"Some might call these differences “stereotypes,” but, to me, it is obvious that our differences go deeper. No doubt much of what “gender identity” is based on is nothing but shallow stereotypes and fashion choices, but men and women have behavioral, emotional, and psychological differences on average as well."
"By George, I think she's got it!" 😉🙂
More or less in any case, though I doubt you're much able or willing to consider the many places where you're going off the rails and into the weeds.
To start with, you make a very good point there about the many fairly significant "statistical differences on average" between "men" and "women". But those differences, by sex, is more or less exactly what many credible sources MEAN by "gender". For example, something from an old Wikipedia article on the topic:
Wikipedia: "Gender is the range [spectrum] of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them ..."
One might reasonably say that femininity and masculinity are the two halves of a multi-dimensional gender spectrum encompassing a myriad of variations. Kind of like reddish and bluish halves of the colour spectrum -- a binary comprised of an infinitude of possibilities. See my post for some elaborations:
But one place in particular where you go off the rails is in being too quick to condemn the entire concept of "gender identity", somewhat incongruous or hypocritical given you own, "No doubt much of what 'gender identity' is based on is nothing but shallow stereotypes and fashion choices"
No doubt whatsoever that too many "gender ideologues" -- and various scientific illiterates, grifters, and political opportunists -- have gone off the deep end with the concept -- as your own "something akin to a soul" illustrates. But you might try "steelmanning" the idea, and a good place to start might be the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "Personal Identity". Paraphrasing them:
SEP [paraphrased]: "Outside of philosophy, the term ‘[gender] identity’ commonly refers to [those sexually dimorphic 'behavioral, emotional, and psychological'] properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. My [gender] identity in this sense consists of those [feminine & masculine] properties I take to 'define me as a person' or 'make me the person I am'. ...."
In which case one might say that your own "gender identity" is "lesbian" even though you may well have other "behavioral, emotional, and psychological" traits that are more typical of "adult human females".
The problem, or misuse, of the concept comes from claiming, or giving any credence to the claim that a "masculine or feminine gender identity" is the same as being male or female. You may wish to take a gander at a very good interview by Stella O'Malley of Heather Brunskell-Evans, and my comments thereon. But of particular note is this comment of Heather's:
HB-E: “So the idea that masculinity is fixed and femininity is fixed, all that's different now is that you can have a boy's body be truly female inside and vice versa, and nobody explains what being truly female or truly male is.”
The crux of the whole transgender clusterfuck: "nobody explains what being truly female or truly male is". And your conception of those categories doesn't appear to have progressed much beyond folk-biology or those in the Kindergarten Cop movie: "boys (males) have penises, and girls (females) have vaginas". Don't think you, and too many others, quite get the idea that there are NO intrinsic meanings to "male" and "female" -- they mean what we want to them to mean, but some definitions are very much better than others. Don't think that clusterfuck will be resolved until more people start giving some thought to the reasons why the standard biological definitions should be the only game in town.
Kind of on my list, though I've read many of her other articles, and have subscribed to, and commented on, her own Substack. Of particular note from the latter:
KS: "What I do find interesting, though, is how things went so badly wrong: the causes, not the reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. One big question for this newsletter will be: how did mainstream feminism come to embrace what I’m calling the stupid story, so that many feminists ended up cancelling themselves out of politically effective existence? Effectively, the stupid story functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
Good questions, though not sure she's up to the task of answering them. Too many, including her, blather on about "biological sex" while not having a flaming clue about how mainstream biology actually defines the sex categories -- i.e., functional gonads are the sine qua non for sex category membership.
Apropos of which, you might consider this oldish Duke Law post of hers, this bit in particular:
KS: "A plausible and much more minimal alternative says that each sex is defined by the presence of a developmental pathway to produce certain gamete types - either larger, relatively static ones (in which case, the pathway belongs to females) or smaller, more mobile ones (in which case, males).18 Intentionally, this theory says nothing specific about chromosomes, because it is designed to also apply to males and females in sexually dimorphic species which are not human. That is, it is supposed to be a general account of maleness and femaleness in biology."
Nice that she genuflects to "maleness and femaleness in biology". However it is clear she doesn't have a flaming clue that mainstream biology doesn't say a goddamn thing about "developmental pathways" as defining criteria for the sex categories.
