Is PC a euphemism for 'nice?' | PUNT ROAD END | Richmond Tigers Forum
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Is PC a euphemism for 'nice?'

Brodders17

Tiger Legend
Mar 21, 2008
17,666
11,712
Re: Is PC a euphemism for 'nice?

LeeToRainesToRoach said:
Why does it have to be vengeance? Why can't it be about justice, according to the principle of an eye for an eye?

an old tenet of Islam i believe.
 

MD Jazz

Don't understand football? Talk to the hand.
Feb 3, 2017
13,329
13,714
Giardiasis said:
MD the executioner! Could be lucrative for you.

I like it!

I might use it with my kids, see if I can get improved cooperation.
 

MD Jazz

Don't understand football? Talk to the hand.
Feb 3, 2017
13,329
13,714
LeeToRainesToRoach said:
Announced today that Sean Price is seeking to appeal his sentence. Bolsters the argument for the death penalty.

Bullet. The executioner would do this one for free. What can we learn from this guy being alive?

I think they should have a penalty system in place for released prisoners. Those responsible for their release should be subject to penalties should the released prisoners reoffend. They may be more circumspect in their decision making.
 

LeeToRainesToRoach

Tiger Legend
Jun 4, 2006
33,186
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Melbourne
MD Jazz said:
I think they should have a penalty system in place for released prisoners. Those responsible for their release should be subject to penalties should the released prisoners reoffend. They may be more circumspect in their decision making.

Agree, we shouldn’t have to hear about people like Price. It’s like continually picking off a scab that never heals.

There are regulations around fair sentencing but they manage to knock back John Lennon’s killer every time, and we’ve so far kept Julian Knight locked up. I’m guessing with Chapman that nobody wants to be known as the one who let him out.
 

AngryAnt

Tiger Legend
Nov 25, 2004
27,017
14,794
glantone said:
That's not bizarre at all, Thais are the same. They can do that because they're not politically correct. They're just being naturally nice. Unpoliticized. Why wouldn't anyone of any religion wish another person of whatever religion well on their special day? Cost nothing.

Yeah I'm kidding about the "bizarre". Southeast Asians are genuinely warm and hospitable people and the Indos are no exception.
 

Panthera Tigris

Tiger Champion
Apr 27, 2010
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https://quillette.com/2019/01/23/thank-you-apa/?fbclid=IwAR1CqvtfL9yn2rx1Hga3BJv3nIY5Kgro7yPtKyetqMDxLBenB5D7MuYvQlg

Thank You, APA
written by Clay Routledge


People who don’t live in northern climates may not realize that construction doesn’t stop even in the coldest months. I live in North Dakota and was driving by a building site just the other day and saw a bunch of men stoically working in subzero temperatures and generally miserable weather conditions. I then started thinking about the other difficult and dangerous jobs that are dominated by males such as logging workers, fishing workers, roofers, and iron and steel workers.

For some strange reason, men seem to be uniquely willing to do dangerous jobs. In fact, economist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark J. Perry has documented a gender occupational fatality gap. Turns out that even though men make around 53 percent of all workers in the United States, they account for about 93 percent of workplace fatalities.

Thanks to the new guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA) for practice with men and boys, male psychology is no longer a mystery and mental health professionals are now equipped with the tools they need to combat the worst forms of it. According to the APA, boys and men are at risk of suffering from traditional masculinity which is on the whole unhealthy. Turns out, the traditional masculinity that drives many of us men to be confident, assertive, adventurous, stoic, and willing to take risks for our goals, the people we love, and sometimes even complete strangers are bad for us and society.

Who knew?

Biologists, philosophers, theologians, physicians, parents, and really almost all regular folk have long believed that there are meaningful and biologically-based psychological differences between males and females. Fortunately for us mere mortals, the APA is setting the record straight. It is an oppressive patriarchy, not biology, that has shaped our psychology. Gender and the masculine traits associated with being male are social constructs. The APA obviously isn’t denying that evolution is true. They aren’t some kind of silly group of religious fundamentalists. But like most educated progressives, they understand that evolution stopped at the neck.

There is this odd group of evolutionary psychologists who seem hell-bent on holding onto antiquated views about human mental and social life. It seems pretty clear that these individuals are the academic wing of the alt-right. Don’t be fooled by surveys suggesting the majority of evolutionary psychologists self-identify as liberal. We can’t trust people to self-report their own politics. Only the most enlightened are in a position to tell everyone else what they really think. I would laugh at how ridiculous the academics are who continue to insist that males and females are distinct in any meaningful way, but I now know that comedy is a form of oppression.

