“It is a complicated issue. It is truly a complicated issue, with a wide range of views, truly a wide range of views,” Jean-Pierre said. “There is no ‘yes or no’ answer to this, it is complicated. There is a rule that the Department of Education [DOE] has put forward, and we’re going to let that process move forward, and again, we want to make sure that while we establish guardrails with this rule, we also prevent discrimination, as well, against transgender kids. But again, a complicated issue with a wide range of views, and we respect that.”
“Absolutely no reason for the Biden admin to do this,” New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “It is indefensible and embarrassing. The admin can still walk this back, and they should. It’s a disgrace.”
“Honestly, this move by Biden to push a rule on trans kids in sports is not only a backwards betrayal, it [forces] us to have to spend our time dealing with god d*** sports instead of criminal bans on our healthcare,” Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney and LGBTQ+ advocate, wrote. “He could have just done nothing. This is legitimizing transphobia.”
The mOsT PrOgReSsIvE Administration in History™ 
“A complicated issue with a wide range of views, and we respect that” Fuck off out of here with that “centrist” nonsense. There’s nothing complicated about it, and it’s not an issue unless you want to turn it into one and want to appeal to people’s emotions like Republicans are doing. It was only a matter of time before they’d start throwing trans people under the bus. I guess with the coming elections it’s as good a time as ever.
Just in case anyone from other instances are stopping by, this is how liberal democracy leads to fascism. You have a right wing party that wants to criminalize being trans while tacitly supporting physical violence and extermination. The only viable opposition party can’t even use decisive language about the validity and existence of trans people among cis people. Because it might hurt their polling.
Now the strongest, political position from the “left” is “it’s complicated.” So when the right starts being very clear about violence and carrying it out through official state entities, the new left position will be even more to the right. Because they already gave up on “Trans people should participate in the things cis people do.” So it’s not even about trans people living a normal life. Historically, by the time we get there, it doesn’t matter what the left position is anymore. Because the right has taken over and are putting people in camps.
This is why it’s so very annoying to hear about harm reduction and voting the lesser evil. That’s not how it works. One hand washes the other. The lesser evil just leads to greater evil getting strong anyways. It doesn’t stop it or bide you time. The only lesser evil is violent revolution, which is only evil if you don’t understand what’s at stake here.
I’m one of those people from other instances stopping by that hasn’t thought a lot about this issue.
It’s a shame that US politics seems to be so boolean. As in, the only acceptable position for a political party is the polar opposite of their opposition.
What if an issue is genuinely complicated and cannot be resolved by a three word statement of position? Can there be no discussion around that?
that hasn’t thought a lot about this issue
Yeah, we can tell.
What if an issue is genuinely complicated and cannot be resolved by a three word statement of position? Can there be no discussion around that?
That’s fine if it’s an issue that is worthy of debate.
We’re talking here specifically about the rights and survival of human beings, and in that kind of case, no. There is no room for debate. There is no complexity. You either support people’s right to live, or you don’t. There fundamentally cannot be a grey area here; any response that includes the words “yes, but” automatically cedes ground to fascists.
Trans people matter, sports don’t.
Wholeheartedly agree, I have yet to see this take in person
What stands out to me is that the people worrying the most about trans people in womens’ sports are the same ones who were making fun of womens’ sports specifically right up until they realized they could use it to attack trans people.
The way I always interpreted it was that any artificial environment necessitates artificial constraints which will always ‘sample’ from a ‘population’. Sports are an artificial environment actively ensured to be such for some purpose. Whether that be entertainment, social bonding, profit, etc.
The sampling can have methods of organizing, say in a simple ordering of individuals based on skill with certain qualities. Think weight classes in boxing and the ranking of within them. It doesn’t need to be so, and it seems that it tends to be the case to make it easier to conceptualize the relationships between the people who participate.
Of course in such an artificial environment certain traits like physical strength, coordination, flexibility, endurance, or whatever, in isolation or combination determine the likelihood one may succeed according to the artificial constraints. Are we to be surprised individuals who have been the primary enjoyers and participants, i.e. men, perform ‘better’? It’s what would be expected if the conflict of interest of fascicle chauvinism is accounted for rather than ignored for reasons of self-interest.
