First of all, what do you mean by "using pronouns"? You did use pronouns. She/her are pronouns. Also important to note, that Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns. So assuming she/her is just as much of a choice as using he/him would be.

Second of all, I think the PWHL (and all women's sports leagues/organizations) should allow transfems/trans women to play before transmascs/trans men. It would be a different conversation if women's leagues were discriminating against trans women and trans men equally, but they aren't. They are virtually all allowing anyone AFAB to participate, regardless of gender identity or medical transition status, while trans women are shut out of all opportunities across every level.

So back when I used to coach i would encourage people who wanted to put a little extra time in at home to watch high end competition. Its one thing to be told a certain action, its another thing to practice it, but seeing it done in like a textbook application by someone who's been doing it their whole life is another thing entirely. However, regardless of the gender of the individual I was teaching, I always told them to watch the women's competitions. Because its the actions.... and you can actually SEE whats happening. High end mens fencing lowkey turns into a dick measuring contest. Theres a lot more strong arming, literally just try and push your weapon away and it becomes an arm wrestling contest. Or they'll actually just purely try and outspeed. Womens fencing they just... fence. This is in part why people remarked that I fenced "like a girl." I didn't play into those games. I wasn't strong, I was very mechanically sound. And after a certain competition threshold, caring about the sport and getting good at it as a sport, becomes feminine cause youre not just winning cause your Physically Better

I actually just reblogged a post yesterday with a link to a Forbes article about the PWHL's growing fanbase and how it upends a lot of thoughts about who women's sports appeals to. One of the takeaways is that something like 70% of women's sports fans prioritize athletic skill and achievement compared to 57% of men's sports fans. I'm not just a fan of the PWHL because it's women playing instead of men, but because the game is literally better from an athletic perspective in a lot of ways.

It's not just about sports. It's about spaces that allow men to congregate and perpetuate misogyny as a class. So any space that wants to be safe for women (and trans women) has to be militantly anti-misogyny (and anti-transmisogyny). Men's spaces have proven time and again that they will align themselves as a class against the interests of women, and thus must not be allowed to have spaces to themselves.

The inverse is not true. Women's spaces/sports/programs/etc. work to rectify the class disparity as it exists. Women do need spaces apart from men to escape misogynistic class-motivated violence. Women do need scholarships and sports programs to rectify the economic disparities, both historic and present, to be able to achieve anything like equality in the patriarchal society we all live in.

BUT the division does allow for the continued subjugation of people society deems not to fit into the class of "woman". Spaces designed for (cis) women in the patriarchal structure as it stands will always be aligned against trans women because it is in their material interests.

The goal shouldn't always be spaces and programs to protect the underclass and lift them to the same status as the ruling class. These things are important right now because the disparity exists, but I think it loses the forest for the trees. The end result to work for should be a world where there is no class disparity between women and men, between trans people and cis people, between racialized people and white people, between transmisogynized people and non-transmisogynized people.

That means taking spaces away from the current ruling class(es). That means any space that is accepting of the current ruling class(es) must be militantly anti-racist. Militantly anti-transmisogynist. No one should be denied the bare human necessities (shelter, food, etc), but behaving in any manner counter to the interests of the underclasses as they exist must be completely intolerable.

If you let one Nazi in your bar, you run a Nazi bar. If you let one misogynist in your sports league, you run a misogynist sports league.

I don't want to live in a world where I have to be wary of at least half the population. I don't want to live in a world where any potential friendship I have with a man, or a cis person, or a non-transmisogynized person is tinged with worry because of the class disparity. I don't want to live in a world where my only option for any sense of real security is a community of people marginalized just like me.

Behaving (trans)misogynistically needs to be considered a breach of the social contract that comes with participating in communal activities like sports. It shouldn't matter how skilled you are or how much money you earn an organization, treating women with anything less than respect and equality should be grounds to remove you from a communal activity. Part of the problem is that practically no space is willing to do this to the degree necessary to actually start to make change.

That's why I think every men's league should be dismantled and rebuilt as co-ed from the ground up. Because institutions like them (and everything else that features and caters to almost-exclusively men as the default) will reproduce misogynist behavior. It's built in to society at the ground level, and needs to be fought on all levels and in all activities.

I think sports is an effective arena to have this conversation in, because it's a community building social activity. If we can dismantle patriarchal norms in sports, especially at younger ages, we can start to build the world we want to see. But just continuing on the trajectory we're setting now (a women's league for every men's league) is just going to heighten the divide further.

We can't expect men to teach themselves to behave in ways that are anti-misogynist. That goes against their material class interest. Giving men spaces of their own will always reinforce this, so these spaces must be removed.

But trans women still cant compete as a women unless they can provide medical records showing they have been on E for X number of years. And still have people throwing fits when they get beat by a tranny, even though they fenced a mixed event the week before.

I both applaud your adaptation to the sport, and condemn the virulent transmisogyny that exists in the activity. In my view, it just goes to show that the skill and technique required to get good at any athletic activity is much more dictated by weight/size/body type than it is by any arbitrary gendered metric or hormone levels. The degendering of sports has to go hand in hand with the dismantling of the forces of transmisogyny (and racism, and economic class disparity) inherent not just in athletics, but in all aspects of society.

None of the problems you've addressed, or I've been trying to address, will be instantly solved by a forcible degendered integration of athletics. The root problem is still the (trans)misogyny that is allowed and frankly encouraged in all spaces at all times.

Part of the problem is that these forces are almost always viewed in a vacuum, and not as a whole. The forces that push people, places, and activities to be racist, transmisogynist, and capitalist are not separate yet similar. They are part and parcel. They are expressions of white supremacy and capitalistic imperialism.