See, I felt she was trying to turn your argument back on you, and doing it poorly (no, black and white athletes aren't appreciably different like male and female) but I ascribed it to poor logic, not racism. I think I may be missing something in some of her comments that weren't quoted.
As for athletes, there does seem to be an over-repr…
See, I felt she was trying to turn your argument back on you, and doing it poorly (no, black and white athletes aren't appreciably different like male and female) but I ascribed it to poor logic, not racism. I think I may be missing something in some of her comments that weren't quoted.
As for athletes, there does seem to be an over-representation of some Africans in some sports that has been much commented on, but clearly they don't dominate. The differences will never be enough to call for testing between races the way we MUST have them for gender differences. Maybe you're reacting to the right-wing tendency to use evolution to 'explain' how black athletes do better due to some pseudo-scientific explanation about how they're supposedly more apelike or have smaller brains or whatever. I'm pointing out that some African athletes do seem to have a slight biological edge over others, but it doesn't mean we can expect them to win every competition they're in the way we almost certainly can when a man is allowed to compete against women.
I think switching sides, via gender or race, could be an interesting experiment to see how the other side lives. I don't think it's a final answer because it's still living inauthentically, and that's one of the main reasons why I'm so skeptical of the trans movement. There really are only a *very* few people who truly feel they were born in the wrong body, and what makes us male and female is a helluva lot different from what makes us white or black or brown, which are really just evolutionary adaptations for different climates. John Howard Griffin was able to provide a view of being black that no black person in America then or now could provide: What it's like to be born into privilege and then switch sides for awhile. His greatest insight came when he sat on a public toilet in Mississippi, just to be alone for awhile, and pondered how he just couldn't do this anymore, it was too hard living like this. And of course immediately realized he had a *choice*, which black people didn't. It's why I find some transwomen TED talks interesting when they're all like, "Holy fuck, he sexism is bad, ain't it?" Yes. Thanks for telling your story. Because some men may listen to an ex-man in a way they might not when a woman talks about it.
"I think I may be missing something in some of her comments that weren't quoted."
As with all of the conversations here, there aren't any comments that weren't quoted. Do you really think I would edit out people's arguments without admitting it?! I'm actually kind of offended!😅
In the interests of complete transparency, after the final reply I posted here, Eve did reply with a link to an article in which she'd basically just posted screenshots of the above conversation. I didn't add the link here because the conversation is all *already* here and I didn't feel like sending her any traffic. But that's it. If you feel as if you're missing something, it's not because I'm hiding it from you.
Yes, we agree that she was trying to turn my argument back on me. This might even have worked if I it were *in any way not racist* to think of black people and white people in the same way one might think of trans women and women.
One of the reasons I had so much fun in my reply to her, was the paragraph about black people needing to have surgery and take hormones to "pass" as "normal people. I can't give a clearer explanation of why the idea to "turn the argument back on me" was doomed the moment it left that lonely little neutron than this.
I wasn't mistaking Eve's arguments for "right-wing" arguments (not least because right-wingers very rarely argue in favour of trans inclusion😅). I don't even mind "genetic differences" arguments, except insofar as they're usually based on Charles Murray's extremely shaky research and they always miss how much diversity there is *within* the "races". Often more than is *between* them in fact. If you group human beings by any criteria, even largely arbitrary criteria like eye colour or skin colour, you'll find data that suggests one group is smart/taller/funnier/better at kissing, than the others. I don't find this particularly interesting, but it doesn't offend me. Even if it suggests that "my" group lacks intelligence or are physiological behemoths. I'm no more or less intelligent than I was before the research was done. Nor is anybody else.
I describe Eve's argument as racist because it requires a "white people as 'normal'" view of the world in order to function. So do some of the things you say here. This isn't KKK racism, or even "purse-clutching" racism. But it's still racism.
For example, you say that there "seems to be an over-representation of some Africans in some sports." When you see a lot of white people in a sport, swimming for example, or wrestling, or most field athletics, can you honestly say that you've ever described it as "an *over-representation* of some Europeans in some sports"?
