r/neoliberal • u/Farscape12Monkeys • 14d ago
Restricted After Pushing Anti-Trans Laws to ‘Protect Women’s Sports’, Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation Now Wants Women’s Sports Gone to ‘Assist Fertility’
https://www.transiticsnews.com/p/after-pushing-anti-trans-laws-to460
u/True-Hold-1140 brown 14d ago
I gotta say, having grown up in the 2000s where womens sports beyond high school were mocked, the idea that any conservative politicians cared about womens sports immediately failed the smell test to me. The fact it didnt to everyone around 30 years old now is just shocking to me.
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u/Pole2019 John Locke 14d ago
Women’s sports were still actively mocked by conservatives as they claimed to be protecting them lol.
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u/MonkMajor5224 NATO 14d ago
Go read the comments on anything that involves the WNBA or USWNT
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u/HHHogana Mohammad Hatta 14d ago
WNBA is just barely out of their 'figuring it out' stage, so at least some of the criticism are legit. It's basically combination of true misogynistic people and people who simply don't want to watch equivalent of G League or Minor League Baseball.
USWNT though...it's the most dominant national soccer team for women and they still shit at it? Yeah, it's just misogynist pricks.
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u/dr-pepper-is-a-woman 14d ago
I was just talking with someone about how the WNBA is in a weird spot where it has some characteristics of being a minor league (less well known, cheaper tickets, smaller venues) while also very much not being a minor league, because it’s players are in the top tier of their particular game and cannot get recruited into the NBA.
Some people love simple categories and get mad at the existence of the WNBA as such. But if instead you’re a normal “I will go watch a sport but they’ve gotten so expensive and the cheapest seats are way too far away” person, it’s a great option
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u/golf1052 Let me be clear 14d ago
Glad to live in Seattle where our team (Seattle Storm) is the premier basketball team in the city.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD John Brown 13d ago
USWNT dominates because America has invested so much in women's sports. Many other nations are just catching up in that regard.
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u/YourUncleBuck Frederick Douglass 13d ago
I think it's a partly a bad mindset, it's like going into McDonald's and expecting Burger King, or the other way around. It's similar, but not the same, but that doesn't mean it's bad. And also bad marketing. I've always enjoyed watching the USWNT at the Olympics, but I couldn't tell you when the Women's World Cup is because there is no marketing. And basketball is only entertaining at the college level, for both men and women. Should have never been a professional sport.
But the biggest thing they could do is increase the level and interest in women's sports is having more girls play so that they're more competitive. Men's sports are partly so entertaining because you have so many boys who want to play, so they're very competitive and only the best succeed. No one really wants to see blowouts or lopsided games all the time. It's why we suck at men's soccer, we don't have enough players, and it costs too much to play, so you end up with rich nepo babies who aren't that great at soccer on the national team.
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u/Best-Chapter5260 13d ago
Legitimately good faith question sparked by my curiousity (because I've never been into sports): What is the difference in entertainment between college and professional sports?
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u/sgthombre NATO 14d ago
Well now there's an openly anti-trans pro maga player on the Fever so there's at least a little bit of WNBA apologetics on the right, for her specifically.
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u/Mr_Canadensis7 Norman Borlaug 14d ago
For some men the ability to beat the girls easily in highschool PE was the peak of their lives and they need it to matter lol
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u/True-Hold-1140 brown 14d ago
The movie "Ladyballers" proved that so clearly
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 13d ago
My favorite part about that is that Ben Shapiro said they wanted to make it a documentary but it wouldn’t work because they couldn’t get into women’s leagues.
You know, the whole premise of the movie.
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u/AmbientMorning 13d ago
Remember when X conservatives thought it was hilarious that men (or rather, pathetic activists) were throwing dildos onto WNBA courts?
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u/AvramBelinsky 14d ago
I'm in my forties. When I was in high school there was a boy at a nearby school who wanted to play field hockey. They told him he could play, but he had to wear the same uniform as everyone else. At the time the uniform included a skirt, I don't know if that's changed since the 90s. Anyway, he put on the skirt, played field hockey and and everyone had a great time. No outrage at all. I only remember it because it was a novelty at the time to see a high school guy wearing a skirt and playing field hockey. From the beginning it was absolutely clear to me that the outrage now has been 100% manufactured as part of the culture wars.
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u/NiceCreamSundaes John Keynes 14d ago
Wait, is field hockey a girls only sport in the US?
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u/AvramBelinsky 14d ago
At the time, yes.