What I never understood was, say there are participants of some group in some sport who are overwhelmingly unlikely to win. This would be true for the participants, what about the coaches? If you open up the artificial environment from some small scale to something bigger, say at the level of winning teams, where are the differences then? In the case of owners of teams, where the amount of risk or investment the owner wants to take is then the primary metric? As you move further and further away from the artificial environment to the real world, the differences matter less and less.
Sure, my wife is not as tall as me, if I am around I’ll help grab something on top of the fridge. That isn’t the only environment she finds herself in. We have a step stool she uses to get stuff, she can rearrange things to bring it lower, or find some alternative item. There are any number of solutions or strategies one can take outside of an artificially constrained environment.
It’s really as though these individuals want to hate women and trans people, or any marginalized group, then find the environments which may be hostile, make them actively hostile, and then when their plan succeeds and they have oppressed or disadvantaged these groups enough they claim victory due to their perceived superiority.
There’s a quote from Catch-22 I think of when this sports talk comes up:
“Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.”
Think weight classes in boxing and the ranking of within them. It doesn’t need to be so
Yeah like Street Fighter. Which of course the Gamer™ types have no problem with when they play with a girl character… But put a trans woman in there an all of a sudden they explode.
Americans lose their minds if you put peoples lives over their treats
Libs get the wall too.
do not cede ground to the right. for god’s sakes, do not cede ground to the right.
But again, a complicated issue with a wide range of views, and we respect that.
You don’t have to though.
In fact there should be no respect for the views of bigots
This sports transphobia is mostly directed at trans girls/femme/women, right?
Are they doing this shit to AFAB people in men’s sports?
Regardless all this discourse is wrapped up in misogyny too, implying that people AFAB are always going to be worse at sports.
And it doesn’t take into account the general unfairness in sports. Some people are born into wealthy families who can afford to feed their kids, get them healthcare, and train them into sports.
It’s all the talking points about affirmative action, just in a different font.
Are they doing this shit to AFAB people in men’s sports?
chess is lmao
yes. You will notice though that the primary direction of transphobic rhetoric is aimed at trans women and not trans men. this is a result of misogyny at its core. this is part of the phenomenon of transmisogyny, the intersection of misogyny and transphobia
It is also about patriarchy in that it is seen as a problem for a man to give up his patriarchal benefits, while it is seen as a virtue for women to seek patriarchal benefits. Same reason that gay men always suffered more gay hate than lesbians, the appearance of taking on the “feminine” role is viewed as a threat to patriarchy.
And in a world where modern psychology was founded upon the teaching that all young girls suffer from penis envy, most people think striving for masculinity seems like a perfectly reasonable goal. Author and sex activist Patrick Califia, who is a trans man, addresses this in his 1997 book Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism: “It seems the world is still more titillated by ‘a man who wants to become a woman’ than it is by ‘a woman who wants to become a man.’ The first is scandalous, the latter is taken for granted. This reflects the very different levels of privilege men and women have in our society. Of course women want to be men, the general attitude seems to be, and of course they can’t. And that’s that.”
Once we recognize how media coverage of transsexuals is informed by the different values our society assigns to femaleness and maleness, it becomes obvious that virtually all attempts to sensationalize and deride trans women are built on a foundation of unspoken misogyny. Since most people cannot fathom why someone would give up male privilege and power in order to become a relatively disempowered female, they assume that trans women transition primarily as a way of obtaining the one type of power that women are perceived to have in our society: the ability to express femininity and to attract men.
Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano
Transphobia directed at transmascs is also always mysogynist in nature. Its core concepts are toxic notions of masculinity seen as unfullfillable for AFAB individuals, the maintainance of control over AFAB bodies as reproductive units and sexual objects, and the denial of agency to AFAB individuals, all due to their assigned “female” gender. Terfs routinely claim that trans men and transmasculine nonbinary people are just “confused girls” making a mistake, the entire terf discourse around the issue hinges on the concept not to let people designated as broodmares decide what to do with their uteruses because they are too emotional and irrational to make choices for themselves. It doesn’t get more mysogynist than that, which is ironic when the target of the mysogyny are men, but that’s bio-essentialism for you. When you want to see how fully seperated any and all terfs have become from the feminist roots at least some of them used to have, how deeply and utterly mysogynist they have become, ask them about trans dudes.