And, more importantly, what would the "testing between races" look like? As I asked Eve (notice how she avoids the hard questions?), what "race" am I? What "race" is Michael Phelps? What "race" is Naomi Osaka? Is Usain Bolt the same race as Eliud Kipchoge? Would this testing screen them both out of the same events? A lot of these gently racist ideas simply come out of a flawed understanding of what race is.
The top 1% of males beat the top 1% of females in pretty much *every single athletic discipline in existence*. In fact, the top 5% of males do. This is not true of any "race". If the "over-representation of Africans" in sport was this dramatic, or if the average advantages males have over females more closely mirrored the average advantages different "races" have in different events, we'd be having a very different conversation.
I think you made my point about switching sides; the experience of being something isn't the experience of pretending to be it.
There are absolutely insights you can gain, but a) there is no unified "experience that you peer into, b) I think the kind guy who won't take a woman seriously because she's a woman is vanishingly unlikely to take a trans woman seriously because she used to be a man, and c) I think those insights can be gained by anybody who is sincerely willing to listen and engage and honestly reflect on their blind spots.
I'm constantly learning about the perspectives of men and women and gay people and trans people and *black* people. I've learned about my blind spots on countless issues over the years, again, including some black issues. I didn't have to become something I'm not in order to do so.
I didn't think you'd edited anything out of Eve's comments on purpose; perhaps just missed something, or were careless, or something.
Okay, maybe I didn't read the bit about the surgery carefully, because now that you mention it here, yeah, I can see how that might come across badly.
As for the 'over representation' of some Africans in certain sports, yes, I do think it's noteworthy when they come from small countries who don't have the money and resources put into developing athletes and teams the way richer European countries do. That said, if athletes from small countries like Lithuania or Estonia were over-represented in certain Olympic sports I WOULD find that interesting. Especially when they don't have the money to put into sterling teams and athletes the way the US and Russia do.
Why were the Russians so damn good at bringing home more metal than a Motley Crue concert before they were banned? I think we all know the answer to that and it ain't superior Aryan genes. Slight biological differences and drugs for athletic performance are things that make me go hmmmmmm. But, I wouldn't support banning athletes for any natural slight advantages they might have, whereas I'm okay with banning dopers.
"yes, I do think it's noteworthy when they come from small countries who don't have the money and resources put into developing athletes and teams the way richer European countries do"
Yes, but they have the advantage of growing up in extremely hot, low oxygen conditions, and needing to do demanding, physical work just as a matter of course. Then they *train* in those conditions. Most distance athletes (at least now) deliberately go to environments like those to train so that competing in more Western climates and elevations is easier.
They also have a culture that specifically celebrates long distance running (or sprinting in the case of Jamaica, say), so they're far more likely to find those exceptional athletes out of the millions of less exceptional ones. Plus, their trainers have done some truly groundbreaking work in the field of running technique.
Somewhere in China, right now, there's probably a kid who, with the proper training, could win an Olympic medal in sprinting. But how much energy is being put into finding him? How interested is he in doing it? There are better explanations for these differences than race essentialism and money.
This isn't to deny that there's such a thing as biological differences of course. But to say that if you're looking for a *specific* biological difference, and try to decide who has it based on the colour of their skin, you'll usually be wrong just as often as you're right. This is not true for sex.
"This isn't to deny that there's such a thing as biological differences of course. But to say that if you're looking for a *specific* biological difference, and try to decide who has it based on the colour of their skin, you'll usually be wrong just as often as you're right. This is not true for sex."
Good point about how these athletes were raised and work, and then trained, but I was still wasn't making a race-based comparison. The observation that athletes from certain African countries seem to have a slight biological physical edge over others and why isn't about race, or at least it shouldn't be. It's about a *biological advantage* but not one worth testing over. We all agree here that men and women should compete separately for biological reasons that won't be overcome by training harder or lifting more weights. Any non-gender-related bio differences are what athletes simply must be up against; being Kenyan or Ethiopian doesn't *guarantee* they'll win the race since they do lose races too. That's the 'competitive' part of athletics. Sometimes the person next to you is just better suited to win and it's up to you to do the best you can.
