Transgender Sues CrossFit After Competition Ban.

Transgender athlete sues CrossFit for banning her from competing as female

From the article:

A transgender woman prohibited from competing in a strength competition as a female is suing the fitness company sponsoring the competition, seeking $2.5 million in damages.

Chloie Jonnson, a personal trainer, charges the CrossFit company with discrimination, intentional infliction of emotional distress and unfair competition in a lawsuit filed Thursday in Santa Cruz, California.

While her lawyer calls it a case of discrimination against transgender people, CrossFit's lawyer calls it protecting the competition.

Last year, Jonnson sought to compete in the CrossFit Games, a contest aimed at determining the fittest man and woman.

According to the lawsuit, Jonnson has identified herself as a female since her teenage years and is legally recognized by California as a woman. She had sexual reassignment surgery in 2006 and has been on female hormone therapy, according to her lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that a CrossFit teammate of Jonnson's sent an anonymous e-mail to the games organizers asking about transgender athletes in the competition. CrossFit determined that competitors in the event had to compete in the gender of their birth.

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Should she be allowed to participate? No.

What you say OT?

I see where CrossFit is coming from, but that won't stop pressure from advocacy groups to settle the lawsuit in the woman's favor.

That is a tough one. Surely this competition has a rule book and if this isn't specified then they might be in some trouble.

But I would still say no because she still was born to be a man who generally have higher peak strengths and endurance.

Pretty much this. Sucks for her, but it's no-one else's fault either.

OH to go back to the days when men were men and women were women.

huh, that's a tough one

When I read those news, part of me thinks that the lawsuit could have been the goal there rather than competing.

The emotional distress is absolute shit. Dont tell me the process of physically changing your body to such a huge degree is less emotionally distressing than being told you cant be in a competition. He/she needs to grow the **** up.

there was a similar (but much nastier, so far) dispute in women's MMA and i kinda have to agree that it wouldn't be fair if she competed against cisgender women. i'm not saying that jonnson isn't a woman (she is). it's just that the whole thing with being transgender is that you're born with the body of one gender and identify with another. athletics are largely a competition of bodies and her body gives her an unfair advantage. hormone therapy can counter differing testosterone levels, but her bone structure remains an advantage.

however, i don't think the solution is to have her compete against men and i don't think there's an easy solution at all. i assume she is going to continue on with hormone therapy, and i can understand why she would, but that also puts her at a disadvantage against men. testosterone levels are considered a performance enhancer across sports, so the disadvantage there is blatant. you also can't really have a transgender women's division because the numbers presumably aren't there.

No, you do.

TOPIC: Placement in sports seems to be somewhat of an unsolvable for transgender people. There isn't really a way around the inherent advantages/disadvantages they hold, and fair competition takes precedence over inclusion.

Well what a well thought out and elaborated answer. It doesn't even remotely reek of having an agenda.

Why would you quote me and ignore my point entirely. Yet you have the audacity to tell me to grow up. How very "mature" of you.

Those were the days.

Liberal states need to come up with the athletic equivalent of "gender-neutral toilets". I wonder how they would go about doing this.

Yeah

It was much easier to simply have an effeminate gay man, rather than playing these ridiculous games.

Need dat money for dat transition surgery.

you thought this woman went through more stress in srs than she did being rejected from the competition, stated you refused to see it from a different view point, and told her to grow up. What point are you trying to make?

That she is lying obviously.

@bowchicka07:

no shit, but I don't understand bringing up the srs. it just seemed unnecessary.

crossfit should just add a transgender category. men who identify as women and women who identify as men would compete in that group

Cutting off your balls and taking female hormones doesn't make you a women, just a dude with no balls and a high voice. I hate how we have to pretend that trans gender people have magically changed their genetic make up just because they don't "feel" like the sex they were born. Buck the **** up guys, you are who you are, surgery won't change it, just hide it. Might as well accept it.

*awaits bleeding heart/politically correct brigades response*

I approve of this, although it would be quite ridiculous nevertheless but its the best available applicable solution to all teh emotional distress and disriminashun.

@vl4d_l3nin: Well it is kind of relevant i guess.

If someone has killed other men then it is doubtful they would get all choked up after killing a deer or something.

Not the best example but I think his point was he/she has already been through so much would being rejected from a competition really wouldn't cause that much emotional stress.

The defendant(s) could use that as cross examination. Not saying it would hold up or anything.

That sums up everything here though really.

Haha yeah....you summed it up nicely bowchicka.

Il clarify for you numpty.

This human....onbviously born in the wrong body, probably spent the vast majority of her formative years trapped inside the wrong body. The feeling of isolation and confusion that would place on a human brain is not something I wished to go into detail about, but as I am sure you can imagine...it would be somewhat traumatic. She then had to make the life changing decision to switch gender. Constulting friends, family...explaining he/she didnt want to be the same gender they were born....big deal I would say. Then she/he had to go through the hormone replacements, operations, physical and emotional scars....just to be in the body she/he feels comfortable in.

But no....being told she couldnt enter a competition was the final blow.....please.

As if Crossfit would have been nasty about it, as if they would dare. It would have been a polite meeting, some very carefully worded phonecalls and emails, explaining that its a physical competition for people of a specific gender. Which is totally fair enough....

