Objectively terrible
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
MADISON – Assembly Republicans passed legislation Thursday that would ban transgender girls and women from competing on high school and college women’s sports teams and bar doctors from providing gender-transition treatment for minors.
Lawmakers approved the three bills in a 63-35 vote, with all Democrats voting against the measures and nearly all Republicans voting for the measures.
…
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has promised to veto the bills.
Girls’ and women’s sports aren’t for girls and women any more, they’re for girls and women and any boys and men willing to claim they are transgender. Do what I may, I can’t see that as anything but unfair to girls and women.
Democrats pushed back on Vos’ claims during an Assembly floor session Thursday and said allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports that match their gender fosters acceptance and belonging.
Does it? Why is it more important to foster acceptance (on the wrong team) and belonging (to the wrong team) than it is to foster fairness and chances for girls and women? Why is it more important to coddle boys who claim to be girls than it is to be fair to girls? Why doesn’t it bother them that it doesn’t harm boys at all but is terrible for girls?
“The fact that legislators are creating an environment that pushes specific groups of children out of existence and sports teams in service to a political agenda is objectively terrible, it’s discriminatory and it’s cruel,” said Rep. Lee Snodgrass, D-Appleton.
Nobody’s pushing anyone “out of existence.” Stop that. Be an adult, not some screamy idiot on Twitter. And which twin has the “political agenda” here? The no side just has the agenda of keeping female sports for female people as opposed to female people plus a selected few male ones.
H/t J.A.
Even if one were to accept the premise that fostering acceptance and belonging for trans people were the most important value, this is not the way to do it. Sex differences in sports are obvious to everyone, lots of people care about sports, and they take place out in the open. As a result, people who haven’t been paying attention to the results of self-ID laws, but were generally tolerant towards trans people, are noticing the problem and becoming less tolerant. This is the wrong battle for trans rights activists to be fighting, purely from a strategic perspective.
There is a new book out that has received extremely favourable reviews from people I respect: ‘The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas & Power in Our Time’, by Yascha Mounk, professor of the Practice of International Affairs at John Hopkins University, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. It arrived yesterday, and I have been skimming it. It is very well and fairly written, shows how the ideas you find in Critical Race Theory, for example, derive from thinkers like Foucault & Deleuze, and addresses the arguments (and fights) over transgender people, among many other things. What I like about Mounk is that he takes arguments, from whatever side, seriously, and addresses them in a responsible and critical manner. He shows also how readily what were originally philosophical positions, the historical reasons for which he clarifies in the course of criticising them, have been reduced to slapstick ideological slogans, such as we see on the internet and in politics, particularly in the USA, Canada, & Britain, and how this derives from the nature of the original philosophical positions (though I never thought, after reading Foucault many years ago, that his ideas could be taken seriously, though some of his insights are worth consideration – his ‘Les Mots et les Choses’ is merely a parody of the Hegelian idea of history that replaces Hegel’s rational progression with a studiedly irrational progression, as Foucault plucks ‘epistemes’ out of thin air and pretends that they determine the course of each new age. (Not that I have much time for Hegel’s idea of history, either.)
Mounck rightly pleads for universalism & humanism. and demonstrates how identity politics actively damages progress towards equality.
Thelibrarian: it’s an unforced strategic error, because even people who DON’T care about sports know that you play sports with your body, and have a vague general sense that cheating is wrong and what’s happening isn’t fair. Most of us who aren’t natural athletes were told at an early age that it’s not the winning but the taking part, and to congratulate the winner politely. Either you kick something over and become Donald Trump, or you get over yourself and accept that sometimes you get beaten fair and square, so it rankles to see the cheating boys and be told that they’re not cheating at all, but brave role models. People might think that Quinn the nonbinary Canadian footballer is a little silly, but nobody thinks there’s anything wrong with Quinn playing on the women’s team, because Quinn is female.
It’s disturbing that every single Democrat in the Wisconsin Assembly voted against these protections for young women and children. Partisanship is certainly at play here, but you’d think that at least one or two Democrats could see how harmful trans ideology is. It will be nice when (if?) this is no longer a hard line issue for Democrats. The criticism from the right about the embracing of trans ideology by the left is well deserved.
Matching their gender. Gender-affirming care. All this confident insistence on the existence of something they can’t define. This incoherent, contradictory piece of mysticism. Certainly there are people who hate the sex they were born with. But that is a mental problem.
It’s sad to see how so many people have embraced this nonsense so wholeheartedly that they’ll put men in women’s sport and pretend they have no advantages; convicted rapists in with female prisoners so as to make the convicted rapists feel better and more comfortable; and drug confused or indoctrinated children with blockers and wrong-sex hormones and even push elective surgeries on them.
Madness.
