Step back

Written by

Ophelia Benson

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Where Megan Rapinoe talked all this nonsense is in an interview with Sean Gregory in TIME that starts with a discussion of Title IX.

What does Title IX mean to you?

Oh, goodness. I mean, Title IX gave me the opportunity to play soccer in college and get a scholarship. I don’t think I even knew about it until probably I got to college, or a little bit after. It wasn’t in my consciousness. That’s kind of the amazing thing about my generation is, we didn’t have to think about it. It was just there for us.

Ok stop right there. Title IX gave her those opportunities as a woman, which she wouldn’t have had without it. Athletic scholarships used to be for men, with women sweeping up a few leftover crumbs if they were lucky. That’s the wrong that Title IX rectified. Now do you see why it’s regressive (to put it mildly) to celebrate men taking over women’s sports by calling themselves trans?

Take the elite aspect out of it, how many women that have just been able to go to college and play a sport? To go to college and to get a scholarship and to not be saddled with student debt? What’s the impact of that in the workplace and thought leadership in business and, every aspect of life? Multiple generations of women, for the first time, we’re able to have these opportunities and break out of the extremely restrictive roles that we had been assigned to for so long. So the impact is immeasurable. I think not only in this country, but around the world. It was a transformational piece of legislation.

Indeed. So that’s why we don’t want men exploiting it for their own purposes.

You mentioned the issue of transgender inclusion in sports, which is such a hot subject right now, as many states have passed bills that ban or limit transgender sports participation. Where do you stand on this issue?

I’m 100% supportive of trans inclusion. People do not know very much about it. We’re missing almost everything. Frankly, I think what a lot of people know is versions of the right’s talking points because they’re very loud. They’re very consistent, and they’re relentless.

But the issue isn’t “trans inclusion.” The issue is men being “included” in women’s sports.

I would also encourage everyone out there who is afraid someone’s going to have an unfair advantage over their kid to really take a step back and think what are we actually talking about here. We’re talking about people’s lives. I’m sorry, your kid’s high school volleyball team just isn’t that important. It’s not more important than any one kid’s life.

Was Megan Rapinoe’s high school soccer team that important? Did it help her get that scholarship she mentioned? Does she wish she had been displaced by a boy who said he was a girl?

Show me the evidence that trans women are taking everyone’s scholarships, are dominating in every sport, are winning every title. I’m sorry, it’s just not happening. So we need to start from inclusion, period. And as things arise, I have confidence that we can figure it out. But we can’t start at the opposite. That is cruel. And frankly, it’s just disgusting.

That isn’t the issue. The issue is any. Why should any girl lose a scholarship to a boy because he calls himself a girl? Why should she have, for instance?

So, we need to really kind of take a step back and get a grip on what we’re really talking about here because people’s lives are at risk. Kids’ lives are at risk with the rates of suicide, the rates of depression and negative mental health and drug abuse. We’re putting everything through God forbid a trans person be successful in sports. Get a grip on reality and take a step back.

And just let some boys take girls’ opportunities and scholarships and medals and records, as long as it’s not all of them? Is that the plan?

How many steps back should women take?

Comments

10 responses to “Step back”

  1. GW Avatar
    GW

    It’s so important to let transkids (TM) into sports, because otherwise they’ll kill themselves. Also, sports aren’t important and don’t matter, so if you’re worried that cis bitches are going to be excluded from sports, take a chill pill.

  2. James Garnett Avatar
    James Garnett

    Shorter Megan Rapinoe: I haven’t given it any thought, but gosh I enjoyed my soccer scholarship! Also, how about those nasty trans-kid-murdering TERFs, amirite? I’m not like them, I’m full of virtue.

  3. Sackbut Avatar
    Sackbut

    Eliza Mondegreen has a great post (short and to the point) on this topic:

    OK, Megan Rapinoe, we all know sports is not the most important thing in life… but can’t we still talk about it?

    A few bits that I liked for various reasons:

    Google Translate tells me this is just a long way to say “I’ve got endorsements to protect and I can’t afford to think this one through!”

    Let’s “get a grip” and “take a step back,” OK? (In Rapinoe’s playbook, “getting a grip” and “taking a step back” are such important moves that she mentions them twice in ajust 400 words.) Clearly, if we don’t get a grip and take a step back, we’re at risk of asking the wrong questions or arriving at the wrong conclusions.

    Let’s set aside for the moment that how we talk about suicide matters quite a bit and that experts advise avoiding talking about specific triggers for suicide—as Rapinoe does.)

