Pants in flames at CNN
Thomas Schlachter at CNN tells us:
The International Cricket Council (ICC) announced Tuesday that “any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty,” will not be allowed to partake in international women’s cricket.
In the announcement, the ICC did not define its criteria for “male puberty.” CNN has reached out to the ICC seeking more detail.
CNN doesn’t know what male puberty is?
“The new policy is based on the following principles (in order of priority): protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion, and this means any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty will not be eligible to participate in the international women’s game regardless of any surgery or gender reassignment treatment they may have undertaken,” the ICC said in its statement.
CNN doesn’t see this as a restoration of fairness to women, it sees it as cruelty to men who say they are women.
In recent years, some forms of gender affirming care for trans youth, like puberty blockers, have become more common. But many adult trans women today did not have access to care that would delay or prevent the hormonal changes associated with puberty in their youth, and these women would thus be excluded from competition under the new guidelines.
But “these women” are not women, they’re trans women, i.e. men. It’s only fair to exclude them from competition against women. Why is indulgence of men who call themselves women so much more important than basic fairness to women?
Mainstream science does not support the claim of athletic advantage in trans women over cisgender women.
Wo. That’s a big leap – from whining and manipulation to just plain lying.
Here again, the puberty divide. Doesn’t this incentivise childhood “transitions?” There’s a much simpler criteria, either born male or born female. Since there is no way for human beings to change their sex, these half measures are almost worse than eliminating women’s categories altogether.
The importance of athletic competitions generally is so overblown that it’s sickening.
But we can’t tell anymore. It’s all down to a flip of a coin who gets assigned what, and it seems they’re more often wrong than right.
The claim that they can is the giant lie behind all of this bullshit, which is why trans activists are so desperate to keep anyone from denying it out loud. When Reality is transphobic, anyone stating simple facts has to be shut down without anyone hearing a single syllable of it.
Even if we can tell, we’re not allowed to say. Verbal violation of trans cult doctrine is verboten.
Even the claim that the issue is male puberty rather than simply being male at any age is disputed. Coach Linda Blade mentioned it on the Genspect podcast recently (https://gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/episode/139-sex-politics-and-double-standards-in-womens-sports-with-coach-linda-blade ).
Coach Blade says that claims of no difference between the sexes at around 10 years of age is due to a failure to consider younger ages, and the similarities at that age are due to girls hitting puberty sooner, meaning the girls have a boost to their performance, while the boys haven’t yet. Prior to puberty and after, the differences are obvious.
This is just another iteration of the “fallacy of the perfect definition” TRAs love to use:
For some people with DSD (or for some animals), it may be difficult to say which sex they are, so it is impossible to define sex 100% consistently, so sex is just a social construct.
In the same way you can say:
At what point exactly does male puberty start and end? Since it is impossible to nail this down to an exact second, there is no way to exactly define what “going through male puberty” means, so this concept is completely arbitrary.
Of course, they use this pseudo-precision only when they want to obfuscate things, not always. Otherwise, they would not even be able to distinguish day from night (“when exactly does the sun pass over the horizon, what if the horizon is obscured by some obstacle, what about light bending in the atmosphere, what about space-time curvature from general relativity…?”).
I can understand that to TRAs, preventing puberty blocking seems cruel. The MtF* trans-identifying child who goes on to adulthood still desiring transition will have a worse starting point appearance-wise thanks to the puberty they experienced, and getting into female sports is cut off from them (barring a league that permits self-identification).
I therefore propose a simplification to the rules of entry to female sports: bar all males. None of this wailing about having gone through puberty that way; male is male, and males are barred.
*FtM too I suppose, but testosterone has powerful masculinising effect, with no other hormone having a similarly powerful feminising effect. Thus ‘passing’ as FtM is considerably easier.
#5 Sonderval
On that note, I wonder if those who make that argument have any idea how many words in every language have vague boundaries. They sure as hell particularly literate. Quick, what’s the precise difference between pebble, stone, rock, and boulder? The exact size cutoffs please, or these words – per their own reasoning – must be struck down as useless.