Brave reporter undergoes inhumane sex test for sports. Brace yourselves.

[singthing]

Here's a blow-by-blow first-person account of what it is like to have the new sports sex test that is being decried as invasive and dehumanising and (in a rather extravagant bending of the facts) a genital inspection etc.

After such a big build-up, prepare to be.... underwhelmed. But please do stop scrolling now if you don't want to read the distressing details:

"I open my mouth and feel the swab brushing the inside of my cheeks for about 20 seconds. The practitioner carefully places the sample in a small plastic bag and then pops it into a sealed envelope. I sign the back of it."

https://archive.ph/kITV9

And more emotional manipulation.

’you are all mean’

’you challenged my opinion that I posted on a publicly accessed forum’

’but whatabout these male athletes, they deserve to access female sports because there is only a few, and they are obviously more vulnerable than the female athletes, especially those they take the opportunities to compete from ‘

‘You are just wrong because I said so’

’you are bigots’

’you are all obsessed’

’you didn’t accept my emotionally reasoned points of view that had no evidence behind despite my telling you unnamed and unreferenced experts disagree with you’

‘you are all just uninformed and scared with it’

If you are not able to engage in civil discussions about a well documented and evidenced topic, I think perhaps that is an issue you need to address for your self.

The fact you resorted to personal attacks and insults last night was not because of posters asked you questions, that if you had thought about the issue as much as you claimed, you would be able to discuss. That was you showing how superficial your self proclaimed ‘kindness’ really is.

This really is something

Be kind in action.

It was a ‘head fuck’ because of the emotionally manipulative reasons that were used to defend a group of male athletes competing in a protected category of sports they have no moral or regulatory right to access.

But it is also a head fuck because instead of you addressing the questions and the points raised, you started ad hominem attacks on the posters raising the questions you wished to avoid considering or answering.

You are still doing it!

Because whilst you’re used to this space, looking in it from the outside, it is genuinely distressing and painful to see.
And this is it.
This space is our experience of being female and having our basic needs to privacy and fairness repeatedly belittled and dismissed. It is distressing and painful to constantly see just how little respect and empathy male people have for women.
This entire nonsense could be solved by male people simply respecting women and being fair to them, and working to find a way that works for all groups instead of insisting that women must put men's wants ahead of our own needs.
The fact that saying this creates such confusion and anger from trans activists just shows how deeply patriarchal trans ideology is.
So I don't know how to bridge that.
All I can suggest is try to see women as human beings with needs and basic human rights of our own? Understand that women deserve the right to privacy. To safety. To fair sports. That we have the right to say no to men. Etc etc.
Trans activists respecting and accepting those as basic human rights for women will get us 90% of the way to resolving this conflict.

If the truth (that both Caster Semenya and Imane Khelif are male) is distressing this is a problem for the people who are distressed by it to deal with not for women who are defending women only sport. Lying doesn't solve anything and is the reason why we are in this situation.

@Deadlifter
You said many pages ago that you don't have the answers - this is not surprising. You want there to be a solution that pleases everyone but there just isn't one.
On this forum anyone can argue and debate for either side, people have for many years, and nothing like a perfect solution has emerged. Neither has any particularly persuasive argument been made as to why women's sports shouldn't be protected.

There are other online spaces where the opposite view dominates, but these tend to occur where that viewpoint is protected by censorship and banning of alternatives.

Because they THINK they are being super witty, sarcastic and superior. They don't realize that it just makes them look sad and desperate.

They'll say anything to try and make us forget that all women want is safety from men in our spaces and fairness in sport. They just think women should be willing to give up our rights to please certain men and give them room in our spaces.

I think she is fuzzy on scientific detail, so is inadvertently making misleading statements.

She also said the test was for XX vs XY but it is the SRY gene that matters, and I thought that was the core of the initial sports sex test.

ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY TIMES

I'm just going to say it again. The representation of people in sport with a DSD is 140x that of people in the general population. There is a reason. The reason is that it gives an unfair advantage in sport.

When Usain bolt was running, he was pretty much winning every race. But the men around him had a fair stab at getting close or beating him. He won on his merits. When a woman races against an individual who has had the benefit of testosterone, they almost literally can't win. They may as well not show up.

Elite boy athletes break the women's world record speed for the 400m at the age of 14-15.

“There are lots more dissenting voices outside of this forum, and you’ve stopped being able to see it at all.”

There are plenty of dissenting voices both on or outside this forum. We read and engage with those voices all of the time.