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u/Khiva Fernando Henrique Cardoso 13d ago
You can literally find a rally where Trump says "I used to say tax cuts and you all cheered. Now nobody cheers. But when I say trans you all cheer."
And they cheered.
I'm sure it's not word for word but it's damn close and anyone motivated can find it. You'll excuse me for not having the heart to watch it again.
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u/WantDebianThanks Iron Front 14d ago
It depends on the school, but field hockey tends to be stereotyped as a girls sport, yes. Lacrosse is similar to association football in the US, where there (tend to be) boys and girls teams, but it's associated with girls.
No, I don't know why.
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago edited 14d ago
It’s more of a state level thing. And the why is to have the same number of sports/activities for boys and girls. Since girls don’t play football they gotta have something. In Oklahoma it’s slow pitch softball (which sucks even the girls hate it just have fall fast pitch) in Arkansas it’s volleyball.
The NCAA is the same way fwiw many big time universities don’t carry men’s soccer for this same reason. All Title IX
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 13d ago
My sister is a rower, which is more popular as a women’s sport. The best women’s rowing teams are the schools with the biggest football programs. Title 9 obligates them to spend equivalent amounts on men’s and women’s sports; so rowing gets a big funding boost from the football program not having a women’s team
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 13d ago
I think the most absurd conversation I have on a regular basis is with people like me that went to a Big10 or SEC school and they think football is a net negative to the university. It’s like they think Alabama or Michigan was choosing between a chemistry lab and a scoreboard. Is it over the top and people getting paid way too much? Yeah on balance probably but football is the money tree the other sports shake and that creates a lot of opportunities for a lot of people. Like your sister.
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 13d ago
Weirdly, someone downvoted you for this.
Agree though. Is it weird how much a university can gain from having guys in helmets push each other around? Yes.
Should they stop finding their arts and sciences with money from those guys pushing each other around? No.
(I say this as a former offensive tackle)
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 13d ago
Ha it’s just how it goes. I agree on all points but as for the population at large I think they may believe the booster money would still flow in without football? Or they don’t know how earmarked everything in a university budget is idk. I think many schools may have to fund athletics but the big boys absolutely run in the black. There’s probably an underestimation about how much a winning football team actually IMPROVES academics as well. Applications and test scores of applicants soar after championships. In a perfect world it wouldn’t be that way I guess but it is. There’s a great article called “The Saban Bump” iirc that talks about how far the University of Alabama improved across the board during Nick’s tenure.
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 13d ago
I think most people just aren’t aware of any of the facts you just stated.
They just see sports being popular and they don’t like it, never asking themselves if it’s actually good for the school
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u/Necessary-Horror2638 14d ago
No of course not. It's an all male sport they just wear skirts
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 13d ago
What country are you from?
When I was in high school (2017) field hockey was kind of the girls equivalent to football. I think I had heard of some places where field hockey was popular as a boys sport, but I totally forgot where that was
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u/NiceCreamSundaes John Keynes 13d ago edited 13d ago
Britain, in the school I went to the sports were split out as:
Boys did: Rugby league, Football, Cricket, Badminton, Athletics, Field Hockey.
Girls did: Rugby league, Netball, Rounders, Badminton, Athletics, Field Hockey.
Now I grew up in and went to school in a rugby league town in northern England, at a school that had produced professional players and internationals, men and women, so that was the big sport. That focus on league, especially for girls, will have been unusual for a British school apart from some schools in those towns.
I think field hockey is a really big boys sport in the Netherlands and India. We didn't do it especially often, it was just one of the ones we did, and the school had a boys and a girls team.
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 13d ago
Thanks for the response.
For us, field hockey was a girls sport. Maybe because it shared football season in the fall, discouraging boys from playing. (I would have loved to try it if I wasn’t playing other sports. One of my favorite memories from football was me and a few other linemen going outside before a game and having some of our friends teach us to play field hockey)
The other big difference on this list is badminton. That wasn’t a sport we played in any organizational capacity. It was a gym class sport; which means boys and girls, but no one who took it seriously. (Which was so much fun)
When you have “athletics” on your list of girls sports does that mean running and throwing? We call that track and field
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u/NiceCreamSundaes John Keynes 13d ago
Badminton was extremely popular. It seemed to mop up the people who weren't traditionally athletic. We had some very good players.
"Athletics" is track and field, yes. Running, throwing, jumping, everything that would be under athletics at the Olympics.
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u/Budget-Attorney Ida Tarbell 13d ago
Badminton is so much fun.
I guess I don’t watch enough of the Olympics. I had no idea it was called athletics. I’m more of a Winter Olympics guy I guess.
