Trans activists failing to persuade people on the sports issue

“I trust the science.” Except when it goes against THE MESSAGE!.

Course you had to dodge post 60 to spout this bullshit line.
Reality is scientific data, dumbass.
Message over science indeed, you self-owning nitwit.
Conservatives: every accusation is a confession.

This is fascinating. If I'm counting correctly, we have two or maybe three people on the board who actually know anything about this stuff, but everyone else is spouting off like a world-class authority.

So .. a Thursday.

I mean, Nova is our smartest trans person here, and FF -ed her posts until she got sick of it, and barely pops in anymore.

Don't forget tererererererererun and Amaris.

You know how I know this whole topic is insincere concern trolling? Because Michael Phelps is still an X-Men level mutant, and no one's called for him to be stripped of his medals or banned from swimming. This whole manufactured controversy is just another weak attempt to vilify trans kids since the whole "bathroom predator" angle ran out of steam.

Erratic, and barely posts anymore.

FTFY

The obsession with sports is astounding, and very usually leads to irrational thinking despite compelling evidence otherwise.

Especially among Jets fans.

Why don't you tell us about your experience transitioning from male to female?

Right after you explain what it was like when the keepers taught you basic words and phrases.

I don't post as much, no. I've been trying to de-escalate the amount of stress in my life these days, so I generally avoid the Red Room here, TNZ over at TBBS, and so on. That said, I would also cede that @Nova is the smartest of our little group here. She certainly pours the most effort into discussions.

It is the same argument that has been had before. I will also admit arguing here is a small venue with little influence over all. No argument here is going to do much over all so it has to be for your personal benefit. If it is causing you more stress than entertainment then everyone has better things to do. @Nova is certainly the most educated around here on the processes. I do not blame others for not becoming educated on these things as it does not really effect them, but then you also need to remain silent on telling other people how things are.

Almost all of the people who supposedly care so much about high school girls sports are lying. The only care most of them ever had was seeing athletic good looking girls in tight sports outfits. These are the same people who want women to wear bikinis and bathing suits while competing. It is all projection of their desire to sexualize girls that causes them to care about any of this. OMG imagine if they were watching some trans girl do cheerleading or gymnastics and they got aroused. This is really why they want to keep them out, because they are spending their time being attracted to teenage girls.

As for the sports themselves, it is high school. Al Bundy was a joke because the best moments of his life were when he scored four touchdowns in a game and was the best for that little fishbowl in that year. If this was the best a girl was ever going to be, then who the fuck cares? I do not care if she is cis or trans, if the best thing you do in your life is be the best in your high school at some game, and it is going to ruin you to have that taken away, then you suck as a person. Perhaps we have missed the point and should be helping these poor kids find something worthwhile about themselves. It is great to win, but it is just a fucking high school game.

You can be a female high school athlete, or the parent of a female high school athlete and support fairness in competition without being some anti-trans activist looking to vilify or troll the trans community. The more I read about this debate it seems like rules/guidelines are put into place at the state level without much outside input. When athletes or parents object the response tends to be deal with it. That’s not going to persuade many people.

There is no fairness in competition. Some people are born able to do things that others can't. Playing rec games you find the reality is there are players on all levels. There is no fairness in it. Even if you do not take natural ability into account, some people simply have more time and dedication to practice a sport which will make them better than others. Even the elite have fairness issues. What if for some reason a coach doesn't see something in you? That could mean something to your playtime and stats in some sports. If you don't get playtime because the coach doesn't like the look of your face, then that could mean a lot to your stats.

I appreciate sports for playing games and enhancing someone's life, but it is a fucking game. It is not knowledge, art, or scientific accomplishment. It is a fucking game. No game should change things, and perhaps the reality that it does is part of bigger problems with humans.

Given that John Roberts and Schlitz Kavanaugh are sports fans I can see this being decided by SCOTUS. The way things are going, the result will probably be K-12 you have to have biological females compete against biological females. They might defer on the NCAA question and let their governing boards decide.

Funnily enough, Mike Phelps weighed in on the matter a couple of days ago:
https://www.insider.com/michael-phelps-trans-athletes-womens-sports-doping-comparison-2022-1?amp

Kind of likens it to doping

Also this is bigger than ‘concern trolling’ as girls in the sport competing against the trans swimmers are raising their concerns. For FF it probably is concern trolling though

Eh, fuck Phelps. Caster Semenya is a cis woman with a "genetic gift" of naturally higher than normal testosterone levels, but she gets banned from competing while Phelps "genetic gifts" get him Olympic medals and endorsement deals and an SNL hosting gig. If Phelps had more integrity he'd be speaking out in defense of Semenya, but he's not.

