Who will feel shut out
There’s standing in solidarity with and then there’s the other thing.
StonewallUK means they stand in solidarity with men who identify as women who will feel shut out of women’s rugby. They do not mean they stand in solidarity with women who feel shut out of women’s rugby because playing against men will be too dangerous. They also ignore the fact that men who identify as women will not be shut out of men’s rugby. Their solidarity is reserved for men who want to be able to play on women’s and men’s teams, and not for women who won’t be able to play at all because playing against men is too dangerous. Everything for men, nothing for women – what could be more progressive?
But it’s not about “inclusion.” Nobody is saying trans people can’t play rugby. World Rugby is confirming that people with male bodies can’t play against women. Rugby is a bruising contact sport; it’s not safe for women to play against male bodies. Why can’t StonewallUK think about the women for a change?
Stonewall is lying about ‘trans’ inclusion. They simply aren’t being excluded from playing rugby. Miranda Yardley recently joined a men’s rugby club, just to prove that ‘transwomen’ aren’t being excluded from playing just because they’re being barred from playing against women.
They may genuinely have themselves convinced that not being allowed to play against women is being excluded, on the basis that it denies their True Essence or some such shit. I wish there were a device we could use to see whether they really do have themselves convinced or just echo the bullshit because it’s mandatory.
It may not matter whether a particular individual is sincere or not. As a rule of thumb, I always assume the vast majority believes whatever odd thing they say they believe (Creationism, Healing Energy, Gender Identity Theory) just because anything that’s gained popularity and a veneer of scientific credibility is easy to believe. It contains some grains of truth, looks analogous to something reasonable, and appeals to our better nature. True meaning and worth; health and wisdom; tolerance and respect. Flip the positives and demonize the other side with the negatives and the appeal to Common Sense and Human Decency is reinforced.
The con artists, cheaters, and sociopaths are probably in there if there’s money, awards, or adulation involved, but I usually figure at least half of those kinda sorta believe their own hype, too — especially if people keep praising or encouraging them. As for the rest … it would bother me less to give them credit for honesty than it would to consider an honest person on the grift.
Hmm yes there’s truth to the “anything that’s gained popularity and a veneer of scientific credibility is easy to believe” part, but there are truths pulling in the other direction too. Social pressure is powerful; social pressure in the form of noisy abuse, threats, shunning, and the like is very powerful.
And then, I’m not convinced that “it’s totally not risky for women to play rugby against people who have gone through male puberty” has much of a veneer of scientific credibility.
More broadly…I spend a lot of time wondering if various people really believe it or just say they do, and why the level of bullying and threatening doesn’t put more people off, and questions like that.
I’ve watched TRAs converse among themselves and agree that the idea that male bodies are more athletic than female bodies is a sexist myth. Women are only weaker because they expect to be weaker due to Western Colonial influence; historically, and in non-western cultures, they’re about the same. If they didn’t believe it, there’d be no reason to bring it up when there’s no one there to fool but themselves. Again, the slight grain of truth, stretched into a hearty bowl of rice to share.
If you mean doesn’t put more people off resisting the dogma, maybe it’s because truth matters (hmm, sounds familiar) to a lot of people.
Those people who do believe it? There’s a quote I only half remember, said about somebody whose name I’ve forgotten (possibly a politician, they usually are) which went something like the only thing that stops me from accusing him of outright lying is the possibility that he thoroughly deceived himself before he tried to deceive the public‘.
I wonder how much social media encourages the eager adoption of dubious beliefs. So many bad arguments get passed along because the constant bombardment of NOW NOW NOW diminishes any desire to think about things at length rather than reflexively go along with the crowd. Nothing new about this of course, it’s just that platforms like twitter seem designed to work for attention seekers to the detriment of deeper understanding, and that’s not even taking into account the large number of horrid trolls that infest the platform.
