Democrats block bill to ban transgender Men from competing against Women...

Their new motto is "your body, my choice."

So Trumpers like this "Nada" dude believe cis people should control trans people's bodies just like he believes men should control women's bodies.

I wonder what he thinks if gay men want to control his body.

this is funny. you act so authoritative while you are wrong on everything:

"Caster had been teased about her masculine appearance since the day she joined the village football team as the only girl..."

the basic flaw in your analysis is to assume that someone playing soccer with boys must be a boy. when you lot made clear it is ok for a girl to play with boys -- say the d3 footballer, the d1 kicker, or the d1 baseball player -- because they are not "unfair" -- but not a boy to play with girls. you thus miss that semenya could have been on a boys team while a girl.

and -- ironically -- based on your ilk's arguments -- you wouldn't have any issue with it. had you understood the facts correctly. which you didn't.

no, i played top level select and HS soccer. in our highfalutin area we would mostly play against good teams with future collegians and even some pros. but we had a team from the sticks in our league -- the wooden spoon team bottom of the standings -- who had a girl. she was quite good and later played D1. but she lived 2 hours from the city. so she played for the local select team. which was a boys team. only her senior year did she join a city girls team for recruitment purposes.

we also faced a couple teams with girls over 4 years in HS, on teams from small towns. the teams were usually the sort of rubbish you beat 10-0.

nope, you made a basic mistake.

i'd feel bad for your error but you're kind of a smug jerk.

i mean, i played d3 soccer and track. in-season in college it would be gendered teams.

but after the season we'd have improvised kickarounds, and some of the women played with us. the girls were not as good as the best boys. i didn't have to worry. but an all-conference girl was roughly as good as a last roster slot boy, IMO.

and you lot continue to miss my basic point, which is that the sort of player who is usually trans is someone who would be cut or last roster spot on a boy's team. it is generally not the best boy players.

at which point, sorry, bull, your theory that men are better than women seems to assume we're talking about the team MVP slumming with the women and not some scrub off the JV who runs 26 for 200 or can barely pass the ball where they mean to. which is more like what is populating the trans players.

just to point something out, where i grew up if a girl doesn't break 12 or 24 in the 100 or 200 she's not advancing past the first step towards state in HS. so in the big city even anti-trans poster athlete cece telfer isn't winning our area and progressing. telfer didn't run d1, she ran d2. the other sprinter from NY was in d3.

a lot of this debate is defined in terms of smaller states or weaker areas. they then miss what any serious track runner knows, which is that those areas tend to be slower and not d1 recruitment hotbeds. the pretense is smalltown annie has been denied her state championship medal and d1 scholarship by one trans runner. setting aside there are 3 medals and that's not how recruiting works, what actually happens, usually, is they were 2 notches below what it takes to do anything in the city or a big state.

the trans athlete in OR in the state final wouldn't make it out of area where i grew up. pffft

the problem is the people from small states who don't have a clue far outnumber as voters the track athletes who know what it normally takes to win.

kind of like the people cranky about the economy outnumber those who know the numbers were solid. who have then brought us "this."

I think you are directing this to the wrong person. I was pointing out the Republican hypocrisy pretending to care for women, and the irony of blaming the DEMs for obsession with an issue that is apparently not important enough to focus on, when Republicans created the bill.

This "mutilation" and "disfiguration" cannot be that harmful when it has absolutely no impact on trans girls' complete domination over cis girls in sports.

/s

Please spell out exact why you think it's "transphobic," wrong and reprehensible to show compassion and concern for people like the young woman in this video, who "went all the way as far as one can go" down the route of "medical transition" because she had been led to believe she was "a man trapped in a woman's body" who needed to remove all of her female organs until one day 8 years later when she "woke up and realized that I made the biggest fxcking mistake of my life."

Jalisa is one of the legions of young women who had her healthy breasts, ovaries, Fallopian tubes, and uterus removed before she reached the age when her brain was fully developed enough for her to have had chance to begin to develop an adult appreciation of - and pride in - her female body, her lesbian sexuality and her reproductive potential.

From what Jalisa says, she had "full bottom surgery" that removed her vagina, clitoris and labia too. "I don't have anything any more," she says in an agonized voice referring to her sexual organs.

A vaginectomy for transgender or non-binary individuals is a surgical procedure to remove all or part of the vagina including the vaginal canal, labia and clitoris. The vaginectomy is one of several bottom surgery procedures sought by transgender men seeking to replace female genitalia with male-presenting genitalia. - Crane Center for Transgender Surgery

"I was so sure. You know, it's crazy. An entire life that should have been mine, that was my birthright. I don't know how this happned to me.

