How dubiously-sourced lists like “HeCheated” and “SheWon” made their way from the anonymous backwaters of the internet to mainstream media, the United Nations, and statehouses across the country.
I absolutely devastated my daughter in air hockey last night. 10-0. Does that count? She thought she could step to this and I was like not in my house. I’m now Sunrise Manor Elementarys air hockey champion.
This nasty mess has been of interest to intersex people since the Olympics started doing genetic testing on presumably female athletes back in the 60’s when Soviet althletes were accused of passing supposedly male athletes off as female competitors in order to cheat for gold medals. The result was that any intersex person would show up as neither male nor female and to their own shock find out about themselves. It has never stopped being an excuse to turn sports into a nightmare. Welllll not just any sports. The assumption that no female can ever compete against a male is just that. An assumption. Every man - male, intersex or trans is assumed to be vastly superior to any female if both receive athletic training. That is just bullshit. I’m a 5’5” 126lb. Intersex man with perfect testosterone level because having no testes my adult hormones have had to come artificially for my entire adult life. There is no way I could ever compete against a female athlete and win a damned thing. Never could, never will. It’s because my legs are so short. I can’t and couldn’t make my way onto even high school sports for the same reason. My grandfather and his brothers were as short and shorter than me. They gently told me to forget competition because it is morally wrong anyway. “They squeeze all the fun out of everything. Go out and play with people who want everyone to win. They’re the only ones having fun anyway!” They were right.
Yeah this is all against this imaginary background of level playing fields for cis men and women. The absurdity of it being VOLLEYBALL that has become the argument for genetic parity in sports...
A very important point, and one that needs combining with detailed statistics about the distribution of basic physical attributes such as height and BMI.
In a small snapshot of a book I'm preparing (not imminently to be published, unfortunately; it's a lot of work and I have another job!), I mention both Brittney Griner and Robert Reich as examples. Real statistics do not come to a different conclusion.
(There are several more entries on this topic on my Substack, for anyone interested. The real science is fascinating. Cisgender women do, in fact, beat men frequently in extreme distance/endurance sports - I've listed a few examples there - and even elsewhere. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were stuck out in sequence by a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell during a farm team game in 1931. Cynics sneer that they let her, but can anyone seriously imagine both of those guys with their egos doing that?? Ha. The catcher for the farm team said:
"Of course she isn't ready for the Southern League, but her signing with the Lookouts certainly isn't a joke, as some people think. Many pitchers have had a tryout with the Lookouts who couldn't hurl as well as Jackie. Her control is remarkable, and if she is coached along properly has a chance to make good in professional baseball.”
I'm way behind on my email and thus newsletter reading, and refraining from replying to weeks-old comments, but I couldn't let this go: *not* BMI please. At best, it's nothing more than a way to express height/weight ratios (such as one might find in mid-20th-century actuarial tables) in a single figure, that completely ignores muscle mass; at worst, it's not just pseudoscience but pseudoscience designed to apply statistically to large populations that's been misapplied to individuals.
Aside from that, I love your post, and am looking forward to reading your related articles!
For better or worse, BMI is still very frequently used today as a metric by scientists studying athletic performance. It is for certain a crude metric. And that's true even when total body mass is replaced by "lean body mass", or the more specific term fat-free mass. (I've cited an article on this in one of my Substack posts; the original article is here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advnut.2024.100335).
This one (https://jaynasheats.substack.com/p/transgender-athletes-to-be-or-not) has a bit more of the raw data referenced. It's not easy (stiff-upper-lip Brit understatement of the year) to put a proper exposition of "the real science" in one 900-word-maximum post! The thesis that I've arrived at after reading literally hundreds of these papers is that muscle mass is, to put it mildly, overrated. The immediate chemical effects of testosterone are *far* more important.
I'm feverishly working on a post that comes at it from the opposite end: actual competition results. These are reported in terribly abbreviated (and hence distorted) ways by the press. It's amazing what one can learn by "doing the numbers," as Kai Ryssdal used to love saying on PBS's Marketplace. (Turns out that Chelsea Mitchell and Selina Soule don't have much to stand on. 🙂)
Willful ignorance. As Maya Angelou says of people who practice willful ignorance, they are cowards that are afraid to examine their own thoughts. (I paraphrase, perhaps too much).
Thank you for this powerful reporting. The New York Time needs to hear from us that they have a duty to be more transparent and rigorous about their sources!
I find myself extremely angry at what is described as the "mainstream media." If there would just be a BLACKOUT on anti-trans hate filled propaganda. Just because someone says it does not mean they have to print it. A blackout on the felon would even be better. He thrives on attention. TAKE IT AWAY!
If you want a true unbiased figure of how many trans women are in sports the Football Association in UK found they had 20 trans women in total out of the 3 million people that play football in their leagues. They also found that they had no advantage and they are letting trans women take part in football as women.
Awesome piece, thank you! I love the thoroughness and patience of this instead of just ridicule and despair. Does anyone know if there is a maintained list of resources (like this post) that are super useful to link people to to debunk common anti-trans talking points?