There are plenty of sound, thoughtful arguments made on twitter and elsewhere I know, and it’s been good to hear them. I happened upon several gender critical feminists a couple of years ago, most of them in the U.K., and have followed them and their efforts to be heard. I think twitter harbors a bias against them based on their putting the feelings of trans folk above those speaking some truths some would rather not hear, like how sex makes a huge difference in sports such as rugby. Reality can be ignored, but it can’t be denied.
Sastra #5:
Women are only weaker because they expect to be weaker due
to Western Colonial influence; historically, and in non-western cultures,
they’re about the same.
Well, I have lived in a ‘non-Western’ culture (one that was never colonised) for fifty years now, and visited other countries in East & Southeast Asia, one of which was was never colonised, and know after all these years a bit about the pre-colonial history of Asian nations, and the assertion that men and women are about equal in physical strength, or were regarded as being so, is arrant nonsense. I really don’t think there is the slightest grain of truth in such characterisations of these rice-growing cultures; or the slightest grain of truth in such a characterisation of any human culture I know of.
Yet another massive insult to women. How do they imagine that a culture where women are expected to be weaker than men would even develop? Somewhere in the (completely undocumented) past men and women were equal in physical strength, offspring popped into existence with no inconvenience – let alone health risk – to anyone and were looked after equally by everyone, but somehow it was decided that women should be treated like property? Must be women’s fault then I guess. Some lazy bitch one day decided to pretend to be a bit helpless and lo and behold, she got to put her feet up in on front of the fire while her man went out to get her a nice bit of mammoth for supper. This soon caught on, and thousands of years of violence and rape and child marriage and widow burnings and FGM and lives of perpetual pregnancy-and-childbirth until death all followed from this one sneaky woman playing on some imaginary vulnerability… bet her name was Karen. But still, small price to pay for the privilege of being able to devote your life to raising children, getting sparkly stuff glued to your nails, and having men do all your thinking for you, am I right ladies?
I remember in Bali, where I went once to hear the music and see the dancing, the quite extraordinary amount of work put in by women, who had constantly prepare for the never ceasing religious festivals that are so much a part of the Balinese year. While the men? Ah, they had better things to do, or not do: illegal cock-fights, etc. That is in fact a bit unfair, for many men have to work hard (usually caring for tourists for whom the Balinese, rightly, have very mixed feelings, since a dependence on tourism is necessarily a constant humiliation); Bali is a very impoverished place; but the work the women had to put in was incredible.
And in Japan, in rural districts, if there’s a village funeral, the house is thrown open and neighbours gather, but the women are confined to the kitchen preparing dishes and bringing them, as well as endless bottles of beer, etc, to the men who lounge around in the main room chatting.
How little so many Westerners know of, or think about, other cultures – if they think about them at all, it is with condescension and sentimentality. In Bali I was taken to see by the taxi-driver I had befriended (and whom I would take to lunch whilst other taxi-drivers had to hang about outside as their patrons ate their fill) the extraordinary rice-terraces which are regarded as beautiful. Having spent some of my youth working on farms in Wales and England, all I could think of as I looked at them was the centuries of labour that had gone into creating them. Once, in the hills near Ubud where I was walking, a peasant woman came along the path towards me with a great load on her back, and gave me a look of the most intense hatred as she passed me. I admired her for it.
I came to loathe the Westerners I met there. ‘This lovely, peaceful, harmonious, artistic island, where everybody is happy!’ How often I heard that sort of thing. They knew nothing of the history of the island. They did not seem to notice the poverty all around them, the struggles people had to make a living, the work that women had to do. In the mid-sixties, when there were mass-killings throughout Indonesia (with the connivance of the US, the UK & Australia), the percentage (not the number) of the population of Bali who died, as old scores going back to Dutch colonialism and Japanese occupation were settled, was, it seems, greater than the percentage of the Cambodian population who were killed under Pol Pot.
