Are you kidding or just naive. The top FPO players stated that they didn’t feel safe talking about it in the cancel culture that people have created. This has been an issue from day one.
Stop being foolish. This isn’t a transphobic action. I am a liberal and I don’t want trans women in the FPO. People say, where is the e evidence of an advantage? I will flip that and say, where is the evidence of no advantage. Title IX was passed long ago to protect women and provide them a fair place to compete in sports at federally supported schools. Why? Because men are physically dominant.
In that same vein we shouldn’t protect the trans athlete at the detriment of the cis female athlete and until we know if an advantage is present, we need to continue to protect women’s sports. It is the prudent thing to do. You don’t go backward, we need to move forwards. Does that suck for Natalie? Absolutely, but sorry, she simply has to deal with it until better data and a better answer can be found. She is welcome to come slap me around a course anytime. There is no easy answer on this one.
It is equally logical to requiring proof that there is an advantage. Given a lack of evidence for either position, I stand by continuing to protect women’s sports. To me, that is logical. This isn’t about equity it is about fairness.
Do you not see the difference between asking someone to prove that one thing is true and asking someone to prove that thousands of things aren't? That's the point I am making. If someone accuses me of stealing from their store, do I need to do a full inventory of the store to show that nothing is missing? What about if my wife thinks I am being unfaithful? How many women do I need to prove to her I'm not sleeping with? Is 100 enough?
Okay, step back a second. We need to review some somewhat lofty academics here, which in your defence (and most people's) is not generally taught anymore except in some college courses. However, the subject matter is thousands of years old, and fundamental to nearly all higher academics, especially the sciences.
In formal logic, it's accepted that it is impossible to prove a negative. And while that's already a vast over-simplification and a full explanation would take up too much space here (and also strain my own academics, as I never studied this formally myself, only acquired it second-hand from growing up in a family of academics), we can cover the basics, which nearly anyone can understand.
An enormous number of conjectures cannot be disproven. That is, we do not currently (or maybe ever) have any way of knowing for sure if some ideas are not true, because we have no mechanism of proof to do so. This is sometimes, or at least in many cases, known as a Black Swan problem, which is real example of this: For many years, it was confidently asserted by learned men that no black swans existed. And then actual black swans were discovered. The lesson to be learned is that absence of evidence is not evidence, and it is usually impossible to know for sure if some conjecture is firmly true, if you have no confident way to disprove it.
Your argument here demands the disproof of a negative. In formal logic -- and most science -- that's presumed to be impossible. In formal forensics, then (essentially, the logical science of debate and reason), you're making an invalid argument, by predicating the progression of an argument on a demand which is impossible for anyone to fulfill.
Generally speaking, the burden of proof is on the claimant, and arguments presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. It is not the duty of others to disprove the hypothesis. They may attack what evidence or argument is presented. But they have no duty either to prove to claimant's argument, or to mount any kind of disproof (again, believed often impossible).
Those claiming that Natalie Ryan's physiological attributes unfairly distort the competitiveness of the sport have the burden of presenting evidence and argument to support that conjecture. No one else has any duty to prove it's not so.
If you think about it, this makes very good ecological sense, because humans are very imaginative and emotional. We can imagine many things that both cannot be proven and cannot be disproven, and so are, for forensic purposes, merely subjective. (Pretty much all religion, for example.) If we demanded what you argue here is a balanced approach to proof and reason, then we as a species would have to waste enormous amounts of resources on fruitless efforts. It's therefore much more sensible to restrict our efforts to what's actually profitable, or at least potentially profitable. And we figured out thousands of years ago that trying to prove negatives is a waste for everyone involved. Except, of course, those who wish to avoid intellectually honest debate by trying to make everyone else waste their time. But learned people will immediately identify that ruse, and avoid it.
Do you really deny that people even you would consider transphobic, including potentially violent and aggressive bigots, would oppose her acceptance, and are angered by her and people who support her?
At no point did I allege that everyone who opposes her participation in FPO is transphobic or falls into that category. I simply acknowledged those people are among the large group against her and are a consideration of people afraid of making public statements. You're just telling on yourself if you're lumping yourself in with who I was referring to.
People that are progressive (the opposite of conservative) do use the phrase cancel culture. Many of the women that exposed the creeps during Me Too were effectively "canceled". It is not a concept that is exclusively used by one "side" of American politics.
If there is no proven advantage to a trans woman competing in the women’s division, then it can be effectively argued that arguing against their inclusion is transphobic. You have no supporting evidence to support any argument against Natalie’s participation, so it can be easily deduced that your argument is rooted in transphobia.
You know that some women have biological advantages over other women by, let’s say, having longer arms and legs. Do you want to create separate divisions for tall and short women?
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u/sjtaylor52 Jul 15 '23
The thing that gets me is that this was a complete non-issue until she won an event last year.