I don't believe it was a search for fairness but is instead a search for an excuse to pander to male emotion and aggression. People often bring up that most of the male-worshipping activists are women, and democrat female politicians also vote to crush women's protections. Of course they do because many women are raised learning the same misogyny as many men learn. These women are also the ones that have anointed themselves as "special women" who know how to get along with men. Fairness is a cover word for aggression and hatred of females. I can't count the number of times I've been accused of hating men because I've (politely) told a male "No, thank you" when he wanted to involve himself in something I was doing.
The framing shift here is critical. Moving away from fairness debates toward simple categorial rights sidesteps the endless pseudoscientific tinkering with testosterone thresholds. Watching sports organizations tie themselves in knots over nmol/liter cutoffs has been absurd when the actuall issue is eligibility based on sex. The religious exemption example with Muslim swim night is revealing, it shows how being female alone isn't considered sufficient justification in current discourse, which is exacty the asymmetry you're calling out.
No matter what hierarchy of oppression you subscribe to, women are at the bottom. With apparently Muslim women a level ahead of the rest of us now. Bodily autonomy apparently only applies to women who subscribe to a misogynist, oppressive, violent religion.
Sarah. Thank you for this simple, clear and clean response. I have been down at the bottom of the pool of fairness, safety, and privacy for so long (all still very important) that just saying “because we are female, damn it” feels like a gulp of fresh air!
I am 10000% in support of female-only spaces, sports, etc. However, your argument that there are two sex classes and that those classes have legal rights to be segregated in civic contexts runs counter to the arguments that women had to make in order to get access to previous men-only clubs, organizations, jobs, etc. Anti-discrimination laws that state people cannot be treated differently merely because of their sex make it difficult to use an argument that is limited to “we are segregating based on sex and for that reason only”. Thus, the qualifiers you see in play - women’s sports with men are unfair, males in the pool violate religious strictures, men in private spaces are unsafe, etc. The legitimacy within the context of anti-discrimination law is the goal of achieving a legitimate and proportion aim, which requires a secondary level of support because the first rule is that sexes cannot be treated differently. So if you do want different treatment, then there has to be a reason.
There is sanity and there is legality, and never the twain shall meet. I made that up. There's every chance that I'm wrong but I thought the argument used for women to get into men-only clubs, organizations, jobs was that those places were where business decisions happened so keeping women out limited their opportunities. Men have sports. They do not need to be in women's sports for that opportunity. They are not treated differently because of their sex. Yes, even squinting so that I can endure the burden of legal logic, "secondary levels of support" have in effect confirmed the being female is not reason enough for our own sports. I'll point out that, over almost two decades of fighting to regain women's sports for women, secondary levels of support have not been effective
Just the fact that all the controversial policies involving transgender people revolve around men taking things from women should prove that this is nothing but misogynist nonsense. When trans "men" start taking awards away from men or clamoring to get into their prisons to affirm their identity, I'll pay more attention. As it stands, it's just an excuse to force women to cede to men with fetishes (for the most part). The same way it's "only a few" men in women's sports so we should just shut up, it's also only a few on their side of the coin too. If transwomen can't compete in women's sports, a lot fewer people are affected than if they are allowed to. It's just that the ones affected have penises which makes their oppression much more critical. Pure misogyny.
See below my comment on scientific method 101 and also the one on weight classes.
It’s legal profession’s inability to comprehend correctly and biologically what women are, not a justification of a category right for same at the heart of the problem.
The problem with the European lawyer way of dealing with all this is that it conflates social limits put on women with physical aspects. That leads to unscientific and impossible legal requirements imposed on women athletes to prove things about the a sub-group of males.
The scientific impossibility the legal process requires is what leaves women with only weaker reasons like religion, fairness, safety to stay within that legal framework.
As I pointed out below, anyone male or female, that is asking to come into a female category is indicating they concede, agree with, and endorse that there is “legitimate and proportionate” justification for having that divide in the circumstances at hand.
Then, the only question to argue is whether or not they are women. It is not arguing a category right, it’s arguing whether or not the person fits in the category. But, the same legal systems and their norms don’t have the scientific wherewithal to disregard opposing counsel’s psychobabble about hormones and identities that invites them to treat TIMs as a sub-group of women.
