The Great Trans Panic

[Pale Rider]

https://road.cc/content/forum/trans-women-are-men-302585

https://archive.ph/bpg1l*

https://twitter.com/jollygoodthen/status/1680921754561138690

Three naked URLs – what an ugly way to start a post!

(Those lyrics need a rewrite, but there's already some stuff to work with. Also, the delayed start makes me feel like Jeremy Paxman. Also also, it's 'county'. I could choose another video, but I'm in too deep now.)

How to tell if you're a coward. An incomplete list:
- Are you a man unwilling to speak up for women affected by trans rights activism?
- Are you staying silent even if there's no personal cost?
- Are you in charge of road.cc's forum?

I have a terrible admission. It's under the spoiler.

terrible admission spoiler

Years ago my wife, on seeing a picture of road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, called him 'girly-boy'. It rated a laugh. I think this is worth posting for two reasons.

1. Nobody is going to read this, begging your pardon.

2. It's a good example of gender coming up in casual conversation. I don't remember exactly how or why she arrived at this Schwarzeneggeresque declaration – some annoyance of mine at him (this?), combined with a less than masculine pose in the shot, was probably the trigger. Once uttered, it couldn't unfit.

We should be ashamed of ourselves for obvious reasons. As this was an entirely private conversation (oops), we gave ourselves a pass.

@1.10

[close]

* I bloody love that site, and not infrequently am the first to get topical stories saved.

[TruthWillAlwaysMatter]

Just a quick "hi"... I'm ex-mumsnet and ex-LFGSS and I think David Kitchen is one of the most despicable misogynistic C U Next Tuesdays I have ever come across.  Fuck him and the evil he thinks he believes, or claims to believe.

[weathered man]

I like your reverse-engineered acronym work; it's a shame your name is too long for the allotted space, which isn't quite as smart as I'd expect it to be, else it wouldn't have allowed that train wreck with the subject heading.*

Can I ask why ex-Mumsnet? Before I hazard a guess…

* At least in desktop view. On the phone it's fine.

[TruthWillAlwaysMatter]

I tend to be blunt online and tend to work on the principle of "if they can't cope with my honestly held views expressed without finesse then getting banned is a risk I'm willing to take". 

LFGSS is somewhere I first went on a long long time ago.  BrokenBetty is a shero and the way velocio denies her right to speak as a woman is just horrible. 


#TruthMustAlwaysWin

#MenRejectingManhood

[sam]

PS. I've merged your last two posts. Can only take so many of these

in one hit.

[weathered man]

UCI bans transgender female cyclists

Nice transphobia, asshole.

The pejoratives are losing their effect.

As was 'trans women', apparently. A refresher:


Needless to say, trans women are men, and should really be 'trans men'. But that ship has sailed.

I guess complete trash humans can be found everywhere

That's one way of describing men who so hate the idea of women having something of their own that they will literally go to court to try and ruin it, yes.

Generally, where transwomen competing in actual women's events aren't "steamrollering" the opposition it's because they're not very good or dedicated male athletes. Austen Killop, only took up cycling 3-4 years ago. Laurel Hubbard, 40-odd. Veronica Ivy, a great big lump. They beat women simply by virtue of their male physiology.

Where you get actual trained athletes, such as the US high school training programmes, male sprinters have declared themselves trans and do steamroller the opposition.

You talk of discrimination, but transwomen are biologically indistinguishable from all the other men. If they're allowed in women's events, it is discriminatory not to let other men compete too. And then women would never win: female world records in most sports are beatable by good amateur men.

But I can't help but feel that, deep down, that's really exactly what you want to see. It's just old-fashioned misogyny, gussied up in an ill-fitting new frock. Trash, you might say.

Transphobia, terf, cis... You've got all these great invented words for basically sane people.

Some patient souls are doing excellent work in the comments section. It's heartening, though aggravating when louts have a bottomless resevoir of of repetitive nonsense.

It just makes no sense to specifically single out transwomen when just looking at results from competitions shows their advantage is really not that great.

