It’s all about the misgendering
The Nation piece the ACLU shared is by Dave Zirin, who does not have any personal stake in whether or not girls and women can continue to compete against other girls and women without an admixture of some boys and men who “identify as” women. He’ll be fine either way.
Naturally his piece reflects that indifference.
There is a right-wing campaign afoot using the presence of transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming women in sports as a stalking horse to attack the already limited and precarious civil rights held by the trans community.
That’s just a lie about “gender nonconforming women.” Nobody objects to gender nonconforming women in sport or on women’s teams. Nobody.
Around the country, legislation is being introduced aimed at keeping high school trans athletes off the playing field.
Again: no. Keeping male high school trans athletes out of girls’ competitions.
Three cisgender high school girls—Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith—and their mothers put their names on a suit against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s policy that allows trans girls to compete in races with cisgender female opponents. In their suit, they misgender two track and field competitors, saying that it is time to call for an end to “boys displacing girls in competitive track events in Connecticut.”
So man Dave Zirin is saying that it’s more important not to “misgender” two boys who say they are girls than it is to let girls compete against girls.
But don’t worry, he gave Chase Strangio three long paragraphs to explain why girls don’t have any right to compete against girls.
Reading through the linked Nation article, it struck me that on the same basis and logic, if the latter word can be used in this context, there should be no age divisions in sports either. It would be ageist to deny me the right to run in races against say, 5 year olds, and take all the prizes. And I am sure that after they had settled down and regained their composure, the other competitors would see reason and support me in this. Well, most of them anyway; especially with parental encouragement to do so.
And not only would it be ageist to deny me my rights in this matter, it would also be heightist and weightist.
And did I say ageist? That too.
If you’re letting your vocabulary do the heavy lifting when answering criticism, you’re practicing deception.
Again, the fact that there is a problem with trans-women competing in athletic events, and not trans-men, is a huge tell.
I think a good response might be “We are not mis-gendering the two individuals in question. We are correctly sexing them. Sports are not divided by gender, they are divided by sex.”
The “gender nonconforming women” bit also jumped of my screen and poked me in the eye. Are men now identifying as gender nonconforming women? If they can identify as women, why not I suppose. But if so, how are we supposed to distinguish between men and men that identify as GNW? Mis-gendering is actual violence after all!
OB’s take makes more sense: this is just a lie to fill out the list, to make the ‘injustice’ seem even greater.
But if men identify not just as women, but as gender nonconforming women, it will make it all the more believable when they claim they’re lesbians, right?
@Papito;
Butch lesbians …
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2018/the-woman-targeted/
Ooooh, “shadowy”, “right-wing” conspiracy stuff. Almost sounds like a spy story or something. But just what “trans rights” are being “smashed?” What is it they already have are being destroyed? This sounds a whole lot better than “High school boys, pretending to be girls, using once-respected civil liberties group and reflexive woke solidarity to cheat their way into girls’ sports, smashing the opportunities of real, actual, you know GIRLS to use sports as a way to better their lives.” Shorter, too.
Malicious, knavish fuckery.
My thoughts too. That means we’re both slated for re-education.
Indeed. It’s not a good sign when you have to resort to bullshit like that to try to win support for your non-argument. Lies, misrepresentation and obfuscation are at the heart of this because they have no real argument. They have to try to convince/fool people to support their cause without allowing them to see the truth of what is actually being fought for, the destruction of boundaries and protections for girls and women. Stamping their feet and insisting “TWAW” is as much as they can muster.
Their position necessitates that they refuse debate and discussion because to allow an open airing of the entirely legitimate issues and concerns of women and girls just highlights the mendacious vacuousness of their sloganeering. Tactically a smart move, but strategically fatal, I think. Beyond the small horizon encompassed by the woke-o-sphere, there’s a whole world of people who are not in on the nuanced bullshit of trans ideology, who have to be convinced to support them, or convinced to stay the fuck out of the discussion on penalty of the eternal condemnation of wokebeard flying monkeys. If the non-initiated get a chance to see what’s really happening, recruitment to the cause is much less likely. Which leaves them with smears, intimidation and attempted social opprobrium jujitsu, in which they try to throw around a moral weight and authority they do not actually have, hoping others will pile on and do their work for them.
It’s infuriating that precious time and effort has to be used re-inventing the wheel to fight this regressive battle against raging, entitled male narcissism when the world is burning down.
Another lie is that this is a right wing campaign. I agree that there is some common ground on the view of sex vs. gender, but the underlying reasoning is frequently different (them: sex changes are playing God!), our treatment of trans people is different (them: freaks! sexual deviants!). And they’ll keep on using this lie, as it short circuits the thinking of so damn many people. “What would my woke friends think if I was caught giving consideration to this? It’s conservative!”
Also, I don’t see them fighting for e.g. feminist libraries or rape shelters at all
Misgender? Perhaps, but more accurately, they are correct-sexing the named. And since sex is a well defined and checkable concept, and since it actually plays a role in athletics, it makes for a vastly better criterion.
Oh and another point regarding the “non-conforming girls” bit that I forgot to wedge in: a woman in professional sports is a woman not conforming to what is expected of the female sex.
Thus a woman or girl that enters sports, especially if she pushes to go professional, is gender non-conforming by that act alone.
In subjective sports like figure skating women can get penalized for being gender-noncomforming. Tonya Harding got criticism and probably lost contests for not wearing nice dresses, not having her makeup done well, and for allegedly acting mannish.
Which admittedly is not quite the same as objecting to her being in the sport.
Also, her hiring someone to kneecap her opponent was a bit mannish.
That is a good point. I’m abashed that I didn’t think of it, because the whole dainty-girly thing in figure skating just drives me nuts – men wear clothes and women wear bathing suits; nothing to see here folks, move along.
Five stars; would stand corrected again.
One of my new favourite podcasts, revisiting news stories we half-heard as children and revealing some fascinating history–they did a two-part series on Tonya Harding:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tonya-harding-part-1/id1380008439?i=1000465289889
I’m guessing the ACLU has launched this campaign at the behest of a big (dare I say “shadowy”?) donor? Does that mean it’s going to take the arrival of an even bigger donor to be disuaded from this course of action?
O.T. – A conservative group is filing suit over gender ID in Wisconsin and whether public schools should deliberately keep information about their child’s transition from their parents. Current school policy is to do so.
<a href="https://madison.com/ct/news/local/education/conservative-advocacy-group-sues-madison-schools-over-gender-identity-guidance/article_25add6ff-d028-50fe-ab3b-ce5faada8335.html"Conservative advocacy group sues Madison Schools over gender identity guidance, plaintiffs are 14 anonymous parents (2/18/2020)