Right to trample
A tweet yesterday:
What proposal? You may think they said what proposal in a preceding tweet but they didn’t. Maybe they deleted something, maybe they’re just sloppy. I searched and found a BBC story from July 20.
World Rugby could ban transgender athletes from playing women’s rugby because of safety concerns.
It would be the first international sports federation to prohibit transgender women from competing.
World Rugby said it had undertaken a review of its “rugby-specific transgender guidelines” in light of the “latest peer reviewed research”.
It said it was committed to “ensuring a safe and inclusive playing environment at all levels of the game”.
You know, it shouldn’t be just safety. There should be zero argument about the safety aspect but safety is not the only reason men should not be allowed to play on women’s teams or compete against women. It should be about fairness as well as safety.
In a statement to BBC Sport, it added: “The latest peer reviewed research confirms that a reduction of testosterone does not lead to a proportionate reduction in mass, muscle mass, strength or power. These important determinants of injury risk and performance remain significantly elevated after testosterone suppression.”
Which is exactly why it should be about fairness as well as safety, but apparently that’s too much to ask.
A World Rugby transgender workshop in February sought a “comprehensive review” for the sport, bringing together experts from across the globe to look at a “rugby-specific framework for all, prioritising athlete welfare, inclusion and fairness”.
One of the experts to attend the workshop was Dr Nicola Williams, director of women’s rights advocacy group Fair Play for Women, who described World Rugby’s position as “trailblazing” if it goes ahead with the decision.
“The sensitivity around this issue around transgender issues, and the fear that people would be called transphobic for raising concerns has meant that most sporting bodies have buried their head in the sand on this,” she told BBC Sport.
In other words it’s not necessarily genuine agreement with the view that trans women should be “included” in everything related to women no matter what, but rather a desire not to be bullied and demonized, that causes so many organizations to jump when trans women say jump.
However, Loughborough University medical physicist and transgender woman Joanna Harper, who also attended the workshop, said she doesn’t feel a ban would be right.
Well it’s not Harper’s safety that’s at stake, is it, just as it’s not Harper’s right to fair competition that’s at stake.
“I certainly understand all of that and I think putting restrictions on trans-women is a reasonable thing to do but I certainly don’t agree with this idea of an outright ban,” she told BBC Sport.
Because hey it’s only the safety of women, and that obviously doesn’t matter enough.
So, International Gay Rugby says it “stands with our Trans & Non-Binary players in solidarity to protect their #RightToPlay” and the hell with women’s right to safety and fairness. Stonewall UK is right there in solidarity with them.
Proud. Stonewall is proud. Stonewall is proud to stand with International Gay Rugby to say fuck women’s safety, fuck fairness to women, let the men trample them into the mud if that’s what they want. Funny thing to be proud of.
If Russia is ever let back into international competition, they should field teams entirely composed of “transwomen.” So much winning.
“Rugby Saved My Life”
Oh, well, that’s alright then, carry on.
What a bullshit statement that is, put there as just another insidious piece of emotional blackmail. What are we supposed to think? That not allowing transwomen to play on womens’ teams will result in an epidemic of deaths of men for whom playing rugby is vital to keep them alive but who are too chickenshit to play on the teams in which they belong?
I am so sick of people, politicians, organisations and the rest using sound bytes in place of actual information, and even more sick of those for whom a sound byte is all the information they need to decide their stance on a subject.
We live at a time when we have more information available to us than ever before, more easily accessed than at any time in history, yet people are increasingly happy to base their entire worldviews around single-sentence, snappy little slogans. What the Hell is wrong with people?
And how pray tell are you going to justify putting any “restrictions on transwomen” when you’ve no doubt been insisting “Trans Women Are Women” till you’re cross-eyed and blue in the face? Given that transwomen are routinely compared to “black women” or “ infertile women” or “gay women” — just a different subset of Woman often marginalized and discriminated against, that’s all — whatever hormone levels or muscle mass they have is within the ‘normal’ range. We wouldn’t ban black people from sports because they were too good, would we? Natural ability is just that. TWAW.
There can’t be compromises here .
“I certainly understand all of that and am more than willing to pay lip service to it but as for doing anything that would actually make any difference well come on now that’s just extreme.”
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I find talk of fairness, inclusivity, and safety irrelevant distractions. Is the league just for women? Then only women get to join. Is the club just for black people? Then only black people get to join. And so on and so forth for every category of people.
That poster of “good feels” that men who claim to be women get from cheating real women out of fair matches and from putting real women’s lives at risk is, well, something special.
