I'm sure this is the best thing YouTube give us: interesting and intelligent people talking about interesting and important things.
The last ten minutes are unforgettable! Neil deGrasse and Richard Dawkins.
quotes:
..." if you keep doing it, one of those pictures is a fish"...
..."your blessing on this,...can I use that word with you?"...
"I'm glad we're on the same side"...
With Bill Nighy, great actor, great singer! Great film! Great argument
Endangered films...
Song : The rowan tree (Lisa Knapp)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27cNb6l-hnk
Mais uma pessoa que pensa pela sua cabeça e não liga aos que querem impor um referencial pateta.
Porque é que os me(r)dia não falam de sujeitos como este? Porque será?
Festa do Vasco e do Francisco no Kindergarten, no São Martinho em 12.11.2024
(personal underlines)
We all know that the saddest words in the English language are ‘too late’. We also know that ‘procrastination is the thief of time’ and that ‘punctuality is the politeness of kings. However, since this piece was published a couple of weeks ago, many have got in touch to point out that, very often, ‘the tidy’ are also ‘the early’. Their irrational obsession with being tidy is matched by an equally irrational terror of being late.
They’re missing out on the joy of spontaneity, the thrill of uncertainty and of going with the flow
I’m not advocating a slack attitude to timekeeping. If you’re late for your train, your plane or your appointment at the Palace to receive your OBE, you really will miss it. However, if you’re perennially and pointlessly early, you’ll waste a significant chunk of your existence in a dull, lifeless limbo hanging around and killing time. And since your time is your life, isn’t continually killing it quite a wretched thing to do?
The problem with ‘the early’ is their pessimism. They’re forever fretting that something will go wrong – the train might be cancelled, they won’t get a good seat, there’ll be a monsoon on the M6 or a UFO on the M25. Their fears, of course, are usually baseless so their time is usually wasted. Their mantra – even though they don’t know it – is ‘hurry up and wait’.
Those of us who prefer to cut it fine are bright, sunny optimists. It rarely occurs to us that there’ll be impediments to our journeys or to our lives. And for the most part, there aren’t. Occasionally we come unstuck but isn’t that better than living in a state of constant anxiety – endlessly waiting, having needlessly panicked?
Anyone who lives with a temporal tyrant knows that this panic, like measles, is contagious and can affect the well-being of everyone around them. Their constant hurrying and harrying is likely to cause others to rush out without keys, phones or passports.
I speak as one who was once harassed by his cohabitant into leaving early for the airport and arriving there one hour before the check-in opened. That airport was Luton. Can you imagine a more soul-destroying place to kill time?
It’s at airports that you’ll witness the early at their most absurd. Even though airlines demand you check in two hours in advance for their convenience rather than yours, that still isn’t early enough for the early. You’ll see them glaring up at the departures board, unable to avert their eyes until their gate is shown. Once it is, they’ll charge towards it like greyhounds chasing a hare. But when they get there, despite having a boarding pass with an allocated seat, they can’t simply sit down and relax. They prefer, for absolutely no reason, to stand and queue. It’s the same at the other end. As soon as the aircraft comes to a halt, they’re out of their seats, pulling luggage from overhead lockers and standing impotently until they can disembark.
On one flight, I was, for the only time in my life, upgraded to business class. On my original boarding pass, it said to be at the gate 30 minutes before departure. On my new one, it said 15 minutes. Only a tiny thing – but so significant. I’d been awarded an extra 15 minutes of time, an extra 15 minutes of life. Since wealthy people are prepared to pay so handsomely to have more time in their lives, it seems absurd that the early give so much of theirs away. But they do.
How much of those lives have been squandered sitting in empty theatres long before the performance begins? Or in empty football grounds at least an hour before kick-off? Those same people will then leave the ground around the 88th minute ‘to beat the rush’ with the score at 1-1. Serves them right when they miss a spectacular injury-time winner.
And that’s the irony. The pointless panicking, the stress and strain they place on others with their neurotic dread of missing things means they’re missing out on so much more. They’re missing out on the joy of spontaneity, the thrill of uncertainty and of going with the flow. In short, they’re missing out on life.
It’d be good to think that the early might change their ways, stop trying to exert such control and enjoy fuller, more relaxing lives. But I doubt they ever will. To re-quote the saddest words in the English language, it really is too late.
Almoço no Mercado, na Caparica, com o Manuel Oliveira, António Pires e Alfredo Duarte.
Independentemente da tentativa de endeusamento em que os media sempre insistiram, ele nunca se deixou enovelar nessa forma simplista, primária, mas tão característica de estarmos - media e populaça -, na modalidade.
