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…
