Culture wars in a blender
The governor of Indiana governor on Monday vetoed a bill banning transgender females from girls school sports.
The ACLU called it hateful. I guess girls don’t have a civil liberty to have their own sports.
Republican sponsors of the bill said it was needed to protect the integrity of female sports and opportunities for girls to gain college athletic scholarship but pointed out no instances in the state of girls being outperformed by transgender athletes.
Well, good that it hasn’t happened yet, but what if it does?
The law would prohibit K-12 students born male but who identify as female from participating in a sport or on an athletic team designated for women or girls. It would not prevent students who identify as female or transgender men playing on men’s sports teams.
Which shows that it’s not a “transphobic” bill, because if it were it would ban students who identify as female or transgender men playing on men’s sports teams.
Democrats argued Republicans were following a national conservative “culture war” with the transgender girls sports ban.
Why is it conservative to protect women’s sports and liberal to allow them to be damaged? In other words why aren’t Democrats protecting women’s sports with or without Republicans?
“Signing House Bill 1041 into law would have put the lives of our children in jeopardy,” said the state Democratic chairman, Mike Schmuhl. “However, this unnecessary debate has set a tone with kids that being transgender means something is wrong with them.”
See above. It’s not about “transgender”; it’s about males invading female sports.
It is conservative, though. It’s conservative in the Burkean sense: an “approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested arrangements.” Women’s sports, especially in the US, have been thriving for the past half century or so, largely thanks to Title IX. That may not have been a conservative policy at the time, but surely by now it’s a “tried and tested arrangement”, and any changes to it should be based on solid evidence and reasoning, not the feelings or delusions of a small slice of the population.
“Conservative” isn’t necessarily synonymous with “right wing” or “reactionary” or even “bad”. Sometimes the conservative approach is the best.
It’s worth remembering that these boys don’t have to “outperform” the girls in the sense of being #1 all the time, they just have to be a little bit better than some girls in order to win slots on teams, win awards, scholarships, etc.; every boy that does that has stolen a slot from a girl (or at university, a woman) who deserved to have that slot or award or scholarship herself.
@1: And why does “conservative” and “liberal” matter any more? Given a few shifts in big money, it could totally happen that the “liberal” position will be to deny climate change, and the “conservative” position will become to pretend to care about it and not do anything about it. Will that suddenly mean that we should shift our position on it? (Of course, both of those positions about climate change are equally horrible, in the real world.)
@GW,
Because we’ve always been at war with East Asia.
The depressing thing about all this is that the Republican Party will use the trans issue as yet another way to polarize the electorate to boost them at the polls. They have no need to do anything to resolve it, they can just use it to further outrage their base and also drive a wedge that splits women away from the Democrats. And trans activists benefit too as the Republicans give them a guilt-by-association stick to beat gender-critical feminists with.
“transgender females” are, of course, females who identify as transgender men. Even that pathetic New Yorker Lia Thomas piece didn’t entirely fumble that.
It really wasn’t that long ago the argument was commonly made that we could safely offer up the words “man” and “woman” to trans people and the words “male” and “female” would remain yoked to biological reality. That went out the window almost immediately, because of course the words “male” and “female” are yoked to the words “man” and “woman”, and always will be.
Soon TRAs will start using the terms “XX” to refer to people that say they are female, and “XY” to refer to people that say they are male. “Stop being so bioessentialist! I identify as XX, and therefore I am XX.”
“…no instances in the state of girls being outperformed by transgender athletes”
Biological realities and the laws of physics are known to be different in Indiana than in other places, so copious examples from other states and countries are apparently of no value.
There’s something about all this ostentatious word-swapping that gives up the game, that exposes the distinction between the reality which transactivists can see just as clearly as we can, and the performance that they put on. The words are so jumbled at this point: if the words “transgender female” are just as likely to refer to someone like Eliot Page (a female who identifies as a man) as they are to Eddie Izzard (a male who, at least some of the time, identifies as a woman), the activists end up having to fall back on their senses to make out which is which: they look at an image of the person or they suss out from context clues what sex the person is. It’s always there: the fact of a trans person’s true sex needs to be known in order to correctly perform the collusion in the trans person’s fiction.
And now that the words have been taken away, it just emphasizes how easily we can all tell — trans activists just as much as the rest of us — what someone’s true sex is, usually just by looking at them.
I imagine a scenario with a police lineup: four men and one rather masculine-presenting woman are lined up for a witness to identify.
Cop asks the witness, “Is one of these five men the person who robbed you?”
Witness says, “Wait a minute. I see four men and a woman.”
Cop points directly to the woman and says, “No! She’s a man!”
Witness replies, “Well then how did you know which one I was referring to?”
This is such a disingenuous argument.
When black athletes were prevented from playing on professional teams you didn’t hear civil rights advocates wheedling “But it’s only a few — and they’re not going to outperform white players We’re not going to see black athletes dominate any sport.” The arguments was based on the fact that they were just like the white players and if they dominated teams so what? People advancing civil rights didn’t play some bullshit numbers game where it’s implied that yes, if X number of blacks got championships that would be bad but it just won’t happen.
The truth is that if transwomen were to compose 90% of women’s teams and have 95% of the records they would be FINE with that because what — suddenly they’re not women? If TRAs insist no, that would be a problem then give us the magic number. And tell us how you’d fix it now they’re already entrenched in women’s sports.
Yeah, nothing is wrong with trans kids but their bodies causing them excruciating horror because their minds are trapped in them requiring lifelong medical treatment and the cutting out of organs along with a constant need for validation from others or they’ll kill themselves which is perfectly understandable.
We desperately need physical changes and emotional support and continuous reinforcement of our fantasy, but don’t dare call us psychologically ill!
GW @ 7
I did read about a trans-identified female who did one of those genetic heritage tests like 23andMe, and was disappointed that they did not provide Y chromosome information for her. She wondered why the couldn’t fabricate Y chromosome information just because she wanted it.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Culture wars in a […]
@J.A.
And of course, if the Republican take back control of Congress, Democrats won’t ask where *they* went wrong. They’ll blame white women for not towing the line.
Domino, it’s just all us Karens, right? If only we would be properly submissive while they legislate away our rights…
Sackbut @12: Amazing.
And apparently 23andme is totally on the TRA bandwagon:
https://twitter.com/23andme/status/1276591213760655361?lang=en
“We believe that 23andMe should be more inclusive to trans and non-binary customers. This includes being aware of the difference between biological sex and gender identity and thinking about how those traits impact people’s experiences. Learn more:”
GW, yes — that tweet from 23andMe (2020) links to a blog post at 23andMe (2020) written by Jey McCreight, née Jen McCreight, creator of Atheism+ (2012). She has a PhD in biology.
I see you commented with a couple zingers on Ophelia’s post about 23andMe mission creep (2021). My comment at the end of that thread noted that McCreight blogged at 23andMe:
I feel very sad remembering that. I can only guess that she has a fantasy that the right puberty for her would have involved a puberty blocker, testosterone, and maybe surgery. But I don’t see that as science; I see it as technology enabling fantasies like body dissociation.
I remember sitting next to Jen McCreight on a panel and feeling a good deal less womany than what she presented as.