Failed to record
Transgender athlete Laurel Hubbard made Olympic history but failed to record a successful lift in the women’s +87kg weightlifting.
Stupid kind of “history” to make. He “made history” by being the first man to steal a woman’s place at the Olympics. Not something to brag about.
She became the first openly transgender athlete to compete at a Games in a different gender category to the one in which they were born.
Carefully worded to sound acceptable. The accurate wording would be “He became the first openly male athlete to compete at a Games in the women’s category.” It doesn’t sound quite as brave and stunning put like that, does it.
Why is the BBC wording it in that cautious, protective, misleading way? Why is the BBC trying to draw a veil over the obvious (grotesque) facts? Why is it calling our indignation at this massive insult to women “hate”? Why is it promising to turn us over to the police if we get too vocal in our indignation?
The questions aren’t purely rhetorical, because the BBC is a serious news organization and I genuinely don’t understand why it’s being so deceitful out in the open where everyone can see.
Here’s some cool news I don’t want to get lost in the whole Hubbard thing:
Emily Campbell becomes first British women to win weightlifting medal with silver. Wenwen Li of China set an Olympic record with her 140 kg snatch lift and won the gold medal with a Olympic record total 320kg.
If that is indeed a genuine question, here’s the answer:
It’s because the BBC has gone woke, gone so as a result of entryism. Cohorts of young graduates have come out of university social-science and humanities departments, which have long been more about far-left activist ideologies than about academic study.
There is now a critical mass of such graduates in most (once) liberal institutions, where they now get their way by throwing around “-ist” and “-phobe” pejoratives and by labeling any dissent as “hate”. And people won’t stand up to them because of cancel culture.
And yes, it is indeed being done in the open where everyone can see, that’s the whole point, the one broadcasting the most woke attitudes is the most virtuous.
That’s so terfy! Hubbard was obviously born with female gender, because gender is innate and unchangeable!
From Ovarit:
[–] cliterally_female [OP] 92 points (+92|-0) 4 hours ago
On one hand I’m happy he failed miserably. He’s a foul cheater and doesn’t deserve any success in the women’s division. On the other hand, the fact he did so poorly will be used as evidence by TRAs that TIMs don’t have a physical advantage over women (ignoring the fact this dude is 43 years old).
[–] Ronja 2 points (+2|-0) 21 minutes ago
And to that we would counter with the fact that he could very well have done that on purpose and we will never know the truth. Running slower, lifting less, not giving your all are tactics readily available for someone who has no scruples manipulating results. He might even have been told to not do his best, since the trans lobby must have seen were this was headed. Global outrage, mass-peaking and more power to our cause.
GW,
I second your observation about the BBC’s woke misstep on saying that Hubbard had been born in the male gender. This is the inevitable result of such garbage thinking.
It’s like Orwell said in “Politics and the English Language”:
“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
Emphasis on “openly transgender”. Stephanie Barrett competed a few days ago (lost in the round of 32), and he is a male competing in the women’s category, but it was difficult to discover his “trans” status. There were several incidents of men pretending to be women in earlier Olympics, but they were not considered “trans”.
Coel @ 2 – Yes, but I don’t see how it can be quite that simple. There are still adults there. Of course there are lots of panting young Trans Allies, but they won’t outnumber the adults yet.
@Ophelia:
True, but the adults are cowed into acquiescence by cancel culture, fear of being labelled -ist or -phobe, fear of being considered “right wing”, and fear of ending up “on the wrong side of history”. The activists’ rhetoric on such points is superbly effective.
And there’s a big asymmetry: the activists relish the fight, but most people don’t and so keep their heads down. And we all know that anyone defending a witch must themselves be a witch. So the activists prevail even when they’re in a minority.
The firing of Donald McNeil from the NYT and the departure of Bari Weiss illustrates how this works. And, in many such cases, plenty of colleagues offer private sympathies, but won’t say anything out loud.
Maybe, but we don’t actually know that. It’s safe to assume there’s a hefty number of “trans allies” working for the BBC, but I don’t think we can assume they have the upper hand or all the adults are terrified of them. Maybe that’s the case but maybe it isn’t. I still think the fact that the BBC is a news organization among other things should mean that it cares about factual accuracy – cares about it quite a lot more than the tantrums of woke youth.
Called it!
“Luckily, there is hope that Laurel will not win, or even place particularly well. The current leading light in that weight division is a world record holder aged 21, Li Wenwen, while Laurel is 43 in a sport where performance peaks at about 25.”
Not that it took much insight. Now let us brace for the other prediction in that post – the flood of TRAs crowing about this being proof that there is no advantage to trans women whatsoever thanks to this sample size of one.
The crowing has already started. I am becoming more convinced he failed intentionally. The IOC started saying last week that the rules for Transathletes need to be reviewed and revised because the 10 nmol limit is not scientifically valid and is too high. Hubbard was probably getting crazy pressure from behind the scenes to fail in order to put a damper on the IOC’s plans to change the rules.
I’m seeing a lot of that on Ovarit.
Eava #11 wrote:
“ You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, IOC.”
Maybe. Though the only way Hubbard could have had class was to not identify into that class in the first place.
Maybe Hubbard botched the lifts on purpose (though I personally doubt it), but they weren’t going to win anyway, since Li’s 320 kg total beat Hubbard’s best total as a man, which was 300 kg and was a long time ago.
Hubbard is old, but weightlifters don’t fade as fast as most other athletes. Hubbard was the third-oldest weightlifter in Olympics history, so quite old, but not off-the-charts old.
I think it’s most likely Hubbard knew they had to put up “female”-career-best numbers to be in medal contention, so went for it and came up short. This is pretty common in weightlifting. They train to precisely peak for a competition, often going for a new personal best that day. Often it doesn’t work out.
Anyway, this should never have been allowed, but it’s kind of ironic that Hubbard flopping has made those in favor of trans women in sports happy and left those opposed unhappy.
Say what? I’m glad he lost, I’m just looking at the downside of what is otherwise a good thing. The gloomy lining of the silver cloud sort of thing.
Should have stopped at “this should never have been allowed.”
I woke up to this on Fæcesbork this morning:
so yes, the anti-women-having-anything-to-themselves faction is already dishonestly framing our argument.
I responded:
Ophelia & Coel (various numbers)
I don’t have an answer but in a previous life many years ago when the world was new, I worked with lots of recently-ex-BBC people. They’d had a big downsize right when New Media was a thing and they flooded into technical jobs in telecoms and e-commerce companies without having the least technical knowledge. Fortunately I was a contractor at the time and these companies drove trucks full of money into my house and asked me nicely to sort out the mess.
What I found was the BBC types had some seriously strange cultural hangups. The BBC must have been an incredibly odd place to work and the ex-staff were woefully unprepared for life outside it. Institutionalised. Working for the BBC had such a profound effect on the way they said and did and how they saw everything that it was virtually impossible to teach them anything new or fit them into roles they weren’t used to. They needed constant supervision, otherwise they would either sit and just do nothing forever or would take on vast amounts of work they couldn’t possibly do, but convince almost everyone that they were pulling it off, while the work piled up. When I interviewed them for jobs, they sometimes seemed confused about what an interview was; some genuinely believed that an interview was a job offer or even that it meant that they had already started work and this was the first day of their orientation.
Like I said, this was a loooooong time ago now and it’s not directly related to Ophelia’s question, or even to Coel’s answer, but if the BBC still has anything like that total institutionalising effect on its staff (and it might, organisations like that tend to evolve slowly) then perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.