KudzuRunner wrote:
Change By Alinsky wrote:[quote]BroncoFan wrote:
They are silent because logic, reason and reality have been tossed away as unfair. All they can do is natter about like Kudzu to try to sound thoughtful.
I'm not trying to sound thoughtful. I'm actually thinking. There's a difference.
Be daring. Overcome your own gag-reflex and startle-response. Take the long view. Risk actual thought, as opposed to easy dismissals grounded in a sneering disregard for people whose behaviors and ideas you disagree with.
How about this for living dangerously: I'll offer you the strongest possible rebuttal, from the Left, to the arguments I offered earlier. I'll try to demolish my own case. I'll ventriloquize Dave Zirin--assuming that he was intellectually honest, which he's not.
Let's try to imagine the present gender-troubled situation of women's athletics from the perspective of the Civil Rights movement. In 1948, for example, the great majority of white Southerners felt that "the races," as they called them, should remain segregated in schools, in public restrooms, on sports teams, in any and all public spaces where they met. They certainly shouldn't marry and produce children! That was the underlying scandal that segregation was trying to avoid: "mongrelization." The horror!
They were fools, those white Southerners. We know that now. I've got a perfectly normal 10-year old son. Smart as hell, purple belt in TKD, very quick with computer games. The whole mongrelization thing was a lie. Blacks and whites married and had kids. The world didn't end. Trust me.
What did happen with desegregation, though, is that the racial makeup of professional sports teams, and mainstream professional sport in general, changed. Over time, black male and female athletes displaced white athletes. This happened in football, in basketball, and of course in the sprints. The world didn't end, but there was a shift.
So here's the thing: thirty years from now, when the presence of trans women and intersex "women" (like Caster) have been normed and no longer seem exceptional, the present-day composition of women's athletics--where what you might call "natural-born women" almost completely dominate--will be seen, in retrospect, as akin in some way to the all-white basketball teams of the 1940s. It'll seem old fashioned: the way things were done back then (i.e., right now), but not the only reasonable way of conducting athletic business.
Over the next 30 years, as the world grows more comfortable with the idea of trans and intersex women moving into the protected world of women's athletics, natural-born women will, like white guys and gals who play pro basketball today and the occasional superior white male or female sprinter, find themselves more at the margins than at the center. A survival of the fittest contest will slowly be waged. Trans women athletes, in fact, will find themselves the focus of interest from coaches looking for the edge in performance. Of course a whole regime of hormone regulations will slowly be evolved--and are already being evolved--to create a level biological playing field. But inevitably there will be more Caster Semenyas, and as the stigma surrounding such sort-of-women diminishes, a bidding war for their services may even transpire. They'll become hot properties for coaches seeking every allowable way of gaining an edge.
NBA basketball today is almost unimaginably different from the game played by white guys in the 1940s. That's what happened when the artificial line between "the races" came down. And today's fans are happy about that--even though, in a different sport, Jackie Robinson took a whole lot of heat for daring to break the white monopoly.
This is what will happen to women's XC and track. The artificial line between "the genders" will slowly dissolve. We'll still keep a basic men's/women's binary around for a while, but our conception of what a woman--a female athlete, more precisely--is will slowly shift. We'll grow much more used to trans women competing in women's events, and--a shocking thought!--we'll grow much more used to the sort of masculine-looking woman that Caster is taking part as well. There is absolutely nothing exceptional about all this. Fifty years ago, women were Playboy Bunnies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbCtirtPEnINow we've got Lolo Jones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0GkWhotRvYFrom the standpoint of a 1950s person, Lolo Jones might as well be a different species. That's not a woman! But of course it is. Norms change. And they will continue to change.
And, believe it or not, some of us are glad they do.
Whew! That's what Dave Zirin might say.
The huge freaking hole in your argument is that blacks in the 60's weren't pretending to be white.
You are seriously equating the Civil Rights Movement to a group of confused adolescents who want to turn their bodies into some kind of twisted science experiment? Harriet Tubman would kick you in your ovaries.