Brilliant reframing of this whole mess. The entire fairness debate basically concedes that maleness needs to be accommodated somehow, when really its just a category violation from the start. I've watched policy discussions get totally sidetracked into testosterone threshholds and biomechanics when the answer's way simpler. Sex-based categories exist because the sexes are different, full stop.
Big yes. This is not complicated. All of the various downstream issues can and will get argued. Safety is another one. Is it correct that male bodies in motion are a threat to females? Yes, for many reasons, but we'll always hear back about competitive sports carrying some level of inherent risk, and that there are female-caused injuries all the time. Worse to me is the thought of parents of young boys who would be led to believe that their "trans daughters" could compete if they block their son's puberty. Just a horrific outcome. The understanding that no males can compete against females period solves these problems (once the world tilts back on its axis and people stop pretending sex isn't a thing anymore).
I have seen others make this argument - that men in women’s sports discriminates against religious women - and not realised why I never really thought it was a useful rhetorical point, and this is why: because it’s just one male-centric ideology butting heads with another, and this ignores the primacy of the female body.
Thank you for this. I’m frustrated by the fact that so many of the gains being made in this space by those who appreciate the reality of sex are based on religious freedom arguments. For example, that decision about parents being able to exempt their kids from exposure to certain LGBTQ+ stuff at school on the basis of their religious beliefs. Surely one should be able to conscientiously object to kids being taught that boys can “be” girls and vice versa without invoking religion. But I understand that when you’re fighting in court, you have to use what’s available as an argument.
As I said, to me that's choosing one religion over another rather than recognizing the human rights of women. So, I as a nonreligious woman have no rights but Muslim women do? It's the whole hierarchy of identities thing. I no like
So Islam's oppression of women trumps gender ideology's oppression of women.
I guess the men who exert authority over Muslim women are more powerful than the men who exert authority over non-Muslim women by breaching our boundaries and coming into our showers.
One must be circumspect when criticizing others based on their religion or cultures. It's not that Islam is bad per se, it's that bad people are willing to use religious beliefs to hurt others. Heck, Christianity is rife with justifications of abuse through the centuries, from the Crusades to reassigning pedophile Catholic priests to hide their crimes against children. Plenty of good Muslims exist. But the reality is that enough bad people use Islam to hurt others that it's a pattern we should be able to discuss and analyze.
The rape gangs in the UK could have been stopped if police investigators and politicians had the audacity to name the problem. Instead, they were (and still are) terrified of being called Islamophobic. Xenophobic. Anti-immigrant. Racist. All terrifying words that liberals, progressives and the Left throw about as insults. Unfortunately, they're effective insults that get government employees fired and politicians cancelled.
In spite of the power of inappropriate name-calling, a clear-headed analysis of the UK rape gang problem recognizes and acknowledges that the perpetrators of these criminals raping and pimping girls were Pakistani Muslim immigrants. Pakistan is relevant because of the misogynist, male dominated culture there. Patriarchy is a common theme in religious movements that create enough tribalism to cause people to kill and hurt others not in their group. These particular Muslims were taught that it's OK to abuse white girls and women because white Christians are “the other.” Hence, their religious beliefs are pertinent, including the tenets of Islam. That's not to say all Muslims are rapists or murderers, only that religious beliefs are frequently used to commit violence.
How did these men successfully attack so many low income white girls? Because as new immigrants, many of them took jobs as taxi drivers or other street jobs that gave them access to the girls. They kids they attacked were poor whites, not rich ones. That's because during holiday from school, low income parents still go to work, leaving their kids to play in the neighborhoods. Rich parents take their kids on vacations, safe from the Pakistani Muslim immigrant predators the poor kids were exposed to over the past decade.
All of this is to say that we must be able to name the problem in order to fix it. What's the biggest theme in everything I just said? Men. Men have always abused, killed and terrorized women and children. Knowing that, we need to figure out what it is that makes some men more violent than others. Identifying bad religious beliefs is a good start.
I'm not criticizing Islam or any religion. My point was, women have rights inherently based on the fact that they're female. In the example I gave of women's swim night, the only reason the rec center allowed a women's only space was to accommodate religious beliefs, not because women deserve women's only spaces simply because they're female
I get it. I'm just going a little deeper into the misogyny of major religions because acknowledging that helps us fix the problems they cause. Afghanistan is a mess right now because girls are getting marital raped at age 12 or younger. Because their god says it's fine and dandy to rape kids, so long as you marry them. How long did it take for the Taliban to destroy women once the Biden Administration gave them a mess of money and weapons? Even as inbred as they are, given enough US money, guns and ammo, oppressing women is easy.
