SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz says that men who become women should be able to play female professional sports, including contact sports.
“I think that transgendered women — I think women should be able to participate in contact sports if they can compete effectively,” she told The Daily Caller in the “spin room” after the CNN Republican presidential debate Wednesday night.
“I think that if they are living as a woman and identifying as a woman that they should be able to play on a women’s team,” she added. “But also I think that there are women who should be able to play on a men’s teams if they can effectively compete and vice versa.”
Asked specifically whether men who become women should be able to compete in female boxing or female mixed martial arts, the DNC chair punted.
“You’re going a little deep on the type of sport,” she said. “I think we are a little afield of what we are here to talk about.”
There is a serious debate over whether men who become women should be allowed to compete in female professional sports, especially contact sports, because men are on average physically much stronger than women, according to the scientific literature and obvious observable reality.
While some medical experts who favor transgendered women competing in female professional sports argue transgendered women “become fairly comparable to women in their musculature” after their transition, others disagree.
“When pitted against an average female, I would say that there were probably some advantages that the hormonal blockade and subsequent replacement can’t take away 100 percent, simply because she lived so much of her life as a male, and developed fully as such,” Dr. Ramona Krutzik told the mixed martial arts news website Bloody Elbow when this issue reared its head last year as it pertained to a transgendered woman, Fallon Fox, competing professionally in mixed martial arts.
When Fox fought Tamikka “Boom Boom” Brents in a female mixed martial arts fight last September, the transgendered fighter broke Brents’ orbital bone and gave her a concussion.
“I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night,” Brents said after the fight. “I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right.”
