School sports

[AlphaTransWoman]

Do you think it is ever acceptable to force a child assigned male at birth to participate in contact sports at school such as football or rugby. If so do you appreciate the distress this may cause to children born with a male body who have a female gender identity?

Why do you think girls have an aversion to physical sports? Have you missed the successes of the Lionesses and the Red Roses. But thanks for confirming that males who transition don't actually feel like women, just how they imagine women feel. Some of us like something a bit more physical than flower arranging.

Christ. There speaks someone who's never met my niece

Come to that, I know more than one middle aged mother who has recently taken up martial arts or boxing. It's safer for their DHs that way.

Do you perhaps not know a very wide range of women?

OP complains about stereotypical expectations of sex being applied to children for sport while spouting stereotypical expectations of sex.

Typical TRA logic then.

I feel like there's some kind of gotcha coming here. Surely nobody can really have such a narrow view of womanhood as to think we hate sports and can't be competitive?

Historically it was absolutely the creation of women's categories that let women begin to excel in and enjoy sports. When there was only one team I daresay women were uninterested in competing and averse to contact sports in particular. They'd have no chance to win and it would be dangerous for them.

Amazing self-reporting going on here.

However unpleasant you found playing rugby with boys the answer isn't to let you play rugby with girls.

I’m not sure if you realise how utter offensive this sort of stereotyping is. Women have been fighting against this sort of stereotyping for hundreds of years.

TW: I am a woman because how I feel inside is what it feels like to be a woman.

Also TW: Finding school sports painful and humiliating is a boy thing.

🙃

This thread seems to be a total non sequitur!

It's important for all humans to acquire habits of being physically active regularly. Being inactive has huge health impacts. The problem is that when you are trying to get a group of 60 or 120 kids active and have limited staff, team sports are the sensible way to organise making them all run around.

I was at an all girls school @AlphaTransWoman despite not having a female gender identity and I assure you that (a) gender identity had absolutely no bearing on how utterly miserable team sports are for someone non-sporty, of either sex and (b) you would have hated lacrosse just as much.

Ideally all schools should have sufficient resources that the kids who are totally unsuited to team sports can be given opportunities to try dozens of other sporting activities until they find a way to be physically active that they are ok with. My DC utterly hates rugby but is allowed to spend the afternoons when rugby is happening doing climbing or swimming instead - but I recognise that most schools simply wouldn't have the resources to be this flexible.

Oh god, not this stereotyping nonsense again, same bollocks, different thread OP. You're obsessed with stereotyping everything as male/female, and I'm now 100% sure you just start these threads to wind people up.

Disliking rugby is just disliking rugby.

You can't understand why a female would like rugby? Why not revisit the 950+ replies on your last thread then, is my suggestion. There were plenty of insightful responses to your supposed lack of understanding about why females would ever like x, y, or z (which I don't believe for an instant now that you've started another thread and swiftly guided the discussion towards this lack of comprehension).

For the benefit of others, OP will just keep stating the same thing over and over again, whilst people commenting will write thoughtful and insightful posts that he disregards.

I think that OP is set to broadcast and not receive.

Please stop insisting that harmful gender stereotypes are real.

Female people can - and many do - enjoy playing contact sports (with other female people). Not universally because people have different likes and dislikes.

Your own experiences of not fitting in at your particular school and not enjoying being made to play rugby in PE are better explored with a counsellor than through transactivist activity on MN.

I was also always picked last, my sex was irrelevant it’s because I was useless at all sports. Yes it was painful and humiliating.

If you would have come to my school (80’s, state) and played hockey you would have seen a level of brutality displayed by girls which they relished. My daughter plays contact Rugby. I used to do martial arts and the level of agression from some women could be high. This is why I struggle with women being portrayed as weak, defenceless or not interested in contact sports. It is not my lived experience or that of the women around me.

This is what I keep seeing from this poster

OP: I was forced into the blue stereotype box and I hate it. I like the pink one.
Actual Women: Sorry that happened to you, you should have been allowed to express whatever interests and personality you had.
OP: I'm a woman because I love the pink stereotype box!
AW: Actually, we don't like it. It's really restrictive.
OP: But you're women! Women all fit in that box just like I do. That's how I know I'm a woman.
AW: Feminism is about smashing both gender stereotype boxes so people can just be themselves. Women have been fighting for that for a long time.
OP: Men go in the blue box, women go in the pink box, la la la not listening...

What a silly goose!

Well said! The stereotyping of sport is also really arbitrary. Would OP have enjoyed playing football (soccer) more in the US, where it's considered a feminine sport?

What about lacrosse? Makes one think of posh girls' schools or Enid Blyton books in the UK, very masculine in the US.

Just be grateful you didn't have periods to deal with as well!

Unfortunately this the view which has led to DD experiencing bullying.

She doesn't act girly enough. She loves rugby. Her favourite toys were dinosaurs when younger. She wears "boys" clothes sometimes. But "identifies" as a girl...

I don't think anyone should be forced to do contact sport, and that school pe should be about fitness and improvement, with team sports for those who want them. For boys and girls.

Honestly there is so much to unpick in that statement, throw in your user name and your therapist is gonna be busy.

It seems you have confused not liking sports/being bad at sports/ being picked last/being picked last as humiliation/the punishment aspects as meaning you are in some way female.
That’s some extraordinary levels of misogyny you are displaying- failure & humiliation as indicative of womanhood.

Being good or bad at sport is independent of being female. Men can be good or bad at sports. Same for women.

My answer to your question before I saw the connection was “I wouldn’t like him, this hypothetical child, to get signals that the rules are for other people to follow, but him not.”
Reading the rest of your posts it does seem that you have internalized that the rules don’t really apply to you.

Just remember wims, its half term out there.

It wasn't a punishment for being male, the less sporty kids always got picked last, harsh but true.

Surely no one is genuinely daft enough to think this "I can't understand why any female would be interested in participating in such a thing."

Did you know that lacrosse actually was developed "as a sort of ritualised combat," and known as "war's little brother," by First Nations people in North America? And how fiercely it is / was played in UK girls' schools even back when "feminine," "ladylike" gender stereotypes were even more rigidly enforced?