How to reshape the future of women’s sports
When June Eastwood steps onto the start line for the Clash of the Inland Northwest cross country meet on Saturday morning in Cheney, Wash., she will make history. Eastwood, a senior at the University of Montana, will become the fastest distance runner to ever compete in an NCAA Division I women’s race.
In fact, it won’t even be close.
Eastwood’s personal best in the 800 meters is 1:55.23. That’s almost four seconds faster than the collegiate record of 1:59.10 set by Raevyn Rogers in 2017.
Her personal best in the 1500 is 3:50.19. Jenny Simpson’s collegiate record, unchallenged for a decade, is almost 10 seconds slower (3:59.90).
Eastwood has run 14:38.80 in the 5,000, far ahead of Simpson’s collegiate record of 15:01.70.
Despite those PBs, it is far from certain Eastwood will win on Saturday. Eastwood has won just two races out of 56 in three years of competition for Montana. She’s never won a national title or earned All-American honors. In fact, she’s never even qualified for the national meet.
The reason? For the first three years of her career, June Eastwood competed on the men’s team.
Competed on the men’s team and didn’t do all that well so hey, let’s try the other team.
Unless Eastwood is utterly awful this fall, it seems likely that she will face questions about whether she has an unfair advantage because of her chromosomal sex — and how big that advantage is. If she’s 20th at NCAAs, will someone complain that she bumped someone out of All-American honors? If she’s 5th at her conference meet, will someone complain she bumped someone out of all-conference honors? If she’s 5th on her team, will someone complain she bumped someone off the travel squad?
All of this makes Eastwood one of the most compelling athletes in the NCAA this fall. How she runs — and how the NCAA reacts — could set a precedent for how the NCAA handles MTF transgender cases and reshape the future of women’s sports.
And “reshape the future of women’s sports” in the sense of killing it stone dead. There won’t be any women’s sports any more, because men who claim to be women will take all of it over.
And then they’ll have to recreate it, because the men who claim to be women will once again be competing against men, and will no longer be winning. So they’ll need to create a new women’s sports, and then they will need to force their way into that, so they can win again.
Vicious feedback loop. As for the women? Who cares? We’re just…boring old vacant non-pretty ‘cis’-women.
I like that term, “chromosomal sex.” It suggests that the differences between male and female bodies are microscopic, hidden until you reveal them with technology.
I sure as hell hope so. In fact, let’s save everyone some time and complain about it RIGHT NOW!
The source of the story in the OP is a website called “Let’s Run.”
The inspirational tagline for the site is
Unles you’re a girl or woman. In that case, dream on.
No, she didn’t. For the first three years of his career, Jonathon Eastwood competed on the men’s team. Then, a transition. They make it sound as if there was some ghastly mixup, a clerical error preventing the poor child from joining her teammates.
There is no ‘she’. There is only he. And it’s not that he competed on the men’s team; the salient fact is that he is a man.
@Josh;
Oh, I’m willing to be polite and use a “she” if I retain the right to keep the quotation marks.
But, yes.
There is no Dana. There is only Zul.
Zuul Oger. I like it!
The 2018 transgender IOC policies no long require sex reassignment by surgery. Restrictions on participation rely only on monitoring hormone levels (D 2.1, 2.2, 2.3). But hormone levels can naturally vary, for example with exercise, for women and men. Is “chromosomal sex” is a game changer (Ben (#2)? Why shouldn’t the criterion for participation in a women’s sports league be chromosomal sex/born as female?
Elizabeth Bauer draws an analogy using Paralympics. Allowing men, however they identify using gender, to complete in women’s sports “gives them an inappropriate advantage that’s the equivalent to wrongly classifying Paralympic athletes. Unless, that is, we say that women’s athletic competition is not about achievement at all, but about providing opportunities for girls to develop physical fitness, and for women to provide encouragement by setting examples. But in that case, can we at least be honest about it?” (https://thefederalist.com/2018/06/14/transgender-politics-turning-sports-special-olympics/)
That Federalist article makes many good points, but I’m unclear about the quoted last bit. How does “providing encouragement by setting examples” change anything? What kind of example is set by girls routinely losing to bigger and stronger boys who have infiltrated girls’ sports? I’m genuinely unclear what Bauer is trying to say here.