Fallon Fox is an awesome name.
I saw an interview with her opponent in her most recent bout and the opponent (who lost) was fine with her being transgender and just wanted a rematch with a different referee.
Thailand was way ahead of the curve on this one. She fought I think only men, though.
I was interested in what you all thought mostly because I don't trust my gut reactions on issues like this. Nothing at all to argue about is an answer.
I was trying to come up with a joke about sandbagging, but then I remembered the handful of students who have come out to me as trans in the last few years, and their extremely moving tales of woe, and decided against it. I guess the worry would be about physically unfair competition? Like "She's REALLY a dude, and dudes have inherent biological advantages over women, so, waah." But... weight classes? Variation within sexes? Gender is socially constructed, so "real" is mistaken? Also, maybe I'm going the way of the stereotypical humorless feminist, because I'm starting not to find the jokes funny, even when they are, objectively, funny.
Weight classes don't come close to equalizing physical ability between sexes, and it's not clear that weight classes plus hormone treatments do, either. She physically dominated her two opponents (who weren't told her status).
I have no idea what social construction of gender means in this context.
Well, okay. Would you have less of a problem with the fairness of the competition if a non-trans woman had similarly dominated the other two competitors? Inequality of ability seems to be the operative factor in the fairness of competition, rather than gender itself.
Men have far more muscle in their upper body, and a much higher bound for potential upper body strength per given body weight. There are other big differences, but that alone is pretty relevant for a combat sport. That said, if other women want to fight her, who cares? Strength isn't the whole story in MMA, and two bouts is not that many bouts. It might be that she starts to fall apart at an elite level for reasons of technique or preparation or whatever.
That said, if other women want to fight her, who cares?
OBVIOUSLY NO ONE HERE. I tend to agree that if all consent, a fight should be allowed (this attitude does seem to have shortened some careers in Pride, though), but should she be required to inform her potential opponents?
I bet everybody knows now. That's a pretty tightly-knit community.
She probably should have informed her opponents before, certainly.
Men have far more muscle in their upper body
Men also have more muscle in their lower body. This often gets overlooked and I don't understand why. Legs feed the wolf and all.
I'm also on team disclose. The heavier bone structure on men is a big deal as well.
I'd be on team disclose, too. Weight classes exist to help make competitive matches by matching up people who are roughly the same size and strength.
Actually in MMA weight classes mostly exist because the various state gaming boards demand them in order to license an event; it's a holdover from boxing. It certainly makes a difference to competitiveness but if they had their druthers I think MMA promoters would just let whoever fight whoever; that's how it used to be, and how it still is in Japan.
I heard an interview with her yesterday, and she came off as kind of a dick, dismissing out of hand the idea that male physiology conferred any advantage. (Yes, "came off", "dick", "hand", have at it.)
Here's a great website in which a trans-gendered woman (engineering prof at Michigan) tells her story, which involves working in computer research organizations at IBM and Xerox-PARC, first as a man then as a woman.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
I originally found it because I was looking for whitewater canoeists around Ann Arbor. I always thought it was a little questionable that she was winning recreational class whitewater canoeing events for women with the inheritance of male anatomy. But what the hell else would you do? Bar her? Force her to compete in men's races?
I have a ridiculous confession: when I wrote the OP, I didn't see anything to argue about, because I forgot about the whole "So is it okay for her to fight women in the future, or will she have an unfair advantage?" angle. Somehow I read it as this feel-good coming out story in which someone in an unusually masculine setting is staying true to who they are, and isn't that great?
I get the impression (backed by nothing but a feeling that I might have read something along these lines sometime in the distant past) that after transition there is a loss of upper body strength and a general rearrangement of body fat and the like. Obviously it's not changing bone structure, so there's potentially still some advantage there, but there are plenty of broad-shouldered women out there.
It's not just about being broad shouldered. Heavier bone in the jaw,skull, ribcage, etc. means she's literally going to be able to take a punch like a man. And having heavier bone structure in your legs and arms is going to be a big deal when it comes to inflicting and withstanding Muy Thai type punishment. The stats I saw for her put her at 5'7 and 145 pounds which already pretty damn big for a female fighter. Couple that with a man's skeleton and it's fucking ridiculous for her to be claiming she has no physical advantages.
