The road was long
A historic first for Argentina! A man is allowed to join a women’s football team. Celebrate!
Mara Gomez is set to become the first trans woman to play in Argentina, after the AFA confirmed her registration to play for Villa San Carlos.
Gomez will make history by taking her place in the Women’s first division in Argentina, and is likely to make her debut against Lanus on December 5th.
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On her social media post Gomez said, “Today I am officially a player of the highest category of Argentine soccer.
“The road was long, there were many obstacles, many fears and sorrows. That which one day made me think that I would not be anyone, that I would never have the opportunity to be happy in my life today is reversed.
You know what? The road was long for women, too. Women too have faced many obstacles, fears and sorrows. Women too have been made to feel they will never be anyone. Gomez doesn’t seem to be devoting any thought to that.
Mara, a striker, had been playing in the Platense Football League for Las Malvinas before her big move that was accepted by the AFA after a testosterone test proved she had acceptable levels in her blood.
He’s still a lot bigger than the women though.
Bigger. He’s trying to minimize it by crooking that knee, but it can’t be done. Bigger arms, bigger torso, bigger shoulders, bigger neck…he’s just bigger. Women on rival teams are going to be at a disadvantage.
There is now one fewer spot on that team—and on Argentine soccer teams in total—for women. As there are fewer spots but the same number of women, that increases the competition for those remaining spots. Thus, it is harder for women to make the cut and participate in women’s sport, which was, lest we forget, set aside for women.
Every transwoman who competes for a place on any team in the league increases the size of the available pool of players; i.e., increases competition. Whether he is athletically gifted or clumsier, weaker, and slower than every woman athlete, he is nevertheless a competitor and thus increases the amount of competition faced by every woman in the league.
The inclusion of transwomen in female sport a priori makes things more difficult for women, regardless of transwomen’s athletic ability.
Yes but that’s not a particularly good argument for not including them. If Jewish or immigrant or atheist or working class women were excluded from women’s football I wouldn’t defend their exclusion on the grounds that they would make the competition more difficult.
An illustration:
I live just down the road from Tanni Grey-Thompson, a multi Olympic gold medal winning wheelchair athlete. A few years ago, she was on the local news campaigning about wheelchair access to her local train station, which is up a really steep ramp. The footage showed her really struggling, having to haul herself up using the rails of the fence.
I’ve been in a wheelchair for a couple of months now. I’m no athlete. Ihad occasion to be at the same station today and made my way up the same ramp. And you know what? It wasn’t that hard. I mean, it was hard, I had to take it slowly, but I didn’t need to use the rail and I never had the sense that I wouldn’t make it. It was far easier for me than for Tanni, an Olympic athlete.
The difference, of course, is that I’m male.
I don’t think for an instant that I could compete with her in a race, but in terms of the raw power I can put in my wheels as a rank amateur, there’s no contest. I’m twice her size and probably nearly twice her weight, much of it in my arms and chest. That’s just the way I grew.
So that’s my contribution to the ‘debate’ on whether men have an advantage in certain sports over women. I – someone who sat on his arse all day even before he was in a wheelchair – could beat an Olympic athlete up a ~200m ramp.
And also another example of the things Caroline Criado-Perez talks about in Invisible Women – that so much of the built environment is based on men and thus doesn’t work for women.
True. I hadn’t thought about it like that, despite having read the book. The ramp’s angle is limited by the available space but I’ve no doubt that there’s a maximum allowable steepness for ramps and that it’s based on measurements of men.
The book’s excellent, by the way. I know most people here have an enormous number of books on their waiting-to-read pile, but this one is well worth adding somewhere near the top.
Yes, the question of transwomen in women’s sports all hinges on whether transwomen are men who identify as women — or women. You’d think this would be obvious, but I keep coming across TRAs who tell me no, that’s not the important point. It’s about respecting people’s right to define themselves. Or it’s about transwomen being human. Or it’s about getting rid of artificial boundaries and restrictions to allow free choices and diversity. Or it’s about being kind. All the emotional tropes are trotted out. After which, NOW we get to consider my question (which science has repeatedly and definitively answered from a dispassionate and objective stance, so let’s get back to what’s wrong with you.)
I hope this is as relevant as it appears to me:
Sarah Fuller has become the first woman to play American football in a game in one of the Power Five conferences, the top level of college football competition in the NCAA. Two other women had played in the next lower level of competition, and several others in even lower levels.
