First this, from a few years ago:
My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit. – Peter BoghossianStudents at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.
Friendship ends over my sticking to GC principlesI've learnt that even certain common ground doesn't mitigate for a drastic chasm in temperament on one of the biggest conundrums of the age.
There are similarities (e.g., "intellectual", "dismissive of all things conservative") to someone I've been fond of and would like to have called a friend, though even after all these years on earth I'm still wondering what friend means. [Probably means you don't have many. - Ed.]
We've never talked about trans stuff(!), or as I should really put it, women's rights. Nevertheless she's aware of my opinions, as am I hers.
I don't actually know to what extent our distant positions on these matters contributed to a break we may or may not have had. What I do know is that her tactics, when used by anyone else, would instantly repel me.
Friendship does good things for your soul but bad things for your objectivity.
. . .
Here are a few tweets which made me laugh today:
https://twitter.com/MockKing_J/status/1672679179379171328https://twitter.com/IngreySherri/status/1672682933398929408 (too good not to share again)
https://twitter.com/LeoTracey1/status/1672184190903762945These not so much:
https://twitter.com/BeullahGC/status/1672784447052349440https://twitter.com/Spacecrafting76/status/1665333961575342082https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1668727775815954433When it comes to tweets I always take stock of the source. For example, that last one comes from 'DeSantis War Room', and Leo Tracey has MAGA in his bio. Thus is the pretence that this is all a rightwing plot maintained.
ButterflyHatched cont'd:thirdfiddle: as I understand it a biological essentialist is someone who thinks that women should be carers and stay at home and have babies and men should be bankers and soldiers and engineers etc. Your biology (sex) determines your role in life. Kind of ultra conservative.
But trans activists are prone to throwing the term at women who think your biology (sex) determines your sex.
IcakethereforeIam: that's ridiculous. How could anyone spend 5 minutes on FWR and think that's what we believe!
FlirtsWithRhinos: Well, if someone is blotting out the acceptance of inconvenient information to the degree necessary to believe that body sex and the inequality of human reproduction is irrelevant to the different experiences and outcomes of men and women and that actually it's all down to a mysterious inner somethingness that simultaneously can't be measured or perceived by others but also requires special rights and mitigations to mitigate its social consequences while body sex, which everyone can perceive and react to, does not....
...once someone is performing the complex dance of filters, denial, projection and cognitive dissonance to do that, merely believing gender critical feminists to be saying the exact opposite of what they are saying is hardly even a blip on the fail scale.
Ever wonder why I spend most of my time on this board
quoting people?
The Legal Foundation of Women’s Sports Is Under Fire – NYTNACF's pick of the letters:
It's sad that we even have to debate this in 2023, so reading Mr. French's piece I feel a mixture of frustration and gratitude that he explained why women's sports are compromised by the inclusion of males.
The only thing people need to consider to see why the issue of trans inclusion in sports is blatantly unfair is the fact that it effects only one sex: females. Gender identity consistently saves the negative consequences for women & girls: in sports, as Mr. French discusses here, and on to more brutal realities such as when fully-intact violent males are being transferred into women's prisons (keep an eye on the federal lawsuit Chandler v. CDCR, about women harmed by California bill SB 132).
No boys or men in sports are worried about losing a spot on a team to a female, or a place in a tournament, a record time, or a trophy. None.
Additionally, it bothers me as a mother of daughters that girls are supposed to change in locker rooms with male onlookers now, without anyone asking for their consent. Are Democrats past #MeToo now? They must be if they don't see that they're forcing girls to submit themselves to sexual harassment by sharing locker rooms with males. Just recently a swimmer from NC who competed against Lia Thomas (of UPenn), shared that she and other girls chose to change in a storage closet rather than change in front of Thomas at the NCAA championships. It's insane that female athletes are being so disregarded by the sporting bodies, and by Democrats.
The vast majority of people understand the argument that allowing transgender athletes, in particular men who have or are transitioning to become women, to participate against women who are born women is deeply unfair and goes entirely against the spirit of Title IX.
The only reason we're even having this debate is because the media is enraptured with the .02% of people who define themselves as trans and are completely willing to throw women under the bus as a consequence.
There's something deeply misogynistic about expecting women to compete against men's bodies, with their bigger hearts, lungs and skeletons - and to be HAPPY about losing too.
It's sex - it's most definitely sex.