She physically dominated her two opponents
That's pretty common at the beginning levels of MMA (where defense is often spotty), and in women's MMA generally, so you can't make too much of that. However, after watching the video clip, her hands, arms, and shoulders are really large in a way that women fighters just don't achieve without steroids (eg, Cristiane "Cyborg" Santos). I have no idea what the policy should be, though, given that estrogen should probably be considered a performance-degrading drug for the sport.
Heavier bone in the jaw
Yeah, this too.
It's a grey area for the reasons that heebie-geebie gives in 20. It's kind of great that people get to be who they want to be, and do so publicly and unashamed, but sport is an odd area. We hedge sport with all kinds of artificial rules that are supposed to rule some kinds of advantage as permissible and others are impermissible. And it looks like some of the changes that trans-people's bodies involve are precisely the sorts of changes that in other circumstances we would count as impermissible.
You can argue that we should just have a free-for-all and admit all kinds of drug and hormone use, for trans- and non-trans athletes alike. But if we aren't going to have a free-for-all, it does seem like some trans-athletes are going to be at an advantage [in certain specific sports].
I don't think the fact that there are non-trans-women out there with broad shoulders and heavy bone structure says much in mitigation. There are people with incredible trained natural VO2 max, or amazing strength-endurance or whatever, but when people take hormones, say, to put themselves artificially into the same area of the bell-curve, we call it cheating. The fact that some people are (clean) really really strong doesn't mean that we think it's OK people can adopt any means (fair or foul) to become really really strong.
It might be that oestrogen is a performance-decreasing drug, but oestrogen after X-decades of testosterone/androgen, etc?
5'7 and 145 pounds
If that's fighting weight, she's probably cutting down from a walking around weight of 160+.
FWIW, I have a [female] friend who fights at international level in the martial art I do, but who also cross-competes at a lower inter-club level in Muay Thai. She had to stop the Muay Thai for a few months as repeated stress fractures of the tibia meant she'd picked up a bone abscess.* She's tall and fine-boned. Having massive great 'masculine' tibia would definitely have helped.**
* being hard as nails, she still went and fought at the world champs in our art, with the bone abscess.
** she'd be frankly terrifying.
The one internationally ranked woman boxer I know seems to have super fine bone structure and ... I guess I don't really have a point other than to say I know one internationally ranked female boxer.
It's a really interesting question w.r.t sports and artificial boundaries. I wonder if it would be possible to adjust her weight class upward, but that's a strange adjustment given that typically regulations don't penalize someone for being an unusually strong flyweight (e.g.).
I think these sorts of issues are going to be much easier to deal with once trans rights are further along and anti-trans feeling is less common and tolerated. At this point, it seems shitty to tell a trans woman that she can't compete as a woman in sports, because there's so much 'not a real woman' shit she's going to be taking generally. Once the general level of abuse dies down (as one hopes it will over the next couple of decades), I think the sane answer on sports is that at serious levels of competition, it's sometimes, depending on the sport and the medical, as opposed to social, effects of transition on the particular competitor, not going to be reasonable to allow a trans woman to compete in women's sports, and that's not going to look like a huge oppressive deal.
(My thinking on this is heavily shaped by living in Samoa, where there are an awful lot of not-exactly-trans-women-but-fa'afafine-are-socially-pretty-close who are athletically indistinguishable from cis men. There'd be very little room for cis women in sports in Samoa if fa'afafine were competing in women's sports.)
Obviously it's not changing bone structure, which is not obvious at all considering the effects of hormones/menopause on osteoporosis. Has anyone looked at fracture rates before and after a transition? Probably not.
re: 31
Googling, there are quite a few scholarly articles on osteoporosis rates in male-to-female transexuals. It looks like oestrogen supplementation is required to prevent loss of bone density.
http://www.eje-online.org/content/153/1/107.full
So, while there is a risk of decreased bone density, it's easily prevented via the right hormone regimen.
For all the reasons listed above, she has a huge advantage. I want to be sympathetic (trans have it hard enough), but I find it hard to find it fair to let her fight.