This! "The goal is to control the world at large, because the world functioning independently of the disconnected mine presents a threat to it. At every turn, the world and the other people in it have the capacity to show the disconnected mind that its constructs are wrong and hollow. This is why gender ideologues must silence others and shut down debate. Behind the bluster, they are incredibly insecure."
If the disconnected mind were an easily transmitted viral disease, today the U.S. would be in the grip of a pandemic. The nation's wilful refusal to implement effective public heath measures would make the Trump administration's largely botched response to Covid-19 look like the gold standard response.
To see how deeply the disconnected mind virus has penetrated the American population, it is only necessary to look at how firmly Oregon's newspaper of record and its readers have embraced gender identity ideology.
The following items are responses to a boy's recent victory in the girls' 6A Oregon's state championship in the 200 meters. He was there as a trans girl. The first is by the The Oregonian's chief sportswriter. I have omitted two paragraphs to remain within the very generous space limit here. The second is a letter to the editor about the controversy that ensued. I will not comment as the items themselves speak volumes about the problem of the disconnected mind.
No. 1
Bill Oram: A transgender teen athlete’s life is not your cause
• Updated: May. 24, 2024, 11:49 a.m.|
• Published: May. 21, 2024, 4:23 p.m.
Congrats to all. To the social media brayers who have it all figured out, to the adults who booed a teen from their privileged perch and to those who think the solution to a complex issue is to further ostracize and marginalize members of one of the most at-risk communities in our society.
You have achieved something spectacularly vile.
You have opened the door for the most bad-faith actors in American discourse to exploit a high schooler, a child, for nothing more than a belt notch in the ongoing culture wars. You have empowered the likes of Clay Travis and Piers Morgan and other ghoulish avatars of the lunatic fringe to mine our high schools for clicks and to use them as the backdrop for their continued fear-mongering of the belief that boys have infiltrated girls sports and are winning every track race in the country, every swim meet and golf tournament and that they are grooming your sons to become women.
They are dehumanizing the real people involved, stripping the conversation of nuance, and turning it into a cause rather than an isolated situation that deserves compassion, thoughtfulness and calm.
A teenager’s life is not your cause.
On Saturday at Hayward Field, a McDaniel High School sophomore won the 6A state championship in the 200 meters, breaking away in the final steps. The winning athlete was a transgender girl.
The boos that rained down at the end of the race echoed across the country, but especially on the internet, where the profiteers and alarm merchants eagerly pounced.
This one race catapulted the OSAA championships into the center of one of the most divisive issues we face as a country. Is it one of the most important?
Over homelessness, drugs, racism and violence? Really?
Sports are an incredibly powerful platform for women and girls. For many, it’s where they learn to recognize and harness their strength and forge their identities. And it’s a platform that was once withheld from them, too.
It wasn’t that long ago that women weren’t allowed to compete or were written off as masculine or somehow less woman-like if they did.
Yes, we need to protect women’s sports. But from whom?
Until you show me genuine evidence of someone abusing our moral obligation to be inclusive for their own athletic gain — inviting the stigmatization and abuse that trans people face in sole and desperate pursuit of a medal or a trophy, to record a time or a score that detractors will say deserves an asterisk anyway — I refuse to bite at your baited hook of hate.
Trans athletes deserve a place to compete, too. We should provide opportunities for kids to participate first and let the adults deal with matters of policy and procedure second.
And what has been lost in the days of mendacious manipulation is that what the athlete did, regardless of how you feel about her right to it, was a demonstration of courage that most of us will never experience for ourselves.
While it is grossly unfair to put the weight of this issue on her teenage shoulders, she certainly knew what awaited her when she crossed that finish line. With right-wing media eager to glom on to what they will say is another trans athlete stealing opportunities from girls, to stoke the division in a nation addicted to it, she ran and she ran fast.
That is brave. And I admire her for it.
Let me be very clear: I do not know what the answer is. I do not ultimately know if trans athletes should compete as their “consistently asserted gender,” as the OSAA rule currently states, regardless of where they are in their transition. I also do not know if it is reasonable to mandate that in order to compete as their asserted gender, teenagers — children — need to have received an arbitrary amount of hormone therapy or treatment. I don’t know that rules that work for the Olympics and NCAA work for participatory athletics at the high school level.
But what I do know, and I’m confident saying here, is that judgment cannot be handed down by a mob of people who are limited to the binary device of cheers and boos.
