Well kid, who was ya?
Rachel McKinnon may now be regretting his bullying of Martina Navratilova yesterday, since it’s getting some unfavorable attention.
I wonder if the cyclepath that is Rachel McKinnon has woken up today thinking, 'Shittttttttt – did I REALLY say to Martina, 'Don't you know who I am?'
— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) December 22, 2018
.@Martina Navratilova was a beacon for gay pride and dignity at time when there was no cyber wall of liberals to defend her. She is no ally. She was the vanguard.
She is a veteran.
Respect, won already. #OverAndOut— Alison Moyet (@AlisonMoyet) December 22, 2018
Lucy Bannerman and Gabriella Swerling at the Times:
She won Wimbledon nine times and is widely regarded as one of the greatest tennis players of all time, so most people would agree that Martina Navratilova has earned the right to discuss fairness in women’s sport.
Not everyone. Rachel McKinnon, a transgender cyclist from Canada, has been accused of bullying Navratilova on social media, demanding she retract and apologise for “transphobic” comments about transgender athletes competing in women’s sport.
They give the background on the new orthodoxy that “biological males should be allowed to compete against women if they identify as female,” and the dissent from the new orthodoxy that points out that men have physical advantages and can be a hazard to women. They quote Navratilova’s tweet saying you “can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women,” then they quote three of McKinnon’s, including the prize-narcissism entry:
She added: “You . . . realize I’m a world champion trans athlete who happens to publish and speak worldwide on trans rights . . . right?”
This obnoxious disordered narcissistic twerp tries to impress Martina Navratilova with how important he is, being a world champion cheater athlete who promulgates his Cheater Bullshit “worldwide” (i.e. on Twitter). Result: now more people know what a narcissistic cheating twerp he is. Bit of an own goal?
It’s everywhere. The narcissists have every powerful voice. Feckin’ nightmare.
The thing that strikes me is how this is such a clear case of overreaching and refusing to take yes for an answer. Navratilova had already deleted the original tweet, declared that McKinnon knew more than she on the issue, and stated her intention to withdraw from the discussion and give it some further thought. Which was in my opinion highly generous of her.
That is pretty much all you can ever expect to achieve in a Twitter argument. McKinnon could easily have declared victory and moved on. But instead she insisted on rubbing Navratilova’s nose in it, demanding that she essentially grovel and apologize for the grave injury that was supposedly inflicted on McKinnon (hint: it isn’t all about you!). Accompanied by this ridiculous don’t-you-know-who-I-am preening. (In all of human history, has “don’t you know who I am” ever worked out well for the person saying it?)
I’m delighted to see it backfire
I’ve always wondered about this “more Catholic than the Pope” attitude evinced by extreme trans activists rather bizarre. But then I suppose that socialization as males might leave them with the idea that they are Experts at Everything, and that the expectation deference and respect they had as boys and men is carried over into their post-transition lives. Now that they’ve come to see how Women 1.0 have had it forever, and they miss the automatic acceptance that they still feel they are owed.
Maybe I’m sheltered or not widely enough read, but I’ve heard of trans men acting out in this way, just trans women and their allies seem to make this sort of stink. Then I don’t imagine many trans men are trying to join men’s sports leagues, so there’s one arena of conflict that is less likely to arise. Ditto shelters and crisis centres. How accurate an assessment is this?
Your name—I think you’re seeing it correctly. The difference is psychological. The men we’re seeing (“trans women”) rolling over these boundaries are clinical narcissists. They are personality disordered. The big elephant in the room that only a few of us are talking about, while everyone pretends they can’t see these deranged Cluster B-disordered men for what they really are.
I’m not saying that your cultural/psychological explanation isn’t at least partly right, but I suspect the main reason is something simpler. We’ve gotten rid of most if not all of the institutions and spaces that explicitly and openly exclude women. (Or they never existed — you don’t see trans men agitating to lead “masculinist” organizations because those mostly don’t exist, with the exception of fringe MRA-type groups.)
