Women's Sports (and A Name From My Past)

I'm a pretty smart cookie.  I know what a woman is.  I also know that, for the most part, women cannot compete physically with men.  If that weren't true, there wouldn't be women's sports leagues or women's sports in K-12 and college.  

And no, a guy who claims to be a woman isn't a woman.  William Thomas was an average swimmer until he changed his name to Lia and started swimming on the women's team, shattering records as he went.  At least Bruce Jenner competed as a man and still set records.  When a "trans woman" set a bunch of records in weightlifting in Canada, this happened:

A bearded pro powerlifter entered a women’s competition in Canada — and smashed a record held by a trans lifter who was watching.

Avi Silverberg, the head coach for Team Canada Powerlifting for more than 10 years, entered Saturday’s Heroes Classic tournament in Lethbridge, Alberta, after identifying as a female.

Video shared by athlete activist group the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) shows him walking up to the platform still fully bearded and wearing a regular men’s singlet.

He then casually bench-pressed nearly 370 pounds — beating the current Alberta women’s record by almost 100 pounds.

That record — 275 pounds — was held by trans athlete Anne Andres, who was seen watching Silverberg while volunteering at the event.

This is the part I love:

ICONS said Silverberg “mocked the discriminatory [Canadian Powerlifting Union] policy” that allows competitors to register for events under their “gender identity and expression, rather than their sex or gender,” vowing “no consequences” for doing so.

Your policy is stupid. 

That worthless human Megan Rapinoe, whose team was beaten by some teenage boys, would be the nobody she deserves to be if she had to compete against men.  Even LGBT icon Martina Navratilova has acknowledged that men should not compete athletically against women.

Here's what gets me:  we all know this to be true.  We all know that most men are bigger, stronger, and faster than most women.  It's not a secret, it's not something that's just been discovered.  This has been known by every member of our species for millenia.  If this weren't true, we never would have passed Title IX and required universities to have more women sports than they previous had.  That was done in 1972, back in the Dark Ages when people still had common sense.

So now we have Riley Gaines, an NCAA Champion (woman) swimmer, attacked physically by a biological man who claims to be a woman, because he didn't share Riley's viewpoint.  And crazy lefties condemn Gaines because she is smart enough to think that women shouldn't have to compete against men athletically, and says so openly.  I don't hear any of them condemning the biological male who decked her, no, that would be "transphobic".  There was more than just one striking blow, read the whole story at the link.

When I was growing up, we were taught that a man should never hit a woman.  The reason was obvious--it would be an unfair physical contest.

I heard more details about Gaines' ordeal while I was driving to work today, and then I heard a name.  I came home and read the article linked above:

But SF State’s vice president for student affairs and enrollment management, Jamillah Moore, sent an email that made no mention of an apology to Gaines, or the acts following her speech about saving women’s sports to the university’s chapter of Turning Point USA. 

"Let me begin by saying clearly: the trans community is welcome and belongs at San Francisco State University. Further, our community fiercely believes in unity, connection, care and compassion, and we value different ideas even when they are not our own," Moore wrote.

"Thank you to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening’s event. It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. I am proud of the moments where we listened and asked insightful questions. I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. These issues do not go away, and these values are very much at our core."

Jamillah Moore.  That's not a common name. 

Twenty years ago I took 4 courses at Sac State in pursuit of a CLAD (cross-cultural, language, and academic development) credential.  It was all the rage at the time, ensuring we teachers knew how to deal with students for whom English wasn't their first language.  I wrote 7 blog posts about my experience, which wasn't positive, and the links are included in this post.

I was in a cohort of teachers, most of whom were from my district, who were taking classes for the CLAD credential.  In one class there were about 25 teachers, mostly from my district, and all were women but me.  The instructor created such a horrible class environment that--I am not exaggerating here--one of the other teachers would just spontaneously burst into tears, even if we were just working individually and quietly.  And no, it was never the same person twice.  You could cut the tension with a knife.  I ended up having a relative of that instructor as one of my students a few years later (daughter or niece, I can't remember now) and I'll admit it took me a long time to warm up to that child.  Anyway, that instructor ran a class that was by far the worst educational experience I'd ever had.

So going into next (and for me the final) class, most of us expected another train wreck, another racist disaster.  I was quite surprised at how welcoming the instructor of this class was, how she "walked the walk" of tolerance, how she didn't attack when faced with an opinion with which she disagreed.  I certainly didn't agree with some of the readings in that course, especially by nutjob Paolo Freire, but being exposed to ideas with which we disagree is part of education.  The instructor handled the class adeptly, she truly impressed me.

Her name was Jamillah Moore.

To say I'm disappointed in her (non-)response to the SFSU mob violence would be a tremendous understatement.