chuso

Gaywallet, 8 months ago

Just going to leave a comment here because it’s the highest up comment chain where you’re cherry picking a single scientific article and ignoring the complexity of the problem. There’s a few issues with what you’re doing and I don’t really have time to write up an entire guide as to why this isn’t nice, but I’m just going to leave the following points:

• This is the LGBTQ+ community, please chill with the antagonism. If you want to make a point about whether testosterone provides an advantage to individuals, you’re welcome to do so, however it needs to be done with caution if you’re not a medical professional capable of examining a complicated question and exert good faith to fully investigate the issue at hand.
• To articulate this point, a cursory google of the issue at hand here ‘trans women in sports’ revealed the following 4 top results from vaguely reputable/scientific resources: 1 2 3 4. All four of these articles touch on a lot more than just testosterone levels contributing to performance in sports.
• A cursory review of the regulating bodies themselves would reveal poor control over who is allowed to compete. There’s no discussion about this present in your point.
• A cursory review of the effects of testosterone on performance in athletes would might reveal any of the following studies: 1 2 3 4. The idea that testosterone is correlated with a positive performance from male athletes is a simplistic and flawed one. Young boys pre-puberty outperform young girls showing a more complicated story than just testosterone and pointing us towards more likely important factors, such as the social and environmental ones. Additionally, while testosterone may contribute to performance in some sports, it definitively does not for certain sports (especially since we’re in a topic about chess). Reducing a complicated topic to a single dimension generally doesn’t work and isn’t a good basis for argument.
• With all that being said, you’re right that for some trans women their testosterone levels may not be fully suppressed with just estrogen treatment, but nearly no regulatory bodies care about that - they care about whether the testosterone levels that they test are above a certain threshold. If they are not, they aren’t allowed to compete. It’s ridiculous to be quoting this study at all, because if someone were at that level and wanting to compete they’d have to be on testosterone blockers or post-op so as to drop their levels to an acceptable range.
• I cannot stress enough how bad it looks for someone to be coming in here and challenging the people directly effected by this issue with such a one-sided and shallow point. In general if you’re going to come in and challenge a minority on something, you need to be extremely cautious about how you do so. Ask yourself, are you an expert on the topic? If not, what could you be missing? Should you seek out education before providing your opinion and attempting to provide “scientific” reasoning for your stance? Ask yourself whether others have likely shared the same opinion as you are sharing- are you bringing anything new or useful to the table? Might minorities already be inundated with people sharing the same opinion, in a scientific manner or not, and might you be contributing to their emotional and educational burdens?

ConditionOverload, 9 months ago

There’s no meaning to life. It’s a scam of an idea that we all fall prey to. Instead, think of it as just creating new meaning to it every single day depending on what you think and do. It’s a liberating feeling, to be honest. Because now you don’t have to stress yourself out to figure out some grand meaning [that doesn’t exist] and inevitably failing and being depressed over that.

leigh, 10 months ago

Other people here are already doing a great job of covering the “what we think” and “whether welcome in queer spaces or not” aspects of your question, so let me dive into this part instead:

…someone who’s not in the space or actively an ally. I would more accurately describe myself currently as a “don’t care” person in the sense that to me it genuinely does not matter what someone identifies as or who someone is attracted to.

Ever watch the TV show Ted Lasso? There was a scene in the final season where one of the players on the football (soccer) team came out as gay. The other players tell him they “don’t care”, meaning to be supportive but not actually succeeding. Ted gives a speech and, as his character admits afterward, makes a poor comparison — but still does a good job of communicating to the others that they should care. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcaUZ9R0y2c

So, like… I’m glad you’re not antagonizing any of us, but that’s just kind of the bare minimum for being decent, you know? And that is somewhat similar to racial discrimination: as a white person in North America, telling Black people I “don’t care that they’re Black” would tell them I haven’t considered that being Black is something core to their identity and how they experience the world because of the way society works. It would tell them I still see whiteness as the “default” but it’s “okay” to be something else. It would tell them that I might say something if I witnessed blatant racism happening, but they shouldn’t count on me to do so because I haven’t made any effort to learn how racism actually works and I might back down if I feel speaking up would put myself at any risk. But I do care, so I try to educate myself, and I look for opportunities to practice anti-racism. I absolutely make mistakes, but they tend to be easily forgiven so long as I show a willingness to listen, learn, and try.

But hey… I freely admit that I was way older than 18 when I finally started listening to people and began understanding all of this! So I absolutely don’t mean to “rake you over the coals” or anything. I just tell you these things because I hope you grow into a better person faster than I managed to. 🙂💜