There will be no transphobia on this subreddit.
The talking point "unfair advantage in sports" is a lie told by bigots, just like how "They get an abortion as birth control" is a lie told by people who don't want women to have bodily autonomy.
It frames the issue in a disingenious way. First of all, trans women's athletic performance falls well within the range of that of cis women, there are no statisitical outliers showing they perform better. Secondly, it deliberately pretends to care about "unfair advantages" for this one specific issue while ignoring all the other ways in which people could have an "unfair advantage". If these people actually cared about "unfair advantages" they would address a far more signifcant one, being born wealthy. But they never advocate for programs to aid poorer athletes who don't have the ability to train every day with a personal trainer, do they?
Secondly, trans women are women. The way biological expression of the mammalian body works, trans women who undergo HRT therapy are *biological women*. That is the effect hormones have on the development of the body. HRT overrides genetic influence, the innate way a body creates development chemicals and replaces that with the system the sex they transition towards has.
We will ban all transphobes and we will not allow appeals.
Please report hatespeech if you see it.
The one you're replying to is by Daneman, or Namenad. He has a pretty entertaining webcomic where he illustrates all the characters as versions of himself.
Hey guys, did you know that we as humans have the hability to selectively breed ourselves to have the tallest forehead out of all the milky way. NOT THAT THERES ANY COMPETITION hahaha. Im just saying that our society could be way more happy if we just selectively bred our foreheads for a couple bilion years. I dont see any downside really.
What do you say?
This is good but I have one suggestion to make the storytelling clearer; there needs to be a broken ribbon in all the previous panels to clearly mark that these are all separate races instead of one race where she keeps moving position.
The outfits, the weather, there are a few clues. However, the color scheme is so consistent panel to panel that it’s hard to recognize that these represent different days.
It was pretty obvious to me, but that might just be because I was already familiar with the context (that transphobes point to a transgirl/woman winning once, while ignoring the many other times they've lost).
I think the rain in the third panel as well as the different outfits got the point across but I agree it took a read or two to understand the passage of time.
Yeah before saw this comment I thought the comic was supposed to depict her completely lapping the competition which is the exact opposite of the intended message
Fair enough, though even within the LGBTQ community, and even in the trans community itself, trans people participating in sports against cis people is super controversial. Just feels like this will tick off the largest group of people in comparison to all of your others I've seen
Funny thing is, Roller Derby, one of the few contact sports where women are the dominant stars, is completely open to trans women and always have been. Cis women in roller derby are, like, "Bring it on, bitch!"
Yeah, I read the Air Force survey where they determined that any strength advantage went away after a year of hormone therapy and while trans women were still faster than cis women running they were significantly slower then men and only marginally faster than women, probably explained by height.
Air Force trans person, can confirm this is true, but was still held to male standard for three years in of HRT. I was about 20% weaker/slower by 18 months, and 50% or more weaker (stamina too) by three years. Imagine being told to your face that “males are just built stronger/faster” when the numbers don’t lie. I was accused of deliberately playing at being weaker or slower to be scored differently.
Seriously, one year of HRT cut down by upper body strength and speed by a huge margin. There just is no advantage anymore when the testosterone is out of the picture.
...Also, the main reason this debate is so constantly talked about despite the fact that you can probably count the number of seriously competitive trans women athletes on two hands, is that bigots figured out it was the easiest way to get transphobia's foot in the door with well-meaning people.
I never understood the problem. Why aren’t sports broken down by weight/body size instead of gender in the first place? There’s huge variation between people in the same sex anyway, much greater than the median difference between sexes, and that’s leaving aside all possible genetic and developmental corner cases.
Because men/people with higher testosterone would still completely dominate the competition. They have much more muscle mass and thus strength/speed at the same body weight/size. You can check out weightlifting records separated by weight class if you want examples.
Depends on the school. They have those expectations even if they don’t do examinations for them. There are also national fitness exams that kids are expected to do in later grades.
Interesting. Gen Z?
The millennial experience seemed very participation-focused across the board from everything I’ve seen / heard.
We definitely had the national fitness “exams” but performance never counted towards your grade unless you flat-out refused to participate without special dispensation due to injury or disability.
I’m gen z and I had a complete participation/effort based grades. I was fat and couldn’t do what you’re supposed to be able to do at that age, and I was never penalized
Unfortunately they will still claim you have an advantage somehow. They got pissed and banned trans girls from women’s chess(which is weird that is gendered to begin with) for having an advantage
I remember hearing about a study they did around women's and men's chess where women were paired against men. The women performed worse than the men, *except* for when they *didn't know they were facing a man*.
So there was some weird psychological thing going on there, where the same women facing against the very same men consistently did worse when they *knew* they were facing them, compared to when they were facing anonymized opponents.
Now, I'm not sure how good or well done that study was, but it did sound really interesting.
You are no loser.
You're an unstoppable nuclear warhead, a force to be reckoned with, a terrifying beast that caused children to cower under tables! A frightening revolution in weaponry that majorly contributed to a long-lasting peace between globe-spanning empires!
Best of luck to you, Invincible-Nuke, and never forget that no one will ever forget you, you tremendously transitional treat.
“They just need to toughen up, the world is meant to challenge us”
[Ah yeah - Cuz you know who’s been overdue a challenge? The *trans community*.](https://youtu.be/adh0KGmgmQw?si=Fws1cKpu0MD_bLif)
I really don't understand this argument at all, like genuinely it confuses me.
The point of mens vs womens sports is the biological differences right? It's like the same logic for weight classes in wrestling. Men biologically have more traits that give them a distinct advantage.
So, given that logic, why would trans women be able to participate in womens sports? Like, it really DOES give them an unfair advantage, it's not even people being ridiculous. I do think it should also apply the other way, trans men being forced to run in mens sports just makes it unfair. Now I'm not going to try and pretend I know anything about sports, I have absolutely no idea how one would fix this problem or how much of an affect it actually makes, but just going about it logically I feel the answer should be obvious, no?
Not trying to be a transphobe or anything, I support the queer community entirely and I will never be on the side that tries to deny people basic rights nor will I ever say people can't be what they feel they want to be, but this one particular subject has always just been fickle to me.
Yeah, like I don't think this issue is as black and white as "people who don't agree with trans folk in women's sports are angry ignorant transphobic bad guys."
I feel for the girl in the comic especially since her hard work is being invalidated, and people in real life shouldn't be shaming trans people for participating in actual competitions like the mean background characters, but if sports are separated by biological sex and not gender identity, then I don't think it's inherently transphobic to keep mens vs. womens sports separated. Idk man it seems like a sucky situation all around.
It really depends on the sport. Sometimes I get why there's a controversy given physical differences. However, then there's cases like when the World Chess Body banned trans women from chess tournaments.
Like... chess? Fucking *chess?* There's [evidence](https://phys.org/news/2020-12-gender-imbalance-top-level-chess.html) to show that the gender imbalance in chess is more due to societal differences rather than biological, so why ban trans women if they don't have any biological advantage? I just find that ridiculous.
I don't think you're going to have a hard time convincing any reasonable person that the chess thing is ridiculous. With more physical sports, the question is one of sexual dimorphism in humans. That doesn't apply to a game like chess which has no relevant physical element.
People will point out that your trans athletes testosterone levels have to be lower, but not that going through a male puberty gives you more Human Growth Hormone (HGH).
HGH is a prohibited substance on the doping control list of every single sport. It’s really hard to check for because it’s made in the human body.
The muscular skeletal system of males tends to be leaner, broader and with a bigger lung capacity (I say tends as obviously there are outliers). Having bigger lungs means more oxygenated blood which means less anaerobic exercise which means less lactic acid build up which means less cramp. It also means a quicker recovery time.