Dissent is irrelevant if the issues that are being used for dissent are not addressed through discussion and considering and exploring views. People express dissent on most aspects of life. So fucking what! It doesn’t make those reasons for dissent accurate, evidenced and moral just because it is ‘dissent’.

FFS! Women are dissenting to male people’s inclusion in a protected sports category that is for female people and looked at how you, personally, have just treated them!

Telling people that they are wrong and not then providing evidence to discuss that explores why those people are wrong is not ‘discussion’.

I think most of the people pointing out issues with your views last night have read very widely and have many read opposing views. We have discussed and explored those dissenting views on threads here for years!

You still think ‘on here’ is the only place people have been discussing this for years. Lots of people have spent equal time and energy learning about this issue, and still disagree with you. Lots of people have life experience you might not have - we work alongside respectful trans woman who we can see every day are not taking anything from us at all. People with a wider lens can also see things you’re not seeing - eg. How your views interact with the rise of the far right etc.

I wish I’d been politer - I’ve said that. But you have lost it at a single person disagreeing with you; I don’t think you should kid yourself that you’d have fared better with hordes of people disagreeing with you.

I genuinely hope you manage to extricate yourself from this one day and look back like ‘woah, that was a weird time

What do transpeople have to do with this? This is about testing people who want to participate in a sport for their sex.

@Deadlifter

Can you point me to a place where I can respectfully discuss what it means to be trans, while disagreeing that trans women are women?

@Deadlifter This was you at 17:05 yesterday:

Im saying plenty of academics and medical professionals think the test is unscientific.

You then had 7 hours to post even one piece of evidence, but you didn't. That's why you took some flak. Did you think that your authoritative voice as a 'World record holder' was sufficient? That's not how you change minds on here.

We definitely get people on here who want to understand, and then we get very definite TRA's.

And to me the shift happened when. Deadlifter picked Helle, the person who is absolutely the most logical, rational, scientific, evidenced and with the memory of an elephant and decided that they are the one who is the most disappointing.

No shit 😄

"we work alongside respectful trans woman who we can see every day are not taking anything from us at all."

I have no issue with being alongside a trans person at the supermarket - their trolley is no different to mine. I'd have no trouble sitting at work with them - paperwork is paperwork. In fact, I have no issue being in any environment where sex is irrelevant.

I have a problem when biological woman are put at a disadvantage because a biological man wants to be seen and treated as a woman.

If this was about the sport, then those who have been banned from competing in the women's category would start competing in the men's category. Invariably this doesn't happen because the individuals know that they don't have a hope of winning in the men's category, which is why they are competing in the women's category, where their higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibres, lower baseline body fat, larger heart, higher haemoglobin, better oxygen delivery to muscles, greater lung volumes, lower diaphragm, stronger ligaments, denser bones, and longer limbs all give an advantage.

It allows athletes who would be mediocre at best in the men's field to be champions in the women's field.

Exactly.

The entire premise has nothing to do with 'working alongside', and absolutely everything to do with 'competing against'.

Agreed. It's almost as if they took deliberate aim at her for those reasons.🤔

I would also add that suggesting that we Google the evidence that @Deadlifter was unable to produce was also a bit of a giveaway.

As for the idea that a National and World champion in something or other is made anxious by a bunch of GC women on an anonymous forum; pull the other one.

"which is why they are competing in the women's category, where their higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibres, lower baseline body fat, larger heart, higher haemoglobin, better oxygen delivery to muscles, greater lung volumes, lower diaphragm, stronger ligaments, denser bones, and longer limbs all give an advantage."

Yes, yes, @Lougle :) But APART from that, surely there's no reason why men who identify as women, aka "respectful trans woman", shouldn't compete in the women's category?

And again, more emotional manipulation.

Do you really not see the emotional manipulation you are trying to use here?

And more falsity. It really is just ad hom attacks now.

“You still think ‘on here’ is the only place people have been discussing this for years.”

I don’t believe anyone has said this is ‘the only’ place any individual/s has or have been discussing it. This is just a false claim to frame arguments as being uninformed and isolated.

“Lots of people have spent equal time and energy learning about this issue, and still disagree with you.”

Indeed. I think I can say most posters on here know fact this very well.

However, if someone has spent as much time and energy learning about this issue, I don’t believe it is unreasonable to expect evidenced discussion and at least logically sound arguments.

”Lots of people have life experience you might not have - we work alongside respectful trans woman who we can see every day are not taking anything from us at all.”

