Posted by: mudhoney
Posted by: syncro
Posted by: mudhoney
My personal opinion is that the NSMBA is more concerned with appearance and performance. My personal experience with the organization has been one of gender discrimination, and failure to acknowledge and address such issues.
Edit to add that I did not say that the NSMBA had done nothing, nor did I imply that. It's not just "can more be done" but more is needed.
For that to have appropriate context you need to include a time-frame of your personal experience with the NSMBA. I'm not trying to deny the validity of your experience, but my own experience and knowledge leads me to believe that the NSMBA has been fairly gender neutral for a long time.
2013 to present.
Using this phrase: “I’m not trying to deny your experience, but…” does exactly what you say you’re not trying to do.
Yeah I know, but there really isn't another way to express that my own experience/views differ from yours. It's highly possible for two people to share the same/similar experience and have different perceptions of it due to many variables. Your experience is valid, but saying that it differs from the experience of others doesn't mean it's any less important. I don't see it as less important and I'm sorry if you got that impression with what I said. Considering there is a strong female presence on the NSMBA board I'm going to guess that when you say gender discrimination issue that it's related to gender identity discrimination? For the general public that's an important distinction to make, for even though there is more general awareness of LGBTQ+ identities unfortunately most people simply do not understand the topic of gender identity and often have ignorant or negative opinions about that aspect of humanity.
From the outside I think the NSMBA has been very progressive in terms of talking about the many aspects of gender identity when compared to society as a whole, and this is especially true when it comes to the mtb'ing community considering its demographics. That said, I definitely agree with you that they could do more, but I wonder about their capacity to do more. What do you think they need to do internally first to create the type of equity you feel is needed? If you don't want to make this a public issue in this forum I get it, but feel free to send me a pm as I can be an ally for you. Gender identity and Indigeneity are two social issues that are important to me and ones I'd like to see the NSMBA take on, but I know that requires people, time and money and recognize that the NSMBA may not have them to give to those issues considering their main focus of trail advocacy.