“Gay = Feminine” never made any sense to me. I’m gay as hell and I’ve never been anything close to feminine. It has literally zero basis outside of, I don’t know, cishet creep mentality?
In their minds it’s simply because anyone that wants to get with a man is obviously taking on the feminine role, and that both men are feminine because of it.
And the other side of it is probably campness being the one thing straight people could use to clock gay people, and campness becoming associated (incorrectly) with all gay people because of its visibility.
Guess that for the straights there are two orientations: straight and sexual/flamboyant.
I’m basically like a stereotypical straight guy in every way except I happen to be gay (and without the creep attitude that seems incredibly common).
That I don’t fit the stereotype has led to an “are you sure tho?” Groundhog Day. Like, motherfucker yes I’m sure, I don’t go around questioning your straightness and suggesting you try same sex relationships every other week.
Cishets need to be placed under clinical observation.
Right and this is a problem for trans people in a unique way too. The trans people that pass can blend so well that cis people don’t think they even exist, and if they do they’re actually ok with those people because they don’t even register as “bad” to them, they can just pretend they don’t exist and in doing so they don’t threaten patriarchy at all because they’re non-existent.
The only idea of a trans person that exists in the head of cis people is those that do not pass. The ones they can clock. The ones that do not fit in the social design and patriarchy that they want.
The intersection of transphobia and misogyny, but you’ll still get people who deny that intersectionality is a thing.
I am so exhausted with this heteronormative/cisnormative (I’m sure there’s another word for it but I can’t recall) society treating every LGBT person as some exotic animal, like there must be an explanation and you owe it to them for your deviation from the “norm”. Rabid queerphobes spewing their vitriol about the LGBTs controlling society when trans people are being murdered left and right. Disgusting, profoundly sick society.
Yes, trans men are being forced to compete against women against their will. They never cared about fairness, it’s entirely about hurting trans people.
Yeah max beggs in Texas. Trans guy wrestler who absolutely dominated because transphobic Texas politicians made him compete vs women.
No, its really not."It is a complicated issue. It is truly a complicated issue, with a wide range of views, truly a wide range of views… There is no ‘yes or no’ answer to this, it is complicated.”
I read this in Stephen Merchant’s voice
In
speak calling something “complicated” is just an excuse to take the reactionary positionKids can be up to a year older than their classmates due to the way kindergarten start date cutoffs work. These kids who arbitrarily end up older tend to outperform their peers, because a 7.9 year old is stronger and faster than a 7 year old. This is a real difference - the NHL did a study on this and found that their players disproportionately have early-year birthdays due to how this effect lines up with hockey camps.
Do you care? Of course not, nobody cares about the competitive fairness of kids’ sports, the point is just to get them to exercise and have a hobby. We can verify that nobody takes this seriously by looking at high school sports, where suddenly a four year age gap is acceptable.
Okay, so why does this suddenly matter when it’s what team a trans kid should be on?
anglo island would be proud
Ironically cracker island doesn’t have anything like this. I suspect that’s mainly because school sports aren’t professionalised as for-profit enterprises like the horror show in america though and would exist if that were the case.
I remember reading that when Utah did their ban on trans athletes in school sports, there was exactly one trans girl playing in a girls’ sport in the whole state. Exactly one. Statewide legislature passing laws focused on one person, a child.
All this scrutiny and transphobia is directed at literal children, many of whom might be the only trans athlete out of millions. Transphobia is such a disgusting thing to me, not only because of the chauvinism and bigotry, but because it’s just so senseless. Trans people are already rare enough as it is and also one of the most vulnerable populations in regards to poverty, assault, unemployment, etc. I’ve seen some statistics saying that only around 1,000 people in America initiate HRT per year. That should give an idea of just how rare and vulnerable trans people are. And now there’s a senseless cultural panic just to whip up a few more eyeballs on the spectacle?
