I thought the VeloNews coverage was pretty good, comprehensive and fairly evenhanded, which is nice to see in a conversation that usually devolves into an ugly mess very quickly. Seeing the big media outlets report on this is pretty rich, though -- they never give a **** about women's sports until they find a controversy they can sell.

She hasn't been shy about publicizing this. She @ mentioned all of the major news outlets. Read all of the @ mentions she added after the initial tweet.

https://mobile.twitter.com/rachelvmc...95467979173888

Edit:

This is what I mean by how she can't go on a publicity road-show then claim here that she doesn't want anyone to talk about it as though it were a private matter. Really?

Sure, and as long as it's a respectful conversation, I don't see why it should be an issue. I was pretty disappointed to see it get shut down here.

People have a lot of ****ty things to say about trans people. And in the case of a trans person winning stuff, people have a lot of particularly badly-informed, science-has-proven-it-wrong things to say. Loudly.

Makes it hard to believe that people are coming to the conversation in good faith, without an axe to grind about their prejudices.

I wholeheartedly agree with both of you and also wouldn't tolerate it.

But, "don't throw the baby out with the bath water". There is obviously room for honest discussion and debate on this topic.

I think the knee-jerk reaction to anything other than 100% support for what was done and how it was done is seen as [whatever]-phobic, when there could be some other very valid points to be debated.

Similar examples that I've seen come up in our world:

- Should Olympians be allowed to compete at Masters Track Nationals/Worlds?
- Should UCI Pros be allowed to compete at Collegiate Track Nationals?
- Are they simply cherry-picking (relatively) easy championships to pad their resumes and egos?
- Should International pro level racers be allowed to enter local/regional events to win cash?
- Even if technically eligible, should they respectfully decline to participate?

These are all things that I've seen happen and people have varied opinions about...and the conversations can be productive.

Other examples:
- How are pedal straps legal when the clipless variants are all modded and thus break UCI rules about modifying parts.
- Is weed a PED? (One masters champ got busted and banned for testing positive in 2012). I think the rule has changed since.
- Team KGF's Preying Mantis position that's not the Preying Mantis position...but was.
- Should juniors be limited to 28-spoked wheels and aluminum frames to even the playing field?
- Should junior gear restrictions change or be lifted in this era of big gears?


Basically, our sport is never without controversies (small and large).

This is possibly the most accurate statement on here. An interesting point to note is that the vast majority of commenting on this issue is coming from males, those people who are not directly impacted by the whole situation. What is needed is a lot more input from females that have and do. I only knowingly have one friend that has competed against trans women and she has no problem it seems.

As the parent of a daughter that, despite being young, is proving herself to be quite an adept sportswoman, I have been paying attention to this discussion. Via a friend, I have had exposure to the whole trans situation years ago and I have come to my own terms on this, that being no problem with them. Now if my daughter continues with sport into higher senior levels, it is very likely that she may be confronted by this very situation. The situation is that it is a very grey area. It is not black and white, sausage and taco. Science rules above emotion and the scientific facts are that there should be no issue BUT there are qualifications for that to be so IMO. The science behind a transitioned male is fairly solid in longer term examples. I think the original IOC stance was close with full transition required, but I think that was a touch heavy handed. Maybe not fully transitioned, but definitely a longer term exposure to the transition process should be required. As a fellow Aussie pointed out on FB, illness had caused him to have the T to be able to compete as a female. The current IOC stance where T levels just have to be on a comparable level I don't think is fair. On the surface a male could compete after only a short stint in transition where many benefits of being male are carried over. Now the science shows that after a prolonged period of transition, factors that people throw around like bone density and muscle mass begin to be on par with comparable females. This is the point where I feel the playing field becomes fair. I believe some transition timeline should be in place to level things out. Now what that is comes down to studies. Perhaps it is 2 years of tracked results or whatever.

Now, an even greyer area goes back to science once again, and SF points to it in the velonews link above. It is a scientific fact that despite what you may be showing on the outside, there's many individuals that are chemically the other way around. Now I have zero doubt that when it comes to strength and power sports, this is where the top performers come from. I believe it is part of the whole puzzle of what it takes for them to be the genetic outliers that make them great.

Now on the surface I don't really have a problem with what SF has achieved. As with my stance above and what I have read about her, she has paid her dues. How she has gone about things definitely rubs a lot of people up the wrong way. But she is a pioneer and those sorts of personalities tend to be just like that. If she didn't do it, someone else would have come along eventually and done the same. I don't believe in her stance that testing her T is against her human rights. In everyday society, sure it is, but she came to compete in sport outside of her birth gender. Competing at this level of sport outside of your birth gender is not your human right IMO, it is a choice, and there is a cost to buy into the game, and that is it.