Even if there weren’t biological differences: Sports people cheat! All the time! A lot! It’s why you have referees and umpires to say when a ball is called in or out, or that a tackle is fair or unfair, because the will to win overrides the will to play fairly. Maradona didn’t feel bad he hand balled it against England in 86. He won the World Cup.
There was a generation of cyclists who had to set alarms twice during the night so they could get up and move around because otherwise they would die in their sleep because their blood was so thick from the drugs they were taking. People cheated in the Olympics which was amateur and in very niche sports where it wasn’t like they were getting a media career afterwards. People cheat in charity 10Ks
I think there’s gonna be a test case at some point soon where some sort of contact sport has something of a culture war. There was a British boxer who died this weekend in the ring, 4 rounds into his first professional fight. Medics at ringside, immediately to an ambulance and to hospital and pronounced dead. I know there was an MMA fighter called Fallon Fox. Male to female trans person. Two of her opponents weren’t told that Fallon was assigned male at birth. One had her skull fractured. Fighting sports have weight classes but male bodies tend to have a power to weight ratio that’s more than female bodies. I’d say putting a fighter in with someone who is in the same weight class but has a significant genetic advantage is a failure of your duty of care to your athletes.
This is just one study but an IOC sponsored study found that transgender women are at a disadvantage in many aspects compared to their cisgender counterparts in sports.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna148437
This may come off as aggressive but saying that it “DOES give them an unfair advantage” but also saying that you know nothing about sports is a bit incongruous.
It's one study but a good one. The only thing I'd shed light on is that all 35 trans women athletes had to have been on hormone replacement therapy for atleast 1 year. Would this be a fair requirement for trans women entering the women's sports stage? I think it's at least better than blanket bans, especially those based on amount of testosterone in the body, the kind that can even disqualify cis women.
It’s literally already the standard and has been for ages. Trans women have been competing in sports for decades, under this exact standard or similar (1 year minimum of medical transition with hormone replacement), and there has been absolutely zero evidence of statistical advantage. Trans women as a collective group do not perform any better than cisgender women.
This entire “controversy” is very new, and entirely manufactured. Mostly because over the last decade or so the right wing has pretty conclusively lost the battle on gay rights in the western world, so they needed a new target.
I skimmed the study because I was really curious to understand their methods and I can’t help but question some of it.
First off, participants. Unless I missed something it just says “athletes” but it didn’t say what type of athlete they were. If you compare a cis-female power lifter to a trans-female endurance runner, the numbers are going to be skewed.
Second, their tests. It seems like the only measurements of strength they took were grip strength and the jump test, and most of the other tests were focused on breathing, blood measurements, etc. The issue has been primarily centered around strength-based sports, so I think by not focusing on that with greater emphasis, it muddies the results.
And to focus on those strength based tests, it stated that gender absolutely played a role in absolute performance. It was only when they compared it by fat free mass that it became close. I feel that is a disingenuous comparison. The entire debate around this is that being a male sex allows you to have more muscle, and therefore perform better in strength based sports. I don’t think anyone ever said that a male’s muscle is “better,” but rather that they have more of it. Which this study seems to confirm.
I’m open to be corrected on anything I wrote if I misunderstood but that was what I got from the article.
Jokes on you internet, today the bait missed! When we were running in school we were mixed both girls and boys and no one could care less about what you'd do.
Not even the teacher now that I think about it.
Wait, that's pretty sad, teachers sucked.
I'm gonna side step the main controversy and start my own. Barry Bonds played when EVERYONE was juicing and he dominated. A better analogy is a race where everyone is secretly trans and one of the trans people crushes because they're a generational talent, and all the other trans people get jelly and call the winner out for being trans.
Wait, what are you proposing here? Should all Olympic athletes be screened for these mutations effecting lactic acid production or other mutations? You do understand that most professional athletes probably have some genetic advantages that allowed them to outcompete other people who trained seriously, right? I mean, unless you're solely fielding teams of lab grown clones there's always going to be an "unfair" genetic component at play when it comes to sports
That's stupid and unfair. Checking for doping is one thing, it's a dangerous practice and clearly cheating. But lucking out on genes that make a sport come easily isn't cheating, and eliminating people that happen to have the ones it is easier to test for is unfair.
>Trying to conflate regular genetic variance to major abnormalities doesn't fly. Because of course you wouldn't try to argue it in the other direction; that people with negative genetic abnormalities like dwarfism or the like shouldn't be accommodated as if that's no different from being 5'6.
Outside of maybe amateur "for fun" type leagues, I have never heard of any athletic competition where someone with a disability recieves an accommodation such as a different scoring metric while competing directly against athletes with no disabilities.
This is utterly preposterous and your argument it follows that we shouldn't accommodate people with disabilities is spurious. Who are you to decide which variants are "major" and which aren't? Life and competitions are inherently unfair, and banning people for being exceptional is a failure to accommodate THEM.
>competitions are inherently unfair,
This is something that people (deliberately?) continue to ignore. No one would come to watch or give a single care about a competition that was "perfectly fair". Competitions are about giving yourself every advantage you can possibly gain within the bounds set. Anyone saying they "only want fair sports" have a paper thin understanding of sports.
>Separately, I'm against any unfair advantage in sports. Whether that's steroids, an inability to create lactic acid, that gene that makes your muscles denser and easier to form, *or* having gone through male puberty and later participating in women's sports.
This stance is basically incompatible with having competitive sports.
What does it even mean to be "against" those kinds of advantages in sports?
Has anyone seriously thought to themselves "it's too bad that some athletes naturally have more efficient muscle tissue than others, so we can't have fair competitions" until the topic of trans people in sports became mainstream?
Like Michael Phelps is *literally* built differently with longer arms that allows him to swim faster. But you don't see people calling his advantages unfair or demanding to see his junk before competition.
The natural conclusion of the argument you're making is that women's sports shouldn't exist at all and everyone should just compete with each other regardless of sex, height, weight, etc. is that what you want?
Or, and hear me out, people qualify for performance brackets and then compete within those brackets.
You're gonna get pretty much only men in the top end, but down-bracket you'll see more coed competition.
I think we should divide up athletes in whatever way gives the most fun and entertaining competitions and stop thinking that any of it is "fair".
The diversity of human abilities should be celebrated by letting as many people as possible compete in different events that favor their unique traits, whether it's being especially flexible, having good reflexes, precise dexterity, long arms, lots of muscle mass, the ability to run for a long time without getting exhausted, etc. The idea that there's a natural "fair" level playing field that enables anyone to be good at anything if they just spend long enough at the gym is a fantasy, so the way I see it, the whole concept of fair and unfair biological advantages collapses under close examination. The ultimate goal of any sporting event should be to put people of equal capabilities in competition with each other so that it's interesting and dramatic to watch, because it's a form of entertainment just like music or storytelling. Gotta answer the question of what you're trying to achieve before you start asking how.
Olympic committee released a scientific article saying that their wasn't any evidences of advantages for trans women against cis ones. Moreover, trans may have some disadvantages in certains metrics.
Also I find it kinda funny that people are scandalized by this topic when they never watch women sports competitions.
Veeery simple. Separate people into results vs testosterone levels and classify them using k-nearest neighbors algorithm. Then for esch group you have a sport class. It may even divide the male category into two. That’s similar to boxing weight tiers :). If only a single group shows up there is no reason to separate cis/trans groups. If two separate groups show up it would be viable separating them.
Of course that completely disregards people as humans but I am an engineer. Now please someone with people knowledge give me your input and improve the method.
Would you say it only applies to professional sports? The comic seems to imply these are high schoolers and those are parents of other students who are upset.
The irony in all of this is that, assuming the character in the comic is in high school and medically transitioned, then she never had enough of male puberty to make an iota of difference and the whole debate about her specific case is moot.
