Flo-Jo’s likely steroid-aided women’s 100m dash record from 1988 still stands today, 10.49s. 35 years of the most elite female Olympians have not beaten that record. But in 2016, four high-school boys did. And the record for a 15-year-old boy is 10.2s. The fastest woman of all time was beaten by a 15-year-old boy.
Life is unfair and sometimes the circumstances of your physical body closes some doors for you. No matter how much he feels in his bones he was meant to be a pilot, nobody’s going to let Stevie Wonder fly a plane. No matter how fervently he wishes to fight fires, no fire department is hiring Peter Dinklage.
I always try to be clear. Sex is an unchangeable biological reality, observed not assigned at birth, that makes us male and female. Gender is a fluid personality trait, expressed subjectively, that makes us men and women. Most men are male, most women are female, the few who aren’t we call trans.
Not only is the public prohibition of showing female breasts antiquated and downright Puritan by European standards, (especially at a swimming pool), it’s sexist. That trans man lifeguard with the exposed boobies would probably rescue someday a fat-ass male with bigger boobies than he.
What if, by today’s enlightened standards, Caitlyn competed in the 1976 Women’s Pentathlon? Where East Germany’s Seigrun Seigl won gold with a 13.31 100m hurdles, 12.92m shot put, 1.74m high jump, 6.49m long jump, and a 23.09 200m dash?
I’ve admitted to my transphobia, and I’m working to understand an issue I may never fully grok. But even if you think the whole idea of transgenderism is nutty, why do you care how other people raise their kids?
The whole reason we feminists fought for Title IX in the 1970s was so that females, who have bodies that are, at every level and every age, at every level of competition, slower and weaker than male bodies, could compete against each other and thereby have fair and equal access to sporting opportunities. We didn’t come up with Title IX because sporting opportunities were lacking for athletes who like to wear dresses and makeup.
I’ve been posting about transphobia, that bigoted belief system that asserts that human beings (with rare exception for genetic anomalies) come in two sexes, one that’s designed for the production of numerous tiny motile sex cells and the other that’s designed for production of a single large mostly-immobile sex cell, the combination of which produces a fertilized embryo carried and borne by the latter sex.
I used to be a Twitter power user, but since Elongated Muskrat has turned it into a Nazi pub, I have migrated to Mastodon. And Facebook just makes me angry.
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