Every woman out there
The state of this.
https://twitter.com/HannahMouncey/status/1036362423370797056
If you didn’t know better, you’d look at the picture and think the “not ok” bit was the huge man playing football on a women’s team…but no, that’s not what Hannah Mouncey means at all. What Hannah Mouncey means is “not ok” is excluding huge men from playing football on women’s teams. It’s not ok to say “No, you can’t endanger women by playing on their teams when you’re built like a god damn tank.”
Risking the women’s broken bones, concussions, smashed faces – that’s perfectly fine, and it’s progressive, and it’s top intersectional.
What a selfish pig, and proud of it. It’s astounding.
It’s fairly clear what’s going to happen in sports in which size, strength and weight are important. And it seems as though the loudest voices will cheer it on as it happens.
There’s an angry treatment of Lisa Litman’s paper here: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/07/academic-freedom-grifters-rall.html
With many angry, ill-informed comments.
There’s one comment early in the list that grabbed my attention. It said that the author *would* have read the paper but they knew it would just make them angry, so they didn’t.
Perfect.
There is the usual malformed preaching about the failings of peer review and the study itself by people who haven’t read the paper and don’t understand peer review.
What happened to the idea that nobody has the right to not be offended?
Yes, by all means, put women in charge of this decision. On that we can agree.
The whole article is a masterclass in how to be a disingenuous areshole.
It’s nice of Mouncey to explain to us all about how teenage girls think, though. Thank goodness we have this invaluable voice of reason, experienced in teenage girl-hood and untainted by irrational female thinki…. wait…. How does this work again?
I am concerned that the result of this controversy is going to be weight restrictions or the like, which will allow small men to join, and keep out large women. I think this is turning “women’s sport” into “small people’s sport”, and losing the focus on sport opportunities for women. There’s more at stake than just safety, as important as that is.
Sackbut:
I was implying the same thing from the opposite end. Either way, men will find ways to force women out of sport.
Because of course they fucking will.
men will find ways to force women out of – everything but doing nasty chores like changing diapers and washing dishes…and picking men’s underwear up when they drop it on the floor in front of the hamper because they are too lazy to heft it that extra few inches.
Indeed.
Surely, adult testosterone levels are an inadequate basis for deciding who gets to play womens’ sport.
This isn’t perfect, but surely would be a better starting point:
During any part of puberty, did you have testes? (Which would have produced the higher level of androgens to cause male-type bone and muscle development). Yes? Then you don’t get to play girls’ or womens’ sport. Ever.
Do you inject androgens? Yes? Then you don’t get to play girls’ or womens’ sports.
Maybe not perfectly enforceable, and I imagine there will be special cases to adjudicate.
The effects of male puberty on at least muscle and bone mass need to be considered, IMO. This seems obvious.
In all the sports I know anything about, there are mens’ and womens’ divisions, and for obvious reasons of sexual dimorphism. Also for some sports like boxing and football, weight divisions are relevant as well.
On top of that, some sports can have ‘mixed’ play: the most obvious being tennis, where skill counts for more than physical strength, as Billie-Jean King showed when she beat the crap out of that self-publicising and self-obsessed attention seeker Bobby Riggs in 1973.
God, how time flies…!.
What i don’t get, gender issues aside, is how sport can not be “body-shaming”. It’s sport. If it’s sumo wrestling you have to be fat, if it’s horse racing you have to be small, if it’s rugby you have to be broad, etc. If you don’t want to be judged on your body size/shape, is sport really for you?
Or maybe we should reform sport so that horses get crushed by sumo wrestlers and jockeys get crushed in rugby scrums.
So Little Miss Six-foot-three is concerned about women and girls being told they are too fat to play football. Yes, that makes sense.
“… there daughters or there friends”? Freedom to choose pronouns should have some limits.
Gordon, that’s not to mention definition-fluidity re. effect/affect.
This is not an issue of ‘fat-shaming’, no matter how much Mouncey frames it to fit the culture of victimhood that the woke revel in because it’s easier to say ‘I haven’t got a problem, you have’ than to actually work at solving their problems.
Nobody in their right mind would call that mass of muscle ‘fat’, would they? I’m pretty certain that nobody in the women’s Aussie rules administration is saying that fat people shouldn’t be allowed to play, or even mentioned ‘fat’ as an issue. It’s about body size, muscle and bone density, and the unfair advantage that male-bodied competitors have over women.
Mouncey is a classic example of the aggressor playing victim when he thinks somebody’s going to tell him no, so he twists things to make it sound like he’s being held back by fat-shaming bigots rather than by people concerned over his sheer size and muscle-mass, and the effect that could have on his opponents, not to mention those women not being selected to play for his team because he’s pretty much auto-selected to play because of the advantage he confers.
Besides, with very few exceptions, fat people bar themselves from competitive physical sports because they tend not to be fit enough to play for any length of time.
Ben @ 10 – thanks for the laugh in the last line. We need them on this subject!
AoS @ 14 – “Mouncey is a classic example of the aggressor playing victim”
Indeed, so the question becomes, why the FUCK did the Guardian run this abysmal ludicrous misogynist and badly-written piece?
I have friends that on a whim went to a women’s roller derby event (which is an odd sport that was previously predetermined entertainment like pro wrestling but has since been revived as a legitimate competition).
They enjoyed it very much until they noticed that the by far most dominant player was clearly a transgender woman. That spoiled it for them, as it didn’t seem fair, so they left.
I suspect that will be a common reaction, that women’s sports will lose popularity over this.