gender studies professor says Lia Thomas body is not the problem

[WandaWomblesaurus]

www.forbes.com/sites/susanmshaw/2024/02/04/transgender-swimmer-lia-thomas-body-is-not-the-problem/amp/

Never mentions the penis though

And they wouldn't enable the likes of Thomas, if Thomas didn't have that gigantic entitlement to access women and to destroy women's sport. They have an inability to say no to Thomas's desires and demands.

Funny how my DD and the other girls on her Rugby team completely understand that its for their own safety they can only play with girls next year (for U12s) and need a new team. But adults claim they can't see the difference.

DD was probably half the weight of one of opposing boys today. She didn't even come up to his shoulders.

Allthegoodnamesarechosen · Today 11:22

It’s a pity the author photo is so blurred.

Here you go:

https://advance.oregonstate.edu/susan-shaw

I've read a lot about Lia Thomas - it's what peaked me!

However, I have rarely seen that photo with their lower half visible....

Talk about a picture is worth a thousand words!!!!

My goodness! I didn’t even get to the main bit about Lia Thomas, I was laughing too hard at what came before!

These people! They are like spoof writers. They just churn out counterfactual dirge, absolute dirge that we all know is not true, both from our lived experience and from actual hard data and evidenced facts and science.

It shows the absolute baselessness of their whole position that this is all they have to make their case.

Absolutely pitiful.

That text made no sense what so ever.

Is she/them sure she wrote it using her/thems own body (Brain, eyes, arms, fingers, torso etc)? How can anyone possibly tell?

We are all just lumps of blancmange floating around in the atmosphere.

Does that creme caramel identify as a blancmange? I hope you haven't mispuddinged them!

In terms of mixed sex categories, the relays (swimming and athletics) were very illuminating for those with eyes to see. I fancy some good soul introduced them for this very reason.

I genuinely don't know what to think. Does she really believe this? In which case she's very unintelligent or very ill-educated.
I've only been on this board for a few weeks and I'm struggling to believe that this stuff isn't pure bad faith. Or have people for some reason actually got thicker? Less able to use logic? Less knowledgeable?
This is going to sound very random, but are we, especially those of us in the global North, being de-skilled in the ability to think because we have so much done for us? We can Google answers to anything; we can just replace goods instead of repairing them; we don't have to farm our own food and understand plants, farm animals, weather, soil inputs; we can use precedent forms instead of drafting things ourselves...
Is it like hamsters and Guinea pigs where the 'wild' populations have bigger brains?
Or is this just a passing societal neurosis like fear of witches or thinking cats should be killed to stop Plague?
I can't believe that supposedly intelligent people - ie those able to hold down an academic job and get things published in academic journals - can genuinely believe such total nonsense. In which case is it just written to try to stay relevant? But in that case, the same argument applies to those who think it's academically strong enough to be published. Who are all these people? And what's happened to their brains?!

I imagine denying TWAW is a quick way of getting your P45 equivalent delivered to you if you are an American gender studies prof. She probably started down this route as a rad fem/lesbian back in the 80s and this is where her specialist subject has gone. So I imagine cowardice rather than a sudden loss of critical reasoning skills is why she takes this approach. To be fair, many of us are not openly GC to avoid the torrent of vitriol and abuse we would then receive. But neither are we writing articles propping up and justifying the TRA regime and its crimes against women.

"The problem for Thomas and other trans women athletes is not trans bodies but rather the way we gender-segregate sports"

If by gender, Susan means anything to do with identity rather than a polite way of saying biological sex then she's wrong at her very first premise. We have never divided sports according to identity. I share no identity with most other women. We just have our bodies in common and the social overlay which people put onto that.

We can define biological sex. Males with a DSD which make them appear female to some at birth are still males.

"We do a lot of things to maintain the illusion of difference. Think about it for a minute. 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."

Well, Susan might but my hair is cut the same as many men, I often wear clothes which are effectively the same style as mens, just cut for people who have wider pelvises and other women's proportions, I often don't shave, usually don't wear make up and still look different from men in all important ways. Susan seems very old fashioned.

"What if we imagined sports in other ways? What if instead of focusing on gender as the dividing line we used other physical traits? Wrestling already does this. People who weigh 120 pounds don’t wrestle against people who weigh 200 pounds. What if we imagined dividing competition along lines of body size?"

I don't know Susan's background but she seems very much like a scientifically illiterate arts grad. Body size does not predict speed, strength etc. A man and a woman of the same height are very different beings.

"What if we rethought team sports so women and men play together? We already have mixed doubles in tennis and pickleball"

Yes but for that to work, we'd still need to know who's a man and who's a woman - and Lia Thomas would still want people to pretend Lia is a woman and would still have no regard for the women Lia has pushed aside.

As anti-women articles go, this is one of the silliest I've ever seen.

"The problem for Thomas and other trans women athletes is not trans bodies but rather the way we gender-segregate sports"

No, it's that they're men.

Enraging article full of lies and obfuscation.

@literalviolence Her background and training is theology.

@ZeldaFighter i haven’t seen a full length in swimsuit photo like that of Thomas before either. I don’t think this is accidental.

It’s a bit pink leggings. So of course the media very often don’t want to use that. It undermines the ‘poor Lia; those meanies won’t let her play’ narrative.

I think that's the worst written article on the subject of males in women's sport that I've read, and there's some stiff competition out there.

We do a lot of things to maintain the illusion of difference. Think about it for a minute. 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

And this is such bollocks. We all know plenty of women like this and they are unmistakably female at one glance.

It really is, isn’t it?

"Gender Studies". Er, okay then...🤣🤣🤣

If I were teaching theology, I'd think she was a shocking advert for the course. I think her writing was incoherent at best.

Anyone wanting to make the case that binning all Uni gender studies departments would make a blind bit of difference to the detriment of anything at all?

So, William Thomas's body would be a problem if he wanted to swim on the women's team, but put on a women's costume, grow hair and change name, and the body is no longer a problem on the women's team. Hmm, yes, of course, completely reasonable. Of course it's not the body that's relevant, but the costume.

Oh god!
I wasn’t wearing my glasses 😵‍💫

Probably wise not to wear them. 🤣

Hi @soupycustard . I also wonder about people thinking skills, let alone their critical thinking skills. I think it’s a huge problem everywhere, with those in positions of power notably affected. Take this gem in the attached screenshot. Genuine person - Canadian government. And this is a woman who is saying ‘transgendered women do not have male anatomy’ with a straight face. I do actually think she genuinely believes it.

To misquote Upton Sinclair,

“It is difficult to get a woman to understand something when her salary depends on her not understanding it.”