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Transgender Texas wrestler wins girls state


greco165

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https://sports.yahoo.com/news/transgender-boy-wins-controversial-girls-state-title-005123777.html

 

Thoughts?  Apparently s/he is already taking testosterone treatments, which I believe are banned in nearly every high school/collegiate/pro sport unless there is a legitimate medical need.

That is the problem, everyone is afraid to do the right thing and call BS when it should be called. What is the difference if it was  a regular kid that was taking testosterone, or any other enhancing drug, they would be out, but God forbid you challenge a LGBT person now a days. Should be a huge asterisk next to the kids name in the record books if it wins.

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According to a previous article, she petitioned to compete in the boys state tournament but the Texas State Association said that she had to compete in the division based on the gender on her birth certificate. My brother refs in Texas and did some of her matches, just destroyed everybody with ease.

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According to a previous article, she petitioned to compete in the boys state tournament but the Texas State Association said that she had to compete in the division based on the gender on her birth certificate.

Yeah I'd say the issue is on the athletic association of Texas since she tried to be in the boys division and it was denied.

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Four things

 

1. Keep this topic clean

 

2. I have read conflicting reports that he has wrestled in girls events throughout the country. Also it has been stated the parents/coach/wrestler never filed anything to ask to wrestle against the boys.

 

3. If #2 is correct I wouldn't be shocked as it seems parents in many sports will always try to get an edge no matter what.

 

4. I wish there would be more positive wrestling stories than ones like that that like to bring drama to sports. We do a great thing by having a girl's state championship...then this.

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The 5A coach of the year for the Woman's division use to wrestled with my sister in college. She told me that the girl/boy did file to wrestle in the boys division but was denied by the state association.

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A couple thoughts.

 

1st -  He. His name is Mack, referring to him as she or her or worst of all "s/he" is just disrespectful. 

 

2nd - I'm not sure it really matters whether or not he officially put in a petition to wrestle with the boys or not. He has stated he would rather wrestle with the boys but there is a rule against it. He is following the rules as they are written. The issue should be with the rule not with the kid that is following them.

 

3rd - It is not the place of a state athletic asocciation to decide what medication is "medically necessary", and it is definitely not the place for somebody on a message board to decide.  There are a lot of reasons that people choose to transition, but none of them have anything to do with wanting to win a girls state title. To say that he shouldn't be allowed to compete because he is taking hormone therapy, which is prescribed by a doctor, is insane. Forcing a transgender athlete to choose between living in a body that fits their mind or competeing in a sport they love is just plain cruel.

 

4th - I have a feeling texas will be taking a look at their rules after all of this and I hope that other states with similar rules do the same.  These rules need to be changed. 

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A couple thoughts.

 

1st -  He. His name is Mack, referring to him as she or her or worst of all "s/he" is just disrespectful. 

 

2nd - I'm not sure it really matters whether or not he officially put in a petition to wrestle with the boys or not. He has stated he would rather wrestle with the boys but there is a rule against it. He is following the rules as they are written. The issue should be with the rule not with the kid that is following them.

 

3rd - It is not the place of a state athletic asocciation to decide what medication is "medically necessary", and it is definitely not the place for somebody on a message board to decide.  There are a lot of reasons that people choose to transition, but none of them have anything to do with wanting to win a girls state title. To say that he shouldn't be allowed to compete because he is taking hormone therapy, which is prescribed by a doctor, is insane. Forcing a transgender athlete to choose between living in a body that fits their mind or competeing in a sport they love is just plain cruel.

 

4th - I have a feeling texas will be taking a look at their rules after all of this and I hope that other states with similar rules do the same.  These rules need to be changed. 

 

So, it is OK for a wrestler to get a doctor's prescription to take an illegal substance that knowingly gives a major competitive advantage? You do know professional athletes have been given steroids by "doctors". Right? So is that OK?

I'm fine with him wrestling with the guys if that's their decision. I'm fine with him wrestling with the girls - since biologically she is a girl. What I'm not fine with is getting to use a banned substance - no matter if it's doctor prescribed or not. What's to say that a guy isn't allowed to take testosterone because he doesn't feel he is gaining muscle as quickly as he desires. For her/him, the testosterone is a choice with consequences. Just like some wrestlers can't compete because of concussions, etc. If she/he wants to compete - don't take a banned substance.

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Performance enhancing drug testing is very different when comparing high schools to college/pro/Olympic levels. I assume that most states are like Indiana and leave that up to the local schools and don't drug test at state level events.

 

On top of that college/pro/Olympic athletes can take banned substances if they are prescribed by a doctor.

