I am active in both soccer and rugby, at a fairly high organizational level. We are starting to see problems. A 100kg trans woman who self-identified as a woman at the age of 28 makes women’s rugby essentially unplayable. The examples in the US so far have largely not been in contact sports, but there will be one soon enough (or not).
However, the basic problem I have with the MAGA narrative of manning the ramparts to save women’s and girls’ sport from the far left and their trans hordes is the very same people are cheering on the destruction of DEI and the Department of Education. The growth of women’s sport is more or less a testimony to what those initiatives can build. Without the Department of Education, there is no Title IX. Without Title IX, there are no scholarships for women’s sports. It won’t be overnight, but the first time an athletic department needs budget cuts, bye-bye women’s volleyball. Fast forward 10 years or so, and it will be right back to the status quo ex ante, no athletic scholarships for women in any sport. Without that carrot, lower level sport will likely unwind all the development that has occurred since the 1980s. Riley Gaines won’t be competing against Lia Thomas, because neither of those schools will be investing at anywhere near that level in women’s swimming.
My personal experience matches Sweeting’s, but should obviously be understood to be limited in its applicability because I am one person.
However, even in that limited applicability, the number of women athletes I know who have experienced dog’s abuse the last few years because RW frothers have identified them as gender cheats just because they have bigger muscles than they do is incredible. This is where the belief I have in the self stated sympathy these people have for “real women” evaporates.
I think it’s the democrats who are hopelessly out of touch pandering to a section of population which won’t bother to vote.
I’m all in for LGBTQ rights but the way the right weaponized that was brutal. That wasn’t the topic democrats really spent their time. Sure they supported LGBTQ rights but the republicans ran a very insidious campaign.
I still feel that the democrats should have gone still left of their current policies (which need not necessarily have involved the LGBTQ issue).
People at the day want bang for the buck. But the democrats lacked a coherent vision.
I for one, if I was the decision maker in the democratic party would have made radical moves on the supreme court expanded it. Appointed more judges who were democrats and then made sure Trump was disqualified. And this process should have started on day 1 of Biden taking office.
The problem with making conclusions from that study though is that it covers 139 participants from 1990 to 2020. That doesn’t surprise me. I would assume that most people who were adults that transitioned knew exactly what they were doing.
But There wasn’t a movement into the schools nor was there social media to introduce dozens of different possible genders up until eight/ten years ago. The number of kids who identify as trans today has exploded to multiple times compared to even a decade ago. How many of those are genuinely trans or just going through puberty confused? Kids weren’t getting gender affirming medical procedures in 1995 like they are today.
This is the first generation of young people where both social media and gender ideology are things. They weren’t even ten years ago. So when I say the data isn’t there, it’s because we haven’t seen the full effects of social media and gender ideology being taught in schools on kids as they grow into adults. We are starting to.
This could be interesting. Musk’s coup is deeply unpopular even among Republicans.
It just feels like the tensions between Musk’s agenda and the Magas is a time bomb.
Democrats need to relentlessly attack this attempt to destroy US democracy, because it’s not popular.
I’m wary of this notion, because I feel we’ve seen too many times that the moment the Democrats start championing something that is seen as popular, it instantly plummets in popularity.
Perhaps the best thing to do now is to find a way to practically reduce the damage while letting them destroy themselves.
This is exactly what I said above - this things is common and dangerous and must be stopped, but we cannot believe the data that says it isn’t because we dont have the data (on this common thing). There is also an issue base rates that are illuminating…surgical success of loads of commonly performed and utterly uncontroversial procedures are absolutely terrible in comparison to gender affirming surgery.
Gender affirming care is multifaceted. Cross gender hormones and surgeries are at the bottom of the funnel and lots more people enter the funnel than ever get to that point, and that is by design, to give patients the opportunity to work through things before jumping to difficult to reverse decisions. And even if they stay in the funnel until that point, it will generally have taken a long time, often the matter of a couple of years, before they are allowed to commit to something more irreversible.
This is the process working as trans criticis say they want it to they just refuse to accept it. In lots of cases that is because there are bad actors in play. Even high profile things like the Cass report incorrectly group all aspects of gender affirming care together hiding that it typically takes years of counselling and progressive behavioral steps before a patient, especially a teen patient is progressed to doing something more irreversible. They point to the referral being granted after one session with a GP and go “ah ha, this is proof they are being rushed” when all it is is evidence that GPs are not equipped to manage these cases and are facilitating them to start their long process of specialized care that may or may not lead them to surgery.
