My love for all things quirky has resulted in a youtube algorithm setting that appears to serve me up the finest random stuff.
I am a bit unsure, to be honest, how I feel about the super-important issue of trans people participating in athletic contests. Actually, that’s not strictly true: the truth is I am puzzled why anyone gives a shit at all about high school athletic contests. Except for the participants. From an existentialist perspective, I would say that anyone who wishes to run really fast in competition with other people, should definitely have at it. Then, there is the question of equality, which is a different axis entirely: there’s equality of opportunity (you won’t notice a lot of poor people competing in dressage as a tax write-off, whether they self-identify as any of the roles in the pastime) equality of training and training equipment, equality of drug use and abuse, and natural inequalities, etc. Rousseau, in his treatise on inequality, would raise the same questions as I am (except looking at the problem across society as a whole) – what would we say about the great horse Secretariat, who had a mutant heart that was literally freakishly large, and gave him tremendous cardio – would we ban Secretariat because of this natural advantage? Would we ban Muhammad Ali? Would we ban Lance Armstrong? (note: why he was not banned for being an obvious statistical freak achieving impossible levels of performance without beneficial mutations like Secretariat’s?)
Of course, if you are a person competing in a gendered sport, the presumed reason for the gendering is because of inherent advantages (?) in muscle mass, etc. I don’t see an obvious solution to this problem any more than if I was competing against someone like Lance Armstrong who had an entire doping operation, paid for by the US Government, tilting the scales. That would piss me off enough to take a tire iron to his kneecap, or something brilliant like that.
Seriously, though, obviously the divisions by gender are probably not the best way to do it, but it’d be pretty expensive to have displacement tank measurements of high school students so as to group them by muscle mass, for muscle-dependent sports, etc. Of course the ratio of fast-twitch muscle to slow-twitch muscle is also as relevant as the difference between Bruce Lee and Arnold Schwartznegger (who probably had a medical assist at some points in his life) – Rousseau would ask if it is possible to achieve fairness, and then he would ask why we would want to. Isn’t the whole idea of celebrating, then shit-canning Lance Armstrong is that he was an amazing competitor until we collectively admitted that he was a high tech special effect. This problem is an old one: I remember in the 70s olympics there were a lot of bad jokes about East German womens’ swim team looking mannish. As if Bruce Jenner looking mannish was fine? I’m not entirely sure how all of that works out, but someone who runs and swims and throws spears and whatnot is going to have a distinctively different build from someone who shoots target pistol, regardless of their DNA arrangement.
In principle, the idea of sport is to overcome obstacles on your own path to development and – sure – compete with others. But, in principle, the idea is not victory at all costs, so much as self-discovery. That is the ideal. I know the reality is completely different. My friend Mike P suggested that some events at the olympics should have teams of “ordinary people” from some volunteer pool, running alongside the high level competitors. When you actually notice the details, such as that the sports stadia have to have computer-controlled high-speed camera dolleys just so they can pull focus on Sha’carri Richardson or Simone Biles, you realize how utterly extraordinary such people are. Also, in terms of size, isn’t being short a biological advantage for a gymnast? But that’s not the point, either – the point is that we are all revelling in how abso-fucking-lutely amazing Simone Biles is, not arguing about why other competitors are not equal to her. The solution I suppose I am leaning toward is moving the olympics away from stupid nationalism and big money teams, toward an event-funded training regime that is … equal. Naah.
Anyhow, have you heard of Paul Hunt, from the 1980s? Paul Hunt did, uh, gymnastics comedy with a distinct gender-bending attitude. What is charming to me about his performances is watching the serious elite athletes laughing as they know how hard what he is doing, is.
Paulette Huntinova on the balance beam:
Paulina on the uneven bars:
There’s more on youtube, but now that you’ve seen a few youtube will offer them all, along with dick pills and tactical condom home defense shooters.
I have noticed that yourube is now carrying ads for dick pills and extremely sketchy medical advice, such as the “depression is caused by tired mitochondria” and “dementia is type 3 diabetes” as well as a lot of ads for home defense and tactical crap. I have ceased to find tacticalia particularly amusing, since there seems to be an endless supply of stupid people who want to defend themselves against other stupid people; I just can’t take it anymore.
«I am puzzled why anyone gives a shit at all about high school athletic contests» – it’s something the bigots can be bigoted about, isn’t that obvious?
Also, Paulina Huntinova is great stuff.
Clearly, to be fair, any competition must be between equals. So if two high schoolers want to compete against each other, they must prove through testing that they have identical strength, speed, agility, flexibility, endurance, and dedication. Until such an identical match is found, competition needs to be against only one’s own personal best results. Thus, every sports activity would be equally thrilling if done by anyone. A completely out of shape kid who does a little better than last time is a much more significant achievement than a formerly star athlete who repeats his own best performance. No event can get applauded or appreciated, except after consultation with the personal record books of that athlete.