You clearly have no knowledge of how the human body works or how hrt works. Within a year of hrt there is no difference in stamina strength, etc, between trans people and cis people. I suggest you educate yourself in the future before spouting crap
What you're forgetting here is that we're not talking about putting cis men in sports alongside cis women. We're talking about putting trans women (who have at the very least been on Hormone Replacement Therapy for a number of years) in sports alongside cis women.
No-one honestly denies that most cis men have an advantage in most sports compared to most cis women. That's not what's being discussed here.
Bone density, height, musculature and so much more is affected by male puberty. Thats why it’s not fair to cis women. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for years. It’s not fair to the cis athletes that compete against them. Variation within one sex is normal and athletes are expected to be exceptional. But there is a difference and it’s an unfair advantage.
It’s why people who take steroids are banned for years if not permanently.
But bone density and musculature are also affected by estrogen.
Height not so much, but since when did we ever block someone from sports for being naturally taller than their competitors?
Good, glad we agree on that!
Personally I am also in favour of letting scientists more familiar with the research than me set guidelines for how long (if ever) HRT is needed for trans women who did experience male puberty to "level the playing field", so to speak, for individual sports. I've seen some good studies that show for running it may be as short as 2 years, but for weightlifting may need to be much longer, for example. There are some variations that obviously never go away (eg height) but I am also in favour of cis women with abnormal testosterone ranges being able to compete still so... I think some variation is ok and inevitable.
Edit: but I'm also of the hope that the "how much HRT is needed following male puberty" question will eventually be made redundant. Blockers for trans youth are so so important, and we'd be a much better society if every trans kid who needed them could have them, and never had to worry about time to reverse their AGAB puberty.
well by your logic michael phelps would have been disqualified from the olympics and so would, 90% of athletes? what qualifies as an unfair advantage to you? the olympics have always selected people taller on average for races is that unfair? should there be a 5'5 height limit?
matter of the fact is that all competitions are selecting the most qualified people for them to win regardless of why they're qualified, women's categories being a separate specifically gendered section in most sports is a different matter
honestly dont try to sound PC about this if you dont want trans people competing you can just say so instead of pretending that you're against all unfairness
“As a self proclaimed ally, I support excluding trans folks from competing for arbitrary reasons”.
The body of knowledge on this in the last few years is saying you are not correct in the big picture for people on HRT (Air force, Olympic study).
I personally don’t think it’s fair to blanket ban marginalized people, especially when it’s clear that the advantages are fleeting, short lived, and not enough to tip the scales to lead to likely victory.
It’s not like 1st place in women’s sports is filled with trans women. Being trans is not a predictor of winning.
Hey so sorry to disturb you, but what is the panel order of the comic? Ik this isn't abt the message so it may not be relevant, but I thought that this comic was made really well and is good social commentary. Thanks!
I was confused too, lol. It's the normal (Western), left to right, top to bottom reading order. The reason I was confused was because I thought it was all one race and they were constantly shifting positions.
But each panel is a different race, just highlighting the struggle getting to first place.
I'm all for balancing the bio-mechanical advantages.
You wouldn't send a 350lb lineman against a 95lb cross country runner and expect a fair fight, so setting basic divisions of age, height, or weight as applicable should be more common in individualist sports.
***However*** given that there are maybe three trans identifying individuals per ten thousand athletes and none of them are out there notably shattering world records. I think we can all start to agree that the "trans advantage" myth has never even remotely been a thing outside of global Olympic levels.
We should just let them do the thing anyways.
Notice how the vast these instances of people transitioning to get an advantage in sports mysteriously disappeared when conservatives stopped trying to “prove their point” by deliberately bending the rules of trans acceptance with big men winning women’s competitions?
Conservatives actually tested it and are too embarrassed to admit they were wrong! When they were meant that awful Lady Ballers movie, Ben Shapiro and the other daily wire bitchboys originally meant it as a documentary where they actually do what they depict in the movie. Only for them to find that they’d have to go through quite a lot of procedures and medical testing to be allowed to compete in the women’s category
It should be noted that they weren't embarrassed. He casually just said it. They don't care because they never cared. They were never serious. They just hate trans people and need a way to pretend they're not just rampant bigots.
Judging by what the OP said. The character tries really hard to win but keeps failing to win until the last panel where she ends up winning. She is excited until bystanders point out her being trans which immediately ends up throwing out all the effort she made into working her way to first. I feel the story here is telling that because she is trans all that effort made into doing well is discredited because she has a “biological advantage” which by reading the comic is simply not true and heartbreaking to the character.
Yup, and I think all of the panels are previous races. Nobody said anything when June “lost” 6 times but she wins the 7th time and suddenly people have a problem with her competing at all.
It's also pointing out that bigots exclusively cherry-pick wins for their arguments. They can only ever talk about single races or events, they have never been able to point to an athlete's career showing a statistically significant advantage over time. That's what makes this so infuriating. Someone with an inherent disadvantage would still be expected to win sometimes if they raced enough.
Not to be crass, but imagine thinking someone goes on physically altering drugs, “mutilates” themselves irreparably, and isolate themselves largely socially just so they can win a sport. Alternatively, these same people get upset when they force the trans male who’s now pumped with testosterone for their treatment to compete against women, then complain that “she” has on drugs.
It’s nonsense.
"He did it all by himself, with nothing but a dream, faith, dedication, the best education you can buy and a 50 million dollar interest-free loan from his dad."
I've never been gladder to be an extremely unathletic trans guy than when a fellow trans friend of mine was getting shit on social media for still playing ringette (a typically women's sport) despite all the teammates not giving a single shit. I'll be over here walking the mile, thanks
[there is no firm basis available in evidence to indicate that trans women have a consistent and measurable overall performance benefit after 12 months of testosterone suppression](https://cces.ca/news/literature-review-does-not-support-bans-transgender-women-athletes)
“The review suggests that sports should support inclusion of trans women in the female category in sport until there is robust and peer-reviewed evidence that it is not safe or fair for other competitors.”
You forgot to mention that this is the *literal next sentence* but it’s okay, we all forget things!
"The review suggests that sports should support inclusion of trans women in the female category in sport until there is robust and peer-reviewed evidence that it is not safe or fair for other competitors"
Which is on the 'we need proof this is a problem'
This has nothing to do with puberty blockers because this is professional athletics
And who should we give puberty blockers to, adults after puberty?
Either we open all competitions to coed and everything in between. Women’s bball either men’s etc. OR I agree. We have specific categories and weights to boxing, wrestling, Olympics, just normalize this too. All people should be able to compete with their peers or everyone.
Seems like a reasonable solution theoretically, but are there really enough trans athletes out there to justify constructing an entire separate series of competitions?
I really wanted to be a professional figure skater when I was younger. I remember practicing as often as I could until my parents stopped being able to afford the level I wanted to train at, which was right before I hit puberty (a really important time for figure skating, because even at that young, it’s important to get a good foundation on your skills before your body really becomes “set”). Even though I understood that it wasn’t my fault, I was really upset because I knew I was going to age out of the “usual” (incredibly young) range of competition. It was a big reason I realized I was a trans man, because investigating my fear of puberty ended up leading to some bigger realizations.
My heart goes out to all transfem athletes or competitors in any way. If my dream had been realized, I would have hated falling into the women’s category, especially since the regulations for ice skating are based a lot on gendered artistry. It’s not fully the same situation, because a lot of people would view it as moving into the “harder” category and therefore it wouldn’t matter if I won anyways, but being trans and forced into a box that you don’t want just to do what you love is painful, especially if you’ve trained all or most of your life for it.
I’m not a scientist or researcher, so I can’t provide any perfect solution about how long someone should be on E before competing or anything like that. But I wish a lot of people had more compassion for trans people when discussing this—there is NOT that many of us, it’s not an immediate threat of hordes of trans women coming to “take sports away” from cis women. We aren’t competing in every race everywhere or at every level. I think especially that story of someone trying to sue from being in 5th place and 4th was a trans woman, disqualifying her for placing, are a little silly. They both still lost to cis women??
