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Blurred posted:If this thread has become a place for people to ask questions / expose their ignorance about transgender people, then there's something I've often wondered but have never found an appropriate time to ask. Basically, it's this: what's the relationship between being transgender and gender essentialism? The answer is: it’s complicated and no one really knows and once you unlock the Pandora’s box of realizing that the default gender binaries were never well defined in the first place and neither were the default sex binaries you are in for an exciting world of identity crisis and/or a playground of social construction. This website is a pretty great introduction to some of the concepts at play https://genderdysphoria.fyi
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Apr 8, 2022 12:01
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 12:28 |
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The fundamental problem is that sport relies on socially constructed divisions and constraints with precise meanings (the rules and regulations) to create interesting and competitive tranches of people but gender was never well-defined. Shot clocks, field dimensions, scoring systems, illegal holds, banned or required uniforms, age groups, weight classes, and gender divisions are all examples of rules created to enable competitive displays of physical excellence. Every sport has different sets of rules and those rules are under constant renegotiation. None of this is natural (whatever that means). Once the rules are in place, people compete and—in very serious circumstances—push to the edges of the rules to eek out every advantage. If you have weight classes, highly competitive athletes do everything they can to be the highest weight (of muscle) they can and then shed as much water weight as possible to just slip just under the limit on the weigh-in day. If you have age classes, people born just before the cut off have an advantage over people born just after the cut off. As it turns out, one of the tranches that has been used (sex/gender) is extremely poorly constructed and imprecise because most people have been under the mistaken impression that gender is a natural and clearly divisible binary. It’s not. Faced with this discovery, most officiating organizations have been reluctant to give up the division and so have been forced to hack together increasingly obviously arbitrary cut off points. Fun fact! There is a healthy dose of racism involved in these controversies too. See the case of Caster Semenya. https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/5/3/18526723/caster-semenya-800-gender-race-intersex-athletes Highly competitive sport is about exceptional physical specimens with exceptional training, discipline, and gear. Some factors of Michael Phelps‘ success are that he has unusual arm length and he was allowed to wear the now banned LZR Racer swimsuit. Semenya was forced to take testosterone suppressants which is kind of like arguing that Phelps should have had to shorten his arms. Assuming that we actually understand how much testosterone contributes to performance. And that’s before getting to questions about trans athletes. The entire thing is a mess and bigots have discovered that they can make political gains by parading trans kids around as freaks and cheaters. It’s gross and dumb and I wish people who saw themselves as intelligent would do a little more to raise their sophistication about these questions.
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Apr 10, 2022 01:35
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When I taught debating to high schoolers, a principle for how we picked topics was “reasonable people can reasonably disagree.” I am ‘new’ to D&D culture but “I wanted to make a honeypot for transphobes” seems like a bad basis for a debate or discussion thread.
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Apr 10, 2022 13:08
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Part of what’s so frustrating about these discussions is that we smoothly move from “in what way can trans youth be enabled to participate in the ordinary extra-curricular activities that are part of growing up” to “how does gender show up in the ultra competitive extremes of elite sport” as if these were the same question.
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Apr 11, 2022 17:52
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Dr. Stab posted:Let's check in on how this issue is being addressed in the real world. Imagine growing up knowing that the entire groaning apparatus of a legislative system—the lawyers, aides, subcommittee secretaries, web servers, legal librarians, catering, regulation drafting interns, scheduling procedures, all of it—was activated to write and pass a bill that said “gently caress you, in particular.” The real world expression of these debates is sanitized human sacrifice in the name of community building. The lives of an incredibly small number of people are devastated in order to make a much larger number of people feel scared and then powerful.
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Apr 16, 2022 14:18
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woozy pawsies posted:I’m being serious here with this line of questioning, I know it’s thrown around by assholes with bad intentions, but I am very curious what you think. I am a man who has enjoyed all the socioeconomic benefits of being perceived as one my whole life, and I have enjoyed (if they exist) the physiological benefits of training as one in powerlifting. If there was a powerlifting competition today that had “men” and “women” divisions, and I started to consider myself a woman today, would it be fair competitors for me to compete in the “women” division? My answer is: Who knows? Because I don’t think we understand enough about the complex mix of biology and social construction to know what would have changed about you in this hypothetical. If this hypothetical is “everything up until now about my biology and internal life is the same but ‘click’ oh I just decide that I’m a woman” that doesn’t really match most experiences I’ve encountered about what it feels like to be in denial about being transgender and kind of reproduces the transphobic fable about why MTF people are trying to compete in women’s divisions “they just want a leg up and they couldn’t cut it as a real man.” If this hypothetical is “I’m me but actually trans and I lived in deep denial about that and my weightlifting career has been profoundly shaped by unacknowledged gender dysphoria that pushed me to reach for a hyper masculine body shape and now I’m confronting decades of denial and my sense of self is crashing down around me but I paid the registration fee so I guess I’ll still compete” then it gets a lot more complicated about what your performance to this point might have been and how you’d handle the competition itself. What I’m trying to gently point out is that these hypotheticals are impossible to litigate because we don’t really understand enough about what it is to be transgender to accurately model in our minds the kind of alternate world that seems like an easy question. Like, no one’s intuitions are tuned for this.
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Apr 16, 2022 17:23
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TERFs do not need evidence in order to advance their agenda and they will happily twist any anecdote or insinuation into pseudo-evidence. Implementing half-measure oppressions to appease them is not a viable path to a better world. In the event that enough trans athletes are allowed to compete to offer significant statistical evidence and it is discovered that there is some systemic advantage at the edges of the gender binary, sure, I’d be happy to hear from good faith proposals for new ways of slicing up the field by people who know far more than I do about the integrity of the sport. At the moment, as we’ve seen from quotes posted in this thread, the decisions are being made by people who believe things like “developing countries are inbred which gives them an advantage on the field.” So we have a long way to go before the conditions for an honest accounting of how gender plays out in sport.
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Apr 16, 2022 21:01
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I’ll be honest. I had no idea that prisoner sex was an athletic sport.
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Apr 17, 2022 12:31
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In 2001, the American government began torturing people. Because the American people did not see themselves as a nation of torturers, the government called it enhanced interrogation. Waterboarding was the most notorious technique. Prior to 2001, bastions of liberal democracy like the New York Times unequivocally called waterboarding torture. But when the administration started doing it, the paper accepted their framing that there was a question. They hosted Op Eds, published both sides of the argument, and let the debate play out. All the while, people were being tortured. To achieve their ends, the people doing the torture didn’t need to win the argument, they just needed to convince everyone there was a debate. As long as they had that cover, they could keep doing terrible harm. The reason there is a national debate about trans kid athletes is because the bigots want there to be one. When you weigh the hypothetical future harms to cis women against the present real harms to trans kids, you are doing their work for them.
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Apr 17, 2022 14:55
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 12:28 |
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This excellent summary that Woozy posted covers the continual evolution of regulations and testing methods at the Olympic level. https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/shades-of-gray-sex-gender-and-fairness-in-sport/
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Apr 17, 2022 20:52
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