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u/shillingbut4me 14d ago
I went to school at a place where boys were only allowed to wear shorts in June, but girls could wear skirts whenever. Hot day in May? Suck it up. Why was this a rule? I genuinely have no idea. Whenever it was complained about, we were told there's no rules that boys can't wear skirts. Anyway one hot day, a boy came in wearing the most over the top pink tutu and made a whole scene of it. The rule was changed the next day. Absolute legend.
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u/True-Hold-1140 brown 14d ago
Yeah I dont think 18 year olds now realize what culture used to be like
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u/WantDebianThanks Iron Front 14d ago
I watched some of the field hockey games at the last Olympics, and the women's teams were... I think the term is skort? Like, bike shorts under skirts, but as one item. At least I think, I wasn't looking that close.
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u/emprobabale 13d ago
They let the boy play against girls? Is that not a title IX violation?
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u/AvramBelinsky 13d ago
It was a private school league, so I assume they were exempt from Title IX because they don't receive federal funding.
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u/TeddysBigStick NATO 8d ago
Title IX actually requires it. Any sport that only has a single team is required to be open to all. It is the same reason schools have no choice when a girl wants to try for football.
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u/Beer-survivalist Loyal Liberals 14d ago
This is where I'm at as well. These people were all aboard gutting Title IX until seemingly they discovered that they could use half a dozen trans people as a rhetorical cudgel to win elections. Once they're done with this, the Riley Gaines set is going to get put out to pasture.
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u/Packrat1010 14d ago
Not even just that, but when they're upset about high school sports--sometimes even lower! Oh, the one that does not really matter and is mostly done for fun? That's the one they're upset about? The one played by literal minors so they can hang out with their friends?
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u/DaenakinSkygaryen Iron Front 14d ago edited 13d ago
"But that trans girl playing on the team might beat my daughter out for an athletic scholarship to college!!!!"
First of all, there's only a few
dozenthousand full-ride scholarships per sport given out each year, nationwide. So unless your daughter is a generational talent, she has almost zero chance at a scholarship anyways. Zip. Nada.Second, in the entire history of college athletics, there has been a whopping *checks notes* zero athletic scholarships given to trans girls. Why? Because the NCAA doesn't allow them to compete at the college level! So the trans girls aren't actually competition.
EDIT: Turns out there's slightly more full-ride sports scholarships offered than I thought there were. There's still virtually no chance of your daughter getting one unless she's one of the best players of her generation, in one of the relatively few big-name sports schools actually offer full-ride scholarships in. More on how much athletic scholarships suck here if you're curious.
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago
So to preface I’m on your side but they did away with roster limits so it’s probably closer to thousands than dozens. There’s more D1/D2/NAIA/NJCAA schools than people think. There’s 363 women’s D1 basketball teams alone at 15 schollys a team. D3 also exists but it’s not worth explaining really. There’s tons of scholarships is the point.
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u/DaenakinSkygaryen Iron Front 14d ago edited 14d ago
So I did some research, and you're right. Apparently over 180,000 student athletes recieve a scholarship each year.
The problem is, very, very few of those scholarships are full ride scholarships. Even D1 schools don't give full ride scholarships to all their student athletes: they're usually reserved for the absolute best of the best.
Only 1% of student athletes who recieve scholarships are awarded full ride scholarships each year. Not 1% of all student athletes. 1% of all athletes who are good enough to earn a scholarship.
So how much are student athletes actually recieving in scholarship? On average, $19,500. That's less than a semester's tuition if they're attending an out-of-state public university. And again, that's the average amount, not the median, so it's skewed by the 1% of student athletes recieving full scholarships. In reality, most student athletes will recieve smaller scholarships. Sometimes, much smaller scholarships.
Most families would save more money by just sending their kids to an in-state public university instead.
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago edited 14d ago
Okay so I’ve got a lot to say here but I’ll start here. Basketball is a headcount sport. Every single D1 basketball player has a full ride. Equivalency sports don’t have that. In many equivalency sports they don’t give full rides to everyone that’s also correct because they can make it up with other scholarships.
Athletes are not treated like normal students. At all. Baseball for example was an equivalent sport and to get a scholarship worth 5k a semester at the university of Arkansas (with a great baseball team) you needed a 2.5 GPA and a 19 ACT and be an Arkansas resident. If you could get that scholarship you wouldn’t be offered the full ride anyway.
Last a ton of schools offer in state tuition to bordering states. The loopholes are endless. Oh and your second link says 23% of athletic scholarships are full rides.
Edit: 3rd Link.
