It never ceases to make me cringe, the harm that is done in the supposed name of fairness.
PDGA said:
Section 8.1 of this framework encouraged organizations to meaningfully consult with a cross-section of athletes who may be negatively affected, which is what drove the decision to conduct a survey of the membership.
As per usual, the negative effects on the trans players aren't even an afterthought. Screw the 12 of us in the PDGA, because we might take away some money that some cis woman could've lost to another cis woman that day. Having allowed 29,844 cisgender men have the loudest, and largest say in this shows the PDGA wasn't giving one whit of concern to fairness. Their system knows what gender players are registered as - they had every opportunity to only provide the survey to those who may be negatively effected (ie- women), and make the decision based on those who actually have skin in the game. Instead, only 8% of respondents were women - making the "all respondents", "all pros", "all DGPT", and "just amateurs" polluted cesspools of useless data, serving no purpose but to make it seem like there was
that much more support for a ban - but data that the board of people who don't do professional data analysis no doubt gave undue weight, regardless of the opinions of the 2796 women surveyed being in-line with the same results (more on this below).
PDGA said:
The PDGA Global Board of Directors cares deeply about the culture and history of the sport of disc golf. From the beginning, disc golf has strived to be an inclusive sport that welcomes people from all walks of life.
Pull the other leg. I don't want to walk crooked. That statement is completely at odds with the 70% or more of the survey respondents self-reporting as being conservative to some degree, especially when one of their most prominent TDs and board members is an outspoken opponent of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Now, about that "more on this below", up above.
This survey was done badly. Flat out. I won't mince words about it. Everyone who took it was baffled as to how badly the questions were designed, but it goes even deeper than that.
You're asking for opinions from uninformed people, about a very complex subject that even the PDGA chose bad studies for. You
cannot survey useful answers from people who don't understand the subject matter, if you want to have
any premise of concern for "fairness" in the outcome. You will get 100% emotional reactions, and not one single respondent doing any research, because they're answering based on what their gut (or whatever talking head they hear about this subject from) tells them - and there is a
lot of misinformation going around, when it comes to trans women in sports.
The Hilton and Lundberg study is an incredibly poor meta-analysis of other science, that focuses solely on numbers, and dives no deeper into understanding them. My favorite cringe whenever someone links it is limb length. Indulge me a brief dive into the data that illustrates the overall lack of care taken by Hilton or Lundberg:
Most of these numbers are easily found on Google, which sources them from census data, and other various publications that do statistical analysis of things like sex and height.
For my estimate on the number of trans women, I used this site, providing information from June 2022:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
The current US population is 331.9 million.
50.5% of the US population are cisgender women.
That means there are 167.6 million cisgender women in the US.
1% of those cisgender women are over 6 feet tall.
That means 1.68 million cisgender women in the US are over 6 feet tall.
There are an estimated 1.3 million transgender people in the US.
38.5% of transgender people report as being trans women.
That means there are an estimated 515,200 transgender women in the US.
That means there are
over three times as many cis women over 6 feet all, than there are trans women in total.
14.5% of men in the US are over 6 feet tall.
Given their sex at birth, and being
very charitable towards those on the
other side of this argument from me by assuming they all received
zero growth stunting from hormone replacement therapy (a physical impossibility, but again, play along even though it goes against my side on this), this means there are 74,704 trans women in the US over 6 feet tall (I'm one of them!).
25% of adults in the US play sports.
This means that out of that 1.68 million women in the US over 6 feet tall, 419,000 are athletes (over 81% of the total population of trans women in the US).
This means there are a mere 18,676 trans women in the US over 6 feet tall, who are athletes.
The Hilton and Lundberg study speaks of the differences between trans women and cis women from the perspective of an insurmountable physical advantage, and includes limb length - which has a direct correlation with overall height, as one of the contributing indicators of an advantage.
If even 4.5% of the cisgender women in the US who are over 6 feet tall compete in sports, there are more cisgender women athletes over 6 feet tall than there are trans women over 6 feet tall, athletic or not - and this is another statistic where the numbers alone don't tell the whole story. Consider that a cis girl over 6 feet tall is going to be pushed
very hard towards playing a sport (especially volleyball and basketball), and that comparatively it is likely
exceedingly rare that a trans girl is athletic (My sample size is only around 150 or so between myself, the trans community I know well enough to know whether they're into sports, and the few trans women in disc golf that I know of, but in my experience the percentage of trans girls/women who are competitive athletes is more like 10% - "competitive", versus those who just exercise to attain or maintain a certain weight or body shape for transition purposes).
That one study seems to have been the sole data set used by the PDGA in making their decision (it is the only one quoted, and they provided
zero citations), and it is only one of
dozens that cover this topic, of varying quality - many of which suffer the same problem that Hilton and Lundberg did. When you analyze these things solely as numbers (which happens all too often in transgender research, because no one funds it, so everyone has to analyze other people's science - so there's never a point at which they
see the people behind the numbers), it is very easy to forget that the numbers represent
people, and that each of them has a
story behind it. Life doesn't happen in a vacuum, and culture, opportunity, and societal bias have a
huge impact on things like participation and success in sports. When scientists make a blunder as big as just that one I went into detail about above with limb length, it makes it very likely the conclusions they make from those numbers were reached with just as little care as their analyses. You cannot just take
one study, and declare it "enough" to codify discrimination against an entire population. Doubly so, if you're speaking out the other side of your mouth about your desire for inclusivity.
Now, before anyone jumps at me about leaving out useful information
myself: Limb length
does determine how much lean body mass (ie- muscle) a given person has (because longer limbs mean more muscle tissue running along their length, and needed to support its weight) - and post-puberty, pre-transition, a trans woman
does have more dense, fast-twitch focused muscles than a cis woman. However, post-transition the composition of muscle fibers in a trans women show more slow-twitch fibers than fast-twitch - they become, in essence, the same sort of muscles that cis women have, except they also have fewer capillaries feeding them blood and oxygen. That means they aren't as efficient as a cis woman. A few years after transition (for me it was between 2 and 3, but I doubt there's a set value you could standardize on), a trans woman's muscle composition has changed enough that if you were to compare her power to that of a cis woman with the same height and amount of lean body mass, they would essentially be equals. There is nothing preventing cis women from doing the strength training necessary to get any muscle mass I have that they lack, and they would be on even footing for fast twitch muscle use like a disc golf drive at that point.
It would all come down to the two things that disc golf needs more than anything, to be successful -
skill, and technique.