I suspect that all of the ‘non-Western culture’ bullshit stems from the obsevation that people in those countries tend to be shorter than Westerners so while there are still size differences between men and women the differences are less noticable. Having made this observation, the rest has been assumed or invented then spouted as if sacred truths, when in reality it’s a bunch of racist nonsense wrapped up in idealistic fantasy.
Thinking about it, there does seem to be a remarkable inference that somehow Western men have not only convinced women to think of themselves as weaker, they have also magically arranged things so that women are on average smaller with lighter frames and musculature to match their expectations of being weaker. This is, of course, in stark contrast to what the fossil record appears to show, where ghe remains of pre-historic humans and proto-humans seem to show a greater difference between the sizes of males and females, and that kind of turns the claim that Sastra mentioned, that historically men and women were equals in strength, on its head.
On reflection, I suppose that it must be easy to convince oneself of anything as long as one knows nothing about the topics at hand and therefore ignorant of certain facts that might prove inconvenient to one’s idealistic imaginings.
When I was younger I spent a lot of time working in central Africa, and as Tim Harris mentions the women did an astonishing amount of physical work and were, to my eyes, supernaturally strong. I used to pay a little girl to bring me my daily ration of three buckets of water on her way to school; she’d show up with one in each hand and one on her head, put them in my yard, then go her merry way. I would go out and, mustering all my strength, drag them one at a time to the house. Where I was living, again as Tim mentions, the men mostly sat around–‘men’s work’ involved money changing hands, and if none of that was happening they were off the hook. So yes, it does seem that in some other cultures, and probably in most if not all subsistence cultures, the strength differences between women and men are probably less marked.
But this isn’t actually relevant to sports. Sports, by definition, and unlike actual work, are physical activities designed for men’s bodies–they exaggerate what men’s bodies are capable of, originally for purposes of military training and now for purposes of competition. In non sex-segregated sports men are always going to do better, because the activities involved in sports are specifically tailored to the advantages men’s bodies offer.
It’s easier to demonize people from other cultures. It is also easier to romanticize them. The former may be worse, but that doesn’t make the latter benign. Ibn Warraq made a point about how Western leftists and progressives who spout the “Noble Savage” trope (Every negative trait – hate, aggression, greed, intolerance, the thirst for power and dominance etc. – is a western cultural invention and supposedly alien to people from other cultures who live in harmony with nature as well as other tribes) don’t actually know anything – let alone care – about the people they are glorifying (like the Inuit who supposedly have 50 words for snow and no words for war). These supposedly noble savages are of interest only in so far and to the extent that they can be held up as the antitheses of everything these leftists and progressives dislike in their own societies whether or not there’s any truth to it.
(Of course if being a “woman” is all in the mind, and having the body of Michael Clarke Duncan is as compatible with being a “woman” as having the body of Ellen Page… )
Tinkerbell won’t die, the BBC belieeeeeeves.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/46453958
I finally decided after PZ”s post today called “The arrogance of TERFs” that I’d had enough, and removed him from my feed. (I’ll probably still look from time to time at posts that people link to.)
The head of my department in Birmingham used to go to Japan about once a year, as he had struck up a close relationship with the head a department there, after going to Japan for the first time on a rugby tour in the early 1950s. On one occasion his host took him to a restaurant for dinner, as he did on every visit, and it was raining heavily. When the arrived at the restaurant in a taxi someone came out from the bushes with a large umbrella so that they wouldn’t get wet on the few metres to the restaurant. When they had finished their meal it was still raining heavily, and again someone came out with an umbrella to accompany them to their taxi. Inside the taxi my head of department commented that the restaurant was very efficient to have people to protect clients from the rain. “No, that wasn’t the restaurant; that was my wife.” My head of department had backward ideas himself about the role of women, but even he was shocked.
This sounds like my family every Christmas of my childhood.
As to women in other cultures, I know a woman who married an Indian. When they had their first child, his parents were horrified that he was helping with child care. According to them, men in India don’t even see the child for (I forget how long – six months to a year) because it is up to a woman to take care of them.