A means to exclood
Nancy Armour, a sports columnist at USA Today, rounds up the usual suspects.
The days of transgender athletes being able to compete at the Olympics are numbered.
The International Olympic Committee will no doubt dispute that, arguing that new president Kirsty Coventry’s announcement Thursday was only for a working group to examine how to “protect the female category.” But from her loaded language to the dearth of transgender athletes at the Games, it’s obvious this is intended as a means to exclude, not include.
Let’s start with her lede. Is there some moral law that says transgender athletes should be able to compete at the Olympics? I mean, one could also write a sob story about how crappy athletes are not allowed to compete at the Olympics. Newsflash: very very very few people are allowed to compete at the Olympics. The Olympics are decidedly not “inclusive.”
Moving on, I wonder, as I always wonder, how she manages to be so eager to replace women at the Olympics with men who call themselves women. Why is she full of sympathy for men who pretend to be women and indifferent to the women those men would displace? She’s a woman herself after all, so wtf? You have to “exclude” men from women’s sports if women are to have any sports at all. She knows that, of course, so wtf?
“A lot of members shared with us their own experiences from their own countries that had nothing to do with Paris or any other specific sporting event. Just their cultural experiences they were sharing with us and culturally what was expected from us as an Olympic movement,” Coventry said. “That made it very clear that we had to do something, and this was what everyone agreed was the way forward.”
Make no mistake: That “way forward” will take the IOC backward. And do so in contradiction of its own research and at great harm to an already vulnerable community.
BUT WHAT ABOUT WOMEN?? What about women you horrible credulous fool? What about the harm to them? What about their vulnerability? What are you even babbling about?
Most of us don’t know anyone who is transgender, let alone a transgender athlete. Which ought to tell you how big a “threat” they are. But J.K. Rowling, Riley Gaines and the U.S. Republican Party have managed to convince even people who should know better that transgender women have both a competitive advantage and are a marauding horde about to overwhelm women’s sports.
Why should people “know better” than “men have a competitive advantage”? Men do have an advantage, of course, so why and how should we know better than that?
The marauding horde about to overwhelm is just stupid. It’s beside the point. Men in women’s sports is unfair, end of story. I don’t suppose Nancy Armour would be happy if a couple of drunk teenagers broke into her house and smashed up the place, even though two teenagers are not a marauding horde.
The people howling for “fairness” will accept nothing less than the complete exclusion of transgender women, from sports and in society.
Liar. Excluding men from women’s sports is not excluding them from society. It’s not even close.
Then there are the disingenuous folks who already have and will continue to use a white, heteronormative notion of what a woman is to remove anyone who falls outside it. A female athlete who is masculine presenting and has short hair? She’d better be ready to prove her womanhood.
Oh honestly. Is she six? Can just anybody be a journalist these days?
Just bring back the once in a lifetime chromosome test for all athletes claiming to be female. Or have all athletes, male or female, take the test. Then we have covered the mythical woman who looks too much like a man scenario. That analogy about how much destruction just two rampaging teenagers can do is quite good. Shows how when the trans boosters claim nobody is being harmed by letting men into women’s spaces, they are only showing that they consider girls and women less than nobodies.
Whaddya mean “quite” good?! It’s VERY good.
I might even add, exquisite.
Nor is it excluding men from sports. There’s the boys’ or men’s division for them to compete in, just exactly as they had always done, right up until they decided it was easier to cheat the girls or women.
Isn’t it nice to be able to quickly handwave away the weakest part of your argument, and tack on a ridiculous, not-at-all hyperbolic claim, just to help move things along past this obvious howler? Does she not know that people can stop and read this more than once, or even print it out and look at it in detail, teasing out the individual claims and evaluate them? Someone tell her that talking fast doesn’t work in print. And that she needs to get better arguments.
I’ve met more transgender people than I’ve met Olympic athletes.
Oh, sure, a few women might be displaced. And perhaps a few will be injured. Maybe even horribly disfigured, paralyzed, or killed. But surely that’s a small price to pay.
Most of us don’t know anyone who is a murderer, let alone a mass murderer. Which ought to tell you how big a “threat” they are.
Where is all this research she refers to that demonstrates men identifying as women don’t have a competitive advantage?
In the January issue of Made-up Science Journal.
