That was somebody’s mom whose dream had always been to be a restaurant owner but sadly she married into the mafia and she was like the mom of someone important and moms are like the one authority italians recognise so when she put her foot down and said “NO. We are going to make them great food and give them the most lovely evening!” Nobody dared disagree and thanks to op she got to live her dream for a night she probably remembers them as fondly as they remember her
As a disabled kid who was in the same phys ed class as everyone else with predictably horrifying results, HARD SAME
“Nobody should have to compete against people with biological advantages in the biological advantage assessment game!”
in middle school our grade in PE was how well we did in comparison to the rest of the class.
got the fastest mile? congrats, you have the 100%. the rest of us? we were fucked. fuck effort, fuck improvement, fuck participation and attitude, it was all about competition.
as a little kid, I enjoyed community sports a lot, and then around middle school i got heavier and worse at running and suddenly sports were just… off limits. the focus was entirely on being a good, competitive team and “kids having a fun time, getting exercise, and making friends” meant nothing. refusing to allow trans kids to play is the exact same principle
Every time I hear the “girls shouldn’t be forced to compete against people with biological advantages” argument I come back to this story from my time in high school (Fall 2004). If you’re still kinda in the middle or unsure about where you stand on this argument, maybe this story will help put things in context for you.
(Okay now that I’ve finished typing this all out I didn’t realize I was writing a novella, my bad. Feel free to skip to the end for my final thoughts)
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So I went to a big high school and in junior and senior year we had options for our gym classes and rotated each semester - depending on which period we had gym, we could choose between classes like team sports, core fitness (weight room), racket sports, leisure sports (archery, golf), or adventure sports (e.g. rock climbing, team building games).
My senior year, on offer we only had Team Sports, Adventure Sports, and Core Fitness. Given that only like five people wanted to pick core fitness, it essentially meant that the first semester we would pick the class we actually wanted, and the second semester we’d basically all stay with the same group of people and just switch to the other one. This meant that the first semester, almost all the athletic people (all boys) went to Team Sports and almost all the non-athletes (nearly all girls) went to Adventure Sports.
The adventure sports class was like five or so weak, nerdy guys (including myself, the only chubby person for some reason), like 20 non-athletic girls, and a couple athletic girls who didn’t wanna spend the year in a class of all guys. And though we didn’t like that we had to be in gym class at all to start with, we made the most of it and had a lot of fun rock climbing and teambuilding. Our gym teacher was herself a big rock climber and though we didn’t end up loving rock climbing, we really liked her and she helped us develop a healthy liking of the sport, and as a class we became decent friends.
Our last day of class though, we were told that the 30 or something guys in the team sports class had spent the semester creating a sport and wanted to play it with us, and that our teacher said yes. We gave her that “what have you done?” look and then it dawned on her what she’d signed us up for. Her excitement faded as the horror washed over our faces, and she switched to encouraging us and telling us that it wouldn’t be so bad and that we could end up having fun, but we already knew how this was going to go.
So the sport the guys made up was essentially a bastardization of handball, where if you got the ball you could only take three steps before passing or throwing, but instead of trying to throw the ball past a goalie or into a net or whatever, you had to chuck it at a target that was attached to a 2x4 that was set into a bucket of cement. And the goal wasn’t just to hit the target, oh no - you had to knock the whole thing down.
Well, suffice to say, us non-athletes got trounced. these guys were absolutely ruthless - they had no interest in going easy on us in the sport they invented and seemed to relish in actively destroying us. You see, even if we managed to get the ball long enough to throw it at the target, and even if we managed to hit the target, none of us were actually strong enough to knock the fuckin’ thing down - which they thought was hilarious! This was the definition of a humiliating defeat, and to them? That seemed to be the point. They didn’twant to share their fun new sport with other people, they wanted people to dominate. They could tell we were miserable and they liked it.
There were only 9 people on the court at a time with rotations after each score, and we were all begging our teacher not to send us out there. Our athletic girls were taking one for the team by taking multiple rotations but even they were getting sick of how the boys were acting, so us nerdy guys had to take multiple rotations because the rest of the class was (rightfully) afraid of them. The guys weren’t just kicking our ass (again, in the sport they invented), they were being cruel about it, and the sports teacher either didn’t care, actively encouraged it, or was too proud of his boys to notice what they were doing. But my teacher noticed, and then her face sank when she finally realized “oh no, that’s going to be my class next semester.”
