Guest post: You don’t sprint 100 metres with your pronouns

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The ACLU is telling whoppers.

How can the ACLU of all organizations declare that athletes should be segregated according to their stated “gender identity”? The ACLU aren’t declaring that all males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports — they are declaring that only males who state that they feel in possession of a feminine “gender identity” should be allowed to compete with females in sports. How can a legal civil rights organization take the stance that any kind of self-assessed, self-declared identity characteristic should be the sole basis by which we sort and segregate athletes in competitive sports? Why not some other self-declared identity characterisitic? Why not favourite colour? Introverts vs. Extroverts? Taylor Swift fans vs. Kanye fans? Even if you truly believe that people’s stated gender identities are sacrosanct and important and “valid” or whateverthefuck, how does that get you to the part where it’s a necessary civil right for athletes to be sorted and separated based on them? How is it a crucial component of the world’s civil rights that members of an Olympic volleyball team can be of mixed biological sex but absolutely must all share the same preferred pronouns? Because in order for women’s and men’s sports to continue to exist as separate categories, that is exactly what we’re demanding — uniform pronouns; mixed sexes and mixed everything else.

It’s stupid and backwards even from a trans rights perspective. If gender is nothing but a feeling inside one’s own head and is completely separate from someone’s biological body — which is all that trans activists scream about all day and all night: the body I was born into doesn’t define my gender, they say — shouldn’t the ACLU be arguing that an athlete’s gender identity is completely irrelevant to their sports career? Shouldn’t the ACLU be fighting to let male-bodied people with feminine-gender-identity-feelz compete proudly and without prejudice against any other male-bodied people, regardless of gender, on the basis that their gender identity has nothing whatsoever to do with the sexed body they happen to have been born in and happen to be using in the physical competition we call sports? After all, “the body I was born into doesn’t define my gender identity” is just another way of saying, “my gender identity isn’t defined by the body I was born into.” You don’t serve a volleyball or sprint 100 metres or throw a discus with your pronouns; you do it with your body.

Of course, the answer to that is obvious: trans activists are in active denial about the bodies they were born in. They claim that their genders are completely separate from their bodies, but all the physical surgeries and hormones give the lie to that: it’s not about freeing everyone’s gender expression from their sexed bodies (that’s feminism, thank you) and it never was: “trans rights” is about men pretending their male bodies are literally female when they plainly, factually aren’t, and guilt-tripping and bullying everyone else into playing along.

This is such a ludicrous, feeble exercise with such obviously negative ramifications — most evidently, to common folk outside of academic feminist circles, in the domain of sports — that I genuinely think it will rapidly collapse once the general public gets a clear, sober look at what trans activists are demanding. The fact that the ACLU has doubled down on it is certain to be a disaster for them very, very soon.

It’s incredible how short-sighted and self-destructive they’re being. I don’t know what’s worse: the foolishness of the eager young virtue signallers the ACLU has brought in at the bottom, or the cowardice of the older people at the top.

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