Civil lies
This is just straight up a lie.
Of course he didn’t.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a transgender sports bill into law Friday requiring students to prove their sex at birth in order to play in middle and high school sports.
The bill states that “a student’s gender for purposes of participation in a public middle school or high school interscholastic athletic activity or event be determined by the student’s sex at the time of the student’s birth, as indicated on the student’s original birth certificate.”
Students must show proof of their sex at the time of birth if their birth certificate does not appear to be the original or does not indicate the student’s sex at the time of birth. This does not apply to students in kindergarten through 4th grade, the Tennessee bill says.
Before puberty the kids can play where they want. Why would that be? Because at puberty boys gain a lot of physical advantages over girls, which make it grossly unfair for boys to play on girls’ teams because they say they identify as girls. It’s pretty simple. The ACLU is just lying about the bill.
If the ACLU’s framing on this (trans are banned if the organisations or law won’t permit the conditions to be of their preference, or for a feeling of safety) is to be accepted, then women could equally claim that the ACLU is advocating for, and achieving laws that ban women and girls from sports, bathrooms, change rooms, locker rooms, medical care, homeless and dv shelters, political parties and women’s groups. Yes?
This smells like Chasio’s rhetoric. The ACLU has lost much respectability because of her.
Trans activists will likely claim that this is not a lie supposedly because this effectively bans trans people from sports, arguing that forcing a trans kid to be on the team they don’t want to be on is intolerable for them. Which is still an admission that the ACLU’s claim is literally a lie, and is a load of bullshit anyway.
Although it is a lie, it is also not a lie, depending on how you read it. This is actually one of my pet linguistic peeves.
Natural language is messy and often relies on context. One distinction often left to context is that between “all” and “some”. Consider these three statements:
In normal, everyday speech and writing, it is common to express both 2 and 3 as 1. As an innocuous example, I might say that pizza is tasty. Do I mean that all pizza is tasty? Almost certainly not, if we’re being pedantically precise, since there are week old, rotting pizzas in some dumpsters somewhere. But even ignoring such obvious extremes, I may not care for anchovy and pineapple pizza. In this case, I really mean that some pizza is tasty, but only context tells us that.
What about “dogs are mammals”? That’s obviously all A are B, but it’s context, not syntax, that makes it so.
“Men are rapists” is intended by most who say it to mean some A are B. However, there are those who mean it as all A are B. Other examples of this sort are statements like, “Jews are greedy,” “women are emotional,” “black people are dangerous”, and every other demographic generalization you can think of. The “some” interpretation is true; the “all”, false. Context admits a certain ambiguity. Whether that ambiguity demands syntactical clarification is a matter of rhetoric and ethics, but regardless: on one interpretation, the statement is true; on the other, false.
Normally, it is convenience that drives the use of 1 over 2 or 3. We’re fine with a bit of ambiguity, as long as context clears things up. It’s only when context doesn’t, or when the distinction is important, that most people bother to include the quantifier.
And that brings me back to the tweet. On two interpretations, it is false: “a bill banning some/all trans kids from playing all sports.” On another, it is true: “a bill banning some trans kids from playing some sports.” (Of course, that’s if you accept the ban framing. Which I don’t. Boys are already prohibited from playing in girls sports.)
So it’s both false and true, a lie and not. And the people who keep saying this shit know it’s ambiguous. The ambiguity is the point. It lets them advance the lie and defend it with the truth. Once you see the trick, you see it everywhere.
Excellent news! Leave all such pizzas to my care, tyvm
Re #4
I don’t think “a bill banning some trans kids from playing some sports” is accurate, and not because of the “all/some” question. I think the question is more about the word “sports”. A TIM who wants to run track can run track, just not on the girls’ track team. The “sport” is running track, not running girls’ track. At different schools there will be sports that only boys play and sports that only girls play, but there is often a fair amount of overlap. The overlap seems to be the typical case for these TIM athletes, who were often competing on the boys’ team in the same sport before declaring their trans status. So, no trans kid is banned from playing any sport; the choice of teams (and sports) may be limited by what are fielded by the school for athletes of the appropriate sex.
There are rules in some states that permit (some!) boys to play on girls’ teams when there is no boys’ team in that sport; I remember a boy playing field hockey (it’s a girls’ sport in the US) under that rule. Girls can also join boys’ teams under the same rule, and some girls joined wrestling teams where there were no girls’ teams.
But Nullius, if you interpret something wrongly it doesn’t make it true. All men are male, and humptydumptyism and tricky semantics don’t change the facts, it only mischaracterizes them. Trans people are not denied being able to participate in sports, they are being limited to participating in sports in an equitable way, in the categories that they qualify for. They say fairness is letting boys play girls sports, I say girls sports should be for actual girls. I’m sure Chasio thinks she has a penis and testicles too, but I digress…
Sack @6 cross post. Agreed.
