Or one can view it as the increasing intellectual vacuousness of ideas on the "right". (In quotes because the dividing line between left and right itself has shifted rightward over the years.)
Don't ever forget that the left cant clearly articulate what a woman is without resorting to circular reasoning.
For starters, the current right-wing hate campaign is targeting transgender people, not transvestites since the latter simply means people who wear clothing associated with the opposite gender, which is quite common in right-wing circles.
Aside from that silliness, let's highlight the "specific, thoughtful, data driven, evidence based rhetoric" that is "not hurting the feelings of a group of people", as if "hurt feelings" were all that has happened.
Also, hurt feelings matter. Humans are our feelings. They're who we are and what we are. People be hurt in a large variety of ways and they're all bad. It's trivial to demonstrate that non-fatal gash on your body is considerably less worse than being, say, ostracized and outcast from the community you grew up in.
On a related note, why is "the right" so obsessed with defining what a woman is? What are the data driven and evidence based rhetorical reasons for coming up with a rigorous and definitive definition of woman?
The idea that evidence or logic is involved in any of this is laughable.
Edit: Nobody can come up with a good definition for what a planet it is either, but somehow we manage to stagger onwards.
Female only categories are always going to be a compromise, their literal existence is defined by excluding people from being able to participate. So you have to draw the line somewhere and say "this person is allowed and this person isn't". I'm sorry it's not as easy as just asking if someone has a uterus or something but just because things are tricky is no excuse to give up.
And frankly, this whole argument is incredibly disingenuous. You didn't give a damn about the sanctity of women's sports 5 years ago and when the right finds a new minority to demonize, you'll happily forget all about them.
There's a word for this, mote and bailey fallacy? The advanced premise is that we should discriminate and hate transgender people and then when challenged you fall back to something something women's sports.
Are women's sports good? Sure, we should support them. Is that worth demonizing a minority and blaming them for society's ills? I hope not. There's like 5 transgender people PER STATE competing in female only sports and 99% of the time they aren't even winning. It really doesn't affect you or anyone else.
But because of this "issue" that people like you keep repeating, people are trying to pass laws that require genital inspectors for our child athletes. Think about that for a second. What exactly are we trying to accomplish here?
According to the research conducted for her report, the failure of governing bodies to exclude males from women's competitions has so far led to more than 600 female athletes losing out of 890 medals in 29 different sports - and this is likely to be a considerable underestimate.
Another adverse effect of male inclusion is that some female athletes, seeing the unfairness of this, will choose not to compete at all. Others will be displaced from qualifying for competition. By including males, governing bodies are excluding female athletes from what should be their own category.
The oft-repeated claim that it's just conservatives bringing up this issue is a false narrative, as is the incorrect assumption that this is being driven by "hate". Many people who have been speaking out on this - whether they're athletes themselves, UN officials, feminist activists, or simply just care about the wellbeing of women and girls - are doing so because they see the inherent unfairness and safety risks this imposes upon female athletes.
Here's a snippet from the first few pages:
> Women and girls in sport, including female sports officials, are vulnerable to physical violence.5 When eligibility norms are deliberately violated and when the risk of injury to athletes is knowingly increased, the physical harms sustained can be characterized as “violence”.6
"The risk of injury is increased [...] can be characterized as violence". Really. People getting hurt in a sport is now violence against women. Ok.
But hey, they cited a source to back up this claim! It's got a footnote and everything! Let's check it out:
> 6 Submission by Independent Council on Women’s Sports
Well, that's pretty vague. I'm not an expert in reading academic papers so someone correct me, but what exactly is this citing? An email from an advocacy agency?
Just for amusment I went and looked up "Independent Council on Women’s Sports." just to see what kind of non-partial and independent academic body was making this submission
> The Independent Council on Women's Sports (ICONS) is an American anti-transgender advocacy organization that opposes transgender athletes participating in women’s sports. ICONS hosts an annual International Women's Sports Summit, where anti-transgender activists are invited to give talks over the course of three days. They also contribute amicus briefs and organizational assistance to anti-transgender legal cases, and their co-founder, Kim Jones, has infrequently hosted a podcast to discuss ICONS’ activities since August of 2022.
I don't want to make an argument from authority here, but this citation is not really compelling me to do further research.
I mean, the person making the claim is required to provide proof, right? Or is that not a thing any more?
Edit:
I looked further in the paper. The next good bit is here: "Female athletes are also more vulnerable to sustaining serious physical injuries when female-only sports spaces are opened to males,9 as documented in disciplines such as in volleyball,10 basketball11 and soccer.12"
What a scary sentence. Good thing it's got citations to prove it's worrying claims, let's check those out:
> Alec Schemmel, “Injured volleyball player speaks out after alleged transgender opponent spiked ball at her”, ABC 13 News, 20 April 2023
Wow, that sounds bad, injured by a spike, hey what's that funny word doing there, "alleged". Hmm, what could that be doing there?
