Do the “Fewer than 10” transgender athletes out of half a million that Charlie Baker, president of the NCAA, is aware of represent a “serious fairness issue”, Pete? Fucking pussy.
“Sure,” he said. “And that’s why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians… in Washington, trying to use this as a political pawn.” Buttigieg added that, in his view, “chess is different from weightlifting, and weightlifting is different from volleyball, and middle school is different from the Olympics.” “So that’s exactly why I think that we shouldn’t be grandstanding on this as politicians,” he said. “We should be empowering communities and organizations and schools to make the right decisions.”
That seems like a reasonable take to me. The leagues and organizations would probably know best how to handle these few outliers better than some old suits in a capital building somewhere far removed.
What makes it unreasonable is that he is saying “Let the transphobes discriminate. It’s fine if trans people are mistreated and excluded from society. They don’t deserve protection.”
This is why Democrats have a popularity problem.
“We could make things better, but we aren’t going to, and it’s not our fault if we stand here and watch things getting worse” is not a policy that resonates with people. It’s sociopathic.
That’s a wild stretch of meaning you made up versus the actual words said.
if politicians can’t make decisions as good as subject experts, they should discuss it with subject experts. else why do politicians even have a job?
Politicians don’t need to be involved in everything. You’d want politicians involved in your sports too?
Another white cis gay man dusting his hands off and says “Well I got mine” then pulls up the ladder behind him.
This is a stupid made up wedge issue. The real question should be - what is sports and what exactly are athletes competing for?
Why is it the default in sports male and female categories? Is it because they are physically different? Is it because one has a uterus? is it because of hormones so males and females develop differently? We have managed, through scientific breakthroughs, hormone replacement therapy to be able to transform our own bodies into what we want and that in itself is an achievement - albeit it isn’t perfect yet - but that’s another topic.
If the goal is to compete and display human physical prowess and strategy in a regulated environment then male/female/other/etc. categories shouldn’t exist. It should only be rated as ‘where do I stand as a human being among my peers in X sport?’
Trying to fit a gender into a flawed categorical system of sports is bound to cause friction.
I just don’t understand why the fuck sports are held in such high regard that we have to have politicians commenting on them anyway. Like imagine if a bunch of politicians suddenly took a stance on Magic: The Gathering tournament eligibility, or who is or isn’t allowed to be in a book club.
For the life of me I will just never understand why we treat sports like they’re some sacred pillar of society. It’s grownups playing a game. None of this shit matters.
lol that’s ok, Dems. i still remember how long it took for yall to champion same-sex marriage. i still remember HRC’s opposition as she ran for president in 2008. now i won’t forget how your party turned on trans people in the 2020s.
keep it up!
God what a pathetic shit head, no wonder he bombed in the primary. He’s no different than Gavin Newsome
This signals that he could actually be moving into position to be inevitable nominee Newsom’s 2028 losing mate. I had been thinking the DNC’s failure strategy team was going to go with Gillibrand.
I love Democrats. They think these positions will “win” them voters on the right, who will never vote Democrat. Meanwhile, this gives yet another reason for Leftists like me to say I’m permanently done with this party.
Democrats should be focused on rampant income inequality, skyrocketing housing costs, growing student loan interest rates, rising cost of gas, scathing Medicaid cuts, attacks on immigrant rights and reproductive rights. Instead, they think taking up conservative populist talking points is the way to go. Have fun losing yet another winnable election, motherfuckers.
Also, as a member of the LGBTQ community, FUCK buttigieg. Our community stands together. He is a traitor who only cares about his own image.
His dad would be so ashamed of him. SMH
As a gay leftist, i never trusted Pete
How about that
I choose to believe based on that URL that he is the secret love child of Gramsci and Sanders
This is canon actually
he said this the same day evangelicals begged the supreme court to take up the case overturning obergefell
Pete, you may think you’re speaking to both sides of the Democratic base, but you’re actually just making the moderates shrug and the left want to throttle you.
