Transgender man wins women's 100 yd and 400 yd freestyle races.

Tipperary Senior Ladies Gaelic Football manager Peter Creedon speaks up.

Define woke?

what did Bud Light cans with Mulvaney have to do with social injustice?

When I said that humans made up the biological differences between the sexes, I don’t mean that humans had an input into the process, I mean that biology is the study of life, and organisms and so on. I’m saying that the classification system was invented by humans based on their observations. That’s what I mean by the classification system, and one is free to take their pick of the various classification systems of how humans are classified according to whatever criteria are used within that system.

The point that sports could be classified in different ways hasn’t been lost at all, nor is anyone depriving anyone of the right to organise their activities and events or whatever in accordance with their own preferences, whether that be based upon sex, gender, age, whatever. Freedom of association - still a thing.

I didn’t put scientists in inverted commas, precisely because while I don’t share their views, they are still scientists, and not click-baity magazine editors. The point being that even though they are scientists, I wouldn’t call what they are doing science, because their findings were based on their own observations as opposed to presenting what could possibly be considered scientific evidence to support their conclusions. In a similar fashion - I wouldn’t take John Money seriously just because he was an eminent scientist and prolific within his own field of research. He tried to make evidence fit his theories, which included the idea that because there was a biological basis for gender, it could be manipulated. His conclusions simply weren’t supported by scientific evidence, but because of his reputation, he had considerable influence and his theories gained widespread acceptance. We now know the implications of his research, in much the same way as we know the implications of arguing that sexual orientation can be manipulated, and under threat of persecution, people will choose to conform, as they are aware of the consequences of non-conformance with a predominant and prevailing social construct.

And that brings me to the point about the phenomenon of young boys bleeding out their their nether orifices and the lack of awareness that this was obviously not normal among a population who didn’t appear to know any better, or as you suggest- perhaps didn’t care, as long as these young boys were still able to work in an environment where they were being infected by parasites causing the phenomenon. I’m not suggesting that anyone need go as far as some scientists who chose to investigate the phenomenon by ingesting the parasites themselves, what I’m suggesting is that people who knew of the phenomenon, but chose to ignore it and in some cases persecute young boys who did not bleed, in order to maintain their own ideological beliefs - their behaviour is unethical. It’s for reasons like this that scientific evidence has to be able to reach a certain level of credibility, and one can’t do that based upon small-scale studies, let alone studies which don’t support their hypothesis at all. It’s why in biology, twin studies are like the holy grail in terms of understanding a phenomenon -

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17749-0

They are not without their limitations of course, the most common one being that they are based on tiny numbers that couldn’t possibly be used in order to be presented as credible scientific evidence of anything. It’s for this reason I have the issues I do with the likes of Ross Tucker and the BMJ purporting that small-scale studies are of any significance, when their methodology is so clearly flawed, in order to support their conclusions that people who are transgender should be excluded from participating in sports competitions in accordance with their preferred gender. They’re purposely choosing to ignore the fact that there are a number of contributing factors which affect anyone’s athletic ability and performance in any given sport.

Those factors are not simply limited to biology, they also include sociological and psychological factors, which confer both advantages and disadvantages depending upon context. It’s why for example therapeutic medical exemptions exist, it’s why women’s categories in sports exist, and it’s why if a policy is designed specifically to exclude people on the basis of gender, which has the intended effect of excluding people who are transgender from participating in competitions in accordance with their preferred gender, then the least one would expect, and what would seem entirely reasonable, is to study people who are transgender in sports, as opposed to producing click-baity articles in support of an already formed conclusion.

That’s the sort of behaviour I’d expect of ideologues who are only interested in promoting their own views and beliefs, with no regard for the welfare of others who do not share their views or beliefs. It’s the kind of ideology which, if it were ever taken seriously, could lead to this sort of nonsense -

https://amp.smh.com.au/world/sweden-debates-hitting-men-with-domestic-violence-tax-20041006-gdjv55.html

It’s really quite simple - I want people to have the same freedom and opportunities which I had as a result of competing in sports, regardless of anyones race or sex or disabilities or gender or religious or political beliefs or whatever else, and don’t bring that shyte into sports.

If people want to whine about the unfairness of perceived biological advantages or disadvantages that men have that women don’t, I say so what if men can run faster than women? Big whoop! If they really wanted to get into a pissing contest about biological advantages or disadvantages, the sex which has the greatest overall biological disadvantages from womb to tomb may well come as a bit of a surprise to some -

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7928849/

I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.

Understandably so if you’re coming from the point of view where it somehow makes sense that men would want to compete against women in ANY sport, at any level. I’m asking myself “why is it assumed that men would want to compete against women?”, because I can’t think of any reason why men would want to compete against women in any sport, let alone the idea that it would mean women and girls would no longer wish to compete in any sport because there are men involved. I think the exclusion of anyone from any sport though, does nothing for the development of the sport.

It wouldn’t though. I won’t waste your time asking for any rational basis for your claim because I know you don’t have one, it’s just more of the usual throwing something out there that has no grounding in reality. It would take an extraordinary amount of effort on the part of any sports organisation to be so incapable of governing and promoting their sport that what you’re suggesting just wouldn’t happen. You have to have some idea of the global popularity of tennis, surely?

What you’re doing is like arguing that because sports like weightlifting, boxing and the modern pentathlon, just because they are under review by the IOC signals the end of those sports. It doesn’t; however it does mean that the competitions need undergo changes in order to keep their Olympic status -

https://amp.theguardian.com/sport/2021/dec/09/olympics-weightlifting-boxing-risk-being-dropped-2028-games

In the IOCs efforts to broaden the appeal of the Olympics, they’re also going out on a limb in terms of other sports which were previously not considered eligible for inclusion in the Olympics -

https://19thnews.org/2023/04/college-cheerleading-future-the-olympics/?amp

It’s all about appealing to the youth to get them involved in sports in order to increase the profile of sports in terms of their inclusiveness and all that jazz.

She was off drinking beer apparently.