Life is not fair
Now there’s a compelling argument. WIRED Science:
Some critics claim transgender athletes are ruining competition for cis women and girls, but they forget: Sports—and life—have never been fair.
Ah. Very true. Therefore let’s make sports – and life – even more unfair, especially for girls and women.
They lead with a photo of this glorious project:
See, bitches? Unfair! Life and sports are already unfair! Sucks to be you.
Transgender athletes are having a moment. At all levels of sport, they’re stepping onto the podium and into the headlines. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard won two gold medals at the Pacific Games, and college senior CeCé Telfer became the NCAA Division II national champion in the 400-meter run. Another senior, June Eastwood, has been instrumental to her cross-country team’s success. At the high school level, Terry Miller won the girls’ 200-meter dash at Connecticut’s state open championship track meet.
Funny how those are all trans women, aka men. Funny how the paragraph starts with “transgender athletes” but actually cites only male transgender athletes, the ones who have a massive physical advantage over the female athletes they compete against. Funny how the article sneaks that in there in such a dishonest way.
These recent performances are inherently praiseworthy—shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort.
They’re not, actually, because they all involve cheating. Remember Lance Armstrong? What he did is not considered inherently praiseworthy or a shining example of what humans can accomplish with training and effort. These recent performances are sleazy examples of what men can accomplish by cheating women.
But as more transgender athletes rise to the top of their fields, some vocal opponents are also expressing outrage at what they see as transgender athletes ruining sports for cisgendered girls and women.
More sneaking – not transgender athletes but male transgender athletes. Males who claim to identify as female and then compete against females.
But is that really unfair? What do we mean by “fair” anyway? Let’s ask an expert.
“Fair is a very subjective word,” says Joanna Harper, a transgender woman, distance runner, and researcher who served on the IOC committee that developed that organization’s current rules. It boils down to whom you’re trying to be fair to, Harper says. “To billions of typical women who cannot compete with men at high levels of sport?” Or “a very repressed minority in transgender people who only want to enjoy the same things that everybody else does, including participation in sports?”
That is, including participation in sports for men competing against women. None of this is about women who identify as men competing against men, because that wouldn’t take anything away from men.
For all the hand-wringing about transgender women ruining women’s sport, so far there’s little evidence of that happening. Although CeCé Telfer and June Eastwood garnered attention for their outstanding performances on women’s collegiate running teams, they are hardly the only transgender athletes in the NCAA.
So are there lots of men who identify as women who didn’t trample all over the women the way Telfer and Eastwood and Miller and Hubbard and McKinnon have? Not that we’re told.
The solution to this problem is to talk in generalities and then run swiftly away.
Where to draw the line between inclusiveness for transgender athletes and fairness for cis ones is an ethical question that ultimately requires value judgements that can only be informed, not decided, by science. Even basic notions of a level playing field aren’t easy to codify. Which means that at some point the question of who is a woman becomes a cultural inquiry: How athletically outstanding can a girl or woman be before we no longer see her as female?
That’s…not the question at all.
This is also dishonest. The women being cheated are not billions of typical women, they are a handful of exceptional, outstanding women who have worked their asses off to achieve the top of their sport only to have it snatched away by mediocre male athletes who cannot compete with the top men at high levels of sport.
There are two truly ludicrous elements to this:
i) ‘Life and sport is not fair’, yet the need to include is itself an argument to fairness. If life and sport is not fair, and that is ok, perhaps there is no category in which trans women fit, and that is ok.
ii) The most notorious advocate for this position, MacKinnon, is in fact competing in a category that is constrained to exclude competitors who have an insurmountable advantage due to biology. The entire premise of Masters’ categories is a grim biological reality that as the human body moves past 30, muscle densities decline, recovery/healing times soar, etc., etc.
Sure, it’s not going to last. The more trans women athletes step into women’s sports, the harder natal women are going to work. Things will even out.
Right.
Why am I suddenly imagining a cartoon villain?
Repressed? That’s a bit Freudian, isn’t it? Oppressed, surely?
Thing is, for the women who have sporting success stolen it is not a tiny percentage of success at sporting opportunities that are taken. It’s 100% of their shot. For the women cheated out of a win or elevated placings, they have only one Pacific Championship to attend and only one weight class open to them. Their competition peak may only be 1-5 years long. If that time period is occupied by a mediocre male weightlifter claiming a women’s slot – they are done. Not only do they miss out on a title, but their friends, family and nation miss out on the feeling of joy and pride at their success. They may miss out on prime sponsorship opportunities and top level coaching. Everyone likes to support the winners. Consider the college girls who miss out on winning State Champs. Sure, they may have more years of competition ahead of them, but now their chances of a good scholarship and access to a preferred University are gone or diminished. They can’t compete in another region – they are kids after all. Even if they make it to university on a scholarship that lets them focus on their sport, chances are that for their whole competing life they are going to be up against a physical male with all the advantages that entails for they whole time.
Desperately unfair.
That.
Ah, what a great thing transgenderism has been for males tired of uppity inferior females wanting stuff we don’t deserve – like rights, safety, boundaries, etc. And now the men can sneer openly and say “life is not fair, buttercup” and still pretend not to be right wing MRA misogynists because they love the the TIMs so (well, they love them in the streets, not between the sheets, of course).
Such a wonder why this trans cult has been embraced by the porn fed men of the left — who have always hated real women just as much as their right wing brothers do but NOW they are praised and applauded for debasing real women. And the libfems are going along like lambs to the slaughter.
This is so obnoxious and offensive. The assumption that too much athletic achievement makes a girl/woman not female is…archaic. Patriarchal. Pre-modern. Ignorant. Biased. Misogynistic. Even creepy.
