Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Olympic Equity Inspired by Title IX
New Zealand has a powerlifter on their Olympic team named Laurel Hubbard (pictured at right). She used to be a male powerlifter, but transitioned to a woman, and is now a female powerlifter. Apparently using drugs, but not surgery. Although I hope you’ll forgive me for making little effort to get the details. I’d rather not think about such things. Regardless, as you might imagine, female competitors who happen to be women are not amused. They know they can’t say much without sounding like they’re discriminating against a protected class, but they’re not happy. They get one chance in their life to win a medal, and they would prefer to attempt that by competing against 0ther women.
How to resolve this issue without offending anyone? That’s a toughie, although I have a suggestion. Just follow the guidance of Title IX – a law that sought to establish gender equity in sports. It required that there be an equal number of athletic scholarships for men and women. Ok, makes sense. So let’s require that there be an equal number of male-to-female transgenders as there are female-to-male transgenders competing.
‘Laurel’ can join the female powerlifting team as soon as someone who used to be a woman qualifies for the male powerlifting team. As long they maintain balance – equity! – then no one can complain. Problem fixed. No conflict. Simple. Gosh, I’m smart.
This is bonkers.
Published in General
Truth is also their servant. Which is why it’s whatever they want it to be.
If you make trans women compete only against other trans women, you’re saying that they’re not real women. The left will never go along with that.
How can anything be our master if it doesn’t have volition?
You beat me to it.
Because many of my current and ex gamecock women basketball players are on our Olympic team and because our coach, Dawn Staley, is the coach having taken over for Gino Aureima, I really want them to win gold. However, the WNBA pulled for Democrats in the infamous Georgia election, celebrated BLM, and knelt for the anthem, so another side of me wants them to face a transgender team so they can enjoy the fruits of their political labor. In the end, when team US plays, I will pull for my team and the girls I love and wait for the WNBA to suffer, instead.
Not if Shaquilla O’Neal has anything to say about it!
The Babylon Bee on the topic:
Now that is just a Monty Python skit. We agree that men have the *right* to have babies….
Right?
When life imitates art, and that “art” happens to be a Monty Python sketch, then we can be pretty sure something is broken.
Know what I mean, Loretta?
Hm. I suppose that makes sense, if you believe that “benefits” means “tilt the playing field so that women should only compete against other women in order to make sure that the strongest/best woman wins, without the difficulties of competing against men who would almost always win the circumstance, due to their superior physical strength.”
If, however, you believe, as I do, that allowing men to compete against women in “women only” sports would damage men by providing them with almost-always-winnable (and therefore illusory, WRT real life) circumstances in which they competed only against biological women, then I don’t really see why it’s discriminatory to set up men-only, and women-only sports events.
Weaken men, enrage women. Win-win for the Left. Feature, not bug.
Do men on the left not think women get enraged at them, too?
Zoophiles and pedophiles are now actively petitioning to march in pride parades. It will be interesting if they make enough of a stir to warrant the LGBTQ movement’s vocal refusal to include them.
There is a problem with basing your philosophy on French perverts who sideline as intellectuals.
FoxNews has a new story on this matter today.
Apparently ‘Laurel’ broke all the women’s power lifting records in New Zealand in her first weekend of competition. The woman who held those records previously is not happy. She says that if transgenders are permitted to compete in women’s sports, girls and women won’t want to compete. Imagine that.
Yeah, in effect the women are being told to suck it up and be quiet. Of course, if a man would have said that, he’d be called a knuckle-dragging neanderthal.
Double standards? Naw!
I was thinking this exact same thing. Women should refuse to compete against these guys. Let the trans people race and lift against themselves. They are disgusting and totally lacking in self-respect as far as I am concerned.
What kind of man gets satisfaction by beating women?
I’ll be praying that he suffers a hernia during competition.
The French sex perverts on which modern progressivism is intellectually descended.
THIS IS WHAT I DON’T GET.
Gaaah. I could totally understand a chick getting satisfaction from succeeding on a dudes’ team, but for heaven’s sake. Someone mentioned Kramer in the kids’ martial arts class — that’s exactly what this is.
Exactomundo…which is Spanish for ” I agree totally “
I am beginning to get a bit jaded with the term “equity.”
Aside from its specialized meanings in law and commerce, “equity” simply means “fairness.” Virtually everybody will tell you that they are in favor of equity, and I think that virtually everybody is sincere about it.
The problem is not that people are against fairness, but that it is difficult to agree on the standards or principles of fairness. When someone cites equity as the rationale for some decision, they aren’t really saying anything at all unless they describe the principles that they are using to define it.
Strategic ambiguity is an important part of modern progressivism, and “equity” is an example of that. It sounds a lot like “equality,” which in our tradition has always been shorthand for “equality under the law,” the idea that we are all citizens with the same legal and civil rights as anyone else.
The progressive left has adopted a different definition of “equality,” replacing the idea of equal rights with equality of outcome. Under that interpretation we are not “equal” unless we all enjoy the same opportunities, outcomes, quality of life, etc. This allows disparate impact to be seen as prima facia evidence of injustice: if groups are experiencing different outcomes, it must follow that the individuals making up those groups are not “equal” in the new, progressive sense.
Enter “equity.” Equity is the mechanism by which we are to remedy the disparity of outcome, the assumed inequality that afflicts our culture. Equity is the apportionment of opportunity — money, admissions, jobs, etc. — based on the alleged injustice that must, it is assumed, be behind disparities of outcome. If board rooms are mostly white, equity involves mandating greater skin-color diversity in board rooms. If college admission tests show one demographic experiencing low marks, equity requires a redesign of the tests, or their simple abandonment, so as to prevent disparate outcomes that are, again, presumed to be evidence of injustice.
I think it’s probably a mistake to believe that the people who bandy the term about don’t know what they mean by it. I think they mean the elimination of those disparate outcomes they find objectionable through whatever means are at their disposal.