Drama over transgender fighter, Fallon Fox, in r/MMA. "I probably sound like an ignorant twat..." "Yeah, you do." (np.reddit.com)
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108 ups - 0 downs = 108 votes
238 comments submitted at 18:17:44 on Sep 21, 2014 by phanon2
Drama over transgender fighter, Fallon Fox, in r/MMA. "I probably sound like an ignorant twat..." "Yeah, you do." (np.reddit.com)
SubredditDrama
108 ups - 0 downs = 108 votes
238 comments submitted at 18:17:44 on Sep 21, 2014 by phanon2
While I don't think it's right to descriminate against people, there's a reason why there are men's and women's leagues for these things- biological males are bigger and stronger than biological females. I realize that while they are mentally female, if they are biologically male they have an unfair advantage against biological females in terms of strength. I don't understand why there is any controversy about this.
I mean, I'm pretty sure transwomen are allowed to compete in the Olympics as long as they use HRT. That's the new norm, it was more or less determined by the Caster Semenya situation in track a few years ago.
I actually just attended a conference on trans health and education. The Olympic have the most stringent rules for allowing trans competitors: hormone treatment for a minimum of two years and gender confirmation surgery. Colleges are slightly less strict, only requiring hormones for two years, and high schools ideally just allow the athlete to compete as the gender he or she identifies as. Obviously not every league or school follows these guidlelines, but I met someone who has been helping rewrite these guidlines all over the country. She told us that transwomen are no more statistically likely to win their match or game (or whatever applies to the sport in question) than cisgender females.
How reliable is that stat given the obviously limited pool of tests?
The sampling self-identifies as i.i.d. and is getting standard-error reassignment surgery before the next experiment.
I don't know what that terminology means.
Definitions can be found here, but I'll explain the joke anyway.
Independent and identically distributed (iid):
>A collection of two or more random variables {X1, X2, … , } is independent and identically distributed if the variables have the same probability distribution, and are independent.
Standard Error (SE):
>The Standard Error of a random variable is a measure of how far it is likely to be from its expected value; that is, its scatter in repeated experiments. The SE of a random variable X is defined to be SE(X) = [E( (X − E(X))2 )] ½.
>That is, the standard error is the square-root of the expected squared difference between the random variable and its expected value. The SE of a random variable is analogous to the SD of a list.
A distribution function maps events from a sample space to the real number line; it assigns values to events that don't necessarily have quantitative characteristics. I was making a joke about gender reassignment surgeries by comparing it to selectively sampling (i.e. not iid sampling) what you're given by ~~God~~ experimental results, and giving those sample points arbitrary values.
It was a terrible joke.
Taking obligatory drugs while everyone else is banned from hormone drugs.
I guess there's the irrational fear of a "Juwanna Mann" situation, and theoretically there could be a bit of confirmation bias since only athletes who are excelling would ever be tested (like Semenya). Still, all of these women's livelihoods are based on getting a fair chance in competition, so I can understand why they'd be very concerned about someone having an edge.
I guess that there's just an irrational fear that we'll have to accept trans people. And they're icky... /s
There is controversy because estrogen quite literally backtracks the effects of the testosterone.
So she loses the advantage she had when she was a "male".
MMA is pretty behind on the science here. Numerous sports groups and allow for MtF people to compete as a women once they are on hormones for a certain period of time. They lose all the strength advantage pretty quickly actually.
Testosterone has permanent effects on the body, which is also why most male, trans identifying people want to at least start hormone blockers before most of puberty.
Mainly in voice and facial hair. They're also the permanent symptoms for FtMs who do hormones.
> Testosterone has permanent effects on the body
None of which have to do with strength.
Muscle growth and height have a lot to do with strength.
Muscle mass is dictated by hormone levels - there's a reason body builders use testosterone. A trans woman on hormone treatment has a muscle mass in the normal female range.
I don't see what height has to do with strength.
Not all true. Going on estrogen therapy won't turn someone who is 6'5 to someone on a similar percentile for height for females.
And do you have a source that says they will lose all of their strength advantage?
You say that as though MMA isn't based on weight classes. Clearly she won't be fighting tiny flyweight chicks.
Men have a huge strength to weight ratio versus women, especially in highly trained athletes, and a large part of that advantage is gained through puberty and early adulthood.