Obviously there are still institutions and spaces that as a practical matter exclude or discourage women, and plenty of privileges and benefits that go with being a man, but they are usually unofficial, often hard to prove, and generally not seen as legitimate — a trans man can’t effectively complain “hey, my colleagues don’t allow me to interrupt and speak over women during meetings like cis men do! I haven’t been given a promotion I don’t deserve, and my pay is only the same as comparably qualified women!” I’m sure that a lot of trans men have complaints that cis men don’t accept or treat them as “real men,” but it’s a harder case to make.
Josh-
You are so right. There was a blogger/vlogger in the UK that clearly outlined the extreme narcissism demonstrated in these trans ‘activists’. She eventually had to stop making videos due to the backlash she was getting.
IMHO, social media is the perfect tool for the narcissist. They can puff themselves up, lie, insult and dominate all they want without worrying about physical backlash. Plus they can tap into a huge source of like minded folk that they would never have the time to meet and ‘recruit’ one on one. These followers not only serve as flying monkeys to descend on anyone who ‘needs punishment’, but they provide near endless narcissistic supply.
Why am I suddenly thinking about politics?
The irony of the times, innit. If you’re a bullying narcissist woman you have all kinds of obstacles to your narcissistic bullying, but if you’re a bullying narcissist man you can just claim to be a trans woman and all of a sudden you have a bunch of allies cheering you on.
Is it purely coincidental (or my imagination) that the loudest, most demanding, authoritarian trans-women seem to be the ones who are unmistakeably men however hard they try to disguise it?
I like the bit where McKinnon told Navratilova how to play tennis (ie not with one’s genitals).
McKinnon is, quite simply, an asshole (a gender-neutral and inclusive term).
Sorry if I missed it, but I haven’t seen the deleted tweet posted here, so here it is:
Well, at least that explains all the yelling about penises, but I think that reaction misses the actual point.
I thought this reaction (from an anonymous comment) summarized the issue well:
A “world champion” whose championship was obtained by a man entering the women’s league. A cheat, telling the winner of eighteen Grand Slam singles titles what it is to be a sporting champion.
Total fucking arsehole.
It all seems to me that men in women’s sport (and women only spaces) is just another in an ongoing patriarchal pattern for the past several millennia, at least in most cultures – punishing women for being women. I mean, you put large men in women’s sports, and women get broken bones and other injuries. You put men in women’s prisons, and women get raped. You put men in women only spaces, and women have no safe place to go anymore.
Punish women. How dare they be women? How dare they be women and speak? How dare they be women and think? Must be punished.
Only now the punishing is done by the liberal wing, those who had to be content with ignoring women for a long time, and couldn’t openly let their misogyny show because, well, liberal and all that nice progressive stuff. This gives liberal men and women who want to punish women a “legitimate” way to do so.
I keep wondering, are there no better advocates for trans-women-competing-in-women’s-sports? Maybe someone who started telling people “no I am a girl actually” from the age of 6, with an entire childhood and adolescence of being a girl, who now at the age of 22 does not stand out in a group of female athletes like a mastiff in a pack of greyhounds and just wants to be able to play on the women’s football team because she’s good at kicking a ball around? They must exist, right?
Screechy Monkey, #2
Probably not, but the responses can be amusing.
My favourite is from the first day of the London 2012 Olympics. Former 1500m. Olympic champion runner Seb Coe (Lord Coe, if you please), chair of the Olympic committee, was asked by a security guard for his official pass, as the rule was nobody entered without one, no exceptions. Coe told the guard that he’d left his pass at his hotel, the guard said that he couldn’t enter, so Coe pulled the ‘do you know who I am?’ card. The guard’s response was delightful.
“Yes, Sir, so it shouldn’t take too long for you to run back to the hotel and get your pass”
Screechy Monkey, #2: “In all of human history, has “don’t you know who I am” ever worked out well for the person saying it?”
Reportedly once, though the story is likely apocryphal. At the end of a Harvard final exam, as a student was handing the exam booklet to a proctor, the proctor said “Set yours aside, because I have reason to believe you were cheating.” The student is said to have haughtily replied, “Do you know who I am?” “No,” said the proctor. “Good!” exclaimed the student, pushed the booklet in the middle of the pile, and ran from the room.
http://time.com/5475037/boxer-transgender-male/
Without much guff on his part, beyond some weirdness about exploring his blackness through boxing…
The thing that strikes me is how this is such a clear case of overreaching and refusing to take yes for an answer.