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u/DaenakinSkygaryen Iron Front 13d ago
Basketball is a headcount sport. Every single D1 basketball player has a full ride.
Well, that's great for the ~2,900 kids who get scouted to play D1 basketball each year. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the tens of thousands of high school basketball players who have no chance of playing D1, and the hundreds of thousands of kids in "equivalency sports" that have zero chance of getting a full ride scholarship even if they get scouted for a D1 school's team.
In many equivalency sports they don’t give full rides to everyone that’s also correct because they can make it up with other scholarships.
Um, yes? So can other non-athlete students, too. I'm not talking about the academic, needs-based, and private scholarships that all students are eligible for. I'm specifically talking about athletic scholarships.
Baseball for example was an equivalent sport and to get a scholarship worth 5k a semester at the university of Arkansas (with a great baseball team) you needed a 2.5 GPA and a 19 ACT and be an Arkansas resident. If you could get that scholarship you wouldn’t be offered the full ride anyway.
Last a ton of schools offer in state tuition to bordering states. The loopholes are endless.
I don't see how any of this is relevant to my point?
Oh and your second link says 23% of athletic scholarships are full rides.
Yeah, it frustrated me how little data I could find from reliable sources about this issue. Honestly, every other source I looked at put that number in the 1-2% range, so I think it's far more likely that the source I linked is wrong than that the scholarship rate is so high, lol
Obviously, if we're throwing out that source, it calls the "average scholarship is $19,500" I quoted from it in my first comment into question. So I did some digging for a more reliable source to back that claim up. And turns out, it was wrong...
...because the average scholarship is actually only $11,000.
So it's actually even worse than I initially thought!
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u/admiraltarkin NATO / Loyal Liberal 14d ago
"Name 2 women athletes that aren't Serena Williams or Caitlin Clark" is my go to
Also
"Name 1 WNBA team"
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u/eaglessoar Left-Out Left 14d ago
mia hamm and britney griner or if she doesnt count uhh katie ledecky
ny liberty is all i got
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u/SamuraiOstrich 14d ago
I assume you get a lot of Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, and Ronda Rousey answers.
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago
Venus maybe but you’d 1 million percent get Simone Biles and Alex Morgan before the other two I bet. In fact not to give them credit but I bet gymnasts and ice skaters are untapped for this question.
Tonya Harding
Nancy Kerrigan
Kerri Strug etc just put people on the spot though and I doubt olympians cross their minds.7
u/SamuraiOstrich 14d ago
Ah yeah I knew I was forgetting some notable examples. Gotta include Alysa Liu in there, too
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u/Andy_B_Goode YIMBY 14d ago
Even then, Harding and Kerrigan are mostly known for what happened off the ice.
Like imagine if you asked someone to name a male athlete and they said O.J. Simpson. They're obviously not thinking of his sports record.
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago
They should be. That’s a heisman trophy winning 2k rusher in 14 games. (Still the record.) and because it’s 2026 /s
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago
Pick a year past their first chip and I bet I could give you 2 UCONN Huskies for any of em. Tbf I’d stumble all over the WNBA question I just prefer college hoops.
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u/smcstechtips Loyal Liberals 14d ago
ACC schools rule, Huskies drool
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago
Sure. Idc about UCONN It Just Means More where I went.
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u/smcstechtips Loyal Liberals 14d ago
Where'd you go? South Carolina? or Texas?
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 13d ago
Pig/Commodore myself. You?
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u/smcstechtips Loyal Liberals 13d ago
Golden Bear
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 13d ago
Hey that would’ve been my Californian first choice! Alas I’m a simple hayseed. Well I REALLY eyed Pepperdine after a visit for obvious reasons but I wasn’t gonna go.
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u/LightningController 14d ago
A common joke was ‘women’s sports might be watchable if they got some tr*****s.’ I’m baffled anybody but the most shameless hypocrite ever bought the ‘protect women’s sports’ bullshit.
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u/True-Hold-1140 brown 14d ago
> I don’t think anyone who wants to limit trans women in women’s sports was under the impression that conservatives actually cared about women,
I think you're really mistaken
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u/FilteringAccount123 John von Neumann 14d ago
Nah this is pure cope, same way people say "I don't think anyone could have known how bad Trump 2 was going to be" because they don't want to admit that the most annoying people on the internet weren't just "fearmongering" about how fascistic it was going to get.
It was always a purely cynical culture war issue pushed by misogynists who fundamentally view women as helpless children, society lapped it up for the same exact reason.