Should basketball players like Manute Bol or Yao Ming be allowed to compete against regular NBA players that don't have their crazy height advantage? I don't remember anyone crying about how Yao Ming was ruining basketball for regular guys.

Larry Nassar molested over 265 female gymnasts for almost two decades before reports from those girls were finally taken seriously and he was finally charged in 2016. Given how long it took for the concerns of countless Olympic medal winning female gymnasts to be taken seriously, I don't believe for a second that the current level of high profile outrage over cis female athletes having to complete with the occasional trans female athlete has anything to do with genuine concern for for athletic careers of those cis girls.

It's 100% concern trolling. Okay, maybe 99%, with some sincerely concerned folks getting suckered into believing it. But that 1% needs to wake up and see they're being manipulated.

It is manufactured outrage. Idaho pols are wringing their hands and clutching their pearls over it, but when you figure how few trans kids there are and what percentage of them might want to compete it becomes pretty obvious that it's bullshit. It is interesting that the people screaming the loudest about trans kids competing in athletics scream the loudest whenever someone mentions efforts by the government to level the playing field for some people..."life is unfair" and all that...

Actually I blocked that tiresome twat and it's generally quite the best choice - albeit it makes reading thread like this one kinda odd. One just has to assume something hateful or idiotic, often both, appears in the gaps between the other posts.

In many states the loudest advocates admit right up front - as happened in MS last year - there there are no examples of a cis girl losing to a trans girl in any sense in the state - but it's never wrong, to a conservative, to pander to bigotry and so pass a bill anyway.

Yes, because religious Dominionist troll for "offended" plaintiffs to sue over LGBT people and there are plenty of Christian nationalist student athletes so they just have to put the pieces together until they think they have a credible case.

Like the case ADF brought - and lost - in MA (or CT?) in which they sued on behalf of two girls who lost to two trans girls...except, as it turned out the plaintiffs HAD beaten the trans girls, and beat them again after the suit was filed - and both of them are at college on athletic scholarships while the trans girls - are not.

Likewise with Lia - all the high profile people complaining have beaten her before, and she just got beaten soundly by another trans swimmer - a female-to-male trans person who's NOT taking T because it would violate doping rules. Of course, the bigots immediately accused the two of colluding to have Thomas lose (she finished sixth) but how does that collusion account for the trans-man winning? if you throw the race you can't control who wins.

In any case, Lia compares to other females - ON AVERAGE - basically the same as she did to other males before transition, her times are slower now because transition DOES matter to physical ability. She has set some school records but no one would object to a person AFAB who happened to be as tall as her setting the same records - and there ARE cis females wildly larger than their other female competitors.

Does she have an advantage because of her height and reach and so forth? It certainly SEEMS so - but so what? Are all trans women to be shunned because an unusually large trans woman has success?

No one tossed Michael Phelps because of his unusual physical advantage, no one object to a cis-girl who's 6'8" dominating in vollyball or whatever - there's a wide variety of human physicality regadless of gender. Going by "average" doesn't help when high level athletes by definition aren't average.

But my answer to this is as it has always been: the NCAA has had the policy that they just trashed in place for a decade, as has the IOC, and in that entire time ONE trans athlete, a division II runner, has won a national championship. If all these predictions of the death of women's sports were true - where are all the examples of trans dominance? Oh look, here's ONE swimmer who's set some school records and had a few dominant meets, but is not unbeaten or unbeatable. For example:



But in any case - she's ONE athlete.

And we're going to render an entire demographic of people who seldom win and almost never dominate because this one person serves as a convenient "monster" for bigots to rile up outrage over?

Yeah, probably. Human history demonstrates that bigotry usually wins and the more tiny your cohort the easier you are to fuck over.

But we shouldn't.

You CAN'T persuade any significant proportion of people who've been programed at church and on social media that this is a terrible threat.

Religious views are notoriously intransigent. You can SHOW people that these policies have been in place for a decade or more and there is NO patter of trans dominance and hardly ever a case of a trans athlete winning with any regularity. If it's 2000 and people say "this will be a problem" - well, maybe? We don't know, it hasn't been tested.

But it's not 2000 and it HAS been tested and it's NOT an issue. If trans girls WERE dominating I'd happily concede that some solution needs to be sought. But they simply haven't. But that reality will never placate the folks who, deep down, think trans people and particularly trans kids are WEIRD and ICKY and should stay away from my precious babies.

Also? You know what solves this problem 100%?