This sums up the social and political goals of trans activism perfectly:
"Because I feel that I am a woman, you must treat me as if I actually am, otherwise you are transphobic. As I insist on participating as a woman in your groups, gatherings, or spaces you also must forgo discussing anything about your female socialization, female anatomy, or female functions because it hurts my feelings. It hurts my feelings because I was neither socialized as a girl nor am I capable of experiencing what the female body experiences from cradle to grave.
"But if you speak about this I am then reminded that I am not female, and therefore not really a woman. My experience of feeling like a woman must not be invalidated by your experiences of being a woman, therefore I will shame you for being female, teach you in university to estrange your body from your mind, make your distinct physicality and oppression that is specific to your sex irrelevant in the laws of the land or anything that names our differences until there is only the mind.
"Now only how I think about your body is real. Mind over body. Mind over matter. Spirit over matter/mater/ mother. A woman is anyone who says they are a woman. My word is now more real than your mitochondrial DNA. Accept that by my word, you really don't exist." - Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure.
This is dispiriting:
“The transgender athletes intervened … with the aid of the A.C.L.U.”
A once great organization has lost its way. From an indispensable champion for civil rights, the ACLU has morphed into a proponent of ideological extremism.
David French writes this column very carefully, and that’s certainly understandable. He doesn’t want to end up like a JK Rowling who recently asserted that, for expressing her belief in biological sex, she has received enough death threats to wallpaper her entire house.
But the subtext of this column is fairly obvious and well-known, if not in fact infamous: David French is adopting a position that is supported by science and embraced by a majority of the public - but it’s a position that’s opposed by some very vocal secular fundamentalists.
And the ACLU has decided to place themselves against science, against the rights of women, and on the side of the fundamentalists who issue death threats against anyone who dares to oppose them.
David French: bravo.
ACLU: for shame.
The atmosphere in the comments section reminds me of public sentiment about interracial dating circa 1950.
I'm seeing a lot of gut-level certainty that two groups were biologically separate by nature and not intended to mix.
This won't age well.
@Laura so your position is that there are no biological difference between men and women? That science denialism won’t age well.
@Laura are you an octogenarian who remembers racial attitudes from the 1950s? I’d love to hear more if you have first hand experience.
But a main difference I see is that biology ain’t bigotry.
I am saddened to see the growing fashionability of treating dignified, visible participation of LGBTQ people in society as if it were a "problem" or an "injustice". This comment section seems to be Exhibit A.
Trans teens' participation in sports is a non-problem.
There are precious few trans boys and girls who compete at an elite level in school sports.
Our society is diverse. While most people are cis, our society also includes trans people and intersex people (hermaphrodites). The few trans and intersex teens who play in high school sports have just as much right to participate as cis teens. They are every bit as entitled to play.
(Have you considered the alternative? If trans girls are ostracized from the girls' team, they will also be ostracized from the boys' team. Are you proposing that schools create a separate "non-cis" sports program? That would be exactly on a par with race-based discrimination: it would be just as stigmatizing, impractical, ignorant, and mean).
No one is entitled to a trophy. No one. No one has an inherent entitlement to win -- not you, not me, and not the plaintiffs in the case described.
The "right" to win is not a right at all; it's disguised self-entitlement. A denial of that "right" is just the cookie crumbling; we can't all win all the time. By contrast, the right to participate in federally-funded school sports is an actual right, and denying that right is a denial of equality under the law.
@Laura Your perspective here is Exhibit A of why many of us on the left are becoming disaffected and disillusioned by our fellow liberals. The "progressive" wing of the liberal movement has become devoted to this carte blanche idea that anything anyone wants to do based on abstract factors like feelings and "my truth" should be permitted without question or debate, lest we "discriminate" against any particular group. This is of course utter nonsense because it draws no boundaries as to where such "freedom" must end. In other words, anything and everything must be permitted, otherwise one is "phobic" and "violently oppressing" a "marginalized (questionable claim) group". Can you not see the chaos and damage that such a free-for-all social policy would have?
Liberals used to be the "party" of women. The left fought for women's rights on every front. Until now. Suddenly when biological men started to claim women's spaces as their own---the ultimate act of patriarchy---based on just uttering some magic words like "I identify as....", the left threw women under the bus to appease those men whose motivations for intruding into women's spaces are questionable at best. And then, rather than have a honest and good faith debate about the issue, the left appeals to emotional blackmail by screaming "Bigot! Transphobe! Right-winger!' at anyone who stands up for natural women. Keep alienating the people that we need to help liberals win elections. See how that works out in the long run.
