Important Note:
Opinions are fun. My friends tell me I am someone with lots of opinions and that's fine since I don't get mad at others when they disagree with me. In this same spirit I am interested in hearing yours views as long as you are able to share your views without boiling over. I look forward to hearing from you. I tend to write in the form of short essays most of the time, but contributions do not need to be in this same format or size. Some of the content here will date itself pretty quickly, other content may be virtually timeless, this is for the reader to judge.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1
Trans-gender and Common Sense.
Posted at: Dec/28/2023 : Posted by: Mel
Related Category: Perspectives, Society, Sports, Watching America,
Asked to define the word “woman” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2022, Judge Ketanji Jackson avoided a direct answer by saying “I’m not a biologist.” I am not a biologist either, but I think I can help with this question. To that end, let me rephrase the question to Judge Jackson: are sex categories in humans of "male and female" real, immutable, and binary, or are they merely “social constructs”? And if these differences are real, do they also impact their physical capabilities? The answer: real and that’s just the way it is, and we all know it. Immutable in that it can’t be changed. This means the options are binary as in there are only two sexes, not three or four or forty something. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. You don’t have to be a biologist to know that any organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete it can or will produce. Gametes are the sperm or ova that are produced for reproduction. Males have the role of producing sperm, or small gametes. Females in this same plant and animal kingdom produce ova, or large gametes. There is no third type of gamete, there are only two. This is publicly available information and doesn’t seem to be a subject of debate amongst the biologist, anthropologist or the general scientific community. Therefore, sex is binary. Binary is the engineering and scientific term for something that is definitively limited to two options: black and white, one and zero, on and off, male and female. It is unclear why, but this should be controversial. Every one of us is the result of a male and female, that being our biological mom and dad successfully reproducing. I apologize if that conjures images in your head you would rather not think about. Without the existence of males and females, you wouldn’t be here to read this I and would not exist to write this. Without this basic binary construct our species would have gone extinct long ago. There is a small number of people who are born with a combination of female and male biological traits and genitalia, who are scientifically classified as “intersex.” Many “gender activists” use the existence of intersex to falsely assert that sex is not binary, and rather must be viewed as a “spectrum.” These same idealists claim that the condition of intersex renders the categories of “male” and “female” meaningless. But intersex conditions don’t undermine the sex binary at all because sex ambiguity is not a third sex any more than someone born without a thumb being classified as a new species. If this argument were true, then the existence of dawn and dusk would clearly cast doubt on the existence of day and night. Our society isn’t experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a dramatic surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female altogether. The new gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariate. Accepting this would mean that our traditional practice of classifying people as either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity” under the flag of “transgender.” But “intersex” and “transgender” are two entirely different things. Intersex people have been extremely rare, this medically classified condition results in apparent sex ambiguity. Transgender people, however, aren’t sexually ambiguous at all, but merely claim to identify as something other than the biological sex they were born with. It is important to be aware of the distinction between the gender that someone identifies with and the sex they were born with. There is virtually no chance that the doctor available at childbirth misidentified the sex of a newborn. Regardless of how comfortable or uncomfortable someone feels in their skin, there are distinct physical differences in male and female bodies. Just to name a few: * Men with long arms generally have a wingspan that exceeds their height by 4-8 inches. Women with long arms never have a wingspan of more than 3 inches beyond their height. * Men have denser bones with more attachment points for muscle and ligaments. * Men are generally taller than women and therefore have room for greater lung volume and capacity. * While women can work to accumulate muscle mass comparable to men, men on average have 36% more muscle mass as a percentage of overall weight than women at the peak of their physical capabilities. Why is all this important, because there is a general advantage physically for men when they compete against women in sports where speed, strength and mass matter. While there are thousands of good examples, William Thomas may be the easiest to draw on. As a collegiate swimmer Will Thomas was ranked as the 462nd best male swimmer in the world. After identifying as Lia Thomas, she moved up the women’s national collegiate rankings to 36th. The world record for the men’s 100m dash is 9.58 sec, while the women’s world record is 10.54 sec. Sports competition is supposed to be first and foremost “fair.” Anyone who competed in sports growing up or currently has children in sports knows all about fairness. Fairness is the underpinning of a simple moral code. For most of us, identifying when something is not fair is almost intuitive, if not basic common sense. Crafting policy to exclude males who identify as women, or “trans-women,” from female-only spaces, especially in sports isn’t complicated. That’s because trans-women are unambiguously male, no physical inspection required. Like so many things…just present the birth certificate. Therefore, any “transgender policy” designed to protect female sports spaces need only specify that participants must have been recorded female at birth on their original birth certificates. Or, if no birth certificate listing sex is available, biology, not an individual’s feelings, will determine whether the participant would be allowed to compete as a male or a female. A person can identify as anything they like, but their gender identity does alter their biological reality. And the reality is that biological sex in humans and the physical capabilities that accompany it are immutable and binary. There are those who will argue that this is restrictive in light of having a “free society,” but our freedoms are not absolute because we do share our society. My neighbor cannot take my television anytime they want because they feel it would look good in their living room. I am not allowed to drive on the left side of the road at my discretion as this would create chaos. We have laws to respect property rights and encourage order on our roads. As a society we allow a biological male to identify as a “trans-woman”, but common sense says they cannot be part of all aspects of life that their sisters have access to. No amount of activist hysteria can change common sense without upending "fairness." There are those who will argue that Title-IX of the crucial civil rights laws prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs and related activities including sports, and they are right. Title-IX was originally written to inhibit sex-based discrimination with respect to accessing college education. The courts have since applied it to ensuring women have access to sports programs. If trans-women are allowed to participate in “women’s sports”, we will return to the era in which sports programs and dollars are dominated by biological males. This circles back to common sense. There are a lot of things that people want in life, and the list varies from person to person. We live in a free enough society that if you feel you were born in the wrong skin, you can change how you identify. But our freedoms are not absolute, they come with restrictions to avoid conflicts with the next person's life experience. For safety and fairness, women’s sports should be restricted to those whose birth certificate says “Female.” This is not discrimination; this is just common sense.
Comments (0) [Add Comment]