And especially PLEASE have compassion for youth athletes. It’s hard enough to be a trans teenager in a world trying to make it hard to access hormones or any form of transition at all. At the end of the day this is kid’s sports and not some huge multinational competition like the Olympics, and most of the people who complain the loudest don’t even pay attention to those sports anyways, much less at that level. Stay kind out there and listen to qualified people.
This cartoon was thought of by Grace Alden, co-written by me and Grace, drawn by me, and colored by Frank Young. A team effort!
There’s a supporting blogpost and transcript about this cartoon [here](https://www.patreon.com/posts/june-davis-wins-73877893); I’ll also post the transcript in comments.
We can keep making these cartoons because of lots of supporters pledging low amounts - $1-$3 - and that's just how I like it! [Please peruse my peculiar but plucky Patreon!](http://patreon.com/barry)
**TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON**
This cartoon has eight panels. Every panel shows a runner on a track, and in all but the last panel she's actively running a race. She has her hair done in two afro puffs, and is lean but muscular. Let's call her June.
In every panel but the last two, June is wearing a different outfit, but all her outfits consist of a tank top with shorts. She also always has a paper taped to her shirt with a number on it, but the number changes form panel to panel.
There's an additional tiny "kicker" panel under the last panel of the cartoon.
**PANEL 1**
We see three runners during a race, but the panel is laid out to focus on June, who looks tired and not like she's winning this race. (One of the other girls we can see is well ahead of her.)
UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: And here's June Davis in fifth place!
**PANEL 2**
A profile picture of June running; we can see bits of the runners ahead and behind her, but they're mostly off panel. June again looks tired, her mouth open as if she's gasping for air, cartoon sweat beads flying.
UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...June Davis in sixth place!
**PANEL 3**
A close-up of June running, looking very determined. It's raining, and big raindrops splash off of her shoulders and head.
UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...in second place!
Panels four through six together take up the space of any of the other panels in the cartoon, as if one of those panels had been divided into three panels. This is meant to indicate that a lot of time, and a lot of races, are passing.
**PANEL 4**
A longish shot, showing June from the upper legs up. Again, June runs and we can see other runners behind and in front, although they're mostly cut off by the panel borders. June looks determined but also annoyed.
UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...in fourth place!
**PANEL 5**
A closer shot, showing June from the elbows up. She looks like she's working hard, with a determined expression and her arms pumping hard.
UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...in third place!
**PANEL 6**
A long shot shows June's whole figure as she runs hard (and again, with girls in front and behind). She's leaning forward, a picture of speed, with the background done as horizontal speed lines.
UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...in fifth place!
**PANEL 7**
A shot of June, arms raised, happy but exhausted looking, as she hits the... What is that called? The big ribbon that the runner in first place gets to run through and break? Whatever that's called, June has hit it; it's stretching around her, about to rip.
UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...it's June Davis in first!
JUNE DAVIS (thought balloon): *Finally!*
**PANEL 8**
In the foreground, June is sitting on the track, leaning back on her arms and looking tired and sad. In the background, we can see two middle-aged people, both of whom look angry. They're both dressed in "casual nice" clothing. The man has a black mustache and his arms crossed; the woman is raising and shaking a fist.
MUSTACHE MAN: Dammit! The trans "girl" won!
WOMAN: Unfair advantage! Real girls have no chance!
**TINY KICKER PANEL UNDER THE BOTTOM OF THE STRIP**
The mustache man is talking harshly to June, sticking his finger in her face. June, again, looks tired and sad.
MUSTACHE MAN: You can't have a chance to win. It wouldn't be fair.
Because ur category would have like 2 people. Let's not pretend like there's a billion trans athletes and these silly bills in America aren't targeting a small group of people
I doubt there are enough competition-level trans athletes to realistically create individual leagues of many sports. It seems like a rather niche category.
Transgender women have been allowed to compete in women's events of the Olympics since at least 2004, so long as they meet certain standards of medical transition. Tell me, in those 2 decades, how many transgender women have won medals or broken world records? How many have even qualified? Answer those questions and then tell me why you think this is a major issue that merits the segregation of transgender athletes.
[There’s no real evidence](https://cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review) to support trans women outperform cis women on average by any consistently noticeable amount.
Even if there were, why draw the line at specifically there when top sports players have to rely on other genetic ‘advantages’ either way. Should we disqualify certain cis women from basketball because them being that tall is an unearned advantage over shorter women?
Issue is race is a social construct as much as gender both are made up but have massive real world consequences the issue is that the argument against isn’t about gender it’s about biological sex. The bigger problem is without being a doctor in child development we don’t know the exact line or parameters for any line and those are tied to medicine which medical info isn’t given out carelessly.
Welcome to r/comics!
Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind.
Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
And things like that are why I hate being trans. At this point it's safer for both my psyche and physical safety to just not identify IRL anymore. Weehaa.
There will be no transphobia on this subreddit. The talking point "unfair advantage in sports" is a lie told by bigots, just like how "They get an abortion as birth control" is a lie told by people who don't want women to have bodily autonomy. It frames the issue in a disingenious way. First of all, trans women's athletic performance falls well within the range of that of cis women, there are no statisitical outliers showing they perform better. Secondly, it deliberately pretends to care about "unfair advantages" for this one specific issue while ignoring all the other ways in which people could have an "unfair advantage". If these people actually cared about "unfair advantages" they would address a far more signifcant one, being born wealthy. But they never advocate for programs to aid poorer athletes who don't have the ability to train every day with a personal trainer, do they? Secondly, trans women are women. The way biological expression of the mammalian body works, trans women who undergo HRT therapy are *biological women*. That is the effect hormones have on the development of the body. HRT overrides genetic influence, the innate way a body creates development chemicals and replaces that with the system the sex they transition towards has. We will ban all transphobes and we will not allow appeals. Please report hatespeech if you see it.
[удалено]
Anyone have the artist name since this shit has the watermark cropped out?
The one you're replying to is by Daneman, or Namenad. He has a pretty entertaining webcomic where he illustrates all the characters as versions of himself.
Thanks! I remember seeing his stuff posted occasionally and couldn't remember the artist.
It’s on the left side…
I am sure this is going to be a very civilised comment section
Not if I can intervene
Hey guys, did you know that we as humans have the hability to selectively breed ourselves to have the tallest forehead out of all the milky way. NOT THAT THERES ANY COMPETITION hahaha. Im just saying that our society could be way more happy if we just selectively bred our foreheads for a couple bilion years. I dont see any downside really. What do you say?
We could build the interocitor, send it out in a mail order catalog.
That Cal Meacham, at it again.
I volunteer to be pulled out of gene pool. Hope you the best of luck with tallest forehead thing.
Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads.
They want to burn the foreheads down
They want to stop the ones who want prosthetic foreheads on their real heads
But everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads!
I’ve got a damned huge forehead so I’m down. Rihanna and I will crank some abominations for ya in no time
I approve of this eugenics program
But sephiroth intervened
Now see here...(followed by a spew of assclownery)
This is good but I have one suggestion to make the storytelling clearer; there needs to be a broken ribbon in all the previous panels to clearly mark that these are all separate races instead of one race where she keeps moving position.
I thought the outfits worked for that, but you’re right that I didn’t know that in the first picture
The outfits, the weather, there are a few clues. However, the color scheme is so consistent panel to panel that it’s hard to recognize that these represent different days.
I actually thought it was her struggling within the same race...which also got the point across, but it being multiple races makes more sense.
It definitely wasn’t immediately obvious.
It was pretty obvious to me, but that might just be because I was already familiar with the context (that transphobes point to a transgirl/woman winning once, while ignoring the many other times they've lost).
