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

She's right. Lia Thomas's body is not the problem. The problem is that body being present in women's spaces.

(Also I literally can't remember when I last wore makeup. Still a woman.)

People like this start with the conclusion they "know" to be right and fair, and construct an argument that will get them there by choosing the premises that will lead to the conclusion they like.

It's a very common thing and people often don't realize they are doing it.

University education traditionally is meant to create the kind of facility with these kinds of logical traps, and enough self-awareness about our own propensity to bias, that we can avoid such bad thinking.

Clearly it doesn't, but I think this has been the case for some time in many of the "activist" kinds of disciplines which are fundamentally ideological. I would certainly include gender studies in that, but women's studies as well. So maybe no surprise that they would produce certain thinkers like that.

That politician’s reply ( TW do not have male anatomy) is a classic example of where TWAW leads you.

That is the movement’s start and end point. Everything must be made to fit it. TWAW therefore everything they do and are is womanly. Women are female. Therefore TW are female. Therefore TW do not have male anatomy.

Utterly disingenuous article slipping between categories in an attempt to confuse. Yes, society does over-value men's sports and under-pay women athletes. Yes, it some sports it makes sense to divide by weight. But there are real, physical differences between men and women quite outside the level of testosterone currently in their bodies which make a meaningful difference to performance, and that matters.

That article was so frustrating. It never finished discussing a point. Instead it raised one issue then slipped over to another 🤯

@soupycustard

I feel your confusion. I’ve been following all this for a decade and I’m still like ‘ WTAF! None of this makes sense! Why is anyone taking this seriously? WTAF!?’

i don’t think human brains have changed though. I think we are the product of our animal species. We can’t escape our animal selves. We are a primarily instinctive and social animal species, not a rational one. The rational side is a teeny tiny part of us and easily over ridden.

GI thrives because people want to be part of a social group and GI presents a set of arguments that can unite a social group. It was well marketed to appeal to people’s pre-established social identities (left wing, progressive, tolerant, inclusive) and it was marketed by trusted established groups ( Stonewall). All of this bypassed people’s need to apply critical thought and so people just accepted it wholesale and without critique. We all use these mental short cuts all the time.

Once established, no one wants to mark themselves outside of the group, especially when this group applies such hard sanctions, so people just double down or go quiet.

Humans are also status seeking social mammals, and this movement appeals to this by marketing its ideas as an evolution in scientific and intellectual thought. So you are on The cutting edge of cleverness if you believe it. You don’t want people to think you are part of the left behind who still think sex is binary do you? ( or as one TRA put it. ‘I didn’t realise people actually still believe that stuff).

By this marketing tool, that politician thinks she is marking herself out as one of the intellectual elite because she no longer believes only females have female anatomy.

we haven’t changed. This is a movement that appeals really, really well to a whole lot of the instincts and emotions of the human animal.

Helped of course, that those disadvantaged by it are primarily women who, it turns out, those few decades of improvements in equality, had not overwritten the millienia of attitudes of no one really caring much about them anyway

Well quite. There's no rational basis whatever for splitting anything by 'gender', and certainly not sports.

But I suppose most of these 'gender studies' folx have backed themselves into a corner where they can't support the properly progressive, inclusive and rational approach of being gender critical as they'd hopefully make themselves redundant.

This is a brilliant analysis.

I saw a comment from Rose of Dawn at one point the observation that trans activists all came from a very narrow political band and all had the same political views. Although Rose of Dawn is trans, the problem has been being ostracised as being the wrong type of trans.

As with Jess Phillips notion of "holding two separate ideas in your mind at the same time", everything is reduced to the status of an 'idea' in the competitive marketplace of ideas where none has any more validity than any other.

So, it is just an idea that there are two sexes and that there are some obvious differences in their relative performance. If only we could change our thinking and change our foundational beliefs then there would no longer be any sex at all......only inclusion, and the benefits that TW bring to competition.

We don’t really have much research-based evidence to say definitively that trans women have a disproportionate advantage in sports.

She hasn’t looked very hard has she?

As someone who went through male puberty, Thomas has developed height and muscular advantage in her sport.

She’s nailed it here though. All those female athletes need to do is to take advantage of male puberty!

