The civil rights of “female athletes”
The Associated Press/The Guardian does a crap job of reporting on the Title IX ruling.
A subhead:
Ruling calls policy a violation of civil rights of ‘female athletes’
What’s with the scare quotes? Have we decided female athletes don’t exist now? Are they all an illusion? Are they a product of lies and public relations?
Connecticut’s policy allowing transgender girls to compete as girls in high school sports violates the civil rights of athletes who have always identified as female, the US Education Department has determined in a decision that could force the state to change course to keep federal funding and influence others to do the same.
It’s interesting how the boys who claim to be girls are called transgender girls, no scare quotes, while girls are called “athletes who have always identified as female.” How insulting is that? And how fantasy-privileging, and reality-scorning? Let’s get this straight. It’s the boys who are claiming to be something they are not, and it’s the girls who are what they are as well as what they say they are. Furthermore, it’s the boys who have a large physical advantage over the girls, not the other way around. It’s also journalistically bizarre that everyone simply assumes that the boys really do “identify as” girls as opposed to pretending to for a few years in order to win races and maybe athletic scholarships.
A letter from the department’s civil rights office, a copy of which was obtained Thursday by the Associated Press, came in response to a complaint filed last year by several cisgender female track athletes who argued that two transgender female runners had an unfair physical advantage.
Again. They’re not “cisgender female track athletes,” they’re just female track athletes. They don’t need an extra label to denote that they’re not lying or pretending or fantasizing about being female, and it’s insulting to slap that label on them.
“All that today’s finding represents is yet another attack from the Trump administration on transgender students,” said Chase Strangio, who leads transgender justice initiatives for the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT and HIV Project.
It’s not an attack. Not letting boys who say they are girls compete on the girls’ team is not attacking those boys – they can compete on the boys’ team. The attack is from the other direction: letting boys who say they “identify as” girls compete against girls attacks the right of girls to fair competition. It would be nice if all these putative progressives gave a damn about that.
“Trans students belong in our schools, including on sports teams, and we aren’t backing down from this fight,” Strangio said.
Nobody is trying to keep trans students out of schools or off sports teams.
It still amazes me how suddenly and swiftly women’s rights stopped mattering.
Control the vocabulary, you control the debate on rights. It’s like constantly forcing everyone to use the phrase “god-given rights,” and then wondering if “god-denying” atheists deserve any.
Exactly. This is why the calling people by their “chosen” pronouns to be polite is so damaging: it conditions us all to think they are women even when we don’t buy the dogma.
And “who have always identified as female” so these girls identified as female when they were 6 months old? While they were in all the fetal stages? Pretty advanced thinking for infants or embryos, I would say!
This torturing of the language is becoming pretty gruesome.
It irks me that people even argue about whether transwomen have a physical advantage over women. Not because they of course and obviously and manifestly do, but because that advantage is ultimately irrelevant to whether they should be allowed to compete in the women’s division. What matters is that an athlete is female. Compete in women’s divisions if-and-only-if female. That’s it.
If competitive fairness is the relevant criterion, then there is some X for which you consider it fair if some male has an X% chance to win any given competition. Which means that a woman who would’ve had a less than X% chance to win will be pushed out of the opportunity. Ultimately, this means that X% of the women’s division will be men, because of that physical advantage the average male enjoys and the finite size of teams. Choosing a non-zero value for X means denying a non-zero number of women their Title IX rights, and it also is necessarily unfair in the abstract to those women. It’s even unfair to the (100-X)% who remain. It’s unfair all the way down, and there’s no way to avoid that.
Of course, competitive fairness is not the sort of fairness this rhetoric trades in. It’s the sort of fairness to which we appeal when we say that life is unfair, or our school schedules, or the fact that I get a hangover after just two drinks. It’s actually not even fairness; it’s a reality-rewriting equity. These people say that it is fair to have people compete with the gender with which they identify. So it would be inequitable were reality allowed to have more influence than anything else, like identifying with the opposite sex.
Yes, what happened to AFAB? I mean, if they can claim they were only assigned as females, doesn’t that give them a different status than “identifying as”, which is supposed to mean they really are? If they “identify as:” female, they are supposed to have rights. If they are “assigned female at birth”, then they are no one. Or at least that’s how it was…or is that so yesterday morning? Have we moved on in the vocabulary now?
There’s another manipulation in there–‘transgender justice’, rather than ‘advocating for policies supported by transgender activist groups’ or something like that. It’s assumed that transgender people don’t have, and deserve, ‘justice’.
southwest88:
Yeah. It seems inevitable when people try to contradict reality, especially when their claims are inconsistent. They end up defining entire classes of people inline for the purpose of the particular sentence they are currently using. You’d think that would be a clue that there’s a rabbit away.
latsot:
Principle of explosion, wot? If their inconsistent claims and rejection of reality sit comfortably with them, then surely they’ll be comfortable with denying reality to make way for the ever more extreme claims derivable from that inconsistency.