Nelly

I really do miss back when it was considered fucking weird to ask trans people(or anyone who is even a little gnc/has a label you don't understand/is giving you queer vibes)* what their assigned sex at birth is. Like we literally used to roast cis people for this shit, that's legit why the "what's in your pants" meme exists, but somehow we've reached a point where a very vocal portion of the online trans community genuinely thinks you owe people this information so they can make insane generalizations about you and your life and if you refuse that's cause for suspicion and I really shouldn't have to explain how fucked that is.

Interrogating people about what's in their pants is transphobe/terf/transmed shit. "If you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide" is fed shit. Tbh "you owe me personal information about your body and medical history" is ableist and intersexist shit. Sex and/or gender tells you literally nothing concrete about a person and there is no world where you are owed this information. Can we cut this shit out and go back to judging people by their words and actions instead of what some random doctor decided their body looks like when they were a squishy baby, you know, like normal people? Please??

*It's also wildly intersexist but unfortunately I don't think we've ever reached a point of collectively accepting that it's horrid to ask intersex people unprompted questions about their bodies and medical histories. You are absolutely not owed any of that information for any reason, especially given that medical history typically goes hand in hand with profound trauma due to how normalized medical abuse against intersex people is, and everyone needs to get that through their heads yesterday. If they want to share they can and will, aside from that it's none-ya.

[Image description: tweet by @carolinekwan on August 1, 2024 at 6:01 PM: "Michael Phelps is literally referred to as a freak of nature because of his disproportionate wingspan, double jointed ankles, lung capacity twice that of an average human, body that produces half the lactic acid of a typical athlete, and he is rightly celebrated for being the greatest male swimmer in history. Meanwhile, female athletes with genetic differences are legally discriminated against and harassed to no end. This is not about 'protecting women in sports' - this is about protecting a very specific idea of what a woman is."]

Reblogging to this blog so this is easier to find!

This post has been getting a bump in notes recently. It could just be random circulation, but I'm inclined to think that the Olympics has something to do with it.

I hate to use cis women and intersex people just as examples, so I think it's worth highlighting that even with trans people removed from this discussion, it's important to remember all of this for the sake of intersex people themselves. Biological sex is infinitely reducible and splittable into so many different moving parts, and it's the social machine of deciding which parts of that "matter" to defining a man or woman that makes what man and woman are. Intersex people have always been subjected to this. Trans people are too.

a lot going on w this whole boxing drama but have to say JK Rowling having made an enemy of the entire country of Taiwan is a definite highlight

best as i can tell 90+% of people weighing in on this on twitter not only don't understand how chromosomes work they also just don't know shit about boxing

ok so what happened is as follows:

in 2023 the IBA disqualified 2 boxers, Imane Khelif (Algerian) and Lin Yu-Ting (Taiwanese) on the grounds that they had failed 'gender eligibility testing'.

the Olympics Committee has (I think?) recently broken ties with the IBA citing various ethical concerns so both athletes were re-evaluated and allowed to compete

the current controversy is mostly focusing on Imane Khelif bcos she basically one-shotted another boxer but people, including JK Rowling, are also saying that Lin Yu-Ting shouldn't be allowed to compete

this has resulted in a lot of very angry Taiwanese people (rightly) calling JKR a racist who can't tell Asian men and women apart. tear her apart guys!!

Also terfs are tying themselves in desperate knots as they frantically argue that a person born with a vulva but with elevated levels of testosterone has to be classed as a man without even once tasting the hypocrisy. Like hey terfs do you see how your worldview is built on quicksand and patriarchy

the thing about her having elevated testosterone is actually hearsay. the IBA have confirmed that the gender eligibility test that she failed wasn't a testosterone check so there's no publicly available evidence as to her testosterone levels. it might be that she was found to have XY chromosomes but that's not been reliably confirmed either.

but yes people are now arguing that the only thing that matters for 'biological sex' is your chromosomes even tho literally no biologist in the world would agree with them.

& to avoid reblogging this over & over:

@phoenixcatch7 #Woman who punches people in the face for sport gets punched in the face during said sport#Apparently she's okay though which is good. Do we know anything about her opinion on this or?#My dad was telling me about this before and he showed me a pic like look how tall unfair genetic advantage#And I was like dad. The cis woman is also taller than the male referee in that picture. Cis woman with that height? No one cares#'oh the boxer transitioned because they kept losing in the men's team' I cannot begin to explain how stupid that is NO ONE DOES THAT

in the name of factual accuracy: both women are cisgender. Imane Khelif might be intersex which is not mutually exclusive with being cis. u can tell your dad Algeria has no legal recourse for gender transition lmao!

When a man knocks out his boxing opponent in one punch, everyone posts Saitama memes and goes on about what a badass he is.

When a woman, especially a woman of color, does the same, especially if her opponent is a white woman, she is IMMEDIATELY vilified and her gender questioned. Multiple billionares use their enormous platforms to spread unfounded conspiracy theories about her.

"Trans women should be allowed in sports, see, here's another article about how trans women are JUST AS weak and dainty and pathetic as cis women" fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou

Organized sports were always sexist

Every single sport we popularize rewards the exact kind of physical fitness that men have, which is why women's leagues of those same sports will always "worse"

The reality is that women, cis and trans, can and do exceed men in many physical metrics, including flexibility and many specific kinds of endurance. But the artificial games we've constructed were built in a society that wanted to reward men, so the core of these games has always been raw speed and strength.

As with anything on HRT, your body will align with cis women metrics in both the "improvements" and "weakening" of both metrics, if you even want to describe them that way

The only way to "fix" organized sports is to artificially come up with new games with new scoring systems that reward more female-centric physical skill, promote those to the same level of cultural phenomena as football/soccer as well as American football and basketball in the states, and then desegregate all sports entirely to let women naturally come up on top in those games

But that's never going to happen.

Anyways. Someone else bring up the article about that female Olympic target shooter that clowned on the men so hard they segregated the event in disgrace, I'm too lazy to find the link

Putting this back out there because of everything happening to Imane Khelif

She's not trans but is being affected by this same brand of wild misogyny, not to mention the racism of it all.

Since some new athletes subject to gender (sex) testing are getting a lot of spotlight shined on the transphobic elements of this practice, please can people keep in mind the intersexist nature of sex testing. While many concerns raised about athletes’ gender/sex are related to transphobia, the material reality is that these people aren’t trans, they are intersex. These tests reveal that these women have hyperandrogenistic conditions that make them intersex. They are experiencing oppression based on having an intersex condition. This isn’t “oops we oppressed a cisgender person who might have been trans,” it is the intentional oppression of people who are intersex.

The rules are intersexist by design, but I think it's also worth mentioning that the enforcement of these rules is racist as well. Hormone testing is no longer mandatory for every female athlete. Instead, athletes are only required to undergo testing if there's "reasonable suspicion". I don't think it's a coincidence that the stories we hear in the news about an athlete failing a gender test are almost always women of color.

Also, if people (not in this thread but frequently elsewhere) could stop using singular they/them for these women, that would be great. Neither of the boxers getting brought up most frequently have expressed any desire to use any pronouns aside from she/her.