You must log in or register to comment.
“The FEEEEMALE specimen famously doesn’t have the special male pool table muscles that men evolved to fight naturally occuring pool tables in the wild, that’s not sexist and transphobic, that’s just science.”
Feeemales!
Pool is the last sport to be concerned about the hypothetical of trans women making it hard for cis-women. It makes more sense for a sport like track where, yes, cis men do have a biological advantage. The average person thinks a trans woman is able to just jump into a track race without having taken any hormones and dominate, making the propaganda as effective as it’s been. They don’t bother to look into the steps that need to be taken before they can compete.
Pool, on the other hand, really doesn’t require any of that and should be one of those sports that allows for a more gender-neutral competition.
Pool is probably segregated for the same reason chess still is: the men are so misogynist that the women don’t want to play with them.
Pretty much. Even sports without gender segregation like motorsports have this issue because the men in those organizations are sexist as hell.
This exactly. There is no male advantage to fucking pool
It speaks to a deeper problem really of women facing barriers to sports.
Pub sports are no different, especially since the domain of drunk old men is one of the least appealing to younger women (creeps and weirdos galore).
So you get a lesser pool of women’s players. Therefore they’re less likely to win. Therefore they get put in their own bracket. Therefore they get paid less in that bracket. Therefore the pay of their top players is a pittance. Therefore they can’t fully devote their life toward it. Therefore they’re less likely to win. Repeat cycle.
Anyway, if you’ve grown up as a man, you’ve probably been allowed to pursue these male dominated sports pretty unhindered. Sure, you might’ve been an egg the whole time, but outwardly the men weren’t hostile to you, or creepy, or doubting. You’ve got to a level where you’re playing against elite players.
Then you come out as trans. The experience you accumulated as a man will serve you well. It is experience afforded far less easily to women.
Technically, women could just ‘get good’ and miraculously ignore those barriers. If that was so simple, there’d be far more female players and winners. But it isn’t that simple, and in some sense trans players can hold advantages over cisgender women.
I’m not calling for segregation, but I do have some sympathy for the women’s player. The great shame of it all is that her views have been moulded by society to blame trans people for this, rather than blaming men and sporting associations.
This whole explanation varies sport to sport, of course.
EDIT: Take this all with a grain of salt. The data is simply not out there. I speak mostly from anecdote as someone who has played and been involved in thousands of hours of sport. As I’ve said, I do not think there should be any trans segregation in precision sports. Here’s an interesting interview from a trans snooker champion: https://metro.co.uk/2022/09/04/jamie-hunter-if-i-didnt-transition-i-would-be-dead-it-had-nothing-to-do-with-snooker-17295875/ They transitioned around the age of 22, and won a championship at 25.
Anyway, if you’ve grown up as a man, you’ve probably been allowed to pursue these male dominated sports pretty unhindered. Sure, you might’ve been an egg the whole time, but outwardly the men weren’t hostile to you, or creepy, or doubting.
This erases the gendered harassment eggs face and is pretty offensive, comrade.
How? My understanding is that an egg is someone who hasn’t realised that they’re trans yet? What gendered harassment does a male who is at that point cis get?
After transitioning, for sure, being a trans sport player must be incredibly difficult. The abuse you recieve just for winning could definitely put you at a disadvantage.
it’s not an on-off switch, and you would be surprised at the amount of people who pick up on ‘queer’ vibes before you yourself have picked up on it harass you accordingly
I couldn’t say which is worse, having experienced neither, but my intuition is that there are significant differences in the way that creates a barrier, compared to what a cis woman might face. A big part of that is probably sexual harassment and such.
I think you have to be careful here - you have experienced neither but you have opinions on the lived experiences of the very people you are talking about, based on intuition. Not to come across as too toxic, but perhaps take a note from your username’s namesake and ask if you have investigated a problem, and whether therefore it is something you should be speculating so much on
you keep saying ‘women’ in this comment when referring to cis women, which is the main issue here - it’s not like trans women are winning and then secretly going ‘yes, another victory for men’, but rather it’s cis women who are not seeing trans women as part of the same team. So what if some trans women get socialised in such a way that they have an advantage in pool? The only reason this is an issue is if you fundamentally see a victory for trans women as a loss for cis women. The fact this is being shown as oppositional (and being played as such) is the major issue here - if a cis woman had gone through the same experiences, and had the same advantages, would she also be considered an unfair competitor?
