I used to strongly resist the focus, when it came to fighting repression and persecution of homosexual and trans people, the focus on athletics and the military, but my aversion was, I guess, mostly that I hated the whole culture of those institutions and didn't want to have anything to do with them. They were mean, childish, gross, conservative, icky. If I'm brutally honest with myself, I just didn't give a shit what happened to "those people."
But I see more clearly now -- and I know I'm late to this notion -- why those are the places where the cracks first appear: because they are the most pathologically attached, the most inflexible, the most (they believe, anyway) existentially threatened by any change in the enforcement of 2 discrete and opposite genders with no overlap or grey area in how they might look, behave, fight, run, dress, urinate, love.
That and the fact that sports and the military are so worshiped and fetishized, so obsessed about, so obscenely visible as to be perfectly situated to host these battles first. So there's a bright side to our addiction to organized sports and war.
(I have to admit that when I started writing this I had no idea that's where I'd end up.)
