Middle schoolers who protested trans athlete in girls shotput competition banned from next competition. lawsuit filed

the headline was inaccurate in at least 2 ways. they weren't banned -- they were supposed to be benched by the coach (and may not have ultimately been) -- and it wasn't for competitions -- plural -- it was for the next meet.

but anyhow, story goes, this was a coaching decision. not a school decision, or a district decision, or a local or state governing body decision. the coach simply decided, you won't play next week.

so now we're getting into, politics or not, the coach can't tell your kid no and bench them. the folks trotting out legal rules from obscure places want for this to be some supreme court case. it's not. it's a "you're being sat for acting like you were going to compete at the meet then not doing it" situation. the athlete frames it as protest. but the coach and team got messed out of effort and points in a sporting sense.

thus confirming my concern that we have silly little men literally going around to middle school meets ogling short bulges. personally i find that kind of attention to child sexuality far more scary than joey competing as jane.

as i have said on other threads, this is really about the few ones who win and not some purity thing. no one polices women in football or baseball. is that not gender crossing? nah, this is really about leveraging the few who are good as a device against the many who aren't, on the inaccurate implication the "boys" dominate. except as the poster noted, at least some of the same girls competed against the same person in disk, didn't throw a fit, etc. why? she didn't win.

i know a girl thrower at the alma mater who looks fairly boyish. i don't know the truth. but she finishes last or next to last and no one cares. so no one cares if a small college girl pinch hits in baseball or plays a down in D3 football, or if a small college thrower sucks. what they care about is when they win.

except, if they don't often win, is it a problem? and if they do compete, shouldn't they have an odds chance at winning? to me it's insincere if it's only indulged in a losing or weak effort. we wink at the scrubs but this one is national news. ok, whatever.

that's a bit much

First normalization, now standardization.

Public education has lost its mind.

"compromise?" do you get the current situation is in fact a compromise?

here is how we get to this spot. used to be just men competed. women too weak, the story went. no, we're not. ok, you compete, but in a separate category. trans come along, your categories don't fit me well. yeah, but god only made 2 categories, so back in the boy box you go. you can't make a third box? no. well, then, put me in the girl box, that's how i see myself. nah, god made you a boy, so, you don't get 3 boxes, and you go in the boy box i want.

you're the ones both denying the possibility of a 3rd box -- the trap door solution out of the mess -- and then trying to shove them in the boy box. the "boy goes in girl box" is the compromise. we keep your 2 boxes. but we let some kids pick their box.

if you can't handle your compromise, it's time for the 3rd box to shut you up. but you're not going to like that much more if this is really about pushing religion and the 2 boxes.

what if a kid every other year kills themselves by suicide over your forced gendering and you don't care about that but instead whether your judy finishes 6th instead of 5th in girl's shotput.

if you want religious schooling, send them to a private.

But it does render moot competitive advantage.

FAFO

re "hiding," that is such a fake argument. the kids who go to school with x know the story. the rules say they can compete that way. you don't have to announce yourself and submit to an exam to compete.

it's interesting that at the highest levels we are looking at the intersex aspect but for kids sports it's trans. that suggests this is about politics. they don't want to pretend science ever comes into this or that it's multifold. it's a wedge issue and not an attempt to solve anything, as you should still have the semenya issue even if you ban trans. so wake up and drink some coffee.

JAHJ, the appeals to authority you keep making aren't persuasive. World Athletics has been wrong about many aspects of its policies over the years, particularly insofar as the eligibility criteria for the female category are concerned. Which is why WA keeps going back to the drawing board and changing those policies.

It's true that the new World Athletics policy introduced last year allows males without any DSD to seek eligibility to compete in the female category if they can demonstrate that their parents and doctors intentionally blocked their normal, natural development by putting them on so-called "puberty blockers" before age 12 or Tanner Stage 2, whichever came first, and that as a result, their natural testosterone since then has never reached or exceeded 2.5 nmol/L (which is still above the normal female range of 0.2-1.68/nmol).

But that part of the current WA policy is based on unproven assumptions and claims whose merit and validity are debatable. Indeed, these assumptions and claims are not considered credible by many people who have a much better understanding of the myriad physical differences between male and females in our species than the men long in charge at WA have shown themselves to have.

Many people who are finally getting a chance to have a say about the rules set by orgs like WA have a much better grasp of human biology and physical sex differences than the gender identity ideologues who've dominated the discourse and held sway in policy decisions over the past several decades too.

I predict that within the decade, probably sooner, World Athletics will jettison the provision in its current policy that would allow males like Becky Pepper Jackson to compete in the female category.

Indeed, if reaction to the recently-released Cass Report in Europe is any indication, WA might be in the process of rethinking its policy about males put on "puberty blockers" even sooner than that.

Because in the UK and across the rest of Europe, health authorities, governments and the general public are starting to see there's no good evidence to justify using the so-called "Dutch protocol" on kids like Becky Pepper Jackson.

In fact, many are coming to the conclusion that it's cruel, harmful and morally wrong for adults to purposely stunt the development and destroy the fertilty and future sexual functioning of healthy-born male children by putting them on "puberty blockers" at/before Tannner 2 or age 12 and keeping them on those drugs through their entire adolescence. Just as many are coming to see how cruel and harmful it is to tell healthy kids they were "born in the wrong body" in the first place, and then go on to tell them that their "wrong bodies" can be fixed if they become lifelong medical patients dependent on Big Pharma products and they have surgeries and cosmetic procedures to remove, rearrange and change the look of originally healthy body parts.

