In the news

Thundercrit gets nearly a whole page in the Daily Heil

The bloke who was tasered has died .

Fully mixed fields has been floated before and has it's own challenges.

What are the challenges (genuine question)?

The main thing is letting people have a fair race against their equals. Men being generally naturally stronger than women cos the testosterone means that good women cyclists can be stuck competing against men who aren't necessarily just slower but also sketchier in a race. Just ask any woman that's done a road crit when it's women's cat 2/3 on circuit at the same time as men's cat 4. People should be able to enter the race knowing they will have a fair competition that will come down to skill and training.

fair competition that will come down to skill and training

Although it isn't for lots of other genetic reasons.

I mean, at the level we're talking it's mostly training. Ride your bike more, be faster. For professionals then yeah genetics plays a bigger role.

I’ve never been tasered in the middle of the road, but I have been picked up by the fuzz.

Yup, I'm just lazy.

Someone was talking about the Olympics a bit further up. If you come from short parents it's unlikely you will be winning the 100m no matter how hard you work at it. But we don't have a classification for people under 5ft6.

Maybe we should have many categories like the Paralympics?

Nothing I've said has related to the Olympics. I'm talking about the response to trans people taking podium places at Thundercrit.

A trans woman is not a person with a 'mental feeling of femaleness', it's a woman who was assigned a male gender identity at birth.

I'm sorry. That phrasing was carefully chosen to express what I genuinely understood was the basis on which trans women know themselves to be women.

If you have a better explanation I would welcome it.

But saying "she's a woman because she is a woman" doesn't really say anything.

I don't think I'm a woman because I'm a woman.

Before the word "woman" was expanded to include trans women, I thought I was a woman because I have a female body, and the women-only rights, protections and opportunities I had were shared with others who had the same body and therefore faced some common needs and challenges.

But if being female-bodied isn't especially part of the definition of woman, am I a woman? I genuinely don't know.

Because when you change the meaning of the word woman to accommodate trans women, it doesn't just change for trans women. It changes for every single woman in the world. And some of us may not meet the new definition. But we are still female and the reasons we needed support when women referred to female people haven't evaporated just because someone else wants to use our name.

If you want to change the meaning of the word woman upon which all the mitigation structures put in to support female-bodied people oppressed within patriarchy depend to apply to a different group of people it is not unreasonable to ask what the new meaning actually, well, means, and how the new meaning intersects with those support structures put in place under the old.

How can society assess whether those women-only rights, protections and opportunities are what women need if we can't say what a woman is?

These aren't supposed to be gotcha questions. They seem pretty fundamental to me, and yet, as you pointed out, I genuinely don't know.

And, fwiw. I sympathise with @brokenbetty 's reluctance to voice an opinion on this. It is way too public a forum/platform for me to feel comfortable.

Thank you. I know we have different views here so I appreciate that you said that. It is scary, but I've got to the point where I can't live with myself if I smile and nod and keep my head down and let what I consider to be a reasonable and respectful alternative point of view be misrepresented as hate by people who will never know how the default male patriarchy weighs on those of us who live in a female body from the day we are born.

I don't want trans women not to exiat or even not to be women. I want to understand what that means, to know myself as a woman or not, and for society to deal fairly with female-bodied people who also exist.

Without wanting to sound massively ignorant, the comments in this thread about TERF’s and mgtow are totally alien to me. It’s like reading another language.

Can anyone point me in the direction of websites where I can read up to get a better understanding of the gender debate?
I know Google’s the obvious answer but I thought it might be worth asking here first.

Thank you Betty. Very eloquently put..

Bleak.

The whole trans sport discussion is incredibly difficult and opinion is very polarised for lots of people.

I know a little about Emily because my son raced with her at the British Cycling Youth Academy and I have watched her race for many years. Emily went on to be selected for the BC (male) Junior Academy and was a fiercely competitive in male races and almost certainly would have secured a pro contract at some point. I think her success before transitioning could be the reason why quite a few of her fellow female competitors threatened to pull out of a recent national champs if Emily was allowed to race (she wasn't in the end due to a testosterone ruling from memory)

It must be incredibly difficult for her because she just wants to race bikes. I have massive respect for how she has managed to train to the level she is now at again after what must be a hugely stressful process mentally (and probably physically). Training is hard enough if there is nothing going on in your life.