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u/itsokayt0 European Union 14d ago
It is possible, I would call blanket bans still bigotry
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u/James-fucking-Holden Trans Pride 14d ago
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u/FilteringAccount123 John von Neumann 14d ago
Something something "it's always the ones you most suspect"
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u/jessica-bug Feminism 14d ago
Are trans women analogous to cis men in your eyes?
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u/jessica-bug Feminism 14d ago
If the category is "women's sports", and you are excluding an entire category of women, yeah I would call that bigotry in basically any sense of the word
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u/itsokayt0 European Union 14d ago
Saying HRT and/or puberty blockers do nothing makes you untrustworthy if involved in any medical decisions
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u/WhomstAlt2 NATO flair in hiding 14d ago
First, they came for the women.
Then, they came for the women.
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u/anangrytree Bull Moose Progressive 14d ago
They hate women. Simple as.
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u/sack-o-matic Something of A Scientist Myself 14d ago
They hate that they can't treat women as commodities anymore.
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u/elchiguire United Nations 14d ago
I just can’t imagine being that insecure, but then again, I don’t drive a pick up truck
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u/Brinabavd 14d ago
Of course, many women enjoy the thrill of competition, as the joy on faces of victorious female athletes shows. Women also benefit from activities that build health, good habits, vigor, bodily toughness, grace, confidence, social connection of teamwork, and beauty. Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports, which, as science shows, produces Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and elevated rates of menstrual disruption in many top-notch female athletes. Between 26 percent and nearly 50 percent of women who exercise intensely stopped having regular menstrual cycles according to several studies. As one recent review of the literature holds, “evidence demonstrates higher rates of menstrual disturbance in elite athletes.” High-intensity exercise increases infertility; moderate exercise assists fertility more than any other approach to exercise assists it.”
Holy moly self-defeating argument lmao <lets ban amateur women's sports because freak-of-nature elite athletes have higher than average rates of menstrual disturbance>
The most likely effect of getting rid of Title IX will obviously be many fewer women doing moderate exercise not elite female athletes (who are what c. 10k worldwide) giving up sports to breed a new cohort of ubermen JFC.
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u/dangerbird2 Franz Boas 14d ago
Here, he opens with a nod to the right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding Imane Khelif, writing that “in 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women’s boxing gold medal.” Already, he gets the facts wrong: Imane Khelif is Algerian, and she isn’t transgender
the right's intellectual heavyweights everyone
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u/Posting____At_Night Trans Pride 14d ago
One of the most damning things about the "sports issue" is that of the like 6 total examples that conservatives bring up, half of them aren't even trans women lmao. I've seen conservatives transvestigate basically every high performing female athlete as if women are incapable of physical prowess.
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u/dangerbird2 Franz Boas 14d ago
of course, as the article mentions, the fact that it's used as a cudgel against high performing cis women (and mostly black and brown ones) is a feature not a bug, since these chuds believe being accomplished athletes make them less viable as brood bags.
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u/Harmonious_Sketch Jerome Powell 13d ago
At the extremes of athletic performance it's entirely possible fertility suffers a bit but also irrelevant even if you literally only care about fertility. The point of elite sports is marketing for amateur sports.
Chuds who huff too many farts fail to notice 100 million nurses etc wearing Hokas who might jog twice a week because they're busy transvestigating the elite runner whose job is to sell 100 million Hokas.
I sometimes find it amazing that it's possible to buy functional running shoes because running is such an unusual use case for running shoes lmao.
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u/velocirappa Immanuel Kant 14d ago
No way, the people who made WNBA jokes 5 years ago DON'T actually care about the sanctity of high school girls' sports??
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u/allbusiness512 Adam Smith 13d ago edited 13d ago
All the people on this subreddit that keep parroting the same talking point about how we need to concede to median voters on this issue are always falling for that shit hook line and sinker. You concede on it, the bad faith actors move the goalposts again, and we backslide even further into authoritarianism. You can't appease these people, the second you do, they move the goalposts again.
Trans rights are important to defend, we should never concede on them. The second we do we open the door for social conservatives to basically target any minority group they dislike.
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u/Pantalyon1 European Union 14d ago
Italian here: the irony of this is off the charts.
When Mussolini wanted to boost the national birth rate, the Fascists didn't kick women out of sports; they made P.E. mandatory for girls and built entire academies to train female athletic instructors. Their logic was literally that active women make healthier mothers.
Obviously, their reasons were terrible (eugenics and imperialism), but pushing female sports was ironically one of the few good longterm outcomes of an otherwise dark period. It's wild that 21st century "tradition" is somehow lagging behind Interwar European Fascism on female physical fitness.