It isn't anywhere near what it should be (and this news is a poke in the ribs for me to get down to serious work), but my Substack has several posts with references to key literature specifically on the athletics topic. They come from a half-finished book (which so far has about 250 literature references). I do have another job, unfortunately, so that book is a long ways from publication. I could, however, put some of those "talking points" onto my website.
This link is the first of the posts; there are more.
Jayna, that’s amazing. Writing that has gotta be A LOT of hard work, and I’m sure it’s also infuriating and hard to stomach (just like writing EITM posts are for Erin and S!!).
If you get any further posts together of anti-trans talking points and how to rebut them, please let us know!! Your Substack articles are always well-written and insightful. ♥️
Thanks; that is *much* appreciated! I do put a fair amount of effort into them; so that the reader feels their time was well spent. It's easy to get distracted by the barrage of bad news every day, but getting useful information out is really valuable to combat it. I have to do more.
Hey! I made the list on Hecheated.org!!! I hope I am sufficiently pissing them off. The women that I fence with love me and are the reason that I fence with them. So, they can fuck right off!
The New York Times can now without reservation or hyperbole be placed in the same category as Fox News with respect to transgender issues. And I must take umbrage with Kaitlyn Tiffany's use of the phrase "skew reality" to describe "flat-out lie like a rug."
I'd really enjoy seeing how these people square their "thousands of stolen medals" fantasies with the fact that, averaged over the entire country and all high school sports, a team is likely to have at most 0.2 transgender girls. https://jaynasheats.substack.com/p/chapter-3-the-real-science-of-transgender
It has been so frustrating to see the laziness of mainstream reporting in their willingness to blindly quote this 900 mesals nonsense with no independent verification. Even a casual folliw up could see it is absolute nonsense. And indicating it is a UN report was clearly fakse and malicious.
Finding ADF behind it is not surprising. They are insidious and can be traced to virtually every piece of ant trans legislation and its by product, anti trans reporting, in the country. With representatives in Congress - either elected themselves or married to senators - as well as friends on the courts they have basically installed themselves at every level.
I absolutely devastated my daughter in air hockey last night. 10-0. Does that count? She thought she could step to this and I was like not in my house. I’m now Sunrise Manor Elementarys air hockey champion.
This nasty mess has been of interest to intersex people since the Olympics started doing genetic testing on presumably female athletes back in the 60’s when Soviet althletes were accused of passing supposedly male athletes off as female competitors in order to cheat for gold medals. The result was that any intersex person would show up as neither male nor female and to their own shock find out about themselves. It has never stopped being an excuse to turn sports into a nightmare. Welllll not just any sports. The assumption that no female can ever compete against a male is just that. An assumption. Every man - male, intersex or trans is assumed to be vastly superior to any female if both receive athletic training. That is just bullshit. I’m a 5’5” 126lb. Intersex man with perfect testosterone level because having no testes my adult hormones have had to come artificially for my entire adult life. There is no way I could ever compete against a female athlete and win a damned thing. Never could, never will. It’s because my legs are so short. I can’t and couldn’t make my way onto even high school sports for the same reason. My grandfather and his brothers were as short and shorter than me. They gently told me to forget competition because it is morally wrong anyway. “They squeeze all the fun out of everything. Go out and play with people who want everyone to win. They’re the only ones having fun anyway!” They were right.
Yeah this is all against this imaginary background of level playing fields for cis men and women. The absurdity of it being VOLLEYBALL that has become the argument for genetic parity in sports...
A very important point, and one that needs combining with detailed statistics about the distribution of basic physical attributes such as height and BMI.
In a small snapshot of a book I'm preparing (not imminently to be published, unfortunately; it's a lot of work and I have another job!), I mention both Brittney Griner and Robert Reich as examples. Real statistics do not come to a different conclusion.
(There are several more entries on this topic on my Substack, for anyone interested. The real science is fascinating. Cisgender women do, in fact, beat men frequently in extreme distance/endurance sports - I've listed a few examples there - and even elsewhere. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were stuck out in sequence by a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell during a farm team game in 1931. Cynics sneer that they let her, but can anyone seriously imagine both of those guys with their egos doing that?? Ha. The catcher for the farm team said:
"Of course she isn't ready for the Southern League, but her signing with the Lookouts certainly isn't a joke, as some people think. Many pitchers have had a tryout with the Lookouts who couldn't hurl as well as Jackie. Her control is remarkable, and if she is coached along properly has a chance to make good in professional baseball.”
https://jaynasheats.substack.com/p/chapter-3-the-real-science-of-transgender
I'm way behind on my email and thus newsletter reading, and refraining from replying to weeks-old comments, but I couldn't let this go: *not* BMI please. At best, it's nothing more than a way to express height/weight ratios (such as one might find in mid-20th-century actuarial tables) in a single figure, that completely ignores muscle mass; at worst, it's not just pseudoscience but pseudoscience designed to apply statistically to large populations that's been misapplied to individuals.