What is needed on this discussion is for the males to sit down and shut up for a while and encourage as many women as possible to come forward with their opinions and experiences. Because males don't actually compete against trans women at such levels and so anything that they say is just an opinion based on emotion without any actual experience.

I beg to differ.

The #1 qualifier in the event declined to race. It's my understanding is that she did this to protest McKinnon's entry. The bronze medalist in the same event (the woman on the right in the podium photo) also spoke out against this on Twitter and in the press. She has since accepted the results but has also vowed to push for a rule change though official channels.

How more direct can it get?

Given the following dystopian scenario:

- The IOC and UCI cannot make a set of rules that makes everyone happy. This is impossible.
- The IOC and UCI reluctantly declare that all fields are "Open to all comers that qualify".

This means:

- One Olympic Road Race
- One Olympic Road Time Trial
- One Olympic Sprint tournament
- One Olympic Time Trial (kilo)
- One Olympic Pursuit (4k)
- One Olympic Team Sprint (3 laps)
- One Olympic Team Pursuit
- One Olympic Keirin
- etc...

All open to both men and women. May the best person win.

This also goes for:

- Juniors Nationals/Worlds
- Elites Nationals/Worlds
- Masters Nationals/Worlds
- Pan-Ams, European Championships, Oceanic, Asian Championships, etc...
- Olympics

Since you mention you and your daughter, how would you and her feel about this respectively?

Filtering out the intolerant BSers and focusing on men with fair comments...

Real talk, McKinnon in particular is no threat to competitive 35-39 year old males if she's riding 11.9" with a peak at Worlds after training for nearly 2 years. Her short-lived WR time would not have even earned her entry into the men's 35-39 tournament. I can't see any men feeling threatened.

Given the scenario I laid out above, It's the girls and women who lose opportunities.

New track training shoes
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/nhkn...anesefootwear/

BUT WHY? The No.1 qualifier, to my knowledge hasn't actually publicly declared her reasoning for withdrawing. I have seen a lot of speculation, but nothing that has come from her directly. Also the bronze medal rider has said "It's definitely not fair", nothing more that I have seen. What I want to see is the reasoning for this. There are rules in place and SF competed within those rules. If the rules are unfair then petition to have them changed (good luck with that). Why, if noone else seemed to pull out of the competition, didn't Fader get out there and race? On paper she had the legs to beat SF. If she had beaten her would we be hearing as much protest? SF isn't the first trans athlete to compete and do well and win medals, yet you would think from all the press and protest that this has never been done before.

I don't like subjective reasoning and try to maintain an objective attitude to most things that I do. I find emotion can land you in the poo more times than not. I qualify my stance with this reasoning. Science tells us that long term transitioning results in reduced bone density and reduced muscle mass, to the point where some particularly solid athletes can be at a distinct DISadvantage.
I think my daughter is too young to have to worry about such woes of life, but it is something that will have to be tackled in her teen years without a doubt. Reading of trans athletes competing in high schools and college means that you don't have to be masters age to have this experience. I am taking my time in formulating my opinion and I like to think that it is a fluid transition and open to change. I will admit that when first confronted with gender transition I was definitely not as accepting as I am now. It was new to me and strange and confronting, but even moreso for my friend who enabled me to gain my insight. Over the years I now have no issue with it. Re the situation now, being objective, there is no issue. SF ticked the boxes and won legitimately. It's all new and weird for a lot of people, but it's by the rulebook. I feel that there are loopholes there that need closing to increase the fairness of a situation that likely won't change - that being transgender inclusion in competition.

I teach my children not to fight the system, but to beat the system. The system allows them to compete, so look at them like any other gifted athlete and beat them!

We have this:

My question about, "Since you mention you and your daughter, how would you and her feel about this respectively?", I meant of my extreme scenario that I outlined above where the IOC and UCI get rid of gender grouping because of inability to please everyone. Basically we have a situation like, "The miller, his son and the donkey", where no one will be fully pleased.

Basically, how would you and your daughter feel if she had to compete against all other children in her age group in sports. It may not be an issue now, depending on her age (not asking). But, after puberty, a performance gap forms and it gets wider every year after.

For the record, I'm not endorsing the scenario above where there are no men's and women's divisions.

In general, I think the happy medium lay with the idea that, when there is significant debate as to which is the right category in which to place a rider, the decision must be into the more competitive category. I think that's fair. I would be happy to race against McKinnon.

