Think of the children
The problem isn’t boys on girls’ teams, the problem is bad coaches!
The February 26, 2021 passage of the Equality Act in the US House of Representatives piqued conservatives into a moral panic.
The bill, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, had a terrifying potential for Republicans: the presence of trans girls in high school sports.
No, not the presence of trans girls in high school sports, the presence of boys in girls’ sports. And it’s not just Republicans or just conservatives who think this will be unfair to girls.
All this language of the need to “protect,” the need to root out other children from “bathrooms” and “locker rooms,” is hard to square with reality.
It’s not “other children,” it’s boys; it’s not “bathrooms” and “locker rooms” but girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.
It’s no coincidence that the wording is always evasive this way. It has to be evasive, because if it were precise and accurate, the problems would be way too obvious.
Which means that at some level they know they’re talking shit, and shit that is oppressive to girls and women…but they do it anyway.
Abigail Weinberg then tells some stories of abusive coaches, then wraps it all up.
As scandal after scandal emerges about the pervasive abuse of young athletes, it’s time we reevaluate our priorities. Trans athletes aren’t the problem.
Again, the issue is not trans athletes but boys competing against girls. And that is a problem, and we can pay attention to both problems – abusive coaches and unfair competition.
Imagine the response if it was TIF athletes cheating on boys.
One of the organizations trying to organize feminist opposition to the Equality Act provided sample letters to send to members of the House, a different letter for each of various cases, including based on whether the Representative has indicated support for or opposition to the bill. My newly elected “representative” is an right-wing Trump zealot replacing a slightly less bad Republican who retired. He voted against the bill. I had toyed with the idea of writing to him, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t think of a graceful way of saying “I hate pretty much everything you stand for, but we happen to find ourselves on the same side of one aspect of this one issue for wildly different reasons.”
On the plus side there’s such a razor thin margin in the Senate that this has pretty much no chance in hell of passing. Is Manchin even on board?
I also keep hearing that this is massively popular but I wonder how popular putting men on women’s sports teams actually is…
@Sackbut, if we are to improve politics, to make it less of a blood sport, more of a societal good, then sometimes we should be the grown ups and congratulate our opponents.
I despise most of what our current state government stands for, but I am happy to praise our Attorney General for her support of abortion law reform.
Ex Prime Minister John Howard, cut from similar cloth to the above, but even more despicable IMHO, but his quick action to reduce the private holding of firearms after the Port Arthur massacre was the decisive action needed.
The other side may not reciprocate, but we can set an example for our children to follow.
Roj, I’m fine with agreeing with “opposition” politicians when they take a principled stand I agree with, even though I usually disagree with them. Mitt Romney spoke out against the Equality Act in such a manner, and I agree with his statements on that issue; he talked about women’s rights to single-sex spaces and resources. I didn’t see anything homophobic in his statements, only support for women’s rights, based on factual information. Good standard stuff.
That is not the case with my “representative” and others like him. Opposition to the Equality Act because all sexual deviance is a sin unto the Lord, or because the Bible says there are two sexes, or because eww gross gay people and trans people, that’s someone whose vote might get the initial result I want, but who isn’t going to help improve the bill to remove the specific problems, and who is never going to vote for the revised versions of the bill that I support. That’s not someone I feel comfortable seeking support from. As noted, “same side of one aspect of one issue for wildly different reasons”.
I concur that, especially in the gender wars, politics makes strange bedfellows, but there are still boundaries.
Well I think FDR wasn’t under any illusions when he joined up with Stalin; I take a similar view.
I don’t think the comparison with Stalin is at all apt.
I think the Equality Act needs to be amended or revised. Mitt Romney and I agree on that, and I would write to him were he my representative, even though I disagree with him on many other issues.
My “representative” doesn’t want the Equality Act at all. He wants to get rid of gay marriage, he thinks it should be OK to fire people for being gay, he thinks Trump won the election, he is a Christian Nationalist. I don’t think we are on the same side on pretty much anything, including the Equality Act, except in the very narrow case of this one vote. If you’d feel comfortable writing to someone like that you plead your case, great; I didn’t. I don’t even think I could make an argument that would be meaningful to him.
If the “similar view” is to ally with your enemies when they are on your side of an issue, how specific do you want that to be? Do you see no difference between a Mitt Romney and a Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert?
If the “similar view” is that you agree that there are limits, great, I agree.
There’s gradation… I’d only trust someone like MTG as long as it takes to win ordering what we have for lunch. But I would trust her for that long…
Romney is a more reliable partner because he doesn’t want to destroy the republic.
All members of the House and Senate are useful insofar as they all have votes that the people should lobby for members to use in the people’s interests.
