Writing and playing tabletop RPG horror one gets a real sense of what horror is just a little too personal to be fun. There’s a whole lot of safety tools the community has developed (actually crossing over a bit with the BDSM community’s tools for safe consent when acting out a fiction). It’s really common to survey all players with an exhaustive list of all the potential horrors one could potentially bring to a table. The top five that are people’s no gos are sexual violence, harm to animals, reproductive horror, harm to children and body horror.

A lot of horror movie fans are not prepared for how you having agency in the situation of tabletop storytelling can make something you can easily handle watching suddenly effect you even when it’s just being described and can misjudge their level of chill and need to tap out mid game. Typical advice on reproductive horror a’la Alien is don’t even bother writing a reproductive horror that directly effects a player character. Damn near every table taps out for that, if not the player targeted then someone else at the table.

Alien de-gendering that horror was definitely a masterstroke. There’s good reason the chestburster reached cultural saturation.

A lot of it comes down to the perception of privilege. A lot of people believe that trans women basically have all of the privileges inherent to being an able-bodied cis man so their assumption of participation in a female centric space is to weild their privilege to unfair advantage…

However women’s sport leagues fall into different reasons for existing. For some it is because of a perceived difference of physiology… In which case the issue is what original puberty the athlete went through. Technically if an athlete transitions early and never goes through male puberty at all you basically remove that issue… But then people start being incensed that someone transitioned at 16 with the a-okay of an entire team of doctors, social workers, therapists and the blessings of the legal guardians. It is easier for them to just assume that there is no solution that allows fair inclusion on this front.

Or

The second type of league exists to combat a systematic rejection of women through treating them as novelties or inferiors. Nobody generally wants to do something for fulfillment, bragging rights or fun if it requires them to wade through being treated like a second class citizen. The exclusion of trans women from these communities assume that trans women do not experience the same forces of misogyny that drive cis women from sport and assumes trans women can just re-don all of their male privileges whenever they feel like… Something that doesn’t really happen. From personal experience within the community trans women are often REALLY vulnerable to misogyny. They just freeze up and have no idea how to deal with it. They didn’t get a training period where elder women assumed they were inexperienced and helped them learn how to deal or strategies how to stay safe or safe places to retreat to where they could find solidarity. A lot of them just stumble into danger with a lot of cis women just leaving them out to dry thinking they are innately strong enough to deal. The exclusion of trans women from these spaces takes a rather callous vein of every one removing all forms of solidarity from all sides of sport. The trans woman looking for a place to do something they are extremely passionate and talented in basically is told that she can either put up with being thrown into the misogyny heavy lions den and treated by all sides as novelty, a reason others can point to to discredit the rest of the needs of the trans community or just as a man (something that for a trans person causes a cascade of negative mental health effects) or she can disappear from the sport entirely…ignoring that similar situations are what caused a segregated woman’s league to be established in the first place.

The first assumes male privilege of body fat and muscle distribution. The second assumes an intrinsic male social privilege remains relevant. A lot of people want to assert that a loss of male privilege isn’t possible. It’s just someone with it trying to angle for an unfair advantage rather than someone who just needs the solidarity of other people who lack privilege in a similar way they do.

Umm… I hate to tell you this but this is propagating some pretty harmful misinformation…

The reactions to medications are actually more closely tied to the hormone balance and body fat distribution of a person than their sex. It’s a common issue in the trans community where birth certificates are non-updatable that a doctor will prescribe meds for a person’s birth sex but because they are fully transitioned through HRT they get the effects more common to their phenotype presentation. This means that treatment is more commonly in line with their gender identity because of their hormonal medication and other procedures like an orchiectomy that make a person more similar to where they transitioned to then where they transitioned from.

With trans paitents by and large the safer way to behave is to go with the “if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and talks like a duck… If you are in a pinch and can’t ask them for specifics because they can’t talk - treat them like a duck.” While a lot of doctors aren’t super well versed in trans specific healthcare it remains a huge problem inside the community for trans women particularly being dosed like cis men which often means they respond like cis women to a lot of different things which is on average a little more scary because meds often linger longer than is expected in trans women’s tissues just like cis women. Sometimes this causes some cascading problems.

Pharmacology wise the way trans folks react to different medications is still a bit of a frontier science… But dollars to donuts “just treat em like their birth sex and call it a day” is way too simplistic a take. The lived experience and often physical nature of gender do not stay nicely behind a cordon marked “politics”. Trans ignorance in healthcare can be very scary for someone whose endocrinologist has informed them what they should be given and treated like and then some hotshot resident could just decide to not listen should the trans person in question be placed in a position where they are in extreme distress and have to self advocate and educate the person caring for them on what may be the worst day of their life.

Info dumping is a love language.