The International Cricket Council has become the latest sports body to ban transgender players from the elite women’s game if they have gone through male puberty.
The ICC said it had taken the decision, following an extensive scientific review and nine-month consultation, to “protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players”.
It joins rugby union, swimming, cycling, athletics and rugby league, who have all gone down a similar path in recent years after citing concerns over fairness or safety.
If your idea of strength is only measured by muscle mass instead of by qualities like perseverance and speed and agility, then it’s true that men have an edge over women. I happen to think that strength can be measured in other ways.
That’s not my idea, no - but different sports are biased in different ways. Something like a shot put is all about raw muscle mass while billards is all about fine motor control and spacial reasoning. No skill is more valuable than another but certain sports and competitions emphasize different things.
In most competitive sports, men do have an edge because they’re sports that men were traditionally good at.
I believe men only have the edge in being “traditionally good at” some sports because women were excluded from them for so long. Not because women are inherently weaker. And (this isn’t about your comments) again I state that it’s imbecility to say that transgender males have some kind of an “edge” over other athletes - suggesting that being trans imbues you with all these amazing supernatural athletic abilities!
I still say that sports is about one thing only - all people of all walks of life having the right to participate.
Just to clarify, transmen are almost never an issue people care about. This debate is usually focused on transwomen who may have even gone through puberty before transitioning.
If we accept that cismen have more muscle mass than ciswomen and that transitioning, physically, is a gradual process then there are two questions 1) after transitioning will transwomen ever be indistinguishable from ciswomen when it comes to sports and 2) how quickly does that happen.
We’ve only got a few pretty flawed papers to go by but they say that ciswomen and transwomen will always be distinguishable when it comes to sports. If those papers are wrong then it’d still be good to know how long it takes and what factors effect it (I.e. it’s likely that someone who fully went through puberty will take longer to adjust to the new hormones).