> (of an incident or a person) said, without proof, to have taken place or to have a specified illegal or undesirable quality.
I'm glad we cited this definitive source where they claim they were hurt by someone who was transgender with zero proof whatsoever.
A bonus section! Here's another worrying section about the horrors of being a female athlete:
> Female athletes who may look “masculine” may be derogatorily described as lesbians.46
Ok, yes, that seems like a problem, but I wonder what else "female athletes who make look masculine" are called? Like, maybe they're accused of something else these days? Some other term is used to attempt to diminish their achievements and slander them? Weird they didn't mention that term.
Instead of engaging with curiosity and open-mindedness towards an expert UN report on this issue adversely affecting women and girls, you chose shallow, snarky dismissal and sarcastic quips.
Your reflexive refusal to take women's safety and fairness in sport seriously speaks volumes about your view of women more generally.
Thanks for linking the report though, even if it was just to cherry-pick bits of it to lazily sneer at. It gives other readers an easier way to click through and engage with the content thoughtfully.
It turns out that when people actually read your citations, sometimes they find out you're full of crap.
Arguing that women are in danger because one woman got hurt by another woman hitting a volleyball at her is ludicrously patronizing.
:100:
Also hiding behind "scientific" findings that there is a purported spectrum between men and women. Science has known that XY and XX configurations of chromosome 47 are the normal genotypes of male and female, respectively, and that any other configuration of these chromosomes (or a failure of the Y chromosome to activate) are disorders and not normative. Trisomy 47 (XXX, XXY, or XYY) is a genetic disorder just like trisomy 18 (Edward's syndrome) or trisomy 21 (Down's syndrome). The fact that some people's lived experience is a life with a genetic disorder does not make it normative or not a disorder.
Women (~50.5% of the population) need their own spaces, and it is devastating to them and society at large to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of small, vocal portion of the population who happen to consistently beat them in sports. The vast majority of genetic men claiming access to women's spaces have no genetic disorder, so invoking genetic disorders (as some do) to support them is a red herring, and there's no cut-and-dry science to apply (except to invoke their genotype which contradicts their claim).
The stance I'm taking on this almost definitionally adheres to "objective truth over subjective emotion" - something GP says they also hold to in a different thread.
These were in fact some of the intellectual greats of the 20th century. Like many today, they wouldn't necessarily closely identify with "the right" as much as they'd disagree with and argue against the current ideology of the left.
Since you called out Lewis -- one of my favorites is his The Abolition of Man and its narrative counterpart That Hideous Strength. They describe in exquisite, arguably prophetic detail many of the evils of the modern left, particularly how it has ushered in a progressive downfall of society through institutionalized lies.
You and everyone like you owe so much of your current life to the modern left that your ingratitude is astounding. The very computer you're using to send your words to me is a product of science and rational thinking that you seem to abhor.
> science and rational thinking that you seem to abhor.
What did I say that gave you that impression? Au contraire.
Modern life, science, rational thinking -- these are not products of left-wing political, moral, or social ideology, not even a little bit. I'm curious how you arrived at that viewpoint, which is incoherent.
Perhaps that which is not currently right-coded is leftist to you, but political coding is a disparate concept from the propositions upon which worldviews are built.
It's undeniable that, right now, the right wing is anti-intellectual and anti-science. They constantly seek to censor speech, defund research and privatize public goods.
Where's a prominent politician saying "no actually, we should keep funding public research"? Or defending free speech? They're awfully quiet on the matter.
Frankly, I don't know how to define "left wing ideology", I've yet to hear anyone give a particularly good definition, but if we assume that what people who self-identify as right wing hate and fear is considered to be left wing, then it seems like I'm in favor of most of that.
Gender/transgender is a trivial subject to demonstrate the point. People thought "male" and "female" was a super specific binary that was trivial to separate people into. Then people did Science and found out it was considerably more complicated and closer to a spectrum with people crossing over at various points.
Now look at which group of people is rejecting that research by calling it a lie and shouting loudly and which group of people are changing their world views.
My email is in my bio if you'd like to discuss there.
First off, universities, including harvard and stanford or anyone else, are absolutely not perfect or above criticism. I'm sure they make tons of bad decisions and mistakes at all levels of their system and those deserve to be pointed out and complained about.
A subtle point is that I think it's useful to look at what someone was trying to accomplish, even if they did it badly or in a way that hurt people. Motive usually matters.
The more important point is that I want people to look at what happens when their agreement gives people more power. Donald trump is an easy example, a man who is literally famous for lying, could theoretically point out an actual mistake or even crime being committed by a university and be right. It's possible! But what actually happens when you agree with his position and start supporting it? He uses it to gain more power for him self, commit more corrupt actions and in general hurt society.
So yes, harvard or the faa or whoever did bad things and should be criticized. The solution is probably not anything involving trump or his cronies though.