1/x Once again, I have to say this, bc even allies, even some trans ppl are being taken in by the rhetoric of "fairness in sport" to the point where they don't know how to respond when the topic comes up. So buckle up, it's another Crip Dyke megathread you need to read all of. 2/x Fairness is always, always, always tied to its context. It is also tied to the purpose of the activity we're attempting to render "fair." If the city offers a vote on a special firefighting tax levy, gets it approved, and then uses the money to fight homelessness, that's not fair. 3/x Saying this doesn't mean taxes are inherently unfair. It's not a value judgement on firefighting or housing. Context and purpose together rendered the vote retroactively unfair. We'll often say that it was the housing spending that was unfair, but really it was the deception of voters. 4/x So when saying that trans kids in sports is "unfair" or is "fair," there's not an inherent judgement on trans kids contained within that -- at least not one that is necessarily implied by logic alone. It's an attack for sure. It's hateful and bad and all that. But rhetorically it's sneaky. 5/x Why? Because again, what's fair is determined by purpose and context. By simply announcing unfairness without going through any analysis, the people attacking trans kids are inviting you to fill in your own context, your own purpose. 6/x They aren't making an argument: they're coopting your brain to make their argument for them. And cis do we get sucked into that! We get so sucked in that often the best rebuttal we can come up with is why WE play sports, and for nearly all of us it's not to win. 7/x But epistemically, this isn't really good enough. Bc just saying we don't play to win leaves open the possibility that someone else does. The bigot just has to find one kid in a state playing to win and all your personal insight disappears in a puff of nothing. 8/x You haven't proved that trans kids playing gender-segregated sports is **Fair** with a capital F, the bigot will say. You've only proved that it's fair to you. But if it's unfair to anyone, then it's unfair. And look at this poor little white girl who cried after 7th grade hurdles! 9/x And they'll always find a poor little white girl crying on camera, bc what **feels fair** is something else again. That has to do with your expectations. If you're 13 and your parents tell you something is unfair, you'll probably believe them. And many bigots are parents. It's shitty, but... 10/x We will always have to face this. So does this mean that it really is unfair to have trans ppl compete? OH, HELL NO. Bigots' children will have to get over themselves. But WHY? How do we show that trans kids playing gender-segregated sports in their own gender category is fair? 11/x We do it by going back to purpose and context. And this is hard. When we tried it the first time we failed bc we spoke from personal experience. And when we try to make the authoritative case that it's wrong we often rely on arguments stemming from human rights, but... 12/x While it seems like the human rights arguments should work, to the bigots trans people aren't human. So the attack continues, and we flounder. We don't know what to say. We don't know how to say it. We only know that our hearts break seeing these attacks & we think there must be a rebuttal. 13/x But it always goes back to "How do we decide what's fair?" And, frankly, most of us don't even know why youth and children's sports are a thing. We think we do: it's fun for the kids, it keeps the kids busy for the parents, it tires the kids out so that they can sleep at bedtime... 14/x And all those are reasons that parents might encourage the kids to play a game of kickball. But hang on here, I'm going to blow your mind: We spend BILLIONS on child and youth sports. BILLIONS. We never even charge admission -- or at least rarely do. 15/x We build basketball courts and softball diamonds. We pay some youth coaches and a few lucky refs, too, but most of the costs are infrastructure and transport. And we do a LOT of that. And we do it with your money. These are tax dollars going to this shit. Billions of tax dollars. 16/x Surely governments aren't mowing lawns for 5th grade shot put so the little ankle biter will go to bed on time, right? Exactly right. The government has its reasons to support child and youth sports ... and the reasons are numerous, but let's start with: spending money on sport saves money. 17/x The science is in, and the science tells us that when we get kids involved in group sports, they get many benefits -- their grades go up, depression goes down, % graduating up, teen impregnating/pregnancy down. Up, down. So many things go up and so many down and it's always the right ones. 18/x And at the root of this it's because social isolation goes down, social skills and sense of belonging go up. In that group you are valued by others, and you learn to value the others that value you. Being part of a team is a model for being part of a community. 19/x In other words, kids learn to be part of a community. And that has tremendous knock-on effects for them bc pretty much all of us are going to grow up and have to participate in community in some kind of way. 20/x Ain't no one reading this a trapper in the woods who grows their own veggies and builds their own computer and satellite internet from scratch during the long, slow months of winter where there's nothing else to do but knit copper wire in front of the fire. 21/x And the benefits to the kids are important enough that parents are willing to make the case that we should tax our communities and spend that tax money on kids and youth sports. But that's not even all. Bc people who aren't parents vote for this as well. 22/x And why do they do this? Remember I said that spending money on sports ultimately saves money? Well it turns out that same research shows that when kids play more child & youth sports, they break fewer laws -- which makes sense. They're learning how to participate in community. 23/x Even if the rules against intentional grounding are stupid & fake & everyone knows that Belinda was throwing the ball away, the rule says it's not intentional grounding if she throws it past the line of scrimmage and out of bounds. So she learns -- and everyone learns -- to play by the rules. 24/x It's not that the rules are always good. And it's not that we never yell at the ref or complain to our coach. But when we want to reach our goals, it's just easier to get there if we're not constantly sending ourselves backwards by breaking the rules in obvious ways. 25/x And as it turns out, even if you think the rules against breaking the window of the hardware store to get some spray paint are stupid rules, if you learn the lesson that you get to do more graffiti art by buying the paint instead of stealing it, you'll probably buy the paint. 