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The culture war seemed subdued in my bubble for a few months, but picked up majorly recently. Oddly enough, the cause (mostly) doesn't seem to be the attempted presidential assassination, the quick Democratic party shifts, the ramping up of tensions in the middle east, or the black female presidential candidate, but the Olympics. Color me surprised.
I see non-stop posting currently about "The Science doesn't support the bigots who think XY chromosomes makes someone a man", "why do they care more about a woman competing in woman's boxing than they do about a literal child rapist competing?", "the people complaining about a woman getting punched in the face by another woman are the same people who don't bat an eye at men beating up women outside of the Olympics". There seems to have been some really high-profile culture war controversies in this Olympics. I really doubt there's more fodder for controversy in the Olympics in general than in everyday life, so why is everyone picking up their keyboards to go vanquish the enemy all of a sudden?
Because a man punching a woman shouldn't be an Olympic sport. Its much more visceral than the three XY males that took the medals in one event during the 2016 olympics.
Images like this are powerful.
https://twitter.com/HazelAppleyard_/status/1820091385199865963
The fact that he groped his first opponent after the match was terrible too.
Too many people didn't care about "just" the women losing out on scholarships, victories, and fame. Too many people don't seem to care about the injuries suffered by teenaged girls playing soccer, rugby or volleyball with much stronger males. But here we have a dude punching a woman in the face so finally more people are saying "you know what, maybe thats not fair".
Serious question - what’s the use in calling a phenotypically female intersex person a “man” due to XY chromosomes? They have a vagina, grew up perceived and socialised as a woman, and some even have ovaries and the ability to get pregnant (if it’s Swyer Syndrome). Prior to the invention of genetic sequencing, there’d be no way of telling they’re not say, female with some hormonal abnormality. Look up CAIS - people with it look 100% like women to the point where historically they weren’t told they were anything but infertile normal women.
Barring intersex athletes from competing with women is perfectly reasonable if it’s a condition that gives them an unfair advantage. However, having pronouns and gender be tied to chromosomes seems to me like it would cause the same issues as what some trans activists request. If you’re intersex, you have to “include chromosomes in bio” so people can call you a dude/a lady despite you not looking like one at all. You’re, ironically enough, saying that men can have vaginas, some men can get pregnant, and that women can have penises.
It's a soldier in the pro vs anti transgender argument war. The person you described, as you noted, is intersex. They're not male, and they're not female. They were born with a very unusual mixture and biological expression of what are typically considered biological male and female characteristics. They're not transgender. Strictly speaking they have no relevance to the transgender debate other than serving as a prompt to explore the issues (read: muddy the waters) of the transgender debate. Transgender debate aside they're also, strictly speaking, not a woman and shouldn't be participating in women's sport. That doesn't mean they're a man either in the same way a mule not being a horse doesn't mean it's a donkey. It's its own thing.
That doesn't mean that men can have vaginas. It means that some vanishingly small number of people were born with phenotypically female sex organs despite having other biological markers of being a male. Society doesn't have a social class that can accommodate those people so they get swept into one of the two bins that they'll never completely fit inside of, and any closer inspection of why they don't fit requires unpacking a biology textbook of initialisms and polysyllables and revealing that there's not even a single class of intersex in the same way I've just found out that there's a second horse-donkey hybrid that doesn't belong with the mules.
If you flip a coin enough times eventually it will land on its edge but we don't ask people to call heads, tails or edges, we say "Holy shit I've never seen that before, is this a magic coin? Also we'll have to flip again to settle the call". That doesn't make a trick coin that has heads on both sides into an edge call, and it doesn't make it worthwhile specifying the precise 0-360 degree Z axis orientation of the edge call when you're arguing about whether a heads is a tails.
You're right about the men-with-vaginas irony but in turn what you're saying could imply that there's no such thing as a woman. IIRC you're a transwoman. I hope you appreciate what showing there's no such thing as a woman would imply for people who claim to identify as such. This is why the intersex issue has no relevance, because it doesn't serve either side of the debate. It's a blind soldier (not even a soldier, more like a conscientous objector) being pressganged into battle and ordered to open fire.
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It's extremely and unequivocally pro-trans rhetoric to say that some women, who are born with female genitalia, have an invisible issue they are born with that adjudicates that they are actually male and should live as men.
No, the unequivocally pro-trans rhetoric is "...and if he believes that he's a man". No pro-trans rhetoric currently known to me, whether tucute or truscum, states that someone "should" live as a particular gender because of any kind of traits they have, visible or not - indeed that's what the "assigned male/female at birth" language is striking at.
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