Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on He’d like that.

The English Rugby Football Union (RFU) is facing a legal challenge to its ban on male players competing in contact rugby with women.

Julie Curtiss, 52, told @ESPNUK that opponents to men participating in women’s sports “need to be dragged, kicking and screaming.”

When reported honestly, like this, in plain language which doesn’t hide the issue, it’s perfectly clear what’s at stake. It’s also perfectly clear that the men are in the wrong. “Identification” may have no power to change material reality, but it sure plays havoc with journalistic integrity.

“Transness” has nothing to do with it. It’s men in women’s sport. Let them keep their socially consructed gendered soul. Let them keep it to themselves. They can be whoever or whatever they want to be between their ears and behind their eyes. Nobody give a fuck. And that’s the problem. They demand an audience, they require enthusiastic validation and participation in their little fantasy. It doesn’t count if nobody knows, if nobody applauds, if nobody bows down to the specialness inside of them, paraded ostentatiously on the outside for all to see. This makes it real, it confirms the impact of their personal belief upon the world.

But they want to be more than just a static, brute fact, a roadblock or obstacle that everyone is forced to notice and make allowances for; they want to do shit. They want use this power they’ve taken (and been given) to force their will on the world, to go places they normally wouldn’t be allowed to go, and do things they normally wouldn’t be allowed to do. Schoolboys might fantasize about having a ring or cloak of invisibility that would let them do naughty things, unseen, and get away with it. Well these men want a cloak or ring of obviousness. They don’t want to “just go pee.” They want to mark their newly conquered territory, to run their flag up the pole and make everyone salute. They want to revel in the public enactment and enforcement of their fetish. This is boner material. They don’t want to blend in and go unnoticed; they want to broadcast the fact that they have been given social licence to violate women’s boundaries, that they have permission to do what they’re doing, and that women can’t do a goddamn thing about it. They need to be seen getting away with their transgression. They want licence to gloat, to cause women to be dragged away, kicking and screaming when, in a sane world, it would be these men who would be subject to forcible ejection from female only spaces and facilities.