Winning!

[kandrathe]

I did not say that it went through whatever surgery it had to win gold medals.

I find your use of "it" offensive. In English grammar, (in polite society) we do not use "it" as a pronoun in this way as it connotes that the person being specified is inferior to a person or is an object. Please stop.

http://drmarkwomack.com/a-writing-handbo...-pronouns/

However, when you are competing against women and you are basically a man and a big man, that is hardly courage. That's a free gold medal. Now, try competing against women in figure skating, wearing a short dress in a man's body, and that's something.

You are also jumbling concepts together, but that may just be your overall misunderstanding of gender and sexuality. People may choose to embrace aspects of femininity, or masculinity regardless of their expressed gender. In the womb, we all begin as female. Testosterone levels signal the physical changes of those with XY chromosomes into male expression. Into adulthood, and old age we continue to be shaped by our hormones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation

In regards to your aspersions of figure skaters in skirts,

I think Alexei Yagudin combines grace, and powerful athletics. He trains every bit as hard as weight lifters, and probably with a higher risk of injury. He can do athletic things few of us can do. Many female skaters are better in many aspects of their sport. If the Olympics Competition's rules limited some of the extreme tricks (like quadruple jumps) there would be no reason to treat competitors differently. Try to consider what equality means not in one individuals ability, but what it might take to fairly build an all inclusive competition (or, work place, or society). Finally, courage is not in the competition, but breaking down the attitudes and insults, such as the ones you display here.

I'm not even going to start discussing the whole gender "reassignment" issue. Let's just say that if I take a Mercedes logo and hang it on a Buick, it ain't suddenly a Mercedes.

This is a ludicrous example. We are not models. What if Laurel (or Katelyn etc..) was born a Mercedes, but with a Buick logo? Wouldn't changing her logo put things right?

My view (i.e. informed by extensive research, like the Kinsey scale ) is that we each are a continuum of humanity, fully capable of all aspects of sexual expression. I have known this since my freshman year at University in 1980. I took a course on "Human Sexuality" mainly as an ice breaker for a shy 18 year old country hick, but it actually opened my mind to learn something about the realities of being human.