Like a hot knife through butter
In March, after Cammie Woodman won a match she was thrown out of a New York metro tennis women’s league because she is a trans woman.
On June 28-29, the self-named “Trans Tennis Princess” from Brooklyn completed a sweep to a crown at the Lincoln Terrace Open. Woodman raced through the tournament’s women’s division through four matches, giving up a mere two sets for the entire draw en route to her first open title.
Well of course he fucking did, because he’s a man.
She said it was a symbol of how far she’s come from being a self-described “queer kid who never played a sport” when she first took up the game.
“I had lost in the first round, um, the past two years competing in this tournament,” Woodman told Outsports. “It was a really big deal to me to get one win, let alone win the whole thing.”
Ooh yes, well done you, really fantastic job of cheating all those stupid women. High five, bro.
He’s much taller than his opponent, and he has the musculature and build of a typical male. No wonder he smoked her in straight sets, 6-2, 6-0. More powerful strokes, more leverage with his longer limbs, greater reach, and so on. No wonder the opponent complained.
Her email to the league stated, “Cammie Woodman is male playing in a women’s league.” The article says that the email was “full of transphobia,” but as we all well know facts are inherently “transphobic.” In fact, the “phobia” runs in the other direction: transgender doctrine is inherently fact-phobic or truth-phobic. Not a single word in the article even purports to address the substance of the opponent’s statement. Woodman is, in reality, a male playing in the women’s division.
The league president responded to the complaint. “Can we move you to an appropriate men’s division,” Chagnon enquired. Woodman refused this perfectly reasonable requestl. He could continue to play and to improve his game; he could also be as transgender as he wants while playing in the men’s division, and wear the cute tennis dresses as much as he likes. He doesn’t have to give up being transgender.
Woodman also trotted out one of the usual distractions to justify his cheating: ” . . .given the talent level of the division, her opponent would have been outclassed against the rest of grouping who are all cisgender women.” So, cheating a woman out of her opportunity to play a fair match is expendable, just because a man wants to play in a dress. That excuse does not work for every match: Woodman beat all opponents, not just the first one, in commanding fashion, and won the tournament. The ” she would have lost anyway” excuse doesn’t apply to the additional rounds of play.
Woodman said, ” I felt really offended that my opponent said that so I stood up for myself and defended everything that I felt like I was doing.” Right. He “felt offended” at the opponent’s words, truthfully pointing out that he is a man playing in a women’s tournament. That’s sufficient to override the absolute disrespect and insult of physically taking away multiple women’s right to play in a fair competition. One man’s feelings about words — in a true statement! — matter more than the feelings of all the women about actual injustice. Why is that?
Woodman has retaliated. He “called on the New York City Human Rights Commission and the NYC Parks Department to investigate TLN and bar the league from using public courts.” Punish the women for daring to point out the male cheater.
The article’s author whines that the pushback against trans identified male players in female sports is no longer just about high school or college sports, but has also started happening in recreational sports. Rec sports leagues are supposed to be for fun. The author seems to think that cheating shouldn’t matter in rec level sports, because it is just amateur fun. The author is making MY point for me: even where sport is at the recreational level, fairness and safety still matter. If it’s “for fun,” Woodman is purposely taking all the fun out of the sport for everyone he plays against. It’s no fun to play against a cheater. The author’s argument also cuts both ways: if amateur tennis is “just for fun,” Woodman can still play recreationally in the men’s division. If he can’t win in the men’s division, oh well, it was just for fun anyway.
The sheer entitlement of this man is gobsmacking, and yet completely consonant with the behavior of trans identified males generally. Everything for the man; nothing for the women.
Bobby Riggs would be so proud!
There you have it:
He/She/It is next in line to take out the gold medal or whatever in the yet-to-be-organised US Trans Tennis Championship, to be held at a venue yet to be announced, and with restricted entry: transsexuals only. There will be two categories: 1. Men who pretend to be women and 2. Women who pretend to be men.
It will be a limited spectator market, but it can only grow. The rival TV networks are already sticking their toes in the water, and the betting is heavy on which one will dive in first. And there is international interest, too. Particularly from TRANSsylvania.
I don’t know how a person’s dignity can withstand that.
How can someone take a win in those circumstances and feel proud?* How can they look at themselves without cringing so hard that space-time collapses around them?
I don’t get it.
(*I mean genuine pride in the whole thing. Sure, anyone can make a good serve and feel justifiably proud of that. And if you win a game against an opponent who’s not really got much of a chance, you would still get a few seconds of elation, because winning’s nice and our brains respond to that. That’s pride-adjacent. But it wouldn’t last. You wouldn’t hang around to give an interview to the paper about your victory. You wouldn’t even talk about it much after, because everyone’d know that it wasn’t really worth talking about. You wouldn’t think that you were worthy of admiration. Not if you were honest with and about yourself.)
Same. I can never understand it. “You do realize you’re walking around with no clothes on, right?”
This always brings to mind Kramer dominating the kids’ karate class.
“You’re fighting children?”
“We’re all at the same skill level, Jerry.”
“He’s 9 years old! You don’t need karate. You could just wring his neck.”