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Transgender hate crimes recorded by police go up 81%

ElizabethofYork said:
Womens' sport has become so popular and so supported over the past few years, and girls now have sporting role models to look up to. It would be madness to change that.
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I'm not really arguing to change it, especially at competitive level. More just to think more flexibility and perhaps provide additional categories to make sports less exclusive so that more people, both women and men (and non binary people), are encouraged to participate. Roller Derby is a good example of a sport played pretty much for leisure which has done this and is noted for being inclusive.

I think it's worth at least looking at how gender segregation in sport has really developed to benefit men, encouraged competitive sports as a site of toxic masculinity as well as created informal patriarchal power networks which women are excluded from such as the golf club. I'm not saying that means doing away with women's sports just recognising there is more to this then fairness - and the reason an exceptional woman would not be permitted to play in men's football is not because that would be unfair to her but because men don't want her to.
 
smokedout said:
I'm not really arguing to change it, especially at competitive level. More just to think more flexibility and perhaps provide additional categories to make sports less exclusive so that more people, both women and men (and non binary people), are encouraged to participate. Roller Derby is a good example of a sport played pretty much for leisure which has done this and is noted for being inclusive.

I think it's worth at least looking at how gender segregation in sport has really developed to benefit men, encouraged competitive sports as a site of toxic masculinity as well as created informal patriarchal power networks which women are excluded from such as the golf club. I'm not saying that means doing away with women's sports just recognising there is more to this then fairness - and the reason an exceptional woman would not be permitted to play in men's football is not because that would be unfair to her but because men don't want her to.
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despite being pointed i nthe direction of the 1984 Olympics and a specific event the poster who originally took up this line of argument this tiem round has been rather quiet on the topic ...
 
Lotte said:
Men don't even want women commentating on football, let alone playing it. Look at how many people think Joey Barton has a point.
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Yes, it's pretty depressing. My husband and sometimes my son come to women's matches with me and some of their mates are like "what are you interested in that for?" And make stupid comments about women playing football.
 
Lotte said:
Men don't even want women commentating on football, let alone playing it. Look at how many people think Joey Barton has a point.
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look at the number of people who make stupid comments about Gabby Logan being involved in sports presenting

Gabby Logan aka former InternationalGymnast Gabby Yorath ( and yes her Dad is who you think he might well be with that name ) ...
 
Thanks to this thread I'm going down a rabbit hole about sex, gender and sport :D
I'm currently reading this - Against women's sports which I'm finding really interesting. It includes history of womens sports, gender testing (ugh) and puts forward arguments that sport doesnt always need to be segregated and that segregation profits sexism and misogyny by proliferating the myth of a 'weaker sex'.
 
ElizabethofYork said:
Yes, it's pretty depressing. My husband and sometimes my son come to women's matches with me and some of their mates are like "what are you interested in that for?" And make stupid comments about women playing football.
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Clair De Lune said:
Thanks to this thread I'm going down a rabbit hole about sex, gender and sport :D
I'm currently reading this - Against women's sports which I'm finding really interesting. It includes history of womens sports, gender testing (ugh) and puts forward arguments that sport doesnt always need to be segregated and that segregation profits sexism and misogyny by proliferating the myth of a 'weaker sex'.
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The men that say that are quite often the ones who suddenly become very concerned about women spaces and safety when Trans people are mentioned, despite never showing an interest or any self reflection on why women feel unsafe around men in the first place.

Mens sport is nearly always promoted as the elite level and it suits men very much to keep it this way as they tend to be the ones that get the money. The amount of men that are getting upset at women's football being "pushed down their throat" is depressing, and all part of the same cultural war narriaitves in my opinion.

Joey Barton and men like him are very angry that women are now being employed in media roles that were usually saved for white men. This is the reason he went down a very predictable route when he couldn't get a media job - Women in football, Trans people, COVID and vaccine denying, fundraising for court cases. It's a gift that makes a lot of men money and the way our media works they get a much bigger voice than they normally would.

There are genuine concerns that can be raised about the commercialisation of all sport and I am sure executives at Sky etc very much see it as a new revenue stream to be manipulated like they have with the men's game, but that's not what the vast majority of these people are getting angry about when it comes to women's football.

There is a ridiculously long thread on the Bristol City forum that I now have on ignore covering the topic of Trans people, and the same people getting so upset about Trans people for simply existing are the same people that get angry that womens football is visible. They are of course just worried about the safety of women.
 