TBH I don't have an opinion and I don't care. Formulating an opinion on an extreme speculation is something I just don't bother with. I can't ever see that happening and I don't think it's really all that relevant and assisting to the discussion here. The issue is about trans athletes competing in their respective "new" gender categories. For M-F there are guidelines in place now that I think are too relaxed. We can get all PC about it but IMO a track record of transitioning should be proven that puts you into the even playing field category. Whatever that timeline is. The previous IOC stance requiring full transition was just that one step too far, but it was close to what I think should be right. As I said before, the science says that makes the playing field pretty much level and then we just begin to talk about genetic differences that aren't M/F

Females can compete against males irrespective of what they want. Basically the IOC is saying that women are not physically as good as men so whatever. But what if a woman were to come in and race US nats and win or place. Given the times that are posted I would say that is something that could reasonably happen. There are women in other parts of the world that could be well expected to win or podium some of the age groups so one would assume it's entirely possible for a US athlete to do. What if you were a male and in a shooting or archery mens competition category and a group of women came in and took home all the medals. That's entirely possible and fully legit too.

So maybe we test athletes and categorise them based on say a T marker, kind of like the UCI Biological Passport? That would be much more fair and equitable. So as all those men get old and their T drops low, does it just become a women's category :foo:

This is exactly what I mean by the fact that we may be in a, "The miller, his son and the donkey" situation. No single answer to your question will satisfy everyone.

The most egalitarian way is simply run time trials, sort the results from high to low. Pick the top 16 and start the event...which is the dystopian scenario I set out.

The top qualifier, Sarah Fader, is on record in this article:
https://www.velonews.com/2018/10/new...ckinnon_480285

I used to compete in shooting sports briefly. I would 100% be open to an Open (non gender-group) competitions at all levels. I competed toe to toe (err...stopwatch to stopwatch) with women half my age...and got my ass kicked. And would pay money the next week to do it all over again.

Bam.

This is from one of women directly affected and likely to beat her.

I agree in general the discussion I've seen on the internet is full of inane bashing. From SF's perspective it must be pretty hard to take, that you've trained hard and played by the rules set forth by the governing body (I don't think that is in question unless I've missed something) and nonetheless the overwhelming response is negative.
I think questions aimed at whether the rules and regulations need further examination / amendment are fine to ask... but there is a person at the center of it, which I think often gets forgotten in internet frenzies like this has become.
To me, do I think SF picked a sport that rewarded her physiology... yes. I don't think that's a question, she would certainly be a fine master's sprinter in an open field of men and women. The question then is whether or not she has an unfair advantage. I think she has an uncommon body type for a female cyclist, but not unheard of. How few women in the US get into cycling to start with, beyond that how many into a specialization like track sprinting. A very small % so not seeing a lot of variety of body types is not much of an argument. (I bring that up since the internet seems so focused on how much larger SF is than the other ladies on the podium) Some very, very large men are track sprinters, who would look downright out of place on a podium with smaller, more traditional cyclists, but should you punish them because they chose the right discipline? If SF had chose to focus on hill climb nationals I doubt this would be a discussion we were having... so is it because she is good at picking her battles why we're here?

Fwiw I don't know any answers... I'm just a dude behind a keyboard who has too much time to read the internet. But everyone who competed at Worlds agreed to compete under the IOC's rules, right?

Right?

As a bike racer, I've come to terms with disappointment a lot - being beaten by people who outclass the rest of the field; being beaten by full time athletes who just get to train more and recover better; athletes who don't have to travel to this race that we're both at; or natural athletes who just start out a ****load faster, stronger, and better than I did. I think that the stuff around sex and gender with trans participation hits some competitive people hard because we like to think that we have a shot of winning, and we like to think that there is something fundamentally disqualifying about people who beat us: to too many bike racers, winners are either dopers or sandbaggers. I've seen a lot of bike racers (and surely it's similar in other sports) try to figure out how to ensure that racing is a "level playing field" - which, honestly, means that a lot of people want to ensure that they're only racing races where they have a reasonable shot at winning or medaling.

But sports aren't about a fair playing field or having a shot at winning. For me, it's about coming to terms with the certainty that I am not the best - that there are a lot of people who are better than me - and the more I try to slice away at the competition to remove them from the starting line in the first place, the more I smell bull**** on my breath - you know?