The strength advantage goes away once hormone treatments are started. The hormones literally change the person's musculature. There is no strength advantage because transwomen develop and maintain muscles in the same manner as ciswomen and when they start hormones they lose all the "extra" muscle that can't be maintained on a woman. It's the higher testosterone levels that give men an advantage and hormone treatments decrease testosterone.
Because puberty and early adulthood is when boys start gaining much more muscle and women start gaining much higher percentages of body fat. These are exactly the things hormone replacement therapy changes.
You only get one chance for some of those changes, though - that's the point. HRT affects some things, but not all - the human body is a very complex thing.
So here's a thought.
Let's take a look at her win/loss ratio in a couple of years. If she's totally dominating then perhaps we should have been concerned. however, I seriously doubt every single match she has will be "Won in KO in first round."
But muscle mass and body fat percentage are things it affects greatly.
Let's find some consensus. Does "greatly" equal "completely"? If not, are you claiming that it's close enough that there can't possibly be an advantage conveyed?
Obviously it doesn't completely change things, because men and women aren't completely different. Men do have body fat, while women have more, and women do have muscle mass, although men have more.
But no, a trans woman wouldn't have any advantage from muscle mass or lower body fat over a cis woman. Many trans women actually have lower levels of testosterone in their system than cis women because they take androgen inhibitors.
HRT affects muscle mass and growth though. Transwomen on HRT have the same hormone levels as ciswomen and therefore have the same ability to develop and maintain muscles. Any "extra" muscle they had from before HRT goes away.
HRT affects those, but it is not the only thing that affects them.
So what are these other things?
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So...she would have the proportional strength of a 6'5" woman trained for MMA. Who would be allowed to compete. So what?
She would be the only 6'5 female in MMA. No other female would be as tall as her.
Well, I'll tell you what. When a 6'5" transgender woman ever competes in MMA, we'll come back to that discussion about whether or not a genetic advantage is a meaningful way to disqualify someone from a sport (considering it never, ever is in any sport ever) but since the only transgender woman in MMA is 5'7", I'd say its sort of a smokescreen discussion that holds no weight and is utterly meaningless.
> When a 6'5" transgender woman ever competes in MMA
I smell a sitcom!
And she's not even that good of a fighter.
She's 5-1 and despite not being very good. And she tends to out-strength people despite not having very good technique or striking. And her ground and pound is over the top damaging considering she doesn't pull back that much or stand over them blasting them like the korean UFC fighter Lim or someone similar. She gets on top, hits them a few times and their face breaks open like a pinata.
Personally I'm still on the fence. I can't get my head around that you could ENTIRELY remove all advantages of being a man (don't we have slightly faster reaction times? Stronger bone density?) and that there is no inherent advantage with this woman vs other women the same weight.
That said - maybe she's super roided out like Cyborg. Cyborg looks like more of a man than Fallon ever will, and punches harder I imagine, and has more muscles but there's no controversy because she did it using illegal narcotics, not legal surgery :P.
There are extremely tall women who play in WNBA though. Margo Dydek was 7' 2"
And to fight in any women's weight classes, she'd have to have a very small amount of fat and muscle on her frame.
Other than striking reach, which the accompanying skill does not guarantee, being that tall is a disadvantage when you go to the ground.
What I find funny about this is that you're saying they allow MtF to compete in female sports but what about FtM? I'm sure it would be allowed without much issue but like you were saying about estrogen backtracking the effects of testosterone then shouldn't the opposite be true? That FtM should be on the same level as regular males? Same issue here, being naturally born a male gives you an inherent advantage to a natural born female. If the women consents to the fight then sure let 'em fight, but she should have the right to refuse.
Yes, FtM trans athletes are usually allowed to compete without much issue. And yes, they do usually have similar musculature to cis men. You never hear about them specifically because it's not considered as big a deal.
In sports that don't have weight classes, having gone through puberty as a woman can be a disadvantage since women usually have smaller frames. However, we don't ban people with other sorts of genetic advantages/disadvantages from sports. If a cis woman happens to be 6'1" she isn't banned from women's basketball due to her unfair height advantage.
A ftm would never be able to play in the nfl, nba or the mlb. The hormone treatment would be considered a performance enhancing drug under their guidelines. They would have to allow every player the chance to take hrt to make the testing fair.
