MyBrainHurts, mybrainhurts@piefed.ca

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for being clear and polite throughout! That’s an increasingly rare thing on threads like this.

I do hope though you’ll maybe think about this next time someone gets labelled as transphobic for not wanting to break sports for a tiny fraction of a small percentage of people. Until we have a good solution to present them, it’s not an entirely unreasonable position as I think has been demonstrated.

Take care and thanks again!

It’s based on what you wrote.

No one who has read anything serious about fascism suggests punching people is anything but helpful to the regime.

You might read Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny”. It’s very short and quite well written.

I have more than a surface-deep level of understanding pertaining to fascism, and I’m capable of recognizing the signs and symptoms.

Watching Andor or some youtuber doesn’t count as a significant understanding of fascism.

If you’d actually learned about fascism, you’d know that the Brownshirts and Blackshirts both were itching for street level fights and that the resulting chaos in the streets fueled perceptions of mayhem which helped enable both fascist movements to enact more sweeping laws etc.

The reason trump sent ICE into Democratic cities with smaller immigrant communities was precisely because he was hoping people would be dumb enough to start throwing punches or better/worse yet, kill an officer.

You beat nascent fascism movements by convincing people. You don’t win by punching randoms. As my friend had to explain to her young son, “you might be right but the moment you throw a punch, you’ve lost. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the right, you’ve lost.”

Honestly, if I were one of the digital overlords of social media and I wanted to help the trump administration, I can think of few things more effective than promoting this idea of punching “nazis”. If enough idiots listen and we start throwing serious punches, we’ll lose.

If you want to learn, it’s a bit of a slog but I can think of few books better than Shirers Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Just because my proposed solution may be unrealistic doesn’t make the exclusion of trans people any less transphobic.

I think this is the crux. Like, we can both probably admit this is pretty ridiculous and implausible solution you’ve proposed. (there is no set of metrics that somehow allows Messi in the same league as the best footballers in the world, or that lets Muggsy Bogues, 5"3 in the top division of basketball, but those are some of the best in the world at their sports.) But somehow, despite that, and there not really being a good solution, folks are still transphobic if they’d rather you didn’t break sports on behalf of a tiny fraction of a small percentage of people? I mean it’s just a little ridiculous…

Consider anything else. Disabled people can’t play traditional sports in the same way. Is it disability-phobic that they are relegated to their own leagues and events? If we’re willing to break sports on behalf of one group, it seems incredibly unequal to not do so for others. All non accessible sports are by definition exclusionary.

do you truly, and I mean genuinely in your core, believe that trans exclusive sport divisions would even get a second glance?

Nope. But, a reasonable solution isn’t to break sports for everyone else in the name of equality.

We make tradeoffs all the time. Cafes and bars hosting open mic nights is exclusionary to deaf people, should we make it illegal to have one without a sign language interpreter even though that would make those events financially unviable in many cases? My sister, like many, has trouble reading, so struggles with foreign movies. Should all foreign movies have large pauses so that anyone who struggles has time to catch up? Or are we phobic to deaf or those with reading issues?

Trans folks face very real and heartbreaking struggles., here are so many serious issues that affect them. Breaking sports on their behalf isn’t going to win hearts and minds. Insisting that people who don’t think we should implement unrealistic solutions are transphobic is not helping.

Fwiw, I automatically downvote this childish shit because almost everyone online seems to call anyone they dislike a Nazi.

If you’re using pop history’s biggest bad guys to refer to everyone with whom you disagree, oknbut you don’t also get to claim the moral high ground that comes with punching aforementioned popular history’s worst bad guys.

You’re just saying you want to punch those with whom you disagree, minus the intellectual justification.

You’d divide up the sport into divisions which all exhibit people at the peak of physical performance and athleticism for what their meat sack allows.

This really doesn’t seem reasonable. Many sports favour size but that’s not the end all be all. Again, back to hockey, Quinn Hughes is arguably the second best defenceman on the planet and weighs 180, by NHL standards, he’s tiny. That’s the beauty of something like the NHL, we get to see the very best in the world against the very best. Watching Hughes against smaller players would be, at best, dull. But if you allow movement between those divisions, very soon you get back to the NHL and no women’s leagues. (Or leagues that are so far below the regular leagues that they become even less watched.)

Yes, people watch the paralympics etc but vastly fewer. Boxing is an interesting example but outside of spectacle fights, it’s pretty unwatched. It also has to be structured significantly differently as most competitors are not expected to have many fights over their careers. (Pacquio, one of the best boxers of all time, had 73 bouts.)

Consider, even in Canada, where we goddamn love our hockey (every province made a temporary change to our liquor laws so we could watch the Gold medal game in bars), it is all but impossible to watch any of the leagues below the NHL on regular TV/sports packages, even though those are our NHL team’s prospects and arguably, the second best hockey league in the world. (KHL is fine but…)

At the end of the day, this has that ring of “I would like to see this, consequences be damned” that the Left is a little famous for. And at the end of the day, these changes would be so an almost insignificant proportion (the number of people who become a pro athlete) of an already small percentage (number of transgender women - I mean, maybe in gymnastics there’d be an issue but for almost every mainstream sport, the concern is pretty unidirectional) can play in a hardly watched league and everyone else just has to suck it up.

It’s a thing about which reasonable people can disagree but I think that the sheer amount of gymnastics you have to do to even envisage a world in which this works (okay, we create new metrics for every sport, break every league and create new ones, everyone gets on board with watching dozens of new leagues and pretending there isn’t a best league and also women’s sports kind of gets relegated) is kind of proof that this isn’t an issue that makes someone a transphobe.

