On the way to becoming

Listen don’t even think about it, ok? Everybody is trans. Move on!

Hate to tell you, but in a way, everyone is trans. As writer T Cooper observed, all of us in life’s competitive arena are on the way to becoming someone profoundly different than we were, and keeping score is just a way to track the arc of a person from youth to prime to past it. If you subtract the aim of becomingness from competition just because you’re afraid of a Lia Thomas and make it strictly about the chance to win a prize, then you might as well go to an amusement park and shoot a squirt gun at a clown face because it will have about as much meaning.

Wut?

I’d expect a jumble of nonsense and pretension like that from a very relaxed blogger (much more relaxed than I am, you understand), but not from a Washington Post columnist. Deep insight: people aren’t exactly the same from one minute to the next therefore men can be women. Yes, I can be grumpy one minute and even more grumpy a minute later, therefore daffodils are the Greenland ice sheet. The logic is impeccable.

And then there’s the profundity about athletic contests and how they should be about a guy’s aim of becomingness as opposed to the women’s aspirations to win – the trouble with that is that competition is the whole point of competitions. That’s why we use the same word for both. It’s entirely possible to swim for the sheer joy of swimming and nothing else, but competitions are what they say they are. Lia Thomas could go do his becomingness thing in the water to his heart’s content without messing up anyone else’s life, but by doing it on the women’s team he is necessarily ruining it for all the women, and by the way ruining their becomingness into the bargain.

And that’s just the first paragraph.

We look to facts to rescue us when a subject becomes heated, but here, the science remains unsettled. No one arguing the issue really wants to admit it — when is the last time you heard a doctor or any other expert say the words, “I don’t know”? But we don’t know. Therefore, to exclude trans athletes from elite competition, out of our own constricting fears and uncertainty, is wrong, harmfully so.

We don’t know? We don’t know that Thomas has a huge advantage over his teammates?

Yes we do. We do know. Of course we do. Look at him. Look at his shoulders. Look at his scores. Of course we know.

What is the real aim and value of NCAA competition? Is it not to grow people? Surely, it’s about more than just vaulting a small subset of young talents on to a podium for the sake of name-image-and-likeness deals and spots in the Olympics.

No, it really isn’t. This is one reason I’m not interested in school sports in general – I think they are in tension with the goals of education. But given their existence, I think they should at least be fair in the sense of not cheating the girls and women who participate out of their chances.

It’s supposed to be about exploring who you are, whether on the pool deck or starting block or basketball floor, and the truth is that “every person has multitudes in them,” as Cooper’s wife, journalist Allison Glock, observed in her own work. That’s the real worthwhile inquiry of college sports.

No, it isn’t. It’s not about multitudes. It’s very focused. Yes it can teach a lot of useful and even valuable skills and habits, but it’s not about “exploring who you are.” If what you are is a dreamy poet with no interest in physical discipline, you won’t enjoy the swim team and it won’t enjoy you.

Using this as a starting point in the Thomas debate seems a much smarter approach than the uncivil fearmongering over bone density and hand size. And it allows you to ask without insult: Is Thomas’s presence preventing other swimmers from finding out who they are?

Irrelevant. It’s not about “who they are.” It’s about how fast they can swim.

H/t What a Maroon

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