I think the enforcement problem here is challenging even without requiring universal sex testing. The problem is that any female player can be accused of being trans (in practice disproportionately players who are athletically strong and/or whose appearance is less conventionally feminine) and the existence of the rule turns these kinds of often opportunistic and ill-motivated accusations into legitimate rules enforcement. So what do we do, have SRY testing on standby and make any player targeted by these accusations do one? That in itself doesn't seem great for women's sports.
We need to distinguish between trans rights and trans interests.
Rights shouldn’t be compromised on, but interests must be compromised on and weighed against the interests of others. Going around misclassifying your interests as rights and insisting that everyone else must yield to you in everything is not going to fly, and is probably the reason why support for trans causes is going down in polling data.
Sports participation is an interest, not a right. We should treat it like one.
The issue of trans women in sports is legitimately a tough one because there are levels of nuance. The even if a team decides to allow trans women, they must decide what stages of medical transition are required, or what particular requirements are required (ie if it’s self ID). It’s not simple. Furthermore, different sports are different and the potential “advantages” really depend on the sport.
These are real questions. But really the fight should not be had in the political arena, but at the level of each sports league. The only places that it makes sense for it to be political are the places where the government organizes sports (public schools for instance), which should be primarily a local/state issue. The only real national issue I can think of is Title IX. Otherwise, these debates should be relegated to an extent to local politics, but primarily to the organizations of the many different sports leagues out there.
One thing I find frustrating is how often people don't realize even the thing they're setting up as the bogeyman is itself somewhat continuous with already-existing rules in another context.
When I was in 7th grade in NY way back in 1999, I joined my high school's fencing team. This required a physical exam due to the age difference, having a doctor basically signing off that I was both generally healthy and also far enough along through puberty to participate safely. At the time, the form included a sexual maturity scale rating, including pubic hair and genital development. I can definitely see how making something like that universal would deter a lot of people, and I think NY has dropped that part of it since I was a kid. But it's not actually fundamentally new, and wouldn't need to be very common if you reversed the bogeyman to assume eligibility by sex assigned at birth like we always have and require it for exceptions ("Yes, you're trans, but if you've gone through male puberty you can't play on the girls' team").
To be clear, I'm not advocating for that, just pushing back against the alarmist rhetoric about the possibility.
It seems to me that in the context of American health spending, just providing every infant with an SRY test at birth that will flag any visually non-obvious DSDs would not be some kind of inordinately wasteful expenditure. If you don't want to go that far, but do want to avoid any disparate impact on female athletes, then make it available for free on request.
I view that as table stakes for anyone claiming to be serious about rooting out male advantage in sports. That is a societal problem and society, not individual athletes, should foot the bill.
Today Matt tells us that Progressives, being the good, good, good people they are, are no longer canceling other Democrats who, like Talerico, are compelled to a tactical retreat in the gender wars in order to appear moderate in red states. And, Matt tells us, never forget how bad conservatives are because they don't like women's sports because they, conservatives, are bad.
At work, when I have lunch with my coworkers, I’ll ask people what they were up to over the prior week. There’s a certain type of parent who essentially tells me that they ferried their kids all over the state to compete in different sporting events. They spend thousands of dollars a year on this and a significant portion of their free time, they live vicariously through their kids and make a lot of sacrifices to ensure their kids get every chance they can.
I think this is part of why America has so many successful athletes. Behavior like this is totally commonplace, but crazy to me.
The point is, a lot of parents are really invested in their kids’ sports education. Obviously, they’re going to have a problem with unfair advantages.
And if you're a certain type of urban activist you might miss this entirely.
I don't like the model and think it's nuts, to be clear.
But back home people would be like "no way I'm giving up 70% of my free time to dedicate to your sports education" and leave it at that. The fact that so many people are willing to do this seems noteworthy to me.
Let’s say Talarico and Turek win, what happens when they get up to the Senate and Ed Markey wants them to sign on to a trans bill of rights? I genuinely don’t know
I mean back in the day when we did quaint relics of the past like "legislation," they would sign on while making their reservations clear, the bill would move to the floor, someone would move an amendment to strip out the trans sports language, they would vote in favor of the amendment, and then they'd vote in favor of the amended bill at the end.
I realize that such concepts are foreign to our modern system in which politics is carried on exclusively in the form of memes and out of context statements on the internet, but it seemed worth pointing out.
Ultimately the whole idea of policing people based on their chromosomes cannot be supported as "scientific".
