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You're right. The real reason is to get the angry mob mad enough to burn us at the stakes.

"We only want to protect women's sports" is incompatible with "we need women to have more children", which is a *real* aim they haven't even tried to hide. The former line is just a rhetorical bludgeon to win over the low-information people who are unaware of or in denial about the latter goal.

THIIIISSS!!!

Love this!

High school sport to me is about participation. Let the trans folk feel included too. College recruiters will see your Betsy's talent and offer a scholarship even if the person in last place happens to be Transgender. The harm done to the transgender child by being excluded is worse than Betsy's.

People who say they care about fairness in sports are actually just concerned with sports remaining as a means of ascent for Brynnleigh, so she can play water polo at Purdue and not immiserate her parents who are in debt from HIGH SCHOOL sports.

That's why you all turned into hookers and criminals, forever faking to know me to get social security.

Sports are inherently unfair. I will never be a good at basketball or tennis. Also I live too far from a mountain to ski.

Listen. All I’m saying is that it’s unfair that only the Globetrotters get to meet Scooby-Doo.

And the point is not how sports steals from other programs, the point is that the shibboleth of "fairness" in school sports, which isn't actually a things for so many reasons, is being used as a pathway to launder transphobia into "reasonable" concessions. It's utter rancid bullshit. #TransRights

My high school marching band won four consecutive state championships (two of them while I was there, 2nd and 3rd my last two years). I believe I heard the annual budget was ~$250K—in the mid-'90s—but raising that money meant coming home a lot of nights smelling like smoke from the bingo hall.

High school math team and academic trivia team member here, and I’m suddenly back in the teacher’s car being driven to our next meet. Thank you, Ms. Walters, wherever you are.

Man I feel this on a primal level. I hated those shitty chocolate bars but I was essentially forced into indentured servitude selling them to pay for school band trips while the jocks enjoyed the full benefits of provincial funding without lifting a finger

Literally talking about it this week.

My high school had relatively well funded extracurriculars but it was always incredible to me how a football team that was once coached by Mike Pettine could end up losing its homecoming game and still be, like, the king of high school. Though oddly after them it was the track kids. Track got $$$

My bowling team harassed the school to get the cheer squad to show up to a couple of our home games.

If my kid plays basketball against LeBron’s kid, chances are that genetics and wealth are going to trounce my kid. Is that fair? No. But that is sports.

Am i mad that I didn't have the capability to be Montana Fouts, even though we were both softball pitchers. Yes, but also, that's how fucking sports works! These were the same people bitching about giving 5 year olds participation trophies.

I agree, no one should EVER actually give a shit about sports beyond a brief novelty. It's a deeply unserious passtime. It doesn't actually matter who wins, it's a children's exercise game.

Isn’t sports supposed to be fun ? A pastime? Exercise? How did it become the critical cultural sexual issue of the century for Republicans?

Nothing made me happier than the Warriors making four straight finals Fee fi fo fum If it weren't for LeBron, the Warriors would've won four and lost none

Wasn’t that the premise of Hoosiers?

Yes and buy my dad’s book anyway www.routledge.com/Fair-Play-Th...

I stg

No one cares about fair, we just want OUR team to win

to me fairness means anyone can play

Weirdly, the super-macho sport that handles trans people and gender mixing most easily is wrestling with its weight classes.

Many such cases!! www.admkids.com/news_article...

That's why no one wants to watch LeBron. He's too good.

Leave that up to the coaches, referees, clubs, and associations... With politicians, let's talk about health care, and War, and food, and housing. You know those LITTLE things that human lives depend on....

Truth is they don't either. Bullying a minority group just fills the emptiness.

Sports inherently aren't fair. There is a reason the klutzy bad runners aren't equally represented in professional athletics

Every game should end in a tie.

🏆

🤜

The man kept that ridiculous stadium with its fake locker room heated and lit, while other Texans froze to death for lack of power. The layout in that ridiculous place makes it so his own team can't see sometimes.

I mean, I certainly can’t disprove this hypothesis. (I grew up in Fort Worth, by the way.)

Boooooo

Someone can have "fun" trolling the LSU fan board about trans people and the unfairness. Once they're on the hook, ask how fair it is to have NFL rostered athletes go back to school at LSU.

Please, ref, blow this call so I can win $50 on Kalshi

As a trans cyclist, I care about surviving to leave the course. Everything after that is a bonus 🤣

If some rwnj is going to ask me if I care about boys in girls sports — (first F-U) and no I f@!€ing don’t. Upend the whole system and make all kids sports co-ed, divide teams by skills level and make college level amateurs again

Nobody really reads Orwell, do they? "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting."

the only 'fairness' is rules equally applied and we all got refs we fucking hate lol

I can barely walk or stand for more than five or ten minutes. No, sports are not fair. How could they be?

mmmhmm = handmedown uniforms, carpooling across town, shared snax etc etc

LeBron James playing HS basketball and Derrick Henry playing HS football we're more unfair and posed greater physical danger to the other players around them than anything a trans kid could ever present.

