But as you say you can’t “have nothing” right? As far as we know, nothing doesn’t exist or we can’t conceptualize it. So where you have A and B and are comparing values, A must have a value and B must have a value. The value can be unknown or unquantifiable but there must be SOME value.

This is a big factor in the “cannot divide by zero” convention. Zero doesn’t strictly exist. It holds the conceptual place of something that doesn’t exist. The concept is firmly expressed to anyone with passing familiarity with algebra but it’s actually quite intuitive. If we compare numbers we must have numbers to compare- or some concept to represent a number.
“Balance the equation.” This isn’t some silt rule, it’s a matter of perception and reality.
If you and I want to compare test grades, if I say I received an A, I need to know what you got to compare. If you didn’t complete the test the comparison would be an A to a did not complete. Numerically a 97 to a 0 on a points scale. This is different than if we do not know what you got- we could say 97 to X in this case or express it in writing as “97 to ?”

Asides being hard to read there is a lot of space taken up for no reason there. There are “infinite” places to the left of hundreds, thousands and tens thousands and hundred thousands and millions on to billions and on and on, and the same is true of decimal places. When we have a while number we rarely need to express that the decimal value is “0” because omitting those places implies it and there isn’t any relevant information there. We don’t need to hold the places forward of the highest value representing existence of physical data.
There are exceptions to this but zero as a place holder exists as a convenience to fill relevant data fields primarily for formatting and parsing.

You have something, or many things, we just cannot observe and have no evidence of the presence of a specific thing- in this case apples. It does not mean you never had it will ever have any apples, it only applies to the exact moment and/or circumstances being referenced.
“When you turn on a calculator it says zero- so zero is existing alone- check mate!”
Not so fast dear friend. That is zero the place holder and it never exists alone. Blank would imply nothing. A zero is there to represent that you have zero of a specific thing. In this case you have zero ones in your ones column. Place a decimal and you have 0 ones or 0 tenths and so on. We don’t always show zero and that blank doesn’t exactly represent nothing. Technically we could write “100” as “00100.0000000” or “0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000100.0000000000000000000000000” or we could put a billion or a googolplex or “infinite” zeros and never finish writing a single number.

procedures pertaining to self image and identity and mental well being. In simple terms, getting gender reassignment made a mandatory insured procedure opens the door to getting things like penile enlargement and other cosmetic procedures covered when they impact mental health and identity.
So if you are stressed about your pee pee size and anti trans, I suggest switching sides because that’s the road most likely to get you where you want to be.

All in all- don’t sweat it. There’s always someone bigger and yes, every partner has a such thing as too big. Insecurity over penis size is common and some people unfortunately do have penises that are medically small and lose actual issues in live making. It is what it is though. Learn other ways to please a partner and find the right person for you. If you want to take the risks and deal with the consequences, surgery is your choice but compared to most other common procedures, pencil enlargement has a very low success rate and low patient satisfaction post op.
Also, if you’re transphobic and insecure about your penis size (oddly those things often go together…) it’s a good chance to rethink your stance in things because gender reassignment presents a mainstream path to the sorts of knowledge that could lead to penile enlargement surgery that is more highly developed, and mandating insurance paying for gender assignment is a stepping stone to mandating insurance to pay for other

The Cadillac of current size enhancement is the very expensive and highly legally and morally questionable practice of penile transplant. Yes, it is possible to get a dead man’s larger penis grafted to your body. Yours must be cut off of course, and function and feeling aren’t guaranteed. If you can get over having another man’s junk- a dead man, and can find someone to do it and are willing to take the risks to do it- also remember like any organ transplant that you can reject the penis. Yeah. Then it rots off. And you’ll need to take anti rejection drugs and comply to strict guidelines for life or your penis might fall off (oversimplified terms.) also you need to find a doctor who will do it and you trust to do it, a suitable donor, and ALOT of money. Also if all that somehow a goes well for you- various partners may or may not find out and may or may not have their own feelings on your deadmans dong.

You can also have one of several surgeries which are generally ill advised and often illegal in many countries. Such methods include grafting/injecting fat or other substances under the skin of the penis (these increase girth but generally not length and are temporary. They also carry severe risks for infections, rejections, complications, permanent damage; and can easily end up in misshapen genitals. You also end up with an erection that has a soft spongy feeling as opposed to “rock hard.”
A more recent procedure involves having a silicone “hot dog bun” and plastic mesh grating grafted inside the penis. This can increase length and girth but has MANY reports of horror stories like implant edges being visible or even injuring partners, loss of function or feeling, infection, and of course your penis always seems semi erect- so having a nephew or niece sit on your lap of such can be problematic as even when not aroused you may seem so and can be felt as such.