InArduisFouette said:
look at the number of people who make stupid comments about Gabby Logan being involved in sports presenting

Gabby Logan aka former InternationalGymnast Gabby Yorath ( and yes her Dad is who you think he might well be with that name ) ...
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And Eni Aluko and Alex Scott, who have something else in common that makes certain football fans and Joey Barton angry, but I can't put my finger on it. Both women have played at the top level but men like Barton don't want them anywhere near their precious men's football, and of course Barton has jumped on the 'I totes care about women's rights, HONEST' bandwagon. The guy is a domestic abuser, it's safe to say he's not exactly an ally.

I avoid all threads about trans stuff on football forums because it never goes anywhere good. Same with women's football. Men act like guns are being pointed at their heads and they're being forced to watch it. My women's team are Everton and it was worrying how many comments on the HYS were deleted, and knowing the type of people who post regularly on football HYS, especially women's football ones, I can guess why. FFS, I give zero shits about tennis or golf. I just don't watch them. It's not hard.

And yes, there is an overlap between people who hate trans people and people who hate women's football and think it doesn't deserve coverage. I have no idea what sports women are allowed to do. Foxy boxing? But being serious, you can't go on and on about how you're SO CONCERNED about women's sport when you barely give a shit about it in the first place outside of the odd trans person. You still get girls discouraged from doing certain sports. One of my cousins, who works for the FA, was tasked with getting women's football off the ground in Gibraltar and it was an uphill task. It just didn't exist.

I went to a women's match with my stepdad, who is a Chelsea fan, and he enjoyed it even though they lost (it was them and Man City). He genuinely enjoys women's football, he's not just watching it for ~woke points~.

I'm sorry if this comes across as a threadjack, it isn't meant to be but it pisses me off how shallow the concern for women's sport from a lot of TERFs and their male allies is. Donald Trump was very quick to turn on the US NWT and accuse them of going out because they were too woke. Because only Republicans know how to play football.
 
I think sport is interesting because it's an area where sex and gender are really enmeshed. What would sporting differentials look like if there was genuine parity between genders? Field of participation must be a big factor - the average man, matched for age and fitness levels, would probably win a race against the average women. But for every woman you add to that race his chances of winning drop and the gap in participation must be huge in some sports like football. What if elite training techniques and equipment had been designed with both men and women in mind, which they often currently aren't? Or the rewards for top women athletes were the same as for men?

Men are on average stronger than woman, and that is partly because male bodies are on average stronger, but it's also because men are more likely to build muscle playing sports and doing physical activities. But what if that wasn't the case? What if men were socially pressured to eat less and stay slim and women were praised for being strong and muscular? What if men and boys were encouraged to wear clothes that limited physical activity and most physical work was carried out by women? What if half of girls grew up wanting to be footballers and played it every weekend whilst boys were discouraged from playing contact sports because it was unmanly? What impact would that have on sporting ability? What would be the social, epigenetic and even genetic factors that might come into play if this had been the case for hundreds of years?

We are not static creatures. Humans have got a lot taller for example in an astonishingly short period of time and height differentials between men and women vary between countries suggesting a social/cultural factor. It may be that in any circumstances male human bodies would be stronger than female ones but gender clearly plays a role and acts to produce gendered bodies at least to some degree. That's why claiming it's all just outdated stereotypes no-one really pays attention to anymore except for trans people is so facile, especially if you go round calling yourself gender critical.
 
smokedout said:
I think sport is interesting because it's an area where sex and gender are really enmeshed. What would sporting differentials look like if there was genuine parity between genders? Field of participation must be a big factor - the average man, matched for age and fitness levels, would probably win a race against the average women. But for every woman you add to that race his chances of winning drop and the gap in participation must be huge in some sports like football. What if elite training techniques and equipment had been designed with both men and women in mind, which they often currently aren't? Or the rewards for top women athletes were the same as for men?

Men are on average stronger than woman, and that is partly because male bodies are on average are stronger, but it's also because men are more likely to build muscle playing sports and doing physical activities. But what if that wasn't the case? What if men were socially pressured to eat less and stay slim and women were praised for being strong and muscular? What if men and boys were encouraged to wear clothes that limited physical activity and most physical work was carried out by women? What if half of girls grew up wanting to be footballers and played it every weekend whilst boys were discouraged from playing contact sports because it was unmanly? What impact would that have on sporting ability? What would be the social, epigenetic and even genetic factors that might come into play if this had been the case for hundreds of years?

