Trans athlete wins in female swimming race

@greasyshoes, do you live on planet Earth?

Do you not think that scientific investigation is a tad more involved than "I know a girl who was stronger than me"?

I'm not seeing how the scientific evidence supports the other side of the discussion. The evidence just shows that men have achieved better sporting results than women, which is something I don't dispute. There hasn't been a study which has determined how much of the difference is due to biological differences between men and women.

Most trash websites that have picked up the trend or are fronts for keyboard warriors all of a sudden give height as 5'8". Others they have got to give it as 6'1". Quite modest for an open category swimmer. LT told Sports Illustrated they'd lost an inch in height through taking cross sex hormones, which sounds horrifically dangerous - is there such a thing as rapid onset osteoporosis? Vertebral fracture?

Pure distraction but alsoproof of the desperation of all those trying to pretend that there is no difference in athletic performance between men and women
Also quite entertaining as Lia's height is shrinking all the time. Now seems to be 5ft7 on some sites. By the weekend they will have disappeared.

What the fecking HELL does his height have to do with it?

It is textbook sparple! Pure distraction.

Look ..... there is a squirrel!

As a slight aside - here’s a chair challenge that only women can do

www.fatherly.com/health-science/chair-challenge-explained-viral-fitness-trend/amp/

Shorter?

I genuinely thought Owen Jones was better than that.

A couple of years ago, at the height of lockdown, I was teaching 'A View From The Bridge' online to my igcse class.

At the end of Act I, there's a confrontation between the protagonist, Eddie, & another character, Marco, where Marco challenges Eddie to lift a dining chair above his head - but there's a catch. You have to start by kneeling, & hold the chair at the base of one leg, before lifting it, without dropping it or letting it touch the floor after the initial lift, getting to your feet & triumphantly holding it aloft.

It's generally performed onstage with a prop chair made of balsa, because it's seriously difficult to do with an ordinary chair.

I set this as a silly homework challenge - 'video yourself doing the Marco lift!'

Well, year 10 loved it. I was bombarded with questions about how far they could cheat.

Plastic lawn chair? Fine, if it's got four legs.

Parent/sibling/mate holding the diagonally opposite leg? Good luck - you'll need to coordinate your balance...

Remove the other 3 legs? Eek, please ask the chair owner first...

The thing is, you need really good coordination & balance, not just strength. That chair REALLY wants to tip over. Get it a foot off the ground & you'll probably get it the rest of the way.

So once the results were in, I had quite a lot of students, male & female, triumphantly waving lightweight plastic chairs, after multiple attempts.

I had 3 who managed it with a chair from their dining room. Guess what they had in common? All boys.

& not even the strongest boys - the favourite, who was a massive gym bunny, gave up early because he couldn't get the damn balance right.

But none of the girls could get a standard dining chair even a few inches off the floor, because the bugger is HEAVY at that angle. They were good with the balance once they tried with a light, plastic chair, but they could not re-enact the 'original' trick, because they just weren't strong enough.

Strength isn't the only factor in sports; but it's usually pretty significant.

What the fecking HELL does his height have to do with it?

Does that mean he doesn't have a dick between his legs? Maybe it means that the dick is proportionally smaller and therefore less of a threat?

Honestly, the lengths these apologists will go to is fucking sick.

MAN does not belong in female sports or in their changing rooms.
It doesn't matter what damn height he is.

If the photos of LT had been doctored to make him look bigger, that the live videos of him swimming must also have been doctored as he's clearly much taller than that in the pool. Maybe he shrinks as he dries off?!

Listened to the start of the LBC show where a guest introduced the call in by backing up a suggestion by Martina Navaratalova that in order to protect the women's category there should be a separate 'open category'. This seems sensible to me. As the guest said (I forget his name) no one is saying that we can't all respect everyone's rights to be called whatever they prefer but biological natal sex is the most important distinguishing factor between separating the sexes into two groups given the natural advantages that happen to natal males during puberty.

Pointing out the unfair cheating is not attacking someone. It's simply spelling out the truth. It wouldnt matter if Lia was 7 foot or 5 foot. As a born male, they should be competing with men, not women. And if they're not good enough to compete with other men then tough shit. Most people aren't good enough to compete. I don't know what makes Lia think they're more special than anybody else.

Based on this photo of Lia walking between two other female swimmers, 5'8" is not accurate. She is almost a head taller than the other two and very few college level competitive swimmers are really short.

Maybe Lia identifies as shorter. Fuck knows.

All the other swimmers now have to identify as 5ft 2 so as not to upset Lia, presumably.

Índia willoughby was spouting that bollocks yesterday all over twitter however despite all the official swimming sites recording LT height at 6ft 2/3, all the media sites are reporting theur height as 5ft 8

How quickly the lies spread around….

I caught a bit of Jeremy Vine show where someone was actually saying that we were all attacking Lia because photos made them look big and in fact they were only 5 ft 8. Needless to say LOJ thought this was great. So Lia is now just a little bitty athlete despite all the photos showing Lia towering over female and even male colleagues. Do these people think our heads are buttoned up the back? Also why is Jeremy Vine not calling them out on this?

