How difficult it is to draw a sharp distinction
Laurie Penny again pretending we all know that sex is a spectrum and that we’ve always known that and that there’s just no question about it:
The suggestion that two transgender women were close to being selected for the British Olympic team was met with outrage earlier this month. LGBT advocates were upset that trans athletes would have to face any queries at all over their right to compete as women, while others insisted that only “biological females” should do so.
Well, yes, biological females, as always. Why the scare quotes?
We are assured that the inclusion of trans women in Olympic sports, which is now possible after a rule change, is unfair because they will have a “natural advantage” over other women.
And “we” are assured that because it’s true. Of course men have an advantage over women. Humans are sexually dimorphic; that’s just reality.
Penny goes on to play the “all competitive athletes have an advantage” card, which is just infantile.
The debates about sport show just how difficult it is to draw a sharp distinction between men and women, between male and female bodies. What should a “woman” be, for the purposes of professional sport?
No, it isn’t difficult at all, and what a woman should be for the purposes of professional sport is a woman.
… there are times when you have to wonder what story people think they’re living in. Even the most culturally oblivious commentator can recognise when they have become the villain in a feel-good sports movie about plucky underdogs overcoming prejudice.
Ah yes and Laurel Hubbard is the plucky underdog, is he? White, rich, middle-aged, male Laurel Hubbard? Not the young Tongan and Samoan women who have to compete against him?
Yet the question remains: what are exceptional athletes to do when they don’t fit into arbitrarily chosen biological categories on whose terms excellence is measured?
The categories are not arbitrarily chosen.
In sport, bodies are quite literally contested. Women’s participation was always an afterthought: the 2012 games in London were the first Olympics in which women took part in every sport.
Exactly, and that’s why we don’t want to see women’s participation trashed by other means now! Every man allowed to compete as a woman means a woman loses a place, in addition to the fact that all the women are now at a disadvantage.
I hope one day Laurie Penny feels scorching shame over this betrayal.
Exceptional athletes? It’s easy to be exceptional as a woman athlete when you are a man. Anyone can see the advantage by looking at Hubbard. It’s like allowing a greyhound to compete in a race for corgis; if he identifies as a corgi, why not?
Ah, right, the “arbitrarily chosen” sex categories that somehow didn’t manage to have competition for both categories in all sports until a few years ago.
These men competing in women’s sports are taking spots from women even if they compete on an equal level, even if they have no performance advantage. Women’s sports were created because women were not given opportunity to play competitive sports at all. Now those hard-won opportunities are being stolen by men.
But how would you be able to know, given that they don’t speak English? Maybe they could tell your their identities in French?
“Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice; “I daresay it’s a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.” (For, with all her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened.) So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?” which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats.”
Ah yes and Laurel Hubbard is the plucky underdog, is he?
I wonder how long it will be before some mediocre but able-bodied athlete (or even non-athlete) claims the “right” to compete in the Paralympics on the basis of self-identifying as disabled even though he actually isn’t? It’s hard to see on what grounds this could be refused, if Mooby Dick can compete as a woman just by claiming to self-identify as one. The definitional distinction between abled and disabled is a lot more complex and ambiguous than the distinction between male and female.
It’s actually encouraging that the Olympics are generating this much controversy over the trans issue. People are capable of looking down the road and realizing that if this “inclusiveness” continues, in ten years or so women’s sports will hardly exist anymore as a separate category, because what would be the point?
The trans ideology enabling community seems to have no problem with pre-verbal children indicating their trans-ness by indicating any sort of preference or rejection of stereotypical clothing or toys.
… and now that I’ve searched, I find reality is stranger than I might have expected. There are tons of videos and articles about “My cat thinks he’s a dog!”, “My dog thinks he’s a cat!”, “My chihuahua think he’s a goat!”, “My pig thinks he’s a dog”, and so on.
Do any of the authors claim that this means that his or her dog literally is a cat?
Too late, not hypothetical. It’s already happened.
https://www.mamamia.com.au/spanish-basketball-paralympic-team-2000/
YNnB, thanks for the article.
Maybe the Olympics will stop having female sports at all, for the next twelve years, in response to Laurel Hubbard.
I’m thinking of entering my APAB* horse in the Kentucky Derby next year.
*Assigned Prius at birth.
Infidel, what if I identify as non-binary? Neither abled nor disabled, but somewhere in between? (It would at least be accurate; with my shoulders having both been replaced, I have lost a lot of my sports ability, which is sad because I had zero ability to begin with.)
That’s like the flip side of the old joke:
PATIENT: Doctor, after the operation, will I be able to play the piano?
DOCTOR: Yes, of course.
PATIENT: That’s wonderful; I never could before!
…as opposed to how clear-cut and straightforward the alleged “gender” differences are…
But once again, for biological sex the standards of accuracy and precision required are at infinity, and for gender they are at zero (or even minus infinity: They have to be accepted no matter what)
@13, I think that’s the point of the argument: the Gender Critical religion says that “gender” is so imprecise as to be meaningless, so we’re going to prove to them that “sex” is just as imprecise and equally meaningless, ha! Checkmate, TERFs!
GW, I suspect you are giving them more credit than they deserve. I very much doubt that it’s ever even occurred to them that they might have to meet any kind of minimum standards themselves. It’s the Gender of the Gaps all the way down.
I’m with Penny here; I too cheered as the plucky Ivan Drago overcame and straight up murdered Apollo Creed.