The new Kiwi government under Christopher Luxon is weighing a rule that women’s sports will remain women’s spaces—at least in publicly funded sports, which clearly includes those in schools. But there’s a lot of pushback, as you can see from reading this piece in the New Zealand Herald (click to read):
Excerpts are indented:
The Government is threatening to withhold millions of dollars of public funding from New Zealand sports bodies if they do not comply with a push to separate transgender athletes from grassroots competitions.
The hardline and potentially divisive policy from the Government sets out the agenda to “ensure publicly funded sporting bodies support fair competition that is not compromised by rules relating to gender”.
The policy is led by New Zealand First, whose sport and recreation spokesman Andy Foster says it is “about fairness and safety in sport for women”
. . . .While previous Governments have left sporting organisations to work through the vexed transgender space at arm’s length, the National-led regime intends to tackle the issue head-on.
International sporting bodies, including cricket, rugby league and swimming among others, have banned transgender women from their respective elite female codes.
The NZ First-National policy agreement, however, applies to the amateur end of the spectrum by targeting participation in community sports.
Are community sports different from school sports? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Rather, I think that the government is leaving professional sports to work out their own rules. But the government is clearly of the mind that it’s unfair to have trans women participating in women’s sports, something I agree with. But the issue is inflammatory (much of NZ is still woke), and so the government is also a bit timorous:
Sport and Recreation Minister Chris Bishop was uncomfortable discussing the coalition agreement.
“New Zealand First are very keen to make sure we have an inclusive environment and atmosphere for everybody – and that rules relating to gender don’t get in the way of that,” Bishop told the Herald.
“It is a tricky one, a thorny issue. There’s strong views on both sides of the debate. I’ll work through that with the relevant sporting bodies.
“Ultimately it’s got to go over to sporting bodies to make sure that we have fair competition.”
They’re very careful in dealing with such an inflammatory issue, but they’re going in the right direction:
Next year, Sport New Zealand will invest $9.3 million in 38 sports at the community level.
Pressed on whether sporting bodies that objected to the separatist policy would find their funding frozen, Foster said: “If a code says ‘We don’t want to do that’, that’s their choice but they shouldn’t then expect the taxpayer to say we’re delighted to support you doing something which we see as unsafe and unfair.
“That’s the policy.”
. . .Foster, a former Wellington mayor, outlined the rationale for attempting to separate trans women from female community sports.
“It’s about fairness and safety in sport for women in particular,” he said.
“Looking at some of the debate that’s been across different sports codes around the world about transgender people who have transitioned from male to female, particularly after puberty, and the evidence around the advantages that happen in weight, speed, all those sorts of things, it compromises fairness in competitions and in some cases safety as well. We’re saying, for publicly funded sports bodies, we think it’s really important for women to have a clear line in the sand drawn.
“With rugby, athletics, boxing, you can see why power, weight and speed become a real issue. If there’s a teenage girl against a former teenage boy, your child is going to get hurt.”
Foster suggested the policy would not apply to all sports, citing equestrianism as an example of men and women competing in the same field.
That’s fair enough. Foster is right about the athletic advantages of post-puberty trans women who have had surgery and puberty blockers, but if data show no inherent advantages of trans women over women in horsey sports, it’s fine to have them compete.
A lot of the article is devoted to criticism from trans women athletes and others about the policy, but the criticisms mostly aren’t workable. For example:
However, transgender athlete and two-time national champion mountain biker Kate Weatherly fears it will lead to athletes being forced into men’s competitions or sidelined completely.
. . . . Given the minimal number of trans women competing in amateur sports, Weatherly fears it could lead to their exclusion from the grassroots arena.
The “small number” argument fails because if a trans women wins because of the advantages she has from male puberty, it is unfair to any number of women or girls who can’t win. There may be few winners, but there are plenty of losers.
Here’s another from Weatherly:
“Sports are inherently unfair. It’s so heavily dependent on money, where you were born, access to coaches, support networks. There are so many factors that determine how successful you are at sport.
Sports are inherently unfair, she says, so it’s okay to add a big source of unfairness to the mix. Nobody doubts, and it’s clear from recent results in sports, that trans women have a palpable advantage over women in nearly every sport in which they participate.
And there’s the inclusivity argument as well:
Former sport minister Grant Robertson condemned the policy’s intention.
