Wow. The argument against trans women in sports is already unscientific enough. Why is chess even split into gendered categories? This just makes zero sense.
It is generally not, most tournaments anyone can enter. However, there are women-only tournaments because for a lot of social and historical reasons, men dominate the open tournaments.
Interesting side-note fact on the power of social norms: if a woman and man play without knowing each other’s gender the woman will be more likely to win than she would if either party is made aware.
Seriously, a lot of people would play better chess if they weren’t intimidated by their opponent. Unless you consider headology part of the game, the way it is in poker and Cripple-Mister-Onion.
There most certainly is evidence that going through male puberty can confer an advantage in some sports. Not all sports. If there are going to be restrictions placed, I would prefer they be placed by the sports’ governing body, who presumably understands how competition works in their sport, based on science.
In this case, though, it seems to be based on social issues, as some others in this thread have pointed out. There are reasons why the womens-only tournaments were formed in the first place, and some feel that letting trans women in would undermine those reasons. We can’t just pretend those reasons don’t exist.
Socially, I have no problem addressing trans women however they want to be addressed, or letting them use whatever bathroom they want. I would prefer to let the governing bodies of individual sports and activities decide what is most fair for all involved, using science. I think politicians should generally get their noses out of all of it, and leave people alone to discover who they are.
There are reasons why the womens-only tournaments were formed in the first place, and some feel that letting trans women in would undermine those reasons. We can’t just pretend those reasons don’t exist.
Yeah, sadly transphobic bigotry is real and we can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist, we have to fight against it, but there’s no legitimate reason for this
The science here is a bit more roundabout. The women’s leagues appears to have been started in the first place (based on some of the other posters here) because males have more success at the highest levels than females. Everyone acknowledges that this gap shouldn’t exist, yet we still have it. So it’s not a scientific basis justifying the segregation, it’s that science can’t explain the outcomes, so the segregation was established to try and make the outcomes more equitable.
Another poster asked whether trans women somehow need to “prove” that they’re oppressed to the same extent. And, ultimately, that might be what’s required, as absurd as it sounds. Because I think we legitimately don’t know whether this male advantage maps to all males, or just those born male.
Maybe, once we establish some data from more trans women competing at the highest levels, we’ll be able to answer that. For now, they made a decision which basically turns the women’s leagues into cis-women’s leagues.
When my daughter sent us the projected path of Hillary, which goes over us, my wife sent back a sharpie-modified version that routed it away. So we should be safe.
There’s a difference between securing a border and intentionally making it lethally dangerous.
When people are being denied life-saving water or drowning because of concertina wire placed there specifically to make it difficult to get out of the water it’s no longer “securing the border.”
I can lock my house’s door. I can put in an alarm system and place a barbed wire or electric fence. I can even shoot a trespasser actively breaking into my house.
What I cannot do is set a trap.
People who are denied water when turned away at the border cannot safely make it back. People who swim up on razor wire at the shore cannot rest before turning around to swim back.
If people have no supplies when told to turn around, we need to give them enough to make it back across. If we’re going to build a razor wire fence, it needs to be far enough inland that swimmers can get out of the water long enough to rest so they don’t drown. Even better - we can ferry them back.
And even better than any of these: we need to actually give fair hearings for asylum seekers.
If more humane border is feasible for preventing illegal crossing then that’s of course good. I wonder what would need to happen in the US to make the border effective, if it is even possible.
And even better than any of these: we need to actually give fair hearings for asylum seekers.
I think that’s often brought up in Europe how illegal crossers circumvent the system and “skip the line” for asylum seekers, also hardening the attitudes towards them. Better border control and more proper asylum seekers would be good.
I think the best course of action is helping Mexico with the cartel problem so people stop wanting or even needing to cross the border. Grain of salt though, the leaders of Mexico are in the pockets of the cartels.
Tackling the problem at the source is of course best overall, but it is also a lot slower and harder than tougher border control. But of course it’s not just one or the another
Let me put it this way: I don’t like kids running into my lawn to get their baseball. I ask them to stop, and I put up a fence. These are both fine.
What I cannot do is place landmines behind that fence and sit on my porch with a shotgun to kill survivors.
