Bullied physically and mentally just for being who you are
Sports editor dude at not-NY Times explains to women athletes why it doesn’t matter if trans women shove them aside:
I’m writing this knowing that most of the people reading it will disagree, knowing that the responses will likely be aggressive. But I’m writing it because I feel the other side deserves a voice. This does not make me right. This does not make me wrong. But in the debate over transgender athletes there has been one dominant narrative, so this is an attempt to try to change a few minds.
He means the women. You know, the historically dominant sex, historically in charge of all the narratives. He’s hoping to be able to be heard over the domineering roar of all these powerful women who’ve had it their own way for so long.
Sharron Davies explained in an interview with The Times about why she wants the IOC to take a stance over transgender women competing alongside people who were born women. She is not alone in feeling strongly about this, concerned that women’s sport is under threat and that there will no longer be a level playing field.
She and Martina Navratilova are important, influential voices who speak for many women on this topic. They, like most of us, are not experts though.
They’re not?
They’re experts on women in sport, surely, which is the subject at hand.
And while it’s important to hear and respect people’s views, I disagree and worry a circus is being created out of something that a) is not a huge problem in sport and b) further marginalises totally unthreatening people and creates a narrative of fear around them.
It’s not a huge problem for him, and that’s all that counts, yeah?
As for totally unthreatening…some of the people in question are in fact very threatening in the most literal sense: they make threats.
Minorities have forever been grouped together and been served up to the majority as threatening: don’t let gay men teach your children or they’ll get AIDS, don’t let black men in the same shops as you or they’ll rape your women, don’t do a business deal with a Jew or he will steal your money.
Oh look, he’s not even talking to us, he’s talking to men only – that “they’ll rape your women” gives it away. That’s default male aka assumed male: assuming only men are reading your paper. He’s not talking to us, and he’s also pretending our subordination doesn’t exist.
Or you could let people quietly go about their lives and acknowledge that they have been through hell compared to you.
Women have it easy, it’s trans people who have been through hell. Alex Kay-Jelski is expert enough to know this by virtue of being a man.
In the case of most transgender people that means growing up knowing you are different, an outsider and often being bullied physically and mentally just for being who you are.
He just has no clue, does he. Not the faintest glimmer of a clue.
So if you know that you are different, an outsider, and are bullied physically and mentally just for being who you are, does that mean you are trans? Because, if so, I am and have always been trans.
Or can we accept that many of us have grown up knowing they are different, that they are outsiders, and that they have been bullied physically and mentally? That in fact is the position most women have been in, since the world has an automatic default to male – including, as you pointed out, this author. We have always been the other, the one that the world was not made for, the one that isn’t called on in Algebra class because the (male) teacher knows our brains can’t handle his (manly) subject, the one that isn’t given the promotion and might even be told that we are taking jobs away from men who are supporting their families, the one that is whistled at, catcalled, grabbed, leered at, up-skirted, and in every other possible way demeaned, insulted, and abused.
In short, trans people are trying to claim a status that women have always had – that of being demeaned and debased – and then claim it is because they are trans, not because they are now women. Maybe it’s time they find out what it really feels like to “feel like a woman”. Only it turns out that a lot of them can’t take it. They must have their feelings protected, they must be guaranteed the right to compete against smaller people, and they must reserve the right to bully and shut up those who have always been bullied and shut up from birth, while casting themselves as the bullied, the marginalized, the shut up.
I grew up being bullied mentally and physically for being who I was, and I’m not trans, or a woman. If anything I’m a pretty bog standard US male, and I certainly wouldn’t lay any claim to women’s spaces.
Hey, asshole, I was bullied mentally–and it didn’t stop after I grew up, either.
And that was aside from the background radiation of sexism and misogyny all women grow up in.
But I don’t know that, and neither do you.
Furthermore, many trans-identified males, like Rachel MacKinnon and Julia Serano are autogynephiles who probably did not grow up bullied. They were–are–straight middle class white men who performed masculinity just fine. These are not the gay men bullied in their youth for their effeminacy you are probably thinking of.
And even if they were, it is not women’s job to step aside for them. Fuck you, Alex Kay-Jelski.
Yeah, none of us boring people who don’t adopt exciting new genders and lifestyles have no idea at all what it’s like to be bullied, for years on end, do we? To wake up every morning and either know that we’re going to get beaten up or bullied, or to fear where the next round will come from. Yeah, only the trans* know this, the poor dear snowflakes. They’re the only ones who can speak to this. The rest of us live in some kind of idyllic wonderland, lazily devouring bon bons after a childhood blissfully free of any sort of self-doubt, body-hate, or suicidal ideation, and none of us grew up feeling different and getting picked upon just for being who we are. It was such a cakewalk, that time of youth! And it just got better, didn’t it? We all turned 18 and suddenly every systemic societal ill disappeared, and now we spend our days holding hands and singing camp songs, warmed by our sense of mutual respect and the equality and love that our wider society generously distributes to us all.
What a Maroon, I’m sorry. I know that a lot of “bog standard” males have, and it seems to me that people tend to forget them (you).
It’s one of the problems with SJW identity politics–people concern themselves less with actual injustice and more with assigning oppression points to individuals based on their group membership.
Lady Mondegreen,
Thanks. I’ve had a pretty good life overall, which is probably the best revenge. (Also, I have to admit that I did some bullying myself. So it goes around.)
Oh, Lady Mondegreen, I was speaking to the author of the article, not you!! I am sorry if you thought that I’d directed my ire at you.
Oh, but now I see you were talking to WaM. *whew*. :)
Also it was one of those empathy “I’m sorry”s as opposed to the apology kind.
No, worries, James, I didn’t think that!
Love your comment.
“Not huge”? Sure, in the sense that women’s leagues are still predominantly comprised of women, and trans people remain outnumbered. I’ll note that his wording implies that it is already a problem, but I’d love to know the threshold at which it becomes big enough that it requires attention.
However I think it is worth pointing out to every supporter of the male sex competing in female leagues: every trans woman finishing anywhere ahead of a woman has necessarily pushed at least one woman down a position, and has done so with an unearned and therefore unfair advantage.
That’s easy. When it hurts him. Which is likely never.
Holms, re
I was thinking something similar. He’d might as well say that religious extremists are not a huge problem because religion is still predominantly comprised of non-extremists. Well, yes, yes it is, but the extremists are still a fucking huge problem.
Ah, more dudes finding out that they can be as snotty and obnoxious to real women as they have always wanted to be as long as they do it in the name of men who claim to be women.
“bullied just for being who you are”
as if trans women (men) are the only ones that happens/ed to? What about just about any woman, any where, any time?