> Yes, FtM trans athletes are usually allowed to compete without much issue. And yes, they do usually have similar musculature to cis men. You never hear about them specifically because it's not considered as big a deal.
Are you claiming their performance is similar? If so, do you have a peer-reviewed source to back that up?
No. No one's concerned with FtM trans folks having an unfair advantage in athletic competition, so no one does studies on it.
>No one's concerned with FtM trans folks having an unfair advantage in athletic competition
Gosh, I wonder why.
You just don't get it do you? It's not about one woman being taller then another or stronger or faster. It's about a man who is now legally now a woman fighting other woman. If that sounds fair to you then i don't know what to say.
So you have literally no reason other than "it feels wrong!" Kk
But she's not a man. That's exactly the thing. She's got the hormonal, and consequently, the muscular profile of a woman. Yes, she's a very strong woman, but, so are the other fighters. There is no difference between her and the other fighters in anything meaningful to fighting.
Well if that's the case then I see no problems. I am not up on the science of how estrogen affects men but I had (wrongly) assumed that it wouldn't cause loss of muscle. I feel like that if the science shows that no significant advantage is gained then there shouldn't be an issue.
Hrt won't change bone structure.
I always wonder if there was some evolutionary reason for that, like why can't we have men and women who are both physically strong.
It's a difference in body composition, a women might have a bigger chance to survive child birth when less energy goes to waste on muscles and more gets stored as fat. Women have a significantly higher amount of essential fat. But that's all just speculation on my part.
Being able to successfully bring children into the world is probably a bigger advantage at spreading your genetics than the strength from additional muscle mass would have been.
More speculation, but it takes less food to feed a smaller person also. Gathering was an incredibly important role in most communities prior to agriculture (there are a few rare exceptions in the far north). Since you can't hunt effectively with a baby, or when noticeably pregnant, and men cannot feed newborns, it makes sense to divide the hunting and gathering based on sex (with some men also gathering, particularly children and old men). Women obviously can't be too small framed, or it creates serious problems for giving birth, but being smaller does mean they require less food, which certainly couldn't hurt.
Yes, but that doesn't account for an athletic male bone structure, and years of being a male and have male musculature. Estrogen won't change that.
A) Yes it does change the muscles.
B) Here. Here you goddamn people who keep talking about bone density. The very first two academic, peer reviewed papers you can find on the subject: there is little to no difference in bone density between genders. Paper 1. Paper 2.
Hormone replacement literally reverses the "male musculature". Muscles shrink. Estrogen changes that.
She'll clearly only fight women in her weight class, so I don't see why her size is a huge deal.
Doesn't shrink the width of shoulders or ration of thigh to shin or angle of thighs and size of pelvis...
It does change the angle of your hips, actually, as there are tendons that affect that and change.
I have no idea what this thigh-shin ratio is, but if it involves the overall size of the thigh HRT would certainly affect it, since it affects your muscles.
And if you're fighting someone of similar size there shouldn't be huge disparities in shoulder width. Cis women would probably have an overall larger pelvis, though.
how exactly can it change pelvic anteversion and lumbar tilt?
female bones are smoother and the indentations for muscle attachment deeper.
. the acetabula (the fossa in which the heads of the femurs lodge) are farther apart, which increases the distance between the greater trochanters and consequently the width of the hips.
Greater hip width in women influences the position of the femurs, which are often more angled than in men, giving them a slight X shape.
A wide pelvis with a significant angle of the femur can provoke genu valgum, accentuated all the more by the hyperlaxity toward which women tend. The legs then take on a typical X shape: the articulation at the knee is excessively solicited; the medial collateral ligament is overstretched; and the lateral meniscus, the cartilage-covered articular surfaces of the external condyle of the femur, and the lateral tuberosity of the tibia are subjected to excessive loads, which may lead to premature wear.
Pathological genu valgum is accompanied by medial collapse at the ankle and the disappearance of the plantar arch (flat foot), which may involve pain because of excessive stretching of certain muscles in the sole of the foot.
It is very important to take into account the individual morphologies and to remember that women are more often prone to genu valgum pathologies, whereas men more frequently suffer from bow-legs (genu varum). People with very noticeable genu valgum should therefore work out carefully, avoid training with heavy weights, and always perform the movements so as to avoid impacts that would aggravate knee and ankle problems.
so fucking different. the holes that the thighs go into do not become further apart from each other through estrogen.
