See, this is a phrase I’ve never heard from anyone but right wing trolls. I’ve wondered where they came up with it, because the general idea of needing to “touch grass” usually comes from mindfulness practitioners, who tend to be more liberal.
I assume, like most stuff these days, it came from some pundit
Well, sure. But then should we not have separate male/female leagues?
Presumably we have them because, on average, men are stronger/faster/larger than women, and women would have very few changes to compete without their own leagues.
And once you start getting into definitions, you’re opening yourself up for a world of hurt and litigation. There was the South African female athlete who had naturally high testosterone levels who caused all kinds of excitement and yelling.
My son was a good small college cross-country runner, and I overheard conversations between women on his team who were concerned about the ability of cis-women to compete for scholarships with trans-women. And of course, a trans-woman should be eligible to compete, but against who?
I don’t know the answer, but it doesn’t require bigotry to raise the issue. Of course a lot of the people raising the issue are bigots, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate concerns.
I don’t think your position is specifically transphobic at all, but I’m not sure that its kneejerk rejection of this particular category of “innate physical advantages” as automatically unacceptably “unfair” is completely uninfluenced by cultural systemic transphobia.
Exactly what types and levels of innate physical advantages should be considered “fair”, in your view? For example, the renowned runners Caster Semenya [ETA: ninja’d by Folacin] and Dutee Chand both identify as female and were both assigned female at birth. But both have been at various times subjected to extra scrutiny, or even disqualified from competition, due to naturally high testosterone levels thought to derive from hyperandrogenism.
They’re not transgender, but are their “innate physical advantages” “unfair” enough to justify barring them from competing against women who don’t have that condition, in your view?
If not, then why should the naturally occurring condition of transgender be considered a more “unfair” advantage than the naturally occurring condition of hyperandrogenism?
I have no problem at all with sports organizations trying to figure out a system of competition classes (age categories, weight categories, etc.) based on rough equivalence of “innate physical advantages”. But any such system, to be viable and just, has definitely got to be way more intelligent and nuanced than just saying “if you’ve completed male puberty then you can’t compete in women’s events full stop end of discussion”.
Huh, I’d never heard the phrase. I inferred that Aspidistra was spitefully instructing us to smoke some weed and, like, just chill out, man.
I figured he was advising us to get high. Only sensible thing he’s said this whole time.
Fear the power of the NINJA!!
(Hivemind high 5)
Right, and that’s where the comparison breaks down, because allowing trans women to compete against cis women isn’t going to completely squeeze cis women out of sports. The vast majority of women’s sporting competitions are going to be won by cis women. There’s no realistic scenario where allowing trans women to compete means cis women get shut out of sports.
The scenario that I’ve heard mentioned is the “Bosom Buddies” one. Where male athletes decide to spontaneously declare themselves women in order to dominate a women’s sport.
That’s not what’s happening, and I don’t think anyone could possibly get away with that. It would be too obvious. So not a “realistic scenario”, to support what you said.
See, the whole problem here is that your stance tacitly assumes that this is currently a problem and isn’t being adequately addressed. In fact, every single sport regulating body has detailed policies addressing this situation.
Walter feels that these policies are inadequate, and that there is real scientific evidence supporting his position. He could be right. I’m not going to bother acquainting myself with the evidence so I can have an informed opinion.
In this matter, as in literally thousands of others, I defer to the opinion of medical societies and the mainstream scientific community, rather than to that of anonymous people on the internet. I trust that, if the current consensus is wrong, the scientific method will eventually discover this, and in the meantime I don’t worry myself about it. On a possibly related note, I don’t have COVID yet. 
As I pointed out in the actual thread, it often turns out that these trans athletes that everyone gets so fired up about have also lost to cis women and continue to do so. And people in the thread showed this was true of the subject of said thread.
There was a video I’ve posted before that covered this about a different athlete. Despite being trans herself, the creator of the video always tries to be as understanding as possible of those who are ignorant about the subject or have fallen for mistruths.
She acknowledges that the trans athletics question is a hard one. But she also dispels a lot of the myths where people just assume certain things.
(Yes, the kid whose mom complained had actually beaten the trans kid before.)
Unlike Bosom Buddies, they would need to keep up their presenting as women everywhere they go, all the time, not just on the field. When Hanks went to work, he presented as a man, his female persona was entirely a lie.
The thing about this issue is that despite believing that people who matured as intact males have an unfair advantage over people who didn’t… I can’t in good conscience actually argue that transwomen shouldn’t get to compete with women, because of who I have to lay down with. It’s not worth the fleas I’m going to get.
Sure–but historical precedent isn’t exactly what’s going on here. The concern has always been about men qua men (insert obligatory xkcd here). There are a host of reasons why unisex sports competitions don’t work, and differential testosterone levels are only one of them. The reasons for separating sports into gender leagues are clearly no primarily about unfair physical advantages. If that were the primary concern, there would also be different leagues for tall basketball players and short ones.
