Transgender Athletes In Sports (Jubilee Fact Check Edition)
Starting off I genuinely think trans women athletes is a discussion that needs to be had with open minds because there are some genuine biological differences that come when the athlete is extremely young but this entire issue needs to happen outside of Congress and outside of random people on the internet such as me.
Anyways, I recently watched the Sam Seder Jubilee episode and saw one about with a conservative against LGBTQ activists and decided to watch it. The topic of Trans Women in sports was one of his topics and he cited the UN as having said that in 2024 900 medals were lost by cis women which is a staggering number. While I didn't doubt that trans women would win some games that seemed like a staggering number so I did some research.
This factoid is technically true but extremely disingenuous.
Firstly, "The UN." It's not the UN. UN reports allow organizations to suggest additions to the report if they consider it relevant. That is what happened here. This is not a UN run statistic or heavily researched by the UN but rather CITED in a UN report. These conservative circles just know that we love to trust the UN reports and so attribute it frequently to the UN instead.
Anyways let's see what group suggested this factoid should be included.
Let's see these three organizations (I for the life of me could not find information on Lavender Patch because it's definitely not Lavender Rights).
Women's Liberation Front about page:
Okay pretty clear that they are an transphobic group. Not a moderate one either. Doesn't want trans people to be legally recognized transphobic.
ICFP? Well this is the first thing you see going into it
Okay I think they are also solidly against trans people. While many of the resources on their page are devoid of explicitly transphobic statements they very clearly have an agenda.
Dianne Post is more interesting here. I had never heard of her before so I did some research. She is a lesbian and women's rights activist who uses inflammatory commentary sometimes in her writing but is probably the most moderate of these three groups. She primarily tries to lobby the UN and write pieces. She often actually uses statistics although will sometimes not paint the full picture. (Honestly I don't often see people on either side of the isle point out problems with their statistics.)
Ex: She had a substack article on trans women in prisons and primarily focuses on the number of people who applied for a transfer and chooses a few examples of situations being covered up. For example she cites 33.8% of the people applying for a transfer to a women's prison as having sexually assaulted a women in the past. On the other hand she does not mention that these prisoners are then rated on their likelyhood to be assaulted where they are and how likely they are to assault someone and only 1/10 prisoners actually get approved with most likely those 33.8% being among the 90% rejected.
Overall not the worst not the best person.
Anyways time for the actually source they cite. They cite shewon.org. Huh. Seems unbiased /j
Their stated purpose? "Dedicated to archiving the achievements of female athletes who were displaced by male athletes in women sporting events."
Okay let's get into the actual content rather then just looking at the purposes. Let's look at the about page to see how they get their data.
"Run by a team of volunteers who accept submissions to the page then review them to make sure that the winner of the award was trans and check the official records."
Okay then. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they do fact check everything but I just want to make it even more clear that this is NOT UN backed information and so it truly peeves me how many people cite this as UN information.
Slight side note: They simultaneously misgender every trans athlete and say the right name. They will say Stephanie and he in the same sentence. I honestly don't know how to react but I'll leave that up to any readers of this post.
Now for my big problem with the data: They over represent the number of awards the may be lost by a AFAB athlete to an AMAB athlete.
This is done through placement awards. If a trans athlete gets first place then 3 medals are counted for first second and third that were knocked down.
This isn't a lie or anything and I do fully understand why they might want to do this but it severely inflates the number when most competitions where a trans athlete wins are multiplied by three.
One other big section that can be talked about is the inclusion of some sports that there is no evidence men have any biological advantage in. Poker is included? (Admittedly only 3 medals are reported lost but still) Snooker and Billards? How many of these do AMABs actually have a "biological advantage" in?
Bigger is the introduction of some sports where research is actively being done right and still inconclusive such as disc golf which contributes 181 of their medals and biological advantage is still being debated with multiple studies being done as we speak (Although maybe not anymore with Trump's research cuts :( )
Anyways have a good day and thanks for reading this and THIS IS NOT A FUCKING UN STATISTIC NEWS STOP SAYING IT IS.
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