I’ve been starting to write for the last two hours. Every time I start I put on some new music I received and then get distracted. Now that people are sending me music every day I’ll have to get better at my musical time management. I very much want to make a time signature joke here but can’t make it work. Let’s just make believe that ¾ is funny. Is 4/4 funnier? Does it march to the beat of a different drummer? On another ♪ yesterday was the first hour-long edition of Gord’s Gold on Folk Music Notebook. Today you can find it on my Mixcloud. Once there you can then click on the button to help pay for the upkeep of the site and maybe even leave me enough money to buy a bagel. Remember you aren’t just supporting me; you are supporting the bagel bakers. If you prefer you can think of it as supporting Marie’s Coffee, Teddie’s peanut butter, the cocoa farmers, Taylor ham, and bacon makers. I have simple tastes.
It was exciting listening to my first show, and I managed to listen to all of it. I hope you did too. Whoever programs Gord’s Gold plays only music that I love. I winced a few times in retrospect. Sometimes for how I said things, and sometimes for my programming choices. I probably shouldn’t have included music from both Chicks With Dip collaborations. Yes I love them, but I love other things too. I don’t want the show to sound too parochial. On the other hand, I needed to play both songs to make the sets work.
My first submissions to the Folk Music DJ List were rejected as I used the wrong form. It said send them as text, so I attached them as text documents. They meant to not use html on the email. What I don’t get it is why I see text attachments on the emails I receive. I was so good about it too. I sent out my report for my February short shows on the last possible day they count, the 28th, but sent out last night’s show as the show was starting. I worked out a system to make things easy. That’s totally me. I keep a spreadsheet with each show that I use to tell Ron the running order, post the track list on Mixcloud, and submit to the Fold Music DJ list. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy for me to move things around.
I’ve been thinking about what people say about transfemale athletes? Is that right or is it trans female or trans-female? This is the biggest problem with rapidly changing social mores, the language has trouble keeping up and the grammar nerds like me are forced to make difficult decisions. I’m going with trans-female for now. I see people who make no other posts about sports, which don’t appear to follow women’s sports complaining about trans-women competing in women’s events. This is not prima fascia unreasonable. I remember the debate when Renee Richards, who had gender reassignment surgery, tried to enter women’s tennis tournaments. There were concerns that as men are stronger and leaner than women it would give her an unfair advantage. Turned out that being over 40, and dealing with the surgery and the hormones, and perhaps simply not being that good, gave her no advantage. The issue soon died down. I have seen polls where Olympic athletes were asked if they would trade a significant number of years of life to win a gold medal, and most said yes. So sure, I could see at some point the 100th best male basketball player deciding to call himself a woman so she could be a star. I could see it as a hypothetical, but not as a real concern. It’s just not happening. And the people complaining are not sports fans. They aren’t worried about the integrity of the game. The reason they care is because of transphobia. The real damage of stigmatization is accepted by them as an acceptable cost of the hypothetical women who are denied victory because of men saying they are women. The focus is on problems that don’t even exist at the present, and they avert their gaze from why this is important to them.
I’m not going to search for it, but I blogged about a short story I was working on with a similar hypothetical problem, an extraterrestrial alien race that can throw a fastball at 120 mph. As I had him pitching for the Mets the answer was, “of course he should be allowed to pitch.” It is an interesting hypothetical problem as if there were enough aliens they really could take all the major league pitching jobs. Know what? We already have something like that. How many people under 6 feet play in the NBA? Are there any now? Does that mean we should ban people over 6 feet from playing? Now that you are saying that is ridiculous, of course not, the same argument could be made about sporting events restricted to women. But if we did that then no women would be able to compete at the top levels.
The fallacy here is that these things are different. We have to think of each case separately and err on the side of those with less power, as it is those with power that make the decisions. So, you know why we should let trans-females compete in women’s sports? Because it won’t mean that women don’t get to compete. It will hardly change anything, except making some trans-women happy. I deliberately muddied the waters to make it seem more complicated that it is. I usually argue that people oversimplify, but when motivated they can overcomplicate. The Golden Rule is the one to keep paramount.
Wise Madness 