So much of the arguments around trans women in sports put forward paint sports as an issue of winning. They do not put sports forward as a civil human right to be able to participate in society. There are so many comparative opportunities made for disabled people to participate in sport that use those arguments but here is a group that faces barriers of social ostracization and they are basically told that they aren’t worthy of being tolerated. That they must accept a dramatically smaller access to society.

What is the purpose of sport? Does it have just one purpose and does that override every other good and enriching thing it offers?

You can’t have a certain category of crime for which all accusations are be taken at face value and truthful by default.

Point of order - that is not what is being advocated for here.

No one said “Let’s ruin people’s lives based on taking an accusation without any proof”

They said “Consequences for rapists” and somehow that jumped to “there’s no way to prove rape happened” like it is a crime that leaves behind no physical evidence or corroborated accounts of repeat patterns from multiple often unrelated victims who have no knowledge of each other.

A lot of the weaknesses of the everyman American is a sort of America centric myopia. Smaller countries have to have their finger a little more on the pulse of soft power - diplomatic moves, reputation and mutual back scratches that make world politics function. The US international soft power moves have not exactly been front and center news when the domestic news is constantly fought with inter-state domestic conflict with the federal government, gun violence and bombastic over the top cultural gossip. The fact the US has a lot of hard power in the form of post WWII advantages that were built in a decimated landscape it survived mostly unscathed from means that they had the privilege of being the big stick weilder in the room.

Everyone was mostly content to let America be the world power it was because it did so under the guise of being a protector… And then it threatened somebody. An ally. Entirely for it’s own interest. Suddenly everyone realized that they were dependent on the US and they’d let their own militaries, food sovereignty and political hard power wither.

And that has happened before. In Greece. It’s ancient history now but everybody realized that they had walked onto that same landmine but it hadn’t gone off yet. Whether deliberately or not Trump opened his mouth and gave the game away and nobody wants that future. So now America is getting treated like the landmine it is and the world is dumping efforts into rebuilding without America in the room.

And America is powerful enough right now to handle a rainy day but not rain that just keeps on pouring. The trust that was the hidden cornerstone of American power just got cracked in half by a guy whom America voted in not just once but twice the first time might have been an accident. The chaos he caused on the world stage might have been a fluke but everybody knows now it isn’t.

Americans have not begun to see the hard times that are on the way and I do not say this with any pleasure. I have a lot of people I care for inside those borders and I am so fucking scared for them all.