The vast majority of people who will be impacted by trans bans in sports will be little girls with short hair or arms that are "too muscular."
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@hydropsyche @futurebird Knowing this person, I don't think they knew this information and chose to admit it. They probably only heard the unfavorable part of the story to begin with.
@semitones @futurebird That's what social media and generative AI have done to people. Nobody bothers to actually research anything for themselves. They report as truth what somebody said on Facebook or what ChatGPT told them. It takes two minutes to read Lia Thomas's Wikipedia article, a few more minutes if you want to click through to the sources and learn even more.
It's not hard to be well informed. But it's so damn easy to just repeat easy lies that support your bigotry.
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@futurebird so, in running competitions, tall people with long legs compete against other people with long legs and short-legged people compete with other short-legged people, independent of sex and gender.
How these classes are defined exactly would need some research, this could include body features but also hormone levels or lung capacity or whatever.
@futurebird the point is, these should be classes that are based on body features that are relevant for the actual sports discipline, not just two classes (male/female) based on one genetic sex marker, which in general will not mean much for that particular sport.
In practically areas of life, we don't decide by gender if somebody is suited for a job or not, but by other criteria.
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@futurebird Fundamentally, it seems strange (and misguided) that sports is to be one of the very few areas that still tries to put people in just two boxes, while we now know that sex and gender is much more diverse than we would have guessed just a few decades ago.
Why not dump the whole concept of men/women sport and use other kinds of classes? In boxing, there are weight classes. Why not similar classes in other sports? For running, classes could be based on leg length, for example.
@StephanMatthiesen @futurebird
Men would never go for that. Can you imagine them losing to a woman in their top sport? -
Women's sport clubs were created because men didn't want women playing with them. "No Girls Allowed" but it's grown men basically. So women made their own clubs. When you have these vast sexist barriers in access, in education, in cultural expectations just learning the rules of a sport and getting practice can become difficult.
And at some point why deal with people who are rude and don't want you around when you could be doing the sport with other women?
I would like to see all "men's only" sports clubs allow women in if those women want to be there and if they meet the entry conditions. After several decades of that maybe we could decide if we still need "women's sports"
Every now and then some little midwestern girl wants to play football and so she joins the "boy's team" and then there are news articles worrying about it.
This keeps happening because girls are generally told flat out "no you can't do this"
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@StephanMatthiesen @futurebird
Men would never go for that. Can you imagine them losing to a woman in their top sport?As long as this is true we will have "women's spots" it's really that simple.
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Women's sport clubs were created because men didn't want women playing with them. "No Girls Allowed" but it's grown men basically. So women made their own clubs. When you have these vast sexist barriers in access, in education, in cultural expectations just learning the rules of a sport and getting practice can become difficult.
And at some point why deal with people who are rude and don't want you around when you could be doing the sport with other women?
@futurebird true, but that seems to me a whole other issue than the computational rules of professional sports competitions.
Related but separate issue. Of course one could still have safe spaces. And bullying and rude behavior should be banned no matter where it occurs.
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As long as this is true we will have "women's spots" it's really that simple.
@futurebird @StephanMatthiesen
Exactly. -
R relay@relay.publicsquare.global shared this topic
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@semitones @futurebird That's what social media and generative AI have done to people. Nobody bothers to actually research anything for themselves. They report as truth what somebody said on Facebook or what ChatGPT told them. It takes two minutes to read Lia Thomas's Wikipedia article, a few more minutes if you want to click through to the sources and learn even more.
It's not hard to be well informed. But it's so damn easy to just repeat easy lies that support your bigotry.
@hydropsyche @futurebird add to that that we are all overworked, busy, and addicted to social media. Who's going to fact check something that sounds plausible according to their worldview, and isn't that important to them personally?
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@futurebird true, but that seems to me a whole other issue than the computational rules of professional sports competitions.
Related but separate issue. Of course one could still have safe spaces. And bullying and rude behavior should be banned no matter where it occurs.
The vast gaps in the "professional" levels grow out of the segregation and exclusion of girls in amateur clubs and local ventures where it really shouldn't matter as much.
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@hydropsyche @futurebird add to that that we are all overworked, busy, and addicted to social media. Who's going to fact check something that sounds plausible according to their worldview, and isn't that important to them personally?
@semitones @futurebird A grown adult who doesn't want to post lies? I don't know how to answer your question. I try to never post anything without fact checking it.
