Up is down
Nancy Armour at USA Today heaps praise on Simone Biles for insisting men should too so ruin women’s sports.
[Biles] also has little use for anyone who punches down on others, which is Gaines’ specialty.
Punching down? A woman saying men shouldn’t invade women sports is punching down? Is Armour aware that men are bigger and stronger than women? Not the other way around?
Gaines has used her tie for fifth place with Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, in the 200-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships to become a MAGA media darling. But her grifting has done real harm to the transgender community, which is already at an elevated risk for suicide and self-harm.
Her grifting? It’s grifting to object to men invading women’s sports? But it’s not grifting for men to invade women’s sports?
How do people get this stuff so backwards?
There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do.
Is there scientific evidence that men have a physical advantage over women? Of course there is. Transgender women are men. They have a physical advantage.
Gaines has publicly lobbied for Biles and Caitlin Clark to support her in her hate which, again, is a laughable idea to anyone who has followed Biles’ illustrious career.
It’s not “hate” to say that men shouldn’t cheat women out of their own sports.
Gaines had inserted herself into the conversation about the Class 4A softball championship in Minnesota, claiming Champlin Park had “hijacked” the title because its star pitcher is a transgender young woman.
This Nancy Armour person is a real brat. We’re allowed to say things! Gaines wasn’t “inserting herself” any more than Nancy Armour is. Less so in fact, because Gaines is an athlete and Nancy Armour is a columnist.
One step forward and 87 steps back. I get tired of it.
Here again, another sports “journalist.” Talentless, attention seeking hacks, the lot of them.
These people refuse to accept the fact that “transgender woman” and “man” are synonyms. Replace the former with the latter in any of their statements or stories and they all fall apart, because the horrible unfairness and injustice to women becomes obvious. It never ceases to amaze me that this minor tweak in terminology, along with a bit of emotional blackmail, is all it seems to take to anaesthetize someone’s conscience.
But Gaines wasn’t swimming against a “community”; she was swimming against a group of women and one cheating man. Was “Lia” Thomas at an elevated risk for suicide and self harm? He was not the victim here. He was the agressor and the predator. The supposed “vulnerability” of trans identified people is no excuse to let Thomas have his way with women’s swimming. The women whose boundaries he violated and whose awards he stole owe nothing to the “trans community” and even less to Thomas. Nobody would have killed themselves if he’d been kept off the women’s team as he should have been. Even if anyone had, including Thomas himself, that would have been through no fault of these women, or anyone else refusing to accede to the unreasonable demands of trans ideology. “Give me what I want, or I’ll kill myself!” is not the strategy of a legitimate rights movement; it is extortion. That it has succeeded in winning power and influence from governments which would normally refuse to bargain with terrorists is as good an indicator as any of how far this “movement” has managed to capture the governments and institutions it has faced*.
This supposed “community” and its “allies” transmit more suicidal ideation in the clear, than their critics and opponents ever have in all the alleged, fever-dream “dogwhistles,” and all the imputed oblique, obscure, coded calls for “trans genocide.” Armour does it in this very article, reinforcing to members of the “community” that self harm and suicide is what they’re supposed to threaten or carry out,** and that they should be using these threats to extract concessions from the rest of society, and from women in particular. It’s all part of the “vulnerable, marginalized community” boilerplate script that nobody is supposed to question. We are bullied and warned that only truly evil people would ever doubt these ubiquitous, unevidenced claims of weakness and fragility, which are designed to protect the ideology from scrutiny or critique.
* I don’t believe for a moment that the suicide/self-harm argument was what was used in the backrooms where genderists were given the keys to the kingdom; this was just one of the rationalizations offered to the masses after the fact. If governments were actually that sympathetic and responsive to the needs of disadvantaged groups, they would have given comparable power and influence to women.
It’s not difficult to get governments to do something they already want to carry out. Or drop. There must have been sighs of relief when organizations discovered they could abandon the passing fancy of “women’s rights” and support trans “rights” instead. If you’re willing to corrupt the definition of “woman” and “female” to the point of meaninglessness, such that it is no longer possible to monitor and gauge the effectiveness and reach of programs designed specifically for women’s benefit, you must not have really been that interested in women’s well being to begin with. The picture becomes bleaker still when you get men put into women’s prisons, hospital wards, rape shelter, sports teams ets. The none too subtle message, as Ophelia has pointed out so many times, is “It’s only women.”
**Though it must be said that the disphoric footsoldiers have done such a piss-poor job of following the script that Jolyon Maugham had to accuse the UK government of covering up a massive epidemic of teen suicides when it changed the rules regarding gender “treatment” for minors. This was laughable on so many counts, not the least of which is the continued persistence, within the Labour government itself, of a large number of members who are currently resisting the Supreme Court decision. They would have secretly welcomed a rash of suicides at the time of the ban on puberty blockers because it would have vindicated their stance in favour of trans “rights”. They could have claimed that they had been right all along, and would have used this made-to-order tragedy to continue steamrollering women’s resistance to the erosion of their sex-based rights. They could have pilloried Rosie Duffield even more than they did. Starmer could have continued to prioritize that 0.01% of women with penises with a clear conscience. This part of the Labour Party had already been fine with the physical and psychological torture of women in the name of trans “rights”; a few suicides for the cause would have been perfect. They wouldn’t have covered anything up; they would have shouted about it in the Commons. They would have loved it. After all, they were on the Right Side of History.
No scientific evidence using that specific wording, but when one gives it a moment’s thought it becomes obvious that collecting such specific evidence would be nigh impossible because of what such studies would require.
To begin the study would require a study group. The group would need to consist of a large number of male athletes who intend to transition but have not yet begun any medical transitioning, a large number of female athletes, and a control group of male athletes who have no intention of transitioning. All three sets must compete in the same disciplines and ideally include groups from across several disciplines: a group of sprinters, a group of long-distance runners, swimmers, cyclists, etc..
Before any medical transitioning begins all athletes must have their performances measured and recorded to set baseline abilities. Ideally, this would take place over an entire season to account for natural fluctuations in performance.
To control for variables, all of the study group would have to adhere to strict dietary and exercise regimes. This would ensure as far as possible that any loss of performance in the transitioning group would be solely due to the effects of the transition. Only when all of this has been done could the study begin in earnest, so we would already be a year in. The study would need to continue for several years to allow for the cumulative effects of the trans athletes’ medical treatments.
While all of the above is possible in theory, it would be impractical in real terms if only because of the difficulties in finding a large representative group of pre-transition male athletes prepared to delay the start of their transition by up to a year to set those baseline scores.
However, remove the word ‘athletes’ from the original claim and we have all the evidence in the world that trans-identifying, medically transitioned men retain a good amount of the physical advantage that men have over women. It does not take a genius to understand that what applies to non-athletic transgender-identifying males applies equally to their athletic counterparts.
AoS, you also have the additional problem of the nature of the activities. It would be easy for a committed TiM to modify his performance during the testing, lowering the outcome to nearer the female standard.