Emotional stress...what a joke. I mean he/she knows that he/she is physically different from the competition...which renders the competition unfair. I hope that cleared things up. Sick of seeing people sue Mcdonalds for drinking hot coffee and and entering competitions they are simply not entitled to enter. If Mike Tyson went through "the change" tomorrow, would it be okay to let him enter a female boxing competition?

i bet she still has a more dense muscle and skeletal structure which makes it unfair to people that didn't spend a couple of decades with shitloads of testosterone pumping though their systems.

Well, he isn't a woman so...

Have a open/non-gender class, where both men and women can compete. This is the fairest solution although the winners will almost certainly always be men.

It's as simple as this ^.

Anyone should be able to compete in whatever they league they want if they are good enough. Unfair for others? Tough shit, I do not see players complaining about Cristiano Ronaldo being tall yet able to run like a god damn gazelle or some other physically gifted attribute. Arbitrary "fairness" in sports is so stupid.

exactly, just this morning i punched a toddler and took his candy.

if he wanted to keep his fucking candy he should be able to match my physical prowess.

That is the worst straw man I have seen on this forum in a long time so that in itself is a huge achievement. Congrats!

my bad i was just making a joke.

had i been wanting to make fun of your concept i would have said i just got on the pee wee football team and made mvp.

@Riverwolf007:

professional sports these days are showcases of genetic freaks but you do have to draw a line somewhere. biological gender ought to be one of them. sports at heart are just entertainment. to be entertaining there needs to be a sense of fairness, otherwise it loses value.

I would say it depends on the sport and the individual themselves. Fallon Fox did not exactly light the women's MMA world on fire competing as a transgender. But since sports are segregated by gender the best thing to do would have doctors check this competitor out themselves to see if she has an "unfair" advantage.

So let me get this straight...

Her teammate sent an anonymous e-mail asking about transgender participants, to which CrossFit said no. Somehow, in Johnson's mind, that equals "intentional infliction of emotional distress"? The "discrimination" and "unfair competition" bits in the charges are something Johnson will fight tooth and nail, but the last point? I just can't see it. She would have to prove that CrossFit was malicious in their intent, to go out of their way to cause emotional distress.

What's the problem men can't compete in woman's sports

This thread is full of stupidity and ignorance. Transwomen are women, get over it. This woman is legally female, and according to the International Olympic Committee, transwomen have no athletic advantage over ciswomen provided that they've undergone two years of hormone treatment, and this woman's been under that for eight. Crossfit has basically no grounds to stand on here.

Also, the idea that sex reassignment is somehow "traumatic" (in itself, a huge misconception) doesn't mean shit. Seriously are you fucking kidding me? It doesn't fucking matter whether she went through a life-changing experience eight years ago. it's probably pretty damn distressing for someone to be told that she can't compete as a her own sex and then being asked to compete with men who have huge physical advantages over her.

That bullshit is like saying that black people in 1950 should have been pretty happy with segregation because they'd suffered for so long under slavery. Yeah, if anyone here actually used that kind of logic, please shoot yourself in the head and increase humanity's mean IQ.

I love you

There needs to be a sure way for these companies to decide under which sex category a person should compete. I think that the only real sure fire way to be consistent among various organizations is to separate competitors based on their genetic code. People with the genetic code of a man compete with the men and someone with a genetic code of a female compete with the female. It's really the only consistent legal way I can think of to separate people by gender.

"female" is to denote sexual characteristic, "woman" denotes a social role which in most cases is treated as compulsively synonymous but there is a difference there

though the transgender woman joined a female competition she is not a female, and there's also a sexual dimorphic advantage that would make it unfair for her to compete amongst the other females

legally though, if the person were to go through a sex change operation, they'd be legally designated as a female, in such a case maybe the plaintiff's case would be stronger

I agree with the competition. Whether one identifies with another gender or not....physiology is still physiology. And it would be an unfair advantage.

@Barbariser:

What if someone who identifies as female hasn't gone through hormone therapy and wants to compete?

really, $2.5 million in damages for emotional distress

Oh, I read the article and she actually had sexual reassignment surgery, so legally it would be discriminatory since she's legally by state law a female. By law they would have to let her compete and not discriminate on grounds she was once a man. It's probably more appropriate she's referred to as transsexual because transgender kind of carries the connotation she's still sexually male but just takes on the gender role of a woman.

And maybe that can be part of the defense, depending on circumstances. I mean if she sent letters asking about the eligibility of "transgender" people, they might have assumed that sexually she was still a man by law regardless of identifying as a woman. There's a lot of confusion that can take place when people interchangeably use worlds like transgender and transsexual like they're the same thing, they are not; same with female and woman, not the same thing. Maybe their best defense is to say there was some sort of communication error. I mean, if I were a lawyer I'd totally play the semantics angle, and jury would be equally as confused and identify with the defense's case.

Eh it's tough. On the one hand I'm not inclined to say she's not entitled to do the same things other women can. On the other hand, the purpose of having the separate leagues in the first place is to have fairer competition since generally the most athletic women wouldn't be able to compete with the most athletic men (by the way, I'm not trying to undermine women's sports - e.g. I love women's tennis). Since transgender doesn't (to my knowledge) change that, I do think she shouldn't be allowed to. But I don't have a problem with her competing in men's sports.

She would not be eligible under IOC rules.