What are the terms this time?
Transgender and sports
- Thread starter Beer
- Start date
Making you angry isn't as good as changing your mind, but it's good enough to show how empty your position really is.
Funny, I don't see as many Christians/Mormons as there used to be. Perhaps you're only bothered by pious assholes you disagree with?
As I've made perfectly clear, multiple times, I don't claim to be any less racist, transphobic, etc., than any other white, straight, cis, man of my age. The reason it doesn't bother me, like it bothers you, likely has to do with that self-awareness, and the understanding that I'm trying to improve, not defend myself.
Identifying someone as a "bigot" isn't name-calling, it's a service I am happy to provide.
Your loss.
In this specific instance I'm with you. I think One Brow's post was a little much. I think this is a complex issue and it's an issue that is very, I don't really have the right word on the tip of my lounge, but it's a rather novel (in the virus sense, lol) issue in that many of us are dealing with the concept for the very first time and we don't really know what to make of it.
I've had the fortune to have met a handful of transgender kids in their late teens. It's been a mix of female and male transgender kids, but it has been a little more frequent for me to meet a female transgender kid.
I've said it before but none of these kids is "militant" about trans issues. They are overwhelmingly homebodies and I think pretty much all of them decided to opt for online or homeschooling fairly shortly after coming out.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic. I have struggled to understand the entire transgender phenomenon. My child (and many of these kids share this particular doctor) has had the fortune to have who I think might be the foremost transgender doctor in the area. This is a person who in the 70s studied under one of the foremost transgender doctors in Sweden (I'm like 90% sure it was Sweden) and has been in the field for a very long time. In order for my child to be seen by this doctor it was required that all legal guardians had to go to the first appointment and provide consent for treatment. This doctor expressed their (I'm using neutral pronouns but this doctor is not transgender and is fine with gender specific pronouns) astonishment in the explosion in people identifying as transgender. They really were shocked by the massive increase in the last decade or so.
So this is an issue that many of us are trying to understand and trying to figure out how we feel about it. I'm right there in that struggle.
I don't think it's useful to draw lines in the sand and put labels on people who are in a different place on the issue right now. For me the most important part is to simply establish that transgender people exist, it's about them, not about you, feel how you want but recognize that these people have a right to exist and a right to pursue their own individual happiness so long as that doesn't infringe on the rights of anyone else, at the very least. I hope that violence against them, which is outrageously high, will fall, and that fewer and fewer transgender people will be killed simply for being transgender. I think we're in a phase right now where that is priority #1 for transgender people and the people close to them.
I do not need transgender advocates who inadvertently increase hostility towards transgender people.
The Thriller
Well-Known Member
Well stated.
I have an evolving view on trans sports. I’m open to arguments for and against their participation in sports. But it needs to be fact based and not just empty arguments easily identifiable as bigotry as many of these debates devolve into.
At the end of the day, I want trans people to feel valued and welcomed. They are a marginalized population and I imagine life can be pretty damn hard for them. I want all athletes to have good and fair experiences. I hope people treat them they way they’d want to be treated.
Like I said, I’m open to having an evolving opinion on trans sports. I don’t have many or any of the answers here.
The Thriller
Well-Known Member
This is also a really good post and I appreciate your sincerity.
I agree with all of that post, except for "increase".
Al-O-Meter
Well-Known Member
"Explosion" is an understatement. Now 21% of Gen Z is identifying as LGBT. Our society holds victimhood up as a virtue and toxic masculinity as a sin. If you dare question the designation of LGBT as putting someone in a victim class and deserving of compensatory extra privilege then someone like One Brow will be around shortly to call you a bigot. There is power in that and who doesn't want to be powerful? Alex Jones was a bit off base. It is vitriol like that posted by One Brow that is turning the frogs gay.
The LGBT people were always there, just scared to self-identify.
Besides the utter nonsense (I haven't read a single civil-rights activist who encourages feeling like a victim), why shouldn't toxic behavior automatically be sinful behavior?
You have to be pretty dense to not notice how LGBT people are victimized.
What's the extra privilege to which you refer? Please be specific.
There is no power in being LGBT, and the only power in calling someone a bigot is over people who don't want to be bigots, but nevertheless are.
Actually, it's various types of chemical run-off, although it's not quite "gay".
Al-O-Meter
Well-Known Member
To start, there is the privilege that is the topic of this thread in moving from the men's division to compete against biological women where the competition isn't as fast and having an army of supporters who will call your detractors bigots. It goes far beyond that. Identifying as LGBT makes you a Title VII protected class which includes a raft of federally enforced legal privileges including being much harder to fire from a job. If you are a straight, white, male who is a bad person to a baker and that baker refuses to make you a cake then you're out of luck. If you are the same bad person to a baker but identify as LGBT, the baker cannot refuse your business without risking a lawsuit and if the legal fees weren't bad enough there will be an army along shortly to cancel your business by calling you a bigot in online reviews.
