The vast majority of people who will be impacted by trans bans in sports will be little girls with short hair or arms that are "too muscular."
It will also mean that when a woman is good at her sport the disgusting grumbling and whispering about "may she is he" gets taken more seriously.
This happened with Paula Radcliffe for running marathons too fast. If it helps you to think of a white cis woman being the victim of this.
Of course little black girls will take the brunt of this. As ever.
I bring up Paula Radcliffe because she was targeted despite HAVING KIDS and being very conventional looking as if that should matter.
The only thing she did wrong was train better and be a total badass who could lay down sub fives til the end of time. Amazing runner. She was just ... good.
And we know girls can't be good, right?
People talking about "shoulders too square" and "elbows too pointy"
Why enable this? It's so sexist.
@RobertoArchimboldi @goaty @futurebird
An upper limit on what it is to be a woman! Thank your friend for putting into words one aspect of this whole thing that has been bothering me.
@goaty Exactly this. It's all about control and about denial of personal autonomy.
(This is why feminists in Ireland in the 1980s got heavily involved in the push for decriminalisation of sex between men. On the face of it, to some it didn't seem to make sense; but when seen through the lens of fundamental human rights and freedoms, it absolutely does.)
@AoifeGreenhamIllustrations I can't 100% say (most of 2018 was a write-off for me for various traumatic reasons, so unfortunately I missed a lot of what went on), although I'd well believe it.
I was involved in the 2015 Marriage Equality referendum campaign, and heard about shitty attitudes there - even while the (initially appalling) legislative proposals on gender recognition were going through the Oireachtas, and discussions around forcing couples to divorce if one transitioned. Awful times.
@raphaelmorgan @goaty @futurebird
I think that women, regardless of if they're trans or not, should just respond by taking the "accusation" in stride and using it to embarrass the person saying it
@goaty @futurebird I think the "sanctity" is even more about the pecking order. Masculinity is just the menfolk's easiest signifier to show their dominance and women have their signifiers of femininity to earn the rewards of submitting to and pleasing their men, according to "traditional values," and that's the bedrock of how Patriarchy runs. LGBTQ people, especially the T, completely undermine and disprove that power structure.
Which is why I love to continually point out that TERFS are dumbasses and completely counterproductive at best to their self-styled "feminism."
I would argue that I would still be trans if gender didn't exist. I would just be referred to as a transsexual person rather than a transgender person
@burnoutqueen @goaty @futurebird
Of course you would still be trans, but you might not need a label for it. You would just be on E, like many menopausal women.
My point is that if we stop forcing people into tiny boxes, we don't need to label the boxes. The people we force into those boxes would still exist, but they would each be individuals, not "the content of that box over there".
@futurebird sexist and, I think it bares stating the obvious, transphobic also. Because yes many women will "fail" these weird tests, but it's especially cruel to women who don't "pass."
You should be able to have knobby joints or a rockin adams apple and still be a woman.
If one *still* wants to police sports based on biological ability that's a whole other convo and it's more to do with ranks than a binary in/out. Like how is it "fair" to the other swimmers that Phelps gets to dominate every other swimmer because of his unique biology?
Anyway I'm tootin to the herd, I know y'all are on the right side of this
It's an old internet meme based on this forum where men would post photos of women and criticize their bodies. Often very attractive women.
"I would never sleep with her, elbows too pointy"
@disorderlyf @futurebird oof, until you said that I thought the concept of pointy elbows as a ridiculous body critique was hilarious.
Ur right.
Right. But I will still laugh at them forever and ever.
In 2009 I saw a great art piece where a college-aged woman had labeled a photo of herself in maybe shorts and a bikini top with things men had told her about her body and which man said them. It unlocked something for me to see that in the same year one boyfriend had told her her boobs were too big and a date said they were too small.
It was in some ways freeing to see it out in the open, but depressing too. We have to talk about it, or it works.
@futurebird @disorderlyf if i remember well that meme was a criticism of the guys though, with someone presenting an unreasonable standard for women while himself being far from a good catch.
(Or did I miss a previous meme that was less ironic?)
@futurebird @otterly_icy history of the 20th century: "what if we do a eugenics?" → "oh no, we did a eugenics"
history of the 21st century: "what if we do a eugenics?"
@futurebird I'm an old, so I was competing just a few years after Nadia Comaneci won all the golds with her unbelievable 10s.
Nadia was a teeny, tiny, bird of a human. She couldn't have weighed 80 pounds. And that was suddenly the standard for gymnastics.
I am built like Mary Lou Retton. Basically a hobbit. A powerful, muscular hobbit. I did a lot of training with boys, because that was the gym available.
The amount of points I lost because I wasn't lithe and graceful, even when I was doing routines nobody else could do, is amazing.
(Also being "exotic" probably played a role in the 80s. I don't even know what it's supposed to mean, but it was used as a descriptor more often than statistically probable.)
If it were today, only the fact that I had to strap the boob monsters down to compete would stop weirdos from wanting to peer into my panties.
It's all so stupid. I have more colored pencils than there are trans athletes in the whole world. It's just an excuse to hate.
@semitones @futurebird He was lying by omission anyway. Thomas was a highly ranked swimmer before she started transitioning. The 250 rank came after beginning hormones but before she was allowed to compete as a woman.
"During her freshman year, Thomas recorded a time of eight minutes and 57.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle that ranked as the sixth-fastest national men's time..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_Thomas
@semitones @futurebird That's what social media and generative AI have done to people. Nobody bothers to actually research anything for themselves. They report as truth what somebody said on Facebook or what ChatGPT told them. It takes two minutes to read Lia Thomas's Wikipedia article, a few more minutes if you want to click through to the sources and learn even more.
It's not hard to be well informed. But it's so damn easy to just repeat easy lies that support your bigotry.
THIS, exactly THIS
so tired of THIS
the whole theory behind this type of ban is girls aren't any good, we're second best, so so SO tired of it
we're second CLASS.
Third if we're ugly, old, tall, fat, or have personal faces.
What the MEN don't realize, is that once the Supremacists have disposed of all the PoCs and women they hate, they will come after them for 'sub-par' hair and eye colour.
Riggs was washed when she did it, but he was still a dumbass who deserved to get beaten.
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