Yesterday we noted, and quoted for the first time in the long-running (seven months) first part of the 2022 series on the legislature, some bills of interest.
Well, maybe not all of interest to everyone.
One that will be in the press a fair amount is SF 50, a Senate File, but which also has some House sponsors. That bill is:
AN ACT relating to school sports; prohibiting biological males from athletic teams and sports designated for females in public schools; establishing related causes of action and protections for individuals and educational institutions; requiring rulemaking; and providing for effective dates.
It is sponsored by:
Senator(s) Schuler, French, Salazar and Steinmetz and Representative(s) Gray, Haroldson and Jennings
Only Gray commented.
This is an interesting bill in that it addresses a socially hot topic, that being men who have had surgery and take chemicals to affect a female appearance.
Now, we'll be frank. We pretty strictly apply biology to things. All things. And part of this is that men and women are very different, including very physically different. We've stated previously:
Eleventh Law of Human Behavior: Men and women are different.
Part of the way we're very different concerns physical strength.
The social movement, and that's what it is, that comports to the recent Western concept that a person's Weltanschauung is governed by their own personal perceptions, and therefore each person has their own personal reality, is a falsehood. This isn't related to matters of sex and gender alone by any means (indeed a few years ago it was, oddly, briefly discussed a lot in the context of "race", which is also a social construct). But as we're a very wealthy society and therefore have lots and lots of time to contemplate sex, our society does that a lot.
This is, I'd note, sort of a symbol and a symptom of too much societal wealth. The other is food. Americans in particular sit around pondering food constantly even though virtually nobody is starving, and we likewise are constantly pondering what we term "diets", which are often self imagined odd food rituals. Sex has become much the same.
Anyhow, as part of all of this we've moved to the "self realization" concept which holds that no matter what your DNA may hold, you can be the opposite gender. Medicine and our understanding of chemicals has gotten good enough that, with constant intake of pharmaceuticals to suppress your natural ones, you can obtain the appearance of the opposite gender, somewhat, and you can have similes that somewhat replicate the opposites genitals, although they won't actually work in remotely the same fashion.
Which has led to the phenomenon of men who've obtained surgery and are on pharmaceuticals getting access to female sports.
If there's any plus to this at all, and it's hard to see where there is one, it ironically ends up proving the old point that, yes, men really are stronger and much more dominant in physical contests and endeavors than women. The entire US Military, dominated by the current social atmosphere and safe as we're in no wars, may be ignoring this, but women trying to compete against men who have entered their teams cannot.
Now, a safe way, presumably, to address this would be simply to abolish the male/female distinction in sports. After all, if we can put women in basic training (and reduce the standards to help them get through it), we can simply do away with gendered sports entirely.
Why not?
Well, the reason is that we know (just as we know with the military) that if we do that women will soon make up a fraction of the membership of any team sport they're in. There's still be, for example, female competitive swimmers, but how many? Probably most teams would be 90% male, at least.
Hence, the statute.
So it makes sense to take it up, right?
Well, not so fast.
First of all this isn't a problem in Wyoming yet.
Secondly, this may be a self eliminating problem.
Long term, it probably is. The current movement we're addressing is probably a feature of a historical wealth bubble that shows signs of ending. While not really a good thing, in the larger sense, there's good reason to believe that a society that spends a lot of time contemplating its bits and bites will be refocused by economics, and hopefully only economics. It's happened before, in different contexts.
Secondly, there's also reason to believe that part of the feature of our times is a rising if grasping lurch back towards standards, and part of that may be the discovery that nature actually applies to us and that there is a human nature.
None of which says anything about the individuals who have this as a genuinely strong interior desire. That's another topic, and we'll touch on it briefly.
And this is a budget session.
That's relevant, as bills aren't supposed to deal with anything other than budgets unless there's some sort of bonafide emergency going on, and there isn't here on this topic. Given that this will take a super majority to get introduce, what the heck is up with this?
Well, I wonder somewhat if it isn't what Tim Stubson noted in another context the other day.
The whole sorry process shows that the majority of the Central Committee are not primarily concerned with improving public education. Instead, their priority is what every political hack’s priority is; feed the outrage machine, stoke fear and generate donations.
The legislator who commented is one of the most vocal populists in the legislature, and after Trump's defeat spent some time down in the Arizona circus that showed, in the end, that Trump lost by a wider margin there than had been previously believed. He was a candidate for the House until Harriet Hageman concentrated support in the My Honor Is Loyalty campaign that she's' running. He was a confederate of Anthony Bouchard, who is curiously absent as a supporter of this bill, who is still running and who ended up having harsh words for Gray after he started running.
Now, I don't know what any of these legislators reasons were for introducing this bill during a budget session, and that would include Gray. I also don't know anything about the real world legislative process. Maybe a bill needs to be floated and die in a session before it gets picked up and passed in another, in the real world. But I do know that many of these social bills are drafted by organizations and that they don't always comport with a state's own laws. Last session one such bill was introduced to try to give the legislature a veto, through a special committee, over the state Supreme Court. That foreign bill even included its own special oath, not the ones that legislators actually take in Wyoming. Essentially, in the guise of the "real' Constitution, it was a legislative coup enabling act.
It didn't get anywhere, but in these tense times, it seems every session there are some bills that seem to serve to "feed the outrage machine" and "stoke fear".
When the drafters of Wyoming's constitution penned it out, and that's in fact what they did, they thought that so little really occurred in the real world that the heavy lifting could be done every other year. On off years, the task was a budget.
This seems to be widely disregarded now. Some of the disregard is hard to figure.
Finally, it turns out the body that governs high school sports already has an existing policy on this and doesn't feel it needs one. It's been quiet about this, but there was testimony from one of its representatives at the hearing on this bill, and they don't feel they need a statute. What the policy says I don't know, but the organization's quiet approach, which avoids making a spectacle out of a difficult situation for those involved, is to be admired. They want a chance to let their policy to continue to work, and having gotten there first, they probably ought to be given just that chance.
Primum non nocere.[1]
Footnotes:
1. "First, do no harm."
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