The very important session
They’re just trolling us.
Yay! Let’s talk about fairness and safety for women [though we carefully don’t say “for women”] in sport by asking a bunch of men what they think!
Oh wait, isn’t there one woman included? The token woman you might say?
No.
Taunty McTauntface. Dr Blair Hamilton is not a woman. Hastings Football Club on “social media abuse” of Dr Blair Hamilton:
Hastings United Football Club would like to respond and condemn the disgraceful and tasteless comments made on Twitter since the announcement of Blair Hamilton’s call up to the England Women’s University Squad.
The ‘U’s will continue to support equality in football and are proud to have Blair Hamilton represent us on the national stage. We do not condone messages of abuse, many as always coming through online accounts where the individuals hide behind a username. Online abuse is still abuse and the accounts have been reported and passed on to Twitter.
All our staff, players and supporters stand alongside Blair and will continue to support her both on and off the pitch.
Insultingly, they file this under “Womens News.” [sic]
They also, also insultingly, don’t say what the “abuse” was, or what it was about. I’m making a wild guess that it wasn’t abuse and it was about putting a man on a women’s football team.
pause to confirm
Oh yes, it’s this guy:
We’ve seen that photo before.
So yes, a panel of five men, one of whom identifies as a woman and feels entitled to compete against women in football, are getting together to decide what rights women can have.
Bit of a misprint there. Didn’t you mean
?
I don’t know if you’e just making a joke, Omar, but ‘sic’ is Latin for ‘thus’, and is used to indicate that any errors in a quoted passage were there in the original. In this case, it’s the missing apostrophe in ‘Women’s News’.
Thanks for the tip tigger old mate, but I have been using ‘sic’ in the grammatically normal manner for yonks. You nailed it first go. It was a joke, and I think an hilarious one. (Aside:) I came to me all in a flash of inspiration several hours ago,, and I have been rolling round the floor in absolute hysterics ever since.
More forced teaming. The latter are used as cover and camouflage for the former. McKinnon, Hubbard and Thomas likely are not men with DSDs. They’re just men. “Transness” doesn’t change that.
FWIW, I found Omar’s joke funny. “There’s a typo!” **different ‘typo’ fixed** Maybe not roll-on-the-floor, but smile and chuckle.
Re “transgender and DSD athletes”:
There is reason to consider these two categories together, if (if!) you are looking at things like testosterone levels and presence or absence of male genitalia for determination of whether someone is eligible to compete in the women’s competitions. The claim is, roughly, “hold men-who-claim-to-be-women to the same standard you hold people with CAIS etc”. To me, this is silly; men-who-claim-to-be-women should not be allowed in women’s competition, ever, and the question about what to do in regard to peoople with DSDs is entirely separate, but I can see that some people want a verification process that covers all of these cases without actual reference to sex.
A computer analogy that may only make sense to a few people, but anyway:
Back in the 80s and 90s, there was an effort to develop certain “open system” operating system standards that included a certification that an operating system was sufficiently UNIX-like to be called UNIX¹. At least one operating system not of a UNIX lineage worked very hard to meet the compliance requirements and pass all the tests, in part (so it seemed) to be able to claim it’s a UNIX without having the UNIX history and underpinnings. This effort was not greeted warmly by the die-hard UNIX people. It was perhaps a trans-UNIX. (Which makes the name UNIX a bit more ironic, I suppose.) It was superficially a UNIX according to the verification tests, but not really a UNIX inside. Maybe the tests shouldn’t have been open that way.
¹ I’m stretching the terminology a little, I know, I hope the analogy is clear anyway.