International relations are politics. The marches are intended to place pressure on politicians of the country they are occurring in, to adopt certain international relations positions.
Yes, they have two date systems in common use. It's only the year that changes though. And there's no way to confuse the two, usually. If you write "2023" instead of "令5" it's pretty obvious. I suppose there is a potential for confusion if one just writes a two-digit year though.
In my experience that loophole has not worked for a long time. I have never been able to redeem gifts from friends in a low-cost region while I'm outside of the country. Even though my Steam account is also based in that same region.
Those are not the trans people being spoken about I'm sports discussions though. Pretty much every sport that allows, or has previously allowed, trans people to compete in the division fitting their gender has had regulations around HRT and maintaining target hormone levels for a period of time before being allowed to compete.
It's like you ignored everything else I wrote, to hyperfocus on one sentence, in order to take offense at something I didn't say.
Mad we’re having a discussion at all that doesn’t revolve around telling him he’s right and we know nothing.
From my comment: "It's perfectly fine to talk about advantages remaining after HRT is started, and for how long they remain. But that isn't what is happening when people talk about transgender women as if they were cisgender men. That is completely ignoring the effects of HRT, making a proper discussion of the relevant facts impossible."
To be clear, that wasn't the argument that I was making. In my comment I was only pushing back on the common tendency in these discussions to talk about transgender women as if they were simply cisgender men. People say, uncritically, things like "oh it's common sense to ban [transgender women] because we know that men on average are faster and stronger". But transgender women on HRT are significantly different, biologically, to cisgender men.
It's perfectly fine to talk about advantages remaining after HRT is started, and for how long they remain. But that isn't what is happening when people talk about transgender women as if they were cisgender men. That is completely ignoring the effects of HRT, making a proper discussion of the relevant facts impossible.
It's also worth pointing out that, transgender women make up 0.5-1% of all women. So it shouldn't surprise us if transgender women make up 0.5-1% of top female athletes. That's proportional.
In reality transgender women are under-represented at the highest levels. While even singular examples of transgender athletes performing well are treated as obvious proof of advantage. That's very lop-sided rhetoric.
The discussion around this topic is terrible, with a lot of people being quite confidently incorrect about basic empirical facts, while arguing theory.
But biologically, there is a lot of difference between a cisgender man and a transgender women on HRT.
You can argue that residual advantages remain, that's reasonable. But to just talk about trans women as if they are basically just cis men is both inaccurate, and offensive.
Simply because there is a huge difference, biologically, between a cisgender man and a transgender women who is on HRT.
You can argue that there is still residual advantages remaining after transition, that's fine. But to call them men is both plainly incorrect, and also offensive.
Except they just don't. The idea that trans women are going to dominate women's sports simply has not played out in reality, despite the fact that trans women have been allowed to compete in women's divisions for many years before these bans.
I don't know how else to put that. The feared outcome just has not happened, despite regulations being more lax than they are now.
Further proof of this is found, ironically, in the examples brought up by people pushing this fear. It's the same small handful of trans competitors, most of which did not make any significant impact. If trans women were dominating women's sports, they would have more, and better, examples.
TERFs have been raging for months over a trans women finishing 6171st in a marathon. People still bring up a specific trans MMA fighter as if she was destroying the competition, when in reality she had a mediocre record, lost to a cis women with a mediocre record, and retired back in 2014. Trans women have been allowed to compete with women in the Olympics since 2004, with looser hormone regulations than those currently in place, yet we saw the first one compete only in 2020 where she didn't even medal.
The strongest example is one swimmer who was also very strong when she previously competed against men. And people ignore that she still lost to cis women in multiple events. They ignore that her times dropped dramatically after starting HRT.
I mean both chess and pool have recently banned transgender women from competition.
So the push is not purely an evidence-driven one. In fact there is a very loud political faction trying to remove transgender women from all events, from the highest levels all the way down to park fun-runs.
Salaries in Japan are fairly low. Though that is offset by a comparatively low cost-of-living.
Additionally, depending on when the currency conversions were done, the yen tanked dramatically in the last few years, leading to salaries appearing even lower when converted to dollars.
Except if you have enough money, it's not even gambling anymore. The only way you'd lose is if everybody loses.
And that's completely ignoring the fact that enough money lets you influence the rules of the game to tilt the odds in your favour.