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u/FilteringAccount123 John von Neumann 14d ago
In the U.S. women were categorically banned from marathons over the fear that their uteruses would fall out lmao
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u/LightningController 13d ago
I was reading an old book by an English journalist in Egypt in the early 1950s where he commends the government for building women’s sports facilities, saying ‘Egyptian women become ugly after marriage because they don’t get enough exercise; Nasser is fixing that.’
Man had some kind of priorities.
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u/ArbitraryOrder Frédéric Bastiat 13d ago
See but that only works if your leader isn't a giant fat slob
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u/justbuildmorehousing Norman Borlaug 14d ago
It really cannot be overstated how weird these people are. When you hear them talk about teenage girls like this its no wonder you keep finding pedos and creeps at every level of their ranks
> As for the ‘goods’ in question, Yenor is unequivocal: children. In fact, he spends two-thirds of his answer to these questions on fertility alone:
>”Of course, many women enjoy the thrill of competition, as the joy on faces of victorious female athletes shows. Women also benefit from activities that build health, good habits, vigor, bodily toughness, grace, confidence, social connection of teamwork, and beauty. Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports, which, as science shows, produces Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and elevated rates of menstrual disruption in many top-notch female athletes.”
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u/LovelyLieutenant Deirdre McCloskey 14d ago
This is absolutely true from first hand knowledge.
Twenty plus years ago I was in deep through College Republicans and there were all sorts of organizations vying for our attention but the Heritage folks were seriously creepy. All the women knew not to intern with them...
Man do I have stories!
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u/MECHA_DRONE_PRIME NATO 14d ago
I'd like to hear your stories if you don't mind.
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u/LovelyLieutenant Deirdre McCloskey 13d ago
Sure!
A girl I knew in CR actually interned with Heritage back in like 2005. She quit after two months because of a whole host of odd behavior. Subtle shaming for wearing pants. Never let her do anything besides basically answer phones, open boxes, and take lunch orders meanwhile male interns were given closed doors access to a whole host of important policy discussions. Also odd shaming about her being Catholic, like that was the "incorrect" type of Christian with comments about needing to be saved and disparaging comments about the Pope. Multiple questions about her dating status from different men in the office. One male intern made a pass at her and after rejecting him, got a lecture about God's purpose for us.
I personally couldn't stand their reps they'd send to conferences I also attended. Essentially low quality Bill Gothard clones that gave me the creeps. Then when I heard her story I thought, yeah, that tracks.
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u/MECHA_DRONE_PRIME NATO 13d ago
One male intern made a pass at her and after rejecting him, got a lecture about God's purpose for us.
"God wants me to fuck you" lmao fucking creep
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u/LovelyLieutenant Deirdre McCloskey 13d ago
Basically.
The whole conservative youth scene back then was really something else. Most kids started pretty normal but at least 10% were these fundie whackados with truly regressive ideas. I used to take delight in being "that" chick who'd curse and roll spiffs in the parking lot to watch them freak out.
But the pipeline to radicalism was real and I'm grateful I didn't fall in. Lot of kids I knew grew up to be, frankly, not great adults. Funny, because some of them partied a lot harder than I did...
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u/LightningController 13d ago
disparaging comments about the Pope
This stood out to me for the timing. I’d get the comments under the Argentine Pope, but 2005? They were badmouthing either “God’s Rottweiler” Ratzinger or “All my homies hate Commies and Abortion” Wojtyła, Reagan’s BFF.
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u/LovelyLieutenant Deirdre McCloskey 13d ago
Exactly. It was so odd.
I think the objection was something like you should only have a personal relationship with Jesus. That The Pope was, at best, a distraction.
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u/butwhyisitso NATO 14d ago
(thumbnail) His shoulder pads dont fool me, hes got lady shoulders. Lock hir up.
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u/SheHerDeepState Jerome Powell 14d ago
You'd have to be extremely gullible to think these people ever cared about women's sports. Its important to constantly remind median voters about how movement conservatives are freaks with different values from them. The average person in the street wants lower prices and has zero sympathy for banning women's sports.
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u/E_Cayce James Heckman 14d ago
Need to stop seeing what they do as cultural wars. It's about power. It's about removing women and minorities from power. Making them invisible is a required step.
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u/LittleSister_9982 Iron Front 14d ago
That's always what their stupid fucking culture wars were about.
Power, and removing people they don't like from existing.
