Guest post: What constitutes fairness
Originally a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany Room.
This should be easy, right? A sport which depends entirely on strength should be strictly segregated by sex. Or perhaps you could accommodate trans people by creating a third category for people calling themselves trans and “non-binary”, as USA Powerlifting tried to do. Seems like a reasonable compromise.
But of course a TIM disagrees, and he found a judge to agree with him. The judge’s opinion is, well, something.
“Segregation and separation are the hallmarks of discrimination,” Minnesota District Judge Patrick Diamond wrote in a Feb. 27 decision. “Separate but equal is unavailing. Discrimination claims are not defeated because separate services, facilities, accommodations were made available.”
If that’s the case, why have separate women’s sports at all? Shouldn’t everyone just compete in one league? I mean, we don’t allow segregated schools anymore.
Most of the rest of the judge’s opinion is the same old boring arguments (inclusion, fairness, etc.), but at least the article itself is fairly well-balanced in presenting the other side of the issue.
And while I don’t condone corporal punishment, and never practiced it on my kids, I got a chuckle out of this (Larry Maile is the president of US Powerlifting; JayCee Cooper is the trans-identified male who sued) (my bolding):
Maile resisted, though, and apparently became frustrated with the repeated efforts by Cooper and her [sic] supporters to challenge USA Powerlifting’s policies, writing in one email that “someone did not get beaten enough as a child. These people were children screaming in Walmart and their parents did nothing. Now they are adults and still screaming.”
The organization fights on.
The case is scheduled to proceed to a trial on damages in May. Maile said the organization is willing to take the case to the Minnesota Supreme Court, if necessary. Legal costs are mounting, but for USA Powerlifting, Maile said the outcome of the case is a matter of survival.
“When you consider the rights of all of our various constituencies, it may be the hill we die on,” he said. “So we will continue because we believe that we’re right in terms of what ultimately are the differences and what constitutes fairness — not in all sports and not out there in society but what constitutes fairness on our platform.”
For some, that is indeed the goal, that sports not be segregated by sex. But there are good reasons beyond physical competitive fairness to have separate leagues.
I saw an interesting (read: frustrating) video today of Peter Boghossian leading a conversation with three young women on the subject of TIMs in women’s sports. The funniest bit to me was that he wasn’t even lying when he assured one of them that he is a published scholar of Gender Studies. Because, ya know, Dog Parks.
Oh, look, ma, I’m on the front page!
Sackbut@1,
One thing that pisses me off about the whole movement, and made me realize just how regressive it is, is its threat to Title IX. Before Title IX, there really wasn’t much funding for female sports in high schools and colleges; after, they were required to fund each equally, which is a major reason women’s sports is so strong in the US.
Partly this is personal. I didn’t realize until fairly late in life that my mother was a good athlete in school. Played soccer (which she learned from her father, who learned as a boy in school; he played center forward for the US Army team in Europe just after WWI; I suspect that he was disappointed that he never had a son, so he passed his skills on to his younger daughter), and she knew how to throw a baseball. But none of that was valued, and she never let on to it. If she’d been born a few decades later, she could’ve benefited from Title IX.