It seems to me that “never take yes for an answer, always demand extra groveling” is bog standard in “woke” discourse these days. McKinnon must be surprised by the pushback, since jerkass was just following the standard playbook.
#17
Interesting, and also more or less in line with expected – the chief advantage men have over women in athletics is size, and combat sports control for that with weight divisions. Nice to see the speculation come true.
***
One thing I am noticing is how much easier it appears to be for trans men to ‘pass’ than it is for trans women. Facial and chest hair are positive indicators for maleness, but their absence is not an indicator of femaleness due in part to the variability of hairiness in men, and also due to the advent of shaving. Thus trans men can induce hair growth via testosterone and gain a male indicator, but trans women do not gain a female indicator by their absence.
Breasts can be added or subtracted via surgery, yet surgically added breasts can have an incongruous, ‘artificial’ shape, with no equivalent possibility for surgically removed breasts; and so it is (occasionally) possible for trans womens’ breasts give the game away so to speak.
The trait that is especially relevant to discussions of athletics and competitive advantage is size. A large frame can spoil the appearance of femaleness due to its rarity amongst women, while a small frame does not spoil the appearance of maleness, because while small waif-like men are not common, they are still more common than tall hulking women. And it is also the only trait that cannot possibly be addressed by surgery or hormone therapy, as it is determined by the skeleton; once broad-shouldered, always broad-shouldered.
I wonder if this comparative ease in passing for male is part of why we never really hear shouting obnoxiousness from trans men. They are simply blending in and getting on with life, trans but also incognito, while lantern-jawed six foot women shout and stamp in anger because they stand out like dogs balls.
Could be; there are probably multiple reasons; but I think most of it is just plain male socialization. The belief that men are and are supposed to be dominant over women is instilled and enforced, however implicitly and covertly, everywhere, and none of us can escape it. It’s ironic really…trans women want to be seen/perceived as women, but the more any particular trans woman tries to enforce that with bullying, the more man-like that trans woman seems.
Athena – ha!
Good point, but I think some trans women stand out because they shout and stamp in anger. I’ve not heard of trans men trying to take over organizations and institutions, demanding that the values thereof be “centered” on them (Of course, in joining the ranks of men, they get to take advantage of thousands of years of male privilege, where organizations and institutions have been “centered” on natal men to start with, so it’s a different situation than the new environment in which trans women find themselves.) It’s disconcerting to see nd hear new arrivals to the status of womanhood demand the walls be repainted and the furniture rearranged to their taste.
And they’re demanding that women do the work of the rearranging, when the patriarchal attitude demonstrated by most men (and some trans-women) is what needs changing. Women simply have no power to change that, only to point out where it needs changing and remake their own activities to, say, ignore men who act like entitled bullies (which is hard enough to do – it’s even harder when they are men).
A young man I know who has been exploring the possibility of transitioning to female puts the point on the problem well, I think. He recently discovered from some of his female colleagues the things they have to do just to get by in the world, things like trying to avoid men who might be lurking in, near, or under their car. Things like not going places alone if there are likely to be strange men. Stuff like that. In spite of several years immersion in the trans community, in spite of his conviction that he feels like a woman, this came as a surprise to him.
I think a lot of it is obliviousness. They are so used to male privilege, to particular modes of behavior when they are around, and oblivious to the fact that females have a widely different experience, that when they transition, they assume the hated and loathing they receive is 100% because they are trans. They have no clue that it is pure and simple misogyny, and that even the hatred of trans is rooted in misogyny, since no woman can ever become truly man, having been born the “wrong” sex, and any man becoming a woman is a “traitor”, a “pussy”, a lesser human being.
Until we deal with misogyny, trans people will not be comfortable in their skins. The problem is, how do you deal with misogyny when it is so entrenched and intractable? And comes from women as well as men?
Someone (I forget who) put this entire matter in a nutshell: Much that is is ascribed to transphobia is quite often plain good ol’ misogyny. It simply highlights how appallingly women are treated by default even in relatively “enlightened” or “progressive” contexts. Being treated as a woman becomes cause for frustration and anger if you expect to be treated as, well, a human being.