Well, i do think it’s batshit crazy to treat elite sports as if they are somehow fair or inclusive to anyone. And i reject any argument based on that premise.
You want to talk about safety? About having a venue for women to excel? Go for it. But once you start taking about “fairness” you’ve completely lost me.
I don’t understand why fairness is such a horrible way of looking at this. It’s the only way to look at this, IMHO.
It doesn’t even make internal sense. People who menstruate is ok, but menstrual cycle isn’t?
I don’t understand why you’re characterizing elite sports as unfair. It’s no more unfair than any other elite activity.
They don’t let any ole body be a tenured professor at a huge research university. They don’t let any random person win the Nobel Prize. Board certified neurosurgeons have to jump through rigorous hoops before being allowed to cut into people’s brains. These are elite professionals. It doesn’t matter if only a small number of people have what it takes to achieve what they have. That is irrelevant when it comes to fairness.
Substituting menstrual cycle /period with uterine bleeding is my favorite piece of crazy.
a menstrual cycle is a cycle. It shouldn’t be used interchangeably with “period” because there is more that occurs in the cycle than just bleeding
earlier in the list, we’re told “uterus/ovaries” is too gendered to use. So why is “uterine bleeding” okay?
uterine bleeding can be everything from a period, to miscarriage, to perforation of uterine wall by an IUD, to placental separation.
Whoever came up with that list think the word “breast” is too gendered to use. Whoever they are, they are insane.
Little Robin Redbreastchest.
https://allnurseryrhymes.com/little-robin-redbreast/
Did i claim any of those is fair?
No, i did not. The world isn’t fair.
Lol, no, that sounds pretty ridiculous. I don’t have Twitter, and couldn’t get through most of it. But…
There are a limited number of situations where it might make sense to talk about people with a uterus. For instance, if you read medical advice regarding hormone replacement therapy, you will see endless references to whether or not your patient has a uterus, because the recommended options are different. (And hysterectomies are common enough among the relevant population that it’s an important question to ask routinely.)
But the appropriate contexts are pretty limited. Mostly, that’s a none-of-your-business item.
“The world isn’t fair” has been used to justify all kinds of crap. Like the mistreatment of transgender people. It doesn’t advance a principled position for anything.
Do you honestly think there are principles of fairness governing elite sports? Because I don’t.
Maybe fairness isn’t a good word, but there is equality of competition among genetic type. The elite genetically XY athletes will be about at the same level as each other, and the same with the genetically XX athletes. When these groups compete with their own sex, they are all basically very close to each other in ability. But genetically XY athletes are going to greatly outperform genetically XX athletes. That’s what I meant by being unfair. The 1st and 2nd place elite males are going to be very close to each other, but an elite male against an elite female is not even going to be close. The elite male is going to greatly outperform the elite female to the point where the female doesn’t even have a chance and the male doesn’t even have to try. The top males competing in a race may be separated by tenths of a second, but a male against a female is going to win by tens of seconds. Since the elite females would not have any chance to win against elite males regardless of how hard they try or train, it seems inherently unfair to say they should compete against each other.
Now, I will say that I feel there are ways to make the competition fair between genetically XX and XY competitors so that their isn’t this inherent, uncrossable gap in performance. That could be by handicapping time, medical ways of reducing hormone levels, or something like that. But this will require recognizing that someone identifying as a women doesn’t mean they are automatically granted access to women’s sports. With appropriate requirements, it can be done in a way that the genetically XX competitors still can compete with the genetically XY atheletes.
Gender and sex are not the same thing—moreover, you do not have to identify as a woman to give birth, have a uterus or be a parent.
You do have to be biologically female, though. There’s still only one group of people who have to worry about abortion access and maternity leave and obstetric care.
Why is it always women getting ‘rhetorically erased’ as iiandyiiii likes to put it? And why is it that not being mentioned in something that 99.9% of the time only women experience, apparently causes transmen such terrible distress, but going through pregnancy and giving birth to a baby is not a problem?
I was thinking about that ‘first pregnant man’ headline. According to gender theory it was a lie, because there have been uncountable numbers of pregnant men in the past, they just couldn’t do anything to express their male gender identity and no one had invented the concept yet.
