NO TROLLS Transgender Discrimination AFL Lawsuit

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May 5, 2006
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It really depends when they transitioned. A male who used puberty blockers and then transitioned at the beginning of adulthood should be fine to play as a women.

Puberty blockers sound like a total mine field.

Puberty is a natural part of human development that typically occurs 10-17 for girls and 11-17 for boys.

At a guess I reckon I started puberty about age 12/13. Didn't even know what 'gender identity' meant let alone being prepared to make permanent life altering decisions about my ongoing biological development. Too busy crushing GoldenEye 64.

What do pubertal blockers do?

Puberty's physical changes can cause intense distress for many gender-nonconforming adolescents. When taken regularly, GnRH analogues suppress the body's release of sex hormones, including testosterone and estrogen, during puberty. These hormones affect:
  • Primary sex characteristics. These are the sexual organs present at birth, including the penis, scrotum and testicles and the uterus, ovaries and vagina.
  • Secondary sex characteristics. These are the physical changes in the body that typically appear during puberty. Examples include breast development and growth of facial hair.
 

Ari

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Sep 5, 2003
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I am all for open opportunity and absolutely against discrimination. The question here is about who is being discriminated against. If a man wants to play AFLW can he call discrimination when he is not accepted? If a transgender woman wants to play, it needs to be well known she has quite a distinct biological advantage over other women in the category which effectively discriminates against non-transgender athletes. Do we really want that?

The ugly reality is that this could deter non-transgender women from wanting to take part in womens sports. And further, it could stop little girls from wanting to strive to those heights as they feels they're at a biological disadvantage.

The fairest path forward? A separate category for transgender athletes. This, of course, becomes messy as well for all the reasons you would expect.

Ultimately we need to be aware that whatever path is taken there is discrimination at play for somebody.
 

Ari

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There's a strong case that they're actually discriminating against females, that's people who were born female.

Correct. Absolutely 100% correct. I am somewhat surprised that is not particularly getting a lot of voice. If, as a man of 100kg, I turn up to a boxing match and am asked to fight a guy of 65kg..... am I not quite advantaged in that match? This generally would not be allowed.
 

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Ari

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We can all agree the standard of football played in AFLW is really not very good.
Ok, it could be better. Still low-scoring affairs, sure.

An injection of testosterone may be the best thing for it.
Ok, sure, where are you going with this?

The aflw may even present an opportunity for someone like Jack Watts to resurrect his footy career.
Bingo, the punchline! Not too shabby.
 

External Inputs

Team Captain
Nov 30, 2008
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The problem in all of this is height. A women may lose muscle, weight and testosterone during transitioning, but they won't lose height. Which will mean they'll go from an average male physique to a big women's physique and that's not fair.
It isn't just height, it's the skeletal structure. If the individual transitions as an adult, they retain a male skeleton, and since they're taking estrogen supplements , which is what older women take to prevent osteoporosis, that skeleton isn't reducing down to a more femine frame.
I've read a tennis discussion that promotes the idea that a women's pelvic bone means her legs are a little wider spaced than a mans, which is a disadvantage at the elite level. I can't say whether that's true, but there are a lot of subtle differences which could have potential advantages.

But it will be extremely rare that men who failed to make it as professional sportsmen decide to transition to women
Some people really want to win and the easiest way to do that is to compete against weaker people.
 

fake tyrone

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Jun 15, 2012
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Correct. Absolutely 100% correct. I am somewhat surprised that is not particularly getting a lot of voice. If, as a man of 100kg, I turn up to a boxing match and am asked to fight a guy of 65kg..... am I not quite advantaged in that match? This generally would not be allowed.
That's a good point but we currently have guys like Sean Darcy weighing in at 111kg and guys like Caleb Daniel weighing in at 72kg taking the field against one another. The issue of size disparity is an interesting one and is being examined in the rugby codes but personally I don't think it's a strong enough argument on its own with regard to Aussie Rules. Darcy would most likely trounce Daniel in a boxing match but Daniel has made it onto an AFL list because despite his size, he has other athletic and physical attributes that have placed him well ahead of most footballers in this country (and most of those footballers would indeed be bigger than him).

As far as Mouncey is concerned, I'd be more interested in how she compares to cisgender women with regard to performance across multiple athletic domains (strength, speed, muscular endurance, aerobic capacity etc). If she were to wallop every cisgender female in each domain by a significant margin then I'd be concerned she may possess an unfair advantage. Comparing her athletic performance to the typical male footballer, or athlete (or just the typical male in general) would also be of interest. Where her physical prowess sits on a standard distribution is, in my opinion, much more telling one way or another than sheer size alone.
 

TP86

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Apr 16, 2010
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I wonder if that would happen today. Pretty embarrassing but just assuming the girls didn’t care too much?

If both teams took the game seriously an A-League U15 academy team would still beat the women's national team but it would be close. Wouldn't be 7-0.