    And the last couple of paragraphs:

    Rapinoe’s right: sports is not the most important thing in life. Funnily enough, nobody suggested it was. All the interviewer did was ask where Rapinoe stands on the subject of trans inclusion in female sports. Rapinoe’s the one who keeps changing the topic and moving the goal posts. If we’re talking about sports, let’s talk about sports.

    Really, why should Rapinoe care about the next generation of female athletes, who will lose out to boys not in a scrimmage match after a World Cup victory but at every level, until they’re outcompeted or out of hope, since the game’s rigged against girls from the start. Megan Rapinoe, you don’t need 400 words the next time you want to weigh in on the conflict between fairness for women and girls and inclusion for trans-identified males in female sports. You can just say: “Fair play? Who cares?”

  4. learie Avatar
    learie

    Rapinoe can take a chill pill and step back. She’s probably near the end of her career. Too bad about the girls and women coming up behind her.

    She knows that men are stronger and faster than women. The US team trains against boys and gets beaten by them regularly. Goes to show how afraid people are of being labelled transphobic.

  5. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    People do not know very much about it. We’re missing almost everything.

    And the reason for this is trans activism. Huge chunks of the media are self-censoring or intimidated out of writing clearly and truthfully about this for fear of being accused of “transphobia.” Reporting neutrally on reality is “transphobic,” so is saying anything less than completely supportive, approving, and compliant with genderism. If TAs have their way we will continue to know very much about it. Feature. Not bug.

    Frankly, I think what a lot of people know is versions of the right’s talking points because they’re very loud. They’re very consistent, and they’re relentless.

    If the right were half as “loud, consistent, and relentless” as trans activists, they would have won already. As much as I oppose almost all of what the American “right” stands for these days, some of the points the right are making are probably correct. Besides, they might not be the “right’s” talking points at all, just simple observations of reality. There are only two sexes. Humans can’t change sex. Those aren’t Republican talking points, it’s just the way things are. We should be able to agree with them that the sky is blue and gravity exists without being lumped in with them on every single policy position they hold.

    The right’s use of language may be more accurate and transparent than trans activists’, and that’s on trans activism. Novel redefinitions and euphemisms are the tools of charlatans and obscurantists. If your agenda’s success depends on avoiding and obscuring the truth of its import and ramifications, then there are problems with your agenda, whether it is “right” or “left.” If the prevention of open, honest debate gets in the way of your plans, then you have set yourself up as an opponent of open, honest debate. That’s great if you want to live in an autocracy, in which case trans activists have a lot more in common with today’s American right than they’re likely ever to admit. Encouraging disregard for democratic norms is, in the long run, a losing strategy, even if it works for your immediate, short-term goals. When your opponents use those very same tactics of dishonesty, secrecy and intimidation against you, you’ll have no right to complain.

    The above discussion, in regards to acknowledging the truth, whoever speaks it, and the “left’s” deployment of autocratic methods, gives me a much greater appreciation of this passage from A Man for All Seasons:

    “William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

    Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

    William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

    Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

    So, we need to really kind of take a step back and get a grip on what we’re really talking about here because people’s lives are at risk. Kids’ lives are at risk with the rates of suicide, the rates of depression and negative mental health and drug abuse.

    A step back is exactly what feminists are asking for. Yes, children’s lives are at risk, moreso than Rapinoe knows. Needless mutilation, sexual disfunction, sterility, lifelong medical dependency, the failure of “transition” to resolve comorbidities (with its own resulting risk of self-harm), puberty blockers’ prevention of full, healthy maturity, and so on. I’ll put all of those known, ongoing outcomes against the shaky, oft-mentioned-but-seldom-proved, astronomically high trans suicide figures that are broadcast in the emotional blackmail part of these performances.

  6. J.A. Avatar
    J.A.

    Rapinoe, from the Time article:

    ”Your kids’ high school volleyball team just isn’t that important…”

    My niece played on her high school volleyball team and that was important to her. She wanted to win and she loved to compete. How Rapinoe can casually dismiss that and say is isn’t important is something I know she really doesn’t believe given her own background. Girls just as much as boys like to compete and win and Rapinoe certainly feels the same way. If some male decided he was a woman and deserved a spot on the women’s soccer team, and then played against Rapinoe and overpowered her and her side, I’m betting it would be quite important to her then. So I agree with others that Rapinoe is saying it’s not important because she doesn’t want to put her endorsements at risk.

  7. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    Google Translate tells me this is just a long way to say “I’ve got endorsements to protect and I can’t afford to think this one through!”

    ZING!

