I have a theory – I won’t bore you with the details – according to which I am Napoleon Bonaparte. And since I have no recollection of having abdicated, that makes me the Emperor of France.
Why am I not being treated as such? Because, apparently, how I think of myself seems not to be incumbent upon how other people think of me. This has been a great disappointment for me. I’ve sent letters of protest, both to this Macron fellow in Paris and to my own Member of Parliament in Ottawa. Silence has been the stern reply.
And yet some people who want to be recognised for who and what they think they are have been more successful. If I think of myself as a woman, apparently I will be both regarded as such and treated as such. I don’t resent her success. In fact I congratulate her. But here’s my problem:
I wasn’t born the Emperor of France. I had to compete for the position. Being a woman isn’t a competitive position. But being the winner of the women’s triathlon is. So the difference between (what you no doubt regard as) my delusion, and the person claiming to be trans, is that the acceptance of her claim negatively affects other people, namely those who now have to compete against her in the women’s triathlon. To share a shower room with her. To share a women’s shelter with her. If convicted of a criminal offence to share a prison cell with her. To exempt her from the military draft.
That, it seems to me, makes her being a woman very different from my being Napoleon Bonaparte. I’m no longer competing with the English and Germans and Austrians and Russians for domination of the European continent. But she’s competing in the women’s triathlon.
As I say, I wish her God’s speed. Now if only my enemies, back in the day, had been so kind to me!
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Humour, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
I have a plan, inspired by your post about defanging the mob.
Recruit a few male high school athletes in the “strength-speed-height” events to self-declare as girls and try out for the girls’ teams at their school. The school will not dare deny them, else the Board will have to pay large human rights damages, with tax dollars, to the aggrieved trans-claiming “girls”. And trans activists across the country will be howling at them.
At this level there is no requirement for testosterone manipulation for an athlete born a boy to compete as a girl, so the boys don’t risk their health. For goodwill and for the social protection of all involved, everyone has to be in on it. The boys’ friends and peers of both sexes have to be cognizant that this is just theatre, not a life event. (Hey, it’s high school. Very few cis-girls, gay or straight, are interested in girls with penises.) But the risk-averse school board daren’t call the bluff even if they are awakened to the ruse. Key to why this mockery would work is that no vetting of the claim is permitted by legislation. The boys can even stop shaving (or not start.). After all, if some women have penises, surely some also have beards.
Being gentlemen, the boys — and I’m calling them boys because they are only actors, dissembling as trans girls — will not enter the dressing rooms of their female teammates or otherwise violate their privacy — no slapping butts to congratulate a good jump, etc. (After all, the boys might be dating the girls, or hoping to, and might never have seen them, or any girl, naked yet.) The boys would not do this at a school where one of the star cis-girls has a chance at a national team or a university scholarship if she wins a provincial meet. That would be cruel and dishonourable, leading to the very harm and shattered dreams that “real” trans athletes will cause. We’re trying to make a point, not ruin a life. And we do need the cis-girls on our team to play along, not beat up their ersatz trans teammates. After all, the cis-girl athletes are the very ones on whose behalf this theatrical production is being mounted.
The girls on teams at other schools in the city or county will likely be furious at this but there won’t be anything they can do about it. One of their girls might miss out on the scholarship, but what of that? (We have that covered. If our boy wins the meet he will be honour-bound to unmask and surrender his prize to the girl he beat.)
The boys selected for the mission would have to be good enough in their events to reliably beat all the girls in the city, not always a safe assumption. In the marathon, not a high school event, the elite women usually beat all but the elite men. Track and field events scored by time and distance are easier to suss out for this purpose than, say, basketball. The impact would be lost if our boys were just also-rans. They have to be a threat to somebody. But the boys would have to be not so good that their own cis-boys’ teams would suffer from their absence…..except who says a gender non-binary or “questioning” athlete can’t compete on both teams? I knew a handful of disruptive misfits at my school who would have been perfect for this, if they could have run the 100 in decent time. And today freed of the risk that the coaches and vice-principal would whack them upside the head for being troublemakers, they would have thrown themselves into it.
Perhaps the conditions would be right for only one or two schools in a province to pull this off. But think of the disruption and dissension it would cause in the ranks of the woke. And, like Arlo Guthrie telling us to walk into the Draft Registration Center and sing, “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant “, it could start a Movement, and that my friends is what The Man is afraid of, that we’ll find out he’s selling phlogiston.
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I think Leslie has nailed it here! It’s flawless. But I do need to enquire as to whether one of these boys can enter into BOTH events. The school might insist that he choses, but as Leslie says, that’s. no great sacrifice if he’s good but not excellent. Now we just need to find a couple of kids willing to do it.
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Not being woke, I always assumed the “Q” in that alphabet soup of people we’re supposed to walk (or at least talk) on eggs around meant “queer”, of course not micro-aggressive when self-referential. But I now understand it means “questioning”, implying that these non-binary states are like the poor cat in Schroedinger’s box who isn’t alive or dead until someone opens it (the box, not the cat) to look. And the cat, if indeed dead, comes back to life to serve in the next thought experiment.
So the simple answer to Paul’s enquiry is that he — an actor who knows he is a boy, remember, so “he” — is “questioning”. He is a girl when the girls run their 100-metre heats in the morning, then he is a boy when the boys run in the afternoon. If it is a multi-day provincial meet, he will claim his right to question himself back and forth with a resonating frequency that can absorb in the infra-red range and stop global warming in the bargain. Carbon credits for the team’s bus ride back to Lethbridge.
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