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So, it is OK for a wrestler to get a doctor's prescription to take an illegal substance that knowingly gives a major competitive advantage? You do know professional athletes have been given steroids by "doctors". Right? So is that OK?

I'm fine with him wrestling with the guys if that's their decision. I'm fine with him wrestling with the girls - since biologically she is a girl. What I'm not fine with is getting to use a banned substance - no matter if it's doctor prescribed or not. What's to say that a guy isn't allowed to take testosterone because he doesn't feel he is gaining muscle as quickly as he desires. For her/him, the testosterone is a choice with consequences. Just like some wrestlers can't compete because of concussions, etc. If she/he wants to compete - don't take a banned substance.

 

The difference being, no professional athlete has ever been PRESCRIBED steroids. Yes, doctors have provided them, but actually writing out a prescription creates a paper trail that nobody wants.

 

Taking adderal has been proven to give an athletic boost as well, it increases force production and provides an increase in cardiovascular endurance. Not to mention the appetite suppression and increased metabolism that make cutting weight way easier. Would you like to ban every kid with ADHD from wretsling as well?

 

He and his doctor have made a decision that hormone therapy is medically necessary for his well-being. 

 

Transgender teens that are not allowed to transition or are not accepted in their need to transition kill themselves at an alarming rate. When transition is allowed and accepted and supported, you end up with happy healthy kids that grow up and don't die. Making a transgender teen choose between competition and transition is just plain cruel.

 

Change the rule, let him, and others like him, compete against the boys while taking their doctor prescribed hormone therapy. Problem solved.

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Again, I don't think the onus for this isn't on the athlete but that of the state association. The case is very simple a female is transitioning to a male which is perfectly legal. Medically, this requires certain things to happen, like testosterone therapy. The governing body needs to look at that and act accordingly. Especially if under the written rules the athlete is doing what they are suppose to, but people are finding/having issues with it. Get on it Texas.

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As long as the hormone therapy is in line with the gender norm, I don't really see a problem. Or in other words if the boy (in transition) doesn't receive more testosterone than the typical HS male, then no advantage is gained, and why should that student be prevented from competing against boys? I get the concerns more regarding girls (in transition) that still have more testosterone than their competitors and would create unfair advantages (in much the same way as the wrestler in the article had an advantage due to his hormone therapy)

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The difference being, no professional athlete has ever been PRESCRIBED steroids. Yes, doctors have provided them, but actually writing out a prescription creates a paper trail that nobody wants.

 

Taking adderal has been proven to give an athletic boost as well, it increases force production and provides an increase in cardiovascular endurance. Not to mention the appetite suppression and increased metabolism that make cutting weight way easier. Would you like to ban every kid with ADHD from wretsling as well?

 

He and his doctor have made a decision that hormone therapy is medically necessary for his well-being. 

 

Transgender teens that are not allowed to transition or are not accepted in their need to transition kill themselves at an alarming rate. When transition is allowed and accepted and supported, you end up with happy healthy kids that grow up and don't die. Making a transgender teen choose between competition and transition is just plain cruel.

 

Change the rule, let him, and others like him, compete against the boys while taking their doctor prescribed hormone therapy. Problem solved.

 

I really wish I hadn't stepped into this conversation. And I'm not going to go on more about this. One reason I like this site is because it's about wrestling - not social issues. But, having said that - studies I have read show that the suicide rate actually increases after a transgender person "transitions".