“It’s incredibly sad the government is undermining the work done to make grassroots sports more inclusive,” Robertson said. “We should be doing everything we can to encourage people to participate in sport and recreation. Chris Bishop should be ashamed to be facilitating this nonsense.”
New Zealand Cricket is the first sport to publicly resist the policy – even if that means losing its $425,000 allocated government funding next year.
“Our position is that we’ll continue to prioritise inclusivity and accommodate transwomen in women’s cricket at community, amateur, social level,” NZ Cricket spokesperson Richard Boock said.
Sport New Zealand chief executive Raelene Castle indicated its focus remained on inclusion.
“We have developed a set of transgender guiding principles for the sector, to help organisations develop their own policies for the inclusion of transgender participants in community sport.
Now this is an argument that can’t be dismissed: trans athletes want to compete, and isn’t it unfair to say they can’t? There are various solutions to the problem, including an “other” category for trans people, or allow “men’s sports” to include trans athletes. That may seem unfair to trans women, but, as they say, “sports are inherently unfair.” (I am just using their own argument against them; I do think the problem should be considered seriously.)
Finally, there’s this argument, which was suggested, I believe, by Neil deGrasse Tyson as well:
Weatherly, a trans woman athlete, acknowledged fairness and safety concerns but pointed out that sports such as boxing featured weight categories to minimise risks.
The problem is that you simply can’t use “weight categories” for trans women competing against women. Even in boxing that would give trans women an inherent advantage. And for other sports, I can’t see a way to “group” women so that the trans women have no inherent athletic advantage. Try doing that in, say, the 400-meter dash.
I’m afraid that I see women’s sports as “women’s spaces,” with no clear way to include trans women. We should try hard to hit on an equitable solution for all trans people, but that demands both philosophical rumination and empirical data, neither of which we have. The New Zealand government is going in the right direction, for, in sports the mantra “trans women are women” does not hold.
h/t: Jez
I fear that bodies like NZ Cricket will render any legislation meaningless (although at the international level transwomen can no longer play on women’s teams).
A new paper “Performance of non-binary athletes in mass-participation running events” has just been published by the journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine.
The findings are, of course, entirely what you’d expect: sex is a better indicator of performance than self-proclaimed gender identity. Nevertheless, research like this needs doing just because if it isn’t the usual idiots will say, “But where’s the evidence?”
https://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/9/4/e001662
You’re right it’s necessary to do this work. But what a colossal waste of time and effort and money by researchers who must have better things to do.
I’m at turns amazed and depressed at how successful the movement has been to recast a rare mental illness as a blessed social justice cause.
Spokespersons for certain disabilities (e.g., hearing impairment) sometimes try to recast the disability as a social justice cause. The tactic, evidently copied from the woke playbook in academia, hasn’t gained much traction. I suppose that if I, with my poor vision, demanded to be credentialed as an airplane pilot on the basis of “Inclusiveness”, that would not be taken seriously. Strange the way comparable demands in certain other realms were indeed taken seriously, but the self-evident absurdity is beginning to take a toll.
The difficulty is that activists can salt experiments in women’s events with any number of male schlumps who will be decisively beaten by the competitive women, then “prove” this shows that not all men can beat all women, just as I am routinely passed on the road now by 30-year-old female cyclists. The 50-year-old man from Ontario — not fake news: he’s a prof at York University — who swims with pre-teen and adolescent girls actually loses to them. Whether he’s just not very fast or whether he’s being nice and doesn’t want to mess up their rise in the standings toward (maybe) Olympic prospects is unknown.
Re “…sex is a better indicator of performance than self-proclaimed gender identity.”
What a perfect, succinct justification from eliminating trans-identified men (i.e. claiming to be “women”) from women’s sports.
It is, as others point out, unfortunate that researchers must waste resources on such an obvious question, but here’s guessing that every single study will reach the same conclusion, and that may be a powerful arrow in the trans-skeptic quiver.
Since you mentioned Neil DeGrasse Tyson — a reminder that one should never let an opportunity pass to highlight how ridiculous his views on this issue are — as I detailed a few weeks ago:
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/neil-degrasse-tyson-probably-should
Appealing to the value of inclusion to support transwomen’s participation in female sports competition is unconvincing. Since that participation makes sports unfair and unsafe (in contact sports only) for female athletes it will lead (already has lead) to self-exclusion by some (or many) female athletes.
