Will create an "open" division for transgender athletes.
Riley Gaines was one of the vocal advocates of this latest ruling. Common sense is starting to take hold, especially in individual sports like track and field, swimming, and cycling. These are sports where the numbers do not lie. The best basketball or football players can be debated in subjective form. Whether Michael Jordon was better than LeBron James is obvious, but still a subjective opinion.
There is nothing subjective when a 6' 4" person with a penis finishes 38 seconds ahead of everyone else in a women's swim meet. We can all look at qualifying times, records, and other objective measures to prove that males run faster, throw further, jump higher, swim faster, and bike faster than females.
Male world record holder Usain Bolt runs the 100 meters approximately 1 second faster than female world record holder Florence Griffin Joyner. While that doesn't sound like a lot, Joyner would finish approximately 10 full meters behind Bolt. Which means she is only about 90% as fast as her male counterpoint.
The same holds true for any race or any event that can be objectively timed or measure. Males are just faster and stronger than women. This is a scientific fact, not a political statement that should cause anyone shame.
A Korean transgender cyclist named Na Hwa-rin recently entered a non-professional race, won the race, and then told everyone that it was nothing to be proud of and that there is no honor in a former male winning races against physically inferior opponents. Na stated that athletics was all about honor and suggested that an open division was the way to ensure that there would be honor in transgenders competing in sports.
It seems odd to me as a former athlete that a transitioning athlete is literally waiting for their performance to decrease so they can start to compete again. Moreover, the longer they are transitioning the more likely it is that they will get worse at their sport (rather than better). While most of Lia Thomas's teammates and opponents got better during the course of the season, her time got slower the longer she transitioned. She was still able to win, but even if she didn't... well what good does that do anyone?
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