They want it to be fun or at least keep you playing. Sports are the same, and being trans is a mechanic the game designers didn’t factor in and can’t generally figure out how to work in without upsetting balance or changing the fundamental game.
That’s what it is about. So save your breath. The logic isn’t about advantage of fair or spirit of competition or any of the BS they sell the nobility of sports on like building team work or values or whatever. Sports can do that- but sports sell, they make halo wealth, and they give people distractions and hopes. Most people end of day wether they realize it or can articulate it or will actually say it- most people who don’t want trans athletes just don’t want to potentially disrupt the status quo. The people who benefit most from things are usually most weary of change because entrenchment protects until the system is disrupted.

If Micheal Jordan had to wear weights each time he dominated, an eye patch, maybe make him play in blue jeans- there wouldn’t likely be a legend of Jordan. No Air Jordan shoe. No jersey sales. No Space Jams. Money down the toilet. No idols. No face to sell as aspirational to a next generation of potential player. Less tickets sold. Because people don’t generally want to see a fair fight. That’s boring usually. They want to feel like it is a fair fight. Be able to tell themselves it is. When a starting player is I hired do they call off all games until that person heals because that team is at a disadvantage…? Like come on. They are literally games. Not too many video games make you slog all the stupid crap. It doesn’t take years of playing a fighting game or RPG for your character to learn basic fundamental taps of fighting. You usually don’t have to eat and maintain hygiene and sleep in realistic ways- they are games. Even 99% of sim type games and survival games nerf realism.

The obvious answer to me is to just drop the bullshit. Let athletes dope. Let them get animal parts and machines grafted to em. Fuxk it. Rich kids can already afford the training and facilities and gear to have an edge. Diet, practice time, genetics, your parents, all these things can create an advantage someone else doesn’t have and can’t just “even out.” What do we do- start making basketball players add weights to their jerseys and wrist bands and shoes if they are doing too much better than everyone else? Maybe that’s the way to do it. But it becomes too complicated. Too complicated to run and too complicated for fans to follow.

… had a trans person say they liked that beer. And of course if that’s how people react to trans spokes people do you think that Starter is chomping to release a line of trans fronted jerseys? There tends to be a lot of overlap between sports and unhealthy tradition and especially antiquated ideas of masculinity and gender. They just don’t know what to do and are more concerned about killing the golden goose than logic or the spirit of play or anything else. Not for nothing- it’s hard. I don’t have the answer. How do you let trans athletes compete and keep things fair for everyone else?

People don’t mind their kids idolizing rapists and felons. They think wanting to grow up to be a sociopath or abuser, academic underachiever, drug dealer or user, mal adjusted, etc. are fine as long as you’re rich and people love you or you at least share the values and traumas that shaped them. But when you have trans NBA players… you have kids that want to grow up to be that person. That just won’t do for so many. Your kids hero had 2 kids they don’t take care of and was involved in a nightclub shooting and has 3 on record sexual assault cases and 30, 100+ off the records…? Well- they at least opened a library in their home town and inspire them to play outside! Yay? But to admire a trans person? To see trans people succeeding and fitting in and doing things that “normal folk” do openly? What does that world like like? Scary to a lot of people. Remember that being openly queer is still shaky in most pro sports. People boycotted and shot up cans because a beer company…

The house of cards comes down. They can’t easily fit trans athletes into the rules and keep the games and the leagues the way they are. The carefully built structure of managing peoples usually life long investment in sports falls apart. People that make money off sports make less. People who use sports as a crutch or personality lose direction or purpose. How can you prove you are better than others or have value if you can’t play children’s games with earnest seriousness?
And perhaps most of all- when maybe you say: “well why couldn’t things equal out and the NBA is still the NBA but with trans players?!” Poor soul.

