How to border and police
Juliet Jacques at Newsweek assures us that no male person would ever pretend to be trans just to win at his chosen sport:
As a transsexual woman and fervent soccer player (and fan), the idea that someone would transition just to succeed in women’s sports because they couldn’t do so in men’s sports is absurd.
Not as any kind of writer though. Writers understand that you have to keep your subjects and verbs straight throughout the whole sentence. There should have been an “I find” before “the idea,” and the “is” before the last word should be gone. Then the whole thing should be re-worked because that second clause is too clumsy.
ANYway – like hell it’s absurd. Is it simply obvious that “Rachel” McKinnon is what he says he is? “Laurel” Hubbard? Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood?
It may be true that some male athletes who identify as women really are serious about it and not at all consciously cheating; it may be true that all of them are (though not likely); the point however is that it’s not self-evident that they all are, and that even if they are serious about how they identify, it’s still not fair to female people. Both of those are true. We don’t know that zero males who claim to be trans do it in order to win, and it’s not fair to female athletes in any case. The unfairness of keeping male-bodied people out of female sports is trivial compared to the unfairness of ruining female sports for females. I think male-bodied people should just recognize that and back off.
It does female athletes a massive disservice, assuming the inherent inferiority of any cis woman to any trans woman or cis man.
Because he really cares about that. Give me a break. Anyway yes, humans are sexually dimorphic and males do have a long list of physical advantages. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but it isn’t.
[T]he particular issue of transgender athletes has occupied sports leagues for only about 40 years, ever since the U.S. Tennis Association barred transsexual player Renée Richards from the U.S. Open in 1976, citing a hitherto unprecedented woman-at-birth policy. They borrowed this terminology from second-wave feminist circles, which were then embroiled in fierce debates about whether to allow transsexual women into women-only spaces, and about how to border and police the category of “woman.”
Mmyes, how dare women say that men are not women, that’s so police-like, so border patrol-like. Bitches. Karens.
It does your readers a massive disservice, assuming as you do their inability to see through such disingenuous – no, make that dishonest writing.
Nobody is claiming that any woman is inherently inferior* to any man or wannabe-woman, the problem is with the pitting of male-bodied athletes against female athletes, where the inherent advantage of the male bodies means that a man who cannot or would not quite make it to the top in his chosen sport if competing against other men can still expect to succeed against women.
Then there’s the simple fact that every event a transwoman competes in is done so at the expense of a woman, either because wherever he finishes, all the women who finish behind him do so a place lower than they otherwise would have done, or because his place on a team means a woman misses out on a place that would otherwise have been hers, or because a woman gets seriously hurt.
* I’m sure it was just a lack of space that meant the writer didn’t specify that he was thinking here only of athletic inferiority, because without such a clarification it would be easy to infer from that sentence that female athletes believe that all women are inferior in every way to all men. Of course, the writer wouldn’t want his readers to make such an inference lest they mistakenly believe that the female athletes are awful people to think so little of their own sex….would he?
It’s absurd to think that there won’t be men who take advantage in this way, human nature being what it is. If there is a way to game the system, there is always somewho who will do it.
James, I thought exactly the same a couple of years or-more ago when PZ stated that nobody should have a problem with allowing any student who claimed to be trans to use the ‘gender-appropriate’ restrooms in schools and colleges, because no student would abuse the situation. It was as though he’d never actually met any teenaged boys.
Or been one. Maybe he identified as an adult early, so he didn’t have to go through teenage.
What “transition” is actually required now for a man to claim to be a woman for playing sports?
He can certainly keep the male genitals in the original configuration.
The rules about being X number of years on estrogen have been mostly scrapped.
The most he might have to do is suppress T levels (which can still be 5-10 times more than the T levels of a human female) for a few months to a year.
The two young men who competed in high school track in USA may not have done ANYTHING at all.
So, really, why does this person think men would not do nothing or next to nothing to dump all over real women for cash and attention?
Yeah, holy shit. “As an Australian, the idea that Juliet Jacques is employed as a writer were horrible.” (<== sentence is munted intentionally) Does no one read anything longer than a Salon article any more?
Also, feminists are not saying cheating in a sport is the sole motivation of those that transition and compete. This would be a strawman.
Should have added: Jacques seems to be ascribing a monolithic mindset to all trans people – how else can he claim to know the motivation for transitioning of all trans people? OMG transphobe!