We are not static creatures. Humans have got a lot taller for example in an astonishingly short period of time and height differentials between men and women vary between countries suggesting a social/cultural factor. It may be that in any circumstances male human bodies would be stronger than female ones but gender clearly plays a role and acts to produce gendered bodies at least to some degree. That's why claiming it's all just outdated stereotypes no-one really pays attention to anymore except for trans people is so facile, especially if you go round calling yourself gender critical.
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better diet has led to an increase in height - the height thing in the famous sketch about class with john cleese, ronnie barker and ronnie corbett was a very real thing until recently.
 
smokedout said:
Who can possibly know. Pretty much every boy on the planet who is able to will be coerced into playing football at some point and if he turns out to be exceptional then he's quite likely to be picked up with potentially vast rewards if he succeeds as a professional. Who knows what might happen if the same applied to girls - football especially is one sport where the differences within a gender - a nippy centre foward vs a giant full back - may be as great as the differences between the sexes. Perhaps there are women out there who could compete at professional level against men if the platforms were genuinely level.

I agree that gender segregation makes sense in a lot of sports, especially at elite level, for reasons of encouraging participation as well as fairness. But that also excludes a lot of people so perhaps more thought should be given to streaming by strength/weight/height especially in amateur sports which are suppoosedly played for fun. And why shouldn't women be able to compete against men if they think they are able to and want to? There has been quite a lot of feminist work done on re-imagining sports which seems to have fallen by the wayside now the debate has become dominated by those trying to keep trans people out.
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I row. The on the water rowing that I do is still a man/woman divide. I captain the juniors who are not divided this way. We have been invited to take part in an indoor rowing competition which is divided between open and girls categories. There is also a mixed competition which is defined as 3 open and 3 girls. I'm not sure if this is progress, an attempt at it or a way of side stepping the issues.
 
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There are definitely sports that could be gender blind. whats the view on Boxing?, does anyone think it would be ok to be gender blind and rely on the simple expedient of weight based classes?
 
Santino said:
By definition if there is a better way of segregating sports than by sex/gender, then that would be good. But I don't know what that better way would be.

One of the issues is that if you segregate by some proxy for physical capability, then you will nearly always be relegating women to a category that is by definition not the top one. So even at an elite level the best a woman would be able to achieve is, e.g. fastest woman in one of the lower-rated leagues, not the fastest woman in the world. (Men's boxing is a useful example here. I'm no expert, but I have at least heard of some of the boxers in the heavyweight class; I've not heard of any in the lighter classes. So you'd probably be limiting women to lower prize money, sponsorship and recognition.)

Another aspect - and this is really where I'll probably bow out to avoid speaking 'for' women - is that at a non-elite level, some women's sports exist partly just as something women can do by themselves, without any men being involved. So you'd have to think about the consequences of eliminating segregation by sex/gender across the board, or at what point you would introduce it (and on what justification).
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FYI, some of the biggest names and therefore earners in boxing at the moment are women. It's really quite common to see female boxers being big name headliners. It's also much more common for the biggest earners to not be heavyweigts, they're much more likely to be middleweights/super middleweight. The heavyweight division is quite frankly moribund.


_Russ_ said:
There are definitely sports that could be gender blind. whats the view on Boxing?, does anyone think it would be ok to be gender blind and rely on the simple expedient of weight based classes?
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At the moment, no.

In the future, yes.
 
In non sport news (rolley eyes at the extensive discussion on sport when peoples health is at risk) an academic I know is giving a lecture tomorrow afternoon at UCL 2.30pm which is also streamed

she's asked that the link is not openly shared to avoid transphobes joining on mass but if you want the link please message me direct

Lecture Outline

The lecture starts with a brief introduction, and a note about terminology, and starts with a critique of Cass, focussing on the pubertal desistance myth. It moves on to the central and systemic role of media propaganda in transphobia including mirror propaganda, systematic exclusion and extreme selectivity.

It moves on to address the idea of organised transphobia as a colonising practice and its links with the far right. It examines theories regarding the causes of transphobia and suggests a new approach to this. It then raises the issue as to whether GC practices should be regarded as an 'ideology' and finishes with a word from Hannah Arendt.​
 
Nah its alright Callie .

