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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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because half a dozen trans kids in your state want to compete.

There's an easy solution to that. Six confused children out of five hundred thousand want to compete on the sports team of the opposite sex. That's not permissible, but there is plenty of counselling available to help these kids with their mental problems.

There you go - and not a menstrual cycle in the house checked!

Supposedly transgender is about 1-2% of the population. How about a compelling explanation why the entire structure should be turned upside down for someone who will probably give up sports as soon as they get to college? See Andraya Yearwood, who seems to have given up competing on the women's team after 2019:

Andraya Yearwood echoed that sentiment – she just wants equality between cis and trans women. The story of her high school career has been written about in many national publications, though she no longer runs – she’s now more of an advocate (though she hesitates to call herself one).

So after all the fuss about trans girls being permitted to compete, she - gave it all up. Maybe that's okay, but I think the cis girls who got beaten out of titles by her (and whose college applications then didn't have that "won state title" on it) may feel somewhat miffed. Maybe they wanted to continue to be athletes, but missed out on scholarships? Who knows?

Yearwood is now a freshman at North Carolina Central University. She wanted to stop competing when she got to college for a few reasons: she was tired of the criticism and scrutiny, she didn’t want to dedicate all of her time to track, and she wanted to try something new. EDIT: This has nothing to do with "Is she really a woman?", it's to do with "Is it fair to let trans girls compete against cis girls when they were running on the boys' team last summer and are taller, stronger and faster than the girls?" when it comes to high school sports.

Being cynical, winning easy girls' running titles got her where she wanted to be, then she dumped it as soon as it was no more benefit. To be fair to CeCé Telfer, the other transwoman in this article, she stuck with running and wants to be a professional athlete.

I agree - there is an easy solution, parents can't stop freaking out that 6 or 12 or 7 or whatever number of trans high school athletes there are is going to ruin their little Olivia or Sophia's chance at her first choice college.

The thing about high school athletics (which I'm old enough to remember when conservatives thought Title IX existing at all was "political correctness" taking money away from real sports, like football) and part of why it's a nothing burger in a national political campaign is, as we've seen truly elite female athletes don't care that much, because it doesn't really effect them so they can be woke, and the vast majority of other high school athletes are using the fact thy competed at all, as their bonus, and don't care if a trans kid means they finish 16th instead of 15th.

So, who this truly affects - basically, the strivers who think their kid doing well in swimming will mean they can get into a better college, are the only ones truly upset, outside of normal ideological conservatives, are the type of "center-left until it affects me" types that conservatives dislike because they still call themselves liberals and the rest of the center-left coalition gets kind of annoyed. I guarantee the type or parent upset their kid might not get to the college of their choosing has a lot of overlap with people who try to block apartments or even duplexes being built in their neighborhood.

I'm not saying the median voter is woke. I'm saying the median voter doesn't really care that much, and caring deeply about this makes people you're kind of weird. They get why a trans person would care, but just like people eventually found conservatives obsessed with gay people weird, it'll be the same thing. Heck, in North Carolina, in 2016, a Republican Governor lost re-election by focusing on the bathroom issue, all as Trump was winning his state.

as we've seen truly elite female athletes don't care that much, because it doesn't really effect them so they can be woke

Do you have examples of elite female athletes not caring because it doesn't affect them? Because that's not what I have seen.