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Chris Fox's avatar

Allow me to be the first to say it: "nonbinary" has nothing to do with "transgender."

Because gender is binary. People are male or female and while there are conditions like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome the men who suffer from it are still men.

I have had it up to here with "nonbinary." Everything I have seen has convinced me that this is a fad to get attention; they are too strident, too angry, too fanatic. I think that just as transvestites piggybacked on gay political advances the "nonbinary" folk are piggybacking on transgender people, real ones.

And it annoys me how so many coddle this affectation. Medium will ban you without warning if you state a refusal to use that abhorrent singular they. Educators are called up on disciplinaries because a student complains about pronouns.

As if we don't have enough real problems.

Race on the other hand is a continuum. While we define three major races only some people fit squarely into one of them and then there is (sorry) interbreeding; there was a hysterical case a few years ago where a virulent white supremacist learned that he was genetically 13% black.

It seems insane that people fight against the reality of gender, as if concave versus convex genitalia are an artifact of societal uh rigidity.

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Dan Oblinger's avatar

Of course your position on this issue is obviously the rational one. And I think your point that we would not be even having this conversation 10 years ago is an insightful and important observation. It really does show just how far over the edge we have gone as a society. It is valid fodder for conservatives to use in dismissing any and all progressives on all topics. It is quite toxic.

Still I am not sure about this back and forth. I am not convinced it served to shift anyones thinking. (A high bar, I will admit in this case. Still this should be our aim.)

I feel the key observation is to notice that anytime there is a dramatic delta in expect performance we split groups up. Male / Female. 5 year old soccer from 15 year old soccer, from collegiate, from professional. Different weight classes in wrestling, etc.

Seems one should ignore all stuff about race (even if she brings it up), and just notice that we do this splitting, and it is good that we do.

If you did want to discuss race, it occurs to me that society WOULD have separated sports if the physiologies of different races were as incompatible as the physiologies. (but I would not bring the up, it would just get twisted.)

The other observation to make is that if one really are going to allow any person to join into either gender's sports, then one MUST simply abolish gendered sports all together. That is a logical position to take on this issue. It is just not a position that many who are pushing for self determination are taking.

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Part of me just wants to allow liberal rules to be applied at this highest most visible levels of sports. Increasingly it would be used by tier two athletes to become world champions to the collective outrage of the majority of the population. This policy would destroy itself, and would also help pull the left just a bit back from its ludicrous position. But I don't wish this, because it would also do large damage to the reputation of the left and many important issues that espouses. The question is how can we constructively demonstrate the defeating aspects of these ideas, without ourselves becoming destructive. (no ideas from the peanut gallery)

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