We don’t even know how her competitors felt about being thrust into this conversation. This seems to be the most accepting generation of kids ever, but it would be understandable if they are upset. They are caught in the same confusing web as all of us and trying to untangle issues that we haven’t fully faced as a society, despite the existence of people like tennis player Renee Richards in the 1970s.
The presence of a trans athlete led to additional security during the medal presentation.
Law enforcement wasn’t there to protect the rest of the competitors from the trans athlete. No, it was there to protect the athlete from adults who were so spun up by her existence and her athletic excellence that they might resort to violence.
Nobody deserves that. Certainly not a child.
She is no less a child because she is trans and she is certainly no less of a human.
Save me the argument that the boos were for the OSAA and its rules, not the teenager. The institution didn’t cross the finish line in first place.
I get if parents are mad. But we should remember that parents always want to see their kids do well and often look for excuses when they don’t. We’ve all heard rumors about the point guard who lives outside of school boundaries or laments about the Little League pitcher who looks like a high schooler.
/ / /
As for the suggestion that trans athletes should be directed to their own division: That should immediately be dismissed and called out for the bigotry it is. Such a move would only further single out those few trans athletes competing in high school sports and reduce them to a spectacle.
Imagine the state track meet taking a pause on Saturday so the McDaniel athlete could race her two events, against no one but herself, under the gaze of carnival gawkers.
Until someone has a solution that doesn’t feel like separation and isolation, then everyone needs to grow up and shut up.
/ / /
I value sports deeply and believe in the role of competition in the development of youth as much as anyone. But I can’t help but wonder if we are overvaluing the sanctity of competition at a cost of the sanctity of participation and inclusion.
I don’t know the answer.
I just know that Piers Freakin’ Morgan and the cretins of the internet aren’t going to be the ones to give it to us.
I played basketball through high school. I stand six feet tall, many inches taller than my teammates and our competitors. Parents were not up in arms about my inherent genetic advantage; they didn’t insist that there be a separate league for tall girls. Alternately, I am physically large, slow and can’t jump. My parents didn’t campaign so I didn’t have to compete against thinner, faster girls with a higher vertical leap.
Like the athletes who wrote this opinion piece, I worked hard at my sport, spending many hours in the gym and on the court. I achieved some goals and others I didn’t. But I never thought to blame this on the taller center that I was unable to contain in a championship game.
The concept of fairness in sports is an illusion. People are born with inherent physical advantages regardless of gender. There are also social and economic advantages lent to athletes who can afford travel teams, camps and private coaching.
Youth sports are about more than winning and scholarships. I don’t remember the games I won and lost. I do remember the true lessons of youth sport participation: learning a work ethic, supporting my teammates, and working closely with people I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.
[Foreword to my post, for anyone interested: I misinterpreted Ollie's Parks' comment. The following post of mine (in quotes) is the result of a hasty (though not disconnected in the same way as referred to in Eva's article, I hope) mind... It should have been directed to the authors of the articles he quoted] "I almost totally disagree (there might be one word or sentence in your post that I agree with...). But I'll defend your right to your opinion, no matter how wrong. That notwithstanding: Leave kids alone! This includes: Girls' sports are for girls! Boys' sports are for boys! No child is born in the wrong body, but only comes to that dangerous and hurtful conclusion due to the influence of some very wrongheaded adults with an agenda, one way or another. I could go on, but won't. I'll pray first for children, and then for misguided adults like you. So be it. It has to be said, even when better communicators than I (like Eva, Matt, et al.) are already doing their all to educate people."
If the disconnected mind were an easily transmitted viral disease, today the U.S. would be in the grip of a pandemic. The nation's wilful refusal to implement effective public heath measures would make the Trump administration's largely botched response to Covid-19 look like the gold standard response.
To see how deeply the disconnected mind virus has penetrated the American population, it is only necessary to look at how firmly Oregon's newspaper of record and its readers have embraced gender identity ideology.
The following items are responses to a boy's recent victory in the girls' 6A Oregon's state championship in the 200 meters. He was there as a trans girl. The first is by the The Oregonian's chief sportswriter. I have omitted two paragraphs to remain within the very generous space limit here. The second is a letter to the editor about the controversy that ensued. I will not comment as the items themselves speak volumes about the problem of the disconnected mind.