It’s very difficult for me to continue supporting Democrats for this reason, but there really is no alternative considering all of the other urgent issues of the time. A Democrat who steps out of line on this issue is going to be drummed out. There is a podcast sponsored by the Minnesota party, with the chair as a co-host, and during the last legislative session the tenor whenever the issue of trans legislation came up was that anyone who opposed trans “rights” is a bigoted RW who hates LGBTQ. I had to stop listening to the podcast, but it was getting boring anyway.
I don’t know how we are going to get out of this. I look for allies but we have no way to identify each other. One positive sign is that during zoom meetings fewer and fewer people include their pronouns with the names, so, maybe someday?
Democrats can’t reject gender ideology right now because they desperately need the votes of 20-30 year olds college grads who believe in gender ideology, and those voters are fickle. The best that can be hoped for is that Democrats will drag their feet on things like revising Title IX to make “gender” equivalent to “sex” when it comes to sport, because Democratic strategists know it’s a loser for them with independent voters.
That said, trans activists will continue to keep pushing for trans athletes to compete as the sex they claim to be and for Republicans to pass legislation preventing that. When the transgender fever finally breaks (and it will because reality always wins) hopefully Democrats will regain their senses.
[…] a comment by Tim Harris on Objectively […]
I just make sure to vote in the primaries and hopefully get the least worst Democrats elected.
Hopefully, Mike @6. The pronoun silliness has been pushed into every segment of business and government now, even though a relatively miniscule amount of people have occasion to deal with anyone who would be suicidal about pronouns, much less ruin their day. They just want to have power over how people perceive them. Being “misgendered” comes with the territory. Too bad.
I’m disgruntled (to say the least) about how we are forced into this gauntlet of Biden vs. Trump again too, when there must be any number of more qualified and better potential candidates in a country of 350 mil. It’s the same in the lower elections. No alternative is right, and no solution.
Keeping these boys and men in the sports for their sex lets boys and men learn to accept that there is more than one way for boys and men to be. Some boys and men are transgender. They may look a little different from typical boys or men, but if they are good at their sport, it doesn’t matter. There’s your “acceptance” and “belonging,” properly “fostered,” without cheating girls or women.
What are you talking about? Nobody is being “pushe[d] … out of existence.” Nobody’s being killed. Boys and men who call themselves transgender (and any number of other nonsense “identities,” such as “non-binary”) still exist. Boys and men who claim a “gender identity” are also not being “pushe[d] … out of … sports teams.” They have perfectly good boys’ and men’s sports teams to play on: the ones for their sex. There you go: there’s your acceptance and belonging, while supporting fairness and inclusion and acceptance and belonging for girls and women, especially for those girls and women who otherwise would be pushed out of their own sports teams, in favor of cheating boys and men. Sports are meant to foster sportsmanship: you know, the idea that cheating is wrong, for example. That’s at least equally important as “acceptance” and “belonging.”
But they’re demanding “acceptance and belonging” as the sex they’re not. The kind of validation they want isn’t one that “widens the bandwidth” of what a man is; that isn’t what they have in mind, it isn’t the solution they’ve been sold. Like the rejection of third space washroom facilities, it’s female spaces or nothing.
But what are those next to winning, right?
This approach is ultimately unstable and self-defeating. It’s a limited time offer, available to only a few “early adopters.” Only the first cheats are guaranteed victory. Only the initial TiM on a girls’ team will enjoy ogling ops made up entirely of female “teammates.” What happens when it reaches the point where a supposedly girls’ team is made up entirely of boys claiming to be girls? There will be TiMs who don’t make the cut because of other boys. There will be no “validation” if the “girls'” locker room turns into a sausage fest. I don’t think it will get this far. This whole thing depends on the presence of a significant number of captive, compliant girls for TiMs to a) compete and winagainst, b) view and enjoy while undressing, c) get the “validation” that only honest-to-goodness, real, live, actual girls are capable of providing. TiMs themselves will have to do something to prevent this dire outcome from coming to pass. In the meantime, girls (and women) will be cheated out of what is rightfully theirs, and until this ideology falls out of fashion, or is finally defeated, wherever girls and women go to have something just for themselves, TiMs (and their allies) will follow, yelling, screaming and pounding on the doors, demanding male “access” and “inclusion.”
maddog, #11:
Haven’t you heard? Trans people in America today are living under exactly the same conditions as the Jews were in 1930s Germany.
It was expressing a little scepticism about that exact statement that got me banned from WHTM earlier this year. Amazingly, two of those arguing with me claimed to be descended from German Jews who had managed to escape Germany in time, so ‘knew what they were talking about’.
The is no shame and no honesty in the TRAs methods.
@YNNB #12
As to the “needs” of TiMs vis-a-vis entering girls’ teams, part b) is a double winner for the guys. It’s not just that the boys will get to view and enjoy watching the girls undressing, it’s also that they get to make the girls see the boys’ genitals too. It’s a power play and an implicit rape threat.