Discussion Doublethink (late 2021) by Janice Raymond... Anyone read this yet?

Thank you for the hint, downloading it now!

>The only part that rlly seems to be something new is the incursion of males into elite Women's sports. I can't say how much of that owes to even TIMs themselves having thought that was beyond the fucking pale back then, vs. how much of it had more to do with Women's NCAA sports still being the new kid on the block (with title IX having been brought into force just a few years before) What's new in recent years is the incursion of large numbers of TIMs into women's sports. But several years before "The Transexual Empire" was published in 1979, TIM Richard Raskin/Renee Richards, who "transitioned" and had "sex change surgery" in the early 70s in his 40s, started playing women's elite tennis in California and the Northeast USA. He did quite well, not a surprise since he had been a star athlete all his life who was prominent in boys/men's tennis at his all-male prep school, Yale, the US Navy and on the men's senior pro tour. In 1976 after being refused eligibility to play in the women's category at the US Open, Raskin/Richards sued for the right to play professional women's tennis in the USA - and in 1977 a judge in NY state court granted his wishes. He played professional women's tennis from 1977 to 1981, when he retired at age 47. Also: when TTE was published in 1979, Title IX hadn't really started to come into force as far as college and uni sports goes. In 1979, the NCAA did not have dominion over USA women's collegiate/uni sports yet. In fact, it's not accurate to say that when Raymond's book was published, "the Women's NCAA" was "the new kid on the block" because in 1979 there weren't any women's NCAA competitions or "Women's NCAA." In 1979, the NCAA was still trying to wrest control of women's collegiate sports away from the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the women-led body in charge of women's college/uni sports in the 1970s. The NCAA finally "succeeded" in putting the AIAW out of business in 1982. The first Women's NCAA sports tournament was held in March of 1982. https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/advocacy/history-of-title-ix/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-college-sports-ncaa-aiaw-11617422325 https://www.si.com/college/2022/06/14/aiaw-ncaa-womens-college-basketball-league-title-ix-daily-cover A bit more on the complicated, convoluted history of Title IX and its application to collegiate sports: Although Title IX was first passed by the US Congress in June of 1972, the law had a generous 6-year implementation period built into it in order to give the US federal government plenty of time to devise and issue guidance instructing educational institutions on what they needed to do to comply - and to give schools time to come into compliance. So even on paper, the earliest that Title IX would or could have "been brought into force" would have been late July 1978, after the 1978 school year ended. In reality, it took much, much longer for Title IX to be brought into force because throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Title IX was constantly challenged both in Congress and the federal courts. As soon as Title IX first became law in 1972, various members of Congress immediately sought to overturn it, amend it and water it down. So over the course of the 1970s, new versions were proposed, debated, voted on and signed into law. At the same time, Title IX was challenged in federal court by various bodies, including the NCAA, which did not want Title IX to apply to collegiate/university sports. In 1976, the NCAA sued to have Title IX struck down as illegal. The NCAA's suit was finally dismissed in 1978. However, Congressional wrangling and extensive legal challenges to Title IX continued through the Reagan presidency of the 1980s. As a result, it wasn't until The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 was enacted over Reagan's veto in 1988 that Title IX became solidified in federal law. And it was only after a landmark court decision in the fall of 1988 that US colleges and universities were told that their athletic departments had to take strong, concerted action to give female students parity with male students in terms of collegiate/uni sports programs, budgets, scholarship opportunities and funding, and athletes' participation rates. All this wrangling and maneuvering against Title IX delayed the issuance of the compliance instructions and either entirely stayed or severely restricted the federal government's hand in enforcing Title IX for most of the 1970s - and for most of the 80s too. To complicate matters further, in the late 1970s and 1980s massive revolutionary changes were afoot in the organization of the federal government - which meant that as Title IX was getting off the ground, the agency tasked with overseeing and enforcing the law changed. Originally, Title IX was to be administered by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare or HEW. But in 1979, the US government decided that as of May 1980, it would spin off education into a brand new, stand-alone federal agency, the US Department of Education (DE). (The rest of HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services or HHS.) Anyways, the new DE began operation in May of 1980. However, the Reagan administration opposed the creation of the US Department of Education and tried to get the new agency nullified. When that didn't work, the Reagan administration took various steps to undermine fledgling Department of Education's ability to function and be effective. In the 1970s when Title IX was still under the purview of HEW, hundreds of complaints were lodged about schools' and colleges/universities' failure to comply with Title IX - but there wasn't much in the way of an office or procedures for handling the complaints. When the new DE started doing business in May 1980, it established a dedicated office tasked with handling and investigating complaints about Title IX compliance issues, the Office of Civil Rights or OCR, But the bar for lodging complaints with the OCR was set prohibitively high and the whole process was very difficult and murky. In fact, it was only in 1990 that the federal government finally issued its first Title IX Athletics Investigator’s Manual used to assist with enforcement and compliance issues. And it was only in 1992 that the US Supreme Court ruled that students deprived of civil rights due to their school's failure to comply with Title IX could sue for monetary damages. But in 1999, SCOTUS also ruled that the NCAA did not have to comply with Title IX. TL;DR: All the wrangling and maneuvering against Title IX delayed it coming into force and stayed or restricted the federal government's hand in enforcing Title IX for most of the 1970s and most of the 80s too. There was no Women's NCAA until the 1980s either. https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&context=sportslaw Sorry to have gone on so long. The history of Title IX and the NCAA's jurisdiction over women's collegiate sports int he USA are really long, drawn-out, complicated sagas. Today, people often speak of Title IX as though its initial passage in 1972 was a magic wand that brought about overnight changes which suddenly gave women and girls attending US educational institutions a fair shot at equal opportunities in scholastic sports. But that wasn't the case at all. Though it was an important milestone, the passage of Title IX in 1972 was just one early legislative victory in a long, hard series of battles in which generations of women had to fight tooth and nail to begin to get our fair share in scholastic sports. The passage of Title IX in 1972 was a preliminary step, not the final one.

Good point!