An entire population group
A November 27 letter from Canadian Women and Sport to the CEO of World Rugby implores him to repeal the “ban” on trans women playing on women’s teams.
Dear Brett, Canadian Women & Sport and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) are writing to express our strong opposition to World Rugby’s ban on Transgender Women Athletes. In doing so, we join 84 academics, Athlete Ally, Egale Canada and others in urging World Rugby to repeal their recent ban preventing transgender women from participating in women’s rugby.
The ban violates the human rights of transgender and gender diverse women, forcing them out of sport and denying them the benefits it brings. The discriminatory ban perpetuates the harmful and marginalizing practice of gender policing in women’s sport.
What are “gender diverse” women? As far as I know they’re not excluded from women’s teams – not wearing skirts would not be a reason to ban a woman from a women’s team.
More basically, not letting men who identify as women play on women’s teams doesn’t “violate their human rights” – and arguably it does violate the human rights of women to let them play on women’s teams. Men who identify as women are still men, and they shouldn’t be leveraging their discomfort with being men to take everything away from women.
The ban is not based on sound scientific evidence. In their letter to World Rugby, 84 notable academics from around the globe stated, “there is no peer-reviewed scientific evidence to justify a ban which would only be harmful to transgender and gender diverse people.” The letter also voices their opposition to the exclusion “of an entire population group from playing women’s rugby: non-binary people assumed male at birth and transgender women … .”
It’s women’s rugby. Of course it “excludes an entire population group,” because that’s the nature of being women’s rugby (or men’s rugby). Nursery schools exclude an entire population group: people over the age of 5; that’s the nature of nursery schools. It’s not invidious or mean or discriminatory, it’s just how sports are organized because of the fact that women and men have different kinds of bodies.
Maybe climate change is making people’s brains to hot to operate correctly.
Nobody is preventing these “excluded” people from other sports. There is no “right to play on exactly the team I want.” I could stamp my feet and hold mybreath until I was blue, but nobody’s going to fight for my “right” to play on the Toronto Maple Leafs,because I can barely skate. My insistance that it is hurtful to recognize the fact that I can barely skate would not enter into the question of whether or not I should be allowed on the team. And this is just a matter of skill and talent, both of which I could have taken the time and effort to develop if I’d wanted to, say 45 years ago. One can’t “”identify” into skill and talent.
But what about Paralympic sledge hockey? Can I identify into being disabled (over and above the required skill and talent) in order to be allowed to play on a sledge hockey team? I’m guessing not, and that my attemps to bully my way in would be met with anger and scorn. Now if in future, I met with some injury that resilted in my being disabled (and I developed the requisite skills), I could legitimatelt try out and have a chance of winning a position fairly.
But deny trans identified males the “right” to identify their way onto women’s rugby teams and suddenly you’ve got “academics from around the world”* in your corner. They might have the skill and talent (but not enough to make it onto men’s teams), but they aren’t WOMEN. That’s kind of a big requirement that is being glossed over. I don’t care how many times any of these petitionrrs has tweeted or posted TWAW!!!, even allcaps, and it’s still not true. And unlike my sledge hockey example, these men who “feel like” women will never actually be women. They should never be allowed to take a space away from a woman on a woman’s team, in a women’s league. Not a woman? Fuck off.
*How many of these acedemics are in the field of sports, or sports medecine? How many are in gender studies? How many are themselves trans?
The ‘non-binary people assumed male at birth’ bit is possibly more disturbing than just advocating for the inclusion of TIMs, because men won’t even have to say that they identify as women to qualify for inclusion, and because as far as I’m aware there is no known ‘normal’ range of testosterone levels for non-binary people nor any requirement to take hormone suppressants in order to transition to non-binary then even the question of testosterone levels is moot. It really is as simple as declaring oneself non-binary. As non-binary doesn’t mean anything at all in any real sense, men who don’t want to call themselves women might happpily take the n-b route into womens’ sports without having to feminize themselves (in their own minds or the minds of others). Including the ‘enbies’ in their demands is therefore literally demanding that women open up their teams to everybody.
Yep.
They are welcome to play on the male team, so this is a lie.
” nobody’s going to fight for my “right” to play on the Toronto Maple Leafs, because I can barely skate. ”
When Harold Ballard owned the team, you would have had a shot.