You toss around "biological" a lot for someone who shows large misunderstandings of biology.
It's a privilege to compete against other members of your gender? If so, that's a privilege possessed by well over 90% of the population, and is in no way an "extra" privilege. I asked what the extra privilege was, and you responded with an ordinary one just about everyone has. Can you name an extra privilege or not?
It's a privilege to compete against people whose bodies are less athletically developed than your own? In every other situation in sports, we *celebrate* this privilege. We don't condemn Lebron James for his athleticism, Gobert for his height, Mitchell for his speed, etc., even though the competition isn't as athletic/tall/fast. Further, there's every reason to believe that they had many of these advantages *from birth*. Why should one set of athletic advantages granted from birth be lauded, and the other condemned?
Complete and utter nonsense. It's just as easy to fire an LGBT person as any other person. You just have to document the reasons, like you would for any other person. What you can't fire them for is merely being LGBT.
If person A a bad person to the baker, and the baker serves other LGBT patrons who aren't bad people, then not only does the baker have a ready-made defense, but also they can counter-sue person A for damages from the false claim, knowing any jury would be filled with people like you, who feel aggrieved and want to take LGBT people down a peg or two.
I think you listing a bunch of posters and then collectively calling them all bigots was... unproductive.
I think many of the posters on that list did not qualify for that label.
I greatly appreciate your perspective and I also greatly appreciate your advocacy.
I also know you well enough (as a jazzfanz poster) to know that you wouldn't want me to pull any punches or hold back any criticism even when you are the subject of it.
Taking fence sitters and telling them that they are your enemy is a mistake, imho. Especially on an issue like this, which as I expressed, is new and complicated and confusing for many people. As people work through how they feel about this issue is I want to provide them a landing place that allows them to recognize the legitimacy of a transgender person existing but doesn't demand that they like it and become an advocate for it.
gandalfe
Well-Known Member
I agree with you, generally, but this doesn't seem like fencesitting to me (admittedly, this was posted after One Brow's call out, so an argument can be made that it was motivated by a perception of vitriol by OB):
One person said that. I said that many posters on that list didn't deserve to be labeled as bigots... I didn't say that none of them did.
Possibly. I find it unlikely that it pushed anyone where they were not already going.
Of course. If anything, you're being too nice about this criticism right now, compared to what I guess your feeling.
I don't recall encouraging anyone else to advocate, and insincere advocacy wouldn't be helpful anyhow.
While I respect your position that people need time, the truth is that people are suffering, especially those who, unlike our children, are not safe enough to even be out. While I like the courage and persuasiveness of King, I find his Letter from a Biringham Jail sufficient that I can not agree to use your tactics.
gandalfe
Well-Known Member
Well said. (Altho I was about to say "Well said, sir" and realized I didn't know if sir was the correct honorific, and so was going to do "sir/ma'am/other," and then thought that would be kind of ****ish, and then considered "gentlebeing" instead, and then thought that sounded mocking. The hardest thing about this stuff for me is trying to figure out what people want to be called - but the other side of that is that 90+% stick with traditional gender identity, so I would hope that if I get it wrong in a case or two people would be understanding if I try to correct myself in the future. If not, then they're either going thru some stuff, or just are jerks anyway, and in either case there's nothing I can do about that. To continue the longest parenthetical of the night, I will just refer to Neil Gaiman's quote: "I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.")
No one expects perfection, and there is nothing wrong with an honest error. Gameface has been fairly clear he's a man. I actually put my pronouns (he/him/his) in my Zoom name.
I'm not being too nice about how I'm feeling. At least not to you. I'm attempting to be too nice to other people so that maybe they won't hold their tongue when someone they know is talking about the evil and destruction that transgender people are causing to our society with a wink and a nod towards how it wouldn't be a bad thing if they all just died or went away.
I'm not being too nice to you at all. I would never pay you such an insult.
gandalfe
Well-Known Member
I have it in my email sig now, mostly because I just moved offices a few weeks ago, so I had to update it anyway. As I tried explaining to someone else, it's not like I actually care what I'm called, but if it makes just 1 person who DOES care feel less self-conscious about putting it in THEIR .sig, well, that seems like a good use of my time. (Even if it's just 1% of the reason they feel comfortable, or 0.1%, whatever, doesn't matter.)
To be honest, my preferred pronoun is actually "you," as I'd rather people talk to me than about me.