"I'm just so so angry. And I'm so sad.

"Like I just don't know how this happened. It was a like a virus or something that infected me. It happened so quickly. And it was like I was right there agreeing to every single thing, and I don't know how that happened.

"Now I can sit here and like look back and think, "why did I do that?" It doesn't make any sense. None it makes any sense.If I just would have waited. If I just would have waited.

"I shoud have waited and let myself heal.

"I can't have kids! I'll never lose my virginity. I feel like I'm left to just like accept the scraps of the life I could have had. I had this full life that I'm now having to mourn while I'm also living in the present moment with what feels like the scraps of what could have been.

"I don't know how to be happy in that. I don't know how to be okay with that.

I hate when people are like "everything happens for a reason." Like no, this didn't happen for a reason. It's just a tragedy. Call it what it is.

"I don't want to use the word "indoctrinated," but I was young, I was sad, I was impressionable and I thought this would fix everything. I don't know what to do with any of it.

"I think feel different from most detrans girls, or detrans women, because I've had bottom surgery. Every girl I know hasn't. You know, they still have this part of them. I don't have that. I don't have anything any more. It's so sad. Like it just sucks so bad. This is just something I just have to live with. There's no fixing it. There's no making it better. I have to live this way the rest of my life."

It is transphobic to use an outlier case like this to justify your attempt to ban all gender affirming care for minors.

What happened to this person is tragic, and should not be repeated. That does not mean no minor should be given gender affirming care.

Do you think abortion should be banned if a small minority regret having abortion? Do you think minors should not be allowed to give birth if a small minority regret becoming mothers? Both have higher regret rates than gender affirming care. What should pregnant teens do if they are not allowed to give birth and not allowed to have abortion?

See, no empathy at all. So much hate.

"No one would force us to do this." (2:22)

You mean, you have no empathy for trans kids and have so much hate?

Thanks for projecting.

Convincing a minor to have healthy tissue surgically removed, resulting in lifelong drug and hormone treatment affirms nothing except the barbarity of those performing such surgeries and treatments, and those who support them.

I'm advocating for us to accept kids the way they are, let them dress the way they want and call themselves what they want and live a healthy productive life. You're advocating for surgically removing healthy reproductive organs and sentencing them to lifelong drug and hormone addiction. I'm the only one who has empathy for these kids.

Nothing "phobic" about expecting a male to compete ve other males instead of smaller/weaker girls. That is simply a common sense thing.

Be whatever ya want but don't expect others to play that same fantasy, I know I would't, I see some guy pretending to be a female that just won't work, he will be treated as what he really is,

This is why the demoRats lose elections. They need to focus on a woman's choice rather than a man's choice to become a woman

You think she would be in the 98% or the 2%?

I think it is not wrong to show compassion and concern for vulnerable minorities. That seems to be what is missing from these discussions. There is a way to address participation in women's sports without being callous and insensitive to the needs of the vulnerable.

Decisions to undergo irreversible surgery should never be taken lightly. It sounds like the adults and doctors around her made the wrong decisions for her.

I might well be "kind of a smug jerk." Takes one to know one!

And I might be wrong on some things. But I am definitely not "wrong on everything" like you say.

I fact, I think I'm far, far better informed than you are about the topic of males in female sports and related issues - such as the number, nature and causes of the myriad physical differences between the sexes that necessitate a separate category of sports for female athletes; the history and details of the numerous and often changing policies governing eligiblity for the female category in force previously and today in various jurisdictions and for different sports; and the most accurate, most practical and fairest methods of determining and verifying sex for the purposes of sports classification and deciding who gets to compete in the female category and who doesn't

I'd bet good money that I am much better informed about the backstory of Caster Semenya from South Africa than you are too.

BTW, on this thread and others, I've noticed that many of your posts end up being about you. You have a reflexive, knee-jerk way of frequently veering off topic by bringing up and focusing on your own personal experience as a male competing in sports as a member of exclusively male teams as though some of the things you personally went through, have heard about or have seen with your own eyes are centrally pertinent to, and shed real light on, the incursion of male athletes into female sports and other issues closely related to males horning in on the the female category.

No offense, but I don't think you add anything at all helpful or illuminating to the discussion of males in female sports by repeatedly making posts about your own personal experiences as a bloke who played sports exclusively on male teams and every once in a while heard about, came across or competed against a boys' team that had a lone girl on it. To me, the details about your own personal history you think are germane are all totally beside the point.

Also, whilst you don't say what country you're from or exactly when you played youth and school sports, it seems obvious to me that it definitely wasn't anywhere near to or like rural black South Africa during the time Caster Semenya was growing up.

