PG on Nostr: I don't watch sports involving cheerleaders, so all I'll say is that while I loathe ...

I don't watch sports involving cheerleaders, so all I'll say is that while I loathe *men pretending to be women* as cheerleaders, males cheerleading alongside women doesn't much bother me. But if you're interested in some depth in the matter, Helen Joyce has some good points.

>So, to recap. The Minnesota Vikings American football team shared a video of its cheerleaders, most of them the usual perky, fit, athletic young women, but now with the addition of two men, Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn.

>I’m sure that there’s a whole discourse among NFL fans that I’m not alert to. But the first I saw of it was Billboard Chris, a Canadian man who for some years now has travelled the world wearing sandwich boards with slogans such as “no child can consent to puberty blockers”, and engaged in conversations with all and sundry, many of them filmed and put on social media. Chris is a social conservative who blames most or all of transgenderism on “feminists”. For him, the problem with these young men is that they are dancing “like girls” and that’s not OK.

>By one analysis, Billboard Chris is a “gender conservative”– he thinks that only women (female people) should be permitted to do “feminine” things, in this case to bounce and wiggle and shake pompoms. Transactivists are “gender essentialists” – they think that if you bounce and wiggle and shake pompoms then whatever you were “assigned at birth”, you’re a girl. The path of wisdom, therefore, is to eschew “gender” entirely and accept that both female and male people should be permitted to move like this without it meaning anything about them, about the two sexes or about anything else.

>A man dancing “like a girl” while not pretending he’s actually a girl isn’t inherently an issue for anyone else; a man forcing his way into all-female spaces where women are vulnerable on the basis that he really is a woman certainly is a problem for the rest of us...

<div class="substack-post-embed"><p lang="en">Reflections on male cheerleaders by Helen Joyce</p><p>Why people pretend not to know what it means to dance like a girl</p><a data-post-link href="https://www.thehelenjoyce.com/p/joyce-activated-issue-116">Read on Substack</a></div><script async src="https://substack.com/embedjs/embed.js"; charset="utf-8"></script>