Allowing trans kids regular and unhindered access to puberty blockers so the claimed physical advantages never appear.

One guess what ELSE the people who object to trans athletes ALSO want to ban. So much for "fairness"

The interesting thing is that the parallels are so clear. For YEARS bigots were passionately insisting that trans access to restrooms according to the expression would inevitably lead to a wave of sexual assaults in those space - indeed long after they acknowledged internally that it wasn't happening - but we had to constantly have the same arguments which always come down to
Them: "Danger!"
Us: "Where?"
Them: "It's coming, just wait!"
Us: "The thing you are trying to stop already exists and the predicted danger hasn't appeared"
Them: "Oh but it WILL!! Aaaaaany minute now! Just you wait!"
ad infinitum.

Eventually they gave up (mostly) on that because it seldom got the results they wanted. The "sports fairness" is a direct, straight rip, reformatting of the exact same argument - "Stop the tranzies or terrible things will happen!!"
They haven't happened, there's no sign they will happen, but still they predict that any week now women's sports will entirely crumble because one swimmer won a lot of races or whatever.

Except this one seems to be working better at convincing poorly informed people to badger their pandering politicians into knee-jerk bullshit.

To be clear - I'm not an athletic type, i don't really grok all the socio-emotional benefits that come from being able to socialize as a team-mate with your peers/ I recognize that it exists, but I have no emotional resonance with it. And so in a sort of dispassionate way, my reaction is that there are so very few trans athletes that this feels like a small matter to be concerned about and how much will we REALLY lose from these bills - but here's the thing:

Bigotry CANNOT be satisfied. Once you designate a type of person as second class, disallowed from full participation in society in ANY way, then you create the intellectual framework to exclude them in EVERY way. It will never stop with this just one thing, they will come for all the rest - as many state legislatures right now are considering bills to ban transition supporting health care for trans minors (and in the MS bill, "minor" is anyone under 21!) and bills to meddle with name and gender change on legal documents, and even a few bathroom bills.

All based on a lie.

And how do I KNOW without any doubt that all this "we just want women's sports to be fair, it's not about bigotry" claim is absolute lying horseshit?

Because every one of the states that proposes such a bill - the bill applies to ALL ages. Don't expect me to take you seriously when you claim an eight year old boy has an inherent physical advantage over an eight year old girl.
You're lying.
You're a bigot.
Your hatefulness is showing.

Sadly, for a time, you assholes are probably going to win because that's the darkness we're living in.

I COULD take it point by point and explain what's wrong with all that but the whole first page is just FF losing his shit and getting mocked and it kind of dampens my enthusiasm.

Shortest possible take: EVERY sport (except motor sports) has exceptional physical specimens which often dominate the competition. These are the rare, unusual, outliers. We do not and should not make exceptions about an entire demographic of people based on said outliers. Imagine if we still had segregated basketball because black athletes seem, on average (to the decision makers) to be unfairly dominant over their white competitors.

Lia Thomas is an outlier even among trans women physically, but there are cis women who are just as much outliers and no one bats an eye if they dominate. The premise of those who object that because Lia dominates, some 5'5" trans girl in 10th grade in high school must also be banned from competition. Don't claim it isn't so - trans-athlete bans as proposed in the majority of instances ban participate at ANY age, and even the stupidest Republican knows there would be no measurable physical difference until age 13 or later (after puberty had been ongoing for some time). So it's segregation, same as it ever was, not "fairness"

Basing policy on outliers is reactionary bullshit. But that's the world we live in.

Way back when I used to work at the paintball field I used to wear nail polish. The boss did not care because we were the ass kickers. Every year we would go from our field to play in the scenario/big game at skirmish PA. When we were there we mixed with the refs because refs play on a different level than most.

So, I am playing with one of the skirmish refs who is wearing a utilikilt. One of the paintball mag writers is asking him why he is playing in a kilt, and he says because it is fun to let the other guys know they got shot by a guy in a skirt. Then the guy notices my nailpolish and asks me why I am wearing that, and I tell them because it is great to tell guys they got their ass kicked by a tranny.

As of January 12, likely worse by now, 27 anti-trans bills filed in 15 different states
And this doesn't include an omnibus health-care ban plus other stuff filed by Mississippi's legislative version of MTG

It used to be occasionally @Federal Farmer would post something other than the stormfront talking points, but now that a lot of the stormfront trolls have been banned and the tiki torch has been passed to him it is all he posts. His meltdowns are frequent and are amusing to some. It is the only reason to bother with him.

@Tererun and @Nova are groomers. Plain and simple.