The whole article is just twaddle that is self identifying as serious academic arguments. It gave me a good laugh though.

We really are moving into an age of totalitarian group think. People are increasingly choosing to believe what they want to believe and retro-fitting the facts to fit, that is if they bother to look at the facts or objective reality at all.

There have been some really good episodes of 'Storyville' recently ( BBC I Player) featuring North Korea ( following a family trying to escape) and China ( the social credit system which is enabled by mass public surveillance and big data).

It is a hallmark of dysfunctionality: a belief that feelings create reality, not facts. It's evidence of psychological and personality problems. And people with such issues need firm boundaries. We're seeing what happens in a society when they don't have them, and are enabled. This probably needs to be looked at in the context of today's articles about the rapidly increasing numbers of those in their 20s with mental health issues, and the tidal wave of anxiety and mental health struggles in kids. This is the most nurtured, supported, gently parented, mindfulness and child yogaed generation in human history, and yet they are more buggered up psychologically on assessment than the kids who were living under nightly bombing during the blitz. We're getting something desperately wrong.

These people live in Looking Glass Land.

"Transwmen do not have make anatomy"

"holding two separate ideas in your mind at the same time"

And of course, that's where the analysis stops. Because if we took it further, it would then either mean that women don't have female anatomy, or 'female anatomy' describes every possible type of anatomy, thereby rendering it completely redundant as a category.

"We don’t really have much research-based evidence to say definitively that trans women have a disproportionate advantage in sports".

Yes, we do. It is beyond me Forbes would publish something so egregiously false.

I think there’s some truth in that statement as there haven’t been too many research papers that specifically test men who claim they are women.

That’s partly because it’s a relatively new phenomenon that these men have started invading women’s sports in significant numbers, and partly because it’s so obvious that men have a massive advantage that few people have bothered to collect the (perfectly obvious) information that claiming to be a woman doesn’t remove male advantage.

Of course, in any logical and fair society, the research showing whether taking oestrogen and drugs to reduce testosterone cut male advantage enough so that those men could compete in women’s sport on a level playing field, should have been done before it was decided whether those men could be shoved into the women’s category with a reasonable degree of fairness.

Of course, had they done that, those men would never have been put in the women’s category as it’s perfectly obvious a few hormonal tweaks don’t remove male advantage.

But because of societal sexism and the great “most oppressed” con, the men were shoved into the women’s category first and now women are having to fight a rearguard action, where they are having to prove it’s unfair after it’s been foisted on them and at the same time, as they are having trophies, prize money and glory stolen from them in the most sickening way.

And all this has been propagated using the lie that men who claim they are women, are women. If we lie that they are women, then you have to check whether they have an unfair advantage over “other women”. When everyone accepted the obvious fact that they are men, nobody needed to do that research as the results were so obvious as to insult the intelligence.

www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/yes-lia-thomass-body-the-problem

At least she's being called out publicly.

That article spouts as much nonsense about feminism as the Prof does about male sporting advantage.

It also conflates feminism with TRAs

In findings to file under “told you so,” the scientists reported that “biological sex is a key determinant of athletic performance,”

Well, yeah. That article is sunlight, particularly in the USA where 'good' people really aren't allowed to say these things.

I’m being a bit facile, but can we ask some decent male swimmers to declare they are women and knock the socks off Mr Lia Thomas? I wonder if he’d keep banging on then?

Like Ari Silverberg in weightlifting?

The TW who crushed all of the women's records and then made videos saying ' I don't understand why women are so bad at lifting' cried when Silverberg, the large bearded women's team coach, entered a women's competition and beat him.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11918455/Male-powerlifter-protests-Canadas-self-ID-rules-entering-female-contest-smashing-record.html

This is really what is needed. That all the top class male athletes declare their pronouns, sweep the field, and end this nonsense.

No, there are conclusive studies on this topic from recent years. Even Dr. Harper came out and admitted as much.

Like Ari Silverberg in weightlifting?

Zuby, a rapper, did something similar, but his record was quashed because the PTB did not accept that he was a woman. According to an LGBT sports organisation (ie trans-captured) "Just deciding on a whim that Zuby says he's identifying as a woman, that's not how it works". Acceptance Without Exception, hmm?