Peak mustelids
Oh blah blah blah. Stonewall trots out the usual evasive dishonest generalities instead of for once condescending to be clear and precise.
On 20 July, Stonewall Chair, Iain Anderson, was interviewed by Beth Rigby on Sky News. The interview was supposed to be an opportunity to talk about 10 years of marriage equality, LGBTQ+ veterans, and Rainbow Laces 10 – all remarkable moments that deserved recognition and celebration.
We took part in the interview because Stonewall has always been engaged in difficult conversations on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community.
No it hasn’t, for the simple reason that Stonewall has not always talked about the fictional “LGBTQ+ community” at all. Stonewall started out as an organization for lesbians and gay men.
The interview largely focused on highly detailed elements of trans policy issues and Stonewall’s position on these remains unchanged.
The details are where the problems are, you weasels. The “policy” to let men destroy women’s sports may seem like a detail to the men doing it, but it matters to the women involved.
Sport should be open to everyone, including trans people, and this includes elite sport. Out of hundreds of thousands of elite athletes, a small handful are trans.
This is what I mean about the evasive dishonest generalities. Stonewall knows damn well it’s not about “trans people” in general, it’s about men ruining women’s sports for women. They don’t say that because if they did it would sound shitty and brutal, so they hide their real meaning. This shows that they know damn well how unfair the actual policy, the one they refuse to name accurately, is.
Stonewall believes trans people’s rights should be fully respected and it is past time that conversations around the trans people’s lives should be used as a political tool. Instead, we’re calling for political leaders to develop a meaningful strategy for trans equality that ensures trans people are properly supported, included and able to participate fully in society.
Same again. No one is arguing that trans people’s rights should not be fully respected. We’re arguing that it’s not a “right” for men to be able to force their way into women’s sports thus ruining them for the women. Trans people, including men who say they are women, can participate fully in society without trashing women’s sports.
Whoever wrote that doesn’t know how the phrase, “it’s past time that …” works. And also inserted an extraneous definite article.
It seems like a lot of people confuse participation with a legitimate chance to win. Participation can be a right, and it is not diminished by making the categories depend on sex at birth. Very few people have any real chance of winning in any competition and having a real chance to win is not a right. Winning or being even close usually means sacrifice in other areas of life. Devoting free time to training, some of which is probably uninspiring. Watching your diet. Building your body for optimal performance. Foregoing opportunities in work or academic life. Dealing with heartbreaking losses. And even with all that winnings is not guaranteed.
If you choose to build your body for sex change in stead of building it for optimal sports performance, of course you will lose in competition.
Well, I guess they sort of answered the question.
“Do you think this is fair?”
“Yes. Out of hundreds of thousands of elite athletes, a small handful are trans.“
Why do they usually include that last part? The proportion. Isn’t it suspicious? I don’t remember seeing that when defending racial desegregation or gay rights. It’s as if they’re tacitly admitting that yes, we’d have every right to be concerned if lots of trans women decided to participate in elite women’s sports but relax — as long as it’s only a few it will hardly make any difference. And it’s going to stay that way. No worries.
It only takes a few male athletes to have a large impact, of course. But it’s interesting that the TRAs insist on using the “small handful” argument in the first place.
Isn’t it though.
And of course, the small handful argument doesn’t really help. If it’s a small handful, then demanding that the rest of the world change to accommodate them is unreasonable. It’s like insisting that we shouldn’t resist language change, because the desired changes are unimportant. But if they’re unimportant, you shouldn’t be bothered by our refusal, then, should you?
And naturally it obfuscates the pyramidal nature of sports competition. If someone makes it into 3rd Place by cheating, they didn’t JUST steal a position from the next person down the count–they stole a place from every person below them, until you get to the position the non-cheating version of that person would’ve gotten.
And since the cheat here is to enter a competition you don’t belong in at all, it’s stealing from EVERY person below you in the rankings, because it pushes all their rankings down by one.
The usual reply to Nullius’ #5: “unimportant to the rest of us, but to the small handful it is tremendously important due to the distress caused by your language choices!”
Which prompts me to wonder, if an ordinary word causes distress to a person, doesn’t that suggest the problem is theirs and is perhaps psychological in nature? I know from experience that being called the wrong word – woman rather than man – causes no distress whatsoever. Am I just anomalously unfeeling? I don’t think so, hordes of people have been called the wrong thing without falling to pieces.
In my experience, the conversation usually ends there with no reply from the other person. It must be difficult to make the case gender dysphoria isn’t a medical condition when it is diagnosed by doctors by identifying a set of (incredibly broad) symptoms described in psychology manuals and treated with medicines and surgery.
To continue the hypothetical exchange, “If acquiescing to these demands causes even 2% of all other people to experience half the distress experienced by the small handful, then the total distress experienced by the greater part outweighs that experienced by the handful. (This continues for powers of two until 64% experience 1/64 the distress, of course, and any distress caused the remaining 36% is just icing.) Favoring the aggregate happiness, I reject your demand. In short, you can take your attempt at emotional blackmail and go choke on a bag of dicks.”
Like so many of the arguments they deploy, it relies on blindness to the fact that the same argument can be made in the opposite direction, only more strongly.