Citius. Altius. Fortius.

One time I was ringside for a Laila Ali fight, it was not remotely fair

This is beautiful.

So what you're saying is, we don't want fairness, we want the most ridiculous SportsCenter Top 10 possible.

Awesome

It's about fairness in sports, the level playing field

This is why people hate tape-replay refereeing or automatic fault detection in tennis. Nobody wants a fair game. They want a game they can argue their team was robbed of if they lose. This is why I blame ESPN for MAGA.

Should Michael Phelps be disqualified? His body makes half the lactic acid so he doesn’t get sore and tired. He’s ankles are double jointed so they act more like flippers. Sounds to me it was never fair to swim against him.

they mostly just want their kid to not be home until dinnertime

I remember a kid on another team who played first base vs my son’s summer team when he was about 12. The kid was 5’10” and 180 pounds. Fairness!

Even if the district is the same size, who do you think has an advantage: the little upstart team of corn-fed hard workers, or the team with the billion dollar stadium and former NFL players' kids on the team?

Yeah, my response to "fairness in sports" is, oh you're a sexist who believes cis girls/women are inferior & can't mentally & physically compete w/ boys/men. Bc that's what they're saying. That's not even getting into the part where studies show trans girls/women have no advantage, etc. Just sexism.

what's 'fair' is letting everybody play

I argue all the time with fellow cyclists about how professional cyclists are not genetic freaks they’re just statistical rarities because of money and time available to them, among other things.

Money opens doors a chromosome never could, that's just how it's always worked.

This is true of most qualities ascribed to a gender - math ability, language facility, emotional intelligence, spacial reasoning. The vast majority of the human pop significantly overlaps and it’s only at the tail of the curve that you see differentiation.

And I also wonder how much of that divergence isn’t socially constructed. See, eg, women setting better marathon times when running with male pacers. Similarly the funding and attention differences will naturally produce better male athletes irrespective of innate ability.

I mean... just look at chess... friggin chess. The game where your sex/gender is the most irrelevant... and they do segregation bc of some esoteric "male brain/female brain" bs. 🫣 Fairness my ass.

Meanwhile, sports betting has taken off like a rocket.

I continue to believe that sports betting apps are an underrated vector for pop transphobia; no one who likes sports for sports cares about ex ante fairness, but people who are trying to turn it into their retirement strategy want to blame someone when their dumb plan doesn't work.

Up there with "I believe in equality of opportunity" as a hollow, thought-terminating cliche thats also a lie. If the person saying it not for the complete abolition of private schools coupled with a 100% estate tax (or, in the sports case, mandatory Harrison Bergeron contraptions), no, theyre not.

"We'll just roll back your rights a little, you'll totally get them back, honest!" Like seriously, fuck everyone who expects trans people to be part of the grand coalition while getting abandoned in every way that matters.

My position is that to get that winning coalition together you have to show leadership, not prevarication. Many examples bear this out. You're asked the question about trans sports (because they are fixated on this as a wedge issue) and you answer from a place of principle instead of triangulation

You don't build a coalition by abandoning every minority the right spins propaganda against because you're too much of a spineless coward to fight for them. Why the fuck would anyone trust you when you show that you'll toss them under the bus the moment it looks politically expedient to do so?

*in

Nobody who has played a sport thinks there is fairness … especially at the high school level.

I disagree. I think it's a very well designed game for its purpose - making Harry a very special hero child. As a game in and of itself? Yeah. One would think that high speed broom hand soccer should be enough.

That's where it started for a frankly upsetting amount of these bottom-feeding troglodytes, yes

Sports are about finding tbe strongest mutant to fling against other mutants you moron

Fairness depends on the rules, on and off field. Did both teams follow the rules? Then it's fair.

It’s unfair that women must compete against men, in sports, but it’s totally cool that wealthy men can rape little girls with impunity. Do I have that right?

Ding ding ding! Trans girls who went through male puberty can’t play sports because it would be dangerous for cis girls but you’re also not allowed to get blockers for your kid because it’s “dangerous” for them. There’s no winning with these people. They just don’t want trans people to exist.

if the only way to create fairness is to enforce the size and shape of people's bodies then let's have youth sports divided by weight and height

Thank you!! Will read with interest!

Great thread, thanks for posting

You're welcome! Glad you got something from my work.

This is a joke a lot of people are going to miss so as a person related to many Bills fans I gotta give you a nod.

Mmmm, wasn't nobody calling Phelps unfair when he was winning everything either.

All the food is poison.

I’d say that about sports in general. At the very least it all should be amateurized and all those resources should be given to something that benefits society as opposed to ruining it.

exactly

No one should either. Especially not in high school.

(Cranking all my guys’ sliders to 99 before I start any sports video game) none of these guys better have a pussy