So I’m a queer/disabled former wheelchair athlete (*gasp* a trans person who’s participated in elite-level sports? The horror!!) And there’s something about this whole “we have to protect women’s spaces” argument that really has been getting under my skin (aside from it being blatantly transphobic, of course)
How come that doesn’t apply to disabled women? Specifically, women in disability sports? If having “biological men” is so dangerous, where’s the outcry for disabled women’s safety? Because they play with actual cis men.
TW: very brief mention of assault statistics against disabled women
Most disability sports don’t have the numbers to divide based on gender, or at least didn’t when they started out. Eventually, it just kind of…became part of the culture, at least here in Australia. Everyone plays together, even in sports that do have the numbers to have gender divides now. In sports like wheelchair basketball, you really only start seeing gender divisions at the national league level. There’s a dedicated women’s national league (WNWBL), and there is technically a men’s national league (NWBL), but there’s just as many women in those teams as men. In fact, in my last few years of playing in the WNWBL, 8 out of the 12 girls on my team also played in the men’s league, or had played in the men’s league before.
You only really see strict gender divisions at international level (ie world championships and paralynpics) and even then, the mens and women’s paralypic teams train together and very frequently play together in practice matches where, with the Aussie teams at least, the women almost always win. That’s basketball though, there are some sports, like wheelchair rugby (also known as quad rugby or murderball for how rough and aggressive it can get) that aren’t divided by gender at all, even in the paralypics.
So why is men and women playing together SO dangerous that it can’t be allowed in able bodied sport, but it’s totally fine to put female athletes “at risk” when they’re disabled? It can’t be because no one would “do anything” to disabled women, since the rates of assault on them is double what it is for able bodied women according to the Australian Royal Commission done on the subject.
Keeping that stat in mind, I would also like to point out that disabled athletes don’t have changing rooms/lockerrooms most of the time. The ones most venues have are not accessible, and one or two disabled toilets is not enough for 30-120 people, all who need the accessible bathroom, so our changing room is the side of the court. Some women wore singlets under their game singlet, so when we changed, people couldn’t see our bras, but most didn’t. They couldn’t, this is Australia, it gets hot, especially in venues without air con, and many had disabilities that impacted their ability to cool their bodies. It wasn’t safe to wear multiple layers. Even on mixed gender teams, there was no privacy for changing.
So disabled women have to change in front of their male teammates, sometimes in front of crowds, the opposing teams etc, and that’s fine? But letting able bodied men and women just exist in the same space is dangerous? Because to me that either sounds like:
A: you don’t care about the safety of disabled women/you only care about it when it might effect you.
B: you don’t care about women’s safety, you just dont want a system where trans/nonbinary people can feel welcome and be comfortable.
Or C: both.
And look, despite everything I said here, I never felt like I was in any danger in those environments. The benefit of all this just being a normalised part of the culture means men are socilised differently, especially the ones who grew up surrounded by it, and they do the work to keep others in check. We look out for each other. We very occasionally get a guy being a creep, usually newly disabled guys who were expecting us to be just like abled athletes, but they always got put in their place REALLY quick. That behaviour doesn’t last long when others hold them accountable, people actually call them out for their bad behaviour, and event/team staff actually take complaints seriously and act.
But according to these kinds of people, this sort of thing is impossible, so where is the outcry for them?
Idea for a Generic Medieval Fantasy Setting: The characters refer to their nameday as an apparent stand-in for birthdays, celebrating it annually according to their respective preferences and perhaps family customs, as one does. People talk about things that happened before someone’s time as having gone down “before you were named”, someone grievously insults an opponent on the battlefield by going “your mother should never have named you.” So with the way naming is always talked about, as a reader you start to somewhat assume from context clues that these people have some sort of a taboo about the word “birth” or something, and naming is used as some sort of an euphenism to avoid naming the process in which people come into the world.
Then somewhere halfway through the story it turns out that in this setting, people aren’t named immediately after being born. This is a semi-realistic-gritty fantasy setting, after all. Due to the somewhat high infant mortality, to at least somewhat soften the blow of potentially losing a child, babies just aren’t named before the parents are pretty confident that the kid is going to survive. The naming ceremony is where a baby is officially aknowledged as an entire individual, a member of the family and a legally existing person, instead of just a gurgling extension of the mother who may or may not disappear from this world. And that timespan between birth and being named is - depending on the situation and the family - somewhere between 1-4 years.
