Gender Rubrics in Sports

(This doesn't really need to be here. I've re-posted it in my free-is-not-free blog, and that's where edits will occur.)

A niece of mine posted an article about Lia Thomas, and it got me thinking about the knotty problem of gender again. 

I don't have an answer, but I do have questions that I don't see anyone asking, that I think might lead to viable solutions.

So that you know where I'm coming from, my sport of choice is dance, which, even though dance has recently been developed into a competitive sport, is not a competitive sport in the model of swimming, track and field, ball games, martial arts and such. 

Even though there are tournament-style competitions in dance now, complete with metrics and rubrics, dance remains naturally a sport where everyone can be a winner. Except in the more recently contrived competitions, competition is not for one unique crown, nor for the runner-up crowns. Natural competition in dance is more about finding someone interesting to yourself, to dance with for a while. Or about finding new ways to move from here to there, or to exercise your own body and keep it running.

Whoa. Wait. There's my entire post, already done in one paragraph.

Except that most people who find this rant somehow and start reading it will not see in that paragraph what is so obvious to me.

When you have disagreements like we have about Lia Thomas, it usually is indication that we need to go back and examine our basic assumptions. That's what I want to do, examine basic assumptions about sports and then come back to the question of how gender and sports should relate to each other.

So -- assumptions.

Of what use is sports?

Okay, of what use is dance?

The easy answers include getting rid of stress -- relaxation, physical exercise and training, possible opportunities for social interaction, and such. If talking about dramatic dance, it can also be useful for self-expression.

With sports, we get a similar list. Self-expression? Yes. Self-expression. Sports provides a sort-of legitimate outlet for aggression and glory-seeking, in a less violent and destructive venue than war. And the training, with the metrics and rubrics, provides a lab for research in health and nutrition. It's all beneficial, all to the good, right?

One of my great grandfathers was an educator. He left me a little saying that was pithy and colorful in late 19th-century American English. Essentially, he noted that we are generally careful when training horses, not to push them so hard as to cripple or injure them, or to be excessive in ways that leave the horses with bad habits, even if the horse seems willing. 

But we often fail to be so careful with our children. Especially if they seem to be willing.  

We all know the stories about the promising little-league pitcher who ruins his throwing arm winning that all-important game and never plays baseball again. About the high-school track star who collapses at the big meet and never runs in competition again. About the high-school football players who never learn to study and wash out in college, or the college football stars who ride their scholarship into the pros only to find that they are really only good enough for a year or two of pro and then have no way to earn a living.

These most recent Olympic Games, postponed until just after the crest of the pandemic. Why were we willing to let tradition push us to risk the athlete's health that way? It seems to have (mostly) worked out okay, but couldn't we have just skipped a cycle, moved the venues back four years? And the winter Olympics, with Russia complaining that the rules about drugs were unfair to them?

I say I don't have an answer, but I might have a suggestion.

In high-school and college sports, there was no national championship in the US for a long time. Common sense told us two or three things:

1. There are always schools without certain advantages that can never make it beyond district play;
   
   
2. At the state level, there are usually several teams that are top-level and would be evenly matched if they meet in the finals, but simple chance will eliminate enough that, maybe, only one makes it to the final game. And if two make it to the final game, it is often a matter of luck which one wins.
   
   
3. (Actually, this is the most important:) The emotional investment of the championship games often leads the athletes to take unnecessary risks, which every now and then result in life-changing injuries. And we thought it seemed unfair to put the athletes at such increased risk of career-ending injury at the academic level.
   

Maybe we should either abolish national and international competition, or somehow create an environment in which even the national and international level can be played in the (intended) spirit of friendlies at the local level?

What is it that moves us to invest so much in championships?

Hmm. Sponsorships. Advertising campaigns. Market wars.

What is it that moves us as corporations to invest so much in winning the market wars? (... competition which has become a modern substitute for more literal warfare, less damaging physically, maybe, but no less emotionally/mentally)?

Excessive market warfare results in products that don't sell well being removed from the market. Many of those lost products were products that individuals wanted or even needed. And what remains does not match those needs or wants anywhere nearly as well.

Market competition, when it is done right, should result in good match between product and consumer. But our current markets are barely any better than controlled markets at anything but maybe volume. Sure, we do see some increase (finally) in the production of microbrews and such, but the race to the bottom that defines the market wars we currently engage in often drag any niche products that become sustainably popular down with them.

Back to sports.

It seems to me that we need to get rid of the idea that there can be only one winner. There never really is, except in some temporary and impractical sense.