Ultimately I think it comes down to ‘biological determinism’ whereby folks that are self-described ‘gender critical’ see the terms man and woman as explicitly defined by biological sex, male and female respectively.

On the other hand, trans-inclusive folks see gender and biological sex as two different things (though doubt many/any would deny the general population-wide correlation between most people’s sex and gender).
Gender, then, is seen as something more ‘in the brain’/about how you feel.

As an example, and to borrow from the video below, historically the term ‘parent’ has tied to someone who has had offspring, yet no-one would suggest someone who has adopted a child isn’t a real parent.

I am by no means authoritative on this topic, but a big fan of this youtube channel linked below (this one specific to pronouns but covers these ideas).

RE: defining the word ‘woman’, for trans-inclusive folks I feel like to some extent is has to be a bit of a circular reasoning approach (due to how gender has historically been tied to sex), and then assuming good faith in that anyone who says they’re a woman, is one.

Of course trans women will have different experiences to those assigned female at birth, but then again there’s massive variation between women AFAB too, and there’ll always be people fall outside particular definitions.

Also want to quickly note that I understand how on the surface/at first getting your head around the shift from sex-based to gender identity-based ideas of womanhood can seem counter-intuative or whatnot - but for me at least it just makes sense after you talk to (or watch youtube videos from) trans folks (also trans men, who often seem to be forgotten about when talking about sports or toilet access etc. etc.)

Sooooo much that’s been omitted here and/or could be expanded on!

https://youtu.be/9bbINLWtMKI

Fwiw I don’t think your wording here is particularly inflammatory, although can see why people would get their backs up over it

trans women do feel a mental femaleness, it’s true, I think it’s more expansive than that but, speaking candidly, one trans person can find it hard to explain how their transness feels to another trans person with a shared experience, I can’t imagine trying to write it down on a bike forum comment!

I know we have spoken last year about this stuff and you have vastly different views to me, but I’m sure we can both agree the article posted is not a representation of concerns in sport, we can also both agree when this is mentioned on the forum well intentioned or sometimes unhelpful individuals can inflame these discussions.

I echo @hoefla that voicing opinions here on this, or a variety of women’s issues can be hostile and undesirable for women. Before people jump in they should think to engage in good faith, and not to hook onto gotchyas as you point out.

We can discuss a vast majority of intricacies of expanding trans participation in sport, for trans women, trans men and non binary people. we can also discuss how the label of what women means to different women, trans women, black women, disabled women, mothers, daughters, all women, in a way which lifts us up. Patriarchal violence and structure affects us all, and every day is a fight not only to maintain those hard won concessions by women before us, but also to expand it in ways which are still under threat for women after us, abortion, reproductive health, gendered violence, access to healthcare, workplace discrimination to name a few.

But the discussion, from articles linked and circulating, about my friends and people who work hard to provide these events, the misgendering and hurtful slurs which are weaponised soley to hurt people , these things would not be ok even if they had done any hint of fact checking of the event, as all they seek to do is cause hurt. A fluff piece for the fringe social conservative who I’m sure would have views on issues we both, even with our different viewpoints on the place of trans women in woman hood, would find abhorrent.

Last point from me - in a world that still separates folks into one or the other, man/woman or male/female, I honestly believe that having trans folks embraced by their gender - as opposed to their birth sex - is by far the more compassionate way of moving forwards.

A trans woman is not a person with a 'mental feeling of femaleness', it's a woman who was assigned a male gender identity at birth.

I don't think I can agree with this. Gender identity is surely a concept about oneself, and newborn babies don't have any concept of self, let alone their gender identity?

Edit: I would agree that from birth onwards, some external gender-based societal role assignment/conditioning takes place. Starting with pink/blue balloons, but that is not gender identity.

possible assigned by omission/on the presumption that their gender identity will be congruent with their biological sex?

Maybe it should be the categories that change; as the main reason split sports exist is due to the physical advantage conferred by testosterone rather than anything inherent in identity as a man or woman. Make them "Open" and "NoT" or whatever and then it's fine for a man or woman to compete in whichever is appropriate and with a reasonably level playing field.

why should the categories change when the only people complaining are twitter twats who don't even ride a bike

If you include other sports then there are more than people on Twitter who are unhappy. There are some examples towards the end of the article at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/60995362

Sorry how does that relate to our racing categories at Thundercrit?

Thundercrit doesn't exist in isolation