Porque não acredito em milagres, vou ter saudades deste S.C.P. mas, sobretudo, desta figura. Teremos de esperar, sentados claro, pelo aparecimento de outro fenómeno como este, no clube ou noutro lado.
Sim, porque é de um fenómeno que se trata. E a "tropa fandanga" nem se apercebeu! Tratou-se simplesmente, para a "massa adepta" e "não adepta" - leia-se carneirismo nacional! -, de mais um treinador.
Amorim foi - e é! -, muito mais do que isso. E disso - independentemente de não ser o principal atributo para o futebol -, é que me custa mais abdicar, pela raridade da peça nos tempos que vivemos.
Sorte para ele! Porque o mundo dos homens é mesmo muito mau...
PS - Entretanto os nossos valorosos me(r)dia, que nos consideram a todos burros e que por isso perderam toda a credibilidade junto de quem pensa, vão divulgando "pérolas" cretinas, leia-se, comparações estatísticas como estas:
"Szabo também é o único que ganhou mais títulos nacionais (7) do que Amorim, que venceu cinco: dois campeonatos (2020/21 e 2023/24), duas Taças da Liga (2020/21 e 2021/22) e uma Supertaça (2021)". Comentário LBC:(No tempo de Szabo havia Taça da Liga?, Supertaça??)
"No último, na época passada, conquistou mesmo a melhor pontuação de sempre dos leões, com 90 pontos"
Comentário (LBC) (Há setenta anos as vitórias valiam 3 pontos?, as ligas tinham 18 equipas?, havia quantas substituições por jogo?, etc., etc! Os campos eram todos relvados? As regras eram iguais???
(personal underlines)
to understand the future...
Drinking With J.D. Vance
‘Israel is a country and a nation that doesn’t hate its own fucking people’
Do you know the old joke about a rabbi, a priest, and J.D. Vance walking into a bar?
Actually, it’s not a joke. It happened to me.
In 2021, I found myself wandering around the Orlando Hilton trying to find a beer to self-medicate after hourslong harangues around the fallen nature of the West, when I bumped into J.D. Vance.
I was trying to fit in with the Catholics and Orthodox (of both Christian and Jewish varieties) who populate the National Conservativism Conference (NatCon), which I was covering for Tablet. I had my kippah on—though I was more than a year away from my conversion beit din—and I remember wondering whether it was helping or hurting my ability to socialize.
See, the “NatCons” are an odd assortment of traditionalists standing for nationalism, free enterprise, public religion, and other “Western values.” Their conferences sort of feel like a continuation of the Thirty Years’ War, spaces where Catholics and Protestants are somehow still in their battle for supremacy. Unlike in history, however, the Jews here had a leg up. Indeed, for all of its many mentions of Christian nationalism, this event was run by one—namely Israeli author Yoram Hazony.
When I finally found the bar, it was a Dennis Hopper-esque scene of the edgy new right. Chris Rufo, the one-man media army, had just launched his anti-CRT crusade and was doing a victory lap over a recent legislative coup. Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air, was entertaining a crowd, as was Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, a notorious blogger whose views veer from nihilist to monarchist. Just about every contrarian weird Twitter account was there, and if you managed to tie the profile pic to the actual face, it felt as if your timeline somehow showed up in person. Drink glasses were filled and emptied as political views of questionable viability (or even sanity) were floated and shot down.
And then, several drinks in, James David Vance—as of yesterday the vice presidential candidate of the Republican ticket, but back then a candidate for senator from Ohio—rolled up behind me.
‘We love our country, but we don’t want to live in a shithole.’
Already a star, he was at the conference to speak about universities as the enemy. Vance and I had a messaging history: He’d sent me a note of support when I had a little run-in with the trillion-dollar corporation which makes the laptop I’m typing this on. Since he was one of the few mainstream politicians—as opposed to semi-obscure Catholic integralist philosophers—in attendance, I decided he was the one to talk to.
We settled down at an L-shaped couch nearby, and within minutes the area around us filled up with various conference hangers-on, forming a hooting peanut gallery to our conversation.
I noticed immediately that Vance had to be at least three drinks deep, which could make for a great interview. Unfortunately, I also noticed, as I fumbled to set up the recording app on my phone and LARP at being a real journalist yet again, that I was at least as many drinks deep as he was. As I tried to remember my interview plan, Vance took the reins.
Vance: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe your book came out on June 28, 2016.”
Me: “That’s incredible recall. That’s right.”
