That Trans Thread

[Rev. Rye]

I don’t think that you need to be on hormones or T-blockers in order to be considered trans. Trans women are women, but for sports, that alone doesn’t matter. If they don’t take their hormones, they tend to have a material advantage that cis women don’t. They’d sooner put Lance Armstrong back in the Tour de France.

These guidelines have been around for decades, and, to use one major example, the Olympics has allowed trans women to participate since 2003, and one of the conditions would be that they needed to be on hormones. Their rules were originally stricter, requiring full genital surgery and legal recognition by their country of origin, but both would be scrapped in 2015. The hormonal requirement, while relaxed a bit (originally, they needed to be on hormones for two years, now they only needed to be on them for one year prior to competition.)

If you understand the controversy around steroids in sports, it shouldn’t be too hard to understand this rule, especially since estrogen and t-blockers are anti-steroids in every sense of the word.

For the record, as Lady Ballers has showed, this requirement hasn’t satiated many transphobes because for a lot of them, the conversation they really want to have isn’t “should they be allowed in sports?” It’s really “should they be allowed to exist?”