Posts by Lucy Stewart
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I suspect Lhaws actually enjoys offending people, and thrives on the publicity. His is an ego out of control.
One would hope being, as Russell put it so descriptively, a flaming cock to twelve-year-olds - with a big dash of thinly-veiled racism to boot - might get him some actual consequences.
(I actually suspect he believed his own bollocks about the teacher putting them up to it and was responding to the teacher, which is still totally unacceptable as well as idiotic, but might explain the extent of the dickishness towards schoolkids. Or, you know. He's just that much of a dick.)
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Great to see you back, Emma.
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It's more to show that there was a problem, that it's not just imaginary.
Thing is, though: what women wear has bugger-all to do with their chances of being assaulted. If the analogy holds, what gang members wear will have very little effect on violent crime. If it does have an effect, then it's a bad analogy.
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Heh, that's probably wise since if you wouldn't say I wasn't asking for it, then that kind of implies you think I was. I shouldn't have used the negative. So you think it wouldn't be asking for it to wear a gang's patches in Whanganui, despite not only not being in the Black Power, but also not even being the least bit dark? I think in theory you are right, but I would not risk it.
Actually, I missed the negative entirely; I would not say you deserved to have violence committed upon you, even if it was quite predictable that you would, because no-one deserves to be beaten up for what they're wearing. I wouldn't feel as sorry for you as I otherwise might, because it was predictable, but it still wouldn't be deserved.
However, given that "asking for it" in quotemarks is usually used of situations vis a vis women and sexual assault where the phrase is entirely inappropriate, and we've just had a whole protracted thread on the matter of clothes-wearing and the signals it sends in that context, I wasn't sure it was the best phrasing. TL;DR: I read too much into things.
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Would anyone say that I wasn't 'asking for it' if I did?
I wouldn't (but I wouldn't go drawing any comparisons using that particular phrase, either, as the situation is somewhat different.)
That, and noting the fact that this bylaw has offered an opportunity to someone I probably wouldn't much like to bring an authentic grievance to court.
That's what the law is for, I guess. The sad thing is that I guarantee if he gets off using the Bill of Rights, the usual suspects will immediately declaim that there's something wrong with the Bill of Rights, rather than the other way around.
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Probably time to buy her that monocle she's always wanted.
Yay for modern western socialised medicine.
I think the monocle would go smashingly with that amazing red coat from a few threads back.
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Is it beacuse this abnormal testosterone level occurs so rarely?
Or because unusually high testosterone levels are just one factor among many that contribute to winning performance?
I would surmise that people with disorders of sexual development are no more likely than anyone else to have all the other factors that make you a top athlete in their favour (e.g. time, support, funding, motivation, body type). Even if abnormally high testosterone was a ticket to success, I can't imagine all those things would come together very often.
Besides, your average man won't beat a good female runner, even with his testosterone advantage. On its own, it doesn't mean anything.
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I agree that athletic talent is genetically mediated. As soon as Usain Bolt started rewriting the record books I reckon there were any number of elite sprinting programs who re-wrote their talent scouting guidelines to emphasise height as a more important criteria than they did before. If Semenya turns out to be a huge talent AND she has a disorder of sexual development that leads to an advantage you can bet athletic programs will be screening for those attributes.
I guess I'm just not seeing so much of a problem with that. It doesn't seem to me so much different from screening for any other sort of advantageous genetic anomaly.
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If a female competitor gains an advantage from abnormal testosterone levels as the result of a disorder of sexual development then I don't think she can race as a female. This is unfair, but is the result of having separate events for men and women. I don't think you can have the latter without excluding the former.
I think you're sticking to an overly restrictive definition of "female" there. For starters, define "advantage". As I said, Semenya is no Usain Bolt; she's within the range of female competitivity, easily. If they're just really good, is that unfair, more than Phelps' slightly freakish anatomy? How much better do they have to be? How do you decide that?
Sex is a continuum, not a binary. Saying "oh, tough luck, they just can't compete" is basically demanding that anyone who doesn't fit neatly into a gender binary buggers off until we start having co-ed top-level sports (you'll be waiting a while). Athletic talent is, to a large degree, genetically mediated. This is just another form of genetic mediation.
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I recall that having a surgeon tell me in lurid detail just exactly how he was going to remove one of my testicles and have someone slice it into little pieces wasn't so much "informing my consent" as "psychological torture."
Apparently it's worse in the US because of the risk of being sued - you're told about absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong. Even if it makes you want to hide under the bed and never come out. I'm pretty sure our system avoids that, because my partner had an operation last month in which, let us say, neither of us really needed to know all the possible worst-case scenarios. Really.
Best of luck, Emma, and may I second the remarks about Chch public - all my experiences of it have made me feel very warm and fuzzy about our healthcare system.