Understand, Steve, I'm not arguing in favour of testing based on race; but I'm also in favour of speaking up about facts that might make others uncomfortable. Yes, I know right wingers will take that information and make racist analyses about them; the problem isn't the facts but the interpretation. Bio differences isn't the only reason why they do well, as you point out, there's a culture of success around these particular athletes that also contributes. Let's look at the whole picture.
"Understand, Steve, I'm not arguing in favour of testing based on race; but I'm also in favour of speaking up about facts that might make others uncomfortable."
Hey, I just realised I didn't respond to this. To be clear, I'm not getting upset. I don't think you're arguing for race-based testing. And I wouldn't even be upset if you were. Not least because the idea is idiotic. I'm just trying to get to the root of two things you said.
The first is that I "blew it" in this conversation. I'm still not clear about why you think this.
And the second is I'm trying to make it clear why the comparison of "race" to trans identities doesn't hold any water.
Males outperform females in every sporting discipline (with the exception of ultra-long distance running) from anywhere from around 10% in running events to over 200% in some weight lifting disciplines.
"Some Africans" outperform Europeans by around 1-2% in some sports and are outperformed by those same Europeans or Asians in others. So even if it *were* possible to test people's race in any meaningful sense, it would be pointless to do so.
I'm not sure what uncomfortable facts need to be added to this analysis.
What??? You don't watch out every night for comments from *me*, your special little snowflake reader & commenter??? LOL
I think the racial biological 'edges' here may be (this is my speculation) around at the same level that male and female *brain differences* are - the very minor ways that male and female brains differ, and neuroscientists are usually quick to note that they're *minor* differences, I wrote about it recently in a Vocal article. The guy's research is encapsulated here https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html. I think it may be the same with these minor African differences, and you know what, that show I saw was like fifteen years ago so it's possible the science has changed on it. I don't terribly care about it any more than I do that some female athletes may have an edge over others because they come from taller stock with longer legs who are tough to beat in a race.
I've lost my train of thought on this one but I went back and reviewed your original article and it struck me as a bit disingenuous to say she broke out the 'big guns' of race when you were the one who introduced it in the previous comment, noting that everyone who sees you agrees you're black. Then she tried to turn it back on you, a common debate tactic, although it did send you both a bit off the beaten path.
I also do understand her concern about what happened to Caster Semenya being 'stripped of her femaleness', even though she was a highly unusual biological oddity. I'm not sure how *I* feel about it although when I first learned about her years ago I wondered if there could be a place in athletics for someone like her. Back then, a third category (mixed M/F, or something - mixed being *each person*) wasn't feasible but it might be now, and could be a convenient place to put the clearly male-bodied 'women' like Lia Thomas who was trending on Twitter yesterday because he came in number one in a women's swimming race - he came in like 482 when he competed as a man. Dude towers over the other women and looks about as much like a woman as I look like a potted plant. Do you know how many women were on the committee that stripped her of her status? I don't know. It occurred to me that if it was all or mostly men, that could have gotten Eve's hackles us...us chicks never like it when men make decisions about our bodies ;P Speculating here. I sort of, internally, support what they did to Caster in a half-assed way because I believe *she* believes* she's a woman and really had no clue that she had a lot male biological characteristics. Even as I have been thinking for years that she shouldn't be competing with other women.
So to sum it all up:
1) You mentioned race first (and I'll bet you shot Greedo first, too!)
2) That's where I felt you kind of blew it not understanding Eve's point - she wasn't being super-rude or blindingly clueless - and she did make an argument I 'get', even if I'm not sure how I think about it.
I've blown my 3 rations of Medium articles this month, so if you want to send me the friend link of the Medium article that started all this, I'd love to read it.
"1) You mentioned race first (and I'll bet you shot Greedo first, too!)
2) That's where I felt you kind of blew it not understanding Eve's point - she wasn't being super-rude or blindingly clueless - and she did make an argument I 'get', even if I'm not sure how I think about it."