It’s all the elephant in the room. We don’t want to talk about it. Asterisks in the record books and eye rolls when players are left off the GOAT list for being doped or being caught cheating- and we roll our eyes because of course they were. Everyone knows it and we pretended otherwise to preserve our sweet illusions.
But you can’t pretend with trans athletes. When a 300lb linebacker takes the field they “trained for it” and are “an impressive physical specimen.” “Born for the game..” but when an M>F trans athlete dogs the field people can’t just shrug and go “they must have had their Wheaties…”

So no one really cares if sports are fair. They never were. You think that the NFL just happens to be full of players that represent a literal fluke of human biology and genetics to have the mass and be able to perform as they do or do you think that maybe a good deal of them aren’t exactly all natural? When they want to “crack down” on doping they can nab as many athletes as the want and the rest of the time…? If you have 30 athletes fail a test for drugs that all weight 300lbs and the next year you have 30 athletes pass at 300lbs… if you could be 300lbs of muscle natty why did those other guys fail? They were just too lazy to go to the gym? Bullshit. At least nascar and F1 give a wink and a nod- duh winners cheat in racing. Cheating and luck are the two ways you break most records in a competitive field with strict rules.

That’s what sports run on. When you start trying to screw with that, people push back. If you can use a wheel chair why not an electric wheel chair? And now the 100 meter dash is a fucking NHRA drag race with some kid in a wheel chair with wheelie bars and a parachute running a Tesla plaid motor right? And why not? But put an American football team from 1950 against one from 2023. Even with a chance to learn the rules and the modern game- do you think that… look at the players from that age. Think they would be in fair footing compared to a modern team? They look like baseball players and modern baseball players look like footbal players.

The rules are the rules, that makes them make sense. “Why do you have to switch if the clock runs out?” “Because that’s the rule…” “why are there X rounds/periods/etc?” “Because there are…” there’s no real reason or logic to it. It’s a balance of what is reasonable to expect from athletes and managing the attention and excitement of an audience.
Most all games rules change over time to combat strategies seen as damaging to the ability of the sport to entertain or as public perceptions and desires change. American football, many motorsports world wide, both some great examples where often times teams have found effective and efficient strategies within the rules to increase winning odds and rules have changed to outlaw or discourage those strategies because they make the game less exciting.

Sports films are a steady side income in film and TV. Sports are used to breach certain social taboos or allow insecure or inept people to form connections. Sports are like booze- a social lubricant, an escape, a thing that even if you can prove how harmful it is, without some sort of radical action getting a society to give it up once it is in the culture is almost impossible. Sports are often the only thing that hold relationships or families together.
There is SOOOOO much money in it at every level and so much attachment.
So that’s the real hurdle. It isn’t about logic. It never was. Look at the rules of sports. They aren’t designed to some grand competition of fairness or to show the extremes of human ability as much as they are designed to be entertaining. That’s the logic. The rules of a sport don’t need to make sense under scrutiny.

Sports medicine, supplements and such, clothing sales like team jerseys and shoes and all these things that get their image and popularity from featuring in sports or being used on field. It seems silly- a gas station here or hotels there… but add it up. Add the money up that gets spent even for little league sports from all those parents combined. Then realize- not just multi millionaire star athletes- lives are made off and around sports. Prestigious high schools and colleges are attended by people who otherwise likely wouldn’t have gotten in most likely- because sports. Even non pro players can become coaches, consultants, commentators, gym teachers, news casters or get into to what fields through their recognition, experiences, and connections in sports. Motivational speaking, books, sporting goods companies…. Etc etc.

So we get to the real issue. A lot of people are invested in these games. There are sentimental and traditionalist attachments and then there is the fact that there is SO much money and SO many lives tied up in sports. Youth sports world wide is a huge business. In many places is it a granted that most kids will play sports of some sort. Even if they never go pro or even play on the school team- the sales of equipment to pee wee leagues and youth programs and camps and just kids and families playing catch or what not is HUGE. Once we start including high school and college sports those numbers get insane. Then there is the halo- all the people who live off sports. Transport companies and property owners of venues, businesses nearby that benefit from the traffic. How much money do you think is spent in a single weekend on pizza or tacos or ice cream etc. by amateur sports teams celebrating games and such?

Take a sport like American football where generally your linebackers are going to be huge. There isn’t an upper limit- if you can find 300lbs of human that is 6’’5” and able to do the job they’ll put them on a field against - 160lb quarter back or another team with smaller blockers and hitters. They aren’t going to say: “that’s not fair, you can’t have a blocker that big!” And forbid someone from playing because they are too well physically suited for the sport. They don’t have a league where all players are weight capped to 170lbs and another league for 200 and one for 250.
A paraplegic in a wheel chair- could they play in the NBA? Probably not. Even if a wheelchair player was found that could be competitive- the rules might not exclude it but they aren’t really built for it. But could they..? In theory. But then… what about an athlete who isn’t handicapped in the special Olympics? Hmmm….