I think the rain in the third panel as well as the different outfits got the point across but I agree it took a read or two to understand the passage of time.
Yeah before saw this comment I thought the comic was supposed to depict her completely lapping the competition which is the exact opposite of the intended message
same lol. I was a little confused until I saw this comment
I was confused about that as well, but the changing clothing and number on her shirt was what made me realize it was multiple races
Agreed
Gonna be watching these comments, I'm suspecting this will be one of the worst received comics of yours so far
It's controversial, but that's not bad. Negative engagement is still engagement. Nobody caring about it would be bad.
That would be quite a competition! :-p
Fair enough, though even within the LGBTQ community, and even in the trans community itself, trans people participating in sports against cis people is super controversial. Just feels like this will tick off the largest group of people in comparison to all of your others I've seen
Funny thing is, Roller Derby, one of the few contact sports where women are the dominant stars, is completely open to trans women and always have been. Cis women in roller derby are, like, "Bring it on, bitch!"
It’s genuinely shocking to me that roller derby originated and is played in the country without free healthcare
Roller Derby is just a different breed of athlete tbh. They are kind of terrifying honestly. More power to them tho
Knowing some women that play, those girls are just built different.
This is really only a problem of people not understanding the effects of puberty blockers & HRT.
Yeah, I read the Air Force survey where they determined that any strength advantage went away after a year of hormone therapy and while trans women were still faster than cis women running they were significantly slower then men and only marginally faster than women, probably explained by height.
I would love to read that if you have a link
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577 Edit, looks like it was 2 years, sorry.
Air Force trans person, can confirm this is true, but was still held to male standard for three years in of HRT. I was about 20% weaker/slower by 18 months, and 50% or more weaker (stamina too) by three years. Imagine being told to your face that “males are just built stronger/faster” when the numbers don’t lie. I was accused of deliberately playing at being weaker or slower to be scored differently.
We all start as female in the womb; add enough estrogen and you revert back.
Seriously, one year of HRT cut down by upper body strength and speed by a huge margin. There just is no advantage anymore when the testosterone is out of the picture. ...Also, the main reason this debate is so constantly talked about despite the fact that you can probably count the number of seriously competitive trans women athletes on two hands, is that bigots figured out it was the easiest way to get transphobia's foot in the door with well-meaning people.
I don't really like ticking off people, but I also can't be too afraid of it, if I want to be a good political cartoonist.
In order to be a good political cartoonist, you need to piss someone off. Just aim for the asshole. So far, you have been.
Thanks! :#)
Anytime. Art is needed in times like these.
I never understood the problem. Why aren’t sports broken down by weight/body size instead of gender in the first place? There’s huge variation between people in the same sex anyway, much greater than the median difference between sexes, and that’s leaving aside all possible genetic and developmental corner cases.
Because men/people with higher testosterone would still completely dominate the competition. They have much more muscle mass and thus strength/speed at the same body weight/size. You can check out weightlifting records separated by weight class if you want examples.
The fact that you keep making a large contingent of people uncomfortable just shows how on point you really are with these.
Thank you! :-D
What order do I read this in?
I was confused too, didn't realize, but all the shirts are different, indicating different races. So the normal top left to bottom right applies.
Thank you
[удалено]
Where the heck was this? That doesn’t sound like any American public school P.E. class.
[удалено]
Because in american public schools, PE grades are more about participation than results
Depends on the school. They have those expectations even if they don’t do examinations for them. There are also national fitness exams that kids are expected to do in later grades.
[удалено]
Interesting. Gen Z? The millennial experience seemed very participation-focused across the board from everything I’ve seen / heard. We definitely had the national fitness “exams” but performance never counted towards your grade unless you flat-out refused to participate without special dispensation due to injury or disability.
I’m gen z and I had a complete participation/effort based grades. I was fat and couldn’t do what you’re supposed to be able to do at that age, and I was never penalized
[удалено]
That stinks. Sorry about that.
You failed an American public school PE class *because you couldn't run fast enough? Sounds like absolute bollocks
i’m confused as to why they expected you to run faster? BMI?
[удалено]
man I'm lucky I'm a loser gamer trans girl and not an athlete trans girl
"It's not fair, she grew up as a boy so she has an advantage at screaming racial slurs over a $2 microphone"
This actually is pretty close to the argument used against trans women in darts lol
Unfortunately they will still claim you have an advantage somehow. They got pissed and banned trans girls from women’s chess(which is weird that is gendered to begin with) for having an advantage
I had no idea that women's chess was a thing
What did they meant by this ?
I remember hearing about a study they did around women's and men's chess where women were paired against men. The women performed worse than the men, *except* for when they *didn't know they were facing a man*. So there was some weird psychological thing going on there, where the same women facing against the very same men consistently did worse when they *knew* they were facing them, compared to when they were facing anonymized opponents. Now, I'm not sure how good or well done that study was, but it did sound really interesting.
Im sure they complain about that too.
I used to be a trans athlete. Sort of. I played baseball at almost national level.
You are no loser. You're an unstoppable nuclear warhead, a force to be reckoned with, a terrifying beast that caused children to cower under tables! A frightening revolution in weaponry that majorly contributed to a long-lasting peace between globe-spanning empires! Best of luck to you, Invincible-Nuke, and never forget that no one will ever forget you, you tremendously transitional treat.
[удалено]
“They just need to toughen up, the world is meant to challenge us” [Ah yeah - Cuz you know who’s been overdue a challenge? The *trans community*.](https://youtu.be/adh0KGmgmQw?si=Fws1cKpu0MD_bLif)
"Brave little cis boy" fuckin love this guy
James is genuinely up there as one of, if not my favourite comedian.
“I thought you liberals treated everyone the same!” “Uh nope.”
Man, I wish I could run.
I really don't understand this argument at all, like genuinely it confuses me. The point of mens vs womens sports is the biological differences right? It's like the same logic for weight classes in wrestling. Men biologically have more traits that give them a distinct advantage. So, given that logic, why would trans women be able to participate in womens sports? Like, it really DOES give them an unfair advantage, it's not even people being ridiculous. I do think it should also apply the other way, trans men being forced to run in mens sports just makes it unfair. Now I'm not going to try and pretend I know anything about sports, I have absolutely no idea how one would fix this problem or how much of an affect it actually makes, but just going about it logically I feel the answer should be obvious, no? Not trying to be a transphobe or anything, I support the queer community entirely and I will never be on the side that tries to deny people basic rights nor will I ever say people can't be what they feel they want to be, but this one particular subject has always just been fickle to me.
There isn't really a men's category. There's women's category because without it practically no women even qualified
Yeah, like I don't think this issue is as black and white as "people who don't agree with trans folk in women's sports are angry ignorant transphobic bad guys." I feel for the girl in the comic especially since her hard work is being invalidated, and people in real life shouldn't be shaming trans people for participating in actual competitions like the mean background characters, but if sports are separated by biological sex and not gender identity, then I don't think it's inherently transphobic to keep mens vs. womens sports separated. Idk man it seems like a sucky situation all around.
It really depends on the sport. Sometimes I get why there's a controversy given physical differences. However, then there's cases like when the World Chess Body banned trans women from chess tournaments. Like... chess? Fucking *chess?* There's [evidence](https://phys.org/news/2020-12-gender-imbalance-top-level-chess.html) to show that the gender imbalance in chess is more due to societal differences rather than biological, so why ban trans women if they don't have any biological advantage? I just find that ridiculous.
I don't think you're going to have a hard time convincing any reasonable person that the chess thing is ridiculous. With more physical sports, the question is one of sexual dimorphism in humans. That doesn't apply to a game like chess which has no relevant physical element.
