iNow

Identity is about who we are and how we identify ourselves to others. I could tell you I identify as a father, and while I could share pictures of me with my kids or submit to a paternity test to meet your arbitrarily high threshold in the name of science, most commonly we simply accept my statement as true since it’s ME telling YOU how I identify MYSELF. Likewise, I might identify as a baseball fan. I could produce tickets to the games I’ve attended and post all the games I’ve watched on TV in the past year and even all the times I’ve participated out on the diamond with friends, but most commonly my saying “I identify as a baseball fan” is sufficient based on my say so alone. You don’t ask to test it and submit it for peer review. Perhaps I was born in Russia then later moved to Germany. I could show you my passport and citizenship papers, but if I tell you I now identify as German, that really ought to be enough no matter how much you love the motherland and hate that I’ve defected. Perhaps I was given the name John at birth, and now tell you I instead identify myself as Bruce or Loretta. You don’t get to tell me I’m not allowed to do that like some entitled overseeing brat. And on and on and on ad infinitum … I could identify as a reader, or an audiophile, or as an art lover, or a car collector, or a weapons expert and cigar aficionado, a brewer, a builder, a lover of memes… and you wouldn’t sit here demanding that I produce scientific evidence to support these. It’s about ME telling YOU how I identify MYSELF, and you don’t get to tell me I’m wrong no matter how forcefully you disagree with the identity of myself I’ve expressed. It’s simply not your place. End program. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. YOU have no say in anything related to MY identity, and gender identity is obviously no different.

//"The strategy of willful ignorance is not to fight theory with theory and statistic with statistic. It is instead to say, "I refuse to believe this," and then filibuster in the court of public opinion. It is not crackpot theories that are doing us in. It is the spread of the tactics of those who disrespect truth."// http://chronicle.com/article/The-Attack-on-Truth/230631/

I also btw empathize with elite female athletes, just find the nature of the risk they face here to be several orders of magnitude smaller, less consequential, and less violent than the risks faced daily by the trans community.

You misspelled empathy

How old were you when you chose to identify as male? They're actually choosing to share with the world who they are and how the doctor made a mistake at birth by using too simplistic categories. Amazingly, both things can be true at once in parallel. They’re seeking acceptance is the obvious priority here. The comparison which actually applies here is the doctor assigned you as Napoleon at birth and you’re simply explaining to the world, “hey guys… sorry to have waste your time clarifying, but I’m not actually napoleon no matter how forcibly you suggest otherwise.”

Transgender individuals authentically telling us how they identify are not delusional. EDIT: Not because of their transgender identification, anyway.

Not precisely, no. What I think is that our historical binary categories of male and female don't map accurately on to the real world around us, that a great MANY humans don't fit these arbitrary criteria, and that a refusal to update our thinking is needlessly causing pain, anguish, and suicidation among kids and adults just trying to be themselves and be accepted by the world around them. Like I said, you used color as dismissive example earlier in the thread. You said Red is trying to identify as Yellow. Haha. Funny stuff, rah rah... but even the color red exists along a spectrum yet you're trying to suggest only one specific wavelength equals red but NO OTHERS, and all just because you say so. If someone tells us they are female, it does us no harm to accept that as true even if your own perception is that male would be a better descriptor. That's not our choice to make. It's theirs. If someone tells you their name is Kunta Kinte, then stop calling them boy and Toby. It's really not hard... unless you force it to be out of ignorance and spite.

If nothing else, these exchanges here have all been quite helpful in further illuminating, for any of those who remain opposed to trans inclusion, the company they’re keeping and the type of allies they have standing behind/beside them.

Yeah. In fact, it was just earlier today that my father in law (about your age) showed me how proud he was for clicking the security alert on his phone to save it from all the hacking. All he had to do was click that easy button inside the flashy window and voila! His hardware was now totally safe! Thank goodness his age made him so much less gullible than an uninformed inexperienced man child like me. Maybe one day I’ll know as much about the world as you do, but until then I’ll have to make do with your kind shared wisdom and insightful little turd nuggets here.

