Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Jeremy: A Change For The Better?

This is just too good to not talk about.
I read an article on Star-Tribune online just now. The headline very much caught my eye. "Transsexual Golfer Qualifies for Ladies European Tour."
It seems that earlier this year the Ladies European Tour, the European version of the Ladies Professional Golf Assoc., changed the wordage in one of their rules. The rule concerning participants used to say that participants had to be female at birth. They changed that so that they could fall in line with International Olympic Committee regulations. I don't know what the new wording of the rule is, but I imagine it is something to the effect of "... must be female at time of competition, regardless of gender at birth, or even last week (or yesterday for that matter)." This week the first ever transsexual golfer qualified for a spot in a tournament.
This could be filed under Sports Illustrated's "This Week's Sign That The Apocalypse Is Upon Us." But maybe we should look at this a different way?
For far too long the percentage of guys who play sports when they are young who go on to become professional athletes has been absurdly low. And until now there has been virtually no loop-hole in the matter. Until now.
You see, I've always considered myself at the very least a serviceable athlete. When I was young I played football, baseball, basketball and later in high school, golf. I was at least decent in all of these sports. But I was never the best in any of these sports. I was good enough to be part of the socially important parts of sports away from the game, but I was never good enough to be a guaranteed starter. I was the athletic version how Paul Harvey describes the "common man": the best of the lousiest and the lousiest of the best.
I was the best player on the second squad of my 7th grade basketball team that won the Rochester City Championship (in which I scored 10 points). I was the last player cut from the "majors" baseball team when I was in 6th grade, which made me the best player on the "minors" team. High school golf teams are allowed to play six varsity players - during my junior year I was seventh, or first on JV and during my senior year I was sixth, or last on varsity. I was never a bench warmer (okay, we WON'T talk about basketball my sophomore year - that had NOTHING to do with my talent) but I was never the team captain either.
Of every sport I played I easily would have had the best opportunity to do something worthwhile with golf. But I never could have gone professional. Right?
Or could I?
So these questions begin to run through my mind:
Am I really that "attached" to my male anatomy?
How much would I really give up to have a shot at playing professional golf?
Did this guy, um, gal, change her, um, his anatomy so that he/she could have a shot at my same dream?
Okay, let's get one thing strait here...
There is nothing, and I firmly mean NOTHING, better than being a guy. The only possible explanation for having a sex change would be so that you would always have the female anatomy readily available (for whatever it is that female anatomy is useful to a man for) and therefore never have to go looking for it. And still, this is a horrible reason to have a sex change. The reason for doing this would come squarely from said man thinking with his crotchal area, and yet that is the very thing he would have to get rid of, and therefore his newfound female anatomy would be rendered useless.
I love golf. I love sports. And I would love to be a professional golfer.
But not that much.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jeremy,

Yes well once you marry a sports fanatic you kind of become an automatic member of the club. He tried to tell me something to write about San Antonio, but I didn't want to sound like I know more than I do.
Not to put too much of a serious spin on the Transsexual thing, but in my women studies course we once read an article about a girl who was disqualified from the olympics, because genetically she had XY chromosomes. However physically she was a woman with the capacity to have children and all. It spured on hours of dicussion over how we determine gender. I often wonder if males contempate gender issues for hours, but now that it has made its way into the sports arena there may be more men intrested.
Anyway I've been able to write because I have the day off, but if its okay can I send this site to Julie and then she can get in touch with you. Her phone and email has changed a lot lately. I would have seen her last weekend, but we were in the cities. Okay I'm getting embarressed this is becoming a novel. Sorry its so long.

Take Care,
Michelle