Perhaps the saddest part of reading the new APA guidelines is realizing just how many American boys and men suffer from traditional masculinity and don’t even realize it, and how many mothers and wives tolerate and even promote this sickness. There are millions of couples and families across the United States who are living lives imprisoned by traditional gender roles and on the surface appear to be happy and flourishing. I especially feel for all the conservatives and devout Christians who are most vulnerable to this illness. It doesn’t help when alt-right institutions such as Harvard publish research suggesting that children may benefit from being raised in such traditionally religious homes.

In fact, it is surprising the number of universities that are willing to allow scholars to publish research that gives credence to traditional ways of approaching life. For example, I recently read a peer-reviewed research paper reporting that conservatives have a stronger sense of meaning in life than liberals. Other studies find that conservatives are also in many ways physically healthier than liberals.

It must be difficult for the APA to do the good work of promoting a progressive psychological agenda at the same time as some researchers are annoyingly documenting a lack of viewpoint diversity in psychology and related fields. For instance, studies indicate that the vast majority of psychology professors are liberals and that many of them admit they would discriminate against a conservative academic when it comes to hiring decisions, conference invitations, and research grant funding. How exactly is this a problem? Most of the academics I talk to certainly don’t find it concerning. And as I already pointed out, despite this supposed lack of viewpoint diversity, some academics still manage to sneak through the peer-review system research findings that appear to be promoting the idea that some traditional ideas and lifestyles have psychological, social, and physical health benefits. Clearly, the real problem is we haven’t done enough to purge conservative and traditional ideas from the academy.

With great shame, I have to confess that after some introspection I now realize that the problem of traditional masculinity has taken hold of my own household. For years, I thought my wife and I were making division of labor and parental role decisions as equal partners and in a way that allowed us to balance as best we could our practical needs with our natural inclinations and interests. I thought my traditional masculinity and her traditional femininity were totally natural and healthy. Now I realize that we were both victims of a suffocating patriarchy. I am trying my best to get her to see the light but she may be beyond help. She still seems so happy and fulfilled. Maybe I should ask her to take some gender studies classes.

Now that I think about it, my past has been punctuated with multiple outbreaks of severe traditional masculinity. I’ll never forget an episode from my college years when my friends and I were walking through a parking lot late at night after going out to a club. I saw a man beating on a young woman. Traditional masculinity overwhelmed me and without a second thought I immediately ran over and attacked the man. A fight ensued and I successfully submitted him just before a couple of police officers arrived. My act of violence almost landed me in jail but thankfully the cops were sympathetic to my condition. Of course, the woman would have been more badly hurt had I not intervened, but why is her physical safety any more important than me keeping my masculinity illness in check?

Just think about all those horribly afflicted soldiers, police officers, and fire fighters who regularly engage in physical risk-taking behaviors that could and sometimes do cost them their lives out of some sense of masculine duty. This isn’t just a personal pathology. It is a public health crisis.

We should acknowledge the true courage of the APA. It must have been very awkward to craft their guidelines knowing they were doing so in the safe, comfortable, temperature-controlled buildings that were constructed by men, many of whom no doubt suffer terribly from the very traditional masculinity the APA is trying to address. I bet some of these workers occasionally congregate at a bar after a hard day’s work to drink a few beers. A few of them, the really ill ones, may even tell or laugh at politically incorrect jokes. Imagine. Those poor souls.

Even more courageous was the APA’s willingness to openly state that social justice activism is associated with healthy masculinity. Many good progressives know this to be true but are too afraid to so brazenly say it. They prefer a more cryptic approach to equating being a well-adjusted human being with having the correct political ideology. God—I mean Judith Butler—bless the APA!

At the risk of revealing my own ignorance, I’ll admit that I was at first puzzled by the fact that so many academics and prominent public figures have been for many years encouraging girls and women to adopt some of the unhealthy characteristics of traditional masculinity. But now I understand the master plan. If we can push men to be more like women and women to be more like men, they can converge into being interchangeable units who are much easier to manipulate in the service of creating a progressive social utopia.

I look forward to the day when we no longer are slaves to gendered names and pronouns but can refer to each other by the identification numbers issued to us by the state. This will help us realize the true utopian vision of anti-natalism in which our descendants won’t have to suffer from oppression because they won’t be burdened by existence.


Clay Routledge is a Quillette columnist and professor of psychology at North Dakota State University.
 