Tbf, I'm not sure what about the stat mentioned in the thread title merits 40-odd pages of discussion. You'd think anyone who's not a complete cunt would go "damn, that sucks, should probably do something about that eh" and then do something.

But, true to form, we're back at the same old topics. You'd think transphobes would find some new angles, god knows they spend enough time thinking about it.
 
treefrog said:
I see this place is as Normal as ever.
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Always good to see you and/or balbi popping by, always shit to know why you don't stick about.

I post a fair bit less here myself tbh. There's a point where the 'trolling' and 'just asking questions' start to look a lot like entrenched positions.

I was going to mention this earlier, but tricky balance to hit with posting on this thread... I think I started in a similar-ish position to some of the cis/het male transphobes on here, 10-15 years ago mebbe? When the positions of GC feminists were less established (perhaps just less obvious on a casual read), when the arguments seemed less destructive. I don't know how bad I was back in the day, and fuck checking, probably soft logic-broing, but not the point... My position changed. There are so many hinge points it seems inevitable now... But those posters lived the same shit; they watched the descent of people like Stock, read Rowling or Linehan's bollocks, saw who turned up for GC rallies etc and their reaction was; 'well y'know this is still fine'. Even 'this is good'. They could have turned up to a trans visibility event, or stood quietly to side of one of the Brianna vigils. They could have listened to people here, read about trans perspectives on healthcare, could have taken some time with trans leftish youtube, could have read perspectives published in various academic journals (thus logic-bro compatible). They did not, or if they did they shrugged and moved on. So if they end up getting labeled x or y I struggle to give much of a shit. n.b I don't mean posters who make mistakes, or aren't as terminally online, specifically ones who continually engage with this subject.

On the subject of Kathleen Stock noticed this flat out batshit article in the Times recently (thanks to apple news for suggesting it ffs); https://archive.ph/LaCiZ (cw: transphobia, obviously). She's basically talking about the defeat of woke, from BLM to trans rights (obviously touches on sports), specifically in the liberal academic circles she frequents (suspect she's not entirely right, I mean if you're mates with Heather Heying you're probably not getting super accurate perspectives, but whatever). I dunno, I wrote a bit earlier about comparisons with the conservative gay right in the 80s, log cabin republicans etc... Then deleted it because, again, this is one of very few active trans rights threads and tricky to know when to post. Some danger in overdoing comparisons, but there are definite elements in there... Just not an analysis I'm capable of taking on while stopping for lunch (or at any other point tbh).

Final point; I think the sports argument is very useful for transphobes... Olympics alone 448 disciplines over 40 sports. Every one with its professional, amateur, youth leagues, governing bodies etc. Every one with wildly different metrics, methods of assessment etc. It's so easy to move the goalposts, so easy to nitpick, so easy to find someone/some article etc to back your angle. 100 pages of thread would get us nowhere. Truth is there is nothing that can be generalised in sports, save that what should have been a discussion about finding ways to integrate ended up with most of the liberal media establishment and everyone to their right pushing it into an argument for exclusion and vilification.
 
Nice to see you too Cid! I just wonder, do these people ever stop and go "man, why am I so pressed about this?"

I'm pretty sure I think less about gender than transphobes do. I see arguments where cis people are getting wild with each other about some obscure fucking paper published in wherever about testosterone and, just, who cares? Go outside. Touch grass. Mind your business. We'll all have a happier time of it, I guarantee.
 
In depressing local news.

www.nzherald.co.nz

'I've lost everything': Drag queen reading group cancels NZ tour after ongoing protests

Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki described the cancellation as a 'victory'.
www.nzherald.co.nz www.nzherald.co.nz

Destiny church is an evangelical scam run by a self proclaimed Bishop Brian Tamaki.

I'm not reposting his nonsense, but it's full US and UK anti trans and anti LGBT talking points - including pretty much all the stuff covered in this thread.

Threats and vandalism has seen multiple events get cancelled here, and our brave free speech unions response is to tug at their libertarian bow ties and go "well that's a police matter if there's been any crimes" when they went to the high court to try and sue a council who cancelled the event of two white supremacist speakers back in 2018.

This has been on the rise for the last couple of years, but Tamaki's mob going all in on it is pretty dangerous - public opinion is that he's a horrible homophobic cunt, but his church has a lot of folks willing to try and make him happy.
 
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