Certainly there is “no fear” and “no issues” for the men here — they know they can bully the real women secure in the knowledge that if the real women speak up, the men can always injure the women on the field (by accident, of course).
In a strange way, I have to admire how craftily these man have managed to use their male power and privilege to turn back the clock on the rights of real women. Of course, these men could not have made those gains without so many real women being unable to escape the female socialization we received to always be “kind” and “nice” to any man who whines loud enough. I wonder if more young real women today will ever have enough of this because I don’t see their lives being very safe or very long if they submit to Male Fantasy World 2.0
Have a look at ‘The Battle of Cardiff’, 1987 (England went in swinging, Wales won) or the 1974 British & Irish Lions tour of South Africa (the Lions won), or the All Blacks vs Llanelli, 1972 (Llanelli won – there’s a rather good BBC documentary about it called ‘We beat the All Blacks’ on YouTube). Quite a bit of trampling in all those, not to mention savage punch-ups. There was a big punch-up in this year’s match between after the French scored a try, started by the English players – the French won handily and deservedly. Rugby is not a safe sport.
southwest @ 6 – yes – a poster full of fists to support men forcing themselves on women – not a great look, is it.
I’ve just noticed that the thumb of the blue fist on the left appears to be wearing nail varnish. Is this an attempt to signify a transwoman? A man (blue – obvs.) wearing laydeez nail varnish? Which of course means that all the pink fists must belong to actual women, because pink. Not at all reinforcing gender stereotypes, that.
Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong and the blue fists represent inclusion of Smurfs – or perhaps SMURFs (Shouty Men Undoing Real Feminism / Shouty Men Undermining Real Females?), or even of the severely hypothermic / very recently deceased (no place in rugby for corpsephobia, thank you very much).
SMURFs – okay, you just started my Friday off on a good note. Thank you. :-)
No one has taken away anyone’s #Right to Play. That’s just a lie. The men are free to play in the men’s division.
A few years ago, Mack Beggs, a boy, won two Texas state championships in wrestling.
Girls’ wrestling.
He wanted to compete with other boys, but the state made him compete against girls because that’s what it said on his birth certificate.
There were girls who forfeited rather than wrestle Biggs because they were afraid of their safety. But the TERFs never complained. Biggs went undefeated over two years. The TERFs never complained.
The TERFs would be happy to force Chris Mosier, a man, to compete against women and let him sweep all the women’s titles.
I have yet to see a trans girl or a trans women dominate female events like Mack Beggs did. If it was fine to force girls to compete against a boy like Beggs, why do you have a problem with letting less athletic trans girls compete against other girls?
I looked up Mack Beggs. Wikipedia tells us:
How do you know “the TERFs” never complained?
If it’s true that they didn’t complain could that be because they didn’t know about it? I didn’t know about it.
If Beggs had extra testosterone then he shouldn’t have competed as a girl.
I looked up Chris Mosier – another trans man. Chris Mosier competed against men. What makes you think “The TERFs would be happy to force Chris Mosier, a man, to compete against women”?
The Beggs case has been mentioned parenthetically a few times in conversations here, but not centrally. It was about a girl who wanted to compete against boys. I didn’t realize she is trans until now, and I also just learned she was taking testosterone. There were complaints at the time from other athletes that she was taking performance-enhancing drugs, and that’s as valid a reason to keep Beggs out of the competition as it has been for any other athlete, male or female.
The issue specifically with women’s and girls’ competitions is keeping males out of the competition. It doesn’t matter how they identify. If women and girls wish to compete in a competition generally reserved for males, have at it. That covers both Beggs and Mosier (except for the performance-enhancing drug issue, noted earlier).
I suspect the Texas rules, like those of many places, are phrased the way they are because they are trying to sound sex neutral. I think things would be improved if they dropped the attempt at sex neutrality and protected female sports explicitly. Even the Idaho “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” is sex neutral.
Actually it hasn’t, unless under another name, or the name spelled differently. I just did a search and these are the only mentions in comments.
I don’t believe the name has ever been mentioned, but the situation of a girl wanting to wrestle in the boys’ division has come up a couple of times. Usually in the context of “boys want to compete in the girls’ division, but we never hear of girls who want to compete in the boys’ division”.
My impression had been that this was a girl who was a good wrestler and wanted to compete against boys because of the level of the competition. I couldn’t be bothered to remember the details, but the description in Wikipedia sounded like what I remembered.
I could also be confusing that situation with this one, but it’s too recent: a girl who does compete with boys won the NC state championship (106 lb) in February of this year. (It appears NC does not have girls wrestling.)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/26/us/first-female-wrestler-state-champ-trnd/index.html