LeeToRainesToRoach

Tiger Legend
Jun 4, 2006
33,186
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Melbourne
Panthera Tigris said:
According to the APA, boys and men are at risk of suffering from traditional masculinity which is on the whole unhealthy. Turns out, the traditional masculinity that drives many of us men to be confident, assertive, adventurous, stoic, and willing to take risks for our goals, the people we love, and sometimes even complete strangers are bad for us and society.

We are actually going to lay down and let aggressors (Communists, ISIS) annihilate us.
 

AngryAnt

Tiger Legend
Nov 25, 2004
27,017
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The Cold War is over and Trump already defeated ISIS. He said so two weeks ago.
 

Panthera Tigris

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Apr 27, 2010
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I sometimes think the social justice warrior set need to be very careful what they wish for. To play Devils Advocate, should we abolish all segregation of sport and just have one open category, with the obvious results that would go with that?

https://www.thepostmillennial.com/canadian-sports-experts-embrace-misogynist-practices-to-please-trans-activists%EF%BB%BF/?fbclid=IwAR1xhZOnxQwPl41vGNvf-EIuDJsIMFnja29uQvoMLOTpq-pFMJn5bfuP4UE

Canadian sports “experts” embrace misogynist practices to please trans activists­
Barbara Kay by Barbara Kay


Months ago, I tweeted that sports would be “where the rubber hits the road” on deference to trans ideology, because affirmation in sport of biological males who identify as women cannot co-exist in harmony with a level playing field for women. That burning smell? Rubber is hitting the road—hard. The latest incident in women’s medal erasure comes from Connecticut, where two transwomen sprinters took gold and silver at a girls’ track championship.

Sport is one area where the community­ will resist “social justice” initiatives if they conflict with sport’s bedrock principles of a level playing field and zero tolerance for cheating. Up until about five minutes ago in the long history of sport, that meant women competed against women and men competed against men in all sports where advantage lies in size, power and/or speed.

When a biologically male runner or cyclist who ranks as middle of the pack in men’s races becomes the gold medallist in a Women’s race, he cheats the silver and bronze women athletes beside him on the podium, and especially the woman who came in fourth. But he also cheats people who came out to see a clean race. Joe and Jane Public know unfairness and reality denial when they see it, and it sucks all the joy out of the word “competition” for them.

“Inclusion” has become an obsession in our culture. But normally there are logical limits to inclusivity that nobody objects to. Only citizens can vote. Only people with a certain level of health and fitness can join the Armed Forces. But sport associations that used to accept limitations and categories based in principles of reason and fairness are now prepared to sacrifice both on the altar of trans reverence.

Gender Studies and Sociology, including Sport Sociology, are currently marinated in theories of gender fluidity and social construction. The PhDs in these specialties are then hired as “gender identity experts” by sport associations in order to help formulate policies on “inclusion.” They invite LGBT advocacy groups as consultants as well. Nobody involved in these working groups even pretends to bring objectivity to their task. Back in the day, they were activists for women’s interests. Now they are activists for trans interests. But in sport, inclusion for trans cannot help but result in exclusion for women.

These advocacy groups will go to extraordinary lengths to make their point. We saw that last week when 62-year old, 18-time Grand Slam tennis singles champion Martina Navratilova, one of the greatest athletes of all time—and an icon for leadership in gay acceptance—was unceremoniously thrown under the juggernaut of trans activism.

Navratilova’s “crime” was to publish an op ed in London’s Sunday Times decrying the penetration by transwomen of women’s sports, asserting that it was “cheating and unfair” for biological males to compete against women.

Martina, for all her celebrity and stature, is spitting into the zeitgeist. She is part of Sport’s unwoke binary past. Athlete Ally, a U.S. non-profit LGBT-supportive organization, for whom Martina was an ambassador, stripped her of her title and turfed her from their editorial board. They accused Martina of transphobia, alleging her comments were “based on a false understanding of science and data.” (The irony of the charge is pretty rich, coming from an organization whose assumptions can only be sustained by a rigorous rejection of “science and data.”)


Athlete Ally is one of a constellation of LGBT advocacy groups that “are helping sport organizations in Canada become more inclusive.” This quotation is taken from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport’s most recent policy paper, “Creating Inclusive environments for Trans Participants in Canadian Sport.” Designed as a policy guidance tool for sport organizations, it was developed by the ‘Trans Inclusion in Sport Expert Working Group,’ which I will hereafter refer to as the EWG. If you want to get a flavour of the kind of anti-science Kool-Aid our sports brain trust is drinking, read this document.

It begins factually enough. The paper notes that the vast majority of sport participation in Canada is focused on recreation and development. At this level, trans inclusion is not a big deal, because it’s all about fun and skill building. It is only for the “very small minority” of Canadian athletes who continue into high performance that competitive advantage becomes an issue. Enter the EWG. And here we leave facts behind and enter La La Land.