My sincere apologies for getting your comment very wrong. I was tired, and I misunderstood the formatting, though that isn't your fault, somehow attributing the excerpts as written by you. I'd like to delete my comment, but will leave it up as a prime example of Think before you post! And, Don't read so fast! It's clear that I need to take a break from social media for a while, for various reasons. Again no one's problem but mine. Best wishes.
If Substack gives commenters formatting tools, I have yet to find them. I had hoped to bold or underline the titles of the two pieces I held up as examples of disconnected thinking for the sake of clarity, but I wasn't able to summon the tools if indeed they exist.
Classic liberalism seeks (superficially) symmetric solutions to assymetric problems.
The right of women to organize separately from men *does not* imply a corresponding "right" of men to exclude women from their gatherings. Within the L&G movement, I (we) lost that battle decades ago. We are reaping the bitter fruits.
In the 90s I attended a fundraiser for an LGB charitable foundation in Portland. As usual, it was held in a showplace of a home owned by prominent A-list gay men. The attendees were other A-gays and their younger boyfriends. Though the charity's target beneficiaries were lesbians and gay men, there wasn't a single woman, gay or straight, among the attendees. When I asked about the apparent exclusion of women, it was explained that women were not invited so as to avoid displeasing some of the men.
How depressing. I wonder how much of the money raised ended up being controlled by lesbians and spent on projects to benefit them.
Since it began, women in the mixed L&G movement have expended a great deal of time and energy on projects of primary interest and benefit to gay men, and received precious little from us in return.
"Some might call these differences “stereotypes,” but, to me, it is obvious that our differences go deeper. No doubt much of what “gender identity” is based on is nothing but shallow stereotypes and fashion choices, but men and women have behavioral, emotional, and psychological differences on average as well."
"By George, I think she's got it!" 😉🙂
More or less in any case, though I doubt you're much able or willing to consider the many places where you're going off the rails and into the weeds.
To start with, you make a very good point there about the many fairly significant "statistical differences on average" between "men" and "women". But those differences, by sex, is more or less exactly what many credible sources MEAN by "gender". For example, something from an old Wikipedia article on the topic:
Wikipedia: "Gender is the range [spectrum] of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gender&oldid=1119204255
One might reasonably say that femininity and masculinity are the two halves of a multi-dimensional gender spectrum encompassing a myriad of variations. Kind of like reddish and bluish halves of the colour spectrum -- a binary comprised of an infinitude of possibilities. See my post for some elaborations:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum
But one place in particular where you go off the rails is in being too quick to condemn the entire concept of "gender identity", somewhat incongruous or hypocritical given you own, "No doubt much of what 'gender identity' is based on is nothing but shallow stereotypes and fashion choices"
No doubt whatsoever that too many "gender ideologues" -- and various scientific illiterates, grifters, and political opportunists -- have gone off the deep end with the concept -- as your own "something akin to a soul" illustrates. But you might try "steelmanning" the idea, and a good place to start might be the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "Personal Identity". Paraphrasing them:
SEP [paraphrased]: "Outside of philosophy, the term ‘[gender] identity’ commonly refers to [those sexually dimorphic 'behavioral, emotional, and psychological'] properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. My [gender] identity in this sense consists of those [feminine & masculine] properties I take to 'define me as a person' or 'make me the person I am'. ...."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
In which case one might say that your own "gender identity" is "lesbian" even though you may well have other "behavioral, emotional, and psychological" traits that are more typical of "adult human females".
The problem, or misuse, of the concept comes from claiming, or giving any credence to the claim that a "masculine or feminine gender identity" is the same as being male or female. You may wish to take a gander at a very good interview by Stella O'Malley of Heather Brunskell-Evans, and my comments thereon. But of particular note is this comment of Heather's:
HB-E: “So the idea that masculinity is fixed and femininity is fixed, all that's different now is that you can have a boy's body be truly female inside and vice versa, and nobody explains what being truly female or truly male is.”
https://stellaomalley.substack.com/p/silencing-thought-a-conversation/comment/57660136
The crux of the whole transgender clusterfuck: "nobody explains what being truly female or truly male is". And your conception of those categories doesn't appear to have progressed much beyond folk-biology or those in the Kindergarten Cop movie: "boys (males) have penises, and girls (females) have vaginas". Don't think you, and too many others, quite get the idea that there are NO intrinsic meanings to "male" and "female" -- they mean what we want to them to mean, but some definitions are very much better than others. Don't think that clusterfuck will be resolved until more people start giving some thought to the reasons why the standard biological definitions should be the only game in town.
