Madeleine Kearns at the National Review can see it, but the wokies can’t. Strange times.
Rachel McKinnon — the so-called defending “world champion” of women’s track cycling — is a man. I’ll repeat that so my meaning cannot be misconstrued. He is a man.
Maybe my kind-hearted reader is offended by this blunt phrasing. Why am I calling McKinnon a man — when, perhaps for complicated reasons, he would rather be called a woman? Why don’t I compromise and call him a “trans woman,” as others do? Or be polite and address him by “she/her” pronouns, like everyone else in the media?
I doubt that many readers of National Review have that particular brand of kind-heartedness – the kind that humors identity bullshit. Capitalism bullshit, market bullshit, antifeminist bullshit, yes, but identity bullshit, no. Not their thing. Once in awhile that makes them right.
This is precisely the well-meant, tragically naïve logic that has enabled a structure of lies and tyranny to be erected around us, a structure that most cannot opt out of without incurring an enormous social cost. It is a structure in which cheating and viciousness are rewarded while civility and truth-telling are punished. Rachel McKinnon is the perfect example of how this structure works and operates, as well as why we should resist it.
He is. He is more so than for instance Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv, because he has a respectable job as an academic, and is much better at righteous rhetoric than Yaniv is. He doesn’t come across as flaky the way Yaniv does; instead he comes across as a determined malevolent conscious cheat and bully.
For context: McKinnon lived unambiguously as a man (called “Rhys”) until the age of 29. In addition to male puberty, he has had a full experience of modern academia where he developed a particular enthusiasm for the philosophy of lies (literally) and for “gender studies.” Graduating first from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, he completed a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo with a thesis on assertions, “Why You Don’t Need to Know What You’re Talking About” (the literal subtitle).
And later a book. Of course he did.
While serving as an associate professor at the College of Charleston, S.C., McKinnon decided to get into sport cycling. (Fair.) He won the 200-meter sprint record for women in the 35–39 range in 2018, and then the UCI Masters World Track Cycling Championship in the Women’s Sprint. (Not fair.)
This month, he defended his title. From the news last week: “Rachel McKinnon successfully defended her track World Championship title in Manchester,” per Cycling Weekly; “Prominent trans rights campaigner McKinnon has defended her right to compete,” per the BBC; “[McKinnon] found herself defending her title against a critic — the president’s son,” per CBS News; “McKinnon keeps dominating women’s cycling. And she keeps creating controversy all the way,” per the New York Post.
McKinnon keeps dominating women’s cycling because of that whole not being a woman thing.
Because McKinnon being a man is directly relevant to the argument that he should not compete against women, in calling him something other than a man, we obfuscate that argument — and all for the sake of a very recently invented set of blasphemy norms (e.g. “misgendering” and “deadnaming”) that don’t apply to us non-believers.
That’s a good way of putting it. They’re blasphemy norms in a religion we don’t adhere to or admire so leave us out of them.
Second, by pretending that McKinnon is not a man — but rather a vulnerable woman — we have forsworn all expectations of accountability and decency. The most egregious example of this, and the precise moment I decided to stop lending McKinnon special courtesies, was when he lauded the terminal illness of a young woman, Magdalen Berns, whom I held (and still hold) in great esteem.
Berns believed strongly that men cannot be women. As she lay on her deathbed in Scotland, at the age of 36, surrounded by her loved ones, McKinnon tweeted that he was “happy” when bad people died, that this feeling is “justified,” that Berns is a “trash human,” and further advised his followers “don’t be the sort of person who people you’ve harmed are happy you’re dying of brain cancer.”
That’s McKinnon. He should write a book on how it’s possible to be seen as progressive while calling women names day in and day out on Twitter.
So, can you compromise or appease a tyrant? You can certainly try. In a surprisingly balanced interview with Sky News — in which the interviewer explained that the science shows that even after taking testosterone suppressants, men retain indisputable physiological advantages that are especially pronounced in a sport like track — McKinnon explained why he thinks skeptics like me, who consider the science of sex, are wrong:
I’m legally and medically female. But the people who oppose my existence still want to think of me as male. They use the language that I am a man . . . If you think of trans women as men then you think there’s an unfair advantage.
Of course, nobody is questioning McKinnon’s existence — for how could the continually aggressive presence of such an unpleasant man be denied? What is being disputed is his belief that he is a woman and his sense of entitlement to compete against actual women. But for those who might be more sympathetic, or for those who don’t know quite how much of a thug he is, he makes the classic cartoon-villain mistake: overreach. Those who are not with him entirely, he explains, must be entirely against him:
[Sport] is central to society. So, if you want to say, “I believe you’re a woman for all of society except this massive central part of sport” then that’s not fair. So, fairness is the inclusion of trans women.