Death to America
I’ve seen some statistics saying that only around 1,000 people in America initiate HRT per year.
Can I get a source on that? Can’t find one myself but I live in the gay city so it might just seem like more
Found a summary of a 2015 John Hopkins study.
Estimates vary widely but it is believed that between 3,000 and 9,000 Americans undergo sex reassignment surgery each year. Transition medical care can include hormone replacement therapy, mastectomy, plastic surgery, psychotherapy and more.
It doesn’t seem like there’s a good central source on numbers like this. John Hopkins is a respected medical institution and even they’re saying “estimates vary widely” and “It’s believed.” I think part of it is this isn’t recorded in census data and perhaps most trans people who get HRT or GRS are kinda private about it? No idea, but it’s still so absurd to me that reactionaries have decided trans people are their mortal enemy now. Trans people are incredibly rare and they’re much poorer and more vulnerable than cis people.
That’s srs which only like 1-2 percent of trans people get/are able to get
Maybe 1-2% of Amerikan trans people, where you have to pay out of pocket for a surgery that somehow costs four times as much as you’d pay in Europe.
They just need to combined all sports and make them genderless. In cases like boxing just go by weight class, since they do that for men and women’s leagues anyways.
Trans people in sports isnt complicated. Let them compete in whatever league or category they want and identify as. Thats perfectly duable right now in the current sports scene. No gender segregation in sports altogether is very complicated and would need a serious advance into a socialist society and population cultural mindset for it to be able to be implemented without hurting most the existing hundreds of millions of women athletes at all levels imo.
Under a socialist system of mostly amateur,well founded sports scene and the equivalent education i agree thats the ideal. In our current system i feel the realities of founding and way the sports ,especially competitive sports, are structured and approached would have a vast majority of female athletes understandably not wanting genderless sports league and any suggestion or movement towards that policy before or without prioratizing complete reform of how sports and sports leagues are structured wont go anywhere.
Why would women track and field athletes want genderless sports rn if that would 100% translate to them constantly losing and being left out of competitions, losing sports scholarships let alone financialy supporting themselves and having little chance of proffessional career or any international or national success. Even if they got payed all the same, there still a want and need for athletes to compete and have a chance to win on some level of the sport against their peers. So even in the amateur scene. If the best performing woman in t&f can only hope for in any competition, be it town,city, college, state or national , to with the 20th best time or throw or jump with everyone ahead of them being men then they wouldnt take that deal and even more so the others.
Same with team sports. At any level the team will be looking to win and will chose the players that will make that more likely. So you will end up with segregated leagues any way where even in amateur leagues 98% of the rosters are male. A solution would be to enforse a quota that every team must have X woman players on the team and they must play at minimum Y minutes but that would still lead to huge issues and idk if again the women athletes would want that
At least at the pro level, they technically are genderless; there are no rules against women trying out. Women’s leagues exist because biological males have such an extreme physical advantage that biological females do not qualify in open competition. Weight classes aren’t sufficient, testosterone dramatically affects more than just muscle volume.
If all sports were genderless, they would be exclusively cis-male at every level after puberty with any significant competition, regardless of weight class
testosterone dramatically affects more than just muscle volume
Yet we do not see any post-transition trans woman in any sport wiping the floor with her competition that did not go through a testosterone puberty. That doesn’t bother any transphobe who has a say in pro sports, tho, in swimming competitions we now have the situation that cis women who’ve cheated by taking testosterone throughout their youth get a 2-4 year ban while trans women who had the wrong puberty forced on them get permanent bans from all competitions they’d stand a chance in.
tl;dr: you’re a transphobic gender essentialist idiot who doesn’t understand basic biology or how transitioning works and systematically ignores all empiric evidence that shows you’re full of shit, go fuck yourself
Okay, so democrats may not be harm reduction, but they’ll… checks notes …look the other way as others cause harm?
Ah the abortion playbook