Read Kathleen Stock's "Material Girls" if you want to delve into a rigorous philosophical exploration of the issues involved.
Kind of on my list, though I've read many of her other articles, and have subscribed to, and commented on, her own Substack. Of particular note from the latter:
KS: "What I do find interesting, though, is how things went so badly wrong: the causes, not the reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. One big question for this newsletter will be: how did mainstream feminism come to embrace what I’m calling the stupid story, so that many feminists ended up cancelling themselves out of politically effective existence? Effectively, the stupid story functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp?publication_id=618787&triedRedirect=true
Good questions, though not sure she's up to the task of answering them. Too many, including her, blather on about "biological sex" while not having a flaming clue about how mainstream biology actually defines the sex categories -- i.e., functional gonads are the sine qua non for sex category membership.
Apropos of which, you might consider this oldish Duke Law post of hers, this bit in particular:
KS: "A plausible and much more minimal alternative says that each sex is defined by the presence of a developmental pathway to produce certain gamete types - either larger, relatively static ones (in which case, the pathway belongs to females) or smaller, more mobile ones (in which case, males).18 Intentionally, this theory says nothing specific about chromosomes, because it is designed to also apply to males and females in sexually dimorphic species which are not human. That is, it is supposed to be a general account of maleness and femaleness in biology."
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol85/iss1/3/
Nice that she genuflects to "maleness and femaleness in biology". However it is clear she doesn't have a flaming clue that mainstream biology doesn't say a goddamn thing about "developmental pathways" as defining criteria for the sex categories.
This! "The goal is to control the world at large, because the world functioning independently of the disconnected mine presents a threat to it. At every turn, the world and the other people in it have the capacity to show the disconnected mind that its constructs are wrong and hollow. This is why gender ideologues must silence others and shut down debate. Behind the bluster, they are incredibly insecure."
If the disconnected mind were an easily transmitted viral disease, today the U.S. would be in the grip of a pandemic. The nation's wilful refusal to implement effective public heath measures would make the Trump administration's largely botched response to Covid-19 look like the gold standard response.
To see how deeply the disconnected mind virus has penetrated the American population, it is only necessary to look at how firmly Oregon's newspaper of record and its readers have embraced gender identity ideology.
The following items are responses to a boy's recent victory in the girls' 6A Oregon's state championship in the 200 meters. He was there as a trans girl. The first is by the The Oregonian's chief sportswriter. I have omitted two paragraphs to remain within the very generous space limit here. The second is a letter to the editor about the controversy that ensued. I will not comment as the items themselves speak volumes about the problem of the disconnected mind.
No. 1
Bill Oram: A transgender teen athlete’s life is not your cause
• Updated: May. 24, 2024, 11:49 a.m.|
• Published: May. 21, 2024, 4:23 p.m.
Congrats to all. To the social media brayers who have it all figured out, to the adults who booed a teen from their privileged perch and to those who think the solution to a complex issue is to further ostracize and marginalize members of one of the most at-risk communities in our society.
You have achieved something spectacularly vile.
You have opened the door for the most bad-faith actors in American discourse to exploit a high schooler, a child, for nothing more than a belt notch in the ongoing culture wars. You have empowered the likes of Clay Travis and Piers Morgan and other ghoulish avatars of the lunatic fringe to mine our high schools for clicks and to use them as the backdrop for their continued fear-mongering of the belief that boys have infiltrated girls sports and are winning every track race in the country, every swim meet and golf tournament and that they are grooming your sons to become women.
They are dehumanizing the real people involved, stripping the conversation of nuance, and turning it into a cause rather than an isolated situation that deserves compassion, thoughtfulness and calm.
A teenager’s life is not your cause.
On Saturday at Hayward Field, a McDaniel High School sophomore won the 6A state championship in the 200 meters, breaking away in the final steps. The winning athlete was a transgender girl.
The Oregonian/OregonLive is not naming the runner in an effort to protect whatever privacy she has left. This is a kid in an extremely vulnerable position. [NBC has published his assumed name: Aayden Gallaghery. https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/transgender-teen-booed-winning-girls-track-race-state-championship-rcna153383 ]
The boos that rained down at the end of the race echoed across the country, but especially on the internet, where the profiteers and alarm merchants eagerly pounced.
This one race catapulted the OSAA championships into the center of one of the most divisive issues we face as a country. Is it one of the most important?