And suddenly the whole bunch of annoyingly-too-mature teenagers and other weird remarks about age start making sense in hindsight. The heroine protagonist who celebrated her 16th nameday at the start of the story is actually 19 years old. The wild difference in maturity between two characters who were both named the same year wasn’t just a difference in backgrounds, The Rich Idiot isn’t just rosy-cheeked and naive due to being sheltered growing up, but actually literally years younger than a peasant “of the same age”. A character who’s sickly and was frequently remarked to look much older than their years hasn’t just been harrowed by their illness, but was not named before the age of seven because their parents didn’t think they’d survive.
Transphobes aren’t attacking bathrooms randomly. It’s not about protecting women and children, it’s about preventing trans people from participating in public life.
Access to toilet facilities are essential to being able to participate in public life.
It’s why society was so reluctant to introduce public bathrooms for women, because before that all public bathrooms were for men only.
It’s why society was so reluctant to desegregate toilets for Black people.
It’s why society was and is so reluctant to create disability-accessible bathroom stalls.
If a person can’t access a toilet, then it’s extremely difficult to impossible for them to participate in society.
So, the best way to exclude a group of people from society without putting up a literal sign saying “x group of people not allowed” is to prevent them from accessing the bathroom.
Over the past few months I have asked a male architect for ideas & drafts for the renovation of the farmhouse, and at every turn I am stunned by his utter disregard for any cleaning-related concerns. For example, he is very into the idea of having in the living-room a big, non-openable window near the ceiling—which, granted, looks pretty, like having a piece of blue sky when you raise your eyes, but immediately I’m like, with a high ceiling, how will I clean this? You can’t open it so you have to clean both sides separately, and you can’t easily reach either side. I’ll need a tool with an absurdly long telescopic handle. He says, a stepladder. I’m like, but I’ll need to carry it by myself to the living-room and the front of the house every time. “So?” So a very tall stepladder is heavy? And it will be hard not to get dirty water dripping down the wall. He reacts like he can’t believe he is being asked to bring the concept of dirty soap water into his grand designs, like these are base, trifling considerations, when to me it’s a crucial factor in the decision to add this decorative window.
Similarly we both agree on leaving most of the wood beams exposed because they’re old and beautiful, but when I ask if we ought to insulate in such a way as to cover every other one, so the remaining ones are farther apart and it’s harder for spiders to use them as ready-made anchors for their webs, he just looks disgusted, like “I am talking about Architecture and you bring up spiderwebs.” At this point I start to entertain the idea that men make horrible architects. You design someone’s house to give them a nice, convenient space to live in, not to make their life more difficult. A man who has never used a sponge in his life should not be allowed to graduate from architect school and that’s the end of it.
Ok, I NEED you to understand just how insane even ATTEMPTING this was for them.
1. Playing an instrument is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Don’t think I’m stepping on any toes saying that.
2. Dancing is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Still not controversial.
3. YOU AVOID, AT ALL COSTS, MOVING YOUR BODY WHILE PLAYING A WIND INSTRUMENT. To make the correct, pleasant sounds, you need to be in the correct form. And that form involves your ENTIRE body, even your legs when sitting down.
4. “oh, but I’ve seen marching bands before and-” MARCHING BANDS HAVE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC FIELDS DEDICATED TO FIGURING OUT HOW TO MARCH WITH MINIMUM BREAKING OF PROPER FORM. A marching band tries to be as smooth as possible while moving, so as not to jar their instrument, mouth, neck, arms, torso, or anything else.These ladies and gentlemen are BOUNCING and still playing properly, what the FU-!
5. AND ANOTHER THING! Wind instruments and dancing BOTH make demands on your breathing, so the fact that they are dancing (making you breath faster for extra oxygen) AND playing wind instruments (making you effectively hold your breath) AT THE SAME TIME is HUGE. Their lungs must be MASSIVE.
All of that also; the song is Sing, sing, sing (with a swing). If you wanna listen to some of THE SPICIEST big band ever recorded. Its a big hard song and this band does it expertly.
I will. I will say ONE thing. As a wind instrument player, and very drunk atm for unrelated reason.
Most of the point above are correct, save for the first.
Playing in syncs with other is actually easier (Imhe, ymmv) due to a stronger base beat/rhythm/placement to follow and the ability to drop out when you need a breath knowing that there is plenty of volume to cover you and and that when you pop back in, you’ll know where you are thanks to following the players around you (and which point you then provide th same opportunity to your band mates)