Many of these TIMs will not be good enough to make the cut on the boy’s team. Being prevented from competing on the girl’s team might feel like a “ban” to them. So much (all?) of this movement is predicated on the prioritizing of male feelings over female material reality. Can’t make the boy’s team because you’re not good enough? Too fucking bad. Cry me a river. Take it up with the boy’s team coach. See how far you get, making demands to be “included.” Leave the girls alone. There are lots of other boys not good enough to make the boy’s team. Talk to them.
Sackbut @ 6: And yet we refer to girls’ sports and to women’s sports, and we talk about their being in in danger. So while it is certainly possible and reasonable to interpret sports as something for which “men’s” and “women’s” are not categorical qualifiers, in practice those are categorical qualifiers. The sport track is divided into men’s track, women’s track, and everything else. Women’s track is a category of sports and one that bills of the sort in question seek to bar males from. Hence, males are “banned” from women’s track.
That’s just a necessary consequence of considering women’s sports a category of sports. If you don’t, then yes, that does not follow. However, biting that bullet bars you from speaking of women’s sports(s), again as a logical consequence. Perhaps we really shouldn’t speak of women’s sports. I don’t know. It’s not a question I’d considered before.
twiliter @ 7: First, you username is hard to type on a phone. Second, my claim is not that misinterpretation makes something true, but that some subset of interpretations is false while another subset is true. “The sky is blue” is true when blue is interpreted as color, but it is false when interpreted as mood. That’s just natural language, for you. Sometimes ambiguity in language is beautiful, as in good poetry. Sometimes it’s deleterious, as in equivocation. I’m not sure if there’s a word for it, but that’s what this basically is: equivocation. Except instead of trading on the ambiguity of a word with multiple meanings, it exploits syntax with multiple meanings. It’s ultimately a bastard stepchild of a formal fallacy.
But Nullius, the sentence in question is not true in any sense, although I understand what you mean. If they had added more details it might be true in some sense, they certainly had more characters available to them in the tweet to make it ambiguous, but they literally said *all A’s are B*, which cannot accurately be interpreted as *some A’s are some B*. If you read Chasio’s twitter, you can see she does this quite often, which appears deliberate as to imply that trans people are being denied some right or other, playing sports, health care, use of facilities, etc. (and I won’t get in to what I think are actual *rights*, that’s another story), but I really don’t see the ambiguity here in the way it is written. It doesn’t even beg the question ‘what trans kids?’ or ‘what sports?’; semantically it is presented as a statement of fact, which, with or without further digging for details, or the unpacking of how we use the words in context, doesn’t meet the requirements of a factual statement. The reverse is also true, they could have tweeted “Trans people suck” and in many cases have that literally not be the case in any possible interpretation (although in one sense it would be a subjective assessment), but at least then we could talk about ambiguity.
btw, I find it difficult to type anything on my phone’s tiny keyboard, I avoid it. ;)
I’m well aware that Strangio is a nutcase despite not having them, and that she does, in fact, explicitly say that all A are B with regularity. However, the tweet does not literally say, “all A’s are B”. It says, “Xing A from B.” This can be said equally truthfully of situations in which all A are Xed from all B, situations in which some A are Xed from all B, situations in which all A are Xed from some B, and situations in which some A are Xed from some B. English is ambiguous like that. Removing that ambiguity is one of the reasons logicians are so keen to convert arguments to formal representations.
I try not to use my phone for this sort of thing, but sometimes you’re out in the boonies and don’t have an actual, full-fledged computer nearby. :(
YNNB @9, Nullius @10:
I understand that of course a TIM who wants to run girls’ track would not be allowed to run girls’ track, and that this is in effect a de facto ban on participation as desired. I understand also that some TIMs would not be able to make the cut for the boys’ team, and this is a de facto ban as well.
However, it’s not a de jure ban. A girl who wants to play (American) football, and is allowed to try out for the team under rules I mentioned earlier, is extremely unlikely to make the team, yet she is not banned from trying. A mediocre or poor athlete who wants to run track and can’t make the team is similarly not banned from trying out for the team. A student who wants to play lacrosse, but whose local school does not field a lacrosse team, is not banned from playing lacrosse, and is certainly not banned from trying out for a team in some other sport. So unless you are going to make the case that all people who cannot play a particular sport because of inadequate skill or lack of available teams are banned, then I don’t think the term “banned from playing sports” applies to TIMs not allowed to play on girls’ teams.