It's mostly Christians in the US who want to keep the age of consent low. It's Christians who would like to take marriage away from the gays. We can criticize Islam and Christianity without stereotyping. (Not all Muslims/Christians.) But unless we acknowledge that the religious beliefs are the problem, we can't fix these problems.
We're in the initial phases of keeping women from our power in the US. Sure, it's not as easy to oppress us since there are multiple religions and many atheists here. But the religiosity of transgender ideology took hold like a moth to a flame. People desperately want to believe whatever it is they're offered. I think if we want to beat transgender ideology and reclaim our sex-based rights, we have to treat it like any other nonsensical religious belief.
IF there is a religious freedom argument to be made, it ought to be that of the establishment clause in the Constitution. Congress (or other government bodies, including schools, etc) cannot establish a particular religion whose dictates all must follow. It's a dangerous tack for members of one religion or another (Christian, or Muslim, or Orthodox Jewish, for three examples) to argue for the right to opt out just their children from gender-woo nonsense in the schools. The argument should be: the genderists are imposing THEIR quasi-religious beliefs on all of us, which cannot stand. Everything from pronounery to males in female locker rooms and sports, is based on mysticism. No child, no girl or woman, not just those of a different faith, should be compelled to worship at this twisted altar.
My guess is that organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom are all in favor of freedom of religion. They are not, however, keen on freedom FROM religion. They won't make the argument to keep schools and such free from gender-woo because it's a quasi-religion, because that would cut across their desire to bring religion into more of the public sphere.
“The misogynistic asymmetry that’s at the basis of gender ideology is that males can simply assert their feminine identity and “deserve” women’s rights and spaces, but women cannot simply assert that they are deserving of male-free zones.”
Yes!
We live in such an upside world, much of humanity has lost their minds and the lunacy just keeps spreading.
Two things are presumed to be the same until proven otherwise.
If you are trying to come into the female category THEN YOU HAVE ALREADY ACCEPTED THE CONCLUSION THE MALES AND FEMALES HAVE BEEN PROVEN DIFFERENT!!
There's no do-overs. There's no reversal of presumption nor of burden of proof. Women don't need to prove that a sub-group of males aren't different enough from the overall male group. No differences they have from other men can give them back the presumption of sameness with women.
This non-sense that "we need more research" and have to let them in until we do is a sham. It sets up a unscientific never ending burden on women to demonstrate this sub-group or that sub-group of men is significantly different from women on this that and the other task. The data are often from situations where TIM are free to and motivated to under perform. (Let's let each sports body or school district decide their policies are a close cousins). There's no scientific basis to ever consider doing this.
It is fairness. And anyone trying to get in the women's category has already tacitly agreed it is unfair for males to be in it. The only logical alternative is to reject the evidence of sex differences altogether and argue for one combined category.
That's the incoherence of the IOC's 2021 framework. By saying there should be no presumption of advantage by males with trans identities, they were arguing for the dissolution of sex categories—not men's track and women's track, just track. In practice, the elimination of women's sports
If you can't do it with the weight categories, you can't do it with the sex categories. Period.
This is a rather low bar to surpass. Weight is a continuum. One change their weight. Not so with sex on either count.
Wrestling federations don't have to prove someone that weighs 100.1 KG has and advantage over someone who weighs 99.9. They just set the division at 100 KG and that's it.
No gets to identify as a lower weight class and say they are taking some ozempic and lost a few pounds so let them in. No one gets to say they are not more competitive than the lower weight class so let them in. And certainly, no one gets to redefine the word Kilogram so their weight is now redefined to be less than 100 KG. Those terms are set by scientific bodies, sports just uses them.
You can see the absurdity and misogyny of their approach.
Excellent points but I would like to point out that in fact it is not so difficult to demonstrate the differences between elite female athletes’ performances and high school boys’ and “sucky” male non-elite athletes’ performances as the record books in quantifiable sports at least show. So fairness is an issue in that case. Also, the science is well documented down to the chromosomal level, that females do not have a Y chromosome and that every other human with any combination of XY as long as there is a Y is a male.