Cycling lets you touch the hem of your dreams. A guy I race with at ttown just won the World Cup Scratch Race; USA Cycling has been sending riders I've beaten to World Cups and other international races. I can, for a moment, flirt with the notion that I could have been there too. But then I remember that everything's more complicated than that.

Here's where I think it's personal to McKinnon and not a general "trans in cycling" issue.

Recall that McKinnon started her talk (that she linked to) by stating that she was "An academic, an athlete, and an activist."

I don't think McKinnon "loves track racing for the sake of track racing and just so happens to have stumbled upon a World Championship in the process." Fader touches on that. I think she sport-hopped (badminton, road cycling, track cycling, and maybe other sports) until she found a sport where she could excel "out of the box" and advance her activist goals and give academic talks about it. Please note what she did immediately after winning. She was in full "activist", "academic", and showboat mode when I would expect the "athlete" to simply relish the moment in a "Damn. I did it! This is unbelievable!" kind of way that happens to most when they win their first Nationals or World Championship.

I wonder if she simply did it for the publicity and not for the love of this sport. Could it have easily been Volleyball or Tennis? If so, it's a shame that the other competitors were part of the experiment.

I wish people would stop holding the IOC as a paragon of how sports should be run. To use it to support the idea that the right to participate in sport is a human right seems a stretch -- not that the idea doesn't have some merit.

The inequity of competitive sport is part of it's definition. However, it's up to the participants / organizations to decide what is acceptable to the rules of the sport -- as well outlined by Carleton in his posts.

SF won fair and square according to the rules as established by the UCI. However, I don't think it's fair to completely dismiss the objections of some of her competitors. As pointed at by many, there are physiologic differences that go beyond just testosterone levels between those who have an xx or xy chromosome. Additionally, are the physiologic differences during childhood development caused by the xy chromosome create an overly unfair playing field in track sprinting?

I would hope that people can consider these things without resorting to "she's a he" or "sour grapes" arguments. This is going to come up again, and more so in the future, and these are not unreasonable questions to ask.

Yikes guys. The IOC had its first trans policy in 2003, updated in 2015.

This 'dystopian future' hasn't happen. Stop the fear-mongering. Also, you're talking about me like I'm not here. Carleon: you're obsessed, man.

I was an athlete since I was 3. An elite athlete at 10.

I was an elite athlete before I was an academic.

I started cycling in 2014. Was an elite cyclist in 2016.

Didn't start working or being an activist on this topic until 2017.

I didn't get into any sport to 'make a point.' Carleton, you're salty and offensive to the extreme. You think it's personal for me? Seems REALLY personal for you. Why are you so obsessed?

And Carleton, haters like you are why I am the way I am in the public: because people have been trying to stop me from competing ever since I entered cycling. So SORRY for not being as humble as you'd like or think is how an athlete 'should' behave.

[MENTION=24941]StanSeven[/MENTION], he's at it again.

It's cute that this is new to many of you, but it's NOT new to science and sports federations.

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/2bc3f...e85bae0750.pdf

But keep it up with the hot takes, fellas. Nothing that hasn't been said 10,000+ times to me already in the past week.

But I'll bow out.

I had Breitbart and Alex Jones yelling about me (yeah, that's whose side you're on).

I have bigger fish the fry than some dude in Atlanta that doesn't even race and can't break 12.0 in a 200m.

And there's the [MENTION=467774]southernfox[/MENTION] we all know :love:

Is Jillian Bearden on Alex Jones' and Breitbart's side too?

I was there when all of this took place at Carson. I had the same thoughts as I watched the spectacle unfurl. I just thought that "she just won a world championship! What is all this other stuff." Full disclosure, at the time of the event, I did not realize that McKinnon was SF. I say this because I do not like the entity that is SF on this forum, based on her past statements and verbal behavior. Now that I know that McKinnon and SF are the same person, her behavior after the WC no longer surprises me. That said, although I do not like the person, I don't have a problem with what or who she is, and don't have a problem with her participating in the race, because she competed in accordance with the rules.

I have literally zero interest in the topic on a personal level. It could be best measured by the word "Meh".

But. You seem to be very upset at the idea of people discussion your situation and background despite celebrating it openly on a social media platform. This seems highly hypocritical.

Whilst I can understand (or maybe can't I suppose, it not being my story) this conversation being highly personal to you, it's hard to spot anyone being extremely negative or phobic in any way. It seems to be fairly evenly handed, being both positive and negative and largely speaking not personal in nature.

Yes there's no doubt Carleton can be a bit pissy with you, but there's no doubting there are others too, and by and large I think it's largely due to a level of arrogance they have had to listen to.