Katelyn Burns: This poor girl was the class president but was a bench warmer on a marginal HS team, got reported, the police were called to investigate her gender, and now she dropped out of school and is taking online classes. She transitioned in 1st grade and never had a whiff of male puberty.

This poor girl was the class president but was a bench warmer on a marginal HS team, got reported, the police were called to investigate her gender, and now she dropped out of school and is taking online classes. She transitioned in 1st grade and never had a whiff of male puberty.

stories like this give the lie to the idea that the right is interested in protecting these children. per their own narrative, this girl is a victim of “gender ideology” or whatever. but the reaction from the right is always hostility, ostracization and violence.

Mom of transgender girl athlete says Florida's investigation has destroyed her daughter's lifewww.yahoo.com A Florida public school employee who faces firing because she allowed her transgender daughter to play girls high school volleyball assailed those who outed her child, saying Tuesday that the ensuing ...

These furors about trans people in girls HS sports are so deeply ridiculous to anyone willing to think for 10 seconds about how low-stakes HS sports are, period. Their primary function is to keep the kids busy from 3:30 until their parent is done with work and ready to pick them up.

also in most cases the number of trans kids playing high school sports in a given state is single digits entire moral panics centered around attacking one kid

Yeah I remember reading that the statewide number in Ohio was I think 3, or 5, or something like that. Just a total non-issue.

Utah was similar when they went off on this bullshit. Maybe half a dozen kids state-wide.

Which the Utah governor noted in his stated reasons for vetoing some garbage transphobic state bill or another.

Doesn’t make Cox any less a piece of shit.

Literally centering Two-Minutes Hates on kids.

Utah couldn't cite a single example 🙃

i think this underrates the size and power of the youth sports industrial complex and its importance to the culture of the exurban dealership-owner/realtor bourgeois class

Our high school league produced lots of professional athletes. They took athletics very seriously in our district.

This. There's a weird obsession, even among the nominally wealthy, to see their kids excel and go pro in sports and it creates the crack TERFs lean on... it makes no rational sense when you look at all the evidence, but the possibility FiFi will be passed over by a scout justifies many heinous acts.

Once their kids cross over into the travel teams for sports, some parents lose their f’n minds.

It's always the same the complaint is always from someone who either A: came in 6th or B: has beaten the trans athlete on more than one occasion talking about an unfair physical advantage

In our area, it was about the slight hope for a sports based scholarship, so we also took sports very seriously. Any way to get funding for college was important since it was such a poor area.

Sure, probably. I don't have kids and when I did this stuff in the 80s/90s nobody cared. There were a grand total of three Extracurriculars: band, basketball, volleyball. Band was before school and the sports were after. Nobody cared and it existed to accommodate 9-to-5 parental work.

Our little league field has signs up that literally say "no one is here scouting our players" because parents are so bizarre about kids' athletics now.

Woooooooow

Look up what colleges cost in the 80s vs now and you have your reason why people go crazy about HS sports now

in my experience the people who are craziest about youth sports are also wealthy enough to have no problem paying for their kids' college (whether their kid can get into their chosen college without an athletic exemption is another matter)

The thing about wealthy people is they rarely say "let the people who need this more take it, I'm going to be fine." Even if they can easily afford the tuition, they're still going to be maximally driven to get the free rides.

They funnel the college tuition money into private sports coaching for their kid. The scholarship becomes ROI.

100%. For the wealthy class, a sports scholarship is an elite status symbol.

I was thinking about the kind of rich people who don't spend any of their own money, but I suspect these are the almost-rich people who spend all their money displaying status for the rest of the almost-rich.

Army of softball/volleyball Girl Dads

no, those people do not care about the high school teams, they're all about private travel leagues.

Downstream of Reagan once again: making colleges so expensive has made sports scholarships desperately valuable to the tune of 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars, so HS sports have to be treated this seriously because of the policy choice to make college expensive to discourage hippie protests.

Indeed. I have friends and coworkers who spend thousands of dollars and every weekend of their lives traveling to various games and tournaments where their kids play baseball and/or hockey. Just an incredible suck of time and money.

But they all do club sports!

A key factor for volleyball, field hockey, etc is there is BIG money on the line for thousands of HS athletes, along w admission to top schools that is only open to athletes. Type A parents are not going to let anything get in the way of their Olivia winning & getting a full ride to college.

It is impossible for these people to care about girls/women's sports in a non-creepy way.

Always a dead giveaway when the Politics of something a person would never care about in a million years suddenly become very very urgent.

You know what I have always been profoundly interested in: YA library books and amateur women's sports. By the way, I'm totally normal and cool.

My God, the implications for two events at a high school regional swim meet. O tempora, o mores!

Back in my day…. bsky.app/profile/zbs....

If you’ve ever met the Little League Dad who’s a bit too concerned over the kid with “a funny name and a suspiciously high batting average” and whether he’s lying about his age to juice stats, then you are very prepared for when Gary starts mouthing off in the bleachers and transvestigating 12 y.o.s

Exactly. And yeah some kids (trans or cis) have better genetics for certain sports. Since the dawn of time this has been true. Only girls sports are seen as that not being 'fair'. Micheal Phelps being half boat is seen as awesome. Super tall, high jumping men in the NBA are revered.

None of these 'super concerned' girls' sports people are insisting that my klutzy, unathletic kid should be able to compete, that would be insane at any level beyond like toddler stuff.

People are losing their minds over the hypothetical situation of a trans athlete somehow costing their Kayleigh a sports scholarship. There's a .001% chance of that happening, but they'll spend hundreds of hours screaming and passing legislation about it, because there's nothing else to worry about.

I did the math recently and assuming athletic ability and interest is distributed amongst trans women the same as cis women, there are fewer than 1000 trans women in the entire country who would qualify for a D1 athletic scholarship (out of 190k total D1 athletes)

I think that's the saddest part for me

unfortunately 90% of reactionary freaks in this country live vicariously through their kids' sports accomplishments; a lower percentage do it through their kids' academic ones and only if it's going to get them into a good school so they can be the best obedient worker possible

THIS IS WHAT IS SO UTTERLY MADDENING. There is vanishingly little money or prestige or anything of the sort in women’s sports PERIOD. even at a professional level it’s peanuts without sponsor money so I am struggling to understand why it would matter either way?!?

That’s not at all how sports are viewed in some districts, who see it as the most important, be-all, end-all, that exists — more important than academics or anything else that exists. I came up through a district like that and it was awful.

Was it all sports, and especially girls sports? My school was all about baseball, football and boy's basketball but would have been happy for every other sport to vanish (and those of us who participated in others often had to fight to keep them from being cancelled.)

They cared about girls’ volleyball and basketball. But not as much as boys’ sports and certainly not as much as football (which was venerated to a disgusting cultlike degree).

During football season they forced us to assemble each Friday afternoon for pep rallies that were not optional. I thought they were dumb and creepy but at least we got out of class. I mostly hid under the bleachers with my Walkman on. But that proved football was more important than academics.

Weekly pep rallies for football and occasional for boy's basketball was common in my school. Some other sports, like baseball and girl's basketball might get the occasional mention in the morning announcements but ones like track & field was ignored even when in the state championship.

This was pretty true in my small rural town. Our teams didn't win; parents weren't there - tho I think another major function of school sports is that they're used as training wheels for nationalism. Not hard to funnel "school spirit" and "my team" affinity into patriotism and a political party.

Is that why ththey emphasized it above academics? Fuck hust anothother reason to hate school sports

It's important to never give fascists a single fucking inch. They don't care about girls sports. They care about recruiting liberals in their jihad against trans people.

Post