Ann Althouse is sarcastic about trans-female athletes:
Today, the pressure to be empathetic toward transgenders is so great that I believe women, known for our empathy and our desire to appear compassionate, will let go of competitive sports and return to the inclinations that dominated back in the days when I went to high school. It’s a trade-off, a trade-off between the potential for athletic victory and the feeling of being kind and inclusive. The latter is something quite valuable and within the reach of all women. The former is a dream, and it’s only a dream for an elite few among women.
I find her reasoning sarcastically oversubtle as well as specious.
True empathy would not involve women giving up on sports, just giving up on winning (which she does mention). More women should enter sports to ensure the transgenders can boost their self esteem and have a legal way to seriously injure real women in the MMA. That’s how women can be most empathetic, and such self-effacement is easily within the reach of even more women than currently play sports.
After all, without women, who are the female impersonators going to defeat?
Update: 3:20PM.
I finished this post and then read a few comments at Althouse, where she resists admitting sarcasm. If that is accurate, here’s exactly what Althouse supposes women will forgo, and that is very, very sad:
Update: Feb-18-20 3:43PM
Later visit to Althouse: She took quite a bit of flack in comments on her post; compelling a second post in defense of the first. She claims Glenn Reynolds’, “So, traditional-gender-roles folks, you have the trans crowd to thank for returning us to the 1950s!” correctly interprets her point.
To me that sounds like sarcasm was the point, but she refuses to entertain such interpretation. She goes to a lot of trouble to say she was simply making a neutral prediction that female empathy will overcome female competitive drive in sports: Because the majority of females in sports will prefer to abandon competition in favor of “compassion and empathy” for transgenders.
Right there you have evidence that transgender women aren’t women. Where’s the transgender empathy for real women?
Who needs some empathy? Female impersonators? Or real women denied success because the female impersonators got permission from cowed bureaucrats to deny their (the impersonators) biology?
Althouse isn’t, she says discreditably, taking a position on the question of transgender “women” competing with actual females, she is just predicting an outcome based on her estimation of actual female psyches. For a retired female law professor, she proposes a surprisingly dim, pinched, and patronizing view of actual females.
For a female law professor and less than obscure blogger: Eschewing any position on anti-scientific, misogynist aggression against females is, in fact, a position. That the aggression is transgender doesn’t dial the female empathy obligation up to 11.
To invoke one of her themes, I call it “civility bullshit.”