    Rapinoe has learned her lesson well, then. She’s seen what happens to others who doubt the Fath. It’s like a real life instance of the success of the old Chinese saying “killing chickens to scare the monkeys.” Good Monkey! (For now.)

    Here’s a better and more detailed examination of the questions of truth and bullying autocratic tendencies I noted above:

    https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/trans-activism-is-post-truth-politics?r=qv57z&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

    I’ve never seen a movement of supposedly oppressed people so at war with the truth.

    For people without power, the truth and liberal science as a process to seek the truth are a lifeline, a way to challenge the powerful and insist on new understandings.

    People with power prefer arguments from authority (“Because I said so”).

    So it’s curious to see the World’s Most OppressedⒸ people only making arguments from unquestionable personal authority, while warping processes and institutions that are designed to seek the truth and silencing the people who speak it.

  8. What a Maroon Avatar
    What a Maroon

    Rapinoe should read Sally Jenkins on the importance of Title IX to women’s progress in the US. No mention of trans in the article, but it still underscores what’s been gained, and what could be lost.

    Title IX didn’t lay waste to men’s athletic programs. Title IX laid waste to everything. It laid waste to ideas — men’s ideas of what women were capable of, but most importantly, women’s ideas about themselves.

    When you cure the perception of emotional frailty and physical incompetence in a young woman, you kill the idea that there are some things she is constitutionally unfit to do. And you seed a new idea in her, that she has the inalienable right to choose her professional interest and to work at it with an unembarrassed shouting passion.

    How do you measure the effect of those seeds cast into the wind?

    What’s striking, in revisiting its history, is how intentional the champions of Title IX always were. They knew. They knew what the law would really do.

    As the law’s most powerful original lobbyist, Billie Jean King, told journalist Grace Lichtenstein, “I’m interested in the women’s movement but from an action point of view, not an intellectual one.”

    Athletic competition was a unique arena in which women could prove they weren’t inherent “chokers,” King once said. That was why King took such a sustained interest in a young pre-Title IX Stanford undergrad tennis player she met in 1972 named Sally Ride and mentored her even after Ride decided not to turn pro and chose to pursue physics instead. In a NASA news conference before her first space flight, Ride was famously asked, “Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?” Ride just grinned and suggested her male crewmate answer the same question.

  9. J.A. Avatar
    J.A.

    Thanks What a Maroon for the Jenkins article, which reminded me of this report from a year ago in my home town about a retiring coach of girls’ track which also shows how sport can be important for girls. Title IX also boosted high school sports for girls and not only benefitted those girls who went on to college thanks to an athletic scholarship, but also those girls who didn’t.

    Weiss said growing up in Verona, her only opportunity to compete in sports was at the intramural level. But she soon realized developing interscholastic programs required a much different approach.

    “I just thought, oh we’ll get together and have some fun and get to participate,” she said. “But along the way I learned it was much more competitive. And that the kids really wanted to compete against others schools and set their goals and develop their potential.”

    Soon Weiss was joined by Polly Simpson as head girls’ basketball coach and Betty Komula as volleyball coach. Weiss said the enthusiasm for girls sports in New Richmond took a huge step forward when the Tigers qualified for the very first WIAA state girls’ basketball tournament in 1976.

    “That really began to spark interest in the community with the parents and the kids,” she said. “So that helped develop the program a lot– that group of girls that really loved athletics.”

    She said it wasn’t long before numbers started to grow.

    “I think as more dads saw their daughters become successful and gain something from sports, it was a little easier for them to see that there was really a value for everyone,” she said.

    But it was on the track where Weiss has made the biggest impact over the years. As a kid in Verona she said she grew up with the mindset that girls weren’t supposed to be competitive, and looked at track as an avenue for goal-setting and overcoming obstacles. But it was still OK to win.

    “There was always a lot of failure and setbacks, but how do you overcome those types of things?” she said. “How did you treat your teammates, your opponents, all those things? I really thought that was the backbone of the program. And then along the way, teaching them that it’s okay to be your best. You can beat somebody else and still be their friend and it’s all okay. That’s the way it should be.”

    New Richmond icon Judy Weiss calls it a career: Coached Tiger girls’ track since 1974

  10. What a Maroon Avatar
    What a Maroon

    Meanwhile I just learned that Arlington’s (VA) own Torri Huske won the women’s 100 m butterfly at the world championships the other day with a US record time of 55.64 seconds, breaking her own record and tying her for fifth best time ever. The record is held by Sarah Sjostrom of Sweden, at 55.48.

    The men’s record is 49.45 seconds.

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