Sex, the EWG says, “is usually assigned at birth.” No. Sex is established during gestation according to chromosomal development. Sex is observed at birth, not assigned. Gender, the EWG says, “is not inherently connected to one’s physical anatomy.” No. Sex and gender are connected for 99% of humanity, and therefore “inherent” by normal metrics.

The definition of the word “trans,” for sports purposes, according to the EWG, “includes but is not limited to people who identify as transgender, transsexual, cross dressers (adjective) or gender non-conforming (gender diverse or genderqueer).” This is quite a puzzling mashup. Cross-dressing males do not believe they “are” female. Neither do non-conforming males and females who have no wish to transition.


But the document does not address this important inconsistency, nor the alarming imprecision of “not limited to.” From what they state in this definition, EWG is okay with cross-sex competing by biological males who do not believe they are females and females who do not believe they are male, but whose appearance or fetishes are atypical for their sex. We’re off to a very confusing start. Things don’t improve.

Indeed, to be trans can mean almost anything an individual wants it to mean (“not limited to…”), according to this document: “It is important for sports organizations to understand that each individual is different. There is no single transition process and each person will make different choices,” including, significantly, “whether they undertake hormonal or surgical transitions.”

And “[a]n individuals’ personal choice to not use hormones does not make them any less trans nor do these choices change their right to be recognized as the gender with which they identify—man, woman, both or other.” In short, the definition of trans, to be accepted by official governing sports bodies, is left entirely to an individual’s “sense” of gender identity, completely untethered from biology.

For contrast (for now): The International Olympic Committee (IOC) requires female trans athletes to take hormones for a year before competition (they used to require two years). The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) asks for one year of hormone therapy on the grounds that androgen deprivation and cross sex hormones reduce muscle mass.



The EWG does not deny that transwomen may have an advantage. Shockingly, they don’t care. They say: “the EWG acknowledges the concern that trans women athletes who grew up biologically male and who do not undergo hormonal intervention may be at a competitive advantage when competing in high-performance women’s sport. Nonetheless it is recognized that transfemales are not males who became females. Rather these are people who have always been psychologically female, but whose anatomy and physiology, for reasons as yet unexplained, have manifested as male.” (Emphasis mine.)

“Always”? Many adults who develop gender dysphoria after puberty or later had normal childhoods. Most children who exhibit gender dysphoria in childhood reconcile their gender with their natal sex in adolescence, although a high number of them turn out to be gay. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), which exhibits many elements of a social contagion, is an escalating phenomenon that occurs without warning after puberty. A certain number who thought they were transgender desist later. In fact, those who “always” considered themselves the opposite gender from earliest childhood and who never waver in this belief for a lifetime, are a minority in the domain of gender dysphoria.

In any case, this statement is in direct conflict with the EWG’s assertion elsewhere in the guidelines that “these individuals should be able to participate in the gender with which they feel most comfortable and safe, which may not be the same in each sport or consistent in subsequent seasons.” (Emphasis mine.) They are saying that a transwoman may “be” a male in one sport and may “be” female in another from one season to the next. There is no “always” present in such a scenario.

Even if some transwomen athletes have “always been psychologically female,” sport is not about athletes’ psychological state; sport is about athletes’ bodies, and what they do with them. Which begs the paramount question of why individual psychology should trump physiological reality on the playing field at all.

As if the rabbit hole were not already deep enough, the EWG concedes that although “participants in men’s sport, on average, out-perform participants in women’s sports, current science is unable to isolate why this is the case.” (Emphasis mine.)

Can anyone with a working brain read this statement without laughing? Could it be that males outperform females because women are on average about 9% shorter than men? Because peak male bone mass is around 50% more than women’s? Because men are 40-50 muscle% by weight and women are about 30-35% muscle by weight? Because men on average have larger hearts and lung capacity, higher metabolic rates?

Hand grip is a marker for overall strength. The strongest 10% of females can only beat the bottom 10% of men in a hand grip contest. In speed events of all kinds, women are about 90% as fast as men. The fastest women will be beaten by boys on high school track teams.

Women’s ligaments are thinner and softer than men’s. Which is why women in combat training suffer far more injuries than men.

For heaven’s sake, when a women’s national soccer team loses 7-0 to a team of under-15 age boys, we are way beyond “anecdotal” evidence. So you simply can’t say “unable to isolate why” men are in general stronger and faster than women with a straight face. The weasel words here are “current science.” Translation: pseudo-science promulgated in the pseudo-discipline of Gender Studies. According to “current science,” the data and statistics that are considered settled by, you know, science, are ignored and replaced by theories that have no basis in evidence or the scientific method.