That’s actively what DeSantis and Abbott want to do : turn the entire border into a deathtrap where even attempting to cross is absolutely going to kill you, one way or another. I believe at least one of the candidates last cycle DID bring up mining the entirety of the border. They want to make the US border look more like No-Man’s-Land in the Somme rather than the Berlin Wall or the Korean DMZ.
“Finally! We were worried something might not go in our favor for once and we were going to have to blow up the economy to punish you rubes.” - finance industry
If something is too extreme for your tastes, you know what your best course of action is? Don’t watch it. If you’re worried about your kids accessing, maybe don’t give them unfettered access to the Internet and actively monitor their Internet usage. You know, actively parent your children.
This is a perfect example of just how completely useless the Left in this country are. We have REAL problems that we face and this is the type of utter nonsense that far too many on the Left focus on.
In Europe and other parts of the industrialized world, liberal groups have given the people universal healthcare, and paternity leave, and strong consumer and labor laws. Those groups have their heads on straight, focus on important topics that everyone faces, and eventually get results. Because those groups focus on things that actually matter and that people want, the people respond by actually giving them some level of political power.
What do we have in the US? We have blue-haired idiots screaming about an honest-to-goodness patriot because his cartoon logo has a musket and the fact that the image is of a man. No wonder that even in some of the most blue cities in some of the most blue states in the country, liberal candidates can’t win local elections.
Some school district decided to change their mascot, something that happens all the time, and you turn into some big, catastrophic issue while screeching about how other people don't have their priorities straight.
It's a legit problem when you look at the sum effect of all these local activists trying to "fix" local problems that should be waaaaaay down on the priority list. It pretty much paralyzed all grassroots activist groups for a good decade or so and let Trump run rampant most of his first term.
they went for the divisive political hotbutton a bit quick there, but I think I understand where the rant is coming from: we in the states seem to be more concerned with appearance of being supportive to people than we actually are supporting their basic needs and it’s pretty sad. for example, it’s insane how in LA they decided the long term solution for supporting people who lost their home during the pandemic was to call them the unhoused instead of the homeless to not use terms which may be sensitive for them. Meanwhile they continue to sleep in dangerous encampments on the street and have to shit in bags while being food insecure and getting no actual support from the people who drive by them in Teslas and Priuses every day. It’s pretty maddening as a bleeding heart liberal to be overshadowed by the the woke inclusive liberal who thinks rebranding the terms we use are more important than actually helping people by actually correcting systemic problems. Changing the mascot isn’t the problem, but I feel $200K can do a lot more good by funding programs to help the people struggling in the school who we assume are “offended” by this mascot.
I could be wrong but that’s just my interpretation of what they meant, minus the angry political rhetoric.
I am more left on most (but not all issues) than most people. I am embarrassed by the majority of people who also call themselves “liberal” in this country.
Schools often spend money on things that are only meant to make their students feel better, like pep rallies and school dances. If the students prefer their new mascot, I don’t think this is particularly stupid or wasteful in comparison.
Students don’t always ask for things that they benefit from. If the school improved the bus routes or auditorium and some random student exclaimed “I didn’t ask for this!”, that student would rightly be ignored.
These decisions are best left to parents, not students. And the parents elect the board. Considering how long this has been going on, parents have had plenty of opportunity to elect new board members if this wasn’t what they wanted.
What that republican senator is doing is immature but military readiness isn’t really that important considering our massive lead over every other country in the world, not to mention our extensive network of allies. Nobody is invading the USA.
Military spending needs to be cut by at least 25% and then maybe we’d have some money to spend on actually relevant concerns
But yes, it shows the partisan and regressive attitudes of the current GOP. It’s sad to see that the OC seems to care about making progress on important issues like public welfare only to get brainwashed into thinking it’s the left’s fault for being inefficient. There is some truth to that but the reason our advocates of social progress can’t get anything done is specifically because of the GOP’s zero-sum stonewalling.
Eh, no. Belarus is not able to launch the nukes themselves, they only have Russian-controlled nukes. In a way it’s an empty threat to the west as well, since technically Lukashenko has little say in the matter.
news
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.