Frankly, and why this bugs me, is that I think that when we fight on the thin edge of things like this, even though the cause is noble, it really does make the Left look a little silly. (According to Gallup, about 3/4 of Americans are opposed to transgender women in women’s sports.) If we can’t be trusted to figure out when we need to compromise with the public/reality, why on Earth would anyone trust our fantastical claims about how we can lead them to a glorious socialist utopia despite all historical evidence to the contrary?

Phew!

Dangit, I love the emojis but we don’t have a saluting one yet!

the person I was replying to specifically mentioned professional sports, and so that’s the context I was discussing.

Apologies, I missed that!

That being said, I don’t think fundamentally reworking sports is a particularly useful or workable goal. Sure, if you had a magic wand AND could make everyone cool with it AND balance out existing talent discrepancies but I think there’d be a few hundred priorities for said magic wand before that.

Also, just gaming through your idea in terms of hockey, my national sport, it’s hard not to see how this would just relegate women to a distant low tier level, rather in the forefront that they are rapidly becoming. In hockey, we have both the NHL and the feeder league, the AHL. Below that are age restricted leagues and then locals. Almost no women would be strong enough to play in the AHL. In the highest women’s league, the PWHL, the team with the highest average weight has an average weight of 154 pounds. On the Canucks’ AHL team, a weak, generally undersized team, the smallest guy is 175. (of the 28 rostered skaters, fully half are over 200 pounds.)

So at best, your metrics relegates women to a significantly lower league in the name of fairness. But even then, because it’s based on physical characteristics, you’d have a disproportionate share of the guys who were too small for the AHL coming in.

Have you ever gone to a women’s sporting event? It’s goddamn heartwarming. When I was at Christine Sinclair’s retirement game, I almost got teary eyed for the number of young girls and their teams all proudly rocking their jerseys and being so excited about that moment (my friend was crying as she remembered Sinclair coming to her school and really encouraging the girls.) Similarly, watching the Goldeneyes (our PWHL team) play you can feel the girls energy as something almost palpable. Those are special and I wouldn’t take them away to say “hey, you can play in the third division welterweight team.” I’d be worried your proposed scheme would relegate women to some double minor league.

I think there can be a middle ground between “we should significantly reorganize almost every sport and have wild metrics to assess teams” (ignoring of course any knock on effects or how smaller communities could possibly handle this etc) and being transphobic. If you’re lumping everything else as transphobic, well it’s pretty hard to root for your cause on serious issues.

Right? In what rational universe is “some people got angry on twitter” a legit angle to a news story unless your point is to prop up aforementioned keyboard warriors.

Yeah, one thing that really helped me was watching out for communities in .ml, that’s where a lot of our crazy comes from. I almost never comment in posts from those communities and think very carefully about whether I want to engage with a .ml user.

And, I guess while we’re throwing out tips, I’ve really dug smaller communities (which was also the case with reddit.) I find browsing by scaled and all you find some neat ones full of interesting folks (or dullsters, as in one of my favourite communities, the dull mens club.)

And fully agree, people seem to have at least been polite with you!

Just a head’s up! Hope the rest of the fediverse treats you well.

Also wtf is with the “Christ, I’m going to regret this” attitude? I’ve been calm and level in all my engagement here.

Because the fediverse isn’t just you? Trans stuff generally leads to a dogpile of self righteousness. For the next few days I can look forward to dm’s about how I’m a transphobe, responses ranging from assholish to abusive etc. And it’s not like we’re going to come to agreement but…

But, I do think your point has pivoted a bit. from

Separating men and women in certain physical sports for safety and fairness is founded in reality and fact.

to

I think that the division in professional sports shouldn’t be by gender in the first place

and these are fundamentally different.

First, in popular context, the big concern about this is in high school and college sports, not professional. And not rec leagues, though sometimes it goes there.

The second stance requires every sport to be reconfigured etc, which gets into the absurdities. (I’m just trying to even imagine how you would do it for the sport I watch most, hockey. On my pitiful Canucks team, we have Connor Garland, who is smaller than some of the women on our PWHL team but having seen both play, it would be incredibly unfair to put Garland in the PWHL. Or my trans soccer teammate who is faster and stronger than almost every woman we play but is similar sized.)

And hey, that’s a valid stance and admirable but it is very different than what you led off with. There’s no way anyone reading your first response would think that, despite claiming there are no differences between cis and trans women, you actually also want to separate sports based on size etc. Again, valid stance but very different from what you started with.

I love how people popped up to confirm your point.

In my more conspiratorial moments, I do wonder if part of the point of social media was to keep us infighting so hard on incredibly niche issues.

If I were rich and in charge, I would be on my knees thanking heavens that of all the things the Left and Right are fighting over, transgender sports is a bizzarely major issue instead of, yknow, almost anything else that would seriously change things.

Isn’t that what the internet is for?

Christ, I’m going to regret this but…

Separating men and women in certain physical sports for safety and fairness is founded in reality and fact. Separating transgender women from cisgender women has no such foundation, and in fact the research directly disagrees with it. There is a minor difference between cisgender men and transgender men in terms of physical performance.

This argument is self defeating. Unless you’re going to insist every transgender athlete be some arbitrary distance along their transition etc, this is nonsense. Plenty of transgender folks aren’t using hormones etc yet, heck I play with one.

If we agree on a)

Separating men and women in certain physical sports for safety and fairness is founded in reality and fact.

And that b) it is in fact hormones etc are what changes the strength

And c) that trans women are not compelled to have hormones therapy or surgery until/if they are ready, then unless you are going to demand a minimum amount of hormones or time (which, hey, maybe that’s the quiet part of our policy) this is a nonsense argument.