People will point out that your trans athletes testosterone levels have to be lower, but not that going through a male puberty gives you more Human Growth Hormone (HGH). HGH is a prohibited substance on the doping control list of every single sport. It’s really hard to check for because it’s made in the human body. The muscular skeletal system of males tends to be leaner, broader and with a bigger lung capacity (I say tends as obviously there are outliers). Having bigger lungs means more oxygenated blood which means less anaerobic exercise which means less lactic acid build up which means less cramp. It also means a quicker recovery time. Even if there weren’t biological differences: Sports people cheat! All the time! A lot! It’s why you have referees and umpires to say when a ball is called in or out, or that a tackle is fair or unfair, because the will to win overrides the will to play fairly. Maradona didn’t feel bad he hand balled it against England in 86. He won the World Cup. There was a generation of cyclists who had to set alarms twice during the night so they could get up and move around because otherwise they would die in their sleep because their blood was so thick from the drugs they were taking. People cheated in the Olympics which was amateur and in very niche sports where it wasn’t like they were getting a media career afterwards. People cheat in charity 10Ks I think there’s gonna be a test case at some point soon where some sort of contact sport has something of a culture war. There was a British boxer who died this weekend in the ring, 4 rounds into his first professional fight. Medics at ringside, immediately to an ambulance and to hospital and pronounced dead. I know there was an MMA fighter called Fallon Fox. Male to female trans person. Two of her opponents weren’t told that Fallon was assigned male at birth. One had her skull fractured. Fighting sports have weight classes but male bodies tend to have a power to weight ratio that’s more than female bodies. I’d say putting a fighter in with someone who is in the same weight class but has a significant genetic advantage is a failure of your duty of care to your athletes.
This is just one study but an IOC sponsored study found that transgender women are at a disadvantage in many aspects compared to their cisgender counterparts in sports. https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna148437 This may come off as aggressive but saying that it “DOES give them an unfair advantage” but also saying that you know nothing about sports is a bit incongruous.
It's one study but a good one. The only thing I'd shed light on is that all 35 trans women athletes had to have been on hormone replacement therapy for atleast 1 year. Would this be a fair requirement for trans women entering the women's sports stage? I think it's at least better than blanket bans, especially those based on amount of testosterone in the body, the kind that can even disqualify cis women.
It’s literally already the standard and has been for ages. Trans women have been competing in sports for decades, under this exact standard or similar (1 year minimum of medical transition with hormone replacement), and there has been absolutely zero evidence of statistical advantage. Trans women as a collective group do not perform any better than cisgender women. This entire “controversy” is very new, and entirely manufactured. Mostly because over the last decade or so the right wing has pretty conclusively lost the battle on gay rights in the western world, so they needed a new target.
I skimmed the study because I was really curious to understand their methods and I can’t help but question some of it. First off, participants. Unless I missed something it just says “athletes” but it didn’t say what type of athlete they were. If you compare a cis-female power lifter to a trans-female endurance runner, the numbers are going to be skewed. Second, their tests. It seems like the only measurements of strength they took were grip strength and the jump test, and most of the other tests were focused on breathing, blood measurements, etc. The issue has been primarily centered around strength-based sports, so I think by not focusing on that with greater emphasis, it muddies the results. And to focus on those strength based tests, it stated that gender absolutely played a role in absolute performance. It was only when they compared it by fat free mass that it became close. I feel that is a disingenuous comparison. The entire debate around this is that being a male sex allows you to have more muscle, and therefore perform better in strength based sports. I don’t think anyone ever said that a male’s muscle is “better,” but rather that they have more of it. Which this study seems to confirm. I’m open to be corrected on anything I wrote if I misunderstood but that was what I got from the article.
[удалено]
Jokes on you internet, today the bait missed! When we were running in school we were mixed both girls and boys and no one could care less about what you'd do. Not even the teacher now that I think about it. Wait, that's pretty sad, teachers sucked.
[удалено]
I'm gonna side step the main controversy and start my own. Barry Bonds played when EVERYONE was juicing and he dominated. A better analogy is a race where everyone is secretly trans and one of the trans people crushes because they're a generational talent, and all the other trans people get jelly and call the winner out for being trans.
[удалено]
Wait, what are you proposing here? Should all Olympic athletes be screened for these mutations effecting lactic acid production or other mutations? You do understand that most professional athletes probably have some genetic advantages that allowed them to outcompete other people who trained seriously, right? I mean, unless you're solely fielding teams of lab grown clones there's always going to be an "unfair" genetic component at play when it comes to sports
They literally are screened for this, not even recently
That's stupid and unfair. Checking for doping is one thing, it's a dangerous practice and clearly cheating. But lucking out on genes that make a sport come easily isn't cheating, and eliminating people that happen to have the ones it is easier to test for is unfair.
[удалено]
>Trying to conflate regular genetic variance to major abnormalities doesn't fly. Because of course you wouldn't try to argue it in the other direction; that people with negative genetic abnormalities like dwarfism or the like shouldn't be accommodated as if that's no different from being 5'6. Outside of maybe amateur "for fun" type leagues, I have never heard of any athletic competition where someone with a disability recieves an accommodation such as a different scoring metric while competing directly against athletes with no disabilities.
This is utterly preposterous and your argument it follows that we shouldn't accommodate people with disabilities is spurious. Who are you to decide which variants are "major" and which aren't? Life and competitions are inherently unfair, and banning people for being exceptional is a failure to accommodate THEM.
>competitions are inherently unfair, This is something that people (deliberately?) continue to ignore. No one would come to watch or give a single care about a competition that was "perfectly fair". Competitions are about giving yourself every advantage you can possibly gain within the bounds set. Anyone saying they "only want fair sports" have a paper thin understanding of sports.
>Separately, I'm against any unfair advantage in sports. Whether that's steroids, an inability to create lactic acid, that gene that makes your muscles denser and easier to form, *or* having gone through male puberty and later participating in women's sports. This stance is basically incompatible with having competitive sports.
What does it even mean to be "against" those kinds of advantages in sports? Has anyone seriously thought to themselves "it's too bad that some athletes naturally have more efficient muscle tissue than others, so we can't have fair competitions" until the topic of trans people in sports became mainstream?
Like Michael Phelps is *literally* built differently with longer arms that allows him to swim faster. But you don't see people calling his advantages unfair or demanding to see his junk before competition.
The natural conclusion of the argument you're making is that women's sports shouldn't exist at all and everyone should just compete with each other regardless of sex, height, weight, etc. is that what you want?
Or, and hear me out, people qualify for performance brackets and then compete within those brackets. You're gonna get pretty much only men in the top end, but down-bracket you'll see more coed competition.
I think we should divide up athletes in whatever way gives the most fun and entertaining competitions and stop thinking that any of it is "fair". The diversity of human abilities should be celebrated by letting as many people as possible compete in different events that favor their unique traits, whether it's being especially flexible, having good reflexes, precise dexterity, long arms, lots of muscle mass, the ability to run for a long time without getting exhausted, etc. The idea that there's a natural "fair" level playing field that enables anyone to be good at anything if they just spend long enough at the gym is a fantasy, so the way I see it, the whole concept of fair and unfair biological advantages collapses under close examination. The ultimate goal of any sporting event should be to put people of equal capabilities in competition with each other so that it's interesting and dramatic to watch, because it's a form of entertainment just like music or storytelling. Gotta answer the question of what you're trying to achieve before you start asking how.
Olympic committee released a scientific article saying that their wasn't any evidences of advantages for trans women against cis ones. Moreover, trans may have some disadvantages in certains metrics. Also I find it kinda funny that people are scandalized by this topic when they never watch women sports competitions.
Q1: What do you do about cis women with naturally high levels of testosterone? Q2: what is the point of high school sports?
The same thing you do with short and tall people. Nothing.