Are any of these things relevant as to whether a trans woman fighter would have an advantage in fighting a cis one?
Coming from a nonmedical background and speaking purely out of my ass, I'm fairly certain that differences in femur position significantly affect leverages. That is to say, similar muscle mass (from a trans woman going on HRT) might not preclude vast differences in leg-striking power.
>how exactly can it change pelvic anteversion and lumbar tilt?
It doesn't change the pelvis itself. It changes the tendons in that area, which affects the angle your legs meet your pelvis at (I believe that is the area commonly referred to as "hips") and affects someone's gait as well.
>female bones are smoother and the indentations for muscle attachment deeper.
What? Since when? You'd think archaeologists and forensic scientists would be all over this immensely simple way to determine the sex of skeletons.
Oh wait, you're copypasting from Wikipedia or some shit to try to look like you know what you're talking about.
Sexing skeletons actually is pretty easy. It's one of the first things you learn in a biological anthropology class.
And the second thing you learn is that when you are actually dealing with the material it gets more complicated. An average male skeleton and an average female skeleton can be easily told apart, but that is average. Real stuff doesn't always conform to charts--it can sometimes be impossible to sex a skeleton. And considering we are looking at MMA we may as well throw "average" out the window.
Source: I have personally worked on osteology.
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Does it have anything to do with women's bones all being smoother than men's?
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>You'd think archaeologists and forensic scientists would be all over this immensely simple way to determine the sex of skeletons.
They are. From the Smithsonian
That says nothing about bone smoothness.
the bones in the hips/pelvis don't change after transitioning. and thats where most of the force gets generated when striking. fallon has a physical advantage that none of the women do.
I have never seen any claims that women's pelvises are worse at allowing someone to generate force or plant a solid stance?
pull out my crayons and color me surprised.
You could, you know, post a source for that very specific claim.
Has that been quantified?
It's easier to grow muscle if you've been muscular before, though.
Not when you're blocking testosterone. It's really had to gain and hold on to muscle without it.
Unfortunately you aren't going to sway the nay-sayers here, who don't even believe that 6'5 tall women exist. Ive heard a transwoman say that when she got into a physical altercation after transitioning with a man, she could not fight back like she would have been able to. People here seem to be arguing 'but what about the bone structure!' and not realizing that trans people are real people with real hopes and dreams and lives. =/
>So she loses the advantage she had when she was a "male".
[Citation needed]
>MMA is pretty behind on the science here. Numerous sports groups and allow for MtF people to compete as a women once they are on hormones for a certain period of time.
Just because the Olympics and other sporting events allow MTF transsexuals to compete, it doesn't mean they are doing it because they have no competitive advantage. It may just be easier to allow them to compete since they are pretty rare than have to deal with the brigade of people who are angered by it. Sporting leagues are businesses who will do anything to avoid negative attention from the media.
Not all of the benefits but yeah most of them.
I can't see any that would affect an MMA fight. The advantage a man has on average other than faster muscle development through higher testosterone can just as well be very different between women, such as hight. But other than that what remains there?
The most common argument is bone density, as is apparent in the rest of the linked thread/article.
No idea whether that's true or not, but I always hear it pop up in these discussions.
Bone density is not true. Period.
Interesting stuff, thanks for the link.
Bones make up a tiny amount of the body composition. Do they mean that it wouldn't be fair because the likelihood of this one persons bones snapping is somewhat lower? I didn't think breaking each other's bones was such an integral part of MMA.
Denser bones pack a greater punch. Same idea as holding a roll of quarters, its not going to be a whole lot but there is an effect. Also probably some effect on building muscle, as the denser bone is less like to suffer avulsion fractures.
Since bones only make up 12-15%(12 in women, 15 in males) of the body weight I still doubt that this will be a deciding factor among physically active people. Do we have anything real world based indicating the contrary?
Adding even a couple extra ounces to your arm is going to increase the impulse generated by your fist. It's the reason that boxing glove weight is standardized.
That is no real world evidence suggesting that it would make a difference large enough not to be overshadowed by the already existing differences between the female fighters. I mean seriously, a women around 10 centimetres taller than the other will generally have longer arms and through that already have a massively larger amount of weight behind her punches. Is there anything suggesting that a transperson will actually have any "advantage" that sticks out? Maybe some sort of evidence?
