Kristi Noem: Now That Re-Election Year Is Upon Me, I Realize I Have to Pretend to be a Conservative Again, So, Say: Let's Ban Transgender Athletes In Women's and Girl's Sports, Huh?
Except... Let Me Put This Huge Loophole In My Proposal

She's up again in 2022. I don't doubt she'll win, but if she wants to run as president in 2024 or later -- which she does -- or be on the list of names seriously bandied about as a possible VP, which then makes her a serious candidate for president in later years -- which she does -- she wants to win in 2022 convincingly, and without a primary.

That was Chris Christie's plan for 2016. That's why he made deals with Obama and Cory Booker.

It did not work.

So now she's against transgenders in girl's and women's sports and she's even willing to have a court fight about it, which she wasn't willing to do less than a year ago when she was showing off for her Chamber of Commerce pals and donors and possible future employers.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Tuesday she would propose a bill to ban transgender women and girls from participation in female school sports leagues.

The proposal, which will be considered during the legislative session in January, revives a debate in the Capitol that split Republicans last year. A similar bill ultimately died in March after the governor issued a "style and form veto" against it.

Noem had argued that bill would have been easily defeated in court and had other technical problems. But she also faced political fallout among social conservatives and issued executive orders that pushed high school sports and public universities to only allow women to compete in women's sports if their birth certificate listed them as female.

Noem's proposed bill would codify those orders, her office said Tuesday. She described them as an effort to ensure "an equal playing field" for women.

I actually don't know if requiring a birth certificate to prove your sex is enough.

Because South Dakota allows people to change the gender recorded on their birth certificate via a court order.

Per this summary from the Lambda Legal Defense group (an LGBT pressure group):

Administrative Codes: S.D. Admin. R. 44:09:05:02; 44:09:05:09(4)

Notes: Although not specifically mentioned in the statute, the State Registrar provides amended certificates to reflect sex reassignment if given a court order. Although the Registrar will follow any specific instructions in the court order, their general policy is to issue a new certificate with no indication of amendment.

Summary: South Dakota will issue a birth certificate reflecting the proper sex.

So any transgender can get their birth certificate changed to reflect their "proper" gender, and the court will make no mention that the certificate was amended (that is, there is notation that it was changed at all).

So Noem's new position is... I don't know if it's a "lie" or not. I know other states use birth certificates to determine eligibility for women's sports.

But do they share South Dakota's policy on "amending" birth certificates as far as gender goes?

Is this another case of tricking the rubes?

Is she also going to change the law about changing birth certificates, or require them to note if they've been amended as regards to gender? And specify that you can only compete in women's/girl's sports if your original birth certificate says you're female?

Or nah?

Conning the Cons

The favorite game of Regime corporate neoliberals for 60 years. And counting.

We'll see. If we see any evasiveness on this question -- any hemming, any hawing, any foxiness, any slipperiness -- then we'll know.

We'll know. We'll know we're being conned yet again, and by the exact same kind of snake-oil salesman as we always see.

While Governor Chamber of Commerce may (or may not) be playing games to Con the Rubes, women's sports are subject to... what would be the right term...?

Ah yes: Let's call it, "the Trans Erasure of Women's Sports."

University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas says she's "thrilled" to be competing on the women's team, but apparently not all of her teammates share her enthusiasm.

Two female Penn swimmers told sports website OutKick in anonymous interviews that team members are frustrated and upset as they watch Thomas smash records in her first season on the women’s team after three years as a men’s freestyle standout.

"They feel so discouraged because no matter how much work they put in it, they're going to lose," one swimmer said in the Friday report.

Meanwhile, the Olympic committee won't even keep the fig-leaf requirement that transgenders at least go on hormone suppression for a year before competing as "women."

And note that the testosterone level they're required to be under is higher than the highest testosterone levels female athletes ever see. And also note: they went through years of puberty and sports training with that testosterone advantage -- an advantage that is illegal in sports. We call it "doping" when we use steroids to mimic just this advantage.

But now the ICO won't even require that. They'll leave it to the individual sports to decide if men can compete with women with full male testosterone or not.

After years of having very specific rules regulating testosterone levels and in what way biological males would be able to compete in women’s athletic events at the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has determined that there should be no barriers at all to men competing in women’s events. Its new ruling overturns the previous 2015 guidance, and should mean that all women everywhere, whether athletes or spectators, boycott the Olympics entirely, in every category, in every form, across the world.

The previous rules for the participation of men in women’s sports were already unfair, with male athletes having to show that their testosterone levels were below 10 nmol/liter of blood for 12 months or more. Women’s standard amount of testosterone is .09 nmol/liter of blood. Even with the application of testosterone during a British medical study, women were only able to increase to 4.3 nmol/liter. The normal, healthy range for men is 9.2 to 31.8 nmol/liter.

The new rules are couched in ideas of anti-discrimination, but they are only about not discriminating against gender-nonconforming biological males who identify as transgender and use female pronouns, and in so doing, they directly discriminate against women.

The rules say that sports organizations' eligibility criteria should "not systematically exclude athletes from competition based on their gender identity, physical appearance, and/ or sex variations."

Overturning the entirety of human history and understanding about biology, the IOC states that "No athlete should be precluded from competing or excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged, or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status."

Below, Thomas, who claims he has no advantage over women by virtue of having competed as a man in collegiate swimming for three years before deciding he was a woman all along, shows his complete lack of advantage over women by... literally lapping them in the pool, as if he was the only adult competing against small children.

As I said before: He's doing so great in women's swimming with only a few week's experience in the sport, imagine if he'd been doing women's swimming all his life! Why, he'd be smashing all women's records and beating women by a humiliating 38 seconds!

In a sport in which first and second place is often decided by less than a second!

Oh wait, he is doing that. Never mind.

posted by Ace at 04:55 PM

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