Absolutely! But as I said, fairness is downstream of sex. Males are not females and thus are ineligible for female sports. Fairness is just one of many reasons females deserve their own sports. By skipping over women's right to sports and spaces based on their sex, it opened the door to an unending parade of stupid ways activists have tried to make it "fair" for men to compete in women's sports. Yes, they're easily disproven but in the intervening two decades, we've been in the weeds arguing about whether testosterone reduction works, completely losing sight of the main point—women's sports are for females because they're female.
I have heard (not sure if it’s true) that in some sports, the men’s category is technically “open” (that is, a woman could compete with the men, if she was fast/strong/whatever enough) and the women’s is for women only. This would presumably have to change (the men’s events would be really just for men) if we are not arguing “fairness” but just separation by sex for its own sake. Which I think would be fine.
I think changing the Men's to Open was supposed to make it more "inclusive" of men who identify as women. From what I have heard, this is unacceptable to that subset of men. They do not want to compete with men
The core asymmetry here is that there are no male-only spaces any more, we have had 50 years of dismantling them.
Why does the WI have to be male only when any equivalent male spaces were long since opened up to women? Why do the girl guides have to be female only when the boy scouts have long since been opened up to girls?
Trans men or boys are already allowed in male spaces because women forced open all those spaces years ago.
I do think this is a lot of the reason why men just don't get nearly so worked up over this as the gender critical feminists think they should - men had their spaces removed a long time ago and were told it was a good thing. So mostly men tend toward the view that only very specific and sensitive spaces where nudity is a significant factor are worthy of concern. Men generally agree that women' sport should be protected. But the much wider "female spaces" concept is a very hard sell to men that have had their male spaces removed.
The problem here is that proving to people that "women deserve spaces that are just for women", means 'proving' a value system that some people just don't share. The other side will, and do, just as easily say, 'trans girls deserve to participate because they struggle and are the female gender'.
Male advantage is objective and probable. What someone 'deserves' is not provable.
I do mention fairness on occasion, because it's pertinent. But yeah, we have the right to say no to men in our sports simply because we're female!
I don't believe it was a search for fairness but is instead a search for an excuse to pander to male emotion and aggression. People often bring up that most of the male-worshipping activists are women, and democrat female politicians also vote to crush women's protections. Of course they do because many women are raised learning the same misogyny as many men learn. These women are also the ones that have anointed themselves as "special women" who know how to get along with men. Fairness is a cover word for aggression and hatred of females. I can't count the number of times I've been accused of hating men because I've (politely) told a male "No, thank you" when he wanted to involve himself in something I was doing.
The framing shift here is critical. Moving away from fairness debates toward simple categorial rights sidesteps the endless pseudoscientific tinkering with testosterone thresholds. Watching sports organizations tie themselves in knots over nmol/liter cutoffs has been absurd when the actuall issue is eligibility based on sex. The religious exemption example with Muslim swim night is revealing, it shows how being female alone isn't considered sufficient justification in current discourse, which is exacty the asymmetry you're calling out.
No matter what hierarchy of oppression you subscribe to, women are at the bottom. With apparently Muslim women a level ahead of the rest of us now. Bodily autonomy apparently only applies to women who subscribe to a misogynist, oppressive, violent religion.
Sarah. Thank you for this simple, clear and clean response. I have been down at the bottom of the pool of fairness, safety, and privacy for so long (all still very important) that just saying “because we are female, damn it” feels like a gulp of fresh air!
I am 10000% in support of female-only spaces, sports, etc. However, your argument that there are two sex classes and that those classes have legal rights to be segregated in civic contexts runs counter to the arguments that women had to make in order to get access to previous men-only clubs, organizations, jobs, etc. Anti-discrimination laws that state people cannot be treated differently merely because of their sex make it difficult to use an argument that is limited to “we are segregating based on sex and for that reason only”. Thus, the qualifiers you see in play - women’s sports with men are unfair, males in the pool violate religious strictures, men in private spaces are unsafe, etc. The legitimacy within the context of anti-discrimination law is the goal of achieving a legitimate and proportion aim, which requires a secondary level of support because the first rule is that sexes cannot be treated differently. So if you do want different treatment, then there has to be a reason.