Vance: “Your book and my book came out at the exact same time. The same day.”
Not only did I not remember when Hillbilly Elegy, my interview subject’s famous memoir of his family’s hardscrabble Appalachian upbringing, was published; I didn’t remember when my own book came out.
Vance: “I remember because your book got to The New York Times bestseller list and mine did not. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘holy shit, this guy wrote this great book about Facebook and he’s going to be the book that’s successful and my shitty book, it’s not going to do anything.’ Anyway, your book is good …”
Me: “Yours stayed on the bestseller list much longer than mine did.”
What little mental planning I’d done here was totally foiled at this sudden confession, five years after the fact, of a writerly competition between us. What I did have, though, was genuine curiosity about how the Big Important Ideas so seriously being fought over by the Twitter avatars here—ideas about religion in society, about populism—might ever translate into actual politics.
“The particularities in my race are very distinct, and so I don’t draw too many lessons for the specifics of my race from the national conservatives,” Vance told me. “But with that caveat, I can’t think of a single other political movement in America right now that has as much energy as this one.”
I asked him to expound a bit.
“The left is committed to brain-dead Bidenism,” he said (note that this was three years before the president’s disastrously feeble debate performance last month). “Biden’s entire political project is harmonizing various parts of the American left that don’t make any sense. And the American right, at the establishment level, is a series of dogmas that existed 40 years ago and are totally exhausted. And then there’s this thing called national conservatism,” Vance continued, “and it is vibrant and young people are excited about it.”
Hoots and hollers rang out from the peanut gallery. (“This is on the record!” one sharpie darkly warned the others. My iPhone was sitting on the coffee table in plain view.)
And not only young people anymore. In the wake of yesterday’s announcement, much has been made (including in these pages) of the seeming enthrallment of a segment of tech with the ticket that Vance—himself a former tech venture capitalist—is now a part of. My own chats have been lighting up with people fighting about how to understand his views on tech, which some people misunderstand as contradictory. He has, for example, praised Lina Kahn—the head of the Federal Trade Commission who is widely loathed in Silicon Valley. But in fact, Vance points to an emerging split in this space: He is, to use Marc Andreessen’s coinage, pro little tech and anti big tech.
“About three months ago, I gave a speech in Youngstown and the whole speech was me shitting on the power of big technology. After, a guy comes up to me and he says, ‘I really love your speech. The one criticism I had was your point about big tech.’ I thought I was going to hear a classical liberal defense of the private sector again. But what the guy then says is, ‘I agree with what you said about the big tech companies, but y+´
ou want to break them up. Why can’t we just throw all their CEOs in prison?’”
(A voice from the crowd piped up, presumably having heard this anecdote before. “I thought he wanted to kill them. Wasn’t it ‘kill them,’” “No,” Vance joked, “that was in southeastern Ohio.”)
To riff on another old joke: OK, but is all this … good for the Jews?
Before I could get my exact question right, Vance launched. “Israel is a country and a nation that doesn’t hate its own fucking people,” he said. “I really admire that.”
It’s worth noting this was pre-Oct. 7, which opened up an ugly rift on the right over Israel, with accusations of Jewish war-mongering bleeding into obscene antisemitism. Still, his comments didn’t feel either superficial or transient. Unlike the neocons, from whom he’s staked a far position, Vance’s admiration for Israel is directly tied to the ideas he has about what’s best for America and our future.
“Israel is the only advanced economy in the entire world that has birth rates above replacement level,” he said. “One of the great lessons of Israel for the United States of America is that when you develop a civilization that’s rooted in self-love and patriotism, you don’t have declining birth rates.”
I asked him how religion factored into these views.
“My relatives want Israel to be successful so that when the Second Coming of Christ happens in seven years, there’s going to be a country there ready to absorb it. So yeah, there’s some of that,” he said. “But the actual reason that most middle-class Christian Ohioans love Israel is that Israel is a nation that doesn’t hate itself. That’s it. That’s why I like it. My dad does not wake up saying, ‘I really want Israel to be successful over the United States of America.’ He says: ‘Israel, they care about each other. They love their own country. They’re basically aligned more or less with America.’ And that’s it. And I think that’s a great thing.”
The conversation rambled on as th784e crowd chimed in with increasingly intoxicated commentary. I circled back to my original question—namely, whether all of the talk of big ideas would ever translate on the ground, to the lives of actual people?
“Does a normal Ohio voter read Yoram Hazony and Mencius Moldbug? No. They’re old people. They live their lives, they support their family, they want jobs,” Vance told me. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.”
