Silly Rabbit, Bathrooms Are For Kids

The discussion is all about transgender bathrooms, but it was never just about bathrooms. High school freshman sprinter Alia Bales probably doesn’t have any problem with Haines High School senior, Nattaphon Wangyot, being transgender, but she does have a problem with competing against a biological male.

In what is believed to be a first for Alaska, a transgender athlete competed in an individual event at a high school championship Friday at the state track and field meet at Dimond Alumni Field in Anchorage. Wangyot was among hundreds of students competing on the first day of the championships.

You can utter the word equality all you want, but Ice runs faster than Alia because Ice is a male who identifies as a female, and Alia is a female who doesn’t have the benefit of a male’s anatomy.  And because equality, much as it’s a lovely word, doesn’t work the way we would like it to work just because that’s how we would like it to work.

Tall and lean with long black hair and an easy smile, Wangyot didn’t look much different from any of the girls she raced against.

Ziza Shemet Pitcher of Homer and Ice Wangyot high-five after competing in the 200-meter sprint. (Bob Hallinen / Alaska Dispatch News)

This isn’t about diminishing Ice. It’s about not diminishing the females who find themselves competing against Ice. This is about whether, and how, to accommodate the question of gender identity in the real world, because like it or not, boys and girls are different.

Unlike so many of you SJWs, neither Loretta Lynch nor Catherine Lhamon are so shallow and simplistic as to not realize that once the wall has been breached between sex discrimination and gender identity, the ramifications are pervasive.  And all this time, you thought it was just about bathrooms?  They knew you would, because you can’t grasp the conceptual implications and obsess instead over the concrete issue in your face.

So discrimination against the 31 flavors of sexual identity is an evil that must be eradicated? Fair enough. But how do you plan to accomplish that without making it impossible for Alia Bales to have a chance to win the 100 meter dash? Or in the workplace? Or in the million other scenarios where questions will arise? But none of this occurred to you because you were busy fighting the bathroom wars, too insipid to grasp that a redefinition of sex discrimination would include all aspects of life and not just who is in the stall peeing next to you.

What the government has done by executive fiat is force this change upon us. What it will mean won’t be recognized for a long time, decades perhaps, as its implications filter through our daily lives. Oppose it and you’ll be branded a hater (as I am), because that’s what simplistic people do when their failure to grasp the implications gets in the way of their social justice feelings. But then, what about Alia Bales? All the Alia Baleses who will be affected by the various implications of this fundamental redefinition of sex discrimination?  And the Arnold Baleses too.

Maybe this is the way society chooses to go. Maybe there are good answers to all the questions that will arise. Maybe, after deliberation, discussion and the creation of rules that allow for accommodation of the interests of all involved, we will decide that this is the policy we want. But for now, it’s being rammed down our throats without any discussion, any rules, and we are still at the very top of a very slippery slope. We’ve got a lot of sliding to do before we cross the finish line.

So would it be better to think about it, to consider the ramifications of this paradigm shift, now, before we deprive people of their opportunities in the name of providing other people with their opportunities?  Or just shut our eyes, pretend it’s all about equality and go full steam ahead, mindlessly leaving the dreams of some in the dust so the dreams of others can win the race?

Maybe there is a good, thoughtful, viable way to accomplish everything we hope to achieve in the quest to end those forms of discrimination we find unacceptable. Maybe not. The time to figure it out is before the damage is done. Even if you lack the capacity to grasp the problems being created, coming down the road, they will find you. Then, you will cry, “how did this happen?” This is how.

20 thoughts on “Silly Rabbit, Bathrooms Are For Kids

  1. Mike

    Girls/young women who tried to compete in boys/ Men’s sports soon realize the biological fact that the boys are bigger , faster and stronger. They migrate back to the women’s sports as they should.

    This transgender person obviously couldn’t compete with his biological equals so decided to switch sides with the hopes of competing and winning a medal.

    There will be more of these situations now that the door has been opened to it. I foresee this eventually impacting the Olympics.