There is sanity and there is legality, and never the twain shall meet. I made that up. There's every chance that I'm wrong but I thought the argument used for women to get into men-only clubs, organizations, jobs was that those places were where business decisions happened so keeping women out limited their opportunities. Men have sports. They do not need to be in women's sports for that opportunity. They are not treated differently because of their sex. Yes, even squinting so that I can endure the burden of legal logic, "secondary levels of support" have in effect confirmed the being female is not reason enough for our own sports. I'll point out that, over almost two decades of fighting to regain women's sports for women, secondary levels of support have not been effective
Just the fact that all the controversial policies involving transgender people revolve around men taking things from women should prove that this is nothing but misogynist nonsense. When trans "men" start taking awards away from men or clamoring to get into their prisons to affirm their identity, I'll pay more attention. As it stands, it's just an excuse to force women to cede to men with fetishes (for the most part). The same way it's "only a few" men in women's sports so we should just shut up, it's also only a few on their side of the coin too. If transwomen can't compete in women's sports, a lot fewer people are affected than if they are allowed to. It's just that the ones affected have penises which makes their oppression much more critical. Pure misogyny.
See below my comment on scientific method 101 and also the one on weight classes.
It’s legal profession’s inability to comprehend correctly and biologically what women are, not a justification of a category right for same at the heart of the problem.
The problem with the European lawyer way of dealing with all this is that it conflates social limits put on women with physical aspects. That leads to unscientific and impossible legal requirements imposed on women athletes to prove things about the a sub-group of males.
The scientific impossibility the legal process requires is what leaves women with only weaker reasons like religion, fairness, safety to stay within that legal framework.
As I pointed out below, anyone male or female, that is asking to come into a female category is indicating they concede, agree with, and endorse that there is “legitimate and proportionate” justification for having that divide in the circumstances at hand.
Then, the only question to argue is whether or not they are women. It is not arguing a category right, it’s arguing whether or not the person fits in the category. But, the same legal systems and their norms don’t have the scientific wherewithal to disregard opposing counsel’s psychobabble about hormones and identities that invites them to treat TIMs as a sub-group of women.
Great comment but it makes my brain hurt 🤔
Brilliant reframing of this whole mess. The entire fairness debate basically concedes that maleness needs to be accommodated somehow, when really its just a category violation from the start. I've watched policy discussions get totally sidetracked into testosterone threshholds and biomechanics when the answer's way simpler. Sex-based categories exist because the sexes are different, full stop.
Big yes. This is not complicated. All of the various downstream issues can and will get argued. Safety is another one. Is it correct that male bodies in motion are a threat to females? Yes, for many reasons, but we'll always hear back about competitive sports carrying some level of inherent risk, and that there are female-caused injuries all the time. Worse to me is the thought of parents of young boys who would be led to believe that their "trans daughters" could compete if they block their son's puberty. Just a horrific outcome. The understanding that no males can compete against females period solves these problems (once the world tilts back on its axis and people stop pretending sex isn't a thing anymore).
I have seen others make this argument - that men in women’s sports discriminates against religious women - and not realised why I never really thought it was a useful rhetorical point, and this is why: because it’s just one male-centric ideology butting heads with another, and this ignores the primacy of the female body.
Thank you for this. I’m frustrated by the fact that so many of the gains being made in this space by those who appreciate the reality of sex are based on religious freedom arguments. For example, that decision about parents being able to exempt their kids from exposure to certain LGBTQ+ stuff at school on the basis of their religious beliefs. Surely one should be able to conscientiously object to kids being taught that boys can “be” girls and vice versa without invoking religion. But I understand that when you’re fighting in court, you have to use what’s available as an argument.
As I said, to me that's choosing one religion over another rather than recognizing the human rights of women. So, I as a nonreligious woman have no rights but Muslim women do? It's the whole hierarchy of identities thing. I no like
So Islam's oppression of women trumps gender ideology's oppression of women.
I guess the men who exert authority over Muslim women are more powerful than the men who exert authority over non-Muslim women by breaching our boundaries and coming into our showers.
I can't click the like button, because I find this abhorrent but it is, sadly, accurate
One must be circumspect when criticizing others based on their religion or cultures. It's not that Islam is bad per se, it's that bad people are willing to use religious beliefs to hurt others. Heck, Christianity is rife with justifications of abuse through the centuries, from the Crusades to reassigning pedophile Catholic priests to hide their crimes against children. Plenty of good Muslims exist. But the reality is that enough bad people use Islam to hurt others that it's a pattern we should be able to discuss and analyze.