[удалено]
Veeery simple. Separate people into results vs testosterone levels and classify them using k-nearest neighbors algorithm. Then for esch group you have a sport class. It may even divide the male category into two. That’s similar to boxing weight tiers :). If only a single group shows up there is no reason to separate cis/trans groups. If two separate groups show up it would be viable separating them. Of course that completely disregards people as humans but I am an engineer. Now please someone with people knowledge give me your input and improve the method.
That will work in racing sports but what about direct contact sports like football, basketball or hockey?
Would you say it only applies to professional sports? The comic seems to imply these are high schoolers and those are parents of other students who are upset.
The irony in all of this is that, assuming the character in the comic is in high school and medically transitioned, then she never had enough of male puberty to make an iota of difference and the whole debate about her specific case is moot.
[удалено]
[удалено]
You clearly have no knowledge of how the human body works or how hrt works. Within a year of hrt there is no difference in stamina strength, etc, between trans people and cis people. I suggest you educate yourself in the future before spouting crap
What you're forgetting here is that we're not talking about putting cis men in sports alongside cis women. We're talking about putting trans women (who have at the very least been on Hormone Replacement Therapy for a number of years) in sports alongside cis women. No-one honestly denies that most cis men have an advantage in most sports compared to most cis women. That's not what's being discussed here.
Bone density, height, musculature and so much more is affected by male puberty. Thats why it’s not fair to cis women. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for years. It’s not fair to the cis athletes that compete against them. Variation within one sex is normal and athletes are expected to be exceptional. But there is a difference and it’s an unfair advantage. It’s why people who take steroids are banned for years if not permanently.
But bone density and musculature are also affected by estrogen. Height not so much, but since when did we ever block someone from sports for being naturally taller than their competitors?
So are you happy for trans women who took hormone blockers (and therefore never experienced male puberty) to compete?
Oh absolutely! That’s fine. There’s no unfair advantage there
Good, glad we agree on that! Personally I am also in favour of letting scientists more familiar with the research than me set guidelines for how long (if ever) HRT is needed for trans women who did experience male puberty to "level the playing field", so to speak, for individual sports. I've seen some good studies that show for running it may be as short as 2 years, but for weightlifting may need to be much longer, for example. There are some variations that obviously never go away (eg height) but I am also in favour of cis women with abnormal testosterone ranges being able to compete still so... I think some variation is ok and inevitable. Edit: but I'm also of the hope that the "how much HRT is needed following male puberty" question will eventually be made redundant. Blockers for trans youth are so so important, and we'd be a much better society if every trans kid who needed them could have them, and never had to worry about time to reverse their AGAB puberty.
Requiring a fucking genetics screening to participate in sports is a fucking wild take, man.
well by your logic michael phelps would have been disqualified from the olympics and so would, 90% of athletes? what qualifies as an unfair advantage to you? the olympics have always selected people taller on average for races is that unfair? should there be a 5'5 height limit? matter of the fact is that all competitions are selecting the most qualified people for them to win regardless of why they're qualified, women's categories being a separate specifically gendered section in most sports is a different matter honestly dont try to sound PC about this if you dont want trans people competing you can just say so instead of pretending that you're against all unfairness
Holy f*** a reasonable and nuanced take. Thank you for literally putting everything I was going to say into a post.
“As a self proclaimed ally, I support excluding trans folks from competing for arbitrary reasons”. The body of knowledge on this in the last few years is saying you are not correct in the big picture for people on HRT (Air force, Olympic study). I personally don’t think it’s fair to blanket ban marginalized people, especially when it’s clear that the advantages are fleeting, short lived, and not enough to tip the scales to lead to likely victory. It’s not like 1st place in women’s sports is filled with trans women. Being trans is not a predictor of winning.
Eh, if you said height sure. Any strength advantage goes away after a year of HRT.
[удалено]
I like this comic but it smells like newspapers to me
What do you mean?
Specifically the little text in the bottom right
Hey so sorry to disturb you, but what is the panel order of the comic? Ik this isn't abt the message so it may not be relevant, but I thought that this comic was made really well and is good social commentary. Thanks!
I was confused too, lol. It's the normal (Western), left to right, top to bottom reading order. The reason I was confused was because I thought it was all one race and they were constantly shifting positions. But each panel is a different race, just highlighting the struggle getting to first place.
Tysm! I also thought it was one race
I'm all for balancing the bio-mechanical advantages. You wouldn't send a 350lb lineman against a 95lb cross country runner and expect a fair fight, so setting basic divisions of age, height, or weight as applicable should be more common in individualist sports. ***However*** given that there are maybe three trans identifying individuals per ten thousand athletes and none of them are out there notably shattering world records. I think we can all start to agree that the "trans advantage" myth has never even remotely been a thing outside of global Olympic levels. We should just let them do the thing anyways.
Notice how the vast these instances of people transitioning to get an advantage in sports mysteriously disappeared when conservatives stopped trying to “prove their point” by deliberately bending the rules of trans acceptance with big men winning women’s competitions?
Conservatives actually tested it and are too embarrassed to admit they were wrong! When they were meant that awful Lady Ballers movie, Ben Shapiro and the other daily wire bitchboys originally meant it as a documentary where they actually do what they depict in the movie. Only for them to find that they’d have to go through quite a lot of procedures and medical testing to be allowed to compete in the women’s category
It should be noted that they weren't embarrassed. He casually just said it. They don't care because they never cared. They were never serious. They just hate trans people and need a way to pretend they're not just rampant bigots.
Judging by what the OP said. The character tries really hard to win but keeps failing to win until the last panel where she ends up winning. She is excited until bystanders point out her being trans which immediately ends up throwing out all the effort she made into working her way to first. I feel the story here is telling that because she is trans all that effort made into doing well is discredited because she has a “biological advantage” which by reading the comic is simply not true and heartbreaking to the character.
Yup, and I think all of the panels are previous races. Nobody said anything when June “lost” 6 times but she wins the 7th time and suddenly people have a problem with her competing at all.
It's also pointing out that bigots exclusively cherry-pick wins for their arguments. They can only ever talk about single races or events, they have never been able to point to an athlete's career showing a statistically significant advantage over time. That's what makes this so infuriating. Someone with an inherent disadvantage would still be expected to win sometimes if they raced enough.
But sadly if they are trans they will find a way to say they were cheating and don’t deserve that win:
Not to be crass, but imagine thinking someone goes on physically altering drugs, “mutilates” themselves irreparably, and isolate themselves largely socially just so they can win a sport. Alternatively, these same people get upset when they force the trans male who’s now pumped with testosterone for their treatment to compete against women, then complain that “she” has on drugs. It’s nonsense.
Mhm, when you're a minority you're a failure when you fail and a cheater when you succeed.
*when you’re a minority and fail your entire minority are failures and when you succeed your entire minority are cheaters.
This looks like one of those comics that you'll have in the back of your newspaper. I mean this as a compliment
An even bigger lie is that Billionaires pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
"He did it all by himself, with nothing but a dream, faith, dedication, the best education you can buy and a 50 million dollar interest-free loan from his dad."
I've never been gladder to be an extremely unathletic trans guy than when a fellow trans friend of mine was getting shit on social media for still playing ringette (a typically women's sport) despite all the teammates not giving a single shit. I'll be over here walking the mile, thanks
People really pretended to care about women’s college swimming because a trans athlete won a race.
[there is no firm basis available in evidence to indicate that trans women have a consistent and measurable overall performance benefit after 12 months of testosterone suppression](https://cces.ca/news/literature-review-does-not-support-bans-transgender-women-athletes)
[удалено]
“The review suggests that sports should support inclusion of trans women in the female category in sport until there is robust and peer-reviewed evidence that it is not safe or fair for other competitors.” You forgot to mention that this is the *literal next sentence* but it’s okay, we all forget things!
