Girls Just Want to Have Fun

Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to anti-bullying and anti-hazing rules in the new CBA, and that includes banning forcing rookies to dress as women:

The policy, obtained by The Associated Press, prohibits “requiring, coercing or encouraging” players from “dressing up as women or wearing costumes that may be offensive to individuals based on their race, sex, nationality, age, sexual orientation, gender identify or other characteristic.”

MLB Vice President Paul Mifsud said Monday the new rules resulted partly “in light of social media, which in our view sort of unfortunately publicized a lot of the dressing up of the players … those kind of things which in our view were insensitive and potentially offensive to a number of groups.”

“There’s lots of pictures of baseball players dressed up as Disney princesses,” he said.

I have to admit I’m a bit confused. I thought gender was supposed to be fluid, that if you’re biologically male and but feel like a woman today, you’re a woman. So it strikes me that a big loophole in this rule is that the rookies could all say they identify as women for purposes of the hazing, dress up like princesses, use the woman’s room, etc, and if MLB doesn’t like it, the players can sue for gender discrimination!

What MLB really is worried about is this:

“Although it hasn’t happened, you could sort of see how like someone might even dress up in black face and say, ‘Oh, no, we were just dressing up,'” Mifsud said. “We’ve also understood that a number of players have complained about it.”

I understand it’s sometimes difficult to balance fun and propriety, especially when you are dealing with young adults. I also understand that no players should be forced to participate in these rituals. (See the Jeff Kent comment in the article.) That’s why you have older people, managers, coaches, traveling secretaries, and such who should be able to say to the players, “That’s crossing the line.” Somehow, banning fun never seems to work that well.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2hzT7GT