The bureaucratic measures
Sneaky: if you just say “trans” then it sounds like another progressive breakthrough and occasion to celebrate.
To get a call up to your club’s first team is every Argentinian boy’s dream. Or so the traditional tango goes.
“Now it’s the girls’ dream … too,” Mara Gómez, who became the first trans footballer to play in a top-flight Argentinian league earlier this week, tells the Guardian. Gómez signed a contract with Villa San Carlos in the recently professionalized women’s Primera División, after years of journeying through the amateur leagues.
It’s all very confusing, and that’s not accidental. This is a man, taking a place on a women’s team. There’s nothing progressive about it.
Gómez’s achievement is not a global first – trans footballers are active in American Samoa, Spain, Canada and England – but it is an important moment in a country where football is entwined with national identity.
There it is again. “Trans footballers” – meaning what, they don’t actually know a football from a tamandua?
It matters which sex you’re talking about. If it’s a man identifying a woman then he’s taking something from women.
She trained indoors and went through the bureaucratic measures of certifying she could play with Argentina’s FA, which follows International Olympic Committee guidelines on trans athletes.
Complying was not an issue for Gómez’s though, as she has been undergoing hormone treatment for some time. “[The AFA] received me with respect … the president heard me and they helped me overcome a past of pain,” she says.
Oh isn’t that nice. As for the woman who lost the place that Gómez has, well, we just don’t give a shit about her.
The real difficulties were more personal, says Gómez. While the law, her club and the institutions around her were supportive, it is Argentina’s culture that impedes girls, trans or not, from playing football. Just a few years ago Argentinians didn’t speak about women’s football at all, says Gómez, let alone discuss opportunities for trans players.
Oh great – a few years ago Argentinians didn’t speak about women’s football at all, and now in just those few short years men who claim to be women are taking women’s places. Heads we win tails you lose.
Now she’s living her dream and is happy to have broken barriers.
And some woman’s dream.
‘Just a few years ago Argentinians didn’t speak about women’s football at all, says Gómez’
Dude would not have had any problem living his dream on a boys’ team. Unless, of course, he wasn’t good enough to get on a team with boys.
My favorite TIM ridden site, Jezebel, has commenced the politics of personal destruction on Tulsi Gabbard over the men wanting into women’s sports issue. Archived here https://archive.vn/M16b2
Yes, once again the real women and real girls who lose their spots to men mean nothing to The Woke. What do the lives of us real women matter when men’s feelings are at stake?
This struck me. It is now the girl’s dream, because now a male can take that spot. It was never a girl’s dream until a boy became a girl? Guess not. Girls aren’t supposed to dream.
The ‘recently professionalised’ link is damning in its own way.
And so they were sued by one of those long-time unpaid players and forced to pay a professional rate to their female teams. That was in 2019, and here comes a man almost immediately to pick up one of those hard won spots.
#3 iknklast
What? Sure they are! Girls have always been able to dream about marrying a handsome prince and making babies; now they finally get to dream about sports! /s
But I think you slightly mistake him. He is taking for granted the fact that the female sex was barred from professional soccer playing until recently, and so he has the cheek to think no Argentine girl ever dreamed of being a professional soccer player until then. Apparently the women who played for the club for peanuts never dreamed of it becoming a viable profession for them… even as they sued to make it so.
Either way though, it is apparent he just hasn’t a clue that women also have minds with their own internal landscapes.
Thanks iknklast, that is a really eye-opening point. And yes Holms, a startling number of men honestly and genuinely don’t think female people are actual people; we are some kind of rule-following automaton. I had a bit of a revelation about this the other day, part of which I’ll share here:
‘You had sex with him, how come you won’t have sex with me?’ ‘You had sex with me yesterday, how come you won’t have sex with me today?’ ‘I did this thing for you, why won’t you have sex with me?’ The only appropriate answer to these questions, which shouldn’t be asked in the first place, is ‘I don’t want to.’ But your read all these distraught women on the Reddit subs desperately seeking some kind of ‘logical’ or ‘sensible’ answer (or as at least one woman wrote, ‘an answer he’ll accept’) to give to these men to make them accept their decisions. Women aren’t people, women are programmed sex robots—if the men aren’t getting the behaviour they want and expect there can be only two reasons—either the men don’t understand the rule or the sex robot is broken. So these women are desperate to play the sex robot role correctly, and develop a ‘rational’ robot rule that the men can understand is part of their ‘programming’.
We don’t need to be rule-following robots to satisfy the men who believe we are. I’m wondering if we should just decide to be as arbitrary and whimsical as possible when dealing with these men, so they simply can’t discern a pattern or make a rule…but then you get into the stereotype ‘women are so dumb and irrational’ thing. I’m just suddenly realising how much I resent the idea that men look at us as robots that must by our very nature follow logical rules, because that’s how robots work, and their job is to be clever enough to figure out our programming to get the behaviour they expect and desire. (I’m wondering now whether there’s a relationship between this understanding of women and expertise in programming—do men look at women that way because they spend so much of their lives in that mental world, or do they choose this occupation, consciously or unconsciously, to get better at ‘interpreting programming’ to improve their skill manipulating the sex robots they believe we are?)