Which is?
All the points missed at once.
What does “chronically underrepresented in sport” mean? How “represented” should they be? How does Owen Jones know?
Maybe the kind of people who are trans simply tend not to be into sport. Some people aren’t, you know.
But also, clearly being trans throws up some obstacles to being “represented” in sport. It throws up some obstacles that are not incidental and unnecessary, they’re inherent. Sport is all about bodies, and trans people mess with their bodies in ways that may make sport unpleasant or impossible or unfair to others or all three.
How does Owen Jones know that no “trans people” are pretending to be trans to get the advantage? He doesn’t, of course. He simply assumes it, which is pretty stupid for a purported journalist. I for one think Lia Thomas is pretending. I don’t know that, but I suspect it.
And finally, what is this childish “It’s who they are!” nonsense? No, actually, it isn’t who they are; the whole point is that it’s who they aren’t. That’s what “trans” means.
A potential way that women can remain competitive in their own sports!
https://farcornercafe.blogspot.com/2022/04/coming-soon.html
The woke wave completely engulfed any reasonable approach to this issue. Conservatism gets a bad rap but it might have served us well in this situation. Step 1: recognize that women’s sports is an important contributor to women’s well being. Step 2: accept that there are transgender athletes. Step 3: establish an organizational investigation into inclusiveness balanced with physical fairness. Step 4: allow transgendered athletes to participate but not compete in events pending an official ruling. Step 5: implement a science-based solution. It might even involve some sort of handicapping based upon enhancements gained from male physical forms.
I’d just stop at Step 1. As for the rest, there are female athletes and males who are pretending to be female athletes. Women, who are adult human females, need their own sports because men do have a physical advantage over women. It is not up to women to placate men who are pretending to be women regarding women’s sport.
In case you can’t tell, I’ve had it with all the gender gobbledygook, like trans-this and non-binary-that, not to mention cis-whatever. There are just women and men who pretend to be women. All the jargon around this issue just serves to obfuscate that reality.
They (and, really, we’re only talking about TIMs here) can both keep feeling whatever they like to feel and continue to play the sports they love. Nobody is suggesting they can’t. Nobody has suggested that Emily Bridges can’t bicycle anymore. Bridges can even compete at bicycling. Nobody has even suggested that Emily Bridges can’t continue to feel like a woman.
The problem isn’t in what the men who identify as trans women feel or do, it’s in what they insist other people feel and do. They are perfectly free to imagine they are women, and perfectly free to play whatever sports they like. But when these TIMs insist that women feel they are also women, and that women let them into women’s sports competitions, they’ve gone too far.
Other people also get to feel and do things. And men don’t get to control women all the time.
Too long for a t-shirt. Darn.
@3: If they could compete in the men’s race, and all the while imagine that they are women, shouldn’t that be validating for them to feel kick-ass? Imagine that, a woman winning in the men’s competition — that sounds amazing! If it’s really all about validation, and not about, say, cheating, shouldn’t they want to compete against, and win against, the men?
Some of them may well be sincere and not deliberately, consciously cheating (because trans ideological rationalizations have turned their brains to pastel pink and blue goo), but that doesn’t change the fact that males aren’t females. And females aren’t males with low testosterone.
@GW #5
My point exactly. It’s a false dilemma. It’s simply untrue that they have “to choose between being who they feel to their very core, and the sport they love.” They can “transition” all they want, and “feel to their very core” all they want; just do so in the men’s division. See? Not being “made to choose.”
Instead of women being forced to lose their sports, let men be forced to get used to men-who-say-they-are-women in the men’s sports. Problem solved, no cheating.
Trans athletes, by which I assume he means couch potatoes that identify as athletes, ought to be poorly represented in (competitive) sport. Because they’re couch potatoes.