But who are these people? Are they just old dying white people, headed for minority status anyway, or are they—as Vance has argued—the members of a multiracial and multicultural base of Americans? Listening to the tape now, I hear skepticism in my own voice—a doubt that the coalition these people had in mind would ever come together. Vance didn’t share it.
“Translating the impulse of the multiracial, multicultural middle class turned working class—there’s a lot of work to do,” he said. “But the instincts of the middle-class Black voter, the middle-class white voter, the middle-class Latino voter, are the same.”
“We love our country, but we don’t want to live in a shithole.”
It was time for another drink.
Uma perspectiva bem diferente e real, do que se passa no mundo.
E não no nosso cantinho, pequenino, mas que alguns acham ser este sim, o centro do mundo.
(personal underlines)
Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.
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Updated at 10:57 a.m. ET on October 1, 2024
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.
And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.
Read: The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood
But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”
Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.
In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.
Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.
The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.
Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”
Xochitl Gonzalez: The schools that are no longer teaching kids to read books
Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.
The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.
But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.
The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.
Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.
The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”
Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.
Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.
I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.
Due to an editing error, this article initially misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
(personal underlines)
I’ve long liked to think that if I was a really big girl I would transition to compete in the men’s boxing heavyweight championship. Why not, ladies? Tyson Fury earns about £100 million every time he laces up his gloves. Why not get a slice of that pie?
After all, for an extremely weird decade or so we’ve been enjoined to believe there are no physical advantages, at least not in terms of strength, speed or stamina, to being born male over female. It’s the foundational myth upon which all sorts of madness – hulking great former blokes taking on women at sports including rugby, swimming, cycling and football – has been predicated.
Why has it taken until now for someone to suggest this?
If biological men can dominate women’s sport, then why not the other way around? Why don’t biological women ever switch codes, so to speak, to beat the fellas on the their own turf?
It looks like we might now never know. The UN has just issued a report on violence against women and girls in sport that appears to want to put a stop to the bending of gender rules in sport for good. Reading it is like waking up from a particularly wild dream in which everyone seemed to have gone insane. Finally, someone – the UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, in this case – is talking perfect sense.
Alsalem doesn’t hold back. She points out that since trans women – she calls them by the old fashioned term ‘males’ – have been allowed to compete with biological women in sport, ‘over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports’. She makes clear, too, that everything we’ve been told about medications to suppress testosterone in trans women, thereby ensuring they have no athletic advantages over biological women, is a load of rubbish.
She says: ‘Male athletes have specific attributes considered advantageous in certain sports, such as strength and testosterone levels that are higher than those of the average range for females, even before puberty… Pharmaceutical testosterone suppression for genetically male athletes – irrespective of how they identify – will not eliminate the set of comparative performance advantages they have already acquired.’ Quite.
It goes without saying the ridiculous debate about whether men should be allowed to compete against women in any sport, let alone contact sports, has had serious repercussions for actual women. Alsalem says: ‘When female-only sports spaces are opened to males, as documented in disciplines such as in volleyball, basketballand soccer… injuries have included knocked-out teeth, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures.’
She cites, too, a study published in Sports Medicine that found:
Even in non-elite sport, ‘the least powerful man produced more power than the most powerful woman’ and states that, where men and women have roughly the same levels of fitness, males’ average punching power has been measured as 162 per cent greater than females.
None of this can possibly come as news to anyone who has walked about in the world with their eyes open.
The way the entire trans issue has been weaponised in recent years by those on the front lines of the culture wars strikes most people, I think, as extremely bizarre. ‘What is a woman?’ has become a staple question of any media interview with a politician, and all of us increasingly – particularly during Pride month, when even captured corporations get in on the fun – are stridently impelled to agree that trans women are indeed women.
Personally, I’ve come suspect the point of it all is just a diabolically clever and deliberate means of making the West question itself constantly, eventually causing it to suffer a nervous breakdown. Looking around, you’d have to say as a plan it’s working quite well.
Anyway, I digress. Alsalem’s report makes one particularly exciting proposal, one that surely would be a ratings smash: ‘the creation of open [sports] categories for those persons who do not wish to compete in the category of their biological sex.’ A trans-only category. Why has it taken until now for someone to suggest this? Who doesn’t want to know who is the fastest transgender person in the world, or the strongest, or the most capable of jumping very high?
One hopes after this report, the allowing of men to compete with women in physical contests, let alone to share changing rooms, will be a strange thought experiment we will tell future generations about, while shaking our heads in bewilderment. ‘Males must not compete in the female categories of sport,’ the report says.
And let that be an end to it.