Over homelessness, drugs, racism and violence? Really?
Sports are an incredibly powerful platform for women and girls. For many, it’s where they learn to recognize and harness their strength and forge their identities. And it’s a platform that was once withheld from them, too.
It wasn’t that long ago that women weren’t allowed to compete or were written off as masculine or somehow less woman-like if they did.
Yes, we need to protect women’s sports. But from whom?
Until you show me genuine evidence of someone abusing our moral obligation to be inclusive for their own athletic gain — inviting the stigmatization and abuse that trans people face in sole and desperate pursuit of a medal or a trophy, to record a time or a score that detractors will say deserves an asterisk anyway — I refuse to bite at your baited hook of hate.
Trans athletes deserve a place to compete, too. We should provide opportunities for kids to participate first and let the adults deal with matters of policy and procedure second.
And what has been lost in the days of mendacious manipulation is that what the athlete did, regardless of how you feel about her right to it, was a demonstration of courage that most of us will never experience for ourselves.
While it is grossly unfair to put the weight of this issue on her teenage shoulders, she certainly knew what awaited her when she crossed that finish line. With right-wing media eager to glom on to what they will say is another trans athlete stealing opportunities from girls, to stoke the division in a nation addicted to it, she ran and she ran fast.
That is brave. And I admire her for it.
Let me be very clear: I do not know what the answer is. I do not ultimately know if trans athletes should compete as their “consistently asserted gender,” as the OSAA rule currently states, regardless of where they are in their transition. I also do not know if it is reasonable to mandate that in order to compete as their asserted gender, teenagers — children — need to have received an arbitrary amount of hormone therapy or treatment. I don’t know that rules that work for the Olympics and NCAA work for participatory athletics at the high school level.
But what I do know, and I’m confident saying here, is that judgment cannot be handed down by a mob of people who are limited to the binary device of cheers and boos.
We don’t even know how her competitors felt about being thrust into this conversation. This seems to be the most accepting generation of kids ever, but it would be understandable if they are upset. They are caught in the same confusing web as all of us and trying to untangle issues that we haven’t fully faced as a society, despite the existence of people like tennis player Renee Richards in the 1970s.
The presence of a trans athlete led to additional security during the medal presentation.
Law enforcement wasn’t there to protect the rest of the competitors from the trans athlete. No, it was there to protect the athlete from adults who were so spun up by her existence and her athletic excellence that they might resort to violence.
Nobody deserves that. Certainly not a child.
She is no less a child because she is trans and she is certainly no less of a human.
Save me the argument that the boos were for the OSAA and its rules, not the teenager. The institution didn’t cross the finish line in first place.
I get if parents are mad. But we should remember that parents always want to see their kids do well and often look for excuses when they don’t. We’ve all heard rumors about the point guard who lives outside of school boundaries or laments about the Little League pitcher who looks like a high schooler.
/ / /
As for the suggestion that trans athletes should be directed to their own division: That should immediately be dismissed and called out for the bigotry it is. Such a move would only further single out those few trans athletes competing in high school sports and reduce them to a spectacle.
Imagine the state track meet taking a pause on Saturday so the McDaniel athlete could race her two events, against no one but herself, under the gaze of carnival gawkers.
Until someone has a solution that doesn’t feel like separation and isolation, then everyone needs to grow up and shut up.
/ / /
I value sports deeply and believe in the role of competition in the development of youth as much as anyone. But I can’t help but wonder if we are overvaluing the sanctity of competition at a cost of the sanctity of participation and inclusion.
I don’t know the answer.
I just know that Piers Freakin’ Morgan and the cretins of the internet aren’t going to be the ones to give it to us.
-- Bill Oram
https://www.oregonlive.com/highschoolsports/2024/05/bill-oram-a-transgender-teen-athletes-life-is-not-your-cause.html
No. 2
Readers respond: The illusion of fairness in sport
Updated: May. 30, 2024, 7:03 a.m.|Published: May. 30, 2024, 7:00 a.m.
People who wish to disallow transgender athletes from competing with the gender that aligns with their identity lean heavily on the concept of fairness. The writers of the recent opinion piece on this topic contend there is some baseline concept of fairness that is being violated, (“Opinion: Transgender athletes should be welcome to compete. But competition in women’s sports must also be fair,” May 26 https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2024/05/opinion-transgender-athletes-should-be-welcome-to-compete-but-competition-in-womens-sports-must-also-be-fair.html).