That first part is very true, and I hadn’t thought of it that way. I mean, I didn’t think they were taking secret male joy in their victories, but it is true that trans women do advocate for cisgender women, and rarely vice-versa.
“if a cis woman had gone through the same experiences, and had the same advantages, would she also be considered an unfair competitor?” - Well, not by me, but probably by the media. However, a cis woman can’t have gone through the same experience and socialisation that a cis man has, or even a cis man who later transitioned. It’s impossible to ignore the way society treats you in your formative years, and the opportunities that are allowed or encouraged to you based on your assigned gender at birth. Think of the classic trope of the masculine father trying to make his ‘sissy’ son play sports to de-queer him, while he doesn’t encourage his daughter to do the same. Again, I know that’s an anecdote, but the stats are out there on encouragement for women to play sports, and they do back my anecdote, I just can’t be arsed to find them. As a hypothetical, it’s just far too utopian.
if we’re going down that path, shouldn’t we separate anybody who has had a parent who played pool from people with parents who didn’t play? And then shouldn’t we separate those based on who owned a pool table at home from those who didn’t? At what point are we drawing the line, if ‘might have had a Dad who pressured them into sports’ is an acceptable metric? Not to mention that basing your opinion on ‘tropes’ is how this discussion was started - people who’s only experience is seeing ‘Men In Dresses’ tropes on TV and then developing their opinions on trans people’s right to equal participation in society from that.
That is exactly my thoughts on the matter. There are many potential advantages some women will have over other women. Same with any other catagory of competitors, unless we just put everyone into an open category. But I don’t think that’s going to help the woman in the post.
This just seems like every just so story explanation for bigotry. Like just because you can come up with a story that sounds plausible doesn’t mean anything, unless you have data showing that trans women have some kind of statistical performance advantage over trans women then nothing else matters. And yeah ofcourse transphobes will come up with plausible stories that make them sound reasonable, few people are so self aware that they are just bigoted because they are bigoted, oftentimes the person the have to most convince is themselves.
Yeah this is true but also the pool of trans women playing professional pool has got to be real real small, yeah? Are there any sports where trans women are overrepresented for their gender?
The experience you accumulated as a man will serve you well. It is experience afforded far less easily to women.
Is this an actual valuable thing though? The “experience” here I mean. If there is one horrible thing perpetuated by that “10,000h makes you an expert” urban legend is that not only that was for music(piano) but one specific point is that bad practice will make you worse.
Essentially you’ll never just bullshit around for 10,000 hours and become a world renowned expert, instead it only means through consistent and thoughtful practice, that is the ballpark time investment required.
In any case if one wanted to talk about natural learning that is just the domain of children anyway, even teenagers and certainly any adult can’t just learn through just experience.
So I don’t want to contest your comment entirely, but I want to make it clear its not that simple at all, shitty experiences and bad practice affords you no actual real advantage at all over someone that spent less time but more productive, focused time.
integration of sports was a mainstream feminist position back when that label actually meant something. now that we’ve just collectively accepted that women can never be equal to men, the only solution is individual striving and a narrow politics of representation.
What do you mean by integration?
one combined league, everyone plays everyone instead of men playing men and women playing women
But that also would result in disparities. In precision sports that should be the case, but anything invlving strength you wouldn’t see a woman in the top thousands for a lot of sports.
Yeah I don’t really see how this would play out in sports like Athletics or wrestling, even with weight classes. People thinking a mixed rugby team wouldn’t result in severe injuries and possible deaths for the female athletes are kidding themselves.
Consider the following: no one should devote their entire life to pool. It’s an asinine waste of resources
Lol, a semi-uncharitable reading of your comment would just be “don’t have hobbies, or fun”.
Why not devote your life to pool, or any other sport? Seems a lot less of a waste than, like, golf.
You shouldn’t have professional hobbies according to Marxist theory, luxuries are bad.
how? Golf and pool are at the same level, not skills which apply to other areas, not useful to society, and not in this case creating community. Pool can be a hobby, but a complaint that anyone can’t make a living off of it is absurd.
One giant difference between pool and golf (I’m putting off work by posting to hexbear and now you have to suffer my nitpicking, I’m so sorry) is that golf is a massive waste of water and land, water and land that could be a dope ass park or wildlife preserve or literally anything other than a golf course. But pool is just an overly expensive (and heavy) table, a few balls, and a couple of sticks.
