politics

I still don't understand why the government needs to be involved in sports at all. They're games, it's not that serious. Leave it to the experts within those organizations to come up with whatever rules are needed.

even if you could theoretically tell a story that sounds somehow “unfair” depending on your storytelling skills.

Yeah, they sure do love pulling the Riley Gaines card even though she came in fifth, making it a total nonsequitur.

And I totally agree that this debate is too big considering it only targets a tiny handful of athletes. I say it's complicated because some arguments used feel, circumstantial? As in, "Trans women should play with women because there's only a couple of them anyway?" Would acceptance of that argument lead to tokenism? BWhat if, for whatever reason, a sports team happened to take on a lot of trans woman? I think that would be okay, but I worry it would dredge the debate up all over again.

Or, people often say, "Trans women should be allowed to play with women because they rarely win anyway." But what if a trans woman ends up on a winning streak and then another controversy erupts? I feel uncomfortable that our condition for entry is framed as our failure to win, and that if we win, then by implication we get othered as opposed to just being a woman who won a sports game one time. This recently happened, actually. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/ca-school-sports-authority-panders

This is to say, I'm just thinking aboug how we come to a supporting argument that ages with grace? And what argument should that be? Not that I think any pro-trans argument would satisfy some people, with it being the wedge issue that makes TERFS out of people originally left of center. I guess I don't know the answer at this point.

Fundies largely ignore the New Testament, especially anything Jesus is quoted as saying (they're more in line with St Paul, especially the Epistles that he probably didn't write) and they aggressively cherry-pick the Old. For example, they're always wearing clothing made of mixed fiber types, so they're going to burn in hell: it's an abomination according to Leviticus. And all the requirements to welcome foreigners among you, and requiring extreme hospitality to strangers: they just pretend that part isn't there.

And as for the Old Testament (the Tanakh) itself, the Jews, over millennia, developed a whole apparatus of analysis and exegesis (the Talmud) to take the various fairy tales, genealogies, records of the actions of kings and prophets, poems and nationalistic history and try to draw conclusions as to what they're telling us. The fundies, in their arrogance, instead believed that anyone could interpret a translation of those texts with no context, no critical thought, and no use of reason, as long as they pretended they believed hard enough. They're like the Sovereign Citizen morons interpreting case law as though it's based on magic phrases.