1) Again, I didn't mention race, I mentioned the colour of my skin because it's an objective fact. I wasn't making a racial argument at all. I could have mentioned the colour of oranges instead, but I wouldn't have been "dragging" agriculture into it. I *did* mention coin flips, but I wasn't "dragging" economics into it.
2) Caster Semenya can't be "stripped of her femaleness." She either is female or she isn't. The issue is that Caster Semenya may well not be female. But regardless, that's not the argument that Eve was making. Eve was claiming Caster had been stripped of her *womanhood*. Something which I have absolutely never done and was crystal clear during the conversation that I would never do.
But again, it's something that could only possibly happen to the roughly 0.1% of people who are intersex males who grew up believing they were females and were tested in such a way where they discovered they weren't. This isn't a threat to "every single woman on Earth." It's absolutely ridiculous to claim that it is.
So yes, her argument *was* blindingly clueless, and also blindingly racist. Because she compared trans women, who are not female, to black people, as if to suggest that we're not people. While I'm a little disturbed that you "get" that argument, I realise that you do so in good-faith. Which is why I'm trying to get you to think about it a little more.
Anyway here's the article. In which, it's worth noting, I don't even mention Caster Semenya😅
At this point, you're just arguing about semantics. 'Skin colour' IS race and I see why she thought you were pulling race into it. Not necessarily how she overreacted, but I do think you introduced the topic first. As for 'womanhood', I suspect that's just how Eve defines it, and at least for the purpose of competitive sports, there's kind of an argument to be made for it. She may be worried about a 'slippery slope' here which is not unrealistic given that we're being told that guys like Lia Thomas is a 'woman' after a few hormone injections and a declaration, not to mention a widespread belief in the left that if that's how you 'feel', that's how you are (unless you 'feel' like you're another race, like Rachel Dolezal). Good article, and ironically I just read the Sports Illustrated story about Thomas (he's a him, let's face it) and how he seemed to be 'throwing' the occasional race to make himself look less of a rank pretender and a cheater. Your idea is a good one, I've been thinking for years that at this point, there are enough people declaring themselves trans that we should just create a third category for 'other'. Let the transwomen compete against each other, and the transmen the same. Everyone stays in competitive sports, women's sports remain protected, and the only people who lose are transwomen who weren't good enough to win medals when competing against men :)
"At this point, you're just arguing about semantics. 'Skin colour' IS race."
No, I'm really not. And this is really centrally important to understanding how stupid racism is. By the logic you're suggesting here, I'm the same "race" as everybody else on Earth who has brown skin. This is pretty silly on its face. But we can go further.
What degree of skin tone variation do we need before somebody is a different race? Chocolate to Black Coffee? Cappuccino to caramel? Somewhere in between? If I have a child with an Asian woman, or even a black woman from a different part of the world (as my parents did) what "race" are they?
Are you the same race as everybody in the world with white skin? If so, what does that mean you have in common? Just melanin content? Or something else?
Do you believe you all have a common ancestor that is different to the common ancestor of all people with brown skin? If we adopt the "five race" model of races, do you believe that Asians and Africans and Europeans and Native Americans and Oceanian all came from different original human beings? And even if you *do* believe that, given the amount of "racial" mixing that's taken place since then, what does that mean for the concept of race today?
Please think about these questions seriously. I'm not being glib. It's not a gotcha. So many people have bought into the lie of race because we don't tease apart these ideas enough.
And all that aside, I'm still not sure why you are so fixated on who bought race into the conversation "first". Let's ignore the race/skin colour debate. Let's say I explicitly mentioned race first. So what? My problem isn't that she mentioned race, my problem is that her argument is *racist*.
Lastly, what is the argument to be made for Eve's version of womanhood? How can a woman (in the good old fashioned sense of the word) be stripped of her womanhood? What's the slippery slope? Because remember, Eve isn't arguing to defend womanhood as it's existed since time immemorial, she is one of the people arguing that womanhood is "a few hormone injections and a declaration."