Testosterone suppression and HRT does indeed reduce their performance. But they still retain an advantage, as you acknowledge: "their advantage is really not that great", i.e. they still have an advantage.

And this is what the better data we have shows: Trans-MAB with treatment have reduced performance to other men, but retain an advantage over women. They are in their own group as a category really.

Because of that advantage, trans-MAB are heavily over-represented on podiums. They are a tiny fraction of the population, yet an unusual number of women's sports podiums have trans-MAB standing on them. (to my anecdotal observations anyway). 1 trans-MAB on a podium is pushing down hundreds or (if at top elite sports level) many thousands of women, and it's just not fair.

I have every sympathy for people living their lives trying to cope with GD. I support them in living their best life in day-to-day things.

But there is simply no human right for someone who was conferred with the performance benefits of male puberty, to use that push women off podiums in sports categories intended for those without that benefit. It is _unfair_. And frankly it is highly _selfish_ for trans-MABs to do this. It is further ridiculous for the trans community to then turn around and call the general population who generally support trans-rights but disagree with that unfairness "terrorists" or "murderers" - and you are losing the room by doing that.

UCI new policy

Austin's statement reads like they've sacrificed and slogged away at this for decades to achieve some level of success. They took up cycling 2019. Four fucking years ago.

He’s been slogging away in transdecades, bigot!

This position paper from Singletrack World just arrived. It must have been stuck in the pneumatic tube system - I'll call a plumber.

Yet another captured cycling outfit to add to the pile.

(I was searching for a clip from 1984, but that was even better.)

[weathered man]

Old school surreal. Hasn't been updated for our times, sorry.

I also liked this rabbit hole collection. Sadly, the animation is inferior.

Back to more serious stuff (though comics, moving or otherwise, are serious business as far as I'm concerned).

Baker Meant Me and He Meant You Too – Jeni Harvey
Whether witches, suffragettes or terfs: there is always a reason as to why we – she – deserves it. Male violence is not random or isolated, but rather has a purpose, and whether directed at an individual or a particular group, that remains much the same: a tool of social control by which men assert their power, maintain their sense of superiority, and keep women in line. The threat of both physical and sexual violence is used to this end as all women, whether victims or not, become constrained by the fear of what could potentially happen to them if they were to step outside the bounds. If, for example, they were to walk alone freely at night; reject a drunk and overfamiliar stranger at the bar; demand the vote; or state freely their belief that male people are not female people just because they say so. Any and all of the above have, at some point, resulted in a punch in the fucking face.     

As part of this pattern we can see that Baker’s threats on July 8th served as warning to every woman watching – yes, even to those cheering along. For every woman in attendance and every woman viewing the clip open mouthed over the internet, it served as that ultimate attempt at patriarchal control: one meant to ensure our understanding that any step outside the bounds could easily be met with violence and the sound of cheering crowds. Not one single woman hearing that crowd erupt at a man calling for disobedient women to be “punched in the fucking face” could count herself exempt.

Jo is fantastic. Not sure I'd want to arm wrestle her. Here's one of the people she's talking about.



Good conversation going on at the usual place.

. . .

At this point there are no end of overviews on the harms of trans activism. When I saw this one by 'Brad' (not sure why I put that in tongs), I was skeptical. It's actually not bad, if you'll excuse a few too many quotation marks (oh, that's why) and the relentlessly anti-woke framing, which starts to be a turnoff after you've seen it 50 thousand times. I do like the name of his substack.

Brad (American, obviously - or maybe Canadian) didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but we get a dopamine hit when reading things we agree with.

Some of his word choices made me think. Take this:

The crisis of authority ushered in by the cataclysmic inception of the internet has resulted in previously authoritative institutions now lacking confidence in their own ability to lead, and they’ve decided that the trans community is a victimized group that can act as a source of moral authority, even as it erases sex-based rights and undermines the welfare of kids.

'Cataclysmic' set my eyes rolling at first, but it's fair. Anyway, see what you think.