With computerized records, each sports result will be reported as being 99.876% or 101.2345% of their personal records.
So comparing people with other people will be impossible. Sounds good to me. Not my business anyway.
As an author, I once found myself in a position to need to know the price of a Kevlar jacket. So, I googled it.
And for the next month, my ads across the internet were absolutely overwhelmed with militia paraphernalia ads. Guns! Bullets! Rations that would last a billion years! Camo shirts, invariably worn by models. So many knives.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, I checked into it and discovered you can actually clear elements from your search history from google, youtube and related places. This does a great job of clearing up these problems. This has been a life saver and I have subsequently been able to search for the weirdest stuff knowing that it won’t be embarrassing when my family looks over my shoulder and sees my ads.
Perhaps we could just make the transphobia a competitive event? National teams of bigots hopped up on Alex Jones’s fake brain pills and Rowling’s Extract of Black Mould having at each other for ten minute sessions. It would be a kind of performance art. We could tell them we were going to televise it, and then just don’t. It would keep them busy and entertained for most of the year – if Graham Linehan is anything to go by transphobia is a sport that requires supreme dedication, and becomes your career and entire life. It would keep them out of our hair, no?
Your doing too good of a job of anonymizing yourself. The people paying for ads can’t find a reason to show you stuff based on your information and video history. The really sketchy medical stuff are garbage ads, the companies offer a fractions of a cent per showing to Youtube and fill in the ad slots that would otherwise be empty. For the tactical ones you must have clicked on an ad or have some pattern in the videos you watch.
Personally I get a lot of video game stuff because I watch a lot of video game videos. It does get funny though when I’m watching Youtube after midnight. The whole algorithm breaks down and I start getting recommended random stuff, such as the bad medical stuff and videos and ads in Spanish.
It helps to keep in mind that bigotry is about irrational social dominance and aggression.
There is utility in separate sports as a means of defending against bigotry, men treating fellow competitors badly. Otherwise the ideal solution is stop the bigotry.
I think that there is a set of physical advantages (measuring a group here) that comes from the social support.
In general I believe that there is the physical effort in training, there is a social environment effect (social stressors and supports cause hormone changes too), and there is probably epigenetic lag from the previous generation. What we have the anatomical “sides” do in our ancestors might have an effect on advantages and disadvantages.
There is a biological reason that the equipment used for men’s gymnastics focuses on upper body strength, while women’s requires massive core and lower body strength. Women’s strength is centered in their hips, not their chest.
When I was a 90 pound, 4’ 11” gymnast, I could easily and repeatedly lift all 500 pounds on the leg press, but nowhere near that amount on the chest press. The football team was quite impressed, since none of them could even manage 300 pounds despite being more than twice my mass.
Those Paul Hunt videos were impressive and entertaining. Thanks.
@6: Your short stature probably actually helped with the leg press. You wouldn’t have had to fold your legs up so much for the starting position, unless you moved the seat in (as you are supposed to do, but nobody does.)
As a male of >6 ft, I could routinely do 400+, and I didn’t think of myself as especially strong because the rest of the football team was a bunch of farm boys who were used to lifting cattle. And yeah, I started with the seat all the way back.
@ Reginald
My height did not give me an advantage in lifting several times my body weight. I had to literally hold myself down in the seat in order to extend my legs and lift. I had seven years of gymnastics training by seventh grade and was actually surprised that I could lift that much.
Weight training was a new thing at the time, and I was less than thrilled that we had to do weight training with the football team and coach. It did mean that not one of those boys dared to sexually harass me, as they knew I could snap their neck like a twig.
None of the football team came close to matching half my weight, no matter how close or far they moved the seat. They tried.
People love to draw arbitrary distinctions and then pretend they are objectively meaningful. The gender ‘binary’ being the most controversial current example, but we do it everywhere and all the time. National borders being another popular topic of discussion.
Conservatives, with their love of hierarchy, are aghast whenever these proscribed boundaries are challenged in any way – even when their artificiality is completely obvious.
The olympics do a good job of showing these artifical divisions – is the best athlete from a super-rich country with millions of dollars in training supports and who can dedicate their entire life to training somehow a ‘better’ athlete than someone from the global south who has to fundraise to buy a pair of top-line shoes? What does it even mean to be ‘better’?
This two-part post at Patheos seems apropos here:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2019/10/21/chestertons-fence-and-frosts-wall/
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2019/10/23/rights-for-me-but-not-for-thee-3/
Lately I’m watching quite a bit of this guy. See what you think.
https://youtu.be/hHpp7FNMkOg?si=chxdLUrukQyov4DF
Why so coy? The advantages you mention are very well substantiated.