Not sure how much it matters, but in some martial arts (muay thai?) I believe it's pretty important.
>There is controversy because estrogen quite literally backtracks the effects of the testosterone.
>So she loses the advantage she had when she was a "male".
She's only 5'7, so it's not as obvious in this case...if she was 6'5, the estrogen wouldn't make her shorter. What are the things that estrogen backtracks? Adrenaline production and muscle mass/myostatin?
Are there any major sports groups that allow MtFs to compete as women?
There are tall women, you know. Tall women who could effortlessly join this sport just as well right now without any complaints and it wouldn't break the system. How is that an argument?
Well this isn't about a women in the traditional sense, but a someone who was born a man then underwent surgery and hormone treatment to become a women. This is a huge gray area for the UFC because there are those who say that it's an unfair advantage and those that say otherwise. What the other guy seems to be saying is if there any proof that hormone treatments actually diminish what muscle mass she had in the first place.
That's a well known side effect of hormone treatment. Even males lose a significant amount of their muscle as they grow older and the body produces less testosterone, that's why many natural bodybuilders start looking a lot less muscular in high age and many decide to get testosterone so they can keep their looks. It's just a fact of life, if you lose your testosterone producing organs you will lose a significant amount of muscle, estrogen and test blockers in addition just shot any doubts down.
It's an argument because then it's in theory an advantage from being born a man that is not removed by hormone therapy.
There are short women and there are tall women. There are areas in the world where women on average get much taller than women in western countries. If hight were to become an issue it wouldn't start with transpeople.
I'm curious if there are mandated levels of minimum hormone levels for her to compete. Fox is basically in the unique position of elevating her testosterone levels just by forgoing treatment a few months before her fight. She could even jump on testosterone to get greater physiological enhancement compared to other female competitors who also dopes. It's no different than men timing their cycles to pass drug tests. Hormone therapy can clearly create very feminine transformations, but in Fox's case, it feels like she is choosing to lean towards anthropomorphically masculine body for the benefit of competition. It's just seems like she's blatantly gaming the system and personally, there's just too much ambiguity to allow her to compete in the female division unless she can be monitored 24/7.
Sure she gets "weaker" when undergoing estrogen treatments, but it still gives her an unfair advantage over women considering she developed the majority of her life as a man.
That just doesn't make sense though. You understand that what testosterone mainly does is promote and support muscle growth. If I take your steroids permanently away from you, you will lose muscle. You can't support it any further.
She will lose the muscle she couldn't naturally support. That isn't much of an advantage at all.
Because muscle structure is the only defining characteristic of masculinity...
What in the world is muscle structure? The defining characteristic of masculinity is the ability to produce sperm. How does masculinity come into play here at all though?
Hormone treatments literally change a person's musculature. All that muscle she had before hormone treatments goes away and reduces to typical female levels. There is no advantage from "developing as a man" because without the higher testosterone levels the higher muscle mass goes away too. Fun fact: fat distribution also changes from around the stomach to hips/butt/thighs and breasts. Hormones are powerful things.
That would be true if she had gone through puberty as a female. But she has man hands and man shoulders.
This is an advantage, even if slight.
Can women not have broad shoulders now? And no men have narrow shoulders? How strange; I guess my sister isn't real.
So you are denying that there are overarching differences between men and women physically?
The averages are going to be different, but there is still a considerable amount of overlap.
Actually there isn't a considerable amount of overlap, especially when it comes to upper body strength. When at similar levels of training men are will almost always be stronger. Of course a woman who works out every day will be stronger then a man who doesn't. But when at the same level of exercise men are much much stronger.
> But she has man hands and man shoulders.
We were talking about hands and shoulders- not muscles.
Yes, there is a difference in upper body strength. The difference in average frame size is much smaller though and there is much more overlap.
Also, once a person starts HRT the strength advantage disappears. A transwoman who exercises every day has the exact same upper body strength and muscle mass as a ciswoman who exercises every day. What doesn't go away is the frame size, but like I said the difference between men and women is quite small.
Doesn't bone density come into as well? I don't think that can be affected with hormone therapy
The only real difference in bone density between sexes is that dudes tend to be larger and thus have larger overall skeletons.