There are people born with XY chromosomes who would never be perceived as being "men". Lookup androgen insensitivity as to the science. So it's never exclusively 2 chromosomes.
Ignoring the exceptions is what conservatives do. The regime to police voting rights to ensure citizenship is not necessary. There are miniscule number of non-citizens voting, and the proposed rules oppressive.
Why can’t they just look at a birth certificate? The birth certificate needs to show their actual sex. In ymca soccer or little league, an age dispute is settled with a birth certificate. Easy peasy.
The trans question isn’t a sports question. Men clearly have the right to dress the way they want, but trying to actually pass for the opposite sex is weird. Especially as a young person. Being gay and wanting to pass as a woman…Weird. Members of society wanting gender signals is legitimate.
Setting people up in counseling and suggesting to them that they have a right to expect other people to conform to their worldview on whether they can choose their sex is setting them up for failure. These individuals may indeed be suicide risks but the counselor is supposed to be talking people off the ledge.
I hate that it took this long for everyone to just agree with my position on the issue: let the sports bodies sort this out and, now this is key, eat all the political costs for doing so.
Nobody cared about girls/women's sports until trans people showed up. This isn't about boys playing girls sports; it's about people's discomfort with something new and unfamiliar. Trans people aren't going away -- get used to it.
"The actual fanbase for most women’s sports in the United States in general, and certainly for the W.N.B.A., is quite left wing and disproportionately queer."
It's worth saying that while this statement is literally true (there are indeed, a greater percentage of people who use the homophobic slur "queer" to define their identities within the WNBA fanbase than there are nationally), the reality is the absolute percentage of WNBA fans who call themselves by that offensive term is very likely tiny. If you actually go to WNBA games (I do), the largest cohort of fans is straight normie parents with daughters. There are definitely some lesbian fans too, but most lesbians don't call themselves "queer"; they call themselves lesbian or gay and reject the q-word.
The kinds of hardcore urban lefties who like calling themselves by that word (which is a political identity, not a sexual orientation) are actually quite hard to find at WNBA games. Most of those folks don't really like sports at all.
Now what is true is that the WNBA fan base is left of center, and Matt IS right that this is the reason they don't just explicitly state what actually IS their policy, which is that trans women can't play in the WNBA. That's what Kanter intuited when he pulled his offensive stunt. But it's definitely not because the WNBA fanbase is full of "queers".
Why do I harp on this? Because I really think commentators like Matt should stop using the term "queer" when he means (in this case) "lesbian". The vast majority of gays and lesbians hate that term, which smears them as a bunch of weirdos who want to destroy normie values and threaten American culture. Somehow the Far Left got ahold of the language that Democratic Party elites use on gay and trans issues, and they got a lot of people to start casually calling normie, conformist, nonthreatening gay people "queers". When we do this, we hand a victory to the Right and promote homophobia.
I am open to this critique and will investigate preferred usage. Probably not productive to debate it at length here, but the team will survey opinion and try to reach a considered view. Always appreciate thoughtful feedback.
In general, no, but very specifically Democrats should use "gay and trans people" or "LGBT people" when that's what they mean (and use "gay" or "lesbian" or "trans" when they mean only a specific subset). It really is offensive to call a sexual minority "queers", especially in an inclusive fashion where you are describing a whole bunch of people who hate that term and hate being called "queers".
Just in this election cycle we had Seth Moulton lose a primary to Ed Market over "blaming trans people for Trump". I'm not sure we can say the argument was won, at least not in blue states.
(Then again in blue states it literally does not matter).
Markey's position sounds very popular. I wonder which red state Democratic candidates will be inviting him to campaign with them and hold some town halls about gender.
I think people took it as a signal that Moulton would generally adopt positions to Markey's right when the two of them disagreed. Moulton made no effort whatsoever to dispel that impression, so I assume that it's correct.
The primary electorate then voted accordingly. I fail to see how anyone has grounds to complain about them doing so.
I live in MA, and while I heard about this, barely anyone I talked to about the election even knew. Most people (that I talked to) just have strong status quo bias and like Markey more than they dislike Moulton.
Matt says conservatives do not support women’s sports. He obviously has never been on the sidelines with the 13 or 14 year old dads supporting their daughters as they play soccer.
Perhaps he meant only elected conservatives who are childless or conservatives who only have boys. Amazing that I didn’t realize there isn't one congressman or senator with granddaughters. Maybe he believes that elected conservatives are incapable of giving birth to the female sex....Yes, that must be it. Some genetic issue.