Can you actually articulate an argument for why it’s not based on fairness? I keep waiting for this argument to be made and I keep not seeing it.
The concept of competitive sports hinges on one principle: there is entertainment value in pitting the best athletes against each other to see who wins. This value is optimized when fair play governs the competition. If an athlete’s win is at least partially attributable to ill-gotten advantages (like sabotaging one’s opponents Tonya Harding-style, doping, or breaking the rules of the game), then the point of the competition becomes less about seeing who the best athlete/team is and more about determining who the most unscrupulous and greedy is. Fortunately our society hasn’t yet decided to assign value to the latter, but it assigns a lot to the former.
People don’t watch sports just to watch a person stand up on a podium and receive a trophy; they watch sports because it’s enjoyable to watch highly trained, highly gifted athletes perform and win the title of the best of the best. This is another passion that I personally don’t have, but I can still respect what others get out of it. I can also understand what drives athletes to play.
Does cheating occur? Certainly to some degree. Do some athletes benefit from advantages that are not exclusively from natural ability and/or rigorous training?Certainly. Does that mean we shouldn’t assume a game between Serena Williams and Shelby Rogers is a fair and evenly matched competition based on all the winnowing it took for both athletes to square up against each other? No. If we can’t assume fairness, then no one (including the players) would be invested in the outcome. The value of it all goes away, if fair play is not ensured.
Cheating occurs in all elite professions. Plagiarists and saboteurs abound. Human nature being human nature, this will happen. It doesn’t mean we should be cynically declaring elite professions unfair, as if there aren’t rules and checks aimed at excluding the unscrupulous.
@DemonTree, is there radon in my house causing me to hallucinate or this real life?
Non-Binary People Like Me Won’t Fit In Until We Change Our Exclusionary Language
Peep the first paragraph:
The problem with gender is that it doesn’t really exist. It is a construct that has changed multiple times throughout the course of history – we all know those throwaway facts like high heels were invented for men or blue was originally a feminine colour! So why have we suddenly become so militant when policing the gender of others? And what does it feel like to be policed in this way? The first question, you’ll have to ask an anthropologist but for, the second I feel qualified to offer an answer… or 15.
So straight out the goddamn gate, the author pulls out all the blocks from the Jenga tower. Gender doesn’t really exist. So that means there is nothing else to talk about, right? So much for people identifying as certain genders; trans folks wholly invalidated in one sentence. Wow. So I guess we can go back to sex-based definitions and forget about affirming gender identities. Right?
No, because that would make too much sense in the year 2020.
This is the part that has me wondering about radon, though:
When you don’t know where or how you’ll be accepted, it can be hard to fit in – or even want to. I’ve lost count of the amount of job applications I’ve given up on because they don’t include an Mx prefix option, or where my only gender choice is ‘prefer not to say’. The thing is, I don’t ‘prefer not to say’ – I want to say. I want to shout it from the rooftops, display it on my passport, be legally recognised as non-binary. But I can’t.
So this person is missing out on job opportunities behind this? Am I missing something? Job apps ask if you are male or female; this is biological sex NOT gender identity.
If this person was able to get this article published in a mainstream publication, I think I need to start penning essays as an oppressed queer woman. Given my attraction to both Prince and Daddy from OINTB, my journey to self love and acceptance is worth sharing with the masses.
I wasn’t talking about cheating (although of course that happens). I was talking about the fact that we all start with very different equipment.
Natural ability. Some people have a lot more of it than other people.THAT’s what I’m referring to when I talked about fairness. The best runners have a different ratio of fast twitch to slow twitch muscles than the best weight lifters. Some swimmers have larger feet than others. Tall people have a huge advantage in basketball – the game is different, in good ways, when the players can’t reach over the top of the net, and basketball might have benefited from having different height classes.
And then there’s access to training and encouragement. Did you read the Freakonomics chapter on birth-month and sports? It turns out that something like half of the NHL was born in the same two months, because being the oldest kid in the class gives a boy an overwhelming advantage in hockey early on, leading to him getting more attention, more practice, better opportunities – kids born in the wrong month don’t really have much of a chance.