Nope. She has a permanent advantage due to the way she developed as a child, regardless of her present hormones. It's absolutely scientifically indisputable and well-established. This is why the Olympics and other sports aren't great places for transwomen--they must be excluded to maintain a level playing field, unfortunately.
You can't backtrack on being tall, strong, and long.
Hello! As a transwoman, I may be able to shed some light on this stuff. Hormonal Replacement Therapy will actually cause muscle deterioration to where the fat to muscle ratio is identical to that of a cis woman.
I don't understand comments like these. I don't know what the effects of transitioning with hormone replacement therapy are, so I tend to not form strong opinions on the issue. I'd bet bottom dollar you don't either, so why are you so confident? The article in question says she's 5-1, which while a good record isn't exactly unprecedented. If she is so unfairly advantaged, why is she already losing?
Wait, is everyone missing the actual argument here?! They were arguing over whether or not it's okay to call her a "he." Both sides agreed that she shouldn't be allowed to compete against women...
Except that she totally should.
Seriously. In a combat sport, no less.
I don't mind anybody in the LGBT community doing whatever makes them happy. But we can't be delusional, here - in this case, her body has the leftover benefits of being born and having gone through puberty as a male. Perhaps some of those benefits are gone - and this is a major point of contention in this case - but many are not. And as badass as a lot of female fighters are, those benefits are huge in comparison.
In the end, it comes down to consent. If her opponents consent to fighting her, having been fully informed, that fine. But she didn't come out, IIRC, until after her first couple professional fights. For that reason, IMO, other female fighters have every right to be be upset.
Several athletic organizations, like the IOC, allow trans athletes to compete as long as they meet some requirements. They don't do this because they are bastions of progressiveness, but because that's what their medical professionals have advised.
Fallon fox has mostly been put up against fighters who aren't very good.
Those organizations aren't representing a sport that involves beating the shit out of each other though.
The Olympics has several combat sports
Boxing
Fencing
Free-style and Greco-roman wrestling
Judo
Taekwondo
USA Boxing (Ctrl+F "sex") has followed the IOC's model and has matched their regulations
The Association of Boxing Commissions also allows trans athletes to play.
I'm not sure which organization regulates Fallon Fox's activities (CFA? Idk) but clearly they have approved her to fight as well.
The UFC has just been avoiding the issue for now. They know whatever they say will start shit up.
After being on hrt the only benefit she has left from going through male puberty is her height and there are plenty of tall ciswomen. Hormones change how muscles develop and how they are maintained so after being on hrt for a while all the muscle mass she had from before has been reduced to typical female levels.
And bone structure.
What about bone structure? Do you mean bone density? Because men and women have essentially the [same bone density] (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12830370). Do you mean skeleton size? Because there are tall ciswomen with broad frames and short cismen with small frames too.
So yeah, she still has the bone structure from before starting hormones, but I guarantee you so does some ciswoman.
What are the huge advantages of puberty you speak of? The chances are that the training this person went through in puberty was more effective in regards of building muscle than the training of the average woman. But that is about it.
Considering how transpeople get testosterone blockers and eventually often their testicals disabled or removed the muscle mass that was supported by the testosterone in the past will disappear and leave the person significantly weaker.
Also this is MMA and not an arm wrestle competition. It's absurd to think the marginal hypothetical advantage would matter in a sport like that.
Bone density and bone structure. Arm reach.
Arm reach isn't a huge deal in a sport with weight classes. She'll only be fighting with women of a similar size.
So you know, I will assume that you know nothing about combat sports or martial arts in general if you say absurd things like "arm reach isn't a huge deal".
Reach plays a massive role in fights, believing anything else gives you away as being very uninformed about the subject. Just because two individuals have the same weight the day before a fight, does not mean they are of similar size or stature.
The taller fighter will have better reach, but there's no guarantee Fallon will always be taller when it's sorted by weight class.
Men don't have monkey arms that are sooooooo much longer than women's arms of comparable height.
No, the taller fighter will not have better reach. The fighter with the longer arms will have better reach.
I was not talking about Fallon Fox. I was pointing out that your comment made you come across as not being knowledgeable about the subject you're talking about; just from reading this comment section I see a lot of people who know fuck all about MMA, combat sports or martial arts but who are all armchair experts about what sort of advantages Fallon Fox does or does not have against her opponents.
