I wish these people could understand that blaming people for voting “wrong” is literally the opposite of democracy and just devolves into nothing ever getting better.
Like you shouldn’t have to do that, people make good choices when they have good options!!
This is a fallacy that treats all arguments as equal in the eyes of average people. But they are not.
The women’s sports attack is a bridge argument. They came after it because it’s a place where we lose. By replaying that loss over and over it serves to erode the general consensus on our rights, so that they can expand to other more radical positions later.
Arguing in that arena effectively builds the bridge with them even though your intentions may be pure.
It’s better instead to instead cut our losses and fight them on a topic very few people will disagree with us on. This builds consensus among the general population that we are on the right side of history. This burns down the bridge so they cannot cross it.
Hate to break it to you but we’re 1% of the population.
We don’t need to be picked but we absolutely do need to be tolerable in the eyes of average cishet people so they leave us alone.
So anyway, some of us have experience from more than two decades of activism & organizing seeing what actually works to secure us basic legal and medical rights.
Others live on hexbear.net and toss terms like “pick-me loser” around at any transsexual with a sense of pragmatism. Be mad about it.
So by your logic we should just roll over and allow them to run roughshod over our rights then while we debate every minute detail of our bodies and whether they affect competitiveness in silly games.
Got it. The general population has barely any attention capacity for this so let’s just keep playing on the conservatives terms then. Great effort.
For every conversation you have about hormone levels you could be raising awareness of far more pressing issues in our community and calling conservatives bluffs instead of falling for the red herring.
No the most important thing is that the government has no business getting involved in policing young girls bodies in order for them to be allowed to go have some fun with their friends and team mates on the field.
High school sports don’t even need to be that competitive to begin with. It’s not a professional league.
In your attempt to problematize 1% of 1% of 1% of the population here, when school admins and doctors are fully capable of handling it themselves, conservatives are running roughshod over the humanity of every cis girl with broad shoulders, every cis girl with a hormonal issue like PCOS, every cis girl who’s period gets delayed because she’s athletic, etc.
Those are the vast majority of victims who are harmed by the type of thinking you’re intellectualizing over here. Cis girls. Who now will be forced to prove their bodies are acceptably feminine in order to play.
Of course they’re doing all that to trans girls too but nobody cares about that. So as a trans woman I tell you: go ahead and do it I dare you.
If that were true you would have replied by ignoring their red herring (women’s sports) and brought the attention back to the real issues—lack of access to medical care, criminalization of trans legal status, etc.
Instead you decided to debate them over nitpicky “biological advantage” arguments which just reinforces the myth in the minds of readers that the only thing we have to lose here are silly games for entertainment and fun. That’s exactly what they want and you fell for it.
Uh huh. As if this 1% of 1% are only ones of us who have lost our hobbies in the wake of having our life saving medical care revoked. So we should all make the conversation about them.
Do you have any idea how much losing access to HRT and surgeries disrupts a persons life and hobbies? How much a sex change in general does that? There isn’t a single one of us among us who hasn’t had their life knocked off course by a sex change it’s not that special.
Sports is a losing issue that sucks up all the air in the conversation and leaves the rest of us dehumanized. Conservatives know it that’s why they chose it.
Response to your edit: THEY HAVE ALREADY STOPPED DOING THAT AND YOU STILL THINK ITS ABOUT SPORTS. That’s the entire point. Stop fighting on their terms. Every time they try to make it about sports change the subject to what matters.
I wound up revising that part out on my second read. But for anyone reading this quote yes I did that in my OG post. And it’s true I just didn’t feel it flowed with the rest of what I wrote
You know what? As a woman who’s had a sex change, I am so tired. I could not give a shit about this mods opinions or any of this topic from anybody.
It’s quite simply a topic that loses us support for emotional gut vibe reasons that have nothing to do with rationality. And for what?
I’ve never played women’s sports. Nobody trans I’ve ever met plays women’s sports because we’re all fucking afraid of it and always have been.
We are less than 1% of the population and of that 1% maybe 1% is anywhere near ballsy enough to even begin to try in this environment let alone having the resources to try competing on top of much more pressing matters like surgeries and hormones.
Are these people ignorant and on the wrong side of history here? Absolutely.
Have transsex people been playing sports for decades without issue and without dominating even one out of hundreds of different sports? Absolutely.
Are they just making shit up about transsex bodies based off nothing but unchecked stereotypes and ignorance because they only ever notice the most visible and non-passing ones and have no idea how many of us are stealth? 1000% you betcha.
Could whatever nuanced future issues be resolved by simply introducing additional classes according to measurable biological traits like weight or shoulder span in the few cases where perhaps one day there will be reason to? Yepppp.
Is this whole conversation actually just misogynistic control over women’s bodies that will ultimately harm quantitatively more cis women than trans women? Yep!! And they are better poised to tackle that than us when it does.
And yet? I want everybody to shut up about it because we have far more pressing issues at hand. When it comes to women’s sports the public has made up their mind and the facts don’t matter.
We’re losing access to life saving medical care, being deplatformed, and criminalized for existing in public and y’all still think this is about pointless debates over sports. The public does not have much bandwidth in their minds to spare on us & it’s imperative we get off this topic.
If someone thinks I’m a “biological male” who shouldn’t play women’s sports I don’t frankly care. As long as they don’t interfere with us building robust community organizations to ensure everybody has means to survive the Nazis in coming years, it’s fine.
Frankly they can call me a biological male all day if they want to deliver some hormones to a girl who needs them. They’d still be stupid and wrong but at least useful then.
The irony here is AOC is the one who can build meaningful coalitions you haven’t even realized are possible yet.
The working class is the largest player in this game and she speaks directly to the working class of all stripes.
Moderate neoliberal DINOs speak only to capitalists. That’s why they lost their old base who all went to the right.
Serious talk. When are people going to start calling them DINOs. Democrats In Name Only from the Jurassic period.
You think Trump took over the RNC because the old guard liked him?? No he built on the backs of the tea party.
Bernie and the squad were the lefts tea party. What they need now is a charismatic leader to build on it and kick the DINOs out by force.
The DNC is not that powerful. We outnumber them. Stop forgetting we outnumber them.
No you see, they don’t want to hold politicians accountable. They’d rather bootlick while blaming individual voters for being stuck between a rock and hard place.