In fact, you come across to me as an bloke probably from North America who doesn't have the foggiest notion about what life was like for black female South Africans who were born and grew up in Limpopo, the rural province in SA that Caster Semenya is from, during the 1990s and 2000s when Semenya was a child and teenager.

So in my imitiable way that's caused you to call me a "smug jerk" and has prompted a slew of other men on LRC to slag me off by calling me a host of other names meant to insult me, shut me up, put me in my place and leave the matter of males in female sports up to men to decide, I'm gonna make a couple of posts to fill in a couple of the huge glaring gaps in your knowledge. Stay tuned.

This is like saying pro-choice people are advocating for abortion. In case you don't know, they don't advocate for abortion. They are in favor of people having choices that include abortion.

If you accept kids as they are, let them use bathrooms and locker rooms they choose. Let them play on sports teams they chose to be on. That's how you let them who they are.

Stop trying to control other people's body just because you believe your judgment is superior.

But I've never assumed, nor would I ever assume, "that someone playing soccer with boys must be a boy."

The passages in the previous post of mine that you've quoted and you responded to were about one and only one athlete - Caster Semenya. I wasn't taking about a hypothetical "someone." I was talking specifically and solely about Caster Semenya, an athlete who was born in Limpopo province, South Africa, in January 1991, and grew up there.

My point was that I believe the reason Caster Semenya was allowed to play on a teenage boys' soccer team when Semenya was a teenager in rural Limpopo - and no objections were raised by any of the boys on Semenya's team, any the boys on all the other teams in the league, any of the boys' parents, or any coaches, refs, managers or spectators - is the same reason that I believe Semenya was allowed to wear a boys' uniform to school and boys' clothes for other situations, and was raised to take on roles traditionally reserved for males.

I think all this happened because for most of Semenya's childhood and for all of Semenya's adolescence, Semenya was widely and routinely perceived by Semenya's family and community to be a male. A male whose genitals were a bit different to other males, but other than that small detail, a male who was normal, healthy and fit. (And in my view, a pretty good-looking male too.)

In Semenya’s memoir that came out in 2023, "The Race to Be Myself," Semenya chose to include this photo of Semenya taken on a high school class trip to the beach in Durban in 2007, the same year the teenager got a South African birth certificate for the first time and the BC stated that Sememya’s sex is female.

Open image

For a whole bunch of reasons I shall go into in due course, I don't find it believeable that any of the other students, school staff, parents or chaperones who went on that school trip in 2007 saw Caster Semenya as female. I don't believe that anyone looking at that photo today or in the past could honestly say, "that 15/16 year-old teenager is a girl. 100% female, no question about it."

I believe it's because Semenya spent most of Semenya's formative years being seen, raised and treated as as boy - albeit a boy who was born with outer parts between the legs that were atypical for males - that Semenya recalled childhood in such as rosy light when speaking to to the NY Times in 2021. Semenya told the Times that looking back, Semenya remembered childhood as a wonderful time of halcyon days spent

playing on a dusty field in a rural village, and being celebrated, not isolated, for standing out, for being singular and distinctive.

"As a kid, you’re walking home to the sports ground, you’re playing with boys and your childhood becomes marvelous because everyone loves you because you’re different,” Semenya said with a grin.

As yourself: if Semenya's parents really did have such progressive, enlightened attitudes toward sex roles, why then were all of Caster's four sisters treated so differently to Caster?

Why was Caster the one and only supposed girl in the Semenya family who got to spend childhood on the sports grounds playing with boys, was allowed to play organized sports as a teenager on a soccer team expressy for teenage boys, was raised to take on traditionally male roles, and was allowed to wear a boys' uniform to school and to wear boys' clothes all the rest of the time?

The fact is, Caster Semenya grew up being granted and enjoying a host of freedoms and privileges as well as an extremely high social status that weren't accorded to any of Caster' four sisters - or to any of the other girls that Caster grew up with and went to school with. Why was Caster and Caster alone singled out for such special treatment?

Caster Semenya also grew up with the cocky self-confidence, sense of entitlement, high self-esteem and and inflated ego that girls in South Africa are not raised to have. Again from the NY Times article I quoted and linked to earlier:

Her definition of herself, Semenya said, was simply this: “I’m just a great human being.”

Viewed in the context of the extemely sexist, male supremacist and misogynsistic hidebound, traditional culture and society in rural Limpopo, South Africa that Caster Semenya grew up in during the 1990s and early 2000s, the claim that Caster was "raised female" and was always widely perceived to be female by family, friends, classmates, teammates, the wider community and by Semenya's own self, just isn't plausible to me.

I'll share some info about the culture and society Semenya grew up in other posts to come.