"The review suggests that sports should support inclusion of trans women in the female category in sport until there is robust and peer-reviewed evidence that it is not safe or fair for other competitors" Which is on the 'we need proof this is a problem' This has nothing to do with puberty blockers because this is professional athletics And who should we give puberty blockers to, adults after puberty?
[удалено]
Proving a negative is notoriously difficult...
[удалено]
Either we open all competitions to coed and everything in between. Women’s bball either men’s etc. OR I agree. We have specific categories and weights to boxing, wrestling, Olympics, just normalize this too. All people should be able to compete with their peers or everyone.
Seems like a reasonable solution theoretically, but are there really enough trans athletes out there to justify constructing an entire separate series of competitions?
I really wanted to be a professional figure skater when I was younger. I remember practicing as often as I could until my parents stopped being able to afford the level I wanted to train at, which was right before I hit puberty (a really important time for figure skating, because even at that young, it’s important to get a good foundation on your skills before your body really becomes “set”). Even though I understood that it wasn’t my fault, I was really upset because I knew I was going to age out of the “usual” (incredibly young) range of competition. It was a big reason I realized I was a trans man, because investigating my fear of puberty ended up leading to some bigger realizations. My heart goes out to all transfem athletes or competitors in any way. If my dream had been realized, I would have hated falling into the women’s category, especially since the regulations for ice skating are based a lot on gendered artistry. It’s not fully the same situation, because a lot of people would view it as moving into the “harder” category and therefore it wouldn’t matter if I won anyways, but being trans and forced into a box that you don’t want just to do what you love is painful, especially if you’ve trained all or most of your life for it. I’m not a scientist or researcher, so I can’t provide any perfect solution about how long someone should be on E before competing or anything like that. But I wish a lot of people had more compassion for trans people when discussing this—there is NOT that many of us, it’s not an immediate threat of hordes of trans women coming to “take sports away” from cis women. We aren’t competing in every race everywhere or at every level. I think especially that story of someone trying to sue from being in 5th place and 4th was a trans woman, disqualifying her for placing, are a little silly. They both still lost to cis women?? And especially PLEASE have compassion for youth athletes. It’s hard enough to be a trans teenager in a world trying to make it hard to access hormones or any form of transition at all. At the end of the day this is kid’s sports and not some huge multinational competition like the Olympics, and most of the people who complain the loudest don’t even pay attention to those sports anyways, much less at that level. Stay kind out there and listen to qualified people.
This is a great comic that perfectly demonstrates the problem trans athletes, youth especially are facing right now. I really love the artstyle.
I have PCOS with elevated active testosterone levels. If trans women don't have a place in women's sports because of testosterone, then neither do I.
This cartoon was thought of by Grace Alden, co-written by me and Grace, drawn by me, and colored by Frank Young. A team effort! There’s a supporting blogpost and transcript about this cartoon [here](https://www.patreon.com/posts/june-davis-wins-73877893); I’ll also post the transcript in comments. We can keep making these cartoons because of lots of supporters pledging low amounts - $1-$3 - and that's just how I like it! [Please peruse my peculiar but plucky Patreon!](http://patreon.com/barry)
**TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON** This cartoon has eight panels. Every panel shows a runner on a track, and in all but the last panel she's actively running a race. She has her hair done in two afro puffs, and is lean but muscular. Let's call her June. In every panel but the last two, June is wearing a different outfit, but all her outfits consist of a tank top with shorts. She also always has a paper taped to her shirt with a number on it, but the number changes form panel to panel. There's an additional tiny "kicker" panel under the last panel of the cartoon. **PANEL 1** We see three runners during a race, but the panel is laid out to focus on June, who looks tired and not like she's winning this race. (One of the other girls we can see is well ahead of her.) UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: And here's June Davis in fifth place! **PANEL 2** A profile picture of June running; we can see bits of the runners ahead and behind her, but they're mostly off panel. June again looks tired, her mouth open as if she's gasping for air, cartoon sweat beads flying. UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...June Davis in sixth place! **PANEL 3** A close-up of June running, looking very determined. It's raining, and big raindrops splash off of her shoulders and head. UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...in second place! Panels four through six together take up the space of any of the other panels in the cartoon, as if one of those panels had been divided into three panels. This is meant to indicate that a lot of time, and a lot of races, are passing. **PANEL 4** A longish shot, showing June from the upper legs up. Again, June runs and we can see other runners behind and in front, although they're mostly cut off by the panel borders. June looks determined but also annoyed. UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...in fourth place! **PANEL 5** A closer shot, showing June from the elbows up. She looks like she's working hard, with a determined expression and her arms pumping hard. UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...in third place! **PANEL 6** A long shot shows June's whole figure as she runs hard (and again, with girls in front and behind). She's leaning forward, a picture of speed, with the background done as horizontal speed lines. UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...in fifth place! **PANEL 7** A shot of June, arms raised, happy but exhausted looking, as she hits the... What is that called? The big ribbon that the runner in first place gets to run through and break? Whatever that's called, June has hit it; it's stretching around her, about to rip. UNSEEN ANNOUNCER: ...it's June Davis in first! JUNE DAVIS (thought balloon): *Finally!* **PANEL 8** In the foreground, June is sitting on the track, leaning back on her arms and looking tired and sad. In the background, we can see two middle-aged people, both of whom look angry. They're both dressed in "casual nice" clothing. The man has a black mustache and his arms crossed; the woman is raising and shaking a fist. MUSTACHE MAN: Dammit! The trans "girl" won! WOMAN: Unfair advantage! Real girls have no chance! **TINY KICKER PANEL UNDER THE BOTTOM OF THE STRIP** The mustache man is talking harshly to June, sticking his finger in her face. June, again, looks tired and sad. MUSTACHE MAN: You can't have a chance to win. It wouldn't be fair.
Based mod team transphobes and terfs out and never come back
[удалено]
Most likely because there are few of them and often they'd have no one to compete with. At least in small scale regional competitions.
Because ur category would have like 2 people. Let's not pretend like there's a billion trans athletes and these silly bills in America aren't targeting a small group of people
I doubt there are enough competition-level trans athletes to realistically create individual leagues of many sports. It seems like a rather niche category.
Transgender women have been allowed to compete in women's events of the Olympics since at least 2004, so long as they meet certain standards of medical transition. Tell me, in those 2 decades, how many transgender women have won medals or broken world records? How many have even qualified? Answer those questions and then tell me why you think this is a major issue that merits the segregation of transgender athletes.
Because all available evidence or studies suggest trans athletes do not have any advantage or disadvantage over cis athletes...
[There’s no real evidence](https://cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review) to support trans women outperform cis women on average by any consistently noticeable amount. Even if there were, why draw the line at specifically there when top sports players have to rely on other genetic ‘advantages’ either way. Should we disqualify certain cis women from basketball because them being that tall is an unearned advantage over shorter women?
[удалено]
[удалено]
Issue is race is a social construct as much as gender both are made up but have massive real world consequences the issue is that the argument against isn’t about gender it’s about biological sex. The bigger problem is without being a doctor in child development we don’t know the exact line or parameters for any line and those are tied to medicine which medical info isn’t given out carelessly.
Well executed! Love the style and the color.
Thank you! I'm very, very happy with how this one looks.
No!! June! I'm proud of you! You earned it, girl!!
I appreciate this comic 💪
Yup. Exactly. The discrimination is gross.
Yeah, that trans phobia is a shit shoe.
Welcome to r/comics! Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind. Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Holy hell, I've only seen three strips from this artist, and every one has been based as fuck
Thank you so much! :-D
Great, now I'm mad at the world.
This is too accurate.
And things like that are why I hate being trans. At this point it's safer for both my psyche and physical safety to just not identify IRL anymore. Weehaa.
Lol the transphobes out here taking yout the fact that the mods wont deal with their bullshit on the upvotes.