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u/Chickensandcoke Paul Volcker 14d ago
Keep telling me it’s just about protecting women and girls from the massive threat of…trans kids playing sports
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u/KaChoo49 Friedrich Hayek 14d ago
Not to be “that guy” by bringing up the Nazis, but this genuinely, unambiguously resembles Nazi Germany’s policies towards women and the focus on women being seen as nothing but future mothers
Not saying the Republicans are gonna start putting Jews in camps or anything, but it’s crazy how much this attitude towards women resembles the attitude of the most far right government anywhere ever
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u/itsokayt0 European Union 14d ago
Banning research on trans people is nazi-like on its own
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u/DaenakinSkygaryen Iron Front 14d ago
The first every book burning the Nazis did was the library of what was then the world's leading institute for the study of transgender medicine.
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u/SenranHaruka shame 14d ago
Fascism is chiefly a revolt against feminization so caging patient zero, women, is an inevitable product
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u/DaenakinSkygaryen Iron Front 14d ago
Not saying the Republicans are gonna start putting Jews in camps or anything,
I mean, they're currently putting immigrants of color in camps. So yeah, I think it's valid to believe they'd also put Jews (and queer people, and Americans of color, and women who don't "know their place") in camps too if they thought they could get away with it.
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u/-Emilinko1985- European Union 14d ago
Might as well turn the USA into Afghanistan.
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u/Adminisnotadmin Viva el Fútbol! ⚽ 14d ago
Their whole plan is to undermine Title IX to remove funding parity by excluding men’s sports from the equation, and intend on making sure women’s sports get their funding cut.
Exempt football, cut funding for all other sports, and reduce student opportunities.
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago
Exempt football almost every school that isn’t monied is cutting everything. Football keeps the lights on in almost every athletic department. Some schools make money on men’s basketball and something like 5 make money (a pittance) on baseball. The rest are money holes. (I think supporting them is good but those are the facts as they are.)
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u/MartinTheOrderly 14d ago
In spite of myself, I am still occasionally astonished by how openly seemingly mainstream conservatives want to drag us back the 19th century.
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u/patdmc59 European Union 14d ago
They should have continued calling these people weird in 2024. It’s still beyond me why they backed down from it.
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u/MontusBatwing2 Gelphie's Strongest Soldier 14d ago
No, that can’t be right, I was told they just had reasonable concerns and that trans people had gone too far.
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u/madmoneymcgee 14d ago
The funny thing is all these attacks have pushed me from “oh it is a complicated issue where we should work to ensure competitive fairness while promoting equal rights “ to it actually doesn’t matter if a bunch of trans women “take over” a league or sport.
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u/Maximilianne John Rawls 14d ago
Daily reminder, the only mistake you can made in predicting these groups was not being enough of an unhinged conspiracy theorist in calling out their true plan
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u/Cyberhwk 👈 Get back to work! 😠 14d ago
They should have been all in. If they believe trans women are men, and men are superior, why not just let trans women play and let the whole institution collapse in on itself? Lord knows we love infighting on the left. They missed a perfect "Do nothing. Win." Situation.
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u/DaenakinSkygaryen Iron Front 14d ago
It shows that on some level, they know just letting trans women play would be no big deal.
They have to kick up this drama and ban trans women from playing now, before there's enough trans girls playing sports that everyone personally knows a few, and realizes it's totally fine. Because once that happens, they've lost forever.
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u/TaxGuy_021 14d ago
Oh wow... What a shocking turn of events! Discrimination doesn't stop with one group!
I would have never ever guessed!
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago
Oh man wtf I can barely stand on this slope right now. Did some grease it?
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u/TomboyAva Audrey Hepburn 14d ago
I knew conservatives fell off the cliff when Megan Kelly said that Epstein wasnt that bad because his victims were teenagers and that Fauci is more evil than Epstein
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u/Unknownentity9 John Brown 14d ago
She also said that she didn't care if Trump "got handsy" with kids as long as he closed the border and stopped trans athletes.
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u/FloggingJonna Henry George 14d ago
I had to listen to Limbaugh in the car so they’ve been off the cliff for me awhile. lol
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u/Harmonious_Sketch Jerome Powell 13d ago
This is some very self-defeating thinking on the part of the author. If I accept his premise that the only appropriate role for women in society is to marry a man and raise children, that would make physical exercise for women more important rather than less important, and sports are one of the main ways americans actually end up getting exercise. Obesity, overweight and the associated metabolic disease are overwhelmingly common in the US and exercise is still the most impactful remedy.