The rape gangs in the UK could have been stopped if police investigators and politicians had the audacity to name the problem. Instead, they were (and still are) terrified of being called Islamophobic. Xenophobic. Anti-immigrant. Racist. All terrifying words that liberals, progressives and the Left throw about as insults. Unfortunately, they're effective insults that get government employees fired and politicians cancelled.
In spite of the power of inappropriate name-calling, a clear-headed analysis of the UK rape gang problem recognizes and acknowledges that the perpetrators of these criminals raping and pimping girls were Pakistani Muslim immigrants. Pakistan is relevant because of the misogynist, male dominated culture there. Patriarchy is a common theme in religious movements that create enough tribalism to cause people to kill and hurt others not in their group. These particular Muslims were taught that it's OK to abuse white girls and women because white Christians are “the other.” Hence, their religious beliefs are pertinent, including the tenets of Islam. That's not to say all Muslims are rapists or murderers, only that religious beliefs are frequently used to commit violence.
How did these men successfully attack so many low income white girls? Because as new immigrants, many of them took jobs as taxi drivers or other street jobs that gave them access to the girls. They kids they attacked were poor whites, not rich ones. That's because during holiday from school, low income parents still go to work, leaving their kids to play in the neighborhoods. Rich parents take their kids on vacations, safe from the Pakistani Muslim immigrant predators the poor kids were exposed to over the past decade.
All of this is to say that we must be able to name the problem in order to fix it. What's the biggest theme in everything I just said? Men. Men have always abused, killed and terrorized women and children. Knowing that, we need to figure out what it is that makes some men more violent than others. Identifying bad religious beliefs is a good start.
I'm not criticizing Islam or any religion. My point was, women have rights inherently based on the fact that they're female. In the example I gave of women's swim night, the only reason the rec center allowed a women's only space was to accommodate religious beliefs, not because women deserve women's only spaces simply because they're female
I get it. I'm just going a little deeper into the misogyny of major religions because acknowledging that helps us fix the problems they cause. Afghanistan is a mess right now because girls are getting marital raped at age 12 or younger. Because their god says it's fine and dandy to rape kids, so long as you marry them. How long did it take for the Taliban to destroy women once the Biden Administration gave them a mess of money and weapons? Even as inbred as they are, given enough US money, guns and ammo, oppressing women is easy.
It's mostly Christians in the US who want to keep the age of consent low. It's Christians who would like to take marriage away from the gays. We can criticize Islam and Christianity without stereotyping. (Not all Muslims/Christians.) But unless we acknowledge that the religious beliefs are the problem, we can't fix these problems.
We're in the initial phases of keeping women from our power in the US. Sure, it's not as easy to oppress us since there are multiple religions and many atheists here. But the religiosity of transgender ideology took hold like a moth to a flame. People desperately want to believe whatever it is they're offered. I think if we want to beat transgender ideology and reclaim our sex-based rights, we have to treat it like any other nonsensical religious belief.
IF there is a religious freedom argument to be made, it ought to be that of the establishment clause in the Constitution. Congress (or other government bodies, including schools, etc) cannot establish a particular religion whose dictates all must follow. It's a dangerous tack for members of one religion or another (Christian, or Muslim, or Orthodox Jewish, for three examples) to argue for the right to opt out just their children from gender-woo nonsense in the schools. The argument should be: the genderists are imposing THEIR quasi-religious beliefs on all of us, which cannot stand. Everything from pronounery to males in female locker rooms and sports, is based on mysticism. No child, no girl or woman, not just those of a different faith, should be compelled to worship at this twisted altar.
My guess is that organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom are all in favor of freedom of religion. They are not, however, keen on freedom FROM religion. They won't make the argument to keep schools and such free from gender-woo because it's a quasi-religion, because that would cut across their desire to bring religion into more of the public sphere.
“The misogynistic asymmetry that’s at the basis of gender ideology is that males can simply assert their feminine identity and “deserve” women’s rights and spaces, but women cannot simply assert that they are deserving of male-free zones.”
Yes!
We live in such an upside world, much of humanity has lost their minds and the lunacy just keeps spreading.
Also scientific method 101.
Two things are presumed to be the same until proven otherwise.