Not sure if this has been shared already, but it shows how far the impact of 'one man on one event in one sport' goes. threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505729132151259141.html

Oh, I think that I’ve about as much chance as getting picked for Pope next time there’s a vacancy as there is of greasy believing the things he’s saying. However, I wanted to help with ensuring nobody lurking could claim we’d not given him a fair go; & with underlining exactly what it is he’s actually about with his posts on here.

Greasy doesn't sound to me like someone who believes what they're saying, at all. Otherwise he would take on board what women are telling him, and he's not, he's ignoring it. It's a purposeful position which appears to be driven by misogyny.

yes datun. This seems true.

Yes. The facts are pretty simple. So the continued expression of disbelief, supposedly clever questioning really is just being a twonk for twonk's sake.

Greasy doesn't sound to me like someone who believes what they're saying, at all. Otherwise he would take on board what women are telling him, and he's not, he's ignoring it. It's a purposeful position which appears to be driven by misogyny.

There are, however, quite a few people who do apparently think that men and women are fairly well matched in terms of physical power.

Maybe they never think about sport, or more likely, never think about women.

Or maybe they genuinely buy into all these kickass women in films who manage to make mincemeat out of one six foot bruiser after another.

I suspect most of them will be young, and probably not parents and certainly not sports people.

But there's no doubt they exist. And there's also no doubt that many people think that a reduction in testosterone would result in an equal reduction in power. There are far too many people who don't appear outraged by the takeover of women's sport.

And I'm sure a lot of them aren't aware that the root is pure misogyny.

So although I couldn't care less what Greasy thinks or says, I too, believe that convincing even one lurker would be a useful exercise.

Especially as it's fairly straightforward.

[quote greasyshoes]@Midlifemusings

Better funding for sport for men and boys, more men and boys participating in sport.

If you have lots of men and boys competing in sport, and being encouraged to do so, and less women competing in sport, then of course you're going to see men and boys having better running times because the pool of men and boys is bigger to begin with.

The question is a bit like asking "Why are Americans bad at football?" It's not as if Americans have some genetic or biological factor which means they can't play football. You have less Americans playing football to begin with, it's not as well funded, hence, Americans don't perform as well as Europeans.[/quote]
Part of the issue may be that apparently @greasyshoes quite literally doesn’t believe women’s sport is really sport.

Because asserting “Americans don’t perform as well as Europeans [at football]” is patently untrue: the Stars & Stripes are an absolute force of nature. They’re also a perfect example of how socialisation & gender stereotyping impacts on sporting participation, given in the US “soccer” is seen as a girls’ game AND it is the preserve of the middle classes (as in “soccer moms”); but (although it’s a fast-growing field [pun shamelessly retained]) there are still almost no opportunities for girls & women to participate in American Football.

One might almost think that greasy hasn’t the faintest idea about what he’s so keen to lecture all of us on. I know, it’s a shocking thought, a man just barrelling in here to make nonsense pronouncements. A first for MN.

Such a waste not to at least try to use this particular feature of US life to illustrate that coherent argument for the primacy of socialisation (& utter insignificance of biology) that definitely absolutely totally exists & is real. Compounding that Americans can’t football analogy with a complete failure to attempt even a basic analysis of funding structures; grass-roots soccer & football; demographics (including axes of oppression); & the all-important College [sports’] scholarship system (& the pecuniary peculiarities thereof)… it all just highlights greasy’s utter lack of argument, & by extension, that those who would argue this in good faith can make interesting points about about sex-based socialisation, gender roles & participation in sport - but that’s as far as it goes. If he was hoping to look like he has pwnd the denizens of FWR by deliberately wasting our time with his nonsense, he’s just managed a fairly epic self-own.

greasy, if, contrary to all appearances, you actually DID want to engage in good faith but were somehow unable to contain the urge to contradict women at every turn, please at least read the masses of information you’ve been provided with. Make the most of @SamphiretheStickerist being so generous as to share her expertise.

Finally, the Stars & Stripes serve to demonstrate the differences between male & female bodies are key in sport: teenage boys can beat absolute world-class female players by virtue of male puberty. (And remember boys’ football in the US is, as per greasy’s assertion, lacking in investment: the women’s team have had every advantage & were still beaten. Because reality is unbending like that.) The Matildas have endured the same fate as have the Canarinhas & Sweden’s Blågult. Indeed, this is the outcome any time a women’s national team play a team of teenage boys. Biology is a constant, the consistent unifying shared reality of women. Imposed on that are culturally-mediated constructions of gender which dictate how the sexes are socialised. So socialisation somehow accounting for the losses would be remarkable…

Little OJ will no doubt send a few ppl up the mountain with his beee kind/it’s only a few TW/it’s only sport/you’re all bigots

Greasy please just wallow in your own stupidity, it's no ones job to try to fish you out. Go do your own research, or remain ignorant. No one cares for your intellectual fate, either way.