As it happens, I do not have an ideological commitment to gender terminology or pronouns one way or another. For struggling, respectful souls, I’m happy to lend special courtesies (in fact, I frequently do). But for cheats and liars, for bullies and tyrants, for those who seek to use my words to propagate deceit and injustice? Oh, just drop it, sir — I’ll never call you “ma’am.”
How about this guy?
Comments
13 responses to “In addition to male puberty”
What is it with ragey Americans yelling “Give me your corporate number? Are they too dumb to use google or White Pages? Or is the whole country filled with lazy narcissists? maybe they get offended so many times a day that they can’t remember the names of all the corporates they need to call.
Since when has sport been ‘central to society’?
Good for Madeleine Kearns. Doubtless it will give rise to a rage of phallosophical twitterings from McKinnon.
The National Review makes sense here. Oh noes.
Because gcf concerns about the impact of transgender ideology are to an extent shared by conservatives and the religious, I’ve found that new tendency is to lump them together into a single group and decide they all have the same motivations. Gender critical feminists are against gay marriage and think homosexuality is an abomination because their “friends” on the right do. And oh — they’re also politically and economically conservative. Look who they link to or even hang out with. There’s your clue.
Sometimes it seems to be about picking “sides” as much as it’s about the actual issue. I keep running into people who think that feminists who have a problem with transgender women in sports are faking feminism. If someone in the National Review or on Fox News said something a ‘terf’ would say about that — ha! We got ‘em! They’re in cahoots, and interchangeable. If you were starting to think they had a point, read something hysterical by a fundamentalist and realize that’s what terfs are really saying. So cheer on MacKinnon or you like Trump.
Part error; part threat.
I read a good article on Quillette the other day.
https://quillette.com/2019/10/31/torontos-meghan-murphy-meltdown-a-case-study-in-media-driven-social-panic/
…
Mind you, the author uses “orthodox” here to mean the “now-fashionable orthodox position that we should be able to simply declare ourselves man or woman at will, for all legal and social purposes, based on some inwardly experienced revealed knowledge about our gendered soul.”
It’s a pretty rich article. I recommend a read.
@Papito;
Yes, it was. Thanks for the link.
Fear of being on the same side as National Review and Quillette is the meat that McKinnon, Janiv and Co. thrive upon.
If you tell the truth about the Ukraine famine, you’re ‘siding with’ fascists and anti-semitic White Russians.
If you acknowledge the threat of Jihadism, you’re supporting anti-immigrant racists.
If you dare mention Janiv/’Karen White’/McKinnon, you’re beating up trans teenagers in alleys.
Sastra, Papito, JtD – interesting points, and very spot on. One thing I’ve noticed is that it is the right that is coopting the language of the left in their own campaign. They don’t like trans for reasons that have little or nothing to do with feminism, and lots to do with religion. They sense the religious argument has limits on who will be convinced, so they adopt the gfc arguments. So we see people who have not only never been feminists but have actually been anti-feminists forever and ever spouting words that sound like they could come from Ophelia or Julie Bindel…and left wingers sounding off against gender critical feminism.
It isn’t that we have adopted the ideas of the foaming-at-the-mouth right wingers, but rather that they have adopted our arguments to serve their own purpose. Few if any of them really have any interest in preserving the integrity of women’s sports, and while they do care about gender-segregated spaces, it isn’t for the same reasons feminists do. If they cared about that, they would be willing to support other things that protect women. But the right has frequently adopted the techniques of the left, and often to greater effect than those on the left. Now they’re adopting the language of feminism. One side thing is that it allows the few women on the right who have feminist sympathies to express those on an issue that will not destroy their cred with the right wing or lose them their lucrative positions.
I liked that Quillette article, and made a note of it for later and then didn’t get to it.
iknklast, you have some good points there. The right adopts the tone of the left in criticizing the trans cult, the trans cult lumps the left in with the right in bashing “TERFs,” and the only people lefties critical of the trans cult have left to agree with on this issue are on the right. It’s a bizarre state of events.
I don’t know if I’d characterize it as being at cross-purposes quite as much as you do. I’ve seen a similar left-right phenomenon before. Homeschool groups are stocked with both hippies and fundies, all at common purpose. Different reasons can coexist, and if we are to make any progress fighting the trans cult, they’ll have to.
That Quillette article is by their Canadian editor Jonathan Kay, and he will among the speakers this evening at #GIDYVR on the topic, “How media bias shapes the gender identity debate”
The meeting changed location at the last minute because Simon Fraser University backed out, reportedly because of threats of violence from trans activists.
Meghan Murphy said the panel will be live streamed on her YouTube channel, and the start time is scheduled to be 5:30 PM Vancouver time. I’ll probably miss the live stream, but I expect her to post the video permanently a few days later.
Jinx, I just came back here to share an article about that very thing.
Ha!
[Clarification to my #11 — The university did not back out, it was the sponsor at the university who backed out, given a report from security, and the booking was under his name. Meghan Murphy said that in the future they will book the talks themselves, as they have done before, without a sponsor.]