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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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My point then and now is that it's not obvious how much of an advantage Khalif actually has.

No, your point then and now is that anyone claiming to care about fairness in sports is doing so in bad faith as a stick with which to beat trans women. I resent this characterisation of my opinion that it's unfair for unambiguously male athletes to compete in female sporting events. I remain agnostic on the question of whether Khalif is unambiguously female, unambiguously male, or a female with a DSD which gives them a competitive advantage.

Then let me clarify. I do not think literally everyone who talks about fairness in sports is only using it as a stick to beat trans women. But I do think there are a lot of people out there who do see fairness in sports as a stick to beat trans women.

  • -11

Sure. Doesn't mean they're wrong though - that's Bulverism.

And please stop doing this unbelievably dumb thing of saying "wow, isn't it interesting how this debate about fairness in sports only comes up in the context of allowing trans women to compete? I wonder why that would be!" The very existence of weight classes, age classes etc. demonstrates, with zero room for ambiguity, that you are simply wrong.

Right now the only reason this debate only comes up in the context of sex-segregation in sports is because sex-segregation is a contested category, while weight classes are a settled matter: currently there's no broad social movement demanding that heavyweights to be permitted to compete alongside welter- or feather-weights, on the grounds that they "identify" as a body mass different from their objective bodily mass. Any heavyweight who demanded such a thing would rightfully be laughed out of the room; but when a six-foot tall swimmer who has never been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and who has been competing as a male for years, suddenly "discovers" that he is actually a woman (barely even hiding that he is doing so to fulfil an autogynephiliac sexual fantasy) and demands to be included in female sporting events on that basis - for some reason society at large (and sporting bodies in particular) react with "of course, right this way sir ma'am".

When the transfats in sports movement arrives (when, not if), I want it known both that I foresaw it, and that I promised in advance to fight against it just as stridently as I am currently fighting against the "right" of unambiguously male people to compete in female sporting events.

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