This is undoubtedly going to be trumpeted as indication that men and women can compete in sports together.
If I’ve got my information straight, all of these women played as kickers. Football players vary considerably in size and strength, depending on position, and kickers tend to be much smaller. They don’t need anything like the upper body strength used in some of the other positions, nor the running speed needed for some others. Kickers making tackles are rare enough that they make highlight videos when they happen. Clearly the kicker position is the obvious choice for a woman joining a men’s football team, but I don’t anticipate many other roles for women, and I don’t think these players are any sort of indication that women will join men’s teams in the future.
https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/vanderbilt-kicker-sarah-fuller-makes-history-as-first-woman-to-play-in-a-power-five-college-football-game/
Weirdly, I know who Tanni Grey-Thompson is, because she is the life-president of the World Bollard Association:
https://twitter.com/WorldBollard
Actually, I disagree with the conclusion but agree with the underlying assumption.
Does including more subsets of women make competition more difficult for women? More explicitly, does it increase difficulty for women as a whole? I say no. The change to competitive difficulty is net zero across the whole set of women, because difficulty increases for one subset are offset by decreases for another (e.g., the difficulty for atheist women goes from impossible to possible). Of course, this only works because the people added to the pool are a subset of women. If the players to be included are not a subset of women, then the plusses and minuses don’t cancel out, because there’s only one valence of change within the set of all women.
Your example is consistent with this analysis. We can predict that our intuitions will differ if the proposed inclusion is not also a subset of the nominal set. For example, let’s change domains and consider a scholarship set aside for Native Americans, and for some reason Cherokee students are not included. Including them would make it more difficult for other students to win the scholarship, but the net change in difficulty among all Native American students is zero. In contrast, suppose we consider including Jewish women as potential beneficiaries. Now the difficulty increase has no balancing counterpart within the set of Native Americans. It transfers benefit from one group to another rather than shifting benefit within a group.
On the other hand, your example isn’t consistent with the argument from athletic advantage. Suppose that Irish women are just, as a matter of course, significantly better at soccer than other women. Would we defend their exclusion from the sport because women on rival teams would be at a disadvantage? I think not, no more than we would defend excluding women of a particular ethnicity on the same grounds.
This has made my day. I love the fact that no matter how mundane or obscure an item may be, there will be a club or association somewhere dedicated to it.
A bollard-related aside: I know at least two otherwise sensible, intelligent people who have had their bicycles stolen because for reasons they couldn’t quite explain or understand, they chained them to bollards.
To the OP:: I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Gomez wasn’t able to cut it in mens’ football.
Actually, after writing that last bit I’ve had a look for more information. Guess what I found?
So after three years of getting nowhere, a switch of gender and suddenly Gomez was good enough to play for Toronto City in the Argentine womens’ lower leagues, moved to various clubs, ending up at Las Malvinas, becoming their top scorer, and finally moving to Villa San Carlos, who are currently bottom of the league so are obviously in need of a player who can score goals.
Somebody with a height advantage like Gomez has, along with the leg strength to out-leap the opposition and even a little ability to direct a ball with the head is almost guaranteed to score a lot of headed goals, no matter whether it’s in womens’ or mens’ football. Gomez wouldn’t have that advantage in the mens’ game, but against smaller women then as long as he can head a ball in the right direction then as long as his team-mates make sure that their crosses are at the right height for him he really can’t fail to score a few goals. He is, to use a derogatory British expression for that kind of player, nothing more than a head on a stick.
The report in the OP is wrong in the first line, by the way. Gomez is the first TIM to play in the highest womens’ league in Argentinia, not the first to play in Argentina.
https://remezcla.com/sports/mara-gomez-argentina-futbolista-trans-top-womens-league/?amp
What are the mechanics of making block quotes or italics? Or underline or strikethrough for that matter?
em or i in angle brackets for italics, blockquote ditto for that, ul ditto for underline. Strikethrough is more complicated because it includes a date and time stamp.
maddog1129@11:
Comment formatting is a subset of WordPress html markups, like O just said. You can google “wordpress comment formatting” and get a ton of useful links. There are various aliases; “b” can be substituted by “strong”, for example. Here’s a relevant comment on a forum:
https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/formatting-in-comments-on-someones-blog/
Thank you. I’ve used such signals on discussion boards, but those signals don’t work here. Do you do the /I or whatever in angle brackets at the end?
Yes.
Try something and if it doesn’t work I should be able to see why.