More than winning a race
A male reporter on Eastwood a couple of weeks ago:
BOZEMAN — When you’re a transgender athlete, and it seems the world is taking aim at what you are instead of trying to understand who you are, a walk — or run — on the wild side is the straightest path to clarity and balance and resilience.
As always, the issue isn’t being “a transgender athlete,” the issue is a male person competing against female people. It’s beyond annoying that journalists keep obscuring this point. Nobody is “taking aim” at what or who Eastwood is, but many of us are saying male people shouldn’t race against women, for the simple reason that it’s unfair. It’s unfair to all the women in the race, and they matter too.
Though it has been more than a year since Eastwood last competed at UM, and much of her focus now is on earning a post-graduate degree in environmental philosophy from the school, she has resurfaced publicly now that the Montana Legislature is back in session. House Bill 112, authored within days of the opening gavel by Whitefish representative John Fuller, seeks to ensure that sports designated for women or girls are open only to those who were female at birth.
Supporters hail it as the “Save Women’s Sports Act”. Eastwood sees it as an attempt to disenfranchise an already-challenged class of women.
Except that it’s not a class of women. It’s a class of men who say they identify as women. We used to know that it’s not possible to change physical reality with the power of thought, but now that magical idea is not just accepted, it’s embraced and mandated with menaces.
“That’s unfathomable to me,” she said of male athletes making such a dramatic physical and emotional transition simply to win medals. “If you’re comfortable in your body already, there would be no reason to transition. I don’t think anybody would ever do that to win some race or have a competitive edge in sports.”
Why? Why wouldn’t anybody ever do that? Why is Eastwood so sure no one would? Or is he just pretending to be sure? That’s the thing, you see – people can pretend. It’s not unheard-of. They can also genuinely feel as if they ought to be the other sex, or as if they “are” the other sex, but that feeling is just a feeling, it’s not by itself a reversal of reality.
Eastwood immersed herself in her running, especially with her UM teammates, many of whom will be “lifelong friends.” Sports, she said, enabled her to be with people who were less concerned by what she is than who she is.
“For me, that’s what running is all about — more about community and friendship and self-development than winning a race. That’s just a cherry on top in the process,” she said.
Fine! Brilliant! There’s the solution – do the running and the community and friendship and self-development but stay out of the actual races. Get all the community and friendship you want, and refrain from doing harm to those female people you say are your friends and your community.
And of course all this talk about hormones and surgery and drastic physical changes obscures one very real goal of the trans lobby: to make it where men don’t have to do any of that to compete. To make self-identification the only requirement, which means men competing against women.
And of course the fact that those changes do not make their bodies comparable with women. Yeah, they might be less muscle mass and less testosterone than men, but they are still substantially larger, more muscled, stronger, and faster than women. And with much higher testosterone levels.
To put it this way, Frankie Adams (plays Bobbie Draper on the Expanse) is 5′ 11″ and has been involved in MMA stuff prior to the show. I’m 5′ 10.5″ and while I have no doubt I wouldn’t want to get into any sort of fist fight with her given her skills, if she has about the same mass as I do I’ll win any sort of bearhug contest.
Of course there’s no reason to transition and win, except that no one has to transition at all; and some men hate women enough that they would: they’re motivated by a hatred of women, not a love of sports. June of course claims that *he* wouldn’t do that, ignoring that thousands of men *would*, and in catering for June, we prevent any stopping of the arguably much larger subset of males who glory in hating on women.
There’s a question TRA like to ask those women who are unconvinced by gender identity ideology: “Imagine you woke up tomorrow in a male body. Would you be a man — or a woman?”
This is supposed to be a light bulb moment where we think “ooh, I’d still be a woman on the inside now I totally get it.” Instead, the answer “I’d be a man” strikes me as obvious. I’d still be me, but I’d be a man.
And if I became that man, I’d use the men’s room. And I wouldn’t enter women’s sports, or try to break into women’s counseling or pools or safe spaces. Not just because I’m not a woman, but because I know how those women would feel. Racing or joining a team wouldn’t be fair. Going in women’s bathrooms would make them uncomfortable. Who the hell do I think I am? Not someone who’d do that.