I said I had no answers. This is not an answer, it's a sort-of a suggestion that just occurred to me now.

Looking at the metrics in swimming, speed within a style is the only metric. Well, there is water polo and such, and water ballet, but those are different.

Why?

What if swimming meets required each speed competitor to also compete in water polo or some similar team sport, and in water ballet or water gymnastics? And the overall scores weighted all the performances together? And we got rid of men's and women's divisions?

Hmm. Not workable exactly like that, but maybe there's something in there that might spark a solution.

...

No medals in single events. Medals for overall scores, maybe four gold for the top four, four silver for the next four, etc? Exact number depending on the number of athletes.

Are You Meeting with Acephobia? Do People Say You Must Be Asexual? Unemotional?

(Reposted, edited, in my main blog: https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2022/02/are-you-meeting-acephobia-do-people-say.html. )

(This is for people that get questioned over their lack of interest in sex.)

Don't ever believe that you don't have human emotions. Whoever tells you that is either lying for their own power or gain, or trying to use metalanguage you don't use to say something else. 

You can hope for their sake it's the latter, but that's not your problem. Just don't believe them.

The whole social conversation about sex is so skewed that you really can't tell what people are trying to say any more. People claim to be gay or lesbian or even bi-sexual, and yet they claim not to be practicing -- not sexually active. Other people claim to be defending the rights of the homosexually inclined, but they themselves are practicing bi-sexual. 

Machiavelli and de Sade were not the first, nor were they the last, to assign for more, and less, meaning to sex and gender than can be justified.

It can be sort of understandable sometimes. For too many people, the hormonal flux is the only thing they've experienced that makes them feel good about either themselves or life. Maybe nobody ever hugged them except to try to force them to feel better. Or maybe words of praise were always attached to conditions. Or some other such. So many ways we pervert natural affection.So many ways we pervert love.

Anyway, human emotion has lots of colors. 

(And the rainbow flag is now being used to mute those, even.)

If LGBQTetc. Is Real, Everyone is LGBQTetc.

(This is another rant that doesn't really work on several levels.) 

[JMR202412171406: On the other hand, it seems to work better than not talking about it.]

I have no right to deny anyone the right to choose their own labels. Nor, really, do i want to.

But when you choose your labels for yourself, be aware that you do not need to limit yourself to the labels society offers.

About twenty-two years ago, I read some in a blog by a guy who was the maintainer of a certain program that was considered by some to be essential in working with the SGML family mark-up languages. Or maybe it was XML. I don't remember the name of the program now, nor do I remember the name of the developer. Neither seem to come up in web searches any more. 

I guess the web is just too big now. (I can't even find my own blogs by simple web search on my name any more.)

He identified as gay, and had several posts that defended his identification and, as he thought, the existence of the gay community. 

In one particular post, he posited that there was no such thing as a true lesbian. The short version of his theory was that, at any particular time, one of the partners would be taking the role of butch. Gay males, on the other hand, would have no similar requirement.

I thought, at the time, of taking screen shots of the post, but I figured no one would believe I hadn't created them in the GIMP (i. e. Photoshopped them), anyway.

I rather fancy that he realized what he was saying, and took the post down.

At the risk of drawing the ire of all sorts of people, as near as I can tell, this is the substance underlying LGBQTetc.: identification based on mistaken concepts of sex, gender, and the nature of human relationships.

When I was in elementary school, somewhere around 4th or 5th grade, there was a group of budding jocks in the locker who would show each other what they had in their shorts and tease each other about it. They generally tried to get the rest of the guys to join in, teasing, or even bullying those who would not with crude comments about the supposed size or shape being the cause of their reticence.

I was tall enough and heavy enough that they mostly left me out of it, although some of the alpha-wannabees would complain that I didn't join in the fun.

What kind of is never said about this is that it is fun -- in a sense. Showing and seeing stimulates certain brain activities, which respond in blood rush to the gonads, which is perceived as pleasant, and cyclically reinforcing. Mix into that the sense of camaraderie when being part of a group engaged in edge behavior, and you get addictions. 

The alpha wannabees were the ones who would then seek out the most vulnerable of the other boys after school and badger them for sexual favors.

That's one of the lenses that I still view the whole question through.

Anyone who lets their own self-image get tangled up in the way they react to various hormones is going to get turned on by seeing flesh, whether of the same gender or the opposite gender.

You do filter your reactions by your subconscious perceptions of what is acceptable and desirable.

But turn-on is turn-on.