Inclusion as such is not a value! For instance, an elite academic institution cannot include dunces. You want to be a firefighter? You got to be physically capable of doing the job which will exclude those who are not. Etc.
Taxpayers not supporting sporting associations that treat transwomen as females is a political winner. That’s what all reputable opinion polls I have seen say (for US, Canada, UK, Great Britain).
The idea that a man can become a women simply by saying so is not just false but also has no social acceptability.
Here’s the latest survey (this one for the US) I have seen about this:
Kara Dansky: Democrats Should Defend Sex-Based Rights for Women and Girls. Nov 12, 2023
New national poll of 1,262 registered voters shows strong consensus in favor of female-only spaces and services.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/democrats-should-defend-sex-based
When a man ponders the decision to transition, many factors must be weighed, of course. There are risks to one’s health, possible losses in one’s social or working network, the monetary expense, etc. No man transitions “by accident” or unintentionally. (exceptions to this might be juvenile transition, a whole ‘nother can of worms) The transition is most justified on mental health grounds, and those are not to be discounted. The prospect of improved mental health is surely to one’s advantage. Being made ineligible to compete in the sport of one’s choice, at least with or against females, should be one of those factors that a person will need to weigh in the decision, just like all the other factors.
Trans women could continue to compete in the categories in which they are already established (i.e. in men’s categories). If that means giving up some ground to your peers (in the men’s category), then so be it. It is just another cost of transition. That is fair.
The problem of course is that if you want to live the life of a woman socially, it would be a bit weird to tell your social circle that you must compete with men, because of your transition in the past. Trans women would like to be accepted as women, and indeed typically would want the history of transition to be invisible, if not outright erased. Being forced to compete with the men (or in a trans category) spoils this desire. I don’t know how to solve the problem, but it should not be solved at the expense of women’s sports, or safety in other certain women’s spaces.
There are many problems that have no solution. That’s life.
I agree with your point here. But its application depends on your last paragraph: “trans” women don’t want to just act out their supposed internal sense of being a woman; to succeed in improving their mental health they also require other people in their social circles to (at least pretend to) accept that the “trans” person is female. Without that, the supposed mental health benefits of social transition can’t be realized. But holding others hostage to one’s mental illness is not acceptable in a liberal society. I grow less tolerant of this view that a “trans” person really does have an inner sense of being born in the wrong body because “trans” is just a mental illness, one for which we should have compassion but not indulgence.
Hitchens wrote this about religion:
“One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others.”
Gary Francione sings from the same hymnal on gender:
“To the extent that we value a liberal, pluralistic society, we cannot compel people to embrace the metaphysical belief systems of others.”
And don’t get me started on non-binary (the Unitarian Universalists of gender).
Re “And don’t get me started on non-binary (the Unitarian Universalists of gender).”
Perfect. Well done.
Thanks for your interesting reply. The notion that gender dysphoria is a mental illness is plausible, not least because it sounds so strange to most of us. But definitions of mental illness are fuzzy and fluid, to say the least. It used to be argued that homosexuality was a mental illness; I don’t think so many people think that anymore, except maybe on the far right (but I have no data on that, and am curious).
At which point is anything mental illness? I guess if you’re suffering from something evidently “mental” and seek therapy or medical solutions, it would be fair to call it an illness. Then by those lights, your arguments are persuasive.
While I’m sure that transition is a difficult and heartfelt process for many, there also seem to be plenty of others for whom it is a matter of opportunism and expediency. I’m thinking of the cases where men are identifying into female spaces for sexual gratification – whether in toilets and changing rooms or female-only prisons. And there seem to be enough mediocre male sports competitors willing to seek victory in female sports categories for this to have become a problem in numerous sporting disciplines.
> The transition is most justified on mental health grounds. . .
There is no evidence that gender-affirming care, whether it’s drugs and surgery or just compelling those around you to play along with your new you, actually improves any mental health outcome including suicide. The evidence purporting that it does is all consistent with the placebo effect —there are no blinded controlled trials — and that satisfaction we all have when we get something we want, aka expectation bias.
Two out of 315 trans youths 12-20 years old committed suicide within a year of starting gender-affirming treatment in this observational study (~0.6%).
