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Oh, It’s About Sports, Is It?
Nope, it’s not. It’s about constraining transgender lives.
When does a “fairness in sports” discourse display its anti-transgender bigotry? From the beginning, usually.
Look at the supposed injury and the proposed remedy. Is there a logical disconnect? That’s one way to spot a bad-faith attack on a marginalized group.
A Fallacy I Still Remember After 20 Years
I remember a notably bad op-ed against gay people in my local newspaper at least 10, probably 20, years ago. This columnist wrote many op-eds of this sort and keeps some on his website today. I can’t find the one I remember — anyway, it’s just as well.
In those days, newspaper columnists eagerly expressed offensive and wrong opinions against gay people, presented for polite society under the rubric of a “national conversation” about same-sex marriage. Marriage was not yet gender-neutral in the United States, but mass media talked to itself neverendingly about it.
People treated this as an opening to make all manner of anti-LGBTQ statements or to support strict patriarchal gender norms and reproductive control. Many straight people just didn’t want anyone to be gay. They tied this to “marriage” in logically unsound ways, claiming that their beliefs were “principled” rather than “homophobic,” often expecting gay people to thread that needle for them. They’d challenge: My religious ideology isn’t homophobic. I hope you agree! I have my reasons for not wanting you to have certain legal rights and social inclusion. I hope you can explain my reasoning back to me in a flattering way! Otherwise—if you call me ‘homophobic’—you’re the real bigot and I’m the real victim.
The specific column I remember made the following argument:
Some closeted gay people stay in straight marriages because it’s the only kind of marriage there is. If gay marriage were an option, they’d feel inspired to divorce their spouses, come out as gay, and enter second marriages with same-sex partners, thereby abandoning their spouses and children.
Explicitly, what the newspaper columnist objected to was divorce. He gave no reason why a first-time gay marriage would be unacceptable. In his…
