I just want to watch some fucking hockey without having to be complicit in being a piece of shit. I really miss the sport but fuck this stuff.
Meanwhile the dollar is crashing, people are even getting murdered. Some priorities.
The policy was passed on 11/15/25. All that chaos makes it hard to keep track of all the terrible awfulness happening.
This is hard for me to get a handle on.
On one hand, there’s something about sports and competition that speaks to a lot of people, taps into something key in our collective psyche, and is profound, if not important.
On the other hand, if half-baked, moronic, bad faith arguments about fair play and alarmist bullshit can be used as a tool to foster discrimination and hate against a group of people, then we’re clearly taking this shit far, far too seriously.
I think the problem is that we don’t take sports seriously enough. Trans women are women and they need representation in women’s sports. Trans men are men and they need representation in men’s sports.
Just to be clear, I fully agree with you. Trans persons should be represented in all levels of sport. Banning these althetes is asinine and needlessly cruel. Including trans althetes endangers nothing, and would strengthen the sport and it’s community of fans in the long run.
But what bothers me, and what I mean by sports being taken too seriously, is how anti-trans crusaders will use people’s tendency to regard sports as something that’s almost sacred to further their agenda. I get this sense that there are people who don’t have a problem with the trans community outside of this issue, but who back anti-trans measures and politicans because they fear the fabric of our society will crumble if sports aren’t safeguarded somehow. They act almost as if a church is being defiled. They fetizie this idea of “fair play” and hero athletes to the point that people openly hate someone for using steroids but don’t seem care if their teammate commits domestic abuse. That phenomenon gets used as a wedge on election day.
But come on, unless you compete, it’s mostly entertainment. It’s just a show to watch. At the end of the day, the role sports play in most people’s lives is little different than anything else on TV. Some people go to cons and collect merch, other people go to ball games and collect memorabilia.
Right-wing outrage over representation in TV and movies has made the market shift, but I still feel like there’s a broad majority of voters from both sides that don’t seem to care and just watch whatever despite the noise they make on socials. Right-wing outrage over representation in sports has gotten actual legislation passed. The difference seems to say that sports play an outsized role in our collective gestalt or whatever. That we take, what is for most entertainment, a little too seriously.
Or it could just be that I’ve had too much caffeine today. I dunno. Like I said, it’s hard for me to put this in words.
Yeah I think some of it is the delusions of fame and fortune - that is, parents think their little Timmy is the next Sidney Crosby and any potential competition to that must be removed.
Fact is that Timmy probably isn’t the next Crosby, and none of those games actually matter in the long run.
I hear you. I appreciate you taking the time to put pen to paper, so to speak, to think through this.
