Meh, girls
The NY Times also obscures the issue in the same old way.
Utah Legislature Overrides Governor’s Veto of Transgender Athlete Bill
No, not transgender athlete, male transgender athlete. Generic “transgender” makes it sound like random cruelty, but preventing the sabotage of girls’ athletics is not random cruelty…unless of course you think girls just don’t matter, or don’t matter as much as the feelings of boys.
The Utah State Legislature voted on Friday to override the governor’s veto and enacted a bill that would bar young transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports, making the state the 12th in the country to enact such legislation.
That would bar young male transgender athletes.
Most Republicans in the Legislature who voted for the override said they were concerned about fairness in girls’ sports, while Democrats who voted against it argued that transgender youth would feel unnecessarily targeted and that their mental health would suffer.
Why don’t Democrats care about girls, and what they feel, and how their mental health would suffer? Genuine question; I have no idea what the answer is.
I’ve seen so many otherwise thoughtful and intelligent people saying “meh, all this fuss about x trans athletes, find something important to talk about” or words to that effect. How many racist lynchings in the US in the last three years? Similar number. Yet those same people are quite rightly outraged and want action taken. It’s disappointing when people who emphasise the importance of principles, loose interest or even swap sides when it’s not something they personally get upset about.
Rob @ 1
I agree, it’s disappointing and frustrating. I have a friend who referred to the situation in women’s sports as a “niche issue”. He wouldn’t even go so far as conceding this was an important issue but not a priority for him; it’s just, simply, not important. How can we even get to the point of discussing the impact on women’s sports when women’s sports themselves are considered irrelevant? Heck, how can we talk about disproportionate effect on women, or harm to women, when those things are simply seen as unimportant? We’re not even at the same starting point in the discussion.
I think that if you enjoy women’s sports, the upcoming Final Four for NCAA basketball will be an event to watch. It may be the last without male athletes being validated. And UConn is back! (They have never really left.)
I’d speculate that they care more about fundraising than winning elections…
Basically all the women’s Democratic boosters have jumped on the trans train (an Astrotrain you might say…) And so has corporate America and the PMC types. That’s where the money is, so who gives a fuck about the general?
The mystifying fact of the matter is that most of them have never thought about the issue in those terms. It’s like the depiction of trans vulnerability is so blindingly bright that nothing else can even be seen until someone finds a pair of polarized sunglasses.
They passed a law that “Bar transgender athletes from girls’ sports,” noting that there aren’t any transgender athletes trying to get into boys’ sports. If there’s no advantage from sex, why wouldn’t there be trans ID girls getting to boys’ sports?
@Nullius in Verba:
It’s not just that Trans Vulnerability is blindingly bright, but that it’s colored in racial & homosexual overtones. A female athlete feeling distressed or depressed gets bathed in the same hues that lit up ppl protesting integration or gay marriage.
It’s not that their suffering is overlooked. It’s that their suffering makes them bad. Fine, moral, decent people are cool with it, if not tickled pink. Resenting losing a place on a team or a trophy on the podium because “transwomen aren’t women” is just the DAR & Marion Anderson all over again.
There certainly is a subset for whom the racial/orientation framing is present and dominant, but it’s not all of them. There’s a fundamental laziness, if you will, in human thought. We only process implications when necessary. Say we know that A implies B. Then at some point we hear that C, and that C implies A. We’ll tend to say, “Oh, C, therefore A,” and leave it at that. For many, it goes, “There’s this ‘unfair’ thing that happens to people. We can help by letting them play on women’s teams.” And that’s where the thought process stops. It’s the same reason I have to walk conservatives through the economics of minimum wage: they stop after the first step.
For those who are infected by the racial and rainbow rhetoric, your description is spot on, though. I’m curious which group is larger. I know that news media are overwhelmingly on the “feminists are evil” side, but what about the run-of-the-mill citizen?