Transgender skaters and ISU

stevenlee said:

Hi!

Double whammy here...Too old to even think about being competitive and transgender, but going for it. (Or going to die trying, possibly.)

Obviously, just like every other aspect of life, people's transitions are completely unique. How your body takes (or rejects in some cases) the hormones, how quickly the hormones affect you and in what ways.

I was only on my testosterone injections for 4 months before I had an insurance issue, and am just now getting able to get back on them.

Even if your body takes the hormones well, the changes are very gradual.

Here's what it's done for me over the 4 months on and 2-3 months off - Facial hair and redistribution of fat and muscle, not change in mass of muscle or fat, any differently than before injections. As far as exercise and "performance" goes, nothing has changed, but I was born with a naturally athletic build and have been doing athletics on and off for my entire life; ballet, volleyball, soccer, fire performing (dancing if you must), hooping and even weight lifting.

Everyone worries about the concern of it being fair, and I could see far more concern with MTF, as SOME, not all, biological males are just naturally more resilient and athletically inclined than biological females, whereas biological females usually have an easier time with gaining and maintaining flexibility, and biological males tend to be the same, but with power and strength.

Transitioning from female to male, even with injections you're probably at a disadvantage still when it comes to competing with people who are born biologically male, depending on where in your transition you're at, (I'm looking at this from an ongoing HRT / pre-OP standpoint, because...Hi. That's me.), because the replacement goes at such a gradual pace that there's really not a lot of performance boosting to it...
Not to mention if your T levels are too high, your body can convert it into excess estrogen and essentially cancel out the effects of the testosterone, and it's also hard on your liver, so doses are based on the individual and what is healthy and maintaining for that individual, never too much, or anything extremely high that could be considered performance enhancing, and if that was the case then you'd need to find a new doctor, because that's begging for health problems. (RIP Liver and Kidneys, it was nice knowing you.)

That being said, if you'd been competing as a female athlete all your life, like a gymnast or a figure skater and you had the flexibility edge on the other guys now that you're transitioning, or if you'd been competing as a male all your life and brought your super awesome quad jumps into the female competition, I could see where the playing field seems questionable....

HOWEVER, hear me out, male or female, inside or out, something that you've worked hard to achieve as either sex or gender, before, during or after transition, is something you've worked hard to do REGARDLESS, and should be treated as such without taking your physical sex and gender identity into account.

But you know...that's me... just dropping a little bit of an insight bomb from my end.

I will now descend back into my safety net of memes and cooking videos, as that was hands down the most serious topic I've commented on in quite some time, and it's really draining.

Ciao! :agree:

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VegMom said:

As discussed already, there are many factors that go into gender identity:

1. Hormones
2. Genitalia
3. DNA
4. How others perceive you
5. How you perceive yourself

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Manitou said:

If a scientist says otherwise then he/she is disqualified...

If people say opinions I have a right to say mine.

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Manitou said:

Whatever have worked for tens of thousands of years must work now and must work for another tens of thousands of years.

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Mathman said:

You do, of course,. But if your opinion is that people who do not agree with your opinion are "disqualified" from contributing to the discussion, ... well, gosh.

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drivingmissdaisy said:

... society as a whole is doing a better job of making reasonable accommodations to make people feel normal and included. .

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Manitou said:

In the theory of gravity if two bodies fall onto one another then each of them moves towards the other opposite to its contribution to the total mass. So if a person falls on Earth then it's the person who does most of the trip, rather than the Earth moving towards the person.

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gsk8 said:

You are entitled to your opinion. You have stated it. This is a LBGTQ-friendly forum. This thread was not created to debate transgenderism itself, but the ISU's policy on transgender skaters. It is not a philosophy or ideology to be discussed. If this thread turns discriminatory, hateful, if folks start pontificating, and/or it turns "political" in nature, it will disappear.

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notunprepared said:

Can it just be locked instead if it turns into a cesspool? There's some good information about ioc rules and speculation about how the isu might use/adjust them for figure skating on the first couple of pages.

And yeah, I didn't intend for this to become a debate. Of any kind. I just wanted to know if there were skaters like me, or whether it would even be possible for trans skaters to compete properly. That question has been answered, so I feel like the discussion should be over? Unless the isu makes an announcement on the topic, but that's probably unlikely to happen anytime soon. And then it'll be it's own thread anyway.

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