Wise Old Man wrote:
RunRagged wrote:
I never said that girls in HS or young women in college should be making sports policy about this matter or any other. Let them be at the table and have a voice, sure. But to be the only ones to decide? No way.
I think it would be unfair for all concerned to place the responsibility for resolving such matters on people so young because the human brain does not finish developing until age 25-26. And because through no fault of their own, most high school and college students tend to have limited life experience, and are overly concerned with what other people - and particularly their peers - think generally, and think of them specifically.
Most persons who are of HS and college age don't have a full grasp of all the issues at hand - nor enough experience in areas like conflict resolution, policy-making and jurisprudence - to craft policies that are well-thought out, balanced, finely tuned and fair to all parties. As a result, I believe putting such young people in the driver's seat here would be placing an undue burden on them and would result in bad policy.
The policy mess that exists today is the doing of full-grown adults, and the grown-ups should resolve it - not hand it off like a hot potato to still-developing young people who haven't reached full maturity yet and don't have the benefit of being able to draw on a lot of life experience, insights gained from considerable world travel and contact with diverse cultures, and specialized learning and expertise in relevant fields like law, governance, medicine, developmental biology, sports physiology and history.
Ok fair enough.
I’m sure your an accomplished person who has done a great deal for the sport and my daughters should be grateful to you. They are powerful, brave young women. They literally kick a-s and don’t back down. I’m very proud of them and I’m sure you would be impressed. They take after their mother who is a professor of surgery in the #1 university dept of surgery in the US. If you want to see a world full of misogyny, athletics has nothing on surgery. I truly don’t appreciate you calling me names, and that does not further this discussion. You really don’t know anything about me. The feminism of my wife (just checked with her) and my daughters includes trans women. You may not agree with this, or thinks it lacks historical perspective or is regressive in some way. They feel it is progressive. I hope we can arrive at a solution that balances inclusion and competitive fairness and from my perspective the one size fits all approach does not make sense.
I think I've called your views and positions misogynistic, male supremacist and sexist - not you as a person. That's always been my customary practice - criticize the position, not the person. If I have strayed from that practice on this thread today and called you names, I apologize.
But please stop bringing your female family members into this. You're starting to sound like someone who says, "But I can't be prejudiced against [insert group] because I have a [insert group] friend!" Most people on earth have female family members, and we all have mothers. Coming from a woman's body, sharing a bed and life with a woman, and having female children isn't a bulwark against having misogynistic, male supremacist beliefs. Just like being female isn't a guarantee of not having misogynistic and male supremacist views either.
Plus, you just keep repeating "but my daughters agree with me!" and "my daughter is even more insistent than I am that's it's good, just, right, noble and kind to open up female sports to males who make gender identity claims and she and her friends don't care if this harms females either" without advancing your arguments or answering any of the questions I've asked. Adding "my wife agrees with me too and she's a professor of surgery" doesn't expand or elucidate your arguments or make your position any more convincing. And throwing in that she's "a professor of surgery in the #1 university dept of surgery in the US" just comes off as a pathetic appeal to authority by proxy.
Seriously, flip this around: you'd be laughing at me if instead of trying to make a case for my position, I just kept constantly saying "my son who was a college athlete agrees with me," and "my other son who also does sports agrees with me too" then added as if it's the coup de grace, "my spouse, who's a big cheese in spouse's field, agrees too, so your position has to be wrong!"
So how about you address the questions I asked? Starting with: why does all the onus of "inclusion" need to be put on females? Why can't males be the ones to be more accepting, welcoming and "inclusive" of males whose way of dressing, grooming, wearing their hair and "identifying" is different to the norm and who might have some interests that by today's standards might be seen by some people as unconventional for males?
Also, I hate to break it you, but surgeons aren't widely perceived as fonts of knowledge, wisdom and judiciousness regarding matters like sports law, policy and ethics. In fact, when it comes transgenderism specifically, many people believe surgeons are a big part of the problem.
After all, along with male sexologists and male endocrinologists who originally set out to "cure" male homosexuality, it's been arrogant male surgeons like Erwin Gohrbandt, Georges Burou, Stanley Biber and Marci Bowers who've played the major role in creating and spreading the false notion that with enough cutting, stitching and use of artificial means, human males can undergo "sex change" and become transformed into women in the first place. This notion and the operations performed by many surgeons who specialize in "gender medicine" have done enormous harm to many, many mentally unwell people over the years. And over the past decade, unscrupulous "gender affirmation" surgeons have especially focused on peddling their promises of "magical sex change" to mentally unwell and often autistic minors too young to grasp the enormity and consequences of having their bodies irreversibly altered and too sexually immature to be able to give fully informed consent to losing the chance of having children and also forfeiting their chance of ever having normal sexual function (or any sexual function in some cases like poor Jazz Jennings). The public health scandal coming down the pike regarding the unethical medical and surgical procedures done on vulnerable, naive, mentally unwell, increasingly underage people for the purpose of "sex change" and "gender transition" is not going to reflect well on surgery as a profession. What surgeons have done to young males brainwashed and bullied by their parents into thinking they're girls like Jazz Jennings and Trinity Neal because as little boys they liked "the wrong" toys and clothing, and to the tens of thousands of same-sex attracted girls with serious MH issues who've gotten "gender affirming" double mastectomies still in their teens before they are 18 coz of the gender gibberish they got indoctrinated into on Tumblr, YT and TikTok - and all the lies that surgeons have told these vulnerable youngsters - is appalling .
Oh thanks for the insider information that, "If you want to see a world full of misogyny, athletics has nothing on surgery." Golly gee, that's big news. No woman alive who isn't a surgeon or married to one has ever had any idea! Next thing you'll be telling me that medical research and the whole field of medicine are full of misogyny and anti-female bias too. LOL, sometimes LRC is like a TIL bonanza.