“They confirmed that I need to wear a female swimming costume despite having to compete with the men, which ‘outs’ me as a woman who is transgender,” Coombes told the Reading Chronicle. “I explained to the person on the phone that they are not allowed to do that, and he didn’t have an answer.”
so she's a woman enough to be required to wear a women's swimsuit, but not woman enough to be allowed to swim in the women's competitions?
And she's woman enough that the Reading Chronicle blurred out her nipples/boobs in their picture!
I sort of like the recent (running, I think) competition where the trans girl was allowed to compete, and she and the cis girl who came in after her got the same medals and place on the podium as if it was a tie. Second place, I believe. That seems much more fair than this.
Edit: it was California track athlete AB Hernandez. Several nice stories about how mutually supportive the girls were. But now I'm seeing a story about Oregon cis girls stepping down from a podium because they refused to be there with a different trans girl. Because I guess hating on her was more important to them than celebrating their own win. Sigh.
They don't though. This isn't a gotcha that will make the bigots second guess themselves, there will be no internal discomfort or recognition of internal contradictions, because exclusion is the point. The more stupid barriers there are, the less trans people participate.
There is power in protests like these, but the power lies in the way it forces the people who aren't deep down the transphobia rabbit hole to challenge their previously unchallenged opinions.
There was a committee hearing out the public on a bathroom bill. When a trans man said this bill is stupid would you want me to go to the women's bathroom when I look like this(he was very muscular and a full beard), the committee head and author of the proposed bill short circuited. The guy explained under the bill he would have to go use the women's bathroom or risk arrest.
The asshole committee head couldn't wrap his head around it. Why do these bigots always forget about trans men? Even after explaining that he was a woman that transitioned to a man and that's why he's a trans man, the asshole was just sputtering and failing to say anything coherent. The whole room was just laughing at him. He eventually dropped the bill less than an hour later.
That's what I'm saying though. He dropped it, not because his mind was changed, not because he had suddenly become less transphobic, but because the people around him, who hadn't really thought about this much, suddenly had to think about it, and that social pushback forced the bigot to change course.
My Dad didn't get it either until I showed him pictures of a friend of mine who looks very much like a man, and is in fact, a trans man.
I knew this particular trans man when he was a feminine lesbian, and knew him the entire journey through the transition since it was public knowledge in our shared social circle at the time.
Since then, the old social media has been erased and you wouldn't know if you didn't know.
I said I'm fine going to the bathroom with my friend either way. But he's going to get called out going to women's room now.
I said what I'd been saying, it's always been illegal in living memory to assault people or peep in bathrooms. That's not going to change. And having guards to check genitals is way worse than the current risk of running into a bathroom criminal.
He finally got it after seeing the photos though and dropped it.
Yeah, their thinking is probably something along the lines of 'shouldn't have gotten tits if you wanted to swim' or whatever. This is definitely not going to cause them to think.