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2206297
That’s more than 10 times higher than the mortality rate FROM ALL CAUSES for similar-aged youth 10-14 years old (~0.015%) or 15-19 years old (0.055%).
https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10-provisional.html
What literature do they cite for the discovery of “gender” in all animals?
It doesn’t have anything to do with the occult doctrine The Kybalion (1908), of course – because that would be…
It’s why they don’t cite it, … right? Because “gender” is just a word everyone knows… somehow…
This is by and large good news — but it’s always slightly disheartening to hear people say they still want to make sure they have an “inclusive environment” when women’s sports were specifically designed to exclude males. Yes, males are excluded from female sports, and adults are excluded from children’s sports. Sometimes there’s a good reason for exclusion!
“Yes…adults are excluded from children’s sports.”
At the risk of over-commenting:
https://twitter.com/Jules31415/status/1735796421817749957
For those unable or unwilling to view tweets, or whatever they’re called now on X, (capitalisation in original):
It’s interesting that almost the whole kerfuffle is around trans women, not trans men. That, in and of itself, is highly revealing.
Perhaps a category for biological females and one for biological males? Still not perfect, but perhaps better.
If transwomen are not women when it comes to (sports/prison/domestic violence shelters/etc), then the strong claim that they’re scientifically and biologically real women is exposed as a polite fiction. Society agrees to pretend out of compassion— they’re not claiming a right. There’s no right to claim. Thus, there are compromises.
While this may have been acceptable to Transexuals many years ago, the postmodern synthesis of Identity and Critical Social Justice is absolutely fixated on viewing a male who identifies as transgender as a type of woman who’s being oppressed and abused. It’s even gotten to the point where referring to them as “male” is transphobic, for they’re supposed to be female by virtue of their inner knowledge.
They will fight this without compromise. Women who object to any of it are assumed to be in the same category as those women screaming at black children going to school during the Civil Rights era of the 60’s. They can’t see the other side. It’s the same in New Zealand as elsewhere in modern democracies.
That is the folly of trying to be liberal and enshrining civil/human rights for trans people on the same level as race, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, etc. etc. As soon as you do that, the trans people will deny that you can put any limitation on those rights you have just recognized. It is oppressive to say, “We grant you these rights except for the limitation we impose to safeguard others who aren’t you, in this case female athletes but also women in sanctuary spaces generally.”
The activists make the same argument — safeguarding is oppressive and paternalistic — when they say that laws restricting gender-affirming care for minors violates their rights to make autonomous choices as immature children and adolescents.
When I was a young girl, I wanted to be a jockey or a gymnast. I grew to average American size, too big to be either of those things and too small to be a basketball player or a high jumper. Unless we want to go full “Harrison Bergeron” (Kurt Vonnegut – a brief short story in which everyone is artificially handicapped to make everyone ‘equal’ – text available online) – then we have to accept that our individual biology and choices (donuts or celery?) do limit our options, but fortunately, the menu is still huge. Almost every decision we make (determined or not) involves opportunity costs. For trans-women, sports competition is one.
“Harrison Bergeron” is a great story from the great, sardonic, incisive mind of Vonnegut. I’ve often recommended it to people during the current craze of forced equality.
The NZ Herald Freudian slip is showing.
“While previous Governments have left sporting organisations to work through the vexed transgender space at arm’s length, the National-led regime intends to tackle the issue head-on.”
One could not ask for a clearer indication of bias. The present government are described as a ‘regime’, but the previous administrations are described as ‘governments’. This journalist can’t come to terms with democracy, after Labour received a caning by the voters.
Let’s hold a Trans Olympics just for them. They can be further divided into male, female, non-binary, non-non-binary, and non-participative. Any rules that smell of competitive patriarchy will be abolished in the interest of fairness. Running along the track should be considered phallic, races will only occur across the widths of tracks. With soccer, no goal posts and nets allowed which resemble cisgender heterosexual penetration, instead only passing the ball for 90 mns is allowed. In swimming, there should be no water which too closely resembles female cisgender amniotic fluid. Let’s be honest, sport is disgusting and reeking of oppressive stench, away with its patriarchy (we still have benches to sit on, can you believe, just like they did during the Roman gladiator games, same bloodthirsty cheering, same sense of fun watching people lose). Happy irreverent holidays! Humbug! (but I’m still having my Jewish Xmas of Chinese take out)
The swimming World Cup announced trans-only races in October and no one applied. That supports the idea that the whole thing is an attempt by mediocre men to win championships by cheating.
