for real, banning drag shows is ridiculous. drag shows are the most fun thing ever.
I forget which state/city did that recently. it’s doubly fuckin lol because dressing in drag does not at all mean you’re trans.
First and foremost, I’m pissed off at people not getting to live their lives as who they know themselves to be. Live how you want to live. Love who you love. Dress as you want to dress. Be called how you want to be called.
But secondarily, it pisses me off that, even if these fuckwads want to deny that “transgender” is a thing, they’re denying the existence of objectively, scientifically, inarguably intersex people. We know that there are people born with ambiguous genitalia. We know that there are people out there who are XY but have female body plans. We know there are people who are XXY. We know that people with male body plans can have female-ish hormones and people with female body plans can have male-ish hormones. I’d love get a straight answer from some evangelical politician asshole about if God didn’t make these people who they are, then who did? You wanna tell me that someone who came out of their mother’s womb intersex is some spawn of Satan? Huh, please, let’s hear your thoughts on abortion.
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Yeah all of that pisses me off too, but the fact that the other side doesn’t actually care and we’re actually bothering to debate it with them in bad faith is suuuuuper tilting.
I really wish our politicians would just start pivoting to the issues they’re trying to smoke screen instead of actually engaging. The entire conversation is terrain picked by the other side because it’s advantageous to them so naturally not only do we argue with them about it but we also let them frame the entire conversation. It’s bullshit and I’m tired of it.
Just once I’d like to see someone respond to a bad faith argument about trans people with “You don’t give a shit about trans people Kyle, I’d be surprised if you’d ever met a trans person before you started bullying them for political gain. You want to talk about trans people so that you don’t have to talk about infant mortality in your state since…” or literally any other topic that we win on handily.
Embarrassing bigots fucking works, my friends, this is awesome
I barely even knew who that guy was before he nuked his own career.
Literally everyone at the Olympics is a genetic freak who put in a ton of work, not just one or the other. But, gotta lock down the genetic freaks who make conservatives uncomfortable, natch. Mise well ban 7 footers from basketball, because that kind of genetic variation is unnatural.
This is actually one area where I’m genuinely kinda conflicted about what the right solution is. I mean intersex people do exist, and if being a female-presenting athlete with a specific condition that affects hormone balance turns out to be the cheat code to make it 100x easier to succeed in women’s sports, then on its face that seems like a big issue? And I don’t feel like it’s much of a stretch to consider trans women at certain stages of their transition to be in that same ‘family’ as intersex folks, as far as hormone profile and its effect on strength etc.
I just have no idea what the right way is to go about fixing the issue. I obviously don’t want every aspiring female teenage athlete to have to go through an involved medical exam to rule out that they’re XXY or something (the conservative strawman of course would be rooting out these ‘groomed’ girls that have been forced into secret MTF transition by their parents in order to reap the huge financial rewards of a career in women’s sports, which we know isn’t a thing but still).
I’m not a doctor but the right way to do this can’t be to ostracize the athletes trying to compete or to set rules based on conservative theories instead of actual science.
Michael Phelps is less affected by lactic acid (which causes that burning in your muscles when you’re exercising) than most people, and he’s got freaky long arms. Secretariat might have been off to the glue factory instead had he not had a freaky large heart. In general, the interaction between genetics and athletic performance is incredibly complex, but one place where a simple interaction has been found is baseball. Baseball players, as a rule, have fantastic vision, and, while that can be trained to a degree, there’s a strong genetic component.
I have a nephew who’s a pretty darn good hockey goalie. He plays on traveling teams that win things. His chances of playing in the NHL are basically zero, because his parents are short, and he’s not going to be over 6’. That’s pretty much no matter how hard he works (maybe he could juice up with some HGH).
As much as it’s fun to pretend that sport performance is a function of the hard work to build muscle and respiratory capacity, and precise training to get good at the skills necessary for the sport, it’s not, it never has been, and it never will be, and it won’t be at any level of competition. Most kids involved in sports have probably seen at least one kid who was born just over the cutoff date and who hit puberty a little earlier than everyone else and who was born to big, athletic parents and thus who’s just bigger and stronger than everyone else and wipes the floor with the competition. Maybe that evens up later when the other kids catch up. Maybe it doesn’t, but those sorts of advantages are allowed in sports. So, once we grant that certain kinds of innate advantages are OK, it gets harder and harder to say that a person who’s just living life as they were born should be excluded because their particular genetic advantage isn’t OK while some other person’s genetic advantage is.
Trans athletes are a little trickier, because trans men or boys would be taking testosterone, something specifically forbidden for cis men and boys, and trans women or girls who’ve been through male puberty are likely to have some advantages (bone density and ligament and tendon strength, specifically) that persist even after years on female hormones. The former is addressable by settling on an accepted testosterone level that is in the normal male range but probably under the highest levels that unjuiced cis male athletes might have, and then let things fall as they may. The latter is especially tricky due to the difference in ages between when puberty happens and when we give kids full agency over their lives, not to mention when kids settle on whether they’re trans or instead gay with a somewhat effeminate presentation or something else queer. But still, letting a trans woman compete with male-ish ligaments but female-ish musculature doesn’t seem that bad. She may be less prone to injury but still not able to throw a 100 mph fastball (men tear ligaments doing things like playing football or throwing fastballs for years on end. Women tear ligaments doing things like playing volleyball.)