Such lobbying shouldn’t be taken as support for the member, nor prevent the people from lobbying for better members to be voted in at the next election.
If it weren’t for the seriousness of the consequences, the trans activist claim that gender critical feminists are JUST LIKE right-wing, white-supremicist, religious bigots who want to send trans identified people to extermination camps, and that they are universaly funded by, and happy to work with, such bigots and bigotry, would be uproariously hilarious. As it is, even agreeing with the likes of Boebert and Greene that the sky is blue gets you tarred with the same brush on this issue. I can see Sackbut’s point on this. The scope and grounds of their rejection of the entirety of the bill make them useless as any sort of allies. It’s like trying to work with cannibals, or face-eating leopards. Being seen to agree with them on anything will taint whatever the topic of agreement happens to be, hobbling any chance of a fair hearing for legitimate grounds for disagreement or opposition to trans demands. Trans activists have, here in the American case moreso than in the UK, done a good job of conflating GC opposition with religiously-inspired, bigotted, hide-bound, conservative intolerance. Distinguishing the two positions does not require much subtlety and nuance, but for too many people it’s a distinction without a difference.
Re #10, exactly. Thanks.
I suppose in retrospect I could possibly have written a sentence or two about “keep men out of women’s bathrooms”, but a longer letter that laid out a position on women’s rights would not be useful, addressed to someone who doesn’t care about the oppression of women. I refuse to pen an argument that they themselves might make, about sanctity and religion, that I don’t actually agree with.
It is clearly impossible for biological females to beat males, and I cannot understand people who think otherwise.
The best women simply cannot outdo the best men. This is proved by science.
It is simply unthinkable for it to ever happen at the Olympics.
Thank you for addressing this issue.
That conflation of opposition to trans anything = right wing conservatism is strong here in Australia too. Whenever opposition is mentioned, it’s conservatives, right wing, old, fuddled duddy, religious (all religions), and often, it’s old blokes, or pearl clutching Helen Lovejoys. The times I’ve seen the actual radfem position in our media is fewer than five times, I think. Holly Lawford Smith got two op eds, one on Self ID in Victoria, the other on the so called Anti Conversion Bill.
Sam240: example one was from 2006, a schoolgirl from a family of talented tennis players, played against her older brothers and sister from early childhood, won many girls competitions and you cite her because she won one competion against high school boys 15 years ago.
Example two, a high school girl who has wrestled from the age of 6, trained by her older brothers who are themselves wrestlers, and she won a high school competion. Whoopie!
Example three tells us what we already know; the one sporting area where women tend to do better than men is the ultra-endurance events. No surprise for anybody there.
Example four: bowls? Rolling a lignum vitae ball accurately? Are you fucking serious? Leaving aside the fact that she has played from the age of 6, it’s bowls, for God’s sake, nothing to do with speed or strength, just a keen eye and ability to aim a bowl and put it on a good trajectory.
Example five: shooting. Really, shooting a gun accurately is, like bowls, not about speed or strength, it’s about a keen eye and consistent accuracy. Never mind that it was just shy of 30 years ago and the last time that the particular event (Olympic skeet) was open to men and women.
Desperate examples, I’m afraid, and each a one-time achievement. All credit to the women, of course, but they don’t prove what you think they prove. Show me women cyclists or sprinters or weightlifters consistantly beating men and smashing records in the process, point me to women playing high-level men’s cricket and knocking up record runs or bowling the men out left, right and centre, or the women rumning riot in men’s rugby, and then you’ll have a point.
Even on endurance events it’s very far from a level playing field. New Zealand has many endurance and extreme adventure races. Arguably the best know is the Coast to Coast. The premier event is a one day race across the Southern Alps from the West Coast to Christchurch on the East Coast, known as the Longest Day. The course length and makeup is tweaked from year to year, which means you should really only compare times from within a year, but it’s currently:
Stage 1: The first cycle – 3km run, 55km road cycle
Stage 2: The Mingha Deception Route – 30.5 kms mountain run
Stage 3: The Waimakariri Gorge – 15kms road cycle, 70kms kayak
Stage 4: The last cycling section – 70kms road cycling
There’s a final short run from the cycle to the finish line, but that’s not of importance.
It’s a brutally hard event that attracts the Worlds best multi-sport endurance athletes. The current individual Women’s record is 1 hour 35 minutes slower than the Men’s. It’s pretty typical for the best women to be 1.5-2 hours behind the best men in any given year. in fact going back over the last eight years, the placing of the first and second women to finish in the overall rankings has been 21/26, 18/20, 12/16, 14/15, 18/24, 13/15, 11/14, and 15/19. Never closer than 1.5 hours though. So yeah, running, cycling and kayaking, you can be an incredible elite female athlete and you’ll get thrashed by your male peers.