That's what a compromise is, no? No one getting everything they want, but finding a middle ground where people can compete according to their own world view.

For a contemporary real world example, note the decision by the United Methodist Church General Conference voted today to allow LGBT clergy, and to stop penalizing clergy for officiating same-sex weddings.

This comes after a 2-year period where reactionary Methodist congregations left the General Conference, and formed their own conference, where they can live by their own rules.

If it's a good enough solution for a religious dispute over sexuality, surely it's good enough for a middle school sports dispute over gender.

Actions have consequences, I’m sure it was the parents who told her not to throw. Or a coach who is a Trump supporter. It’s middle school, move on.

Actually, it's not complicated at all. Female sports exist because males have a biological advantage. Letting males compete in female sports goes against the reason for even having female sports. That's simple enough that middle schoolers can easily understand it.

I'm about as liberal as they come, but transfemales participating in women's/girl's sports is ridiculous. There is nothing that can be done to make that even remotely fair. Beyond that, it is potentially dangerous, even in ways that may not be seen.

Example time:

Let's say there's an official working the shot put. He is familiar with how far the girls typically throw the shot, and so he knows about where to be at all time to avoid getting hit. Transfemale steps up, throw is a little off...hits official in the head. Dead.

Transpeople should have all the legal protection in the world. They shouldn't be targeted for hatred or ridicule. They are just living their lives as they see fit, and I have no problem with that, and I honestly can't see why ANYONE would have a problem with that. When you get into competitive sports though, that's a different ball game. It's not fair. It's not right.

It is hard to fathom not comprehending that this issue is not the most important issue in public policy to most people.

Huh? As the part of the post of mine you yourself quoted clearly shows, I was specifically speaking about

Becky and other so-called "trans poster children"

A "poster child" is by definition a child whom adults have turned into a public figure. Which is the opposite of children whose parents have attempted to pass their kids off as the opposite sex and made a point of trying to keep the truth a well-guarded secret.

From the Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionary definitions of "poster child" :

1) a child who has a disease and is pictured in posters to solicit funds for combating the disease. 2. : a person having a public image that is identified with something (such as a cause) -

Poster child 1930s: from the use in print advertisements of good-looking young people and appealing children. - Oxford

From Wikipedia, since that's a source you seem to consider trustworthy:

A poster child (sometimes poster boy or poster girl) is, according to the original meaning of the term, [is] a child afflicted by some disease or deformity whose picture is used on posters or other media as part of a campaign to raise money or enlist volunteers for a cause or organization. Such campaigns may be part of an annual effort or event, and may include the name and age of a specific child along with other personally identifiable attributes.[1]

In modern times, a "poster child" is a person of any age whose attributes or behaviour are emblematic of a known cause, movement, circumstance or ideal. The person in question is thought of as an embodiment or archetype. This signifies that the very identity of the subject is synonymous with the associated ideal; or otherwise representative of its most favorable or least favorable aspects.

Are you really going to to try to claim that the parents of well-known "child transitioners" like Jackie Green, Kim Petras, Jazz Jennings, Kai Shappley, Trinity Neal, Gavin Grimm, Penelope Patterson, and Becky Pepper Jackson haven't tried to make these youngsters into "trans poster children"? You think these kids became nationally and in some cases internatiionally famous all on their own with no parents and other adults in their lives pulling the strings?

Sorry mate, youngsters like Jackie Green, Jazz Jennings and Becky Pepper Jackson were never given a chance by their attention-seeking parents to "go stealth." The fact that these kids and young adults and all the tragic details of their back stories are known to the world isn't because mean "transinvestigators" tracked them down and outed them.

As for the male youngsters with opposite-sex gender identities who try to "go stealth" - the reason they get outed is usually because as they grow up, the fact that they are male becomes apparent to many observers from the way they physically are built and move. This is especially the case if they compete in girls' and women's sports.

Becky Pepper Jackson is a case in point. Physically, Jackson today at 14 is a far cry from the small,, slight kid dressed "girly style" all in pink and sporting gigantic hairbows shown in the staged publicity photos that have been used to garner media attention for Jackson's court case and drum up sympathy and support for "cute little Becky" and Becky's crusade to put an end to female-only school sports in the court of public opinion.

I mean no disrespect to Becky by saying that. Becky isn't unsual on that score. When my own kids were Becky's age, they physically appeared to be a far cry from the cute-as-a-button adorable little kids they'd been just a few years before. And at 14, my son and his male friends and classmates had grown to be far more physically imposing and obviously much stronger and faster than they'd been when they were 10 and 11.

Yes, there is. It is called puberty blocker and cross hormone therapy. In spite of all their claims to the contrary, the anti-trans activists have not proven kids like BPJ has any advantage over cis girls.

The attorney representing the state of WV argued there would be "exponential growth" of trans athletes in girls sports if someone like BPJ is allowed to compete. Well, it has not happened in 15 states and DC where trans girls can compete with no restriction. It has not happened in NCAA where trans women could compete after one year of hormone replacement. It has not happened in the Olympics... But it WILL happen in the great state of West Virginia because.... well because people in WV are god fearing moral people.

No. Hate is not appropriate. Hate leads to atrocity. You may disagree, even strongly so. Not hate.

Did their parents force their kids to transition because they were seeking attention?

Did their parents force their kids to transition for any other reason?

Did the kids want to transition and their parents supported their decision?