So, who the hell does Mr. Entitled think he is? Not what, but who?
If I woke up tomorrow in a man’s body, only two options exist (as changing sex in humans is literally impossible):
1. That up till now, I was under the delusion that I was female.
2. That now I was under the delusion that I was male.
Both require psychological treatment to deal with the delusions, not society bending over backwards to claim to see what I claim to feel, and treat me as if my feelings were facts. If noting the facts leaves me suicidal, then it only emphasises my need for psychological treatment.
@ Arcadia;
Yes, but you forgot there’s a third option: it’s a hypothetical land of limited magic.
Actually, there is another option. You could have woken up inside a Kafka novel.
Only instead of an insect, you are a man.
If someone posed that hypothetical, I’d point out that they’re implicitly (if not explicitly) endorsing mind/body duality, and if I were in a pedantic mood, I’d bore them with an explanation of the embodied mind.
@ Sastra, I wonder why women must entertain these impossible hypotheticals, but men need not entertain women’s realities?
Except that men don’t one day wake up inside a woman’s body do they? There is no existential angst caused by physical reality no longer matching the interior. Instead, the change is entirely in the metaphysical. The change has occurred only in the mind of the person believing it, not the physical realm where it can be observed or measured in any way. more to the point, neither the body swap nor the belief swap actually makes for full 9or any) sex/gender change. In the body swap case the man waking up in the woman’s body will now be subject to female hormones, but still has a lifetimes experience being raised and treated as a man, plus the experiences and attitudes that seep in from having undergone puberty – those are dramatic. in the belief swap case, literally nothing happens at all. male body, male hormones, male socialization. it all just rolls on, barring perhaps a bit of performative guessing at how the subject thinks women behave (which is often clownishly insulting).
The comments at 5, 6, and 7 have the combined right of it.
What, Arcadia, are you saying women are actually real?!
/s
@Arcadia;
Many Trans Identified Males have successfully convinced themselves (and others) that they’re civil rights cases similar to gays and blacks. They therefore think of women who are uncomfortable around them as just like white women who don’t want colored women in their Whites Only bathrooms. They leave? Good. They don’t come in? Even better. If they try to put themselves in our place it’s like they’re imagining what it would be like to be a bigot — and that’s that.
@Rob:
No, they’ve ALWAYS been women. Sometimes they tried to suppress it, but gender identity forms in the womb, dontchaknow.
@ Sastra, indeed, some even call Self ID laws “anti discrimination laws”, which produced an extremely confusing exchange between us, as I think of anti discrimination laws as something entirely different.
‘Frankie Adams (plays Bobbie Draper on the Expanse) is 5′ 11″ and has been involved in MMA stuff prior to the show.’ I did not know that–thank you. I’d say Bobbie the Space Marine is my favourite character, except that they all are.
This reminds me of one of the long, long email arguments I had with my dad. He’d assert the truth of the New Testament using a similar argument: why would anyone make it up?
It’s a good job they were email arguments because if they were face-to-face the stupidity of that statement would have caused me to combust on the spot. I can think of about nine hundred and four reasons without having to stop and think. And even if I couldn’t, I would like to think a rational person would require better evidence for a probably-non-existent-anyway carpenter curing someone from death than their not being able to think of a reason for anyone to lie about it.
Anyway, this reminds me of that.
What a Maroon:
Maroon, I beg of you, don’t do that on Twitter. I did, and I’m not sure I ever made it out of the rabbit hole. A maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
iknklast:
Exactly right. It’s a tactic that has worked on many of us in the past. I know I fell for it for a while.
Well that’s put my mind at rest.
Athletes might dedicate their lives to their sport, take potentially fatal drugs, fake an illness to cover their drug taking, become pregnant and then have an abortion after the championships, rig their equipment to enable cheating, cut themselves to allow a substitution, fake blindness or mental handicaps, use a dummy penis to try and fool a urine test; and, possibly most relevantly, pretend to be a woman or a child to enter a contest they’re not eligible for
– but they’d never identify as being a woman just to win.
