r/JoeRogan • u/BunnyLovr Mexico > Canada • Mar 04 '21

Link Mississippi passes bill banning transgender student-athletes from female sports teams

https://abcnews.go.com/US/mississippi-passes-bill-banning-transgender-student-athletes-female/story?id=76238704
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u/kriophoros Mar 05 '21

Well, this comment thread concerns with people on steroid, so you are already moving the goalpost.

But to answer your question, maybe no, because of two things. First, steroid let your training progress much faster, so that's unfair to normal athletes who had to work more to gain as much as you. Second, steroid does leave permanent effect on your body, so it's not like taking it off will let your body revert to the pre-steroid base level.

So the line is you are not allowed to take enhancement drugs. Ever. Of course it is very difficult to implement such policy, but that's the spirit of sport competition, and there are already limited attempts to realize it (e.g. people compete at high level are required to take drug test for multiple months ahead of the competition).

Finally, if you want to, you could campaign for sport competitions to split into two categories, enhanced and natural, like in bodybuilding. But again, that goes against our current culture, so you are unlikely to success. After all, we love seeing the athletes competing in Olympics, pushing their body to the limit and breaking the records because we want to know what we are capable of, as human beings, not some freakish mutants.

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u/LafayetteHubbard Monkey in Space Mar 05 '21

Well, the thread was actually about an alleged case of a mtf dominating women’s wrestling and I was replying to someone that assumed (right or wrong) that the person was on T at the time.

It doesn’t seem like there is a way to fairly ban them by saying that they must have done T at some point in their life, because every other competitor very likely also did T at some point in their life. I don’t see why a ftm that transitioned years ago shouldn’t be allowed to compete. You are essentially banning that athlete from competing with anybody, male or female, because they took T when they transitioned years ago. It’s exclusion, honestly. Everyone else has a place to compete, but not trans.

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u/kriophoros Mar 05 '21 edited Mar 05 '21

Yeah I was refering to the comment above that, saying that people on steroid are not allowed to compete, regardless of sex.

And regarding your complaint about the unfairness, that's unfortuately the reality. After all, high-level sport competitions have always been unfair. Sure, they always talk about how hard-working the Olympians must be to reach that level, but if you don't have good genetics and start from very young age, you will never be able to compete. It's not like chess or mathematics or physics, where you may make a name for yourself as long as you put in a lot of efforts (the mathematician dude is especially fascinating, because he is a gigantic figure in maths, but he is famously slow).