Honestly the reality is that there's a segment of right-leaning INTELLECTUALS (going back to Elaine Donnelly and people like that, and perhaps represented now by Helen Andrews) who have always disliked gender equality, including Title IX. But most rank and file conservatives love girls sports for their daughters and while the WNBA audience is disproportionately liberal, plenty of conservatives do watch, and certainly plenty of conservatives like the US Women's Soccer Team and watch women's sports at the Olympics. Hating Title IX is very much a niche Rightie thing and yes, Matt is not being entire clear on this point.
So, let me get this right, a few dumb a** jerkoffs with their troglodyte opinions have a beef with Title IX and have zero agency to do anything about it. Yet Matt says we're going to paint conservatives as people who do not support women’s sports.
Yeah, I’m betting he wants to rephrase his statement. In fact, there is a tendency to attribute hyper-politically charged statements by idiots on both sides of the aisle to the entire elected officials of both parties and to the voters.
It’s like saying the Democratic Party’s voters are turning to DSA candidates in urban centers. Umm
So I think the driver is something else, which is an intellectual tradition that goes back to Phyllis Schafley. One way to get ahead as a conservative woman intellectual is to oppose your own equality.
The same sorts of considerations apply to so-called "bathroom bills."
There was no transphobic bathroom bill in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte took it upon itself to enshrine "gender identity" as a protected attribute for access to public accommodations -- rather than leaving well enough alone with private stalls. (Perhsps this was out of "compassion," lest a person with a vagina be driven to suicide for want of access to a urinal!)
Only then did the state legislature pass a law "protecting" biological sex -- raising the prospect of strip-searches at the restroom door.
None of this was necessary, but in the politics of moral panic, stupid begets stupid.
I think the enforcement problem here is challenging even without requiring universal sex testing. The problem is that any female player can be accused of being trans (in practice disproportionately players who are athletically strong and/or whose appearance is less conventionally feminine) and the existence of the rule turns these kinds of often opportunistic and ill-motivated accusations into legitimate rules enforcement. So what do we do, have SRY testing on standby and make any player targeted by these accusations do one? That in itself doesn't seem great for women's sports.
We need to distinguish between trans rights and trans interests.
Rights shouldn’t be compromised on, but interests must be compromised on and weighed against the interests of others. Going around misclassifying your interests as rights and insisting that everyone else must yield to you in everything is not going to fly, and is probably the reason why support for trans causes is going down in polling data.
Sports participation is an interest, not a right. We should treat it like one.
The issue of trans women in sports is legitimately a tough one because there are levels of nuance. The even if a team decides to allow trans women, they must decide what stages of medical transition are required, or what particular requirements are required (ie if it’s self ID). It’s not simple. Furthermore, different sports are different and the potential “advantages” really depend on the sport.
These are real questions. But really the fight should not be had in the political arena, but at the level of each sports league. The only places that it makes sense for it to be political are the places where the government organizes sports (public schools for instance), which should be primarily a local/state issue. The only real national issue I can think of is Title IX. Otherwise, these debates should be relegated to an extent to local politics, but primarily to the organizations of the many different sports leagues out there.
One thing I find frustrating is how often people don't realize even the thing they're setting up as the bogeyman is itself somewhat continuous with already-existing rules in another context.
When I was in 7th grade in NY way back in 1999, I joined my high school's fencing team. This required a physical exam due to the age difference, having a doctor basically signing off that I was both generally healthy and also far enough along through puberty to participate safely. At the time, the form included a sexual maturity scale rating, including pubic hair and genital development. I can definitely see how making something like that universal would deter a lot of people, and I think NY has dropped that part of it since I was a kid. But it's not actually fundamentally new, and wouldn't need to be very common if you reversed the bogeyman to assume eligibility by sex assigned at birth like we always have and require it for exceptions ("Yes, you're trans, but if you've gone through male puberty you can't play on the girls' team").
To be clear, I'm not advocating for that, just pushing back against the alarmist rhetoric about the possibility.
It seems to me that in the context of American health spending, just providing every infant with an SRY test at birth that will flag any visually non-obvious DSDs would not be some kind of inordinately wasteful expenditure. If you don't want to go that far, but do want to avoid any disparate impact on female athletes, then make it available for free on request.
I view that as table stakes for anyone claiming to be serious about rooting out male advantage in sports. That is a societal problem and society, not individual athletes, should foot the bill.