The guidelines offer even more unintentional humour, when they insert “A note of caution.” The EWG recognizes “that an unintended consequence of this policy guidance on hormone therapy for high-performance sport may be that a trans individual consider, or be pressured to consider, delaying the use of hormone therapy in order to realize some perceived or real competitive advantage in their sport.” (Ya think?)

Additionally, “sport organizations may want to consider how it might deal with any complaints about ‘gender impostors’ in high-performance sport. It is important to recognize that cheating of this type—presumably men masquerading as women in order to achieve a perceived advantage in women’s sport—is unprecedented and considered highly unlikely.”

There it is again: the admission that biological males have an advantage over biological women. The “presumably” is a coy deflection; it reeks of disingenuity. I reached out for comment on this issue to EWG member, former Olympian runner (1964) and the most influential academic voice in Canadian sport, Professor Bruce Kidd of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education.

Kidd conceded in an email to me that biological males might have an advantage in competition, but “we did not think that any advantages that MF trans might possess…have been shown to be so significant that they merit policy exclusions.” He added, “No one would ever say that sports offer a completely level playing field. As a social scientist, I can point out that personal and national income is the most closely associated with Olympic medals.”

At first I found the first comment baffling. The International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF), which is quoted in the CCES guidelines that Kidd signed off on, accepts that “male athletes have a competitive advantage over female athletes to the order of 10-12%.” How are these stats not significant in a domain where medals are won on the basis of .01 seconds?

But then I realized he was saying men do have advantage, but the advantage of transitioned male-to-females athletes is no different from the random distribution advantage within a sex category (biological, economic or social), as per his second comment.

In response, I say that as long as biological sex is the primary categorizing principle in sport (for now), the categories need to be either enforced or eliminated. Para sport, for example, is divided into many categories for degrees of disability. But they would certainly not allow an able-bodied person to compete against paraplegics, no matter how deep their “sense” of transableism.

As to economic advantage, Kidd certainly makes a good point, even if it is not relevant to the discussion here. It is indeed troubling that a multitude of talented youngsters are constrained by financial obstacles from opportunities to realize their dreams. But there is an easy solution to that form of inequality: Increase funding to ensure Canada’s talent pool widens and deepens. Biology, however, is an immutable form of inequality. No amount of money, no form of regulation, can change that.

If the EWG really believes that the male advantage is not significant, they should consider abolishing sex categories altogether. But they won’t do that, because even ideologues know that would be the end of women in sport. The fact that nobody, not even those arguing most strenuously for parity between women and transwomen, is complaining about the reverse problem, transmen winning medals in men’s sports, should shame the ideologues into admitting the hard truth this disparity represents. But they won’t do that either.

Their compromise was to inflict a handicap on every woman in sport competing against a transwoman, and hope that the relatively few women athletes affected would have drunk enough social-justice Kool-Aid to accept that transwomen are exempt from the zero tolerance for cheating rubric. (Which by and large they have done—so far.)

And why does the EWG consider it “unprecedented” and “highly unlikely” that cheating of the kind they do recognize as cheating—identifying oneself as trans when one isn’t—would occur? The history of high-performance sport is rife with athletes who have cheated by doping. Offering the legal opportunity to enter the record books by competing against females, with no questions asked and no moral judgment levied against them, is tantamount to allowing any male athlete who is willing to lie about his psychological state the right to dope, is it not?

In fact, the more one thinks about it, the more it looks like “gender imposterism” could end up as a feature, rather than a bug, in the execution of CCES guidelines.

There are some observers of the lunacy that the CCES document exemplifies, such as conservative Selwyn Duke in this American Thinker article, who sees this great injustice to female athletes, as feminists’ own petard upon which they have now been hoisted. Feminists have insisted all these many decades now that social construction, not biology, has been the only obstacle to women achieving parity with men in every field of endeavor. If only women had the same opportunities, they have claimed, they would perform equally well. Duke says there is “poetic justice” in this logical extension of presumed equality.

I agree that radical feminists dug themselves into this hole, but I take no pleasure in their comeuppance. They aren’t the ones training five or six hours a day for years to realize their dream. Radical feminists are the proponents of anti-scientific theories about women and men’s psychological natures. They are way off base in their repudiation of evolutionary biology, true, but most athletes are not ideologues of any kind, let alone gender theorists. They just love sport. They know their bodies intimately and what they are capable of. They are very well aware of the differences between male and female bodies, and they do not observe these differences through the lens of social justice, but of realism.