If turn-on is the purpose of relationships, we are all lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender. The only question is whether we are in the closet or not.

There is a side question of physical expression of gender. 

No two people are alike, and it would be really difficult to specify what is "full sexual differentiation". 

Large breasts do not a woman make. Breast size does not indicate ability to lactate. Penis size does not correlate with sperm count. Etc.

So the term sexual differentiation has (probably rightly) become deprecated. (Yeah, I used to use it, too.)

Some men will not be able to produce a high enough count of viable sperm count to induce conception. 

Some women do not produce egg cells, or will produce egg cells that are not viable. 

This does not make them less than others. It's just one more way to be different.

Nature makes a variety of people for many reasons. 

(For those who believe in God or such, by the evidence we have before us, God makes us all different.)

One person will be good at raising wheat. One will be good at raising oats. One will be good at adding numbers. One will be good at manipulating abstract symbols.

Even within a "specialty" there will be specialties.

With all the different things people are good at, the necessary jobs and the important jobs are much more likely to get done. 

Put in the negative, if we were all the same, we would all have to live thousands of years to be sure there would be enough people with enough skills to handle every necessary job, because we would all have to pick up every specialized skill. 

... because we would all have to learn everything before we could learn anything -- before we could live.

One thing that cannot be forgotten is that specialization changes over time. Someone who is pretty good at raising grain may change paths and learn how to raise cattle or manipulate abstract symbols instead of just continuing to get better at raising grain. 

Sexual function is similar. So is sexual attraction. Both change. That is, I've seen plenty of blog posts by people who at one point identified as gay or lesbian, but later decided they were bi or even ace. 

Variety is good. Since we are all different, there is a greater chance for each individual to find someone, compatible or otherwise, with whom they can maintain a relationship, perhaps for the purpose of raising a family, perhaps just for the purpose of having companionship.

(It is a gross evil to box people up in stereotypes, and we, as a society, as a world, have been doing that since millennia before Machiavelli and de Sade.)

We separate children as boys and girls at birth for reasons that are and are not reasonable.

But when we find it difficult to assign gender, instead of just letting the assignment wait -- or, what may be better, just deciding we as a society don't need to assign gender -- we have doctors who believe they can "correct" nature's "mistakes". 

At very minimum, we should be much slower in our attempts to correct nature.

If we, as a society, were not so insistent on enforcing a binary classification between male and female from birth, rainbow and gay could go back to just being about art and about enjoying being alive.

Thoughts on Homosexuality

[This is a rant from back in 2018 that I was never able to finish properly. Some things about it just don't work on several levels.]

http://guerillamormonism.blogspot.jp/2018/01/getting-different-answers-to-prayer.html

Now, there are people who believe that there is such a thing as homosexuality. I personally believe the whole thing is a misunderstanding of sexuality.

Some people pray and believe that God is telling them that they are homosexual. I could guess at all sorts of reasons, but I know that at least some of my guesses will be wrong for any particular person.

One thing I could guess at concerns all the teenage jokes about sexuality. Come on. Teenagers have no idea what sexuality is. If the popular kids at school tease a less popular kid about his or her sexuality, they are almost guaranteed to be wrong. But that assertion doesn't help everyone. I don't know that it will even help anyone except me. I know it helped me.

Another guess I could make concerns the question of whether people have some inalienable right to find a passionate romance. Or whether a "rich, nuanced sex life" is even something to be desired.

The first big love of my life would have been miserable married to me. When I realized that, I bowed out of her life.

If I had married the second big love of my life, I would now be miserable. When I was trying to recover from that breakup, a bishop who had gone through a similar breakup advised told me that he thought maybe he was happier with someone who had not initially ignited the passion in him.

And I eventually settled for a relationship which I had to work at from the outset.

I can't even fathom, now, giving any weight at all to sexual attraction, unless it is within an already existing marriage relationship. Nor can I fathom an attraction within marriage that is not the product of the two partners' efforts to be each other's friend at all levels of intimacy they dare or deem wise. And I can't fathom thinking that the product of such efforts should ever be considered not enough sexual attraction. I know that even the physical relationship is not all about sex.

There are more important things.

These are my own answers. They were not always, but they are now, and I don't believe they are wrong, even though I know they won't work for everyone.

Correcting Gender

[This is a rant from 2017 that I was never able to properly start, much less finish. It's another rant that doesn't work at several levels.]

I have a friend who received gender correction surgery.

It's unreasonable of me to wish I could have talked with her about it first, but I wish I could have.

