Ada

Appeasing the bigots and fearmongers has never once in the history of people lead to success and protection of minority rights. All it is is a slowly closing ratchet.

The only method that has ever worked is pushing back. It doesn’t have to mean violence, but it means making people uncomfortable, and challenging their harmful beliefs, not letting them sit comfortably with them

If transphobia wasn’t rampant, that would be ideal. But transphobia is rampant, and it just means each and every sport defaults to exclusion. That’s how it worked before this IOC ruling. That’s how it worked at the last Olympics, in which zero trans women were able to compete.

Idealised scenarios that assume fairness and good will don’t work. They just lead to exclusion, and worse, they make it impossible to gather more data.

And the reason for that is that everyone thinks like you. Which is to say, everyone thinks “Biology matters”, but for some reason, is never working to challenge that assumption by acknowledging that trans folks biology changes with the introduction of hormone replacement. It’s also a space with a lot of bad faith and actively misleading research, because of the aforementioned transphobia.

Excluding trans people from sport is an openly acknowledged “first step” of a where they’re using to normalise exclusion of trans folk in wider society. These are the folk generating much of this research, research that normally would be laughed out of the room, but when it’s about trans people and aligns with the “common sense” belief that trans folks have an advantage in sports, somehow the research gets taken seriously.

That’s the environment we live in. And that’s the environment that tried your approach, as a stepping stone to the outright exclusion we have now.

The only trans woman to ever compete in the Olympics was a power lifter. She came last.

Your intuition about trans athletes is wrong.

They ban people whose identity documents don’t match their assigned sex at birth (ie, me). All of my documents list me as female. Birth certificate, passport, ID card etc.

So if I declare that I’m trans, they deny me a visa, because my documents don’t match their transphobic guidelines. And if I don’t declare that I’m trans, and they let me in, then they can hit me for entering the country with “fraudulent” documentation if they later identity me as transgender.

Here’s a breakdown of how it works https://www.huschblackwell.com/newsandinsights/new-visa-rules-target-transgender-individuals-considerations-for-employers-and-educational-institutions

my point stands: you don’t care about nuance

The irony being here, you aren’t interested in nuance either. You’ve got your line in the sand, and it doesn’t matter how much exclusion, harm or bigotry you see, how explicitly exclusion from sports is shown to be a wedge issue to normalise exclusion of trans people from other levels of society, your opinion won’t change.

Yep, the real issue isn’t the fact that trans people are being excluded, the thing we need to talk about is how a trans person didn’t talk about their exclusion in a way you were comfortable with.

I’ve been on Lemmy long enough to realize that most on Lemmy don’t want to have nuance, or useful conversation. People here LIKE being mad.

There is a world wide growing movement against trans people. We have had our drivers licenses and passports taken away, we’ve been excluded from sports, we’ve had our protections against violent and sexual crime weakened and removed, we’ve had whole governments campaign on their desire to attack us.

I personally live in a country that has escaped the worst of it, but even so, do you know that I legally can’t enter the US? Not that I’d want to, but it would literally be impossible for me to provide ID that matches their expectations. And if I was let in anyway because some random person didn’t realise I was trans, I would face imprisonment if they identified that I’m trans.

Fuck nuance.

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Can’t we all just try to get along?

That’s a bit hard when we’re having our rights taken away. But sure, the biggest issue is that the folk defending trans people aren’t doing it in a polite enough way for your sensibilities.

I’m a vegan. When i see people eating beef, I don’t claim “either you like hurting cows, or you’ve been duped by people who hate animals”.

I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian, but I wouldn’t argue with you if you made that claim, because the only reason we as a society eat as much meat as we do, is because it’s normalised at every level for economic reasons.

If I can manage that, you can manage to not argue with trans people trying to deal with the active and ongoing exclusion they face.

For what it’s worth, I don’t give a shit about “fairness” in sports.

Then why the fuck are you even in this discussion, arguing with people trying to defend a highly marginalised section of the community?

If you “don’t care”, then dropping it so as to not be part of the active exclusion of trans people would be the appropriate move.