What if we shift the terms of the debate from winning/losing to having full opportunity to experience the myriad benefits gained from participating in sports? Why do we argue as if these benefits can be rightly restricted to privileged elite athletes?
The underlying purpose of Title IX, after all, was to make these benefits more widely available to all. From this perspective what matters is how these benefits can be most widely and completely experienced, that is, how they can be most equitably distributed. The critical factor becomes access to opportunities for participation, skill development, and meaningful competition.
By focusing on the widest possible distribution of benefits from sports, we invert the currently dominant pyramid, replacing the narrow summit of elite performance with a broader, more inclusive base of participation. We don't do away with elite performance, but we do adjust priorities. That seems something at least considering in an era of increasing social isolation and decreasing levels of physical and motor skills.
@John The object of competitive sports is to play your best and beat the competition. That's what makes it so alluring. You test your strength, agility, speed and guile against another person or team and you try to win because there is great satisfaction in winning. And it doesn't matter what level you are playing at and against.
Your proposal really shows a lack of understanding about why people play competitive sports. People perceive the "benefits" of sports differently, but if you promise people merely the right to participate without the satisfaction of winning, you won't have many people playing. You can tell people to focus on the tangential "benefits," but it will be a different kind of sport and one that is less pleasurable.
You sound like one of the people who don't want their children to have to experience losing. You obviously don't know that losing can be the best teacher because it reveals your inadequacies, weaknesses, deficits, etc. It forces you to improve if you want to keep playing. If you don't want to lose, you get better so you can win, because, as I said, that is where most of the pleasure in sport is.
No one questions men's right to rise to the top of their sport based on a desire to win. Yet those in favor of trans participation argue that women should be in it for fun, or to be nice. As usual, we're told that women need to learn to share. But anyone who watches women's tennis, from the Williams sisters to Iga Swiatek know that female athletes are in it to triumph. Watching Petra Kvitova win the championship in Berlin today, clenching her fist after every successful point is a lesson in competitiveness. Women are allowed to play sports because they want to win. And letting biological men into women's sports is to deny women and girls the same opportunity available to men.
I was in High School when title IV passed. My school had a boy’s swim team that swam and competed in the spring semester. They didn’t have a girls team because the swim coach was the football coach. Girls teams competed in the fall, when the coach was busy coaching football. To comply with title IV, the school opened the swim team up to girls.
As a good swimmer who had competed on swim teams throughout my life, I joined the swim team. I quickly learned that no matter how much training I did, I would always place last competing against boys. It diminished my enjoyment of the sport, and sapped me of the will to train hard. After all, why bother when the guy who barely knew how to swim at the beginning of the year could easily beat me?
Females should not have to compete against males. Identifying as a female doesn’t erase the biological advantages of being born male.
Changing one's sex is a non-starter, so a term had to be invented to signify what could be changed. Of course feelings can be changed, but that is not what activists want; rather they want society to acquiesce in the magical belief that strong feelings can lead to a change of sex. In effect, they want to force the rest of us to accept religious dogma, while at the same time casting aspersion on anyone who subscribes to traditional religious dogma. What a ruse!
Creating categories will create still more categories like patterns of tree branches from the trunk to the smallest branch, repetitions or fractals are created. This has materialized into that slippery slope, where now there is no way to stop sliding. Some are now saying that there is a spectrum where male or female genders are placed. This has become web, a tangle web that no one can correct, and it is all our own making. A prestigious university attempted to define a lesbian as a non-male attracted to other non-males, this logic is hard to follow, and that is where we are at the moment. The attempt to fit transgenderism into the binary concept is like tracing the path of a single spaghetti in a bowl of spaghetti. Eventually you'll give trying, because you no longer care.
[Metaphor overload - Ed.]
It's because I like having voices other than my own here, even if they are almost always ones I agree with. I suppose it also adds to the illusion of a forum to some extent.
It's a little like having the radio or the TV on in the background.
If anyone ever did show up who strongly disagreed with me, I'd probably disappoint them. From
TWAM, my first foray into all this:
I'm not a debater. I like listening to ideas and having them bubble out in other ways. Doesn't help move a thread such as this along, I know, which was why I was pleased to actually have two very different people posting here. The three of us are of three generations (maybe two and a half), which gave it even more potential to be interesting.
That's right – there were three of us! Then I blinked.
Islands don't complain.
Poll