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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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With the talk of tran mma competing as women can someone give me a run down on how this ever came to pass? I would have assumed mma = not woke. And trans men would have always been banned from fighting women.

Combat sports are subject to the jurisdiction of the various state athletic commissions. The matches themselves are scheduled independently by promoters (the biggest MMA promoter is UFC) and are supervised by sanctioning bodies approved by the athletic commission. The actual rules the commission enforces are state law and determined by the legislature. Only two trans women to date have fought in unsanctioned MMA matches, the most prominent of whom was Fallon Fox, who amassed a 5–1 record between 2012 and 2014. All that happened there was that she was granted a license by the California Athletic Commission after she had proven she had undergone all the necessary procedures (and the commission required a full sex change), and a promoter scheduled the fights. She was later granted a license in Florida. MMA people were pissed but it wasn't MMA people who had the authority to make the decision, it was state bureaucrats and individual promoters. The inherent danger of combat sports means they aren't like basketball or whatever where anyone can rent a gym and stage a tournament, and the increased level of state supervision has historically led to a system that was based more on independent promotions rather than organized leagues or even widely-recognized sanctioning bodies (which is why boxing has 743 sanctioning bodies and title fights result in the awarding of 15 belts).

An mtf tranny in MMA was actually one of the earlier men in women's sports controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallon_Fox

An mtf tranny

Don't do this. Directly using slurs (as in "use," not "mention") is a direct violation of several of our rules.

Didn't realize it was considered a slur here, sorry.

Come on, dude. It's a slur everywhere. Nobody uses it except to be insulting. (No, don't point to the handful of trans people who use it to refer to themselves. You also can't call black people "niggers" here just because some black people use it amongst themselves.)

Not objecting to your original modpost, but I think you're incorrectly excluding the "is clueless" category here. This strikes me as a thing where lots of people are clueless, and more than that as a thing where there's a fixed supply of clues.

Yeah, the original modpost even makes for a very nice clue.

Personally, I think banning slurs here is a good idea, just because it's really hard to regulate the actual principle.

Which is, you can use whatever language you want as long as you don't start wielding it as a tool of war. We're fine with calling ourselves "tranny gayfucks" or whatever because we know each other's motives well enough to have faith in it's lightheartedness. Or on 4chan because threats aren't credible anyway and desensitizing to toxic language is fun.

A semi-anonymous internet culture war thread where you're not supposed to be waging culture war is a trickier situation.

Nah, it's just what spending too much time on 4chan normalizes

I do not report you because I practically never do but I would like to ask you not to use basic slurs. I don't care about it but others may care and this poisons the site for neophytes. Let's not slide into /r/CultureWarRoundup even faster.

Fracturing someone’s skull is absolutely nuts. It is the hardest bone in the body, it’s extremely strong, very few people on earth can do that spontaneously barehanded.

My understanding is that’s virtually unheard of in women’s combat sports, and very uncommon even in top level men’s combat sports.

Also, in absolute terms Fox sucked and all of Fox's wins are against nobodies, the only time Fox fought a UFC-caliber (but mediocre at best, by UFC standards) female fighter, Fox got TKO'd.

This has been a bit of a theme, in which it turns out an average man transitioning will go from a 50th percentile athlete as a male to a 95th percentile as a man but doesn't necessarily automatically win all the Olympic Golds ever compared to equivalent female outliers. Then again, the lack of elite athletes transitioning doesn't provide us with the opportunity to prove the rather obvious conclusion that MTF Lebron annihilates the WNBA.