Aside from that, I love your post, and am looking forward to reading your related articles!
For better or worse, BMI is still very frequently used today as a metric by scientists studying athletic performance. It is for certain a crude metric. And that's true even when total body mass is replaced by "lean body mass", or the more specific term fat-free mass. (I've cited an article on this in one of my Substack posts; the original article is here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advnut.2024.100335).
This one (https://jaynasheats.substack.com/p/transgender-athletes-to-be-or-not) has a bit more of the raw data referenced. It's not easy (stiff-upper-lip Brit understatement of the year) to put a proper exposition of "the real science" in one 900-word-maximum post! The thesis that I've arrived at after reading literally hundreds of these papers is that muscle mass is, to put it mildly, overrated. The immediate chemical effects of testosterone are *far* more important.
I'm feverishly working on a post that comes at it from the opposite end: actual competition results. These are reported in terribly abbreviated (and hence distorted) ways by the press. It's amazing what one can learn by "doing the numbers," as Kai Ryssdal used to love saying on PBS's Marketplace. (Turns out that Chelsea Mitchell and Selina Soule don't have much to stand on. 🙂)
Professional athletes who cheat with steroids and other means are always treated better than trans people in sports.
Their only hope is their continued misinformation campaign. It is disgusting and immoral and hateful. Monsters.
Willful ignorance. As Maya Angelou says of people who practice willful ignorance, they are cowards that are afraid to examine their own thoughts. (I paraphrase, perhaps too much).
Thank you for this powerful reporting. The New York Time needs to hear from us that they have a duty to be more transparent and rigorous about their sources!
I find myself extremely angry at what is described as the "mainstream media." If there would just be a BLACKOUT on anti-trans hate filled propaganda. Just because someone says it does not mean they have to print it. A blackout on the felon would even be better. He thrives on attention. TAKE IT AWAY!
These provably untrue statistics will only serve to help prove our point that some people will stop at nothing to hurt us. It’s pure hate.
If you want a true unbiased figure of how many trans women are in sports the Football Association in UK found they had 20 trans women in total out of the 3 million people that play football in their leagues. They also found that they had no advantage and they are letting trans women take part in football as women.
Transgender women can continue playing under new FA rules - https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c4g7e81nn57o
Awesome piece, thank you! I love the thoroughness and patience of this instead of just ridicule and despair. Does anyone know if there is a maintained list of resources (like this post) that are super useful to link people to to debunk common anti-trans talking points?
It isn't anywhere near what it should be (and this news is a poke in the ribs for me to get down to serious work), but my Substack has several posts with references to key literature specifically on the athletics topic. They come from a half-finished book (which so far has about 250 literature references). I do have another job, unfortunately, so that book is a long ways from publication. I could, however, put some of those "talking points" onto my website.
This link is the first of the posts; there are more.
https://jaynasheats.substack.com/p/transgender-women-in-athletics
Jayna, that’s amazing. Writing that has gotta be A LOT of hard work, and I’m sure it’s also infuriating and hard to stomach (just like writing EITM posts are for Erin and S!!).
If you get any further posts together of anti-trans talking points and how to rebut them, please let us know!! Your Substack articles are always well-written and insightful. ♥️
Thanks; that is *much* appreciated! I do put a fair amount of effort into them; so that the reader feels their time was well spent. It's easy to get distracted by the barrage of bad news every day, but getting useful information out is really valuable to combat it. I have to do more.
Damn it, all my stolen mountain biking podiums were overlooked - just going to have to cheat harder, I guess!
Hey! I made the list on Hecheated.org!!! I hope I am sufficiently pissing them off. The women that I fence with love me and are the reason that I fence with them. So, they can fuck right off!
The New York Times can now without reservation or hyperbole be placed in the same category as Fox News with respect to transgender issues. And I must take umbrage with Kaitlyn Tiffany's use of the phrase "skew reality" to describe "flat-out lie like a rug."
I'd really enjoy seeing how these people square their "thousands of stolen medals" fantasies with the fact that, averaged over the entire country and all high school sports, a team is likely to have at most 0.2 transgender girls. https://jaynasheats.substack.com/p/chapter-3-the-real-science-of-transgender
The fact that they're keeping a doxxing list of teenagers yet don't stop to consider that maybe they're on the wrong side is astounding.
There’s no self-reflection happening in ANY of these MAGA asshats. No questioning. No thoughts. Empty head.
It's not about transgender, it's about making sure that women know their place.
It's the basis for challenging anyone who is too good or not pretty enough
It has been so frustrating to see the laziness of mainstream reporting in their willingness to blindly quote this 900 mesals nonsense with no independent verification. Even a casual folliw up could see it is absolute nonsense. And indicating it is a UN report was clearly fakse and malicious.
Finding ADF behind it is not surprising. They are insidious and can be traced to virtually every piece of ant trans legislation and its by product, anti trans reporting, in the country. With representatives in Congress - either elected themselves or married to senators - as well as friends on the courts they have basically installed themselves at every level.