I like all of your suggestions, but one would need to eliminate all rules, which almost by definition are oppressive. Keep score? Math is white-supremacist now.
Jingre Berrs!
The swimming World Cup announced trans-only races in October and no one applied. That supports the idea that the whole thing is an attempt by mediocre men to win championships by cheating.
I agree. In an article from 2018, I found the following comment about Kate Weatherly: “Until this year, Kate Weatherly was an average men’s downhill mountain bike competitor. Now she’s dominating the elite women’s field. Some of her rivals say that’s unfair.”
https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/2018/03/a-level-playing-field/
Lia Thomas is a similar case. As a man, she was a mediocre competive swimmer at best. As a woman, she put in a dominant performance at the US Collegiate Championships and openly talked about wanting to take part in the next Olympic Games.
I think New Zealand appears more woke than it actually is. We are a small country, our mainstream media have been corrupted with DEI ideology, but we don’t have the variety of alternative media other countries do to be able to counter it. But kiwis opinion is very decided on this issue, 2 separate polls have found that less than 15% support including transwomen in womens sports, but they are a very vocal minority and unfortunately include all the mainstream media.
One of the reasons Labour lost the recent election so decisively is they spent their last term pushing through incredibly divisive woke policies that they hadn’t campaigned on, and without the support of the public. Voters felt betrayed and ditched them in droves (they lost a record 50% of their votes). Despite hit piece after hit piece from our media, the new government have increased their support since the election, the majority are happy with these changes, including these changes to exclude transwomen from women’s sports. Labour on the other hand who are still clinging to DEI have now dropped to a record low 20% (quite a feat for a party who had nearly 60% 3 years ago).
Wow – those polling figures are encouraging!
I suspect that the SNP in Scotland face a similar fate. Unfortunately, Labour are riding high in the polls elsewhere in the UK because of so many other issues after 13 years of Conservative rule – I really hope that they don’t undermine the recent progress made in rolling back trans rights activists’ overreach. [Note, I don’t mean that transgender rights should be rolled back – transgender people are, rightly, as protected as everyone else under the UK’s Equality Act thanks to the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.]
Yes don’t worry, I know what you mean. I’ve just come back to NZ from a couple of years in the UK. It seems like the difference is that in the UK it’s been the Tories that have been so weak to allow all this to happen (although they’ve kept out self ID), where for us it’s been under Labour. So where do people go from there in the UK in terms of votes to oppose this? Is it just a choice of terrible vs less terrible? It also probably seems very late in the day for Tories to start having a backbone.
But I think if NZ is successful in turning it around (fingers crossed!) then there is hope for every country since it seemed like NZ and Canada were the furthest along. You are also so lucky in the UK that you have such a variety of media outlets and that they are actually willing to talk about it. It was a breath of fresh air going over there and hearing conversations on mainstream platforms, I couldn’t believe it!
The coverage on mainstream platforms is a relatively new development. The BBC and The Guardian still avoid covering news about the issue unless it is unavoidable. Earlier this month the BBC wrote a report about a “predatory woman” who had encouraged the sexual abuse of a young child and been found guilty. The “predatory woman” was, unsurprisingly, a man with a transgender identity. Such crimes are vanishingly rare amongst the genuinely female population.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-67659811
When I complained that the report was misleading they said:
For anyone wondering about how weight categories might work in practice, here is how elite males and females stack up when you control for bodyweight. These are the Olympic weightlifting records for both sexes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_weightlifting
The record for males 61kg and under is 313kg (combined snatch and clean-and-jerk)
The record for females up to 87kg is 289kg.
The record for females 87kg+ is 320kg. The woman who holds it, Li WenWen, has a bodyweight of 150kg.
So when it comes to raw strength and power at the elite level, a 61kg male is competitive with a female weighing 2.5 times as much.
From The Hill: “Majority of Americans oppose gender-affirming care for minors, trans women participating in sports: poll”
The majority also agree that transgender people should not be discriminated against in areas such as education, employment, housing, etc.
https://archive.ph/19YIZ
The “etc.” is where the strife arises. We in Canada do prohibit, in our human-rights legislation, discrimination against trans people. We are still stuck with self-identifying men in women’s prisons and sport, and with allowing the mutilation of children, even though no one but the activists seems to want this.