Protecting women’s sport sounds like a worthwhile and laudable cause, which is painted as something sinister and underhanded. Including men in women’s sport is the intrusive, abnormal, grotesgue, “loaded language” project, which is being presented as some beleaguered ideal, rather than an intrusive novelty.
This from someone who thinks up is down, left is right, black is white, and men are women. How is destroying women’s sport (which is the inevitable result of following your idea of “forward” to its logical conclusion) in any way progress? Show your work. Why is including men better for women than keeping them out? Why would women welcome this? Why do you?
At this point, the whole “already vulnerable community” is just bullshit, emotional blackmail designed to avoid actual engagement with the inconvenient, unanswerable facts of biology, just like Imane Khelif running away from the inconvenient, unanswerable cheek swab.
You aren’t allowed to ask that because you’re supposed to “know better”. I guess she needed broader and more frantic hand-waving.
And in the January issue of Make-up Science are the test results showing exactly what shades of lipstick and eyeshadow will turn a man into a woman.
“ Most of us don’t know anyone who is transgender, let alone a transgender athlete.”
Let’s introduce everyone to Lia Thomas, then! Because last time Lia Thomas made news, everyone liked trans athletes so much better. Or how about Veronica Ivy? We can all be told to “die in a grease fire”, which is tolerance and inclusion personified. Failing that, Fallon Fox, who loves “beating up TEFs” so much, Fox actually declares it to be “bliss”.
So don’t be shy, let everyone get to know you!
I suspect anyone who lives in an urban area has at least run into them, if not known them. Even in Lincoln, which as a city goes is rather smallish, I know personally at least three or four, and am familiar on a seeing them basis with more than a dozen. Add in the non-binary, and the number skyrockets.
Of course, I am deeply involved in the theatre scene, but they aren’t all in that world. In Hastings, we had one TiM who worked as a landscaper; once he ‘transitioned’, he did his landscaping in hot pants and spike heels. That just proves he isn’t a woman; no woman of any sense at all would mow a lawn dressed like that. That’s Ivanka Trump style photo op time.
Seriously? That violates every safety rule in the book. Steel-toed boots or go home.
It’s a vicious circle. Performance and appearance are all that TiMs have; any time they’re not in “woman-coded” clothes and accessories = not being a woman, so even in situations where safety, comfort, and mobility compel women to dispense with “woman-coded” wardrobes, TiMs have to keep up the pretense, because doing otherwise results in even smaller chances of “passing”. Their use of stereotyipcal, exaggerated “female” clothing and mannerisms are the equivalent of holding up a sign that says “I AM A WOMAN” (“It’s MA’AM!” if you will). In their minds they can never put the sign down, because the sign is all they’ve got. They want us to believe that sign is their sex. The hyperfeminine dress and comportment is large, boldface type, for those with poor eyesight who might accidentally see them as men. It’s closed captioning for those who don’t understand what they’re trying to say. It’s a demand to surrender our reading of reality to their delusion. Ultimately, it’s a warning, to women particularly: “Give me what I want. Or Else.”
Females don’t have to do any of this and can dress as they like without risk of changing sex. Men-who-claim-to-be-women are always on stage, always in costume, always performing. By doing so they’re claiming to change sex. Butlerian reasoning would have us believe that this is enough to make them women, that in fact performance is all anybody has, or anybody is. Nice try, Judith, but it doesn’t work that way. As if we can so easily shed the inescapable journey of birth, old age, sickness, and death that is the lot of material beings, philosopher or no. We are not beings of pure thought and energy, who can slip into and out of whatever roles we set our minds to, reifying them through sheer force of will. We are tied to this Earth, and the sustenance it provides. We are our bodies. We are matter, we are mammals, we are male and female. Oh, to slip the surly bonds of biology!
Yes, they’ve reduced womanhood down to simply performance. Of course, that ends up leaving out a lot of women, those who don’t perform ‘womanhood’ but instead dress in comfortable clothes, sturdy, appropriate shoes, and wear their hair short. Forget about whether black women or disabled women are women (they are, obviously). This is about whether any women are women, or at least any women who don’t perform the ritual correctly.
And if we perform some parts correctly (for instance, long hair, comfortable clothes, sturdy shoes), then we must necessarily be non-binary. For people who insist sex and gender are a spectrum, this seems an awful lot like in the box thinking to me.
Armour misses one pertinent fact about this issue, which is that not one transwoman has done better in athletic competition against males than against females. This is why we have separate sex classes in sport when it comes to elite competition like the Olympics.
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