Just in case you thought Buttigieg was useful for anything other than Transportation Secretary, here you go.
Controlled opposition party you say?
And this is why any queer person who knows half a lick of history is, at minimum, suspicious of assimilationist sentiments if not outright hostile to them.
🖕 Fuck you too, Pete. You don’t give a shit about fairness, pandering asswipe.
What would be the solution here? Trying to maintain fairness in sports is just gonna be a game of wack-a-mole. Women’s leagues were created because it was believed they couldn’t compete at the same level. Its argued that Trans women shouldn’t play in women’s leagues because they had too much testosterone, but some biological women also have increased testosterone. Should the league someone qualifies for be determined by testosterone measurements? Just have everyone qualify for men’s leagues unless they can prove they’re testosterone is below a specific threshold?
It’s almost like this issue is more complicated than just “if you don’t support trans women in sports, than you’re a right wing fascist and not a leftist.”
It’s not binary, and it’s not team sports, puns intended.
Dave Chappelle makes a great point about this on one of his specials. “If LeBron James got a sex change today, should he be allowed to play for the WNBA and score 800 points per game?”
If I was a girl, or had daughters that were aspiring athletes, and trans women came in and started beating records to the point no women could compete with…? This is real and has happened.
It’s a complicated issue. The people who say you’re not a leftist if you even question this at all, aren’t actually leftists themselves, their just ignorant assholes.
The billionaires are happy we’re arguing about this, instead of talking about taxing the wealth they did not earn and do not deserve.
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“If LeBron James got a sex change today, should he be allowed to play for the WNBA and score 800 points per game?”
If LeBron James got on HRT, then he wouldn’t play like pre-transition LeBron James because that’s like the opposite of taking steroids. Also, isn’t Dave Chappelle the guy who had a whole anti-woke special and had Musk on his show?
The billionaires are happy we’re arguing about this, instead of talking about taxing the wealth they did not earn and do not deserve.
Yes. Only a small fraction of people is trans and only a small fraction of that compete in sports. What’s even there to argue about?
Leftist or not, transphobia is transphobia.
This is such a dumb take. LeBron James makes about $50 million a year. The highest WNBA salary is about $250,000. Rookie NBA players make about a million a year. Absolutely none of them would give up that just to score “800 points a game”.
Yeah, women have unfair advantages over men. It wouldn’t be fair to them, they went through a lot just to join us after all.
But people can figure out what is fair on their own and politicians can learn to let reasonable people live decent lives without their stupid uninformed perspectives.
Every fucken time these stupid bitches think they need to go right. Every fucken time all that does is alienate their own base. This shit isnt fucking hard. It literally couldn’t be easier.
Nah, they don’t think. They cash donor checks, and then do what they’re told.
Inskeep asked Buttigieg for his own opinion on transgender rights, to which he replied, “I think the approach starts with compassion. Compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them. Like, wondering, ‘Wait a minute. I got a daughter in a sports league. Is she going to be competing with boys right now?’ And just taking everybody seriously.”
“I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies of my party,” he continued. “For example, around sports, where I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports.”
When Inskeep pressed Buttigieg on whether he believes a parent who has complained about a trans athlete competing in girls’ school sports “has a case,” he agreed.
“Sure,” he said. “And that’s why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians… in Washington, trying to use this as a political pawn.”
I was expecting a more nuanced case and was disappointed when I didn’t get one.
If you’re going to hand out medals, I think you should borrow from how they do it in boxing: by weight class. Or limb length or whatever matters to the sport, so that you’re competing on skill, not whoever was born with the better [insert sport here] body.
Shouldn’t the league be the one who comes up with their equivalent of weight class? And Isn’t that who he is deferring to in the quote?
Its funny how many people in this thread are pissed off when he essentially just acknowledged that physical differences do exist and probably should have some rules made, just not by politicians who have 0 expertise on the matter.