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@Pinchy63 @futurebird
Well, but isn't that the same problem as in many other areas that were tradditionally male-dominated? Women who went into plumbing or construction workers faced the same problems. The resolution was not to have construction sites that are women-only, but change the culture that it is now normal to have mixed teams of construction workers (I have a building site opposite my window so I see that every day). -
@futurebird the trans ban in the Olympics also mandates genetic testing so I think we're going to end up with a lot of athletes who have been assigned female at birth and been living their whole lives as women getting randomly kicked out because it turns out they have abnormal chromosomes
@waitworry @futurebird This is exactly what happened last time, and why chromosome testing was ended. Women were finding out they had androgen insensitivity, or only a single X chromosome (no Y), or were XXY females, and the IOC finally ended chromosome testing in 1999 to protect the dignity of athletes who don't already know they have these conditions.
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@semitones @futurebird A grown adult who doesn't want to post lies? I don't know how to answer your question. I try to never post anything without fact checking it.
@hydropsyche @futurebird This was something discussed in person. I often discuss things that I don't know about a hundred percent. I just say what I've heard. Saying it's not hard to be well informed is missing the mark when the conservative elites made it their business to misinform people.
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I would like to see all "men's only" sports clubs allow women in if those women want to be there and if they meet the entry conditions. After several decades of that maybe we could decide if we still need "women's sports"
Every now and then some little midwestern girl wants to play football and so she joins the "boy's team" and then there are news articles worrying about it.
This keeps happening because girls are generally told flat out "no you can't do this"
Many people think there are no girls on their local middle school football team because "girls just can't keep up" but this is totally false.
There are no girls on the team because it's enforced as a "boys only" space. When someone points this out, when some girl comes along who just wants to play (and she need not be athletically exceptional, it's middle school, there are lots of boys on such teams who are not super athletes) everyone freaks out.
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Many people think there are no girls on their local middle school football team because "girls just can't keep up" but this is totally false.
There are no girls on the team because it's enforced as a "boys only" space. When someone points this out, when some girl comes along who just wants to play (and she need not be athletically exceptional, it's middle school, there are lots of boys on such teams who are not super athletes) everyone freaks out.
Now could we find that more boys end up doing some sports than girls? Probably. More tall people will play basketball. Maybe you need to have different leagues and levels so everyone can play.
But "women's sports" exist because in most cases women still aren't welcome in "men's sports" and this is just a choice. It takes effort to enforce it.
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I would like to see all "men's only" sports clubs allow women in if those women want to be there and if they meet the entry conditions. After several decades of that maybe we could decide if we still need "women's sports"
Every now and then some little midwestern girl wants to play football and so she joins the "boy's team" and then there are news articles worrying about it.
This keeps happening because girls are generally told flat out "no you can't do this"
@futurebird @StephanMatthiesen
Yep. Our football coach saw me kick in the PPK and told me he wished he was “allowed to have a girl on the team so you could kick for me.”
He would have been fine with it, but no way the district would have allowed it back then. (Early 1980s)
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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@Pinchy63 @futurebird
Well, but isn't that the same problem as in many other areas that were tradditionally male-dominated? Women who went into plumbing or construction workers faced the same problems. The resolution was not to have construction sites that are women-only, but change the culture that it is now normal to have mixed teams of construction workers (I have a building site opposite my window so I see that every day)."The resolution was not to have construction sites that are women-only"
Not true. I used to work doing math education for GEDs with a group that helped women get construction jobs.
The org sends the women in "pods" to the same site because if a woman is the only woman at a site she gets harassed too much.
The main attraction are that these jobs are high paying and it's worked out well for some who did the program.
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@futurebird i've long said that the root of transphobia is sexism! at the end of the day it's all about enforcing a strict definition of what a woman is and protecting the "sanctity" of masculinity
@goaty @futurebird Yep. The base of all anti-LGBTQ actions and sentiment is sexism.
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Now could we find that more boys end up doing some sports than girls? Probably. More tall people will play basketball. Maybe you need to have different leagues and levels so everyone can play.
But "women's sports" exist because in most cases women still aren't welcome in "men's sports" and this is just a choice. It takes effort to enforce it.
@futurebird well, many men like me were not welcome in mens sports either.
When I was a school, I absolutely hated it and most of my friends, too, because of a couple of bullies.Of course, girls face additional problems of sexism, I am not discounting that, but the bullying culture is a separate issue that needs to be tackled anyway.
Yesterday, I watched a local neighborhood's unicycle team - girls and boys performing together, in a very diverse neighborhood. So perhaps it is possible?
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"The resolution was not to have construction sites that are women-only"
Not true. I used to work doing math education for GEDs with a group that helped women get construction jobs.
The org sends the women in "pods" to the same site because if a woman is the only woman at a site she gets harassed too much.
The main attraction are that these jobs are high paying and it's worked out well for some who did the program.
@futurebird @Pinchy63
Okay, well, that is my experience in Britain and Germany, and I should not have given the impression that this is universally true in all countries and in all cultures.