See, I felt she was trying to turn your argument back on you, and doing it poorly (no, black and white athletes aren't appreciably different like male and female) but I ascribed it to poor logic, not racism. I think I may be missing something in some of her comments that weren't quoted.
As for athletes, there does seem to be an over-representation of some Africans in some sports that has been much commented on, but clearly they don't dominate. The differences will never be enough to call for testing between races the way we MUST have them for gender differences. Maybe you're reacting to the right-wing tendency to use evolution to 'explain' how black athletes do better due to some pseudo-scientific explanation about how they're supposedly more apelike or have smaller brains or whatever. I'm pointing out that some African athletes do seem to have a slight biological edge over others, but it doesn't mean we can expect them to win every competition they're in the way we almost certainly can when a man is allowed to compete against women.
I think switching sides, via gender or race, could be an interesting experiment to see how the other side lives. I don't think it's a final answer because it's still living inauthentically, and that's one of the main reasons why I'm so skeptical of the trans movement. There really are only a *very* few people who truly feel they were born in the wrong body, and what makes us male and female is a helluva lot different from what makes us white or black or brown, which are really just evolutionary adaptations for different climates. John Howard Griffin was able to provide a view of being black that no black person in America then or now could provide: What it's like to be born into privilege and then switch sides for awhile. His greatest insight came when he sat on a public toilet in Mississippi, just to be alone for awhile, and pondered how he just couldn't do this anymore, it was too hard living like this. And of course immediately realized he had a *choice*, which black people didn't. It's why I find some transwomen TED talks interesting when they're all like, "Holy fuck, he sexism is bad, ain't it?" Yes. Thanks for telling your story. Because some men may listen to an ex-man in a way they might not when a woman talks about it.
"I think I may be missing something in some of her comments that weren't quoted."
As with all of the conversations here, there aren't any comments that weren't quoted. Do you really think I would edit out people's arguments without admitting it?! I'm actually kind of offended!😅
In the interests of complete transparency, after the final reply I posted here, Eve did reply with a link to an article in which she'd basically just posted screenshots of the above conversation. I didn't add the link here because the conversation is all *already* here and I didn't feel like sending her any traffic. But that's it. If you feel as if you're missing something, it's not because I'm hiding it from you.
Yes, we agree that she was trying to turn my argument back on me. This might even have worked if I it were *in any way not racist* to think of black people and white people in the same way one might think of trans women and women.
One of the reasons I had so much fun in my reply to her, was the paragraph about black people needing to have surgery and take hormones to "pass" as "normal people. I can't give a clearer explanation of why the idea to "turn the argument back on me" was doomed the moment it left that lonely little neutron than this.
I wasn't mistaking Eve's arguments for "right-wing" arguments (not least because right-wingers very rarely argue in favour of trans inclusion😅). I don't even mind "genetic differences" arguments, except insofar as they're usually based on Charles Murray's extremely shaky research and they always miss how much diversity there is *within* the "races". Often more than is *between* them in fact. If you group human beings by any criteria, even largely arbitrary criteria like eye colour or skin colour, you'll find data that suggests one group is smart/taller/funnier/better at kissing, than the others. I don't find this particularly interesting, but it doesn't offend me. Even if it suggests that "my" group lacks intelligence or are physiological behemoths. I'm no more or less intelligent than I was before the research was done. Nor is anybody else.
I describe Eve's argument as racist because it requires a "white people as 'normal'" view of the world in order to function. So do some of the things you say here. This isn't KKK racism, or even "purse-clutching" racism. But it's still racism.
For example, you say that there "seems to be an over-representation of some Africans in some sports." When you see a lot of white people in a sport, swimming for example, or wrestling, or most field athletics, can you honestly say that you've ever described it as "an *over-representation* of some Europeans in some sports"?
And, more importantly, what would the "testing between races" look like? As I asked Eve (notice how she avoids the hard questions?), what "race" am I? What "race" is Michael Phelps? What "race" is Naomi Osaka? Is Usain Bolt the same race as Eliud Kipchoge? Would this testing screen them both out of the same events? A lot of these gently racist ideas simply come out of a flawed understanding of what race is.
