Where centrist-dad equivocations are difficult
Gary Lineker was talking to Oliver Brown at the Telegraph when he said that stupid thing. He said a lot of stupid things in that talk.
And for Lineker, the subject of right and wrong is simpler than it may be for others.
“You either have empathy or you don’t,” he says. “It’s more important now than ever before that people raise their voices, because we live in dangerous times. I’ll definitely continue pushing humanitarian issues. Sometimes they cross over with politics, although I’ve never been overly loud with my politics. Nobody knows who I vote for – I’ve voted for lots of different parties over many years. You feel sometimes like you’re fairly helpless, like you can’t really do anything. But you have to live with yourself. That’s the important thing.”
Ah. That would explain a lot. No, that’s not the important thing. Self is not the important thing when talking about injustice to other people. It’s the other people who are the important thing. Not you, them.
One other area where Lineker has been noticeably silent is a subject where centrist-dad equivocations are difficult: men masquerading in sport as women. This has been front-page news in his own realm, with the Football Association forced this month to ban males from all levels of the female game, honouring the Supreme Court’s ruling that the definition of a woman was based on biological sex. And yet Lineker has consistently swerved it. When his podcast, The Rest Is Football, tried a public question-and-answer experiment last November, Martina Navratilova, Sharron Davies and hundreds of other women asked him what he thought of the FA banning a teenager – revealed by The Telegraph last weekend as Cerys Vaughan – for asking a transgender opponent: “Are you a man?” Even under pressure from a nine-time Wimbledon singles champion and a celebrated Olympic swimmer, he neglected to engage. Why?
“Ugh,” he sighs, slumping so far forward in his chair he nearly hits the table. “You can’t cover that subject properly in a post. It’s too nuanced. I don’t actually think, in terms of sport, that it will ever be a real issue. Sport, as it’s already doing, will sort it out and work out rules. Like they did in boxing, when they realised they couldn’t have heavyweights against little fellas.”
Is it not blindingly obvious, however, that sport will not simply “sort it out”? It has taken many determined female campaigners a punishingly long time to undo the damage of gender ideology, compelling sports to prioritise fairness for women rather than vacuous mantras about inclusion. Amid broad acceptance that the rights of half the population should trump the view of a small, vocal minority of men that they are entitled to colonise women’s sport, Lineker makes it clear where his sympathies lie. “They’re some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You’ve got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue? It’s the same swimmer, the same weightlifter, the same boxer. They’re the only people I ever see.”
Well there you go. He thinks trans people are some of the most persecuted on the planet, so he thinks the women they shove aside are not their victims but their persecutors. Same old crap in same old words.
We HAVE a rule. Male people compete with other male people. Even if they’re very sad about being male, or they wear their hair in a ponytail, or they were born with an unusual-looking penis. This rule covers pretty much all the use cases unless there’s deliberate obfuscation.
“Imagine going through what [trans people] have to go through in life. . . .”
Such as? They have managed to normalize womanface in public, to an extent. There’s no necessity for them to do anything else: no drugs, no surgery, no GRC hoops to jump through are required. Self-declatation, audacity, and tons of screaming admirers and enforcers. So . . . what, exactly, do trans people “have to go through in life”? Nothing much, as far as I can see.
“Is there even any issue?”
Yes, there is. The issue is that they are men in sports set aside for women, who, until relatively recently, didn’t have any sports opportunities.
“It’s the same swimmer, the same weightlifter, the same boxer.”
Right! It’s the same male swimmer, the same male weightlifter, the same male boxer.
The image of WilLIAm Thomas coming off the starting blocks a body length in front of the women swimmers shows that, yep, he’s the same swimmer he was on the men’s team.
Weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is also the same male weightlifter he was before he decided to cheat by lifting against women. Male and female weightlifters in the same weight class are not pound-for-pound of equal strength. The male record for the weight class is much higher than for women lifters of the same weight class. Even though Hubbard did not get a qualifying lift in the belated 2020 Tokyo Olympics, his presence in the women’s competition was a double cheat. In weightlifting, as in boxing, the sport “realised they couldn’t have heavyweights against little fellas,” and so created weight classes. Hubbard was assigned to the top weight class in the women’s competition. This was a cheat because men out lift women in the same weight class. Hubbard would have been assigned to the top weight class in the men’s competition as well; this was a double cheat, because the top weight class in the women’s competition is two classes below the top weight class in the men’s competition. So it’s like he was getting to compete two classes below his normal classification. So, yeah, he’s the same male weightlifter.
Male boxers are the same male boxers they were before they entered the women’s competition. Gary Lineker says that sports organizations can be trusted to “sort things out,” just as they did in boxing, ” when they realised they couldn’t have heavyweights against little fellas.”. Well, the sporting organizations already sorted things out, long ago, when they realized they couldn’t have men (the heavyweights) against women (the ” little fellas”). That adjustment had already been made, decades ago, until some entitled men, bent on cheating, decided to upset the applecart.
Yes, the swimmers, weightlifters, boxers, etc. are the same as they were before they decided to enter women’s competitions. They are the same men that they were before. I have no idea why Lineker’s realization that the men are “the same” athletes that they have always been militates in favor of allowing them to invade women’s sports, instead of immediately affirming that they don’t belong in women’s sports. I’m not following his logic, there.
“You either have empathy or you don’t,”
I can think of few ideas more likely to kill a sense of empathy, than the idea that the people who don’t agree with you lack empathy.
The fact is that most of us do have perfectly functional senses of empathy and can understand why deluded people feel upset when their delusions are challenged. We get the frustration and the sense of hurt.
And we also get that all the frustration and sense of hurt in the world won’t turn a penis into a vagina. I get that saying this is hurtful, but I’m going to say it anyway because honesty matters.
At the core of the trans movement is a statement of fact, that humans can change sex. That statement is objectively incorrect. There is an attempted motte and bailey – where the term is shifted to gender.
But it still doesn’t change the falsity of the claim. It just serves to obfuscate it. The fact is that when we’re talking about such as women’s sports for example – that whole category exists because of physiological differences between men and women.
And when we talk about gender, that is the strategies our societies developed to account for sexual differences. Yes, many of those strategies were bad, gender roles are often bullshit, but that doesn’t change the fact that our societies developed ways to deal with what is an underlying biological reality. There is a difference between being critical, and being in denial.
There are always consequences to ignoring reality. These consequences cannot be guilt-tripped out of existence.
And claiming those who won’t bow to such tactics lack empathy? Is the sort of bullshit that undermines empathy, it designed to avoid having to think for one second about the humanity of the people on the other side of the argument.
It creates the sort of behaviour, that lets face it has actively undermined support for “trans rights”. Look at Pew’s polling on the issue – and you can see the decline.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/26/americans-have-grown-more-supportive-of-restrictions-for-trans-people-in-recent-years/
Finally, there is this research out of Finland from 2020.
“Both experiences of being bullied and perpetrating bullying were more commonly reported by transgender youth than by cisgender youth. Among transgender youth, all involvement in bullying was more commonly reported by non-binary youth than those identifying with the opposite sex. Logistic regression revealed that non-binary identity was most strongly associated with involvement in bullying, followed by opposite sex identity and cisgender identity. Transgender identities were also more strongly associated with perpetration of bullying than subjection to bullying.”
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612424/full
We all want a world with less bullying. Trans people being bullied isn’t a win for Terfs, people being bullied fundamentally sucks.
If what we’re talking about is empathy, and part of that is stopping bullying, maybe we also need to address the ideas that lead trans youth towards being bullies. Ideas such as claims that people who disagree with them about something they are wrong about lack empathy.