Give it all away
Oh honestly. Why.
Why do we have to balance???
Why, especially, do we have to “balance” when the balancing harms women and doesn’t harm men? Why does anyone even call it “balancing” when the losers are women and the gainers are men? Especially when the person calling it that is a woman? Especially when the woman is Alice Dreger?
Why why why why why the FUCK do we have to keep giving away women’s rights and calling it “balance”?
Stop. Stop stop stop.
And why the fuck do we have to respect gender identification in the first place? Why is that worthy of our respect? Why? Why why why why why … Why are we expected to give it more respect than our senses and knowledge and reason?
WHY?
Emma Hilton response to Dreger:
https://nitter.poast.org/FondOfBeetles/status/1786466390989246649#m
Article is paywalled, but am I correct in thinking that Dreger is imagining a world where this occurs?
“In tennis news, Novak Djokovic advanced to the final of the High Testosterone draw at Wimbledon. The Low Testosterone final is set for tomorrow with Iga Swiatek taking on Aryna Sabalenka. Switching now to High Testosterone golf….”
Nobody’s going along with this. Even if you got the athletic bodies to “officially” call the groups this, everyone would just call them “men’s” and “women’s” events.
And if you did get this to be accepted, you know who’d hate it? Trans women. They WANT the label of “women’s sports” because they feel it validates them.
Then of course there’s the recurring issue that hormone levels may not be a sufficient measure of the advantages of male bodies in sport.
Hormones do not negate the advantage conferred by longer levers, the reason that men can throw things further than women can.
Hormones do not negate the larger lungs and hearts that confer an advantage in any competition that requires stamina, eg distance running, field sports such as the various footballs and hockey.
Hormones do not negate the effect of muscle twitch, which along with longer levers, is why men punch so much harder than women.
And finally, hormones do not negate the sense of entitlement that appears in so many mid level males who will do anything to win, even if it means wearing lippie and a bra.
[…] a comment by Rev David Brindley on Give it all […]
Ah, “balance”.
When one person says kill all the babies, and another says kill none of them, we should kill half the babies. “Balance”.
When one says “lock her up”, and the other says “make her President of the US”, we should let her be President from behind bars. “Balance”.
When one says “female sport should be female only”, and another says “but I refuse to play male sport with my male body”, we should let him play female sport, but he has to wear a ponytail and take the pill. “Balance”.
If only you could understand that all these baby killers, baby savers, Hillary Clinton jailers and voters, female sport defenders and men who want to play female sports are all extremists, and the way forward is in between.
It’s kind, logical, obvious, and above all, “balanced”.
Hormonal classes in sports. Endless arbirary cut-off points for those classes could be proposed. Never mind all those ‘transwomen’ who identify as women and want everyone else to agree. They IMHO should put the sources of their testosterone on the table, butcher’s block or whatever, and have them surgically removed, chopped off, or the euphemism oif choice which best applies.
Then their hormonal class would be trans-testicular adding a third item to the boring old male-female dichotomy.
Worth a try, surely.
“Biology that matters”. Interesting.
As a biologist, I would say that a lot of the ‘biology that matters’ is centered in one way or another around sex. Not ‘assigned’ sex, but real, obvious, observed sex. That’s why the doctor asks for that information, and includes it in his/her/their/its chart. It can make a real world, non-fantasy, non-delusional difference whether you are a woman or a man.
Sex is the biology that matters, both physically and socially. If it didn’t matter socially, we wouldn’t need feminism.
Applause for iknklast for getting to the point so succinctly. I wish I had your way with words. And Ophelia’s. So many good writers here.
tigger says, 5 minutes after writing a brilliant comment!