The IOC has said it is committed to inclusion
Allowing transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard to compete in the women’s competition at the Tokyo Olympics would be like letting athletes dope and may set a dangerous precedent for future Games, Samoa’s weightlifting boss told Reuters.
Like letting athletes dope only worse, because it’s 37 years of more testosterone.
Tuaopepe Jerry Wallwork coaches Samoa’s Commonwealth Games champion Feagaiga Stowers and is concerned Hubbard’s presence in the super-heavyweight division at Tokyo could deny the small island nation its second Olympic medal.
Sorry, small island nations go to the wall.
The IOC has said it is committed to inclusion regardless of gender identity and sexual characteristics but is also updating its guidelines.
This stupid word “inclusion” needs to be banished from discussions of this kind. Sport is all about exclusion, by its nature – there is winning and there is losing. Sport is competitive, and with competition you get exclusion. The IOC isn’t “committed to inclusion” at all – it doesn’t include everyone. A very small select few get to compete in the Olympic games; they’re about as exclusive as it gets.
So why are they carving out an exception for one man who claims to be trans? (I don’t believe he is trans, I think he’s just taking advantage.) Why is just this one purported mental state an exception to the rule that otherwise governs billions of people? They never say, they just repeat the stupid words.
Wallwork coached Samoa’s only Olympic medallist Ele Opeloge to weightlifting silver at the 2008 Beijing Games.
Doping robbed Opeloge and Samoa of the podium moment, however, with the medal only awarded eight years later after a re-analysis of drug test samples disqualified the bronze and silver medallists.
Ah that’s nice, so now the IOC is doing it to them all over again.
TBF, New Zealand is also a small island nation, though not as small as Samoa.
I don’t know what that means, unless one accepts the dichotomy (is it Abigail Shrier’s?) between “true trans” (=men that literally have pink brains) vs. non-true trans.
People who mean it versus people who are pretending.
@Colin Day,
New Zealand is pretty big for an island nation, with a population of just under 5 million (Samoa’s is less than 200k). Among island nations, that puts it just behind Ireland, and well ahead of Jamaica. Among all nations, it’s between the Central African Republic and Mauritania.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
I suspect that there’s a whole lot of blur between those categories, especially since as soon as a man says once “I’m a woman!!” or a woman says once “I’m a man!!”, regardless of how much they believe it, a chorus of thousands of twits online will affirm that and say: “Yes, you really are!!”, until they believe it. But OK.
I didn’t say there isn’t a whole lot between those categories, I just tried to clarify what I meant in response to your question. Maybe I didn’t understand your question, because I think the meaning of “(I don’t believe he is trans, I think he’s just taking advantage.)” is pretty obvious. Of course I don’t think it’s a matter of 100% belief on the one hand and 100% pretending on the other. Of course there are gradations.
Well, that’s just silly, as there’s no reason small island nations can’t cultivate their own transwoman athletes.
Aside from the women affected, I’d love to see a small country put up a big slate of “transwomen” ringers and sweep the medals. Not Laurel Hubbard types, but young men in their prime. I think that would shake a lot of people out of their denial, and this is basically what’s going to happen anyway, just dragged out over many (ha, “man”-y) years.
Fair.
Skeletor are you familiar with the concept of a “joke”?