So most athletes reading this document will know in their hearts that they are reading a catechism, not a policy paper grounded in any reality they recognize. But athletes tend not to rock political boats, as it takes time and effort to beat against the current, a distraction from personal goals. They keep their heads down and focused on their disciplines. Those girls and women athletes need these injustices redressed on their behalf, not smug taunts that they had it coming to them.

We are seeing the trickledown consequences of the EWG’s trans-reverential stance in the wholesale adoption of these guidelines, after a two-year consultation process with the CCES, by U Sports, the governing body of Canadian university sports. They are now in effect at U Sports’ 56 member institutions. All these institutions have, consciously or not, embraced a misogynistic policy in the name of gender inclusivity. On the up side, nobody could possibly call them “transphobic,” a fate worse than death to many cultural elites.

The rubber hitting the road in sports sparked a flame that now threatens to break out into a wildfire. It is clear that many of sport’s ethical gatekeepers have lost sight of their mission. The sport world needs to give its head a shake, break out of its politicized trance, and step back from ill-considered policies like those of the CCES.

Stakeholders in sport should understand that activists of all stripes always demand more than they expect to get. I am sure that delighted trans activists were quite surprised that the amateur sport world, when told to jump, didn’t negotiate limitations that would protect women athletes’ rights, but simply asked, “how high?”

Female athletes need to know that their coaches, managers and associations will stand up to politically correct tyranny. CCES’s political masters must do whatever it takes to protect women athletes from medal erasure, in order to restore honour, presently corroding in plain sight, to Sport’s founding principle, “Play Fair.”
 

DavidSSS

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Dec 11, 2017
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I don't think this is a simple issue but one part of the above large slab of text did catch my eye. Just to be clear here, I have no issue with trans gender people, in fact I think we need to be seriously questioning gender roles.

Panthera Tigris said:
Sex, the EWG says, “is usually assigned at birth.” No. Sex is established during gestation according to chromosomal development. Sex is observed at birth, not assigned.

Hmm, seems fair enough.

Panthera Tigris said:
Gender, the EWG says, “is not inherently connected to one’s physical anatomy.” No. Sex and gender are connected for 99% of humanity, and therefore “inherent” by normal metrics.

I disagree, gender is a societal construct, we assign gender roles and this happens very early on. We link these gender roles to biological sex but gender is not biological, it is cultural. What makes someone masculine (the gender role assigned to Men)? Well we can look at a cliche, who wears the trousers? Well not the soldiers out the front of the Greek parliament, and I think they're pretty masculine. The point is that masculine and feminine roles come in a variety of shapes and sizes and are only one part of any person's identity. Identity has many aspects and has societal context, and power implications too.

There is also a lot of biological variation within various human traits, such as male and female. I suspect there are probably more sports which could be mixed, the only one I can think of is equestrian but there may be more. But we all know that, on average, a lot of sports do need to be separate for each sex to be competitive.

So where does this leave me? Very simple actually. The division of sport is based on the biological differences between men and women. What gender you are is irrelevant. If you choose to be feminine but were born a man, you are a man, you just take on the gender role normally assigned to women. I would add that I see no reason to have only 2 gender roles, but that's another issue.

Navratalova is right to point to the advantage that men have in sports involving physical strength or the like and the unfairness of allowing men into women's sporting competitions just because they adopt feminine gender characteristics. People are confusing sex and gender, separation of sporting competitions is based on sex, not gender.

But I'll leave the last word to paraphrase Germaine Greer: Just because you put on a dress and cut off your f***ing *smile* doesn't make you a woman.

DS
 

Panthera Tigris

Tiger Champion
Apr 27, 2010
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Heresy is not to be tolerated in the psuedo-religious cult of oppression worship.

LGBT group drops Martina Navratilova over transgender comments
• Athlete Ally drops former world No 1 as ambassador
• Navratilova also loses place on advisory board
Guardian sport

Thu 21 Feb 2019 00.02 AEDT Last modified on Thu 21 Feb 2019 08.36 AEDT
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Martina Navratilova
Martina Navratilova’s comments on transgender inclusion were labelled ‘disturbing, upsetting, and deeply transphobic’ by the rights group Trans Actual. Photograph: Jonathan Ford/BBC
Martina Navratilova has been removed as an ambassador by Athlete Ally, an organisation that supports LGBT athletes, following her comments on transgender inclusion.

In a newspaper column this week the 18-time grand slam singles champion referred to trans women as men who “decide to be female”, adding that allowing them to compete with women who were assigned female at birth is “cheating and unfair”.