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the solution is to let every sport use as much performance enhancing drugs as they want. there, no more “issue.” I say issue in quotes because much of the hand wringing about women’s sports is done by people who wouldn’t be caught dead watching women’s sports.
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You have to define we, though. We know these things. I know 40% of Americans don’t, I’m guessing it’s more like 70%. Don’t underestimate how poorly informed most people are on this issue.
Yeah this is where it’s tough, the bolded sounds fair but then you’re starting to descend that slippery slope by saying “Yes it is OK to impose some regulations that require medical screening and possibly the disclosure of one’s trans status” and I’m not sure where it leads. I think a lot depends on what level of play you start to impose these regulations. Does it only matter at the professional level? College?
They already check testosterone levels in track and field events and have arbitrary limits on what is acceptable.
Yeah, I’d want to hear the opinions of some trans men, but it’s also possible to frame the rule in a non-transphobic way, such that any boy who’s taking medically approved testosterone supplementation should have his testosterone levels between X and Y. I could imagine some cis boy who’s had some tragic testicular injury, or someone who’s had testicular cancer, may want to play sports and live a normalish life afterwards but who needs supplementary testosterone to do so.
The issue here is letting people trade years off their life for short term athletic glory, which is pretty grim. Yeah, it’s paternalistic, but I think there should be at least some guardrails for people against themselves.
Even debating trans people in women’s sports is letting the other side choose the ground we fight on. They choose that ground because if you squint hard it’s unfair to top female athletes to compete against someone who might be competitive in men’s athletics.
Having the conversation inherently helps the right. What we should be practicing is smooth clean pivots away from this minor bullshit and back onto stuff that matters like the absolutely hellish experience of being trans in America.
These conversations are like nesting dolls of right wing bullshit. Want to undermine a more just and evenly balanced society? Bring up the most different group of people who might benefit and make it about them.
That different group of people is actually pretty sympathetic when you mention their life expectancy? Bring up the one place in existence where they might have some kind of unfair advantage over sympathetic normies.
Letting them pull us to the conversation they want to have is where the leak is here. I’m not super interested in refining my arguments for conversations whose very legitimacy I want to destroy.
IMAGINE having trans issues even be an issue you care about as a cis gendered lower middle class white person. There are an unbelievable number of things going on that are actually incredibly important to your lived experience and we’re over here essentially talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Treating these conversations that right wing people want to have like they are happening in good faith instead of a diversion tactic is a huge leak that leftists of all stripes are extremely prone to.
If I’m talking to a right wing person and trying to move their views and they try to even talk about trans people my response is 100% of the time ‘Neither of us gives a fuck about trans people (this is a small lie, I do care but not proportionately more than I care about anyone else… the important part is that it makes them feel like the won the point and keeps their mind from locking up tight) let’s talk about corporate greed and how it’s destroying every single good thing about being a human in 2023.’ Now we’re bitching, together, about how everything is getting more and more crap sack and who is turning the crank. These thoughts are a lever you can use to actually change minds. You don’t do that by arguing about what Fox wants you to argue about.
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Yeah this is my feeling and of the couple trans folks I talk with frequently none of them care what the Olympics does or doesn’t do. They more interested in getting documents with their name, healthcare access, etc.
It’s probably overly utilitarian and easy for me to say but seems better for the majority of trans folks just to let the professional sporting government agencies just do whatever they want and focus on the issues that impact the 99.9999% of people who aren’t elite professional athletes
Yeah, this is yet another example of the left failing completely at messaging. The right has deliberately picked the most complicated way to frame the issue and everyone goes along with it. There’s like a dozen people in the US directly affected by the trans policies of hyper-elite athletics —when was the last time anyone got super worked up over women’s powerlifting? Let the IOC decide these things on a case-by-case basis, you can get so bogged down debating this.
The left should focus on anti-trans bullying and pointing out how creepy the right’s fixation with people’s junk is. It’s actually a very simple issue: there’s no good reason to freak out over trans people.
People care about issues that relate directly to them, it’s just human nature. Even if few people are impacted by international competition standards, the general principle is going to hit close to home for a lot of people. Most people are parents, most parent have daughters, most of those daughters will participate in some level of competitive athletics. So it’s going to be natural to have a knee-jerk response of “Wait, so you’re telling me that a boy can just pretend to be a girl and take away my daughter’s trophy that she’s worked so hard for? I don’t think so!”
Very similar to the “bathroom bill” issues restricting what bathrooms people can use. It’s not complicated at all, it triggers people’s innate sense of fairness and protectiveness. “Wait, so you’re telling me that a boy can just say he’s a girl and walk right into a girl’s bathroom or locker room where my daughter is changing? Not on my watch!”
Of course these responses are not happening in a vacuum, people are flooded with anti-trans propaganda and misinformation daily. But if these “personal” concerns are the entry point for most people engaging with trans issues for the first time, I don’t think it’s going to work to just try and pivot away from them and back to the more important issues that we want to focus on.
My response would be “Shut the fuck up; you don’t care about women’s sports” to anyone on the right who complains about this topic.