The top 1% of males beat the top 1% of females in pretty much *every single athletic discipline in existence*. In fact, the top 5% of males do. This is not true of any "race". If the "over-representation of Africans" in sport was this dramatic, or if the average advantages males have over females more closely mirrored the average advantages different "races" have in different events, we'd be having a very different conversation.
I think you made my point about switching sides; the experience of being something isn't the experience of pretending to be it.
There are absolutely insights you can gain, but a) there is no unified "experience that you peer into, b) I think the kind guy who won't take a woman seriously because she's a woman is vanishingly unlikely to take a trans woman seriously because she used to be a man, and c) I think those insights can be gained by anybody who is sincerely willing to listen and engage and honestly reflect on their blind spots.
I'm constantly learning about the perspectives of men and women and gay people and trans people and *black* people. I've learned about my blind spots on countless issues over the years, again, including some black issues. I didn't have to become something I'm not in order to do so.
I didn't think you'd edited anything out of Eve's comments on purpose; perhaps just missed something, or were careless, or something.
Okay, maybe I didn't read the bit about the surgery carefully, because now that you mention it here, yeah, I can see how that might come across badly.
As for the 'over representation' of some Africans in certain sports, yes, I do think it's noteworthy when they come from small countries who don't have the money and resources put into developing athletes and teams the way richer European countries do. That said, if athletes from small countries like Lithuania or Estonia were over-represented in certain Olympic sports I WOULD find that interesting. Especially when they don't have the money to put into sterling teams and athletes the way the US and Russia do.
Why were the Russians so damn good at bringing home more metal than a Motley Crue concert before they were banned? I think we all know the answer to that and it ain't superior Aryan genes. Slight biological differences and drugs for athletic performance are things that make me go hmmmmmm. But, I wouldn't support banning athletes for any natural slight advantages they might have, whereas I'm okay with banning dopers.
"yes, I do think it's noteworthy when they come from small countries who don't have the money and resources put into developing athletes and teams the way richer European countries do"
Yes, but they have the advantage of growing up in extremely hot, low oxygen conditions, and needing to do demanding, physical work just as a matter of course. Then they *train* in those conditions. Most distance athletes (at least now) deliberately go to environments like those to train so that competing in more Western climates and elevations is easier.
They also have a culture that specifically celebrates long distance running (or sprinting in the case of Jamaica, say), so they're far more likely to find those exceptional athletes out of the millions of less exceptional ones. Plus, their trainers have done some truly groundbreaking work in the field of running technique.
Somewhere in China, right now, there's probably a kid who, with the proper training, could win an Olympic medal in sprinting. But how much energy is being put into finding him? How interested is he in doing it? There are better explanations for these differences than race essentialism and money.
This isn't to deny that there's such a thing as biological differences of course. But to say that if you're looking for a *specific* biological difference, and try to decide who has it based on the colour of their skin, you'll usually be wrong just as often as you're right. This is not true for sex.
"This isn't to deny that there's such a thing as biological differences of course. But to say that if you're looking for a *specific* biological difference, and try to decide who has it based on the colour of their skin, you'll usually be wrong just as often as you're right. This is not true for sex."
Good point about how these athletes were raised and work, and then trained, but I was still wasn't making a race-based comparison. The observation that athletes from certain African countries seem to have a slight biological physical edge over others and why isn't about race, or at least it shouldn't be. It's about a *biological advantage* but not one worth testing over. We all agree here that men and women should compete separately for biological reasons that won't be overcome by training harder or lifting more weights. Any non-gender-related bio differences are what athletes simply must be up against; being Kenyan or Ethiopian doesn't *guarantee* they'll win the race since they do lose races too. That's the 'competitive' part of athletics. Sometimes the person next to you is just better suited to win and it's up to you to do the best you can.
