A man plays a woman's sport and everybody pretends he's a trailblazer

A mentally ill man discusses how tennis makes him feel more powerful because he's able to beat girls and get away with it.

When I was growing up, my ghosthood was most obvious to me in locker rooms and on ball fields — places where I had to confront my own body and its relation to others’. But the emptiness was always present, in classrooms and at prom and at friends’ houses and even alone in my room. All I wanted was embodiment, and it was the one thing that I, for so long, would not be able to find. Instead, I used drugs. I self-harmed because pain, at least, felt real.

I didn’t realize there was another choice until age 28, when I popped my first little blue estrogen pill, sitting at a bar with some friends in Philadelphia, a humongous grin on my face.

This is not the way a mentally healthy man would ever talk. Of course, trannies are just faggots with that extra level of crazy as we well know.

Peter Moskowitz is very excited that he gets to play tennis now against women, and pretend that they're "other women" rather than women who are going to be humiliated playing against him as long as Peter has a modicum of skill. Let's look at what I wrote exactly four years ago yesterday:

I can speak with a little bit of authority here: I've been playing a lot of tennis over the past couple of years and one of the regular players I play against is a woman. She has been involved in a few Edmonton tennis tournaments and finished top 5 in a couple of them. She is actually a ranked Canadian tennis player. Watching her games as a spectator against other women tennis players I have seen her win more than she loses and have often been impressed with her skill.

And I've never once lost to her.

Okay it's not like I win every bout between us 6-0, 6-0, 6-0. I've lost sets to her before, but never two in a row. I've lost sets to one of the other women I've played as well, but usually I lose a set 6-4, and I often win sets 6-4 or 6-2. In a heads up battle between a woman who is pretty good and me, I fare extremely well. If you watch me playing her on the courts sometimes you might think I'm really an impressive player. I'm always in position and my feet barely move while I make her cover all four corners of the court. My serves are often returned into the net, her volleys fly over my head and go long. My ground game in particular might blow you away.

And then you watch me play male players and you'll notice that I'm regularly the second best player on the court.

If I decided to pull a Marcel Panas and pretend I was a woman, I could officially play against her and the other girls in the tournament...and I'd probably fulfill my dream of winning a tennis tournament. Of course, I could also go trans-temporal, claim I'm actually an 8-year-old boy, and win tennis matches against them too. It's cheating but I'd at least win: in fairness I have no trouble using a cheat code in a single-player Starcraft or Birth of the Federation game so there's probably no reason I shouldn't also use one in a physical sport. Yet I don't.

Mr. Moskowitz does, of course. Then he writes an endless screed about how it's all about his identity like that's something that actually matters. rmcolborn has the best of the many good comments at the bottom of the article (at least they permit comments):

Human beings one the most dimorphic of all mammals. Males average no less than 50% greater mass and strength than females. THAT is the elephant in the living room. Who here remembers when Venus and Serena Williams, two of the finest females tennis players in the world, announced the challenge that they could beat any male rated lower than 200 in the sport? First, the nature of that bet should give you pause: the best of the best of the best knew that they couldn't compete with the 200 best males in tennis. But, then, Karsten Braasch, rated 203, beat both sisters back to back. And it was not because he was anti-female. It was quite simply because he was cis-male, and they had wagered too far.

At some point, we need to recognize the mistake of whining, "You're disallowing us because you are transphobic and unwilling to accept us." No, we are not. In reality, I would really not like to see a transmale get killed in a normal MMA tournament, or a transmale get killed playing American football or rugby. Or, even to see a transmale dominate women's tennis because cis-women can't compete with a person whose biological destiny was 50% greater muscle mass and density. I like trans people enough I don't want to see them killed because they've misunderstood the issue. You wanna play badminton? I guess that's okay. But don't be surprised when a transmale comes and steals the show. I know we don't like in our so-modern society that the average differences in the sexes are actually associated with real biological and adaptive function, but they are.

Women are built with bodies that give birth, make milk, with radically different fat locations and concentrations, radically different hormonal soups for their brains and glands, and with joints actually designed to soften and stretch to allow a baby to pass through. It is amazing and miraculous. Men's hips in general are not designed to stretch wide enough to pass a baby head. A woman's body is miraculous, even if it is not the kind of body that is first in the race or first in overhead lifts. On the bell curve, besides being way smaller, even very lean women will be at 15% fat or much more. On the same bell curve, lean men will run 7-8%. Are there outliers in the population? Sure. Yes. In all domains. Very rarely--it's why they're outliers. But it's hard--perhaps cruel--to make rules, 1) around large public activities, and, 2) greater risks of injury or death, for normal public or educational activities.

It reminds me not only of my classic tennis story (which was during my story about Serena/Venus claims about being almost as good as the Top-200), but also something that Martok remarked a long time ago that I don't think I've ever blogged about before: the WNBA.

You know the WNBA, surely: it was probably the first of the professional sporting female-copycat leagues. It's a basketball league made up (for now) entirely of women. Yet Martok had a point about it that you might have to read twice to fully appreciate:

There's a WNBA. There's no MNBA. There is only the regular NBA that anybody can join but only men are ever good enough.

This is true of almost all the leagues: they aren't specifically excluding women, they just need the best of the best and women aren't even close. Occasionally the leagues will bring in a token woman as a marketing tool, but no teams are interested in actually keeping them on the roster.

If Peter Moskowitz had his way, they would only be token women once a decade in the league of their own.