Today Matt tells us that Progressives, being the good, good, good people they are, are no longer canceling other Democrats who, like Talerico, are compelled to a tactical retreat in the gender wars in order to appear moderate in red states. And, Matt tells us, never forget how bad conservatives are because they don't like women's sports because they, conservatives, are bad.
Thanks, Matt. Very insightful.
At work, when I have lunch with my coworkers, I’ll ask people what they were up to over the prior week. There’s a certain type of parent who essentially tells me that they ferried their kids all over the state to compete in different sporting events. They spend thousands of dollars a year on this and a significant portion of their free time, they live vicariously through their kids and make a lot of sacrifices to ensure their kids get every chance they can.
I think this is part of why America has so many successful athletes. Behavior like this is totally commonplace, but crazy to me.
The point is, a lot of parents are really invested in their kids’ sports education. Obviously, they’re going to have a problem with unfair advantages.
And if you're a certain type of urban activist you might miss this entirely.
There's actually a lot of evidence that pay-for-play is why America has so FEW successful athletes compared to, say, Norway.
I don't like the model and think it's nuts, to be clear.
But back home people would be like "no way I'm giving up 70% of my free time to dedicate to your sports education" and leave it at that. The fact that so many people are willing to do this seems noteworthy to me.
Let’s say Talarico and Turek win, what happens when they get up to the Senate and Ed Markey wants them to sign on to a trans bill of rights? I genuinely don’t know
I mean back in the day when we did quaint relics of the past like "legislation," they would sign on while making their reservations clear, the bill would move to the floor, someone would move an amendment to strip out the trans sports language, they would vote in favor of the amendment, and then they'd vote in favor of the amended bill at the end.
I realize that such concepts are foreign to our modern system in which politics is carried on exclusively in the form of memes and out of context statements on the internet, but it seemed worth pointing out.
Ultimately the whole idea of policing people based on their chromosomes cannot be supported as "scientific".
There are people born with XY chromosomes who would never be perceived as being "men". Lookup androgen insensitivity as to the science. So it's never exclusively 2 chromosomes.
Ignoring the exceptions is what conservatives do. The regime to police voting rights to ensure citizenship is not necessary. There are miniscule number of non-citizens voting, and the proposed rules oppressive.
This applies to trans issues as well.
Why can’t they just look at a birth certificate? The birth certificate needs to show their actual sex. In ymca soccer or little league, an age dispute is settled with a birth certificate. Easy peasy.
The trans question isn’t a sports question. Men clearly have the right to dress the way they want, but trying to actually pass for the opposite sex is weird. Especially as a young person. Being gay and wanting to pass as a woman…Weird. Members of society wanting gender signals is legitimate.
Setting people up in counseling and suggesting to them that they have a right to expect other people to conform to their worldview on whether they can choose their sex is setting them up for failure. These individuals may indeed be suicide risks but the counselor is supposed to be talking people off the ledge.
Birth certificates won't show "actual sex" until and unless an SRY test is made mandatory for all children, for free, at birth.
Until then they will show "some doctor's educated guess about sex."
As for your bizarre mental hangups about the existence of trans people, get over them.
I hate that it took this long for everyone to just agree with my position on the issue: let the sports bodies sort this out and, now this is key, eat all the political costs for doing so.
Nobody cared about girls/women's sports until trans people showed up. This isn't about boys playing girls sports; it's about people's discomfort with something new and unfamiliar. Trans people aren't going away -- get used to it.
We spend a ton of money on title ix. Somebody better care.
Pretty sure the girls/women playing those sports cared.
"The actual fanbase for most women’s sports in the United States in general, and certainly for the W.N.B.A., is quite left wing and disproportionately queer."
It's worth saying that while this statement is literally true (there are indeed, a greater percentage of people who use the homophobic slur "queer" to define their identities within the WNBA fanbase than there are nationally), the reality is the absolute percentage of WNBA fans who call themselves by that offensive term is very likely tiny. If you actually go to WNBA games (I do), the largest cohort of fans is straight normie parents with daughters. There are definitely some lesbian fans too, but most lesbians don't call themselves "queer"; they call themselves lesbian or gay and reject the q-word.
The kinds of hardcore urban lefties who like calling themselves by that word (which is a political identity, not a sexual orientation) are actually quite hard to find at WNBA games. Most of those folks don't really like sports at all.
Now what is true is that the WNBA fan base is left of center, and Matt IS right that this is the reason they don't just explicitly state what actually IS their policy, which is that trans women can't play in the WNBA. That's what Kanter intuited when he pulled his offensive stunt. But it's definitely not because the WNBA fanbase is full of "queers".