The “legitimate concerns” are precisely as legitimate as concerns about tall people dominating the sport of basketball. If someone’s raising the concern about transwomen but not about tall basketball players, they’re not concerned about unfair physical advantages, but about something else.
Probably nobody needs this spelled out now that Aspidistra’s flounced, but just to address a fundamental point:
CONVENTIONAL GENDERED NOUNS AND PRONOUNS IN LANGUAGE USE DO NOT CONSTITUTE TRUTH CLAIMS ABOUT BIOLOGICAL SEX.
I mean, a moment’s thought ought to be enough to convince anybody how silly it is to assume that grammatical gender has to correspond to biological sex in human language use.
When Hindi or Hungarian speakers use the same pronouns for male and female persons, are they “pretending” that males and females have identical genitalia? When Victorian authors referred to infants (or even toddlers or ten-year-olds) as “it”, were they “pretending” that the child in question was sexually neuter with no genitalia at all?
Of course not. They are simply referencing some social category (e.g., “person”, “child”) that is conventionally decoupled from claims about biological sex.
English and other gendered-pronoun languages have always recognized certain specific conventions where gendered nouns or pronouns are considered to be decoupled from implications of biological sex.
For example, the traditional “indefinite singular ‘he’” pronoun in English that theoretically applies to both male and female referents. Or, say, French feminine nouns used as titles for male persons but keeping their grammatical feminine gender:
“Où est le roi?” “Sa Majesté est en retard, elle arrivera bientôt.” (“Where is the king (m.)?” “His Majesty (f.) is late, she (i.e., the Majesty) will come soon.”)
The emerging English-language convention of decoupling gendered pronoun use in general from biological sex at birth is fundamentally the same sort of thing. When ignorant transphobes try to claim that the use of such conventions implies deliberate “pretending” or “lying”, they are full of shit.
Yup. [ETA: I’m assuming you meant that phrasing in the sense “compete in women’s events”, rather than trying to draw an invidious distinction between the categories “transwomen” and “women”.] If transphobes actually gave a rat’s ass about really providing fair and fulfilling competition opportunities in women’s sports, they’d be respectfully and thoughtfully discussing the sort of issues I mentioned, about exactly what levels and types of innate physical advantages should be considered “unfair”, and how to structure a system of competition categories that would successfully accommodate those different advantages.
And in the process, they’d be referring to transgender female athletes by their preferred names and pronouns, because there’s absolutely nothing in the issue of sports competition that requires anybody to do otherwise.
But do they? Of course they don’t. Pretending to care about supporting (cisgender) girls and women is nothing but an excuse for them to insult transgender people. Otherwise they would be perfectly well able to discuss the relevant issues without insulting transgender people, just as all us non-transphobes manage to do.
No, you fucking assclown, “we” did not think anything of the sort and that’s because many of us A) understand the science of brain/body congruence is anything but settled and B) are not raging shitheaded patronizing bellends. Many of us are perfectly capable of grasping the plain (and historically documented, too) fact that sometimes people get dealt physical selves that are completely out of whack with what their brains tell them, insistently and constantly, and are willing to recognize that a person is what’s up in the brain, not what’s in the pants.
Because if we were to go only by what’s in the pants, many of us would be forced to conclude that you yourself are in actuality a tiny, tiny hamster. But you identify as a human so yeah, we’re paying you the courtesy of taking you at your word. Because most people aren’t judgmental gatekeeping fucksticks.
@puzzlegal I always kinda liked you and you’re probably closer to the reality-based community than anyone I’ve seen in this thread, so I really urge you to read 4thwavenow or the detrans subreddit (or some of the other resources that I alluded to before) and get some broader views that aren’t in the information bubble.
Gender-non-conformity is real. Biological aspects of gender (which is social) are real. But sex is real too, and transitioning is just a social response - one that’s becoming too toxic for wider society to allow to continue in its current form. Helping gender-non-conforming people by all agreeing that we pretend we see them as the opposite sex just isn’t working, it just causes a huge ruckus that hurts a lot of other people on the way
I don’t ‘just pretend’ to see them as their declared, I just do.
Including the people with completely unchanged bodies who simply put different pronouns in their email sigs and bios?
I find this hard to believe, and probably a bad psychological sign if true
And there we go. It starts with an OP about the narrow issue of women’s athletics, and here’s where it ends. Big fucking surprise.
Their brain has been what it is ALL THEIR FUCKING LIVES and in case you’ve not realized it yet, physical transitioning takes a LONG FUCKING TIME and usually COSTS A LOT OF FUCKING MONEY that the trans person might not have access to. So yes, someone tells me their gender and I take that at face value because I am not stupid and am capable of overriding my societal prejudices and my own stubborn insistence that what I see is the only reality. Because I endeavor not to be a rigid, stupid, annoying cunt.