Forbes mag article on trans in sports

[adultingforever]

I cannot find another post on here about this one, so here goes! https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanmshaw/2024/02/04/transgender-swimmer-lia-thomas-body-is-not-the-problem. I have never seen this viewpoint before and I certainly do not agree with it. I remember when there was not a separation between mens and womens sports. How can anyone be thinking this way now??? We keep going backward!

“Right now, we’re mostly working out of our deeply-held and rather largely unexamined assumptions about biologyand gender.”

I'm not

I am sure that the author of this article thought that their arguments sounded wise and well supported at the time of writing. Yeah! Nah! I am just being very generous - it is bereft of fact or even believable theory.

At least this is novel.

We don’t gender-segregate because women can’t compete with men. Rather, we create sports that play to men’s typical strengths (football, for example) and value them over sports in which women are more likely to excel (balance beam). We then use this as proof that men are better at sports, and so men and women couldn’t possibly compete together.

In other words, we use sports to maintain the illusion that men and women are more different than they are alike. This reinforces a whole world outside of sport that values men over women and questions women’s abilities to lead and succeed.

I mean, seriously? The only reason that males do better at the overwhelming % of sports is because they are designed to suit male bodies? Well… sure. But that doesn’t mean that males and females can compete fairly…

But fuck, really??

If women cut their hair the same way as men, wore “men’s” clothes, and didn’t shave their legs and underarms, wear makeup, or pluck their eyebrows, they wouldn’t look nearly as different from men as they do.

We have to tell ourselves that gender makes us fundamentally so very different that we can justify entire social structures that give men dominance over women. Otherwise, why would we have gender-segregated bowling?

Really? Is it because women have different hair cuts, shave, where make up that we separate bowling competitions? That if women adopted the same hair as males, and shaved like males etc we would be competitive. With some powerful magic I expect.

Not because male people have more power in their arms to ensure male people have greater potential to knock down those pins… to get strikes … but because women wear make up.

Points for attempting to try something new though.

This is what you get if you don’t allow input from other people.

You can feel the smugness emanating off - I bet they felt they’d really nailed it!

I've just seen a research article detailing sex differences on the running track before puberty.

Eventually enough proper science is going to have to filter through to prove that sex matters

What a crock that is. What is obviously specially stupid is the science IS there. We understand in some depth the differences between male and female. In terms of musculature, hormonal impact, size difference, etc and also how this impacts strength, speed, and power.

what they don’t see in the literature of studies from older than say, 10 years ago, is a mention of trans and a trans lens put to this.

that’s the only reason I can see that these people are ignoring this.

that and the other option, they are just stupid and lacking in interest at anything, but especially the truth.

Did India Willoughby write it?

Didn’t bother reading when I saw that Susan teaches “gender studies”. Guess she needs to keep the myth of gender alive and relevant in order to hold onto her job.

When I read the paragraph about how similar men and women would look, it's no surprise that the following wasn't used…

If men grew their hair the same way as women, wore “women’s” clothes, and shaved their legs and underarms, wore makeup, and plucked their eyebrows, they wouldn’t look nearly as different from women as they do

Most of any of the 'onboard' audience would be lost at this point. Not least because they would have an adverse reaction to the mental image of man behaving in such 'a ridiculous manner (surely only women would do such frivolous things). The image of man (the ideal human) belittled by trying to look like a lesser human (woman) would lose whatever crowd had begun to gather around.

This reminds me of the idiot man on twitter that thought he'd come up with an excellent "gotcha" by saying "it's misogyny to say that women can't compete with men at sports because all women need to do is try harder and they'll be able to do it!". I guess if we're going down that route, it's also misogyny to say women can't scratch their testicles?

Irony is this male twitter troll user was a wheelchair user - I wonder how offended he'd be if I said some ableist offensive shit to him about trying harder to walk?!

Anyway, all this comes from a fundamental lack of understanding of biology, or a wilful blindness to it in order to pander to trans ideology. It's fucking tedious.

Thanks, everybody!! The author is a woman, gender studies professor in Oregon, which is probably the most "woke" place possible - but I just couldn't believe what I was reading. You have confirmed that I am not mad, or not missing something here. This is just bizarre.
Forbes Magazine was/is a respected business focussed publication, and I can't understand how they published this.

If, as she suggests, we define sport by body size then Thomas (being such a massive male) would very likely be swimming against men. Did she think that one through? 🤫

I really try with some of the arguments around this sort of thing, people with their own opinions are entitled to hold them etc

but when it comes to males in sports then no…not having it, any one who honestly believes that, as a class, males do not have an advantage over females is fucking stupid , no ifs or buts

@adultingforever I thought the same about Forbes. But apparently Forbes online is a content machine where contributors get paid peanuts for churning out articles and they aren't checked first. Have a look at the link I posted up-thread.

CuriousAlien: I just read your link. What I think is relevant is that people are trusting Forbes.com because it has been respected in the past as Forbes Magazine. Not sure how they get away with using the name in this way.....

@adultingforever yes my thoughts exactly. It feels like that a lot on the Internet these days, like every source and author needs checking and then I also briefly checked the place I found that info!

The article was so unjournalistic I felt the need to get some context and check the source. And the fact it's from a gender studies academic explains why the reference to science is laughable.