Is any of that fair? No, it really isn’t. I can’t imagine you can convince me that it is.
The competition is most fun to watch when the top competitors are close. That’s why it’s fun to watch women’s tennis, even if the players aren’t as good as the top men. They are still better than you and I, objectively really good, and the top players are close enough for the game to be exciting.
So any sport that wants to succeed has to find ways to pair off players or teams that are both objectively good and also comparable in ability. Is segregating by sex one way? Sure. And for some sports it may be the best way. For others, honestly, height or weight might make for an even better game.
But because elite sports are inherently totally unfair, I can’t get worked up about whether trans people are allowed in this or that category. As I said above, I think each sports authority ought to think about what will make a good, engaging game.
Middle school gym classes, or club sports, are a different beast. There, I agree that there should be consideration for injury to the players (a good reason to ban American football, by the way) but I don’t think there’s really a lot of danger if you let a transgirl play baseball with the other girls. Or play dodgeball in the girl’s gym class.
What is the purpose of this sport? Is it about winning and attracting money from an audience? Or is it about camaraderie and getting some exercise and being on a team? If it’s the latter, let the transgirls play with the girls, and the transboys play with the boys, or let everyone play the sport together.
A massive fraction of the male population would be competitive in or even dominate the highest elite level of women’s sports.
Any transwoman has an inherently unfair advantage over women they compete against athletically. Despite your prejudice against sports in general, fairness is actually one of the most important principles of sports.
Segregating men and women in sports is akin to weight classes. What you’re essentially saying is that lightweight boxers should let heavyweights into their elite levels of play because only a tiny fraction of people are elite in the first place. Well, no, obviously, because there are tons and tons of middling heavyweights who would absolutely dominate the most elite lightweights.
I would think that a trans girl who cared about fitting in would, you know, make an effort to fit in by like attempting to look like a girl.
No, I can’t see how a private space created for one student is a ghetto. And I don’t think that the feelings of isolation a trans student may feel changing in a private space trumps the feelings of discomfort that the 20 or so girls who are required to change in front of a male student may feel.
Except that’s exactly what you’re saying, unless your point is that it’s sometimes understandable for a white woman to feel uncomfortable undressing in a locker room where women of other races are also undressing.
Trans issues are not analogous to race issues. The vast majority of people do not choose their race, they are the race that they were born as. The vast majority of trans people have choosen to change their gender. They have made a decision to switch their gender which is all fine and wonderful until they want to pass the ramifications of that decision on to other people. If someone decides to change their gender, yes some things are going to get more difficult, but that is a result of the choice that they’ve made. They need to deal with the ramifications of their choice, not make everybody else deal with it.
So, that means that a transgirl who isn’t satisfied by changing in a curtained off area in the boy’s room should have to deal with the isolation of changing in a private, unisex room instead of visiting the ramifications of their decision to switch genders on high school girls by changing in the girl’s locker room.
This completely summarizes my view. There doesn’t seem to be any compromise on the trans side. I feel like I’m already compromising by “allowing” sincere transwomen in the women’s locker room. Because honestly, I’d be most comfortable with no males in the women’s locker room at all…but we have to change with the times and adapt, so I need to get over it. But it feels like they keep pushing the envelope…so now it’s not only someone like Caitlyn Jenner in the locker room, it’s someone who looks exactly like any other guy, but is a woman in their mind…and it’s like really? And that’s ignoring the sports issue, and the prison issue, and “menstruators,” and people who presented as men for 20 or 30 yrs of their career and now that they’re on top claiming awards for accomplished women in business…
When do they compromise? Because I’m not seeing it.
It’s not even that. I looked up the cases. One was a trans boy who sued because they let him change in the boys’ locker room but behind a privacy curtain. The other was the opposite, a trans girl who was asked to change in a private area inside the girls’ locker room. But that wasn’t good enough.
The judge decided that children have no right to privacy, ie no right not to be seen naked by the opposite sex. And ordered the schools to change their policy. Surely such a sweeping decision also supports peeping toms, upskirters etc? Seems dangerous to me.