This has been the way people viewed it in the past, but it’s a dying view. Folks like you who refuse to update simply won’t be around much longer for us to care.

Forgive me for assuming context was understood without being explicitly mentioned in that one post that one time 80 pages into the thread.

J.C.MacSwell has shown willingness to allow participation among transgender people who went through their reassignment protocols years in the past. He has confirmed he supports allowing transgender participation in all but the very top tier of elite female sports categories. He has also been open to calculations using multiple criteria for qualification along the lines of those proposed last fall by the Cato Institute. That is important and foundational in finding a path forward as allies here, so I urge restraint and caution in responding. It’s detrimental to that progress to act with vitriol and harshness toward him and others with similarly open minds since his more nuanced stance is FAR better than many of the purely ignorant and bigoted comments we so often encounter around this topic.

People will watch whatever you put in front of them, and specious forecasts about possible future ratings aren’t a valid reason for the blanket exclusion of trans individuals.

Is off topic here

In the battle over personal liberties and societal acceptance, not choosing a side is equivalent to choosing the wrong one. And while the name you’ve selected needs tweaking, we could instead simply decide to proceed with the latter category. I could be mistaken, but fairly sure the world wouldn’t come screeching to a halt.

Your definition excluded postmenopausal, prepubescent, and all the others with non-binary chromosomes. It was so remedial it failed to capture multiple categories and thus was rejected. It’s just “she.” Not he, not he/she… just she. It depends on the sport and on the level. There is no one size fits all here. The ask is mainly that we seek those categories with the starting premise that trans individuals not face a blanket exclusion. Saying I tend to focus more on the 99.99% of this problem shouldn’t be conflated with ignoring the 0.01%. My words are right there. I simply don’t tend to focus on the marginal extreme categories since the others impact so many more thousands of lives. That’s not “ignoring them.” Yes. This. You can begin with the easy stuff like simply using the pronouns they’ve asked others to use. Right now, it’s like they’re telling you their name is Kunta Kinte and you keep calling them Toby.

There’s certainly an ugliness on display here, but it’s not those talemted women who have fought their entire lives to become as globally elite as they are.

A microscopic roundworm that spent the last 46,000 years in suspended animation deep in the Siberian permafrost was revived then started having babies in a laboratory dish https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/07/27/nematode-revived-siberian-permafrost/

Or that the evil woke libtards are trying to force your children to be trans and worse!! they’re doing it to gain unfair competitive advantages in sports… Gasp!!

Of course. It’s far easier to turn us against each other with tribal culture war issues so we’re distracted while they act as grifters looting the civil coffers than it is to do the hard work of governance addressing famine, drought, climate change, poverty, economy, etc. Start with the premise that we both can AND should do this, accept that allies come in many forms and those relationships must be nurtured, and refuse to give up. Perseverance, tenacity, and stamina in battling back the forces of ignorance and hatred against trans people.

Since only like 12 humans get to elite level sports, my comments on this topic tend to focus more on lower less elite categories where state legislatures, local school districts, community sporting clubs, and many others are painting trans athletes as bogeymen who MUST be prevented from competition. I know you're not in this camp, but I'd wager it comprises 99.99% of the athletes impacted by this issue. I'm not as interested as you seem to be in focusing on the marginal remaining 0.01% of the challenge.

Unfortunately, there's more artificial selection involved here than natural selection. Bad actors, bots, and active state sponsored disinformation campaigns are ruining the internet and the minds of many millions of humans using it.

It’s hard using reason and logic to argue someone out of a position at which they arrived using neither.

Hasty generalizations are always wrong all the time and this never varies. Not ever. Not once. Never. I don’t accept your premise. I bet we also define science differently

Rightly so, because you’re not a fast enough runner. You don’t qualify because you’re too slow, not because you happen to be trans.