In the locker room after, the guys were all congratulating each other and bragging about their flawless victory and calling the guys from our class every homophobic slur in the book (again, it was 2004). The sporty guys all had their lockers near the front, and us nerdy guys had our lockers a few rows over. I realized though that, because there was always at least one or two guys on the court at any given time, they thought it was a fair game and that they were just so skilled with their strategy and that’s why they won. They thought they were dominating us because of their skills and athletic prowess, not because they were literally double our size and strength. They were completely ignorant of their biological advantages over us guys because hey, we were guys too. They couldn’t see that it no more impressive than winning a spelling bee against a 3rd grader. And even more so, they looked down on us guys who failed against them as being lesser and as being queer.
Well, I lost my fucking mind. I don’t know what indignant spirit possessed my body in that moment, but I stormed over to their row and was like “Are you proud? Are you fucking proud? You beat a bunch of girls and a fag in a sport you made up. Yeah no shit you beat us, might have well been up against a bunch of toddlers out there. Fuckin’ idiots. Yeah, good for you. Have fun rock climbing next semester.”
Somehow this did not result in me getting the shit kicked out of me, but I’m not gonna lie and say everyone clapped, either. It was just awkward. After changing I went back to go hang out with my adventure sports class while waiting for the bell to ring, and we traded horror stories from the day’s events. Trauma bonding at its finest.
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Every time I hear the “girls shouldn’t be forced to compete against people with biological advantages” bullshit I come back to this story for several reasons.
1. I’m reminded of how I, a guy, was often forced to compete against people of the same gender with biological advantages. I’m reminded of how, in my adventure sports class, the strongest people in the class were not the boys but instead girls who had some biological advantages - they were taller, beefier, and naturally stronger than the guys in our class. And we still got demolished by people who were so ignorant of their biological advantage that they thought they won on strategy alone. And to my knowledge, none of us ever went on to fake being trans in order to get a leg up in women’s sports because that’s not a thing.
2. Looking back on it, that day in gym class was one of those things that later on led to me realizing I’m nonbinary - it was hardly the first or last but possibly most prominent reminder that no matter what I do, I’ll never be one of the guys, and yet I also wasn’t one of the girls as I had to put myself on the court to protect the girls from those guys. I couldn’t be on either side that day, I was in the middle. And again, it didn’t lead me or anyone else to fake being trans in order to get a leg up in sports - because that’s not a thing. Instead it was yet another instance that made it very clear that regardless of my gender I would never have a place in sports not (just) because I wasn’t good at them but because they didn’t want me.
3. Trans women are the least of our quote-unquote “problems” when it comes to sports. Misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia, unsportsmanlike conduct, pay disparity, injury, healthcare, disability - the list goes on and on, but all of these problems are exponentially more important and real than the hypothetical nonexistent cisgender man who pretends to be a transgender woman in order to get a theoretical leg up in women’s sports.
baby rabbits have no idea what they doin. they just be boinging around. they’re like “mother I have springs in my feets- oh no” [accidentally propels to the moon]
Ohh THAT’S how rabbits ended up on the moon
Rabbit mother dialing phone: Yes hello miss Chang'e? You have one of mine again.
I think at one point or another everyone should become slightly obsessed with a show (preferably 10+ years old) that 99% of their mutuals don’t care about. it builds character. keeps you humble
listen to me. listen. sometimes your show is a video game from two years ago. sometimes it’s an 19th century opera. sometimes it’s a math-themed crime drama you watched in middle school but did not retain because you were blinded by lust for that one elf from the santa clause movies. the only thing that matters is that none of your posts get more than like 15 notes and all your mutuals reply to them with
Hearing them get so excited over the whale fall is so fun I love hearing people who are passionate about their work
Fascinating to see how low energy this ecosystem is. This is the greatest bounty these animals will probably see in their lives, and they’re sleepily shuffling toward it, because their body literally lacks the energy to move any faster than that. To them it probably feels like breakneck speed.
ALT
