WWTBAM Bored

Chris Mosier, a transgendered athlete, qualified for the U.S. Men's Duathlon national team (it's sort of a triathlon with an extra running leg instead of the swimming leg). He will also be appearing, in the buff, in ESPN's Body Issue, out next week (typically the athletes selected are posed to minimize or eliminate exposure of their private parts). He competed for the U.S. team last month in the World Championships in Spain (it's not an Olympic sport, so this is the top level of international competition there is). He finished 144th out of 434 competitors overall, 26th out of 47 overall in his age group (35-39), and second in the U.S. in his age group. There is international women's competition in this sport, and Mosier had competed as a woman in the past.

Obviously, this is just a girl who couldn't cut it in women's competition and decided to go through years of treatment and surgery just so she could take advantage of those weaker men, and it obviously worked, since she finished ahead of nearly 300 of those weaklings in this competition.

http://espn.go.com/olympics/story/_/pag ... issue-2016

The fact that you see nothing wrong with a particular athlete taking steroids and winning while the others it competes with can't says a lot about your definition of fairness.

BackInTex wrote:The fact that you see nothing wrong with a particular athlete taking steroids and winning while the others it competes with can't says a lot about your definition of fairness.

Mosier has to comply with the requirements of the US Anti-Doping Agency, the same as any other competitor, to make sure he does not have abnormally high testosterone levels. I guess by your definition, any athlete who takes insulin for diabetes should be banned as well.

I've wondered about the man-to-women side of the coin, though. If someone went through puberty as a man, then transitioned into being a woman, they have the musculature of a man. That never entirely goes away. (It goes to flab without exercise in both men & women, but that's another story.) This would give them an edge in sports that favor strength, I'd say.

If all sports adopted height & weight classes instead of separation-by-gender this could be more fair in many ways, but brute strength would still win out where it counts. And many supposedly unmatched contests which really weren't would never have been seen.

BackInTex wrote:The fact that you see nothing wrong with a particular athlete taking steroids and winning while the others it competes with can't says a lot about your definition of fairness.

Calling this person "it" says a lot about you

triviawayne wrote:

BackInTex wrote:The fact that you see nothing wrong with a particular athlete taking steroids and winning while the others it competes with can't says a lot about your definition of fairness.

Calling this person "it" says a lot about you

You've got your jock strap too tight around your neck.

There is nothing wrong with what I wrote to those not looking for something wrong. "it" is a impersonal, gender neutral pronoun. The assertion was that SSS is O.K. with any athlete, man or woman, being given special accommodation that gives them an advantage provided they are a politically correct protected class.

"athlete" is an impersonal, gender neutral noun, therefore "it" is an appropriate pronoun where the subject could be either.

BackInTex wrote: The assertion was that SSS is O.K. with any athlete, man or woman, being given special accommodation that gives them an advantage provided they are a politically correct protected class.

Under BiT's theory, slaves were given "special accommodation" because they were given free room and board by their masters.

Chris Mosier competes in the same race as everyone else under the same conditions and has to satisfy the same anti-doping requirements as everyone else. He has had surgery and he takes medication as do many athletes. His surgery was somewhat different, but I doubt you'd get many people to say that what he's gone through has given him an unfair competitive advantage. I don't think you would have had a problem with him having had surgery to correct a leg deformity, even though that's as much of a "special accommodation" as sex change surgery, or if he took insulin or heart medication, even though without it, he couldn't compete safely.

Unless of course, people like you get to decide what sorts of surgeries and treatments are acceptable and which are not because they're not for a good enough reason.

silverscreenselect wrote: Unless of course, people like you get to decide what sorts of surgeries and treatments are acceptable and which are not because they're not for a good enough reason.

Someone decides this. Not me, but someone does. A person identifying as a duck getting webs surgically implanted between their toes would certainly be deemed illegal by most sane people. There are lines drawn. We disagree on where those lines are. Political correctness has run amok. I did not consider Pistorius' artificial legs to be fair. It has nothing to do with his mental state or orientation or anything other than the physical bodies competing against one another. In my opinion, those bodies should be the bodies one is born with, unchanged and unaided by unnatural means. Is it fair that he lost his legs and other didn't? An irrelevant question. The Olympics, or other athletic competitions, are not suppose to be about life's fairness of the distribution of physical attributes. Just the competition of those physical attributes given to individuals at birth and appropriately developed by the athlete.

BackInTex wrote: In my opinion, those bodies should be the bodies one is born with, unchanged and unaided by unnatural means.

Well, doctors have been performing surgery and prescribing medication for athletes for years. That's changing their bodies by unnatural means. Hundreds of athletes compete professionally with diabetes, including Jay Cutler. Shaun White had reconstructive heart surgery as a baby. Without it, he wouldn't have lived, let alone competed in athletics. And that's just some of the people who were born with diseases and defects. If you add in those who are injured while competing and undergo reconstructive surgery, you would have difficulty filling out most professional team rosters. While we're at it, let's also ban eyeglasses and contact lenses. After all, they're not the bodies one is born with, unchanged and unaided by unnatural means.

silverscreenselect wrote:

BackInTex wrote: In my opinion, those bodies should be the bodies one is born with, unchanged and unaided by unnatural means.