Pool is way better than golf, is what I’m saying.
They argue that the involvement of [trans women] in ladies’ competitions is deeply unfair because they have a clear physical edge over [cis women] competitors.
These advantages include possessing greater upper body strength enabling them to make a more powerful initial ‘break’ of the balls
I made the actual data-laughing face irl I’m so brainbroken
famously the hardest part of pool, the break, in which you get more points the more balls you knock clean off the table.
Someone tell that to my upper body strength, which has diminished to the point that I can barely pick up a 40-lb bucket of cat litter now.
post in c/mutual_aid if you need help with any pickle jars
Real practical pickle jar advice that always works: take a decent sized knife and tap the corners of the lid with the blunt end enough to dent it just a bit, one on each side of the circle or maybe 2 more should do it. It’ll come right off after.
further additional advice: pretty sure 90% of opening a tough jar is persistence. if you’re really crankin on that thang as hard as you can, there’s a good chance you’re making progress, even if it’s not perceptible. at the very least you’re stressing the metal or plastic and making it more malleable. there’s a reason letting someone else have a go at it works so often and it’s not just cuz they’re stronger.
Just do the knife thing and you don’t have to deal with any of this
Additional real advice: twist the jar, not the lid.
So…they wouldn’t be able to go full falcon punch on a pool cue and knock a bunch of balls off the table, which I’m not that familiar with pool but I’m sure incures a penalty and would be super embarrassing at a professional level.
the cis woman ringer pool shark has been a sitcom trope for like 4000 years because it’s one of the few sports-related activities that doesn’t even have the pretense of biologically male skeletons. unless cis women are gonna start demanding that girlbrains be recognized as a disability like even for notoriously shortsighted reactionaries this kind of stuff is wild in its aimlessness.
‘I recently played a transgender player and I was destroyed when I lost.’
Why do you have to veil your L around transphobia? Just admit you have a skill issue. Oh wait, I guess being the “star” of a game only racist boomers in dive bars play really inflates your ego.
Much like darts, it’s a real bummer that’s the crowd cause it’s fun as hell.
Getting so mad you got rekt that you start shrieking about ‘gender ideology’, kind of embarrassing!
“worthless sack of shit terrified she will be shown up by trans supersoldiers”
lol yea im sure there is such a huge gap between men and women when it comes to holding lightweight pool cues and tapping a ball in to a hole. get fucked.
Well there’s obviously no intelligence test to become good at pool.
donald duck in mathemagic land in shambles
The biological males all spread their enormous beards across the table at the start of every game. They use them to jostle the balls around, scoring points when it isn’t even their turn. They wrap their long moustaches around her pool cue and yank her off balance whenever she takes a shot. They put their testicles on the table, painted to look like pool balls. Every single time.
They put their testicles on the table, painted to look like pool balls
oof ouch owie that one got me right in the snooker
Yes. Biologically male pool stars bear this pain so that the rest of us don’t have to. That’s why they are heroes.
Balliards
TIL pool is a gendered sport
Moooom I need a new xbox controller this one is trraaaaannnsss
Shut the fuck up
New rule: if your “sport” can’t manage skill divisions without worrying about genitals it’s gone. Your sport is fired. No more pool until you can figure out how to let everyone play. This goes for all the other sports too.
This is reminding me of the time I was watching a roller derby bout. The away team had multiple huge guys (like they should’ve been playing football), that just bowled through the other team.
Convinced me the sport needs weight classes.
Transphobia in sports cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy in sports. They use the same racist excuses against trans people, and the same transphobic excuses against black people (see: all the black athletes that get banned for not being feminine (read: white) enough). And the transphobes even have their own transgender pseudoscience they use as justification, much like their race science of last century.
This whole discussion just reminded me that race car driving, Go-Kart racing, motorcycle racing, radio-car racing, paraglidng, gliding, motorboat racing, radio-boat racing, precision shooting, bull riding, and speedcubing are all the biggest sports that have no gender segregation.
This is true. Everbody with testicles eventually develops an intuition for how balls bounce of each other because they can feel it happening to them every step.
Boobs? Checkmate
Trans women still dominate due to having experience with both 😔