Martina Navratilova criticised over 'cheating' trans women comments
Read more
Her comments were heavily criticised and described as “disturbing, upsetting, and deeply transphobic” by the rights group Trans Actual and now Athlete Ally, a US non-profit organisation that campaigns for greater inclusion in sport, has followed suit, also removing the 62-year-old from their advisory board.

In a statement the organisation said: “Athlete Ally unequivocally stands on the side of trans athletes and their right to access and compete in sport free from discrimination.

“Martina Navratilova’s recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence.

“As an organisation dedicated to addressing root causes of homophobia and transphobia in and through sport, we will only affiliate with those committed to the same goal, and not those who further misinformation or discrimination in any way.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/feb/20/lgbt-group-drops-martina-navratilova-over-transgender-comments?CMP=twt_gu&__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR2FWegXDg59Uq9-lTVeVK1eNxXXxKPtcpxUcDMaE_CDoECmJNh8ZCQs11c
 

KnightersRevenge

Baby Knighters is 7!! WTF??
Aug 21, 2007
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Interested in your take here Gia? To my mind the woman in question was skirting with the boundary of decency/courtesy. I'm not convinced that ought to be enough to lose your job (even if your employer is a non-prophet). Your private online accounts ought not to be the business of your employer, IMO.
 

Giardiasis

Tiger Legend
Apr 20, 2009
6,906
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Interested in your take here Gia? To my mind the woman in question was skirting with the boundary of decency/courtesy. I'm not convinced that ought to be enough to lose your job (even if your employer is a non-prophet). Your private online accounts ought not to be the business of your employer, IMO.
My take from this is that it is nuts that you can get fired for stating a basic, fundamental fact of nature on your own private account. I wonder how far this can be taken?

The other take away is that it doesn’t matter how woke you are (JK Rowling is certainly a virtue signalling celebrity) if you aren’t full blown woke than you will cop the full brunt of the twitter horde to shout you down as a bigot. As an aside, you’ll also be guilty for past transgressions with ruthless efficiency.
 
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DavidSSS

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Dec 11, 2017
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Not to worry, ScoMo's religious laws will make sure that only people who have the right religious beliefs will be able to get away with this in future.

DS
 

Brodders17

Tiger Legend
Mar 21, 2008
17,666
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My take from this is that it is nuts that you can get fired for stating a basic, fundamental fact of nature on your own private account. I wonder how far this can be taken?

The other take away is that it doesn’t matter how woke you are (JK Rowling is certainly a virtue signalling celebrity) if you aren’t full blown woke than you will cop the full brunt of the twitter horde to shout you down as a bigot. As an aside, you’ll also be guilty for past transgressions with ruthless efficiency.
shouldnt businesses have the right to fire whoever they like?
 

Midsy

I am the one who knocks.
Jan 18, 2014
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Dominic Sandbrook's 2020 vision: A farewell to the hate mobs' joyless intolerance of anyone who dares disagree with them

By DOMINIC SANDBROOK FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 00:28, 24 December 2019 | UPDATED: 09:30, 24 December 2019

With Christmas upon us, it seems fitting that the Church of England is making the headlines.

Unfortunately, it's doing so for all the wrong reasons. Two days ago the former chaplain to the Queen, Dr Gavin Ashenden, announced that he was abandoning Anglicanism to become a Roman Catholic.

The reason, he explained in a blistering broadside, is that the Church of England no longer defends Christian values.

According to Dr Ashenden, Anglican leaders have surrendered to the new orthodoxy of the liberal Left, which is 'highly intolerant of dissenting views'.

In particular, he says, Church leaders have given in to the transgender lobby, refusing to stand up for the principle that the 'vast majority of us are born one of two sexes — male or female', which most of us regard as simple common sense.

For Dr Ashenden, who as a young priest smuggled bibles into communist Eastern Europe, all this is a depressing symptom of a general narrow-mindedness.

As he explained, 'freedom of speech is slowly being eroded', while 'those who refuse to be 'politically correct' risk accusations of thought crime and Christians are being unfairly persecuted'.

Obsession

The sad thing is that all of this rings absolutely true. In recent months our cultural elite's obsession with the transgender issue has plumbed truly absurd depths, typified by the Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson's attempt to persuade voters that people should be allowed to choose whether to be men or women without following any legal or medical process whatsoever.

(Currently, to legally change gender, people must be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and live in their 'true' gender for two years.)

Dr Ashenden's story is a reminder that the 2010s has been a decade of increasingly strident and intolerant political correctness, with institutions such as the Church of England, BBC and National Trust taking ever more extreme, bizarre and unrepresentative positions.

