NCAA Announces New Policy: Males with Trans Gender Identity No Longer Allowed in Women's Competition

Here's the thing about the transgender movement, which goes beyond simply fairness in sport, although that's a part of it. There's a central contradiction at the heart of the whole movement's philosophy (if you can even call it that), which simultaneously renders it totally unworkable, but also makes its adherents even more zealous in spouting it.

On the one hand, it takes its cues from "classical" leftist sources--feminism, the civil rights movement, gay rights, etc. It's largely a legal argument, not a philosophical one. It imagines transgender people as a minority of the population that has been oppressed and ignored for far too long, and now demands their right to participate fully in public life "as their true selves" (to use a phrase from a certain very successful middle distance runner who subscribes to this). This argument necessarily depends on the idea that trans people are not the whole population, not even a large part of it. They are a class of people, a class which is demanding their civil rights.

But on the other hand, when you try to press the point and ask questions like "what is a woman?" or "who counts as trans?," the rhetoric shifts from the legal/civil to the philosophical/ontological (or destruction thereof). Gender, they say, is on a spectrum. There is no male/female binary, only our "performance" of them. These are the Judith Butlers. But here's the thing--if gender is a spectrum, then everyone is potentially a trans person. It doesn't matter if you're the paradigmatic example of your own gender, like a Grace Kelly or a Paul Newman. You're just performing your gender, even if you don't realize it. In this formulation, trans people cannot count as a separate class in any meaningful sense, since everybody is included--it's just those who choose to embrace the spectrum. It's all arbitrary. Furthermore, if it's a spectrum, why is there any significance in transitioning? And if we decide gender by a person's "innate inner sense" as opposed to his or her genitalia, isn't that exactly as arbitrary as deciding it based on genitalia over innate inner sense? It's all arbitrary.

The point is, it is either 1 or 2, but they want both. It can't be a set legal class/category AND ALSO an arbitrary Heraclitan river of flux.

These two sides are irreconcilable, which is why I suppose many love to embrace and evangelize it.

She hates men though.

We'll if they actually enforce it. My assumption is that those who aren't reported into the NCAA won't ever get looked at and people don't want to look like douchebags unless the kid is nattys caliber

Well written. And nice mention of Heraclitus. Not a name I think you hear associated with this debate very often. "Trans debate focused on Heraclitus..."

And yes, if there is nothing essentially male or female (according to activists), then what are they aspiring to transition into in the first place. If they believe there can be no scientific or normative definition of male or female, then how can they be or become male or female?

But that was essentially the "don't ask, don't tell" era. If you were under the radar, living your life, most people were pretty tolerant and didn't make a big deal out of it. Nobody cares if the person in 98th place at an all-comers meet doesn't carry their birth-certificate around with them. "You do you" in those cases.

But when Lia Thomas destroyed the whole NCAA and bragged about it, it changed the debate considerably.

Open image

RIT one is back at RIT and obviously off test suppressors as "she" is running PRs on 200 meter flat tracks while getting 4 second wins

No not well written at all. IF colors are a spectrum, I could still use the word transitioning when altering the color of something. The Heraclitus reference is irrelevant, and did nothing but impress you and come across as pretentious.

Trump won - f'uck your feelings

Apologies for the perceived pretension in my tone--if you would like, feel free to reread my post and simply close your eyes at the mention of that particular philosopher.

As for your note about a color spectrum, it's not my idea, but the Butlers and those who are the intellectual vanguard of this movement. If you change something from blue to red, yes, that counts as a "transition" but the point of the "spectrum" image is not that something is EITHER blue OR red, but that there are seas of greens, purples, indigos, in between, and who knows where we all land on it (or even what is the authoritative voice that decides when someone has authentically "landed" on his/her/their place on the spectrum. Is it the person's inner, ineffable feeling? Is it the parents? The delivery nurse in the hospital room? The priest? Who knows?) For a person "transitioning," then the binary suddenly matters greatly.

The point is that there is one facet of the movement that demands that trans people be taken as a separate, distinct legal class, and another part of the movement that maintains that everyone is a potential "trans" person, so no such legal class can exist.