We are not saying that the transgender athletes are not women because they are athletic. We are saying that because they are men. Mediocre male athletes who compete against stellar female athletes who are smaller, with less musculature, and in many cases who have been socialized to be less aggressive. Men. Beating women. Calling themselves world champions because they beat someone by having an enormous advantage over them.
This is the very definition of a bully.
If sports aren’t fair, then why bother having rules?
Over the last few nights I’ve been watching Australian Ninja Warrior. Yeah, I know… Just focussing on the incredible athletic performances, last night was the first of the semifinals. No women made it through. 0/10. The best of the women were eliminated on an event where they had to do an overhead swung leap from one hand hold to another 2.5m away. This was a ‘filter’ event. Lots of great athletes failed here, but no woman got past it that night. The only woman who was of the size and strength to have looked like a contender actually got her hands to the ledge, but couldn’t hold on. Remember that data presented here a few days ago that showed women’s grip strength compared to men’s?
My point isn’t that this event was unfair, but rather that in an event designed to test agility, strength, stamina and speed, women get eliminated at a faster rate and earlier than male competitors when placed on a ‘level’ playing ground. Women are, on average, shorter with weaker hand grip and less muscular shoulders. In events that require long reach, strength, grip, inertia and sheer upper body strength; better flexibility and agility are only partial compensations.
What an odd argument to make. Since life isn’t fair, we should remove the modicum of fairness we’ve achieved in one aspect of life, all for the sake of fairness.
Why consult some philosopher when any old farmer round the place, or his wife or child down to about the age of three can show you how to tell the difference between a boar and a sow, a bull and a cow, ram and ewe, stallion and mare….? ( I could go on.)
Effeminate men have been mocked and made the butt of jokes since ancient times. Life can be very unfair. But, on the bright side, thanks to this recent breakthrough, it can be made fair again. All the effeminate man has to do is compete in wonens’ competitions. Though he might not have a prayer against more masculine men, at least there he has a chance of winning.
AND MOST IMPORTANT, he has a chance of winning fairly.
I was very pleased to see iknklast’s comment about the disgraceful and logically ridiculous question ‘How athletically outstanding can a girl or woman be before we no longer see her as female?’, since it (the question) struck me when I first read it as quite extraordinary in its assumptions that sports are first of all a male preserve, that there is some kind of continuum whereby if certain woman enjoy and are good at some sport they somehow move towards being more man-like, and that women athletes therefore in the end may become indistinguishable from men – with the unspoken conclusion that therefore ‘trans-women’ athletes with male bodies have every right to compete against women since there is ultimately no difference between the female body & the male body.
I suppose the idea that fairness is a ‘subjective’ (and therefore arbitrary) category runs a close second.
I think this can be answered by asking how many people have looked at Serena Williams and thought ‘that just may not be a woman.’ Very few, I think. So perhaps more outstanding than that? As if.
Really, that’s a regressive, outdated idea. I’m not part of that “we.”
And Serena couldn’t beat Federer. Hamm couldn’t beat Messi. Letting women’s sports fill up with TIMs would deprive many women of their chance to excel in sport. It’s a self-fulfilling prediction, mean to obfuscate the difference between a woman who is strong and a man who is cheating.
I thought this was intended to make a different point. We’re *supposed* to find it offensive. But then we’re supposed to realize that omg that’s what *we’re* doing. We’re saying trans women aren’t women because they’re too athletically outstanding. Ooo — NOW I get it.
Except that’s not what we’re saying because it assumes that trans women are women.
But this is really the heart of their argument:
“It’s only a game. What’s important is that all the kids participate, have fun, and learn sportsmanship and teamwork — so that’s why the Riverview Park District Children’s Summer Softball League randomly changes positions and batting order regardless of merit, ability, popularity, weight, race, or their parents’ income and status in the community.. It’s not about competition; it’s about character, and letting everyone enjoy the same things.”
This is an argument most people can appreciate — in this context. How nice; how wise; how reasonable; how *fair.* It’s the right thing to do. Then they shift it out of context, moving it up from Riverview Park District Children’s Summer Softball League to sports in general, all the way to the Olympics. Don’t you think doing the right thing is more important than who wins and loses? Sure you do.
This is a sort of semantic slippery slope. They want to “enjoy… participation in sports.” Sound great! Go out to the park and toss a frisbee around, slug a few softballs, ride a bike, play some volleyball. Nobody has a problem with that. I have played on a coed team with a transgender woman. No problem!
But “participation in sports” is not really what they mean. It’s competition in sports. And not just competition in sports, but competition in sports, with an unfair advantage of men against women.
It will come crashing down. We’re going to see some ridiculous olympic competitions first.
Sastra #16, very well put. I love that analysis.
The reason women’s sports exist is to provide opportunities for women to play sports (at whatever level we’re talking about). Transwomen should not participate in women’s sports, not primarily because they’d dominate the competition in many events, but because they are men. The performance difference makes the situation oh so much worse.
At the higher levels, organized sport is NOT about self-improvement and the joy of athleticism. There is a grim undercurrent of obsession and self-destructive compulsion. The abuse scandals in gymnastics, swimming etc. demonstrate just how deranged the culture of elite sport can be.
In the case of McKinnon and co. Is it possible to know how much of their ‘trans-ness’ is autogynephilia and how much is a will to win at all costs?
This is the problem. They will not admit they are men. They will not allow anyone else to point out that they are men. To say what Sackbut said here is to be ‘transphobic’ ‘bigoted’ ‘hateful’ ‘TERF-y’, even ‘genocidal’.
We keep bringing logic to an emotion fight.