Well knock me down with a 2 by 4.
Oliver Brown in The Telegraph:
British Rowing is expected to announce a dramatic abandoning of its controversial transgender policy on Thursday by restricting the women’s category solely to those born female, Telegraph Sport can reveal.
All right. Now all other sporting bodies all over the world kindly follow suit. Restore fairness to women!
After months of intense discussion at board level, the governing body has decided to follow the majority view of its 31,500 members, more than 80 per cent of whom are understood to have urged a change in approach that would ensure the fairness and integrity of the female category.
It is about. fucking. time.
Rowing is the last of the major Olympic sports in Britain to scrap its hugely contentious rules around transgender inclusion in women’s races, with athletics, swimming and cycling all having banned biological males from female competition. In May, Telegraph Sport revealed how, at the 2015 Boat Race, a place in the Cambridge University women’s reserve crew had been taken by Sarah Gibson, who was born male and who attended an elite boys’ school.
Never again, ok?
rowing is incredible whole of body exercise and also relies heavily of having big leverage. It’s pretty hard to think of another athletic sport where having male body geometry, lung capacity, and muscle mass/density would matter more. A couple of examples from the World Rowing best times website.
M4- vs W4- : 5:37:86 vs 6:14:36 – or 36.5 second difference.
M8+ vs W8+ : 5:18:68 vs 5:52:99 – or 34.31 second difference.
In a sport where a couple of seconds is a big win, these differences are massive.
I didn’t want to hijack this post but this is one of the few not-right-wing-Trump version of the internet where I feel I can speak freely. And there are personal reasons why I can’t be more proactive about this stuff.
The “self” is the “soul.”
If this is not original, please shoot me down. But my contention is the religiously inspired notion that there is a “soul” / “sef” that is tempted by the body, is the same thing /soul/ that trans-cult victims believe in
I promise not to comment when high for a long time.
.
One doesn’t have to be high; I talked about the self as a soul in the post scorning Hemant Mehta’s claims early today.
Will Britain now put pressure on the IOC to follow suit in at least all of these fields of competition??
Aside from Fair Play for Women, which has been engaging on this issue for a while, the Women’s Rights Network has been doing a ‘summer of sport’ campaign this year, rating different sports in the UK:
https://www.womensrights.network/sport
I’m better now. I was raised Catholic but I hadn’t thought about my former deluded relationship with my eternal soul for over 30 years. So I always understood the criticism of the gendered soul but hadn’t really appreciated its significance until last night.
I’ll just leave off by saying how “rowing” is close to “Rowling.”