Neo-liberal selfishness personified
Why indeed.
I would really like to know that too. The obvious surface-level reason is years of yammering and bullying and shunning (as in Graham’s lost friends), but that reason is better at explaining silence and looking in the other direction, it doesn’t so much explain active support, not to mention joining in the yammering and bullying and shunning.
I wonder if part of the problem involving sports relates to something that was popular back in the 80’s and 90’s — denigrating children’s sports for fostering an inflated desire for “competition and aggression” over cooperation and kindness. My own children were young back then, and I was sympathetic to the message. Certainly there were problems if the former two attributes came at the expense of the other two. But I knew parents, and read articles, which argued that the negative association was invariable and unavoidable unless children’s sports— and eventually sports in general — changed into group efforts where everyone was a “winner” and no one had their self esteem destroyed by being a “loser.” That was the atmosphere in which all children could thrive.
I hear echoes of that in some of the defenses of trans women in sports. It’s not about who wins, it’s about fairness and forming a society with character.
Or maybe people look at women’s sports as “participation ribbon” sports. They were never legitimate, because they didn’t value “real” competition. So who cares what happens to them now? Let transwomen wreck them. We all need to toughen up.
Hm.
Religion does, though. Religious zeal can justify and motivate anything. And perversely, the binding power of professing a religious belief is inversely correlated with the reasonableness of that belief. The more at odds with reality the claim (talking snakes, virgin births, worldwide floods, etc.) the more invested in the claim an adherent becomes with each profession of faith.
The trans movement is religious in structure, content, and emotional effect. There is dogma (TWAW) and sin (misgendering) and the elect (TW) and absolution through works (take our restrooms) and heretics (TERFs). It’s all there.
Rejoice, everyone! We get to see a new, worldwide religion form and take root before our eyes at an unprecedented pace.
:vomit:
It could just be that money in women’s sport is starting to reach parity with men’s sport.
spacejunkie, my thinking entirely. Why should all that lovely booty go to mere women, when male bodies can run faster, push harder, and excel over women? Why waste such good money on excellent women, when it can go to mediocre men?