I played basketball through high school. I stand six feet tall, many inches taller than my teammates and our competitors. Parents were not up in arms about my inherent genetic advantage; they didn’t insist that there be a separate league for tall girls. Alternately, I am physically large, slow and can’t jump. My parents didn’t campaign so I didn’t have to compete against thinner, faster girls with a higher vertical leap.
Like the athletes who wrote this opinion piece, I worked hard at my sport, spending many hours in the gym and on the court. I achieved some goals and others I didn’t. But I never thought to blame this on the taller center that I was unable to contain in a championship game.
The concept of fairness in sports is an illusion. People are born with inherent physical advantages regardless of gender. There are also social and economic advantages lent to athletes who can afford travel teams, camps and private coaching.
Youth sports are about more than winning and scholarships. I don’t remember the games I won and lost. I do remember the true lessons of youth sport participation: learning a work ethic, supporting my teammates, and working closely with people I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.
https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2024/05/readers-respond-the-illusion-of-fairness-in-sport.html
[Foreword to my post, for anyone interested: I misinterpreted Ollie's Parks' comment. The following post of mine (in quotes) is the result of a hasty (though not disconnected in the same way as referred to in Eva's article, I hope) mind... It should have been directed to the authors of the articles he quoted] "I almost totally disagree (there might be one word or sentence in your post that I agree with...). But I'll defend your right to your opinion, no matter how wrong. That notwithstanding: Leave kids alone! This includes: Girls' sports are for girls! Boys' sports are for boys! No child is born in the wrong body, but only comes to that dangerous and hurtful conclusion due to the influence of some very wrongheaded adults with an agenda, one way or another. I could go on, but won't. I'll pray first for children, and then for misguided adults like you. So be it. It has to be said, even when better communicators than I (like Eva, Matt, et al.) are already doing their all to educate people."
This is the part of my post that I wrote. What do you disagree with?
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If the disconnected mind were an easily transmitted viral disease, today the U.S. would be in the grip of a pandemic. The nation's wilful refusal to implement effective public heath measures would make the Trump administration's largely botched response to Covid-19 look like the gold standard response.
To see how deeply the disconnected mind virus has penetrated the American population, it is only necessary to look at how firmly Oregon's newspaper of record and its readers have embraced gender identity ideology.
The following items are responses to a boy's recent victory in the girls' 6A Oregon's state championship in the 200 meters. He was there as a trans girl. The first is by the The Oregonian's chief sportswriter. I have omitted two paragraphs to remain within the very generous space limit here. The second is a letter to the editor about the controversy that ensued. I will not comment as the items themselves speak volumes about the problem of the disconnected mind.
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My sincere apologies for getting your comment very wrong. I was tired, and I misunderstood the formatting, though that isn't your fault, somehow attributing the excerpts as written by you. I'd like to delete my comment, but will leave it up as a prime example of Think before you post! And, Don't read so fast! It's clear that I need to take a break from social media for a while, for various reasons. Again no one's problem but mine. Best wishes.
I appreciate your kind and thoughtful reply.
If Substack gives commenters formatting tools, I have yet to find them. I had hoped to bold or underline the titles of the two pieces I held up as examples of disconnected thinking for the sake of clarity, but I wasn't able to summon the tools if indeed they exist.
P.S. The gift of a link, fwiw. Be sure to turn on the sound: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5DuAfnIgDI/?igsh=cDBjcXZyOTJ1Njg0
Classic liberalism seeks (superficially) symmetric solutions to assymetric problems.
The right of women to organize separately from men *does not* imply a corresponding "right" of men to exclude women from their gatherings. Within the L&G movement, I (we) lost that battle decades ago. We are reaping the bitter fruits.
In the 90s I attended a fundraiser for an LGB charitable foundation in Portland. As usual, it was held in a showplace of a home owned by prominent A-list gay men. The attendees were other A-gays and their younger boyfriends. Though the charity's target beneficiaries were lesbians and gay men, there wasn't a single woman, gay or straight, among the attendees. When I asked about the apparent exclusion of women, it was explained that women were not invited so as to avoid displeasing some of the men.
How depressing. I wonder how much of the money raised ended up being controlled by lesbians and spent on projects to benefit them.
Since it began, women in the mixed L&G movement have expended a great deal of time and energy on projects of primary interest and benefit to gay men, and received precious little from us in return.