And now we have the emotional plea, with some ‘I’m alright, Jack’ privilege, and a swerve to another group of male people. Was this your focus all along? Were you arguing about how male people with DSDs should compete in female sports so that you could wedge in this group of male people too?

The argument about male people with DSDs with bodies that have produced male levels of testosterone where that body has/had the capability to produce that testosterone is exactly the same for all people. They should not be accessing the single sex provision that is the protected female sports category.

”People with a wider lens can also see things you’re not seeing - eg. How your views interact with the rise of the far right etc.’

And more emotional manipulation by way of a ‘guilt by association’ argument that seems to be based from a person’s own tribal political views and not from a position of engaging in good faith.

This is a way that a person justifies not engaging with legitimate arguments because they can categorise doing so as ‘interacting with the far right’.

This is a version of ‘*hey you are all just bigots or bigot adjacent so I will just call all your scientifically established arguments ‘bigoted’ and they must be wrong or incorrect.

’I wish I’d been politer - I’ve said that. But you have lost it at a single person disagreeing with you”

This is a false lead into to victimhood. This is a partial admission from a person who resorted to ad hominem attacks and insults that they acknowledge that they did it. But then it is a ‘you made me do it’ swing.

Who ‘attacked’ you last night? People asked you questions and pointed out issues with your position. Then they pointed out where you started using ad hom attacks because you having your views challenged was not acceptable to you.

”I don’t think you should kid yourself that you’d have fared better with hordes of people disagreeing with you.”

Many of us have had ‘hordes’ disagree with us. It doesn’t change the science, the evidence and it doesn’t change the logic.

While you seem to have an issue with people disagreeing with you, I don’t think many of those on the thread last night have that issue. That is the strength of having confidence in the science, in the evidence and in the logic. If you have to rely on emotional reasoning and emotional manipulation to convince anyone, that is not a strong argument.

”I genuinely hope you manage to extricate yourself from this one day and look back like ‘woah, that was a weird time”

What a statement! I think that readers can probably work out the emotional manipulation on quite a few different levels with that one.

You know though, I have no shame in understanding the harms to female people that comes with male people accessing female sports categories. I actually think that that last statement was one of projection from you…

As far as I'm aware, the data shows that every single man who's cheated his way into women's sport would have performed as a mediocre sportsman in his own sex sport. Thinking of swimming, cycling, weight lifting, cricket .

Arguing that these men should be able to continue to cheat, destroys womens sport - which of course is the aim for certain people amd organisations.

I've just taken an example race:

2018 Commonwealth Games 800m

Caster Semenya won 1st place with a time of 1.56.68, which was a Games Record.

In that same year, in the men's category, there were 3 heats, with 26 athletes. Only 2 athletes (placing 9th in heats 1 and 2 respectively) ran slower than CS's Games Record winning time.

I must admit that being told I disappointed them by continuing to point out the lack of consistency and coherency of the discussion was interesting. I have had this exact dynamic before though and it didn’t work then either.

I mean, I am always open to taking on new evidence and modifying my position as are you and many others here. That is why we read so widely.

@Deadlifter has simply enabled another useful example of how transactivism / male rights activism works in real time for anyone reading through this thread. Refusal and failure to engage with and understand women’s views, no real ability to provide proper evidence, and then resorting to patronising ad hominems. Helpful, actually.

@Deadlifter

I remember how painful it was when I used to lurk on here. I would never last long, because I would end up thoroughly confused, depressed or hurt. The main problem was that posters would use factual arguments that I could recognise made sense logically - but they didn't align with what I saw as my values: kindness for everyone, absolute tolerance, constant open-mindedness. I was torn between being a Good Person, and being a Logical/Factual Person, two things that were equally important in my eyes.

And then things happened, and I realised that my values were not things I had chosen for myself, but imperatives that had been imposed on me from the outside: by my family, by my church, by society, by other trans people, and so on. I had never chosen them; I'd been told I had to live by them or else I would be a Bad Person, and I didn't want to be a Bad Person, did I?

So I looked at them squarely, and I realised they made no sense. You can't be kind to everyone. You can't tolerate everything. You can't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. You have to have principles to live by, and in my case, I wanted those principles to be fact-based.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: what matters to you most? Seeing yourself as a Good Person all the time, or having principles based on fact and science and logic? Remember though: in the end, you will end up hurting someone somewhere, no matter what you choose. So choose wisely.