I could fill every page of this newspaper with examples. Not surprisingly, universities have been among the chief culprits. I think of the students at Cambridge and Cardiff who tried to 'no-platform' the veteran feminist Germaine Greer because she dared to suggest that men could not 'become' women.

Then there were the students at Canterbury Christ Church who no-platformed the veteran gay rights activist Peter Tatchell because he had dared to stand up for Ms Greer.

Like many political trends, the illiberal intolerance of the liberal Left has been imported from America. There it goes under the label of 'wokeness'.

To be 'woke' is to be committed to social and political justice — and no one would argue with that as an aspiration. Sadly, it has come to mean being piously and annoyingly Left-wing — and utterly unable to countenance alternative views.

The irony is that people who consider themselves woke rarely do anything concrete about it.

Instead, they spend all their time on social media, especially Twitter, whipping up online mobs whenever somebody uses the wrong word or makes the wrong kind of joke.

In his 2015 book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson recounted several examples of people who had misspoken online or otherwise made off-colour remarks and — thanks to the vicious efforts of a whipped-up gang of enraged keyboard warriors — lost their jobs and livelihoods. What makes these mobs do it?

One of the many ironies about such people is that they believe themselves achingly modern, tearing down ways of thinking that have existed for millennia. But they are actually the heirs to a very long tradition of joyless intolerance.

From England's 17th-century Puritans, who shut down the playhouses and tried to ban Christmas, to the hatchet-faced witch-hunters in colonial America, history is littered with people who spent their time denouncing their neighbours as debauched reactionaries.

The mad Renaissance friar Girolamo Savonarola, who briefly took over Florence, burned books, paintings and tapestries, and tried to stamp out any vestiges of fun or humanity, would have fitted in very well with today's Twitterati.

So would the Pharisees in the New Testament: sneering, arrogant intellectuals who hated Jesus for exposing their snobbery and hypocrisy.

Backlash

What these people also had in common is that they all over-reached themselves, provoking a backlash among ordinary people who were sick of being harangued by a handful of fanatics. And, thank the Lord, we seem to have reached a similar tipping point today.

As luck would have it, Dr Ashenden's broadside coincided with an extraordinary Twitter row engulfing Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling, usually a heroine of the right-on Left.

Rowling's crime was defending a woman called Maya Forstater, who was sacked as a researcher at a European think-tank after she dared to say on Twitter that men who have sex-change surgery are still biological men.

As is now traditional, the hyenas of the transgender lobby waded into battle — only to find Rowling's vast fan base returning fire with gusto.

Then another Twitter celebrity, comedian Ricky Gervais, got stuck in to them too, joking sarcastically that 'those awful biological women' would never understand the joys of 'becoming a lovely lady so late in life'.

This was the cue for more howling from the online Pharisees. They never seem to understand that the angrier they become, the more the rest of us laugh at them.

The truth, of course, is that these people have never been more than a tiny minority. Because they dominate online platforms such as Twitter — to which most people do not belong — they have an exaggerated sense of their own importance, which means they get a shock when they discover what ordinary people actually think.

In a sense, this was the story of the General Election twelve days ago. A tiny, fanatical, highly vocal minority ventured out from their online bubble, and were staggered to discover that the vast majority of the British people regarded their hero as a fool, their promises as unbelievable and their beloved manifesto as utter madness.

But if the tide has turned, as I hope it has, where do we go from here? Well, since it's the season of goodwill, perhaps both sides in the so-called culture war should start by putting down their weapons.

Few of us, whatever our politics, would deny that social media brings out the worst in people. We could all do with thinking a little more and tweeting a little less.

The last decade has been a low point for public debate, thanks not least to activists' fondness for shouting and screaming. It baffles me that so many self-declared liberals, in particular, are intolerant of difference and so reluctant to listen to contrary opinions.

Indeed, earlier this year almost two-fifths of Remainers told an opinion poll that they would seriously mind if their child married somebody who had voted Leave. So much, then, for their cosmopolitan open-mindedness!

Humility

Yet democracy depends on competing opinions. And we all learn far more from people who disagree with us than from those who reinforce what we already think.

So as we prepare to celebrate Christmas and bid farewell to the 2010s, I hope fervently that we will leave behind the age of confected outrage, the culture of 'calling out' perceived offences and the hysterical obsession with political correctness.

We have so much more in common than we think; we just need to recognise it, that's all.

So here's my Christmas wish list for the next decade.

A bit more freedom of speech, a bit more tolerance, a bit more perspective and a bit more humility. Is that really too much to ask?

Happy Christmas!
 
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