If you are considering gender correction surgery, for yourself or someone you have the legal authority to make such a decision for, I'd like to tell you my arguments.

If you are not, this rant is not for you. You would do well not to read it. Please don't read if just for your prurience.

First, there is no such thing as "gay" or lesbian. Not ultimately. There is intersex, but that isn't what the argument of gay/lesbian usually is.

That is, in almost every case I am aware of, the question of homosexuality quickly becomes an excuse for sexual promiscuity, generally of the bisexual kind.

Almost every case.

What does exist, then?

There are two issues here -- physical gender configuration and sexual orientation.

Physical gender configuration outside the twin bell curves around the binary human gender norms exist. There's no arguing with that.

We, as a society, inherit some terrible cultural baggage on this point. We accept all too many artificial norms as if normal were somehow equivalent to ideal.

Social norms almost always stray from any ideal, anyway.

And, if that's not bad enough, if true perfection exists, human ideals never match it. We'd do better to talk about parfection than perfection.

So many times in our shared cultural heritage in every nation, in every culture, we have viewed variation as flaw and destroyed true talent -- wasted the true gift.

We were lucky that Einstein, for example, found a way around the social impediments he faced. We are not always so lucky, and, we, as a race and as individuals, would be far better off to just accept those who don't match our artificial norms.

It is true that pushing ourselves to do better than we have is important. But pushing others to meet our ideas of narmel is not at all the same thing as pushing ourselves to be/do better. It's usually quite the opposite.

Normal. Narmel.

Normal is an illusion.

This is true of gender configuration, too.

Maybe you are not convinced, but I want to let you know I think society has no right to demand anyone change to fit society's norms, especially when it will effect your health. Ask questions first. Be sure that the change you want is not just giving into peer/social pressure to meet some arbitrary narm. Be wise.

Progenesis ch01 -- Hot!

[Yet another beginning of a novel that didn't go anywhere, from back in 2016 or 2017.]

TMX001 looked apprehensively at the apparition in front of him.

Her skin glowed softly in the dark. His eyes traced her features and curves, eyes, lips, arms, breasts, hips, legs, everything quite visible in the glow, in spite of the limited light.

He got out his geiger counter and directed its transponder window towards her. The counter ticked steadily, maybe three events per second. "Not good, but not so bad, I guess." He brought the transponder closer, and at about an inch from her abdomen the rate rose or so. "Sixty-five, plus or minus. Roughly a low C in ancient earth-human notations."

"Lower."

"What?"

"That's where I took most of it." She spread her legs, and he brought the transponder below her thighs. The frequency increased to a low buzz which echoed hollowly in the empty dark.

"Three hundred thirty events per second. You are so hot."

"Thanks. For checking." TFY000 blinked.

"Were you able to keep from breathing it?" he asked as he got out a clean rag and wiped her face, especially around her eyes and nose, so she wouldn't have to use her contaminated hands.

"Mostly."

"Let's see what we can do to cool you down." He got out gas masks for both of them, helping her put hers on first.

After they had their masks in place, he dug the filtered vacuum cleaner out of his kit and let it suck the dust from her skin. The glow faded as the dust disappeared into the vacuum nozzle. He let the vacuum run for a minute or more, to clear the nozzle as much as possible.

"How much damage do you think I've taken?"

"Who knows until we analyze the dust in the vacuum cleaner? But we need to put you in a detox bath."

He led the way to the airlock, where both were subjected to further blowing and vacuuming, and then after removing their masks, to more cleaning and a shower. Standing before the lock detectors and turning around, TMX001 was cleared for entry, but TFY000 was not. A compartment at the side of the lock opened, and TFY000 entered the detoxification bath. She fully submerged herself, working the oil over her face and head, then, after the timer rang, she raised her head above the surface of the oil and started working it over the rest of her body.

"What happened?"

"I was ambushed."

"TFY003?" He was asking the obvious, but it was equally obviously hard for him to understand.

"Yes."

"We aren't supposed to do this kind of thing. It's against our programming."

Chiriso and Kefumi watched their robots on the monitors.

"Why is it so hard to get the interactions between the emotional functions and the motivation functions right?" Kefumi asked.

Chiriso shrugged.

"Can't we just build them so they reproduce asexually?"

"The problem of pride remains, as long as they need to share genetic information to keep the redundancy up."


TFY003 and TMX000 were visible on separate monitors, waiting in standby mode where they had


The scientists who created these  robots, the last of a human-like race, as they attempt to produce a replacement race and decide to de-gender the robots, making them all hermaphrodite.