Forum Index
»
Website Feedback
Women's Sports and Lia Thomas thread
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
Definitely sus. |
jsteele
Site Admin Online
Site Admin Online
Obviously, the GOP does not care at all about transgender people. What is interesting about Scott's position is that it shows how the GOP has hardened its position. It's no longer just about sports, but the mere existence of trans people. I assume that focusing on sports didn't gain enough traction. |
Anonymous
|
Anonymous
The people are are genuinely pro-woman and do fight against gender and racial inequality don't see it as either/or. https://nwlc.org/issue/education-title-ix/ |
Anonymous
| ^The people who are genuinely |
Anonymous
NP here. I don't see a whiff of transphobia in that post in question either. It's strange. That poster is anti-athlete though, for sure. |
Anonymous
I’m the person who wrote the post above and after reading the rest of the thread, I still do not have any idea why the other PP said it was transphobic. Is it considered transphobic by transactivists to even observe that if one woman wins a scholarship via athletics, another doesn’t? Because that seems to be what the other PP is saying, which, I’m sorry, is abject nonsense. The closest explanation I got was some handwavy “you sound like the GOP” which is useless. If the definition of not being transphobic to trans supporters is to literally never observe the world around us, you are going to be in for a rough ride. |
Anonymous
“Women’s issues” are always losers. Hate to be a Charlie Brown about it. It’s the opposite side of the same coin that democrats run into with women’s reproductive health. |
Anonymous
What do you see as the ideal outcome in college-level sports? |
Anonymous
I’m the person who wrote it and boy, people really are reading their own spin into what I thought was a neutral summary of the conversation. I’m not at all anti athlete. I think it is actually very good that women’s athletics at the university level both exist and provide access to disadvantaged women. For the record, I’m also very interested in how mainstream feminist organizations pick their issues and sides, because there is a long and grim history of those organizations pulling the ladder up behind them and harming poor women of color. It is very common for white feminist feminist organizations to tell women of color that “we are all in this together” with a vague promise that they will get to their issues some day. Candidly, some of the exact language used by mainstream feminist organizations with respect to trans issues very much mirrors — almost word for word — some of the language used in the 1960s and 1970s to keep issues of Black women backburnered and deprioritized in those organizations. How all of this intersects with trans athletes is interesting and I think a good and nuanced conversation to have. But Jeff cannot and should not spend his days deleting posts referring to transwomen as men (which, by the way, I have reported). I’m sorry DCUM isn’t the space for that conversation but I think Jeff is right. |
Anonymous
And? |
Anonymous
That’s a good and hard question. The short answer is that I don’t know. I don’t think the current situation is right and I think it needs changing. To be clear, I don’t blame Lia Thomas individually for anything, as she is operating within rules and hasn’t broken any rules. But I don’t think that the current rules, which are very favorable to transwomen, are right or fair. If I ruled the world, we would spend a lot of time figuring out the physical characteristics that give biological men the advantage they have and then figure out how to measure when those characteristics have been mitigated. Testosterone levels simply aren’t sufficiently accurate to mitigate for the advantage conferred by male puberty. But surely, with enough study, we can figure that out. Then it is a matter of measurement. Transwomen who measured under the threshold would compete as women, transwomen who measured above would compete as men. I also think transwomen who transitioned pre-puberty should be classified differently than post-puberty transitions. That, however, is a long and imperfect way off. So the question is what to do before that point. And this is where the zero sum nature of athletics becomes a real issue: while we do not know how to actually mitigate for the undeniable physical advantages of being born male, which marginalized group bears the burden of that exploration process, in a zero sum situation? To be totally honest, I’m not sure how that should be decided. The transphobic black athlete was very wrong about her transphobia, but she wasn’t wrong about how athletics has traditionally been used as a vehicle for access to education for disadvantaged women, and I do not think it is deniable that a very broad policy with respect to transwomen is going to have the effect of removing access to education for biological women who would otherwise qualify. I wrote up above about mainstream white feminist organizations and their horrific history with respect to women of color, and it really strikes me how similar the language used to exclude black and brown women’s issues from mainstream feminist platforms is now used to support access by transwomen to women’s sports. So the short answer is that in a situation with zero sum results (and sports is unusual that way), I honestly don’t know what the best short term answer is. But the fact that we can’t even talk about the zero sum nature of sports without someone screaming “transphobic” is really unfortunate and frankly I think I t basically just hands the GOP a powerful election tool. Nuance is not a Republican thing, and so when transactivists refuse to engage in a good faith discussion, they are just essentially agreeing with the GOP that this is not a nuanced issue. |
Anonymous
Which is a problem. |
Anonymous
How do you think they'd feel if they found out you were disrespectful behind their back? Or found out you thought they were mentally ill? |
Anonymous
Why? They can support women, women of color, and transgender women. |