One of the Matildas players played that particular game in a jumper. There was positional and tactical experimentation. It was in every sense a training match and the score should've been irrelevant.
 
Mar 22, 2013
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Simple solution.
Mens team
Womens team
Transgenders team
Transgenders already make such a small amount of the population, take away from that, the amount of transgenders who actually want to play footy and then take away from that some more, the amount of transgenders that can actually play footy and you’ve got yourself a shortage of players to fill up a comp I reckon
 

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Sep 15, 2007
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Next time I'll hold up a sign.

Men's sport effectively is open competition. We don't have a men's test team and a women's test team. We have a test team and a women's test team. If there was a female player capable of batting like Steve Smith or bowling like Pat Cummins then you would pick them in the test team. Different in something like boxing where a woman making the weight class for a men's bout wouldn't be allowed to fight for safety reasons. Something like horse racing (other than for the class of race and how it affects the horse) is open. Michelle Payne won the Melbourne Cup, not the women's Melbourne Cup.

If you combined say the Socceroos and Matildas you'd just end up with the Socceroos. So instead of a men's team that's ranked 41st and a women's team that's ranked 7th you'd just have a men's team ranked 41st. Which would achieve precisely nothing.

You are correct there doesn't need to be professional women's sport, but there doesn't need to be professional sport at all. The Matildas lost 7-0 to the Newcastle Jets U/15s. The following year they played in Newcastle and 17,000 people turned up. Can you even buy tickets to watch the U/15s? People pay good money to watch WWE and that's scripted garbage. The standard of any competition (men's or women's) doesn't define its commercial value.
This may be true in part. But it says nothing as to why there should be women professional sport if people dont want to pay to watch it.

people want to see the best of the best and be entertained. In most sports women cant compete in the first. Do they add anything in the second? Not really as being entertaining is not a function of gender.
 
Apr 29, 2013
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If a person believes sex is dimorphic and immutable, why should they have to refer to someone like Hannah with the person's preferred pronouns rather the name they want to use? This is not just hypothetical, cause it happened to a rape victim who was told to call her rapist a 'she.'
 
May 5, 2006
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This may be true in part. But it says nothing as to why there should be women professional sport if people dont want to pay to watch it.

people want to see the best of the best and be entertained. In most sports women cant compete in the first. Do they add anything in the second? Not really as being entertaining is not a function of gender.

There shouldn't be. But there really shouldn't be any 'professional' sport that isn't commercially viable.

Things like equal pay for tennis tournaments is really just men subsidising women (who don't even play 5 set matches). Everyone knows that if there was an Australian Open "M" and an Australian Open "W" which one would be more commercially successful. Look at the FIFA World Cup. $400m in prize money for the men, $15m for the women. It's not FIFA being nasty old sexists perpetuating the gender pay gap, it's sponsors saying they get a lot more value for money sponsoring the men's event.

The point about AFLW or any other women's comp being inferior in quality to the men's equivalent is that the best women's competition often is more commercially viable than a lower tier men's comp. The quality is to a large degree irrelevant. VFL, WAFL and SANFL are telecast as semi-professional leagues and have been for decades. What are the crowds and viewership like?
 

Lip Gallagher

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Nov 11, 2020
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There shouldn't be. But there really shouldn't be any 'professional' sport that isn't commercially viable.

Things like equal pay for tennis tournaments is really just men subsidising women (who don't even play 5 set matches). Everyone knows that if there was an Australian Open "M" and an Australian Open "W" which one would be more commercially successful. Look at the FIFA World Cup. $400m in prize money for the men, $15m for the women. It's not FIFA being nasty old sexists perpetuating the gender pay gap, it's sponsors saying they get a lot more value for money sponsoring the men's event.

The point about AFLW or any other women's comp being inferior in quality to the men's equivalent is that the best women's competition often is more commercially viable than a lower tier men's comp. The quality is to a large degree irrelevant. VFL, WAFL and SANFL are telecast as semi-professional leagues and have been for decades. What are the crowds and viewership like?
Every woman i've spoken to has no time for womans football, "What is this s**t doing on TV" etc, it's being shoved down our throats, the standard is pathetic, see better quality watching country level magoos and no one watches that.
 
Mar 6, 2021
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Hawthorn
If a person believes sex is dimorphic and immutable, why should they have to refer to someone like Hannah with the person's preferred pronouns rather the name they want to use? This is not just hypothetical, cause it happened to a rape victim who was told to call her rapist a 'she.'
My wife also got followed into the dunny by a freak dressed as a woman on our way home from a ross noble show (Cockburn Train Station Perth) luckily I was close enough the hear her yell out and rushed into the toilet to find the freak trying to get into HER cubicle (was late at night). These examples are exactly why freaks with penises should NOT EVER be in a womans toilet. World has gone *ing nuts.
 

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