I was a little surprised by how quickly the NCAA reacted, but it tells you that the NCAA thought this was the right thing to do the whole time and were just waiting for the political cover to do it.

You're in such a lather that you're mixing up two entirely different things: Trump's executive orders and the new NCAA policy.

The "sex assigned at birth" lingo appears in the new NCAA's new policy, not in any of the recent directives from the Trump White House or other documents from the Trump admin.

The EO that Trump signed on January 20 - "Defending Women from Gender Ideology and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" - says that sex is determined and fixed at conception.

The EO Trump signed yesterday - "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" - uses the definitions given in the January 20 EO, not the "sex assigned at birth" nonsense that appears in the new NCAA policy.

It feels weird that this has been a political debate for a while. I get that people hyped it up as a liberal position, but as someone on the left myself, I have met maybe one person ever who supported it.

Crazy that it took an executive order imo.

OK but what about people who are asked to identify as white, black or something else? These can be legal distinctions, no, and yet you can have a black person who is lighter skinned than our orange President, although, forgive the jest, there is quite a spectrum of people in terms of their shade who identify as black, for example, although admittedly it would be almost unheard of to say one is transitioning in this sense. If you want to say they are trying to have their cake and eat it too, then it seems one should follow the science, if the science indeed can point the way.

What the hell type of Trumptard garbage is this ?? wtf

A fully transitioned trans-man would be taking testosterone and therefore ineligible to play on any women's teams or any sports teams for that matter.

I just copied & pasted the NCAA's new policy so others could see what it says. I am not parroting or endorsing any of the wording.

I agree that generally speaking, there's no such thing as "sex assigned at birth." The sex of children isn't assigned at/after birth, it's observed and recorded. Everyone is born with their sex already well-established. And except for rare cases of certain DSDs in particular circumstances, the sex observed and recorded early in life is almost always accurate

Also, for several decades now, it's been common for HCPs and parents to know the sex of children long before they're born. In many places, it's the norm for pregnant women who receive basic prenatal care to get fetal scans that can tell the sex of developing offspring in the second trimester, and it's becoming increasingly common for pregnant women to undergo prenatal genetic testing in first trimester too. (I had prenatal testing at 8-9 weeks, and my kids are over 30 now.)

But in any event, the sex of human offspring is determined at fertilization by the DNA inherited from the parents by way of the egg cell and the sperm cell the mother and father contribute.

Because sex/gender is quite different from race. Race, as you correctly point out, does exist on a "spectrum" in a way that gender absolutely does not. A person can be biracial/mulitracial ("nonbinary" as concerns race, if you want), but a person cannot be "nonbinary" as concerns sex/gender.

For one, race is heritable, which is actually the necessary condition for it being something of a spectrum (I say "something like," because, as you correctly write, there are legal, and I would also add cultural and historic reasons for differentiating among races). A person is not denying his or her own biology and nature by switching legal categories if they already are in that category to begin with and just wants the legal status/recognition of that already real fact. E.g., if a person with half-black genes wants to "identify" as black, say on the census, there is no "transition" to be had at all, because that person is already part-black--he or she is just choosing to emphasize one part of the genes/culture that they already have.It's a legal recognition of an already-exisiting reality, not a changing of that reality. But if that person is not black at all, and chooses to identify as such (like a Rachel Dolezal), we would of course say that person is lying/crazy.

Sex is not heritable, obviously. The child of a white person and a black person can meaningfully say she is both/and or either/or, but with sex you really are either/or. To "transition" in this sense is not to seek legal recognition for an already-real fact, but to change that fact entirely--to transition. Of course, you could say that the trans person was always-already a man/woman, and is now choosing to live like that. But then that raises the question, who/what determines it? Why should we privilege someone's "inner felt sense" of what their gender is, a sense which is accessible only to that person, but not his/her biology?

Either way, the point I'm making is that if sex/gender is a spectrum like race, then it cannot be treated as a "classical" civil rights movement. You cannot say "we trans people" without including everybody in that grouping.

The woman kicking at Vandy was a very unusual covid-year situation - no kickers on the team available (covid reasons, and the punter was the only holder) and she was covid-eligible because her soccer team had been tested recently for the SEC tournament and other students weren't eligible because they had been off campus for Thanksgiving break.