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Two things are happening to make this an issue. First, most people do not understand even a little bit the biology of gender, but more importantly they want to be deeply opinionated on the topic without even doing a little bit of learning on this topic. Secondly, we are embroiled in a culture war that caused both people and legislatures to fire shots of battle without thinking things through. Here, the state of Texas (among others) hastily passed a law that requires the assigned gender at birth to be the only possible gender to be participated in for any high school athlete in a state-sanctioned event. Note my wording there: "assigned gender at birth"--this is distinctly different from "biological gender". Many aspects go into "biological" gender besides external genitalia, and they involve brain chemistry and the sustained action of the endocrine system--things controlled by genetics. Did you all know, for example, that 1 out of 1000 live births involves ambiguous gender at birth? Physicians are in fact quite good at assigning what turns out to be the correct gender, but in some 10% or so of the cases this is done incorrectly. This means that a state of 6 million people has some 600 or so transgender people simply because of incorrect assignment at birth. The birth certificate will only record what is assigned, not anything to do with any genetic abnormalities. Now add to that mutations in hormone biosynthesis pathways that make up even more of the transgender population, and you get a total of 0.3% of the USA population who is transgender because of clearly defined GENETIC causes. That's 700,000 Americans. Should they be excluded, when in today's age of awareness the time of puberty makes it clear that something is wrong in an incorrectly assigned individual? Basically, anyone who is treating them with scorn, discrimination, or harshly criticizing them is the same jackass as someone who would ridicule someone with Down's syndrome or any number of other genetic abnormalities.
Yet in our haste to fire shots in the culture war or simply to address someone's "ick" factor, we now have laws being passed such as this, by those who have not thought through the issue and who clearly do not understand the biology. In not thinking it through, the rules in Texas (and I suspect other states) now mandate that this student athlete must compete against girls if he's to compete. This is not the ideal situation. Would some people game the system? Sure. I doubt that this is what is happening here, however. Here we have someone, a "tomboy" as it were, who has wrestled while assigned incorrectly as a girl while small, and upon puberty clearly knows himself to be miss-assigned. Mack is now transitioning to male, and should have been competing against males, as such. Biological hormonal therapy is tightly controlled when administered, and does not offer a competitive advantage over other cis-gender boys of the same age. It is no different than if a boy had a testicular malignancy early on and needed hormonal therapy for replacement after the testes would have to be removed. This is what is meant by "medically" appropriate therapy. In fact the regimen used for gender transition would certainly NOT be the most effective way to gain an athletic advantage: the chemical nature of these hormones is different, they have different serum half-lives, they have different androgen receptor affinities, and different responses to something called "aromatase", which actually makes estrogen from testosterone: a normal process in both men and women but that which does not happen with the designer anabolic androgens that "cheaters" take.
The issue is complicated, but I hope we can take a few moments to read about the biology of gender. If Texas had a more responsible law that was thought out by those who understand the issue, Mack would have been competing against boys, and we'd not hear much about this.
 

Edited by TCCender
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I really wish I hadn't stepped into this conversation. And I'm not going to go on more about this. One reason I like this site is because it's about wrestling - not social issues. But, having said that - studies I have read show that the suicide rate actually increases after a transgender person "transitions".

That is false. Recent studies have shown the suicide rate has tremendously been reduced with a correlation to being accepted/being able to transition. So no, they don't become more depressed when able to live their life like they want.

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That is false. Recent studies have shown the suicide rate has tremendously been reduced with a correlation to being accepted/being able to transition. So no, they don't become more depressed when able to live their life like they want.

DelCo, I wonder if you might be able to post the studies you refer to. I've not found any clear cut evidence in my pubmed search in either direction on this point. There seems to be a paucity of data on a before and after comparison of actually undergoing the transition, but it is clear that a non-transitioned transgender youth has very high suicide rates compared to the general population, which is obviously expected.

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DelCo, I wonder if you might be able to post the studies you refer to. I've not found any clear cut evidence in my pubmed search in either direction on this point. There seems to be a paucity of data on a before and after comparison of actually undergoing the transition, but it is clear that a non-transitioned transgender youth has very high suicide rates compared to the general population, which is obviously expected.

At the moment I am unable to recover the articles with the statistics. However I remember vaguely that CNN and The Daily Beast have articles over it. I'll post if I can find

DelCo, I wonder if you might be able to post the studies you refer to. I've not found any clear cut evidence in my pubmed search in either direction on this point. There seems to be a paucity of data on a before and after comparison of actually undergoing the transition, but it is clear that a non-transitioned transgender youth has very high suicide rates compared to the general population, which is obviously expected.

At the moment I am unable to recover the articles with the statistics. However I remember vaguely that CNN and The Daily Beast have articles over it. I'll post if I can find

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At the moment I am unable to recover the articles with the statistics. However I remember vaguely that CNN and The Daily Beast have articles over it. I'll post if I can find

 

At the moment I am unable to recover the articles with the statistics. However I remember vaguely that CNN and The Daily Beast have articles over it. I'll post if I can find

Thanks. I'll look more into that as well, and we'll see what we can find.

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Looks like the stats do not sway far from the average post-transition, but this could be in part due to those that have transitioned are more likely to report an attempt. Still either way, a horrible stat to look into. 

 

Source: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf

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Why is wrestling the only individual sport in Indiana that is not separated by gender?

 

All you pro-class folks should be fighting for this... want to increase numbers - then have a separate class for girls wrestling... we do it in ISWA, we do it in college, we do it for world championships and for the Olympics... 

 

We don't have girls playing boys in tennis, we don't have them swimming against each other, we don't even have them golfing against each other; and yet we have them competing in the only individual contact sport against each other...?

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