Well, doctors have been performing surgery and prescribing medication for athletes for years. That's changing their bodies by unnatural means. Hundreds of athletes compete professionally with diabetes, including Jay Cutler. Shaun White had reconstructive heart surgery as a baby. Without it, he wouldn't have lived, let alone competed in athletics. And that's just some of the people who were born with diseases and defects. If you add in those who are injured while competing and undergo reconstructive surgery, you would have difficulty filling out most professional team rosters. While we're at it, let's also ban eyeglasses and contact lenses. After all, they're not the bodies one is born with, unchanged and unaided by unnatural means.

Or we could go with your position, whatever you need to beat the opponent, or be happy.....whatever.

I get upset even when people use "it" to refer to a dog or cat. The general usage rules are that humans (& to a lot of us, animals we take into our homes) get referred to as "he" or "she". I, of course, & it turns out many others, though they're mostly not on this list, will use "they" for animate beings when the gender is not important/integral to the story.

Even people who use "it" for cats & dogs tend to use "they" when referring to the beings in the plural, because "it" has no plural. And if someone had been referring, say, to a chair as "it", & needed the concept of "chair" pluralized, they'd say "chairs", because, well, "it" has no plural form.

ghostjmf wrote:And if someone had been referring, say, to a chair as "it", & needed the concept of "chair" pluralized, they'd say "chairs", because, well, "it" has no plural form.

They or them.

Yeah, I have heard/read chairs referred to as "them" in the aggregate. But when a person is talked about its not accepted use to call the person "it". Even if you literally cannot determine gender (they're viewed from too far away, they're bundled into a giant raincoat, they just look ambiguous to you).

ghostjmf wrote:Yeah, I have heard/read chairs referred to as "them" in the aggregate. But when a person is talked about its not accepted use to call the person "it". Even if you literally cannot determine gender (they're viewed from too far away, they're bundled into a giant raincoat, they just look ambiguous to you).

I have never heard or seen that usage, other than as a deliberate sign of disrespect. --Bob

Bob78164 wrote:I have never heard or seen that usage, other than as a deliberate sign of disrespect. --Bob

Now you can no longer honestly say that.

https://ldpottinger.wordpress.com/

These are some of the things that not only help the company and its product but the athlete and its publicity as well, as I mentioned earlier.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4137680/

assessing the concussed athlete, and its impairment

http://fedelestudio.com/electric-athlet ... espn-rise/

show the power of each athlete and its presence between each and his gear

http://entertainment-law.lawyers.com/bl ... mpass.html

Athlete and its representatives

https://storify.com/AdamHallawi/violent ... w-the-belt

by the athlete and its followers

http://www.blackroll.com/blogs/news-1

the athlete and its performance skills

http://www.incia.u-bordeaux1.fr/spip.php?article251

interactions between the athlete and its equipment

As I inferred implied above, you have to quit looking for the negative to see the neutral.

BackInTex wrote:As I inferred above, you have to quit looking for the negative to see the neutral.

You may have implied, but inferring is something done only by the listener/reader.

BackInTex wrote:

Bob78164 wrote:I have never heard or seen that usage, other than as a deliberate sign of disrespect. --Bob

Now you can no longer honestly say that.

https://ldpottinger.wordpress.com/

These are some of the things that not only help the company and its product but the athlete and its publicity as well, as I mentioned earlier.

BackinTex wrote:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4137680/

assessing the concussed athlete, and its impairment

In this example, the word "its" refers to the athlete's balance, not the athlete.

BackinTex wrote:http://fedelestudio.com/electric-athlet ... espn-rise/

show the power of each athlete and its presence between each and his gear

In this example, the word "its" refers to the athlete's power.

BackinTex wrote:http://entertainment-law.lawyers.com/bl ... mpass.html

Athlete and its representatives

In this context, "Athlete" (capitalized) is a defined term that almost certainly includes the athlete's loan-out corporation (usually formed to reduce taxes).

BackinTex wrote:https://storify.com/AdamHallawi/violent ... w-the-belt

by the athlete and its followers

Are you sure this was written in English? Here's the second sentence: Dunning (1999) describes that through civilization research has identified a shift of change in sports by implementing rule- governed stylized violence, where it is formal and there are rules to preventing any serious type of injury.

BackinTex wrote:http://www.blackroll.com/blogs/news-1

the athlete and its performance skills

I'll bet the native language of the author is German. It certainly wasn't carefully written. Here's the next sentence: Prevention by regenerative physiotherapeutic training prevents injuries and therefore people's health.

BackinTex wrote:http://www.incia.u-bordeaux1.fr/spip.php?article251

interactions between the athlete and its equipment

I can't get through to this site but the URL indicates that it is likely translated from the French.

BackinTex wrote:As I inferred above, you have to quit looking for the negative to see the neutral.

I'll stand by my earlier statement. People don't refer to other people as "it" unless (as was the killer in Silence of the Lambs) the speaker is trying to dehumanize the person being referred to. --Bob

Estonut wrote:

BackInTex wrote:As I inferred above, you have to quit looking for the negative to see the neutral.

You may have implied, but inferring is something done only by the listener/reader.

Correct....and corrected. And I got to use the new Strike font.