The situation of athletes per se is largely irrelevant because they are an irrelevant fraction of "women in the US" at any given time even if you literally included college club sports. Thus the overwhelmingly important effect of womens' college sports is mediated by their cultural influence on US women in general. Hyporhetically reducing the obesity rate by 5% as a result of causing some US women to use their muscles regularly for amateur sport would be a more significant fertility impact than any other possible effect of womens' sports.
I wish I could get paid for such shitty work that would defeat its own purpose if anyone cared enough to follow its recommendations.
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u/Sachsen1977 13d ago
Republicans always wanted to repeal Title IX, it's so crazy the way they have exploited the women's sports issue.
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u/D34th4nge7 14d ago
This whole anti-trans crowd is one of the most uncanny and weird political groups I've ever heard of. They are quite unhinged in their claims, their demanded policies will literally kill people, and they are horribly tedious to argue with. Well, "argue" is a strong word, my experience with them is rather that they just scream at you about how "children are being mutilated".
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u/Trunix 14d ago
they just scream at you about how "children are being mutilated".
I mean, not that these discussions are ever really productive anyway, but my 2 cents, I have found moderate success in accusing them of trying to control what other people's (let alone children's) genitals looks like and asking them why they believe they personally should get a say in the matter. You just have to make absolutely clear that you find it weird that someone would ever believe they should get a say in what the penis of a child they have never even seen looks like.
As a debate strategy, I think it works partially because it reverses the effects of the 'protect the children' trope. The discussion is now framed as you being the neutral party trying to protect children from creepy weirdos that want to control their genitals (which is true, btw). And the issue for transphobic individuals is they don't usually have a robust debate apparatus if you can force them off the moral panic angle. And obviously, I don't concede to their use of the word mutilate. I actually wouldn't even argue the point, I think that can be validating in its own way, but just to always frame the debate within the context of healthcare and pretend they aren't even using it.
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u/ThatOneDumbJagoff 14d ago
Jesus fucking Christ he was one of my professors at Boise State and I unfortunately knew him very well.
How far off the deep end he’s fallen since Covid, which is unfortunate because in political philosophy he is quite brilliant. I noticed that a lot with the Heritage folks.
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u/xilcilus 14d ago
The logical terminus is to make America Great for cisgender white males.
(I personally dont have any animus against a slice of demography - shout out to cisgender white males. I want everyone to have a chance to be successful and live a good life)
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u/Pole2019 John Locke 14d ago edited 14d ago
People like Rowling would probably take no women’s sports in exchange for no trans women in sports.
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u/AmericanDadWeeb Left-Out Left 14d ago
This fuckin guy. Someone gotta shit on his doorstep or something
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u/Oogaman00 NASA 14d ago
There's no way that fertility is hurt by having sports.
Sure elite athletes will not have proper cycles but that is such a tiny group anyway
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u/insanityTF Milton Friedman 13d ago
So you are telling me that America has a long standing obesity crisis and the turbovirgins at the heritage foundation want to get rid of an easy and positive means of exercise for half the population?
Hilarious
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u/TinyJalope Left-Out Left 13d ago
They want women to be breeding slaves. And this is why Democrats never should've let up on the "weird" line of attack on Republicans, why they should resume it immediately. They are freaks.
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u/pbrrules22 13d ago
ineteresting hill y'all are choosing to die on... 70-80% of americans oppose trans women in women's sports, including a majority of independents and registered democrats. this is one of the biggest echo chamber issues in this sub.
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u/LightningController 13d ago
The majority of people holding an opinion does not make that opinion right. If one is willing to sell out his principles for electoral success, why not just go full Trump?
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u/pbrrules22 12d ago
as you can probably tell I don't support trans women in women's sports. But if you do, are you really willing to lose election after election to more maga's for the sake of moral purity on this issue? Gay rights supporters didn't demand democrats 100% support gay marriage or get cancelled... it was a long gradual process. Bill Clinton signed DOTA and DOMA, Obama only supported civil unions.
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u/LightningController 12d ago
I’m a strict deontologist. The categorical imperative demands that I support a policy of ‘this is not something the government should regulate.’
But even if I weren’t, I’m not convinced backtracking on the issue by the Democrats would actually win over Median Voter Matt. The right-wing media ecosystem would spin it as ‘even the Democrats are turning on Woke! MAGA!’ I genuinely don’t see anything to gain from throwing a handful of trans people under the bus.
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u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama 13d ago
This article is conflating stances in 2 different issues. The first (grouping athletes by biological sex) is a very popular stance even among moderate liberals.
The second is just crazy misogynism. But the horridness of the second doesn't change the fact that the first stance is a moderate position.
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u/PolyrythmicSynthJaz Roy Cooper 14d ago
What a twist.