I suspect most people in this thread have never seen any of her fights, never read any interviews with her opponents, or even knows what she looks like. If you had, you would know that she's considered a below average fighter in terms of skill, and is known for winning matches by just physically overpowering lower tier opponents. The only time she's faced a fighter who was actually good, she lost.
The reason why MMA enthusiasts think it's so uncomfortable to watch her fight is because they have seen her fights, and how they usually play out; it's just her ragdolling smaller unskilled women who are unable to do anything about her physical strength, and mauls on them while they're on the ground and unable to get up. It's not particularly pretty.
So does her physical strength come from being born as a man and going through male puberty? I don't know. What I do know is that every opponent she's faced has said the same thing afterward; they have never faced anyone else who comes even remotely near to being as physically strong as her, either in competition or in training, and that it's unlike anything they have ever faced. Should those testimonials just be ignored?
>No, the taller fighter will not have better reach. The fighter with the longer arms will have better reach.
You say this as though it doesn't correlate highly with height.
>I was pointing out that your comment made you come across as not being knowledgeable about the subject you're talking about
Thank god you're hear to point out everyone's lazy phrasing on Reddit. Let me restate: "Fallon clearly doesn't have some kind of inherent advantage in arm reach, since weight classes guarantee she'll be fighting women similar to her size who may or may not have arms longer than hers."
Ronda Roussey's fights can be really uncomfortable to watch and many of her opponents say they've never faced anyone like her before. Should Ronda not be allowed to fight either?
The difference being that they've never faced anyone of the skill level of Ronda Rousey, an Olympic medalist in Judo who has trained in combat sports since she was 11 years old and who has competed at the highest levels of martial arts her entire life.
That is not the same as facing someone who is just physically strong to the point where it comes across as abnormal.
Have you ever watched Ronda Rousey fight? She usually makes her opponents submit to armbars within the first minutes of the fight after out-grappling them with flawless technique. Her fights represent the best of MMA and are a thing of beauty to watch. By comparison, Fallon Fox's fights are on a low level of skill with her winning through brute strength alone. If you believe this to be comparable, you once again make yourself come across as someone who doesn't actually know anything about the subject.
I understand that you want to support Fallon Fox because of what she represents. I am unsure if you would continue to think so if you had actually seen her fights.
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I do not know enough about the science behind this to be on either side of the argument. However, comparing how it looks when Fallon wins to when Ronda wins is very wrong. Ronda's technique is very right, and she finishes opponents mostly due to how much higher of a level it is at. Fallon's technique is generally very sloppy, and she has gotten away with it in fights due to her huge strength advantage over opponents. Some things you can look for that show this is how she has stood up over the bottom, or winning one fight with a shin on face over any actual submission hold.
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Men and women have the same bones. She's 5'7".
>Men and women have the same bones.
Come on, that's just obviously wrong.
No. It isn't.
Yes, it is.
the source for the wiki claim that men have denser bones doesn't really seem to explicitly address that claim (although I only flicked through it and know very little about this stuff in general so may have overlooked it),whereas it's mentioned explicitly by thursdayaug's. The bones may not be the same, but any difference in bone density seems very small.
I agree. I made a comment in this very thread with that same sentiment but I like to bounce countering ideas around and see where discussion takes us so in that interest:
There are many who would say that fighting is more about technique than strength. Yes strength and size can offer large advantages and at a certain point it becomes too much to overcome which is why we have weight classes. That said, you see bigger stronger fighters get beat down all the time by smaller, physically weaker fighters. The difference between win and lose can often come down to intelligence and skill over strength.
So with weight classes and the theory that physical attributes are not the be all end all in combat, would it really be unfair to let a trans fight among her own gender?
I'm not read up on the subject but the way I see it, if you somehow put a Lambo motor in a Corolla, it's still a Lambo motor. You just have a beast ass corolla now. If you put that in a stock corolla race it'd be way unfair.
I understand treating trans as whatever they identify as in social situations. That's what they are. However, competing in sports doesn't seem right. I mean I'm guessing this chick didn't just randomly decide to start fighting MMA. She probably trained throughout most of the time she had a male body, receiving all the benefits of male biology. Imagine if Jon Jones got a sex change and wanted to fight Rousey. People would think it's outrageous.