Glad it’s been cleared up.
latsot,
Thanks for the warning. I don’t twit, so there’s no chance that I’d go down that rabbit hole, but I assume that the same holds true for Facebook.
And I was going to point out that elite athletes are always looking for ways to gain an edge, either within the rules or without, but James Howde beat me there. I’ll just add that it’s been going on at least since the days of the earliest Olympiads, and probably for as long as humans have been participating in competitive sports.
Has anyone told trans activists that Cartesian dualism isn’t exactly cutting edge thought anymore? Not that that would stop them or even slow them down given the frequency of of utterance of such gems as “Of course transwomen are women. The word “women” is right in the name!”
Too caught up in the profundities revealed by “brain in a vat” and “trolley problems” to be concerned with something as plain and uninteresting as real life? It’s just so messy. Women’s lives? Even moreso. Nothing kills a beautiful thought experiment than a dose of reality by some shrill, strident, feminist. Besides,somebody has to make the sammiches. Even brains in vats get hungry.
One of the modifications to my thinking that happened as a result of the current transgender ideology brouhaha, and all the reading and discussions it led me to, is that I jettisoned mind/body duality.
What beliefs could the mind hold, save for those filtered through the framework of existing in one particular body?
Awwwww. Come on, you’all. The ability to download our pure, perfect, sexless minds into a perfect, immortal machine body/computer substrate is coming any day now. So say some of the gurus of Silicon Valley when they are not busy creating aps that allow us to see what a couch looks like in our very own living rooms!
(I did love The Culture novels, though. R,I.P. Iain M B anks)
Off Thread
@23, I also loved the culture novels, although IMB’s non-culture scifi is also compelling. Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background especially.
For a less optimistic view of uploading your mind to a computer, try Alistair Reynolds Revelation Space series.
Rob:
Sadly, I spend so much time venting on these innertoobs I seem less capable these days of actually READING A BOOK! So embarrassing! Ach…when I retire there will be more time. I will look these up! Thanks!
bmiller:
I share your skepticism about the uploading of minds into machines (it’s one of the few things I agree with PZ about, these days) and your love for the Culture novels*.
As someone who has been involved with the tech industry his whole working life, this sort of adolescent wishful thinking by techbros (many of whom should know better) is a deep embarrassment. We are nowhere near even knowing where to begin, but it’s nevertheless predicted to be done and dusted within between 5-20 years, depending on how desperately someone needs money. And people keep giving them the money; people in the venture capital industry should be even more embarrassed than I am.
Rob:
And his non-culture non-scifi: The Wasp Factory is nothing if not memorable.
* Germane to this blog is all the sex-changing that goes on in the culture novels. People in the more advanced areas of society can instruct their body implants to gradually change their sex and people will do this from time to time either to be a mother or a father or just to see what it’s like. People in these societies are effectively immortal and there’s sexual equality and no career/economic considerations. I like to think that if Banks hadn’t upped and died he might have explored all this in a bit more detail.
Latsot, yes you’re right. Memorable is the word. Bank’s was a rare talent who left us too soon. I don’t love all his books equally (the odd one drags a bit), but even those have thought provoking and entertaining material. The feature of the Culture was that it was a genuine physical and mental state change, not just identification. That, and the context of a civilisation that was determinedly, anarchically equal (and safe from harm) with no economic anxiety, puts quite a spin on the discussion. I think Bank’s was becoming more reflective and undergoing quite a change in values system toward the last 3-4 years of his life. It’s a shame we’ll never know what his views on this might have been.
Forget the transgender rights for a second- what the hell is “environmental philosophy?” This person’s problems go way deeper than gender identity, and a school that actually proposes to offer someone a degree in that nonexistent field is only acting as an enabler.
I don’t think you’re right about that – there are lots of applied philosophy disciplines. They’re not woo, if that’s what you’re thinking.
Further reading:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/