Even without the bone issues, the strength is such a huge advantage. Even in swimming, an old fat man like me still has a huge advantage over a much more fit woman in a one-time race that does not involve tremendous endurance.
In swimming, it really isn't fair. I've swam with amazingly tough, hard-working, talented women. They have kicked my ass up and down in workouts. But, they cannot compete in a race with men bc of strength.
I think one thing that has to be acknowledged is that athletes' bodies (especially at the international level) are ALL artificial -- we're not talking about a situation that's in any way similar to the 1896 Olympics, where you had a bunch of guys that ran or wrestled or fenced in their spare time (or to some extent as part of their jobs) showing up and competing for the fun of it. Even the so-called "amateur" athletes in today's Olympics are basically full-time athlete-workers, most of whom have access to an extremely advanced and scientifically grounded training/health/gamesmanship regimen. It's cyborgs all the way down at this point -- unless you really, really, really care about whose coaches have managed to shave off that extra hundredth of a second, why should some purported physiological advantage even matter? Unless we're going to start administering full DNA workups to every athlete to make sure they come from exactly comparable genotypes, there's no reason that someone with biologically male or female genes shouldn't be able to compete with people on the other side of that fairly arbitrary divide.
There's a fa'afafine player on the Samoan national open (men's) soccer team. Things are a bit less complicated in that case, since there's no hormonal/medical intervention for fa'afafine, so obviously they shouldn't be playing women's high-level sports.
It's cyborgs all the way down at this point -- unless you really, really, really care about whose coaches have managed to shave off that extra hundredth of a second, why should some purported physiological advantage even matter?
That's an argument for not having sports separated by sex at all -- they're all cyborgs, so why shouldn't women be expected to compete level with men? While it's not an insane argument, I've heard people make it apparently seriously (not actually with the 'cyborgs' line) but it looks as though it would make seriously competitive sports out of reach for almost all XX people, all of them in most sports.
That seems rough on XX people, but if you think justice to trans women demands that XX people not have sports separated by sex at all, it's a defensible position.
Things are a bit less complicated in that case, since there's no hormonal/medical intervention for fa'afafine
Some fa'afafine are on hormones -- not most, and generally probably not up to US standards of care -- but it's not like it never happens.
The difference between men and women in high-level sports is really really huge, often around 10%. The top high school men's athletes are often better than the top women in the world. We're not talking about shaving off hundredths of a second.
37: Well, as I've said before, I really don't see the point of competitive sports at the level at which they are now played. I mean, if I put together a soccer team from my neighborhood, there's any number of women who would be much better suited to playing than I would be. I think the whole underlying ideology of international competitive amateur sports, or national/university level professional sports is just bizarre and counter-productive. Who cares about the fractional differences in speed or strength or endurance that those sporting event seek to delineate? At least with team sports you've got some strategy & tactics involved, likewise with fighting sports, although I acknowledge that these might pale next to the importance of raw strength assuming a basic familiarity with technique. Even so, I have very little interest in any of that. I think most of the justifications offered for our society's ridiculous obsession with these contests are complete bullshit. Teamwork, integrity, sportsmanship, setting a good example -- none of that matters as much as winning.
I mean, if I put together a soccer team from my neighborhood, there's any number of women who would be much better suited to playing than I would be.
Sure, but probably not all that many who would be capable of competing on a level with not you, but the men who would actually show up for a neighborhood soccer team. If you see what I mean.
re: 35
Sure, you could just eliminate women's sports altogether. With the exception of distance running, and a few other endurance sports, maybe rock climbing, and a few other things, men would win everything.
Pwned by LB in 37.
I don't think arguing for a pre Title IX world is defensible. We know what that world looks like, and it's not good for women trans or cis. Maybe that's defensible if "seriously competitive" doesn't include college sports (or only includes big conference football and basketball).
39: As it stands now, it is. With the exception of a few well-known prodigies, at any given level of competition, the best people in the world are all about the same. So what's the point? We know that if you do X, Y and Z, and you have a favorable physiology, and you're lucky enough to avoid a serious, career-ending injury, you can do N(+/- .xx seconds) in a given sport. Plus, of course, you can't be a political embarrassment to your local political structure, and you may or may not have to adhere to some arbitrary determination of your non-professional status.
