but not your sex. As gull80 said, you can't change your chromosomes, you are either a male or female. The rest is window dressing so to speak.
Plus, as the Bug pointed out, how many shots do you have to take to suppress all that maleness or femaleness? For how long?
I use euphemisms now to comply with the PC police and not to be futher accused of 3rd grade behavior.
Say what you want Connie but you brought up religion. As a Christian there is no part of my life that doesn't involve God. Everything I do is to glorify Him. There is no separation of religion from anything I do. I do not compartamentalize my faith for convenience. Your right to bring up religion doesn't usurp my right to fire back.
As to forum guidelines, you aren't in charge of that so please let the folks in charge do their chastizing of me if they feel it necessary. This discussion has tackled a touchy subject, full of all the pitfalls - sexuality, religion, politics to a certain degree - all loosely tagged with swimming.
Please provide latin translations when you use fancy latin phrases. I'm not very bright in that regard.
Lastly, ridicule me all you want. I've been given a bunch of nicknames on this forum, I prefer Swampything as an alternative.