If you are trying to come into the female category THEN YOU HAVE ALREADY ACCEPTED THE CONCLUSION THE MALES AND FEMALES HAVE BEEN PROVEN DIFFERENT!!
There's no do-overs. There's no reversal of presumption nor of burden of proof. Women don't need to prove that a sub-group of males aren't different enough from the overall male group. No differences they have from other men can give them back the presumption of sameness with women.
This non-sense that "we need more research" and have to let them in until we do is a sham. It sets up a unscientific never ending burden on women to demonstrate this sub-group or that sub-group of men is significantly different from women on this that and the other task. The data are often from situations where TIM are free to and motivated to under perform. (Let's let each sports body or school district decide their policies are a close cousins). There's no scientific basis to ever consider doing this.
It is fairness. And anyone trying to get in the women's category has already tacitly agreed it is unfair for males to be in it. The only logical alternative is to reject the evidence of sex differences altogether and argue for one combined category.
That's the incoherence of the IOC's 2021 framework. By saying there should be no presumption of advantage by males with trans identities, they were arguing for the dissolution of sex categories—not men's track and women's track, just track. In practice, the elimination of women's sports
If you can't do it with the weight categories, you can't do it with the sex categories. Period.
This is a rather low bar to surpass. Weight is a continuum. One change their weight. Not so with sex on either count.
Wrestling federations don't have to prove someone that weighs 100.1 KG has and advantage over someone who weighs 99.9. They just set the division at 100 KG and that's it.
No gets to identify as a lower weight class and say they are taking some ozempic and lost a few pounds so let them in. No one gets to say they are not more competitive than the lower weight class so let them in. And certainly, no one gets to redefine the word Kilogram so their weight is now redefined to be less than 100 KG. Those terms are set by scientific bodies, sports just uses them.
You can see the absurdity and misogyny of their approach.
Excellent points but I would like to point out that in fact it is not so difficult to demonstrate the differences between elite female athletes’ performances and high school boys’ and “sucky” male non-elite athletes’ performances as the record books in quantifiable sports at least show. So fairness is an issue in that case. Also, the science is well documented down to the chromosomal level, that females do not have a Y chromosome and that every other human with any combination of XY as long as there is a Y is a male.
Absolutely! But as I said, fairness is downstream of sex. Males are not females and thus are ineligible for female sports. Fairness is just one of many reasons females deserve their own sports. By skipping over women's right to sports and spaces based on their sex, it opened the door to an unending parade of stupid ways activists have tried to make it "fair" for men to compete in women's sports. Yes, they're easily disproven but in the intervening two decades, we've been in the weeds arguing about whether testosterone reduction works, completely losing sight of the main point—women's sports are for females because they're female.
People can change biological sex so this is all ignorant nonsense to begin with.
I have heard (not sure if it’s true) that in some sports, the men’s category is technically “open” (that is, a woman could compete with the men, if she was fast/strong/whatever enough) and the women’s is for women only. This would presumably have to change (the men’s events would be really just for men) if we are not arguing “fairness” but just separation by sex for its own sake. Which I think would be fine.
I think changing the Men's to Open was supposed to make it more "inclusive" of men who identify as women. From what I have heard, this is unacceptable to that subset of men. They do not want to compete with men
Goddamned patriarchies, starting with myths from on high, and cascading down into every nook & cranny of our societies.
#SheToo has rights.
The core asymmetry here is that there are no male-only spaces any more, we have had 50 years of dismantling them.
Why does the WI have to be male only when any equivalent male spaces were long since opened up to women? Why do the girl guides have to be female only when the boy scouts have long since been opened up to girls?
Trans men or boys are already allowed in male spaces because women forced open all those spaces years ago.
I do think this is a lot of the reason why men just don't get nearly so worked up over this as the gender critical feminists think they should - men had their spaces removed a long time ago and were told it was a good thing. So mostly men tend toward the view that only very specific and sensitive spaces where nudity is a significant factor are worthy of concern. Men generally agree that women' sport should be protected. But the much wider "female spaces" concept is a very hard sell to men that have had their male spaces removed.
The problem here is that proving to people that "women deserve spaces that are just for women", means 'proving' a value system that some people just don't share. The other side will, and do, just as easily say, 'trans girls deserve to participate because they struggle and are the female gender'.
Male advantage is objective and probable. What someone 'deserves' is not provable.