This Evert tweet in response to Bob shows how muddled these debates become. Renee never won a set off Evert, I think what Chris meant was that Renee was competitive as a WTA player despite being in her mid 40’s. Other than Martina N and Kimiko Date can’t think of other women playing well into their 40’s. At age 44 1/2 Renee Richard’s reached #20 in the WTA rankings. Neither Martina nor Kimiko did that.
Now the next thing is going to get me in trouble with some here. There are things, right or wrong, that elicit visceral reactions in other people because we are HUMAN, and we are shaped by our environment and upbringing. Again right or wrong.
I’m old enough to remember miscegenation laws in this country. Older folks confessed to me that they wanted to throw up literally when they saw a mixed race couple kissing in public.
Ditto if they saw a same sex couple.
Some people are still uncomfortable seeing this in public.
All I’m saying is reacting per our upbringing/culture/ is spontaneous; we decide if that reaction is ok or something we need to work on. *Some* of those same older folks have told me also they realized their reaction was horribly wrong per their evolving values/principles.
Now I totally get Federberg’s reaction per transgender male to female. To me, castration or anything involving my junk is a sensitive (no jokes) subject and I also have a visceral reaction. Like Federberg I can’t relate to that at all. Call it male heteronormative behavior, whatever. Yes I GET that other persons may not feel that way about their biological genitalia but I do.
Now myself personally, people born hermaphrodite ( born with ambiguous genitalia) I do think that is such a tough biological roll of the dice when you’re born. There are cases where doctors/parents make a split second decision to make the child conforming to male or female.
That people are uncomfortable isn’t the issue but how this leads them to treat others , whether kindly and understanding and with fairness, versus with open hostility and even violence is the bigger issue to me. These “ PC” activists don’t spring out of a vacuum, there are horrible accounts of continuous prejudice/hostility/injuring and even killing trans or non-binary people.
At the same time I’ve dealt with school counselors which leads me to believe that kids today are just as screwed up and confused as my generation was. Now you mix in social media, technology, an over reliance on western medicine as the solution, and cultural and political wars and bingo, what a SNAFU! So stuff like dealing with a child’s gender confusion without informing the parents or involving them in the conversation is wrong IMO. Some friends told me they were the last to know that school officials were addressing their child with a different pronoun. And I’m not talking about homophobic or transphobic people. And that prison issue, it is NOT transphobic not to allow transgender into women prisons openly, just as it’s not to ban them from competing in sports together.
www.bbc.com