Understand, Steve, I'm not arguing in favour of testing based on race; but I'm also in favour of speaking up about facts that might make others uncomfortable. Yes, I know right wingers will take that information and make racist analyses about them; the problem isn't the facts but the interpretation. Bio differences isn't the only reason why they do well, as you point out, there's a culture of success around these particular athletes that also contributes. Let's look at the whole picture.
"Understand, Steve, I'm not arguing in favour of testing based on race; but I'm also in favour of speaking up about facts that might make others uncomfortable."
Hey, I just realised I didn't respond to this. To be clear, I'm not getting upset. I don't think you're arguing for race-based testing. And I wouldn't even be upset if you were. Not least because the idea is idiotic. I'm just trying to get to the root of two things you said.
The first is that I "blew it" in this conversation. I'm still not clear about why you think this.
And the second is I'm trying to make it clear why the comparison of "race" to trans identities doesn't hold any water.
Males outperform females in every sporting discipline (with the exception of ultra-long distance running) from anywhere from around 10% in running events to over 200% in some weight lifting disciplines.
"Some Africans" outperform Europeans by around 1-2% in some sports and are outperformed by those same Europeans or Asians in others. So even if it *were* possible to test people's race in any meaningful sense, it would be pointless to do so.
I'm not sure what uncomfortable facts need to be added to this analysis.
What??? You don't watch out every night for comments from *me*, your special little snowflake reader & commenter??? LOL
I think the racial biological 'edges' here may be (this is my speculation) around at the same level that male and female *brain differences* are - the very minor ways that male and female brains differ, and neuroscientists are usually quick to note that they're *minor* differences, I wrote about it recently in a Vocal article. The guy's research is encapsulated here https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html. I think it may be the same with these minor African differences, and you know what, that show I saw was like fifteen years ago so it's possible the science has changed on it. I don't terribly care about it any more than I do that some female athletes may have an edge over others because they come from taller stock with longer legs who are tough to beat in a race.
I've lost my train of thought on this one but I went back and reviewed your original article and it struck me as a bit disingenuous to say she broke out the 'big guns' of race when you were the one who introduced it in the previous comment, noting that everyone who sees you agrees you're black. Then she tried to turn it back on you, a common debate tactic, although it did send you both a bit off the beaten path.
I also do understand her concern about what happened to Caster Semenya being 'stripped of her femaleness', even though she was a highly unusual biological oddity. I'm not sure how *I* feel about it although when I first learned about her years ago I wondered if there could be a place in athletics for someone like her. Back then, a third category (mixed M/F, or something - mixed being *each person*) wasn't feasible but it might be now, and could be a convenient place to put the clearly male-bodied 'women' like Lia Thomas who was trending on Twitter yesterday because he came in number one in a women's swimming race - he came in like 482 when he competed as a man. Dude towers over the other women and looks about as much like a woman as I look like a potted plant. Do you know how many women were on the committee that stripped her of her status? I don't know. It occurred to me that if it was all or mostly men, that could have gotten Eve's hackles us...us chicks never like it when men make decisions about our bodies ;P Speculating here. I sort of, internally, support what they did to Caster in a half-assed way because I believe *she* believes* she's a woman and really had no clue that she had a lot male biological characteristics. Even as I have been thinking for years that she shouldn't be competing with other women.
So to sum it all up:
1) You mentioned race first (and I'll bet you shot Greedo first, too!)
2) That's where I felt you kind of blew it not understanding Eve's point - she wasn't being super-rude or blindingly clueless - and she did make an argument I 'get', even if I'm not sure how I think about it.
I've blown my 3 rations of Medium articles this month, so if you want to send me the friend link of the Medium article that started all this, I'd love to read it.
"1) You mentioned race first (and I'll bet you shot Greedo first, too!)
2) That's where I felt you kind of blew it not understanding Eve's point - she wasn't being super-rude or blindingly clueless - and she did make an argument I 'get', even if I'm not sure how I think about it."
1) Again, I didn't mention race, I mentioned the colour of my skin because it's an objective fact. I wasn't making a racial argument at all. I could have mentioned the colour of oranges instead, but I wouldn't have been "dragging" agriculture into it. I *did* mention coin flips, but I wasn't "dragging" economics into it.
