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Lrt: I should go to bed but I'm gonna yell instead.
We are all different and many people who are good at things have accidental but inherent physical reasons for said aptitude.
We are all different and many people who are good at things have accidental but inherent physical reasons for said aptitude.
People who wind up playing pro basketball are unusually tall. We accept that they have an asset regarding that sport. It's not controversial. Nobody gets mad about it and insists anybody sit out or somehow alter themselves to make the sport fair.
Sidenote: since when are sports fair, anyway? Everybody does what they can to get an edge over the other guy. That is the nature of it. Luck, skill, money- many things play into the outcome of a competition but what you're never gonna see is a match where nobody has an edge.
And it comes into other stuff, too. I'm a painter. My eyes are quirky. One of the quirks is my color vision ate my shapes vision for a couple technical reasons I'm not gonna get into. Nobody does colors like me. They literally cannot see what I see.
That's not a brag, it's a fact. But it's also why I paint. The colors sing for me. I understand them and together, we dance.
People find pleasure in doing things they are uniquely suited to.
People find pleasure in doing things they are uniquely suited to.
Someone decided Caster Semenya has an edge. And unlike basketballers being seven feet tall, Michael Phelps being his unique self, opera soloists having particularly resonant sinuses, and any number of other reasons people excel at extremely specific tasks...
No, NOW they're gonna draw a line? Say that it isn't fair someone's body is suited to what she is using it for because NOW, THIS TIME, it's not a cool quirk. No, now she's being a person, specifically a woman, incorrectly?!
We all know why they're doing it, of course. Several reasons and I barely know where to start but the bottom line is they've decided the amount of testosterone produced by an average white cis woman is "correct". They've also decided testosterone grants sporting prowess....
Which also concerns me. Inherent in this decision is the assumption that men are stronger than women and everybody should be wary of that attitude, commonly accepted tho it be.
You know who else produces more testosterone than average? My hobbity ass. I am NOT winning a gold medal of any sort anytime soon unless those puzzles where you have to read the word spelled in subtly different shades of red becomes an event.
So, society is fine with it when the "right" people have advantages and it is deemed cheating when the "wrong" people win, and anything that might be the reason they're winning has to be disallowed. Even when that is totally not why... some people are just good at things!
The thing is even if you do have a natural edge, it's useless if you don't hone it. Semenya has worked very hard. Opera singers train as hard as any athlete and the perfect cheekbones HELP, but won't win the position in the absense of practice.
If I hadn't learned to paint I'd just be a guy going "oooooh shiny..." a lot.
Work meets aptitude and does awesome things and we should let it.
Also, this decree that a woman isn't woman enough is some nazi bullshit and we should call it like we see it.
Work meets aptitude and does awesome things and we should let it.
Also, this decree that a woman isn't woman enough is some nazi bullshit and we should call it like we see it.
