Sunday, February 26, 2017

Transgender Boy Wins Texas State Girl's Wrestling Title


Unlike I suspect most virulently anti-transgender Christofascists, I know a number of transgender individuals socially - on April 1, 2017, I will share the stage with two of them as I receive my "Outstanding Virginian" award in Richmond - and in my legal practice I regularly assist those who have gone through transition and sexual reassignment treatments to amend their birth certificates to conform to their reassigned sex.  What might be shocking to hate and bigotry driven Christofascists is the reality that these transgender individuals are just every day people trying to make it through life just like the rest of us, but who have struggled with a burden that few of us can fully imagine, the difficulty of which is underscored by the greatly increased suicide rate among transgender individuals.  They are not predators or perverts - indeed, most pedophiles and sexual predators are HETEROSEXUAL males. What is tragic is that what most drives these individuals to see death as preferable to living is the abuse, hatred and rejection they so often experience.  Especially form the self-anointed "godly folk."  

Why such hatred on the part of the Christofascists?  I have my theory that applies to the rest of the LGBT community: we threaten their house of cards religious belief system and their desire to have a set of "rules" that they can follow without ever having to think and make their own moral decisions. Our very existence reminds them that they may be building their lives on a myth and fantasy world and for that were are hated.  In this rush to banish us from the world so that they can pursue an unthinking and ignorance embracing existence, the Christofascists ignore the fact that once transitioned, transgender individuals are truly no longer their birth sex.  

Seeking to force transgender individuals to continue to pretend that they are still their birth sex leads to idiotic and ridiculous results.  A situation in Texas demonstrates the stupidity and bigotry of the Christofascist mindset.  Here are excerpts from the Washington Post:
 Booed and bloody, Mack Beggs dropped to his knees to celebrate. He was, after four wins and two days and all the rest, a state champion.
In a 12-2 victory against Chelsea Sanchez in the 110-pound classification, Beggs ended a highly controversial and dramatic weekend by becoming the first transgender participant to win a Class 6A girls’ state championship in Texas high school wrestling.
“I just witnessed my sport change,” a longtime Texas wrestling coach said moments after Beggs, a 17-year-old junior at Trinity High in Euless whose transition from girl to boy began two years ago and now includes testosterone injections, won a championship. The victory was seen as equal parts unavoidable — quick and noticeably strong, he entered the tournament unbeaten in 52 matches against girls — and contentious. The University Interscholastic League, which oversees sports in Texas public schools, ordered Beggs to continue competing in the girls’ division despite heavy uproar and a lawsuit earlier this month in a Travis County district court.
 [T]he tournament ended a week in which President Trump revoked federal guidelines allowing transgender students to use public restrooms that match their gender identity; it played out in a sprawling and culturally diverse state divided over a controversial “bathroom bill” similar to the one roiling North Carolina.
[W]ith Beggs cruising to a state championship, the hundreds here had no choice but to confront one of the nation’s most divisive and highly charged issues.
“She’s standing there holding her head high like she’s the winner,” said Patti Overstreet, a mother of a wrestler in the boys’ division. “She’s not winning. She’s cheating.”
James Baudhuin, the attorney suing the UIL over Beggs’s participation in the girls’ division, has a daughter who had wrestled against Beggs and, at least before the suit, was among his friends.
The ordeal grew complicated, on and off the mat. Baudhuin himself said he was so conflicted that, though he’d filed a petition to keep Beggs off the mat, he would nonetheless be cheering for Beggs to win the championship.
“The 16 girls who are in [Beggs’s] bracket have been put in a very, very unfair situation because of the grown-ups,” Baudhuin said. “To me, this is a complete abject failure of leadership and accountability from the people who regulate sports in Texas. They’re doing wrong by Mack, and not just these 15 girls but all the other girls she wrestled all year.”
Then there is the experience of Beggs himself. . . . . “I want to be somebody,” he said long before all this; before the boos and the cameras; before his coach whisked him on and off the arena floor to minimize Beggs’s visibility; and before a tournament run that sparked an arena, a state and a nation to confront a subject that previously could have been avoided. “Somebody who does something — not just a page in a book. I want to be a book.”
Two years ago, Beggs pointed a camera at himself and described a childhood of struggle and confusion — before, he said, discovering a word that simplified what he had experienced: transgender.
As time passed, attorney Baudhuin said, Beggs requested to wrestle against boys, though because UIL guidelines determine athletes’ gender based on their birth certificate, that request was declined (citing privacy, the UIL would not discuss that request or Beggs’s specific case) . . . 
All of this controversy and unpleasantness could have been avoided had the  University Interscholastic League accepted modern medical and mental health knowledge.  That, of course, would have outraged the Texas Christofascists who would have had to confront their willful ignorance and desperation to avoid thinking and accepting modernity.  

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