Not a civil liberty
Chase Strangio is explaining how sex is a matter of choice and decided in the head rather than the body.
To situation? I suppose she meant ” to situate” but that’s a stupid word for that too. “To describe” would have done the job perfectly well. She’s straining to sound authoritative and scholarly, but the “scholarship” here is bogus. Anyway – yes there damn well is a threat. There’s a threat of women not being able to claim anything for ourselves any more.
The “and white supremacy” is telling. It has nothing to do with white supremacy, but throwing it in there polishes up the progressive credentials, which otherwise tend to look very tarnished.
None of that is even slightly true.
Strangio knows perfectly well why and what.
If there’s absolutely no “biological superiority” for male-bodied people in sports, then there’s no need for women’s sports. But if that’s the case, why are some transwomen so eager to participate in women’s sports?
(Also, where are all the transwomen in women’s gymnastics?)
And figure skating?
Mighty white of you, Ms. Strangio.
Look, Strangio, we don’t want to kink-shame you for your mustache fetish, but it’s no skin off your back if men take sex-based rights you don’t want anymore. Is it that you want to punish women for being something you don’t want to be anymore? You’ve tried to mutilate the woman right out of your own self, so don’t start looking anywhere but the mirror for misogyny.
And a fish-belly ofay like you pretending to talk for people of color? At least Rachel Dolezal bothered to get a tan first.
Keep getting your Strangio on, but do that somewhere else, please. You’re not a man, but you are The Man in this case.
[W]omen and girls who are trans in sports is very odd phrasing. One could almost take it to mean that some people are just temporarily trans, putting on the lippy to gain advantage in sports and reverting to beefy blokes once they’ve collected all the medals.
Strangio is playing some games here, no pun intended. He claims that the opposing argument is based on the premise “that men and boys are always better, stronger, faster and more skilled than women and girls.” Which implies that this argument can be refuted by providing a single example of a woman who is better, stronger, faster than a particular man. But of course that’s a straw man; nobody seriously claims that.
What people do claim is that, in general, men are better (at sports), stronger, etc., and that’s pretty clearly true. I doubt anyone here needs to be convinced of this, but just in case, I looked up the current all-time track and field records for high school students in the U.S. (Why this example? Because this sport provides objective measures of performance, i.e. times in standardized distances. And I picked high school because that’s often the age group we’re talking about.)
Here are the records for girls. Here is the same for boys.
After the first dozen or so events, I stopped checking, but for that first dozen or so, the best girls’ time would not have cracked the list of boys’ times. It’s generally not even close.
And the idea that by saying women are smaller and not able to run as fast is saying we are inferior is just ridiculous. We are saying we are, on average, smaller, and on average, do not run as fast. Biological reality. Translating it to inferiority is the mark of a misogynist, but GC feminists are not doing that. We are seeing it as a difference. It’s no different than allowing individuals who have physical impairments to have their own sports, because they are not able to run as fast or throw as far or jump as high as people who do not have those issues. Wheelchairs can be accommodated without thinking we claim they are inferior, why can’t women?
“There is a relentless effort to situation trans people as a threat to cis people in sport and elsewhere. There simply is no threat.”
Err, no, trans *people* aren’t a threat to cis (blech) *people* in sport and elsewhere. Trans*women* are a threat to *women* in sport and elsewhere. More fucking disingenuous speech.
I could probably beat Strangio in the 100ms and I sit on my arse for 10 hours a day.
I suggest a new sport called ‘Chase Strangio’, in which anyone, whatever their sex, gender, age, etc, may participate. Strangio is given say 20 yards, the starting gun fires, Strangio sets off, and everybody sets off in hot pursuit. The first person to give Strangio a kick in the arse, or ass, whichever he/she possesses, wins. To avoid any real pain to poor Strangio, it should be made into a computer game, along the lines of Super Mario, with a few obstacles, mazes and monsters in the way to make it more interesting and exciting. In this way all sex, gender, age differences would be rendered of little or no significance. Being involved in a virtual world would also make little Strangio feel more at home, since he/she appears to inhabit one in real life.