35: I agree that the boundaries are artificial. But because sports involve these artificial and boundaries, they really have no meaning at all unless they're articulated and enforced. (This is true of all games, really, not just elite sports.)
Gender is not a perfect line, but at most levels of sports, the best women are not going to be competitive with the best men. Getting rid of the gender barriers wouldn't mean that we'd have a great gender-free free-for-all. It means we'd have male competitors with the occasional female elite competitor, and no point, for the average girl, of bothering with competitive sports.
With the exception of a few well-known prodigies, at any given level of competition, the best people in the world are all about the same.
The best XX people are generally quite different from the best XY people. You may not be interested in serious sports at all, but if you recognize that some people care quite a lot, eliminating women's sports has a significant effect on something that many women care about a great deal.
no point, for the average girl, of bothering with competitive sports
There's no point for the average girl OR boy in bothering with competitive sports right now.
Geez, Natilo, people do still do sports for fun you know.
48: Right, so, if it's for fun, who cares who wins?
I think there's some confusion here because "competitive" covers a wide range. Obviously there's no point in average people trying to compete in the Olympics, but just as obviously the number of people who compete seriously at some level (high school, college, club, pickup, etc.) is quite large. And at every single level after puberty the typical man is much much better than the typical woman in almost all sports.
There's no point for the average girl OR boy in bothering with competitive sports right now.
As the mother of an average girl who is building social bonds across ethnic and class boundaries, developing her sense of herself as a physically strong and capable person, and learning to devote effort into something that doesn't come particularly easily to her (as well as enjoying herself a great deal on the days when she's not limping), I'd dispute that.
She's not headed for the US National Rugby team even with single sex competition. But if the only rugby available was co-ed, she wouldn't be playing at all.
49: Because for the kind of people who play sports for fun, caring about who wins at the top level is part of it.
There are probably few enough trans people out there that this is an issue that only really matters at the top level -- for recreational sports, dividing things by social gender or whatever the right term is would be fine, because there just aren't going to be all that many trans women out there. But it seems unjust to XX competitors not to recognize physical differences at the levels of competition where there's something more than fun at stake (like, in the original post, money).
52: Well, what if the only rugby available was women-and-trans*?
51: I'm iffy about your definition of club* and pickup sports as "competing seriously". I'm sure there are many people who take competition in those realms very seriously indeed. In my experience, most of those people are assholes who ruin it for everyone else. Same with the folx who take primary and secondary school competition very seriously.
*I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "club" here though -- doesn't that vary hugely between different sports, from quasi-professional all the way down to slightly-more-organized-than-a-pick-up-game?
Asterisk refers to "club*" not "trans*"
Basically my point of view is that trans women should be allowed to compete in women's sports unless they're too good at it, in which case the should stick to open sports. (It's totally not unusual for really top female athletes to play open sports for better competition anyway.)
I also think the level of injury risk in the sport is a factor. I'm more sympathetic to letting a dominant trans woman play women's tennis than women's rugby.
56: Well then we're getting towards "no hard-and-fast rules about gender in sports" which would be a good model for gender in society at large.
54: The problem is that the sport's connected all the way up to the top level.
If you're committed to the position that it's always wrong to exclude a trans person from any athletic competition in their gender of identification, that's going to seriously distort the hyper-elite level of competition -- pro sports, national teams, the Olympics. At lower levels, it's not going to make all that big a difference because there aren't all that many trans people, except that it's going to tend to shut out XX people from hoping to compete at elite levels. This is a big thing -- people who play sports tend to be, you know, competitive people -- and I think it'd have the effect of tending to depress XX people's participation in sports generally.
If it's ever all right to tell a trans person that they mayn't compete athletically in sports for their social gender, then the problem's not that big. If it were permissible to make case-by-case determinations of whether it was reasonable to think of a specific competitor as competing on a level in the elite tier of whatever sport, that'd keep the possibility of elite competition open to XX competitors, which has, I think, a serious effect on people's interests in sports generally.
58: Yeah, what I'm pushing back against is a hard-and-fast position that it's always going to be wrong to exclude someone from single-sex competition for which they're socially qualified based on their genetic sex at birth. If you can make judgment calls, you can make it all work. If it's always wrong to bring genetic sex into it, though, I don't see how not to lose a lot of sports for women.