The phrase “banned from playing on girls’ teams” or even “banned from girls’ sports” might apply to TIMs, but neither of those is the phrase under discussion.
Nullius, agreed, language is so much less precise than formal logic. It still looks to me like all A’s are B, but I try to avoid interjcting the X factor, it’s a habit of mine. ;)
(I haven’t had a full fledged computer for a dozen years, my tablet does everything I need, and yes the damnable touch keyboard isn’t much better than my phone’s, but at least it’s a little bigger)
So then your tablet doesn’t do everything you need.
Re #15
She didn’t say it did it well.
I have a friend, retired professional writer, who loves her tablet and its virtual keyboard, much prefers it to a physical keyboard. Me, I like the tactile aid to hand and finger positions, and I’m much more comfortable on a physical keyboard, especially one with the bumps on the F and J keys.
This is why there are laptops. I usually have at least one with me.
Sackbut:
Chasio’s two dishonest moves here are (1) creating ambiguity between universal and existential, and (2) conflating different types of category. I’ve already addressed the first: Girls’ sports is a subset of sports, and thus “some sports” can refer to girls’ sports. The second dishonest move is the one you identify.
The men’s/women’s sports categories are fundamentally different from the track/water/motor/combat/etc. sports categories. One deals with the activity itself; the other deals with the activity’s participants. This conflation allows her to illicitly apply a feature of one to the other, where it makes no sense.
Participant-based categories by their nature include and exclude, welcome and ban different subsets of potential participants. As you say, track is track, and prohibition from participation in girls’ track, or London natives’ track, or Mrs. Johnson’s third grade class’s track is both natural and does not prohibit one from participation in track qua sport.
twiliter @ 14: Of course it does. That’s the point! That’s why it’s such a dishonest rhetorical technique. Lead with a claim that is naturally interpreted as a universal, and use it to advance the universal interpretation. If challenged, respond that you only meant the existential. When your challenger leaves, go back to advancing the universal. It’s a win-win, if you’re willing to be dishonest and use a technicality of language like that.
@15, Well no, not everything… This is how they sell peripherals. My phone is much more powerful and capable than my last laptop by a lot, and also more capable and powerful than my tablet, and in a pinch would be more useful than either if it weren’t so damned small. (So what did I do last year? Downsized my phone of course.(cue the Jean Luc facepalm)) :D
@16 Sack, I am honored that you perceive that I type in a female voice, maybe I am more of a feminist than I think I am. :) I did learn on an IBM Selectric in high school after mostly toying with an old manual Remington Rand as a kid, so the lack of tactile feedback is what I miss, that and the key spacing… OK, that and using all my fingers instead of just two. :P
@17, Yes as I said earlier, Chasio does this repeatedly, dishonestly, and completely (and deliberately) avoids any acknowledgement of the effect on women and girls with this kind of bogus rhetoric. She may be fairly intelligent, but loses intelligence points for underestimating her audience’s intelligence. This is what pettifogging hacks do, and she is despicable for doing it.
@20 Oops, I meant @19 rather than @17 replying to Nullius. My apologies Latsot. But yes, I really don’t need a laptop or desktop for work or anything, and when I realized I wasn’t using the one I had, I got rid of it.
Professional sports is by its nature exclusive. Most school sports are, too, other than informal gatherings of friends to play a game of baseball for fun. If you are not good enough, you will not make the team. The problem is, once males start playing on female teams, then females will become “not good enough”. Exceptional females are often not able to compete with mediocre males in sports that require strength and/or speed. And there really is no place for them to go once they are out of the girl’s teams. Unless they start a new girl’s team, in which case they will find that the TiMs will invade that, in order to have to avoid playing against other TiMs, who may be as strong or fast as they are, and they are no longer guaranteed a win. This will effectively bar females from professional sports, though they will still have the right to try out for those teams, because women won’t make the teams if there are enough male-bodied pretend women wanting to try out. (I don’t see that happening immediately, at least, but it still does preclude exceptional females from playing the sport of their choice in favor of mediocre male athletes…like Rachel Veronica).
I would be excluded from any sports team, and not just because I’m 60. Even as a young woman, I was not strong enough or fast enough. Fortunately, I was not interested. But…I did want to be in school choir, but since I can’t sing, I couldn’t make the cut. So far, I haven’t heard any TiMs insist on being in girl’s choir, in spite of their bass voices…wonder why that is?
A lot of things are exclusive. All of us have things we are “barred” from by virtue of talent…rather, lack of talent. My sister got to be in choir; my sister can sing. Why shouldn’t those of us who are trans-tuneful be allowed access to the choir? We are being barred!