It is, I think, somewhat interesting how often the names of the activist sort of trans person sound like stage names.
Anyway, Chase’s biology denial is nothing new. It’s hard to fathom how someone so addlepated could make it through law school.
Nullius,
I fear you have an exaggerated notion of the abilities of law school graduates.
More seriously — law school, and the bar exam, rewards a certain kind of test-taking ability. You’re usually evaluated on your ability to “spot the issues,” state the relevant legal principles, and then apply those principles to the issues. In fact, there’s a test-taking acronym, IRAC = Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. But from what I can tell it’s the “IR” parts that matter most, and the “C” the least, which is to say that if you answer an exam question with “on the one hand, plaintiff will argue XYZ, but defendant will respond with ABC…” you’ll do just fine regardless of which argument you say is better or even if you say at all. Most exam questions are set up to have multiple good arguments that could go either way, so that’s understandable. But the one thing I always have to teach new lawyers is that the “on the one hand this, on the other hand that, who can say what the outcome will be” analysis that got them As in law school gets you a frustrated client in real life. “I paid $10,000 for a memo that says ‘I dunno what you should do’?”
Also, lawyers get so used to being advocates and coming up with arguments even for weak positions that it’s an occupational hazard to start to get high on your own supply and fall in love with your own cleverness to the point that you start to believe a position you knew was weak back when you started. I suspect that’s particularly dangerous when you work in the realm of public advocacy, where you are a passionate believer in a cause instead of just a hired gun like the rest of us.
Screechy, I think you just described a common pattern in journalists, too. I started out as a journalist major, but had to switch majors. It just seemed all so…unethical…So I returned to creative writing, which is what I love anyway, and has little in common with journalism. And scientific writing, which is somewhat dry, and the “on the other hand this” is saved for the hypothesis. You are expected to reach a conclusion, and if it’s a good paper, the conclusion will match the data. (Of course, there is no guarantee it will be a good paper, even published.)
‘[W]omen and girls who are trans in sports’
Strangio is adopting the American ‘person first’ style of disability language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language
I’ve come to appreciate that while it sounds positive in principle it’s not actually helpful; understanding the ‘social model’ of disability lets us realise that people are in fact ‘disabled’ by the physical and organisational structure of the environment we live in rather than anything inherent in them. So saying ‘disabled people’, the preferred locution in England, helps us acknowledge that they have been ‘disabled’ by their environment, not by whatever impairment they may have.
I used to tell my students that I once lived in a small cozy house where I could reach everything and everything was convenient for me. Then I moved into a house which I swear was designed for giants–I had to have a stepladder in every room just to do basic stuff, including using the thermostat controls. Did I suddenly become ‘too short’ when moving from one house to the other? Nope–nothing ‘wrong’ with me, I just moved from an environment in which I was not disabled to one in which I was.
Ah but in the TRA mentality, there is absolutely no difference in physical ability between trans women and actual, which means in their view it is a matter of us nassty tricksy hobbitses positioning things our way in our narrative. Which of course is either a delusion of theirs, or thy are plain lying.
This would certainly be a ‘dangerous and faulty premise’, but no GC feminist claims that even the weakest man in the world is stronger than the world’s strongest woman, and since when has skill ever been part of the discussion? This has always been about physicality, not learning. Chase is openly lying in attributing this as one of our premises.
But these are actually true, so the untruth here is that Chase calls these untruths.
They’re male, which is not something they share with “cis” women aka women.
guest, I can sympathize. I grew up in a house built for my great-grandmother, who was under five foot tall. I am five foot ten. I had the opposite problem, and found myself struggling to do dishes at a sink built for a much shorter woman. And counters, etc. Yeah, environment makes a huge difference in what is and isn’t disabling.