    1. SHG Post author

      1. This is no more about sports than it is about bathrooms. It’s a concept thing.
      2. Your assumption that “this transgender person obviously couldn’t compete with his biological equals” is flawed and irrelevant.

    2. delurking

      There are no biological equals. I will never play basketball at even a decent club level, because too many other men have a biological advantage over me. Cycling, skiing, soccer, baseball – those I could play well, because I don’t have an overwhelming disadvantage.

      Sports have arbitrary rules; a rule limiting entry to a competition to a sex or a gender identity is no less arbitrary than one limiting competition to those under a certain weight (i.e., lightweight crew, sprint football).

      It is extraordinarily unlikely that this transgender person changed gender in order to compete and win a medal. It is far more likely that she is simply trying to live a normal high-school life after the gender switch. It seems like you posted just to insult this transgendered person.

      SHG’s point is good, though people seem to have missed it. We can all recognize that people with gender identity disorder likely live tortured lives, and that their gender switch likely brings them some measure of psychological relief. Most people would probably agree that you shouldn’t be gratuitously mean to transgender people when their lives don’t meaningfully affect yours (though there are certainly millions of jerks out there). However, just starting a top-down blanket policy of replacing “sex” with “gender identity” is very likely to lead to a lot of unforeseen but not unforeseeable sub-optimal outcomes.

  2. REvers

    This should be fairly simple, really.

    Got balls? Then you race against the males. No balls? You can race against the females, assuming you lost your balls long enough ago for your male hormone levels to get down to normal female levels.

    1. SHG Post author

      And when it appears in the workplace, or the dorm room, or dating in college or online, or prison, or operating room, or the million other venues in which it will eventually arise and create a cause of action for sex discrimination?

    2. F5

      Even that’s not so simple. See Caster Semenya. Although of course the article is really about agency overreach and unintended consequences. This case of course was a pretty foreseeable.

  3. Brady Curry

    I have always secretly wished that Michael Jordan had undergone gender reassignment and played in the WNBA. “Michelle” Jordan could have averaged 80 points a game. It would have been breathtaking to watch.

  4. Brent W

    This is a much bigger deal than just high school athletics, we’ll see it on display at the Olympics this summer. There are a category of women who are not transgendered but are intersex and have conditions resulting in male testosterone levels. Several years ago two athletes with these conditions dominated an entire season of competition and the IAAF and IOC set a pretty generous upper limit on those levels in an attempt to even the playing field. Athletes with those conditions were forced to either seek treatment or sit out.

    Since then the court of arbitration for sport has thrown those limits out and Caster Semenya has re-emerged as the world’s best 800 meter runner. Watching her race is like watching a professional compete against high schoolers, she’s very close to the world record and finishes races looking relaxed. It would be pretty miserable to try and make a living racing against her.

    Ross Tucker has written extensively about this on the Science of Sport if you want to read more.

      1. Patrick Maupin

        Shhhhhh!

        I don’t want my contacts at the SBA to think too hard about this and realize that maybe I’m not really a black latina.

  5. paul

    Alea iacta est.

    Llamon and co. Have crossed the rubicon and it means that all the alia s in the world and their considerations can be cast aside in the name of PC.

  6. Harrison Bergeron

    The answer to this mess is simple. You add weights to their feet like my friend John Rawls suggested and call it a day. We must all be equal, you see.

    1. SHG Post author

      Ah, the obligatory Harrison Bergeron reference. Because a day without Vonnegut is a day without.

  7. Lucas Beauchamp

    The whole point to women’s sports, or women’s colleges or the reasonable-woman standard in sexual- harassment law, is that women exist as a discrete category. If binary sexuality really is just a cultural construct that masks the spectrum of gender identities, then treating women as separate or different is an aggression against nonbinary identities.

  8. Jim Majkowski

    A reminder to pay very careful attention to the message of Chesterton’s fence?

  9. ShelbyC

    “It’s OK, ma’am. The officer performing the cavity search identifies as non-binary. “

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