Joan Smith on another heartbroken dude:

In an interview veering between self-pity and entitlement, Bridges claimed to be ‘heartbroken’ after being refused permission to ride for Wales as a woman in the Commonwealth Games. (British Cycling has suspended its policy on transgender athletes while it carries out a review.) Bridges also claimed to understand the anxieties of female athletes who don’t want to compete with biological males, but dismissed them because ‘I am not a man’. 

Which is funny, because he is a man, and this whole business of dismissing women’s anxieties about being displaced by him and men like him is the very thing women are anxious about.

Not many people, one would guess, really believe that men can become women, but trans activists have created a climate where the fear of being labelled ‘transphobic’ inhibits honest responses. Bridges’s interview is an egregious example, linking criticism of trans participation in women’s sport with the murder of five people in an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs last month. The deaths of two trans people in the attack ‘are directly related to dehumanisation and demonisation of trans people in the media, online, and in debates such as those about sports,’ the cyclist claimed.

It’s tempting to observe that ‘directly’ is doing a lot of work there, but it’s more important to ask whether anyone at ITV Wales actually read this piece of malevolent hyperbole before they tweeted a link. Doesn’t anyone at the channel feel uneasy about publishing a claim that female athletes who defend sex categories in sport are in some way responsible for the actions of a mass killer in the U.S.?

My guess is no, no one at the channel does. It’s the fashionable thing, to see women as the enemy and trans people as their poor fragile trampled victims.