Cajoled into silence
Isaac Schorr at National Review:
Tracey Lambrechs is not quieting down.
Lambrechs — a female weightlifter from New Zealand who took bronze in the 2014 Commonwealth Games, silver at the 2015 Pacific Games, and competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — has retired from the sport. But that retirement appears to have lent her her voice back after several years of being cajoled into silence.
Those several years are the years when “Laurel” Hubbard was breaking records.
In 2017, Lambrechs was gearing up to compete in the 2018 Commonwealth Games when she was informed that if she wanted to participate, she would need do so in a different category than she was accustomed to.
“I was told if I wanted to go to the next Commonwealth Games I needed to lose 18 kilograms [the equivalent of almost 40 pounds] in three months or retire” Lambrechs told National Review. “Losing that much weight quickly was not ideal for my health and I suffered some severe migraines and started passing out a lot.”
When she raised her concerns over both Hubbard’s participation and its very visible consequences on her body and career, Lambrechs was instructed to be “resilient.”
Schorr forgot to explain what Hubbard has to do with telling Lambrechs to lose weight though.
Instead of at minimum providing support for athletes whose physical and psychological well-being was being adversely affected by Hubbard’s participation, higher-ups responsible for managing the national team told athletes “to be quiet,” with the threat of reprisals hanging over their heads, according to Lambrechs.
I’ve been wondering about that all along.
“We were told not to talk to the media and were warned that if we did we could bring the sport into disrepute and then could miss out on being selected or could be dropped from national teams. The sports national body did not know how to handle the situation, so they had a knee-jerk reaction and thought silence would be best for them.”
When in doubt, just shrug and leave it to the women to deal with.
For female athletes with the opinions on the matter of transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports that Lambrechs has — and the willingness to express them so publicly — the waters are choppy. Consider, for example, the reaction to a USA Today guest column authored by a high-school track and field athlete who had been robbed of four state titles in Connecticut.
Not only did the newspaper that agreed to publish the piece edit it without the consent of its author, it added an editor’s note apologizing for not “reflect[ing] USA TODAY’s standards” and the use of “hurtful language.”
Remember: when women do it it’s “hurtful language.” When men do it it’s stunning and brave.
Moreover, some transgender advocates are eager to paint those with Lambrechs’s views as not only mistaken, but violent and hateful. On a May New York Times podcast, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer accused American legislators seeking to protect the integrity of women’s sports of being motivated “on some level” by the “impulse” to “kill” transgender youth.
Chase Strangio? Is that you?
The athletes are being forced to protect the reputations of corrupted officials who permitted the “disreputable” behaviour, at the cost of their own participation in the sport. So talking about cheating brings the sport into disrepute, but enabling an actual cheater doesn’t.
Weird. Must be “new math” stuff.
Why would Lambrechs have to cut weight?
I understand that, in the men’s division, Gavin/Laurel Hubbard would have been classed as 109+ kg weight division, three divisions higher than the 87+ kg division that is the highest division in the women’s sport. In the men’s division, there are weight classes for 96 kg, 109 kg, and 109+ kg, above the closest division to the 87+ kg division in women’s weightlifting. It’s as if Hubbard has been given dispensation to compete in at least three weight classes lower than his actual weight, all because men generally weigh a great deal more than women. That’s a whole other level of cheating, on top of the cheating Hubbard is doing by competing against women at all. Surely, it would be much fairer to impose a 109+ kg division in the women’s sport for Hubbard, than allowing him to compete three whole weight divisions below his actual class. Not that it would be fair to let Hubbard compete in the women’s division at all.
What weight class was Lambrechs set to compete in? Would she have had to go head to head against Hubbard? Rather than raise Hubbard to his own solitary weight class, women were forced to cut weight to have a chance of winning at all?
This is so wrong on so many levels. Brava to Lambrechs for pointing out the lack of clothes on the Emperor.
ETA:
That’s not “cajoled.” That’s “threatened” and “coerced.”
maddog, I don’t know if this is the answer, but I sort of thought maybe she couldn’t qualify for a spot in that weight class because Hubbard filled the last available spot, so she had to move down a weight class. Since I know almost literally nothing about weightlifting, I could easily be wrong (and that’s true even about things I know quite a bit about).
@iknklast
That makes sense.