2) Caster Semenya can't be "stripped of her femaleness." She either is female or she isn't. The issue is that Caster Semenya may well not be female. But regardless, that's not the argument that Eve was making. Eve was claiming Caster had been stripped of her *womanhood*. Something which I have absolutely never done and was crystal clear during the conversation that I would never do.
But again, it's something that could only possibly happen to the roughly 0.1% of people who are intersex males who grew up believing they were females and were tested in such a way where they discovered they weren't. This isn't a threat to "every single woman on Earth." It's absolutely ridiculous to claim that it is.
So yes, her argument *was* blindingly clueless, and also blindingly racist. Because she compared trans women, who are not female, to black people, as if to suggest that we're not people. While I'm a little disturbed that you "get" that argument, I realise that you do so in good-faith. Which is why I'm trying to get you to think about it a little more.
Anyway here's the article. In which, it's worth noting, I don't even mention Caster Semenya😅
https://steveqj.medium.com/the-endangered-art-of-running-like-a-girl-83c636cffdda?sk=a16709b88a787c9757d0b12eb1cc04c7
p.s. Greedo had it coming.
At this point, you're just arguing about semantics. 'Skin colour' IS race and I see why she thought you were pulling race into it. Not necessarily how she overreacted, but I do think you introduced the topic first. As for 'womanhood', I suspect that's just how Eve defines it, and at least for the purpose of competitive sports, there's kind of an argument to be made for it. She may be worried about a 'slippery slope' here which is not unrealistic given that we're being told that guys like Lia Thomas is a 'woman' after a few hormone injections and a declaration, not to mention a widespread belief in the left that if that's how you 'feel', that's how you are (unless you 'feel' like you're another race, like Rachel Dolezal). Good article, and ironically I just read the Sports Illustrated story about Thomas (he's a him, let's face it) and how he seemed to be 'throwing' the occasional race to make himself look less of a rank pretender and a cheater. Your idea is a good one, I've been thinking for years that at this point, there are enough people declaring themselves trans that we should just create a third category for 'other'. Let the transwomen compete against each other, and the transmen the same. Everyone stays in competitive sports, women's sports remain protected, and the only people who lose are transwomen who weren't good enough to win medals when competing against men :)
"At this point, you're just arguing about semantics. 'Skin colour' IS race."
No, I'm really not. And this is really centrally important to understanding how stupid racism is. By the logic you're suggesting here, I'm the same "race" as everybody else on Earth who has brown skin. This is pretty silly on its face. But we can go further.
What degree of skin tone variation do we need before somebody is a different race? Chocolate to Black Coffee? Cappuccino to caramel? Somewhere in between? If I have a child with an Asian woman, or even a black woman from a different part of the world (as my parents did) what "race" are they?
Are you the same race as everybody in the world with white skin? If so, what does that mean you have in common? Just melanin content? Or something else?
Do you believe you all have a common ancestor that is different to the common ancestor of all people with brown skin? If we adopt the "five race" model of races, do you believe that Asians and Africans and Europeans and Native Americans and Oceanian all came from different original human beings? And even if you *do* believe that, given the amount of "racial" mixing that's taken place since then, what does that mean for the concept of race today?
Please think about these questions seriously. I'm not being glib. It's not a gotcha. So many people have bought into the lie of race because we don't tease apart these ideas enough.
And all that aside, I'm still not sure why you are so fixated on who bought race into the conversation "first". Let's ignore the race/skin colour debate. Let's say I explicitly mentioned race first. So what? My problem isn't that she mentioned race, my problem is that her argument is *racist*.
Lastly, what is the argument to be made for Eve's version of womanhood? How can a woman (in the good old fashioned sense of the word) be stripped of her womanhood? What's the slippery slope? Because remember, Eve isn't arguing to defend womanhood as it's existed since time immemorial, she is one of the people arguing that womanhood is "a few hormone injections and a declaration."