“The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want to feed your shame.” — Viola Davis
Someone beat me to the punch. I’ve never promised to be first in this business. After all, this is something I do in my spare time. One of my favorite spots already covered this in great detail. The Ohio state legislature apparently has legalized groping and invasion of privacy. They are calling it protection. See, they want to protect young girls of the indignity of competing against transgender girls in youth sports.
I definitely invite you to click on the link. It is a well-written piece that covers a lot of the seeded underbelly of conservative politics these days. You always have to wonder about people who are so interested in little girls, porn, and whatever else this is.
Somewhere in the space between performative politics, right wing hysteria, and mendacious posturing lies the true decay of the human spirit. Whatever you think of this dingbat, just remember her husband was arrested for exposing himself to two minors at a bowling alley. Still, I guess we should give Boebert credit for not suggesting we take our kids there.
We could write a whole book on the relationship between the public pronouncements that people make and the dirty behind the scenes reasons for those announcements. We will have to take the Ohio legislature and their pronouncements at face value for now.
As a former coach of girls volleyball, it never occurred to me to question whether anyone we were playing was actually a girl. My first high school team routinely played teams a lot bigger and stronger than them. We lost most of those games. As far as I could tell, no one was worse for the wear. If anyone ended up having difficulty in life it wasn’t because they lost to a team of girls that used to be boys. The notion is patently ridiculous.
Like I said, the writer in the post linked above covered all of the salacious things we can assume are going on. I am more bummed out by what has happened to youth sports in general. Families routinely pay 2000 dollars or more a year to play club volleyball (or other club sports) so their daughters can effectively keep up with their classmates. Most competitive high school programs expect their players to do this. You don’t get ahead if you don’t.
These are not for fun leagues. There are two to three practices a week and in most clubs, playing time is hotly contested. Let’s forget that we are paying that money for our daughter to grow as a player and get more experience. Let’s forget we are paying the exact same as everyone else. Fun? Well, that was forgotten a long time ago.
The bill in question gives coaches, parents, and other “interested bystanders” the right to question girls as young as ten. Could you imagine thinking any event that a ten year old is participating in is so important as to subject a young girl to that? Sure, someone is getting their jollies I suppose, but there is something else at play here.
At some point, kids need to be kids and a part of being a kid is being able to play a game without their futures, self-esteem, and worth in the community riding on the outcome. Sometimes a game just needs to be a game. Sometimes keeping score isn’t a big deal. No one is going to remember who won a game between ten year olds 20 years later. We might remember a funny thing that happened or when we got the big hit or the crucial basket, but we won’t remember the damn score.
Admittedly, I have probably taken the least important facet of this discussion to focus on, but it needs to be said. The learned representative from Colorado demonstrates this daily. We focus on crap that doesn’t matter. How many people are really taking their kids to a drag bar? How many people are obsessing over whether a ten year old girl is really a girl? If we are obsessing over these things then what in the hell are we actually getting done about the problems people do worry about? Of course, that’s the whole idea. If we focus on the stupid, trivial nonsense then no one will figure out that we are morally and intellectually bankrupt on the important stuff.
halloffameindex 