Why do I harp on this? Because I really think commentators like Matt should stop using the term "queer" when he means (in this case) "lesbian". The vast majority of gays and lesbians hate that term, which smears them as a bunch of weirdos who want to destroy normie values and threaten American culture. Somehow the Far Left got ahold of the language that Democratic Party elites use on gay and trans issues, and they got a lot of people to start casually calling normie, conformist, nonthreatening gay people "queers". When we do this, we hand a victory to the Right and promote homophobia.
I am open to this critique and will investigate preferred usage. Probably not productive to debate it at length here, but the team will survey opinion and try to reach a considered view. Always appreciate thoughtful feedback.
There’s no way to keep up with what the current definition is and which word is currently acceptable.
In general, no, but very specifically Democrats should use "gay and trans people" or "LGBT people" when that's what they mean (and use "gay" or "lesbian" or "trans" when they mean only a specific subset). It really is offensive to call a sexual minority "queers", especially in an inclusive fashion where you are describing a whole bunch of people who hate that term and hate being called "queers".
Just in this election cycle we had Seth Moulton lose a primary to Ed Market over "blaming trans people for Trump". I'm not sure we can say the argument was won, at least not in blue states.
(Then again in blue states it literally does not matter).
I mean, it is hard to defeat an incumbent senator by running to his right in a blue state.
Markey's position sounds very popular. I wonder which red state Democratic candidates will be inviting him to campaign with them and hold some town halls about gender.
Seems a bit tendentious to talk as if that's the only reason Moulton lost, no?
I think people took it as a signal that Moulton would generally adopt positions to Markey's right when the two of them disagreed. Moulton made no effort whatsoever to dispel that impression, so I assume that it's correct.
The primary electorate then voted accordingly. I fail to see how anyone has grounds to complain about them doing so.
It was literally what the entire discourse was about. All the headlines and online commentary focused on this subject.
I live in MA, and while I heard about this, barely anyone I talked to about the election even knew. Most people (that I talked to) just have strong status quo bias and like Markey more than they dislike Moulton.
Matt says conservatives do not support women’s sports. He obviously has never been on the sidelines with the 13 or 14 year old dads supporting their daughters as they play soccer.
Perhaps he meant only elected conservatives who are childless or conservatives who only have boys. Amazing that I didn’t realize there isn't one congressman or senator with granddaughters. Maybe he believes that elected conservatives are incapable of giving birth to the female sex....Yes, that must be it. Some genetic issue.
Honestly the reality is that there's a segment of right-leaning INTELLECTUALS (going back to Elaine Donnelly and people like that, and perhaps represented now by Helen Andrews) who have always disliked gender equality, including Title IX. But most rank and file conservatives love girls sports for their daughters and while the WNBA audience is disproportionately liberal, plenty of conservatives do watch, and certainly plenty of conservatives like the US Women's Soccer Team and watch women's sports at the Olympics. Hating Title IX is very much a niche Rightie thing and yes, Matt is not being entire clear on this point.
So, let me get this right, a few dumb a** jerkoffs with their troglodyte opinions have a beef with Title IX and have zero agency to do anything about it. Yet Matt says we're going to paint conservatives as people who do not support women’s sports.
Yeah, I’m betting he wants to rephrase his statement. In fact, there is a tendency to attribute hyper-politically charged statements by idiots on both sides of the aisle to the entire elected officials of both parties and to the voters.
It’s like saying the Democratic Party’s voters are turning to DSA candidates in urban centers. Umm
Right-wing intellectuals are not beating the “secretly gay” rap, lol
So I think the driver is something else, which is an intellectual tradition that goes back to Phyllis Schafley. One way to get ahead as a conservative woman intellectual is to oppose your own equality.
Yeah but they’re trying to appeal to conservative men. Who apparently aren’t attracted to female displays of physically fitness.
The same sorts of considerations apply to so-called "bathroom bills."
There was no transphobic bathroom bill in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte took it upon itself to enshrine "gender identity" as a protected attribute for access to public accommodations -- rather than leaving well enough alone with private stalls. (Perhsps this was out of "compassion," lest a person with a vagina be driven to suicide for want of access to a urinal!)
Only then did the state legislature pass a law "protecting" biological sex -- raising the prospect of strip-searches at the restroom door.
None of this was necessary, but in the politics of moral panic, stupid begets stupid.