Must be the Wheaties
Oh good, another one. TV sports director tweets:
Today June Eastwood won the Griz home cross country meet and HBO Sports had a crew there filming
How about that. June is the great big one in the middle then?
On Saturday, August 31, Juniper Eastwood will become the first transgender athlete to compete in DI cross country when she runs for the University of Montana in the women’s division at the Clash of the Inland Northwest meet.
Assigned male at birth, Eastwood, now a 22-year-old senior, says she has identified as female since middle school and made the decision to transition during her third year competing on the men’s track team at Montana.
Because that way guess what, he’ll win everything. Of course that means no woman will win anything, but oh well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
It will be her first race for the Grizzlies since following the NCAA’s policy on transgender student-athlete participation, which requires transgender athletes who are transitioning from male to female to be treated with testosterone suppression medication for one year before competing on a women’s team.
Totally fair. The long legs remain, the greater lung capacity remains, the bigger muscles remain, but never you mind, it’s all totally fair.
Eastwood’s last race was 15 months ago when she placed seventh in the men’s 1500-meter final at the 2018 Big Sky Conference Championships.
This article is dated August 31. It’s a miracle! In the 41 days between then and now Eastwood has improved so much that he flat-out won!
So, observed to be male but calling himself female.
Yeah, a year of low testosterone ought to balance 21 years of high testosterone…
Yet Another Cheating Male (YACM).
Needs a donger test.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2019/guest-post-just-a-feeling-and-not-something-you-can-see/
Because if you can’t beat ’em, leave ’em and find an easier way to personal glory.
It is not actually an ideal case to argue the unfairness of a trans athlete, when you really look at the results. Eastwood ran 5:51 average mile times in the August meet, and placed 7th. For the recent Montana event, average mile time is 5:47, which is indeed an improvement. Eastwood’s teammate Frissell ran 4 seconds slower than at the Clash of the Inland event in August that she won, which is a bit odd, finishing with the same 5:47 as Eastwood. However, none of the women who placed 2nd-6th at Clash competed in the Montana Invitational, and indeed the only Div 1 school at the Montana event was Montana – which placed 5 runners in the top 5, not surprisingly.
Had Eastwood run the same pace at the August Clash meet, 5:47 would have good for a solid 3rd, but closer to 4th than 2nd. Compared to a pre-transition crosscountry comparable mile time of 5:05, this is not a slam dunk example of how competition can be distorted.
Naif, it is not supposed to be a slam dunk. It is merely one data point. In the absence of all other data points, it would be merely what you are saying. Taken in conjunction with all the other data points of male wins over females, and shutting women out of the race, it is worthy of noting.
It is also worthy of noting that these are men competing in women’s races. Races for women. Men calling themselves women are now winning races against women, who are smaller and less muscled and with smaller lung capacity. It is men removing something from women that women fought hard to earn. It’s like when Kaitlyn Jenner won a woman of the year award, and the only reason is that she had been a very high profile individual who changed genders. Women who did real things for women were passed over for the award to give it to someone who had earned huge levels of fame and fortune as a male, in a world where women were pretty much excluded, and then as an elderly man chose to proclaim that he was a woman and won an award that was designed to represent women.
That.
Also, the issue is not “a trans athlete.” The issue is men claiming to be women in order to compete against women rather than men in sport.
I’m wondering if even the current requirements regarding testosterone levels for these athletes are going to stand up against an increasingly aggressive insistence that trans women ARE women. If someone born male doesn’t “choose” to be a woman, or “become” a woman, but “discovers” they’re a woman, then hormone therapy and surgery are really just optional embellishments. The critical component in transgenderism is the way someone thinks of themselves. Any other requirement is a kind of gatekeeping, outside judgments intruding into someone’s right to know their own identity.
Is sports really going to be the one area where concessions are made? If Eastwood is and always has been a girl, why should she have to hamper her natural abilities by modifying her natural hormones? Caster Semenya doesn’t have a powerful lobby behind her defending a gender ideology. I’m not sure how someone could both grant the TRA view of gender and defend hormonal restrictions.
Sastra,
That is indeed the argument being made by Rachel MacKinnon and others: that trans women are literal females in every sense — because they feel like women, or at least claim to — and therefore it’s discrimination to oblige them to undergo any compromise, even testosterone suppression.
The whole testosterone question is a red herring anyways. The only reason trans activists rely on it is because it’s the only thing men can actually change. There is no existing technology that can modify a man’s lung capacity or heart size or muscle composition or hip-bone structure to make them female, so activists insist that those differences are either not real or don’t matter. Which is ridiculous of course. But they’re getting away with it by distracting us with all this talk about hormones — the one and only thing medicine actually has a degree of control over. Pay no attention to our bones and our lungs and our muscles and our hearts, let’s just talk about glands. If it ain’t glandular, dismiss it out of hand… ular.
Nonsense… We can modify lung capacity, heart size, and muscle mass just fine.
I’ll hand McKinnon the scalpel…