RunRagged wrote:
SDSU Aztec wrote:
My response to Narwhal was that the rules are not new and have been in place for 10 years.
The N.C.A.A. has always taken its transgender rules seriously. Even if they had wished to ban transgender athletes, they would have been advised by their attorneys they would lose in court if challenged. Even with Thomas dominating NCAA women's swimming, they cannot unilaterally ban such athletes. If there will be changes, it will be as a result of court actions and it will take far more that one successful transgender athlete to get it done
As for your statement that the NCAA "cannot unilaterally ban such athletes", I think you're using "unilaterally" to mean something different to what it actually means.
But sure the NCAA can unilaterally ban male athletes like Thomas from competing in women's sports. The NCAA is the sole body that decides the eligibility standards and other rules for nearly half a million college and uni athletes at the more than 1,200 educational institutions and conferences under its purview. Not that women wanted it that way: women formed their own organizations to govern women's and girls sports in the 20th century, and in the 1970s we fought hard not to have women's intercollegiate competitive sports come under the control of the male-led NCAA. But we lost.
Guys like you who constantly tell women like me that it's time for women's sports to be "inclusive" of male athletes with identity issues, and condemn us for not doing as we are told, seem to have no clue about how long women were excluded from sports, and how hard we've had to work to build the sports (and spaces and services) that male interlopers like Thomas, CeCe Telfer and host of others now feel entitled to waltz into and claim as their own. The fact is, women and girls around the world were kept out of sports - and other spheres of life too - for nearly all of history since the dawn of agriculture well into the 20th century solely because of our sex - or, rather, solely because a majority of men believed that our sex made us inferior, not fully human and thus not deserving of the same rights accorded to males.
In the US, the various bodies involved in regulating women's sports and PE in colleges and universities prohibited women from having any intercollegiate competitive sports until 1957, when the powers-that-be said women's intercollegiate sports competition “may” exist. In 1963, the bodies in charge - now organized under the umbrella org called the Division for Girls and Women's Sports - went a step further by formally stating that it was “desirable" for intercollegiate programs for women be permitted to exist.
But in the US, female students at all levels of education, including college and university, only won the legal right to establish and participate in interscholastic competitive sports with the passage of Title IX in 1972.
However, women's scholastic sports didn't suddenly spring up overnight once Title IX was made federal law in 1972. Title IX gave educational institutions until 1978 to implement the law, and it took a lot of time, effort, money and new facilities to get girls' and women's school sports off the ground. Most of the time and effort was put in by women on our own; by and large, men and male-run institutions like Penn and the NCAA did not leap to their feet to lend a hand.
Moreover, when the Title IX implementation period ended in 1978, educational institutions were not penalized if they hadn't fully established interscholastic competitive sports programs for female students on par with programs for males the way the law required. So long as schools were generally moving in the right direction, no matter how slowly, they were considered to be in compliance with Title IX. So practically speaking, it's really only been since circa 1982 that women and girls began to get a chance at fair play and parity in scholastic sports.
Prior to Title IX, the NCAA sought to block women from having interscholastic college and uni competitive sports; and after Title IX was passed, the NCAA tried to undermine the legislation, prevent it from achieving its aims, and stop women from having control over women's intercollegiate sports. Women initially wanted a governing organization entirely separate from the NCAA, to be run by and for women in consultation and partnership with the NCAA but not under NCAA control. Which is why the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was founded in 1971.
The NCAA, run and almost entirely made up of men at the time, did not take kindly to this, which led to decade-long struggle between the NCAA and AIAW over control of the women's collegiate sports that were then beginning to be established. In case you don't know, the women who wanted women to have a major say in the governance of women's collegiate sports lost.
After the AIAW challenged the hegemony of the NCAA in court on the grounds that the NCAA is an unlawful monopoly in violation of federal anti-trust laws, the court ruled against the AIAW. The NCAA, by now aware that control of women's intercollegiate sports could bring it more revenue and power, then used its vast resources to muscle the AIAW out of the way and put it out of business. Broke and defeated, theAIAW folded in 1982, and the NCAA became the sole official governing body for women's interscholastic college and uni sports in the US.
Now a mere 40 years later, the NCAA, the powers-that-be-at Penn and other schools, the IOC, the ACLU, the Democratic Party, the MSM and virtually all other establishment institutions in the Western world say it's fine for selfish males like Lia Thomas, CeCe Telfer, June Eastwood, Terry Miller, Andraya Yearwood, Laurel Hubbard, Stephanie Barrett, Chelsea Wolfe and many more to use gender identity claims to demand access to girls and women's sports, thereby rolling back and removing the basic rights for the female sex that generations of women fought hard for. You approvingly say that "The N.C.A.A. has always taken its transgender rules seriously." But I see the NCAA's actions as proof that the NCAA has always made its priority favoring males and insuring that male athletes are catered to and get what they want, no matter the damage this does to women and women's sports.
And to justify this male invasion and attempted coup of female sports and female spaces, males are using the very same sexist, regressive sex stereotypes that generations of women fought hard to escape and free both sexes from. Today's male-led gender identity movement wants to force everyone to accept outdated, restrictive and incredibly sexist, superficial and offensive sex stereotypes as a given because those stereotypes are at the heart of the sacred dogma that authoritarian adherents of gender ideology want to make the mandatory state religion. And guys like you are cheering this misogyny on. How very sporting.
Please quit with the mindreading. I rooted against Eastwood and was pleased that she ended up being no more competitive as a female athlete. I am disgusted that Thomas obviously has an unfair advantage and went from good as a male to dominant as a female. I don't think she is a cheater but I don't know why she would want to become the most hated athlete in the country. It's a straw man to say many people are cheering on Thomas and I haven't seen a single post on LR here celebrating her success. You linked in a previous post to some articles from LGBTQ websites which hardly buttresses your opinion that Thomas is a hero to the masses.
The difference between me and most posters is that I don't believe that if everyone gets really mad and hold their breath, the NCAA will change its transgender athlete rules. There would undoubtly be a court challenge and I believe the N.C.A.A. will lose. A college transgender athlete challenged Idaho's statewide ban and immediately received a court injunction. The judge indicated he would likely be unwilling to make a decision contrary to the rules in place for other levels of women's sports.
Another difference is I don't believe there will be "fakes" and athletes from a pool equal to .3% of the population is not even remotely a threat to women's sports. At a competitive D-1 level, it will always be a one-off transgender athlete every few years.