It’s Bandcamp Friday, which I almost forgot. (This just means Bandcamp doesn’t take their usual percentage out of sales, so some people wait for this day to do their buying to maximize what artists get. Or in the case of And Yet…, maximizing what Lambda Legal will get.) I picked up a few things which I will review later.
I finished reading Body Neutral a few days ago. Or rather, I got most of the way through and stopped. I don’t actually have the sorts of body issues that the book addresses — dislike of some aspects of one’s body is totally normal!
The book is about people whose subconscious minds have created these body image issues as a response to trauma, abuse, fear etc. The author says that after years of treating people they found almost all their patients match with one or more of four “avatars” — ways that the subconscious views the body as the cause and/or solution of a problem.
Still, reading the book did have me considering my own thoughts about my body, and also some struggles I’ve had in the past (e.g. when I was a kid and paranoid about other kids bullying me) and how I dealt with them (mostly poorly). It was worth the read. I’ll keep those personal details to myself though.
In other books, Tales from Moominvalley worked better than some of the other books because each chapter was a little self-contained short story that primarily featured a specific character. Many of these characters are really quite neurotic, and the stories much more melancholy than you’d see in typical American children’s stories, but some of them are great in a sort of uniquely gothy emo way.
I am really not liking Moominpapa in Moominpapa At Sea though. He’s having a sort of crisis about his usefulness (or lack thereof) as a masculine protector figure, when things are generally fine and his family is capable of taking care of themselves. He ends up hauling the whole family on an adventure that they don’t seem to be particularly into (but they’re also not objecting, which… I think is bothering me more). Maybe things will shift a bit as the story continues, but so far it’s a bit ugh.
The “Tendan Old Temple Meiko Spicy Sandalwood Incense” is absolutely not the same as the old “Tendan Sandalwood” that I liked so much. It’s not unpleasant, but it smells kind of like… baby powder? I think the problem is the benzoin is stronger than the sandalwood and cinnamon (I don’t know what spikenard smells like). Anyway, it’s the wrong vibe. Maybe for general “make your house smell nice” purposes it’s okay.
The Kobunboku incense by Baiedo is also not particularly my jam. It’s apparently super popular but there are about a dozen different Nippon Kodo incense options that I like more. Ah well.
Speaking of things that smell nice, I have an order of soap and stuff from Native on the way. They kept getting recommended wherever I’d see people asking about gender-neutral soap. The body wash is actually a tie-in with Jarritos Mexican soda, and is watermelon scented. Hey, it makes as much sense as the “Stone” scented body wash I’m currently using.
A few weeks ago one of my donations was to an organization called Private Citizen. I now regret this.
While some of what they were talking about at that particular moment resonated with me… they have an awful lot of conservative buzzwords on their website. I get the feeling their idea of “government overreach” does not include any of the authoritarian, unconstitutional, unauthorized shit Trump has been up to.
They have something called the “Pardon Project” but their success stories are three people who were pardoned by Trump’s first administration — there is zero mention of anyone Biden pardoned, including Leonard Peltier, nor of the frankly embarrassing pardons that Trump handed out to the Jan 6 insurrectionists this time around. And looking at their board of directors: yep, they are conservatives. Well. Poop.
I have opinions.
I do not care about sports very much. But when supposed progressives like Gavin Newsom declare their opposition to trans people in sports… that’s not really about sports, nor is it about fairness or protecting women.
It’s a wedge, a slippery slope. If you claim that a trans woman isn’t a woman, in the specific context of sports, it’s not many steps from there to the Texan attempt to pass a law declaring that all trans people are inherently committing fraud with their bodies and identities at all times. (This has no chance of passing, but it does reveal the thought process behind transphobia and politician’s open willingness to attack trans rights.)
Everyone seems to assume that trans women have a huge advantage over AFAB women in basically every single sport. (I’m not going to say “biological women” because if you have been taking female hormones for several years, and it’s changed your body, it should be self-evident that this is biological.) There is no science or statistics that actually bears this out.
Testosterone during puberty does affect things such as hand size and other factors. Someone who completes puberty and then transitions, will be physiologically different — on average — than someone who transitions first, or a cisgender person. Going on E doesn’t shrink what has already grown. But yes, let’s look at hand size here; assume we’re talking about a sport where that matters (perhaps basketball). Here are the issues:
- All trans women are being discriminated against in the same way here: those who have socially transitioned and aren’t on hormones at all; those who transitioned later after puberty, and those who transitioned before puberty.
- Average hand sizes vary more with ethnicity than with gender. An average Filipino’s hand is 41% larger than an average Bangladeshi man’s hand. But within each ethnicity the average man’s hand is only 20% larger than the average woman’s. Would you support banning Filipino, Czech, Iranian, Jordanian, Turkish, and German cis women from womens’ basketball because of their unfair advantage…?
- If the unfair advantage comes from hand size, why is biological sex at birth the criteria instead of actual hand size?
- Testosterone levels (in both cis males and cis females) also vary a lot… and vary a lot by ethnicity. A lot of accusations against cis women with high T as “actually men” have been quite racist.
Hormone replacement therapy does change aerobic capacity, body composition, muscular strength and endurance. How much it changes them varies on a case-by-case basis.
Studies of military fitness tests have shown that in many respects, trans women perform more like cis women than cis men, and trans men perform more like cis men than cis women. Trans women did generally have faster 1.5 mile run times than cis women — but worse than cis men — and trans women were worse at vertical jump height, pushups, and aerobic capacity than cis women. (These were not long-term studies and some portions of the studies had fewer participants than one would ideally want, but still.) There’s also Lia Thomas, who was a star swimmer… whose times got 15 seconds worse within a year or two of transitioning.
In terms of sports statistics? There are no credible statistics claiming trans women have an advantage in sports. The Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport released a report saying as much. There are really very few trans athletes (one piece of data I saw said “less than 20 in international competition” and another claimed “0.04% of female athletes are trans women”). A group whose sole purpose is advocating anti-trans sports bans could only find five trans kids in K-12 sports in the entire nation. The NCAA says there are only ten trans athletes in college sports. Their presence has done nothing to disrupt opportunities for cis women to excel. In fact… in states that have anti-trans sports laws, there are fewer cis kids participating in sports.
It is well-known that most people who vehemently oppose trans women in women’s sports don‘t actually support women’s sports in the first place. Not as participants, not as parents, not as supporters of equal pay, not as supporters of racial justice in women’s sports, not as supporters of preventing actual harassment in women’s sports. In fact many of them advocate for humiliating tests to be carried out on all women in sports to prove they’re not trans.
Youth sports are not about performance, they’re about socialization and well-being. The American Medical Association says that the only effect of banning trans kids from sports is harming trans kids’ mental health.