Layers of cheating
Transgender and nonbinary people across the U.S. are navigating an upended sports landscape — on top of additional rollbacks of their protections and civil rights — following President Trump‘s February executive order banning trans athletes from women’s sports.
Same old lie. The issue is male athletes in women’s sports.
“If you can dictate my identity on a sports field, why can’t you then dictate my identity in different areas of public life?” asked Sydney Bauer, a rower, runner and journalist who covers sports and LGBTQ+ rights.
Stupid question. Stupid framing. Stupid choice of words. Nobody’s “dictating” anyone’s “identity.” Some people are pointing out realities and the areas where they make a difference. Nobody gives a fuck about Sydney Bauer’s idenniny; the fucks are given about what sex people are.
Trump’s Department of Education alleged last week that the University of Pennsylvania violated Title IX by allowing a transgender swimmer to compete on the women’s team.
Again: the issue is not “transgender”; the issue is male.
We know they know this, because they keep doing it. They are very careful not to say “by allowing a male swimmer to compete on the women’s team” because they know damn well that if they put it that way the problem leaps off the page. They’re carefully obfuscating and lying, in an effort to help men invade and ruin women’s sports. Nice.
All over the place I’m getting sneered at: “There are only 15 in the country,” or “there are less than a dozen in the whole NCAA,” the argument being that “there are so few; why do you even care?” So, how many does “some transgender athletes” refer to? If there are so few that it doesn’t matter, then there are so few who could possibly be affected. Make up your minds.
What? 15 or 20 people, out of 330,000, amounts to a significant number of athletes “across the U. S.”?
How could the “sports landscape” be “upended” if hardly anybody is even participating?
Of course, it’s the “layers of lying,” as you say. The miscreants are lying about their sex. The journalists make themselves complicit: They say “transgender athletes,” and “transgender and nonbinary people,” to obscure the truth; the only athletes who matter are male athletes in girls’ and women’s sports. It’s about sex; it’s not about “gender.” The “transgender athletes,” and the “transgender and nonbinary people” who matter are the male ones, and they only matter to the extent they seek access to female spaces and female sports. If they’d stay in the male division, and male-only spaces, there would be no issue.
Bauer is making a category error here. No one is dictating his “identity.”. His “identity” is a thought in his head. He’s allowed to think whatever he likes about the generally incoherent idea of his “gender identity.”
Rather, he is being classified (not “dictated to”) by his sex, which is an objectively determinable and immutable biological characteristic of his physical body. Nobody is “changing” something in an arbitrary way; they are simply recognizing that sex can’t be changed.
Did they ever report about women having to navigate an upended sports landscape when men were given access to their medals, teams, and locker rooms? This is a restoration of balance and sanity that should never have been needed in the first place. This is a return to a level, female only playing field. Anyone who says anything different wants to allow men to continue to cheat.
A few days ago, Katie Ledecky, at the age of 28, broke her own record in the 800m freestyle with a time of 8:04.12.
To put that in perspective, the men’s record is 7:32.12. A half a minute is a lifetime in swimming.
More perspective: in the last Olympics, the man who came in last in the 800m freestyle had a time of 7:48.36.
In short, a relatively mediocre male swimmer would blow the most amazing female swimmer out of the water.
I looked up the heat information. Ledecky’s world record time would have beaten only five of the 31 men in the preliminaries.
What a surprise.