26/x That matters to the store owner who doesn't have to deal with broken glass. it matters to the NIMBY prig who doesn't have spiking crime numbers to complain about, and it matters to the local multimillionaire who pays less in taxes for sports fields than for housing criminalized kids. 27/x That's right, NOT PAYING FOR JAILS is a major reason why we have child and youth sports in the first place. So is not paying for welfare! All the bigots who hate trans kids really, really hate food stamps going to 17 year old Black single moms, bc they're racist eugenicist libertarians too. 28/x Everyone gets something out of kids & youth sports. The kids are better off. The parents are better off. The local businesses are better off. The dipwad bigot libertarians who only love money get to make out with their dollar bills in their money vault like a plutophilic Scrooge McDuck. 29/x And this, ultimately is why we spend billions on kids and youth sports. It's not bc of bedtimes. It's not bc it's cute to watch 7 year olds flock to a soccer ball like the darting, swirling swallows of Capistrano. 30/x We do it bc, as it turns out, breaking kids isolation from community and making sure everyone is valued by society and in turn learns to value society itself is worth the money. Sports are a way to get kids together who wouldn't otherwise come together, for the benefit of all. 31/x And the biggest benefits flow -- by design -- to the kids who are normally the most excluded, the most isolated. This isn't pro-trans bigotry or even pro-wallflower bigotry. It's the people who least benefit from society that need to learn that participation has its benefits. 32/x Without those benefits, we'll kill ourselves more often, sure, but we'll also do more crimes **bc we never learned to care about you.** And guess what? Those other kids who are used to excluding the Black kid and the trans kid and the kid who self-stims? They never learn to care about us. 33/x We have this whole system set up, and we tax 10s of millions of people and businesses, all so that we can break isolation, teach community, and develop a healthier, more cohesive society as a result, which in turn reduces the need for gov't payments to young families and $$ for jails. 34/x And as it turns out, all of this hinges on making the least welcome feel most included. It's unfair to trans kids to steal this opportunity to break isolation, to evade suicide and depression, to improve their grades, to go to college, to raise their fitness, and to make friends. 35/x But it's ALSO unfair to the potential teammates who grow up being taught that exclusion is good, actually. They grow up thinking this is right and productive and 2 tiered societies work just fine. 36/x But then it's their turn to run a business & they have to invest more training in the employees that didn't graduate, pay higher insurance for the windows that get broken more often, walk through streets where they fear getting mugged bc they know they hate others and assume others hate them. 37/x Adults are spending all this money to be able to give the next generation a better, more functional world, and the bigots are asking us to blow up those benefits. 38/x The bigots want more dead trans kids, but they also want higher tax bills and more crime and children who grow up not sure why things don't work. It's not fair. Trans exclusion from gendered sport is not fair to anyone. Not even to the crying white girl whose parents are bigots. 39/x It's not fair bc the purpose of gendered sport was never so one child could win. The purpose of gendered sport is because, **on average** when you get to the teen years there are enough guys with enough testosterone and height and muscle mass that girls' participation was discouraged. 40/x Again, we go back to the same studies that justified all of sports spending. Before Title 9, girls participation in sport was low bc their chance for meaningful opportunities were low. This was partly due to teammates sexism actively excluding even exceptional girls. 41/x But it also did have to do with those averages. And so to make sure that girls have a chance to meaningfully participate -- and thus to be valued as part of a group and to value the group in turn -- we have girls sports teams for certain age ranges. 42/x Some bigots will tell you that the unfairness is about who wins, but that misunderstands the entire purpose of sports generally, and gendered youth sports in particular. There is no right to win. We created girls' sports not so one girl named Faster McFastlegs could get one medal. 43/x We created girls' sports bc even if there's no right to win, there should be a right to be part of the group. There should be that right as a matter of basic dignity but also because taxpayers are spending a lot of money on creating a system that teaches us to value each other. 44/x Now, if trans kids were meaningfully participating in sports as the gender assigned to them at birth, then nothing the bigots are saying would be harmful or unfair. But that's also not what the data shows. 45/x The last time I looked at Mississippi, for instance, the participation rates in youth sports for girls 12-17 was over 50%, but the participation rate for out trans kids was 0%. That's right. 0%. Not rounded off. 0. 46/x The state tried to get info to justify a ban, and they found trans kids had been effectively banned already. In other words, trans kids are in the same spot as cis girls were before the Title 9 era: this is no chance to meaningfully participate. 47/x We spend all this money to make sure that every child has a chance to be part of the group, to get the benefits of the group and for the group around them to get the benefits of learning inclusion -- and ultimately for their community to benefit by preventing development of an underclass. 48/x We even recognize the barriers to kids with disabilities and create the special olympics so that they can gain the same advantages, on the same playing fields, learning and teaching the same lessons. Yet here's this one group, excluded from meaningful participation. 49/x The bigot plan is unfair to trans kids who will use more drugs, more often become addicted or pregnant or a parent, will graduate less often, suffer depression more, and die earlier. 50/x The bigot plan is unfair to cis kids who learn exclusion, will suffer in the future from the existence of an underclass and its social costs, and will have that suffering prolonged because they never learned why exclusion is wrong or the role of inclusion in creating functional societies. 51/x The bigot plan is unfair to parents who have to see their kids belong to one of those groups, cis or trans, and suffer one of those avoidable fates. 52/x And the bigot plan is unfair to taxpayers, who are spending gobbets of billion-money in order to get the benefits that our government researchers have told us we will receive from youth sports programs only to end up with higher costs for drug treatment, criminal punishment, & family support. 53/x Excluding trans kids should be something we are unwilling to consider on the basis of human dignity. But as long as bigots are out there using sports inclusion to attack trans kids, we must be able to articulate why gendered sports exist and the benefits that they provide. 54/x Child and youth sports has a CONTEXT AND A PURPOSE. We've never bothered to learn them bc with a functional gov't someone else does all this for us. But it's time we learned the context of the purpose, bc when we do, it's easy to say that excluding trans kids is unfair to everyone. /end