Spat Thread

jebuz wrote: »

Boy that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast...

Slightly OT but to pick up on the highlighted point above, I'm reading a book called the "The Sports Gene" right now and it's just covered the area of transgender performance.

There's a transgender physicist, Joanna Harper who transitioned from a man to a woman using hormone therapy to suppress the testosterone levels. Aswell as being a scientist, she is also an accomplished age grade (55+) runner so naturally crunched some numbers along with 5 other subjects who made a similar transition.

What she found was there was a noticeable pattern of performance decline in all subjects, her own half marathon time went from 1:23 to 1:34 in the space of a year. She felt the same effort but just couldn't go faster yet she still remained as competitive in her age and gender category. As a female, her performance was just as good relative to when she was a man. Correspondingly the opposite holds true, when a female injects testosterone she gains a similar level of performance

So what they're hinting at is that testosterone is one of the primary generic advantages males have over women when it comes to athletic performance. Other more obvious advantages include height, broader shoulders, muscle mass, larger heart, denser bones, longer arms etc.

That's my spat contribution :pac:

I read the book too which is where I got the example from. I don't recall any discussion of somebody moving from a female body to a male body though but then I also didn't recall the name of the physicist or that there were other people studied who made the transition. Just checking that you're sure that there was a female to male athlete because I was wondering if the naturally longer legs (assuming that they had them) would have given the person changing their body from female to male an advantage. One of the physical characteristics that is said to give runners an advantage is relatively long legs. (swimmers by contrast have long torso's with Michael Phelps standing 6' 5" on a 28" inside leg measurement). Anyway, I doubt that there's ever going to be enough data for a serious study.

T runner wrote: »

You'll get no argument from me that men are faster than women for biological reasons. The lads can take the p1ss out of each other night and day about that for all I care. That's not the point.

The problem is that they are not just saying that BP women are faster than BP menetc......they are taking it one step further. They are using that as an excuse to call them women. Which is something completely different isn't it? That illogical jump is where the line is crossed into sexism.

The sentiment is that 'your women are faster than you, therefore you guys are a pack of women (haha)'

Again under no circumstances could anyone here come up with any context where it would be acceptable to mock a white person by calling him black.

Yet we seem to have no issue with mocking men by calling them women.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057241424

T runner wrote: »

You'll get no argument from me that men are faster than women for biological reasons. The lads can take the p1ss out of each other night and day about that for all I care. That's not the point.

The problem is that they are not just saying that BP women are faster than BP menetc......they are taking it one step further. They are using that as an excuse to call them women. Which is something completely different isn't it? That illogical jump is where the line is crossed into sexism.

The sentiment is that 'your women are faster than you, therefore you guys are a pack of women (haha)'

Again under no circumstances could anyone here come up with any context where it would be acceptable to mock a white person by calling him black.

Yet we seem to have no issue with mocking men by calling them women.

Thought experiment: would it be acceptable to call a black person white if they sunburned easily or a white person black if the never got sunburned and their skin never changed colour? It veers towards the pointlessly stupid for me rather than the unacceptable.

I never understand why some people find offence when the people they are offended on behalf of see no issue...

The point that people on the "PC" side of the argument miss sometimes is that terms change meaning over time and with changing context. So - since race seems to be the benchmark - people of a certain age will use the "N word" to describe a black man with it's original meaning. That's derogatory and racist, even if unintentional. Some marginalised and unpleasant people will use it as a term of insult and they need to be held up to public ridicule (yes I am talking about UKIP and the BNP for example). Some people - those of my generation - would never use that word as I find it repellent.

But go younger than me again and it's used casually and without malice by people of all colours, describing themselves and their friends often without reference to actual skin colour. I happen to live in London and so there is huge diversity here and I genuinely feel that large sections of the city are post-racial. My son - whiter than white thru his Irish genetics - has been told he's really black by one of his Nigerian friends. They use the word "racist" among themselves in banter along with words that 20 years ago would have been grossly racially offensive. They do this not because the words have power but because they are meaningless. A white boy calling a black boy racist because the black boy said he was blacker than the black boy is??? Confused yet? The words lose the power to sting when they are meaningless. Other words that may have been as hurtful - ranging from Paddy to Queer - have been adopted by the very groups that were once offended by them as labels to be celebrated. This doesn't mean that all society is colour or gender blind but it does indicate a direction of travel.

So if both genders of a particular club banter about gender with laughter and good spirit from all (male and female) on both sides then doesn't that indicate we are living in or moving to a post-sexist world? A world where it's ok to say someone runs like a girl because everyone knows that the joke plays to a factually untrue and dated stereotype. Yes racism still exists. Yes sexism still exists. But in the margins. The only mainstream people still feeling outraged about the N word in rap songs or gender name calling in sports (for example) are those still carrying baggage that the rest of us have left behind.

menoscemo wrote: »

Let's get back to the point of this thread.

Brothers Pearse AC (aka Sisters Pearse aka the grass trackers aka Knocklyon Joggers) are a bunch of posh wannabe, slow, useless, inept w*nkers. That statement applies to both their male and female Atheletes*

(*I use the term Athletes in the loosest possible sense)

How dare you N, we are not posh

I have no affiliation with either side to this 'spat'. To me, it seems like harmless banter between lads that know each other. Context is everything.

T runner wrote: »

Your own words (from today) tell us that the lameness above is just some bull you've just made up to take the bad look off things.






Care to explain why your professed sentiment is so at odds with your actual words? (need a bigger spade?)

Maybe let's not go there again, can we agree to move on and let it lie?

pconn062 wrote: »

Maybe let's not go there again, can we agree to move on and let it lie?

Asking nicely, appealing to peoples better judgement? Ah, the honeymoon period... Next week the cards will be out for the slightest provocation :-)