Guest post: An excellent response
Originally a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany Room.
The Washington Post had an excellent, disturbing series recently on abuse in the bodybuilding world, including of course sexual exploitation of female bodybuilders. Karen Attiah followed up with a mostly excellent opinion piece, pointing out that even female bodybuilders are vulnerable to the male gaze and male abuse. I say “mostly excellent” because this is the final paragraph:
There has been a ton of fuss about transgender athletes in women’s sports, with some claiming that allowing trans women to compete is a form of “abuse.” No. The abuse of women in bodybuilding is a reminder that the biggest threats to women and girls in sports are — and always have been — men.
There is an excellent response to her piece in the comments section.
Transwomen are indeed biological men. As such, trans identifying men who enter women’s sports cause terrible distress to women on many levels: forced shared private space, inevitable loss in sports to XY humans, girls/women’s compelled speech to use trans identifying man/boy’s preferred pronouns when one’s eyes sees the lie, terror of speaking truth to power because of financial consequences. So trans identifying male forcing himself into domain of women/girls’ sports is as vile as the male body builders you rightly vilify in this article.
It speaks volumes that whenever woman intersects with a protected group, woman ALWAYS loses. We are devalued everywhere. In the East, we are erased from public view by hijab, niqab, and chador. In West, woman is erased from language to now include men in skirts. That change in language affects policy and law. Trans identifying men are able to transfer to women’s prisons where they terrorize, beat, rape and impregnate female prisoners. But it seems nothing beats support for trans, not even lesbian, Black women in prison.
And you, Karen, are part of the devaluation of Woman when you do not stand up for our rights to privacy, our own spaces, in sports, women in prison having to share space with rapists, and protection of girls from out- sourced self-harm by medical community which performers mutilating surgeries, hormone suppressants and cross hormones on vulnerable people. All to further the delusion of those vulnerable people that they are born in wrong body. No one is born in the wrong body. We are our bodies.
Indeed that is an excellent response. I was about bowled over knowing that supposedly intelligent people have become so mindless about trans- ideology they can make a statement that implies trans women are not men.
Indeed, and they don’t realize just how regressive that ideology is. My own kids think I’m a transphobic bigot because I believe in the reality of sex as opposed to gender.
Women like Attiah seem adept at self-gaslighting. First, they can look at men and persuade themselves they’re looking at women. That’s obvious. But they also apparently manage to fool themselves when they look at the Gender Critical. Instead of noting that “here is someone who thinks transwomen are men,” they apparently tell themselves “here is someone who thinks some women aren’t as good as other women.” And then they address that.
I agree that trans women bodybuilders being in women’s locker rooms is a problem.
As for the competitions, this is an esthetic sport, and trans women are at a serious disadvantage when the criteria is building muscle while still having a female shape, since they have a male frame. (At least that is the criteria when they’re not elevating people based on sexual favors and signing exclusive contracts to relatives’ companies.)
Maybe some small local contest will award a title to a trans woman to signal how woke they are, but it’s unlikely to happen at any major shows. If you take a top male swimmer and let him compete in a women’s event, he’ll have a great chance of winning. If you take Mr. Olympia, put a bikini on him, and enter him in the Ms. Olympia contest he’s going to finish toward the bottom of the pack.
Heh – nail on the head, Sastra. As usual.
Right. I mean, no male claiming to be a woman has ever won a contest based on aesthetics. Like say a beauty contest. Never happened.
/s
I have to say I find the “sport” in itself…questionable. It demands…yes demands* the use of damaging hormones, requires starvation/binge and purge dieting, and imposes strange definitions of beauty. Many bodybuilders die in their 40s. Those who survive, like the famous Ronnie Coleman, are often semi crippled (he required multiple surgeries). Like trans, bodybuilding also is spread by Instagram and other social media and has affected body image of many youths.”I wanna get BIG, man” says every 110 pound teenager.
I say this as someone who LIKES weight lifting on a very casual scale. Who admires the discipline of building a physique. Who is a bit neurotic about it, in all reality.
But, as with so much else, the big issues are not those facing the trans “community” and their delusions.
* It is mindlessly easy to time your use of steroids to avoid testing at “natural’ events.
@Brian M.,
If you delve into the whole WaPo exposé, you’ll see it’s very damning of the whole enterprise, and discusses a lot of the issues you mention.
And, in an entirely
unpredictable development, the comment I quoted has been removed. And not just the comment: “This commenter has been removed by a moderator for violating our community guidelines.”No explanation of how the commenter violated community standards, of course.
(Also, someone responded, taking the commenter to task for calling the author “Karen”. The author whose name is “Karen Attiah”, that is. And who once wrote a column defending the derogatory use of “Karen”.)
After looking up judging criteria for body building, I’m not convinced that men will inevitably lose to women in competitions in the women’s categories. I’m not convinced that men will inevitably win, either, but they might win. So perhaps those couple of words in the excellent response were a bit exaggerated, but that really isn’t the point. Karen Attiah slides right over the point that trans-identified men are in fact men, and she is rightly taken to task for doing so.
It is again worth pointing out that unfair competition is only one reason for having separate sports divisions for women and girls.
I have an estranged male cousin who was a champion bodybuilder (now in the Masters division; they have such things). He’s something of a, well, let’s say men’s rights advocate, so I’m morbidly curious if he’d think men competing in the women’s division was a laughably stupid idea or something he’d consider doing to show his superiority to women. Not something I’d ever ask him, though.
Capture capture capture.
Thanks WaM for saving the comment from the jaws of Erasure!
Damn. the gym I attend actually has a sharps box in the bathroom. It was 2/3 full.