Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 35 Posts
  • 1.06K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Honestly, that is how I would prefer it be done. But it isn’t what OP asked for.

    It would have to be set at an operating system level, with the OS providing an API for the browser to use, while the os itself restricts installation of unapproved apps (and to work, installation of apps would have to use an allow-list or a similar age-tagging system, where any app that includes general web access has to be 18+ unless it also implements age-gating correctly).

    But yes, this would be the best system. Parental controls have never been very successful in the past, but I think part of the reason for this is that they’ve never been properly supported up and down the stack. The government should mandate that it is supported the whole way, so that parents really have the tools they need to enforce parental controls.

    Edit: I thought this was a comment in another thread. My reply here only makes sense in that context.











  • There is some merit to the idea in some highly competitive sports that trans women may retain some biological advantage over cis women.

    However, the “protect women’s sports” crowd isn’t interested in having a good faith discussion about it. For starters, they’ll cry against even the idea of preteen trans girls playing with cis girls. Or against trans women in a social women’s sport club. Outside of elite sports, the argument is literally completely irrelevant because so many other factors are far, far more significant. When you have a league consisting of people who have been playing casually for a year or two in addition to people who were only a few spots away from going pro, the difference between the genders is an irrelevancy.

    But there have also been studies that say the biological advantage is overstated. One study showed that 2 years after starting HRT, trans women retained none of the advantage they started with in push ups or sit ups, and that the advantage in a middle distance run halved. The study didn’t say, but I’d hypothesise that after 5 years that, too, would be gone.

    So at the elite levels, it’s fair to say that each sport should be making its own decision based on the types of fitness and skills involved. And those decisions should be based on the weight of evidence, not—as is usually the case today—on the vibes or because of political lobbying. Some restrictions, especially pre-hormonal transition and shortly after, are likely warranted in many cases. Longer-term restrictions are less defensible.

    And all of this assumes someone who went through a normal male puberty. It says nothing of the fact that the same crowd arguing against trans people in sport are the ones arguing against puberty blockers and allowing children to make decisions for themselves with the aid of their parents and doctors, without government intervening. If that were allowed, many of those biological advantages never would have been able to develop in the first place.







  • There are a few different things you need to know to get this, so it’s hard to blame you.

    The first is that there is a prominent and very loud transphobic community of people who cry about “women’s sports”, where what they really mean is “trans women aren’t women and shouldn’t be allowed to be in women’s spaces”, but they couch it in notions of fairness in sport. You know it’s not legitimate concern because of how often they’ve gone after cis women who just happen to look a little too masculine for their misogynistic tastes.

    You also need to know that Donald Trump, the US president, has been closely tied to these loud transphobes.

    The third thing is that at this year’s Winter Olympics, the US teams won both the men’s and women’s ice hockey competition.

    Following that win, Donald Trump called the men’s team and invited them to meet him at the White House, after the State of the Union. He derisively joked with them:

    And we have to, I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that. I do believe I probably would be impeached [if the women’s team was not invited].

    We know this because one of the men recorded the call and posted the video online. Many of the men were heard laughing in response to Trump’s sexist joke. One or two of the men posted after-the-fact that the men should not have reacted like that. Whether it’s sincere or face-saving, I’ll leave up to the reader.

    So we’ve got Trump, a member of the “protect women’s sports” movement, caught vocally deriding successful women athletes. Almost like the “protect women’s sports” movement is actually just an “exclude trans women from society” movement.