This is feeling a lot like some of the Pistorius conversations. You can't really have sports without hard and fast rules about things.
The rules aren't always about just finding the best. We're thinking here of kids progressing through a competitive league, but there are age-segregated master's events that do a lot to encourage recreational-but-committed level participation.
So I don't really see finding rules that allow incorporating trans-women as different in kind than making other rules, except that it's extra important not to be a jerk.
61: Only if you care about winning. Also, equal opportunity demands that all Olympians be allowed to compete in the Paralympics.
re: 60
We already have a little bit of that, too. Some sports where there's no significant gender-advantage already have open competition. Equestrian events, ultra-marathoning (and I think long-distance swimming events?), sailing, etc.
Paralympics rules are fascinating. Sports are paired with type of disability. So soccer is just for people with cerebral palsy, stroke, or traumatic brain injury, Pistorius wouldn't be allowed to play. Furthermore, competitors are assigned a numeric classification based on their level of disability, and teams must maintain a certain average rating. One could imagine doing the same thing for female-ness, but I somehow doubt that'd make anyone happy.
I wonder at what age the gender gap in athletics disappears. My recollection is that the top over 80 years old athlete is a woman.
the level of injury risk in the sport is a factor
Particularly in a sport where the goal is to render someone unconscious by blunt force trauma.
Comparison of men and women in open water swimming:
Average female competitor is younger and faster than the male competitors.
But, the fastest swimmers are still male.
http://www.vaswim.org/OW_women_v_men.pdf
Time for truly open class sports - anything goes where Lance and Ben Johnson are still champions.
Cool data on swimming, will. This should be a front page post in honor of Ogged's weird swimming posts.
Trying to get my head around the big difference between elite comparison and average comparison. If I were trying to build a statistical case that women would surpass men in this sport, I'd be very concerned about different self selection of amateur athletes into different sports.
"Oh, tomorrow he's really gonna feel that." All Drug Olympics.
OT, but this is as good a place as any.
I found this gallery of photos of porn actresses before and after make-up sessions weirdly compelling (mostly because all the women I've lived with used very little make-up, so the process is a bit mysterious to me). Technically safe for work inasmuch as there's nothing here you couldn't show on network TV--and it's mostly just head shots--but predictable amounts of cleavage and a handful of pictures in lingerie, so weight your workplace standards accordingly.
71:
The average swimmer data is messed up bc of the age differences.
But, in swimming, mental toughness and stroke technique outweigh strength in endurance events.
I have just started back swimming. My stroke is still good (apo?) and I am stronger than most of the women. So in one swim for time in anything under a mile, I would still beat them. But, in a workout, the women crush me bc I am fat, out of shape, and dont care enough/lack mental toughness. (It has hurt my ego.)
73 is indeed compelling. It's surprisingly hard to draw any sort of generalization. A lot of the make-up free pictures evoke some sort of non-porn stereotype (college student, mom, fresh-faced kid, etc) but nothing global.
Most of them do much more elaborate eye makeup than I would ever even consider in myself but it's very effective in giving the glamourpuss look. In some ways the elaborate full face is a leveller.
It isn't always clear to me whether I'm looking at fake lashes or heavy mascara in some of those pictures, but I suspect that fake lashes attached to my own eyelids would drive me up a wall in a matter of minutes.
The variation in how transformative heavy makeup is is interesting -- more than half of the subjects look like basically the same person with a bunch of paint on their face, but about a third? a quarter? are almost unrecognizable.
And the age range appears smaller when they're in full glam - the older ones look younger, the younger ones look older.
Some sports where there's no significant gender-advantage already have open competition. Equestrian events
...in which major disciplines (eventing, show jumping) are dominated by stallions and geldings (though there are notable exceptions).
I will take fire for this, but I tend to feel that, yes, transgender people really are their biological gender (i.e. 'she' is a man, at least biologically), there are good reasons to separate biological genders in certain settings, and hand-to-hand combat is one of them